by Baker, Phil
There was a new attention to urban subjects and urban squalor, which was partly a response to grim London conditions and partly the influence of French writers such as Baudelaire. Homosexuality was coming to the fore as a coded tendency within aestheticism, only to be driven underground again after the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895. People felt they were living in a time of crisis and decline, exacerbated by the tendency to think in centuries: the fin-de-siècle is often a strange time, whether it is the 1590s, with the dark and morbid spirit of its proto-Jacobean drama, or the 1790s, with the French revolution and the guillotine. Writers with a grounding in classics and Latin felt that they were living through something akin to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the decadence of Petronius. Occultism and High Catholicism were gaining converts. Pessimism and despair reigned, notably in the work of the quintessential Nineties poet Ernest Dowson, not to mention the verse of Enoch Soames. Peter Ackroyd provides an elegant role call;
“…those doomed poets and writers who make up the generation of the Nineties and who arrive in our midst with the intoxicating perfume of hot house flowers from that strange conservatory known as the fin-de-siècle; Richard Le Gallienne is here, together with Swinburne and Dowson and Symons, forming a strange litany of fluted lust and hopelessness.”
One night in 1890, the essayist and minor poet Richard Le Gallienne was offered some absinthe by the poet Lionel Johnson. Le Gallienne remembers that they were walking back from a public house after closing time, and Johnson invited him up to his rooms in Grays Inn, Holborn, for a final drink. Looking back in 1925, Le Gallienne says that Johnson’s warning on the stairs still makes him smile as he writes, “for it was so very 1890”: “I hope you drink absinthe, Le Gallienne,” said Johnson, “for I have nothing else to offer you.”
I had just heard of it, as a drink mysteriously sophisticated and even Satanic. To me it had the sound of hellebore or mandragora. I had never tasted it then, nor has it ever been a favourite drink of mine. But in the ’90s it was spoken of with a self-conscious sense of one’s being desperately wicked, suggesting diabolism and nameless iniquity.
Immediately those all-important associations and connotations came into play: “Did not Paul Verlaine drink it all the time in Paris! and Oscar Wilde and his cronies, it was darkly hinted, drank it nightly at the Café Royal.”
So it was with a pleasant shudder that I watched it cloud in our glasses, as I drank it for the first time, there alone with Lionel Johnson, in the small hours, in a room paradoxically monkish in its scholarly austerity, with a beautiful monstrance on the mantelpiece and a silver crucifix on the wall.
(A monstrance is a luxuriantly ornamental piece of High Church ornament, not unlike a reliquary, in which the consecrated Host is exposed for adoration). Johnson was a founder member of the Rhymers Club, a group of poets who met at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, including Le Gallienne, Dowson, Arthur Symons, and W.B.Yeats, who was a great admirer of Johnson’s poetry. Johnson was a fin-de- siècle figure but he was some distance from being a true Decadent himself, as his sharp essay on the Decadents shows.
First of all – says Johnson in his 1891 essay ‘The Cultured Faun’, published in The Anti-Jacobin – the true Decadent should be soberly dressed (just as much as William Burroughs in his “banker drag”, or T.S.Eliot, Aubrey Beardsley was noted for dressing like a man who worked in insurance, which he once did; he was said to look like “the man from the Prudential”). Then, says Johnson, the Decadent should be nervous, attracted to High Church ritual, cynical, and above all a worshipper of beauty; even if life also contains harsh and terrible realities, such as absinthe addiction.
Externally, our hero should cultivate a reassuring sobriety of habit, with just a dash of the dandy. None of the wandering looks, the elaborate disorder, the sublime lunacy of his predecessor, the ‘apostle of culture’. Externally, then, a precise appearance; internally, a catholic sympathy with all that exists, and ‘therefore’ suffers, for art’s sake. Now art, at present, is not a question of the senses so much as of the nerves… Baudelaire is very nervous… Verlaine is pathetically sensitive. That is the point: exquisite appreciation of pain, exquisite thrills of anguish, exquisite adoration of suffering. Here comes in the tender patronage of Catholicism: white tapers upon the high altar, an ascetic and beautiful young priest, the great gilt monstrance, the subtle-scented and mystical incense…
To play the part properly a flavour of cynicism is recommended: a scientific profession of materialist dogmas, coupled – for you should forswear consistency – with gloomy chatter about ‘The Will to Live’… finally conclude that life is loathsome yet that beauty is beatific. And beauty – ah, beauty is everything beautiful! Isn’t that a trifle obvious, you say? That is the charm of it, it shows your perfect simplicity, your chaste and catholic innocence. Innocence of course: beauty is always innocent, ultimately. No doubt there are ‘monstrous’ things, terrible pains, the haggard eyes of an absintheur, the pallid faces of ‘neurotic’ sinners; but all that is the portion of our Parisian friends, such and such a ‘group of artists’ who meet at the Café So-and-So.
Johnson was received into the Catholic Church in the same year that this essay was written, and he had a distinctly austere streak in his character. He once said to Yeats that he wished people who denied the eternal and permanent nature of damnation would realise how unspeakably vulgar they were.
Johnson’s agonised religious and monarchistic (in fact neo-Jacobite) sensibility can be seen from two of his most famous poems, ‘The Dark Angel’ and ‘By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross’. He slid into alcoholism after a doctor – with what now seems like criminal negligence – advised him to take up drinking for his insomnia. Yeats chronicles his decline in his Autobiographies. Le Gallienne could already see trouble in store on that night in Grays Inn, feeling that absinthe was “too fierce a potion” for a man as delicate as Johnson. But Johnson was devoted to alcohol, “because, particularly in the form of his favourite absinthe, it has for a time so quickening and clarifying an effect on the intellectual and imaginative faculties.” Later he developed a tendency to persecution mania, and believed that detectives were following him. A good friend of Ernest Dowson, Johnson haunted the pubs of Fleet Street and died in 1902, after falling off a bar stool.
Johnson’s fellow Rhymer Arthur Symons played a key role in shaping the 1890s. He edited the influential periodical The Savoy, and he wrote studies of Baudelaire, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, as well as his major work The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), which made modern French poetry better known in England and was regarded as something of a manifesto. He had already written an essay on ‘The Decadent Movement’. Symons’s own poetry is quintessentially Nineties in its impressionistic handling of sleazy urban subjects – theatres and cafés, equivocal actresses or prostitutes, and the life of lodgings and digs – complete with what were then ‘unpoetic’ details such as cigarettes and gas. At the same time he is capable of a heavy flowery aestheticism, and more fantastic touches such as the gaslit streets in his poem ‘London’:
… and in the evil glimpses of the light
Men as trees walking loom through lanes of night
Hung from the globes of some unnatural fruit.
His 1892 collection Silhouettes contains his poem ‘The Absinthe Drinker’:
The Absinthe-Drinker
Gently I wave the visible world away.
Far off, I hear a roar, afar yet near
Far off and strange, a voice is in my ear
And is the voice my own? The words I say
Fall strangely, like a dream, across the day:
And the dim sunshine is a dream. How clear
New as the world to lover’s eyes, appear
The men and women passing on their way!
The world is very fair. The hours are all
Linked in a dance of mere forgetfulness.
I am at peace with God and man. O glide
Sands of the
hour-glass that I count not, fall
Serenely: scarce I feel your soft caress
Rocked on this dreamy and indifferent tide.
It is a companion piece to his earlier and more vicious poem ‘The Opium-Smoker’, which begins well (“I am engulfed, and drown deliciously”) but ends badly, revealing a rat-infested garret.
Symons was associated by reputation with drink and hashish, but he had only a slight experience of them. Havelock Ellis believes Symons to have drunk absinthe only once, with Ellis himself outside a Paris café. This is probably an under- estimate, but Symons was certainly no addict. Perhaps mindful of his reputation, Symons wrote in London: A Book of Aspects
I have always been curious of sensations, and above all of those which seemed to lead one into ‘artificial paradises’ not within everybody’s reach. It took me some time to find out that every ‘artificial paradise’ is within one’s soul, somewhere among one’s own dreams… The mystery of all the intoxicants fascinated me, and drink, which had no personal appeal to me, which indeed brought me no pleasures, found me endlessly observant of its powers, effects, and variations.
He would have had plenty of opportunity to observe it with friends such as Dowson and Johnson. Symons’s absinthe-free lifestyle did not protect him from a catastrophic nervous breakdown in 1907, but it may have contributed to his longevity, compared to his absinthe-drinking comrades. He survived Dowson, Johnson and Wilde by almost half a century, living on into the distant future of 1945.
The fortunes of aestheticism, decadence, and ‘Art for Art’s sake’ rose and fell with Oscar Wilde’s own, ascending from around 1880 and crashing disastrously in 1895. Wilde was a disciple of Walter Pater, whose book The Renaissance contained a manifesto of nihilistic aestheticism in its ‘Conclusion’. “It is my golden book”, Wilde said, “I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence; the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.” Wilde himself wrote the other great English decadent work, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Smouldering resentment against Wilde flamed into the open in 1895, when he was found guilty of homosexual offences and sent to prison, moving to France after his release in 1897.
The French litterateur Marcel Schwob was an acquaintance of Wilde, and he has left a wickedly exaggerated picture of the aesthete as he knew him in 1891. Wilde was, “a big man, with a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck some more. While he ate – and he ate little – he never stopped smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes.” To complete this unappetising picture, Schwob adds that he was also, “A terrible absinthe-drinker, through which he got his visions and desires.”
In reality Wilde was not such a terrible absinthe drinker at that period, and his attitude to it seems to have varied with time; his drinking in general grew heavier as his life grew more unhappy, and eventually he came to like it. He once told the art critic Bernard Berenson “It has no message for me”, and he confessed to Arthur Machen – partial to a glass himself† – that “I could never quite accustom myself toabsinthe, but it suits my style so well.” He did accustom himself to it in the end, and in Dieppe, after his downfall, he said, “Absinthe has a wonderful colour, green. A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?”
Wilde developed what his biographer Richard Ellmann calls “romantic ideas” about absinthe, and he described its effects to Ada ‘The Sphinx’ Leverson:
“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”
“How do you mean?” asked Leverson.
“I mean disassociated. Take a top-hat! You think you see it as it really is. But you don’t, because you associate it with other things and ideas. If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad.”
This awful de-familiarisation has all the hallmarks of a real drug experience. Then Wilde went on, perhaps less convincingly:
“Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clearheaded and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust. The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies, and roses sprang up and made a garden of the café. ‘Don’t you see them?’ I said to him. ‘Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien.’”
The other thing that Wilde said made you see things as they really are was prison, which is a sobering thought.
Wilde always liked to raise the tone of his conversation by quoting himself, and he gave a slightly variant account of the effects of absinthe to John Fothergill, who went on to become something of a sensation as a ‘gentleman pub-keeper’ in the 1930s. When he was younger, Fothergill had known Wilde, and Wilde told him – “all in his great heavy drawl” – of the three stages of absinthe drinking. This time:
The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things. One night I was left sitting, drinking alone, and very late in the Café Royal, and I had just got into this third stage when a waiter came in with a green apron and began to pile the chairs on the tables. ‘Time to go, Sir,’ he called out to me. Then he brought in a watering can and began to water the floor. ‘Time’s up, sir. I’m afraid you must go now, sir.’
– ‘Waiter, are you watering the flowers?’ I asked, but he didn’t answer.
‘What are your favourite flowers, waiter?’ I asked again.
‘Now, sir, I must really ask you to go now, time’s up,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m sure that tulips are your favourite flowers,’ I said, and as I got up and passed out into the street I felt – the – heavy – tulip – heads – brushing against my shins.”
Wilde’s last days were grim. An ear infection, believed to be a result of syphilis, grew worse and worse; an operation failed to clear it up, and Wilde seems to have died from meningitis. He was understandably preoccupied with death during his final period, and he wrote to Frank Harris, “The Morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc bed there.” Ellmann notes that Wilde really did visit the Paris morgue.
Some weeks after his ear operation, he got up and went with some difficulty to a café, where he drank absinthe before walking slowly back, and rallied enough to produce his famous statement (for a woman named Claire de Pratz) that, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” His friend Robbie Ross said, “You’ll kill yourself, Oscar. You know the doctor said absinthe was poison for you.” “And what have I to live for?” said Wilde. It was a wretched time, but Wilde didn’t have the monopoly of good lines. “I dreamt I was supping with the dead”, he said to Reggie Turner. “My dear Oscar,” said Reggie “you were probably the life and soul of the party.”
In his epilogue to Wilde’s life, Ellmann notes of his later days that “a constant sense of ill-being” was checked, but not eliminated, by brandy and absinthe. Drinking itself is the subject of one of Wilde’s less well-known quips, set against the nineteenth-century fashion for declaring that all kinds of things, from rare beefsteak to seaside air, could somehow cause intoxication. “I have discovered”, said Wilde, “that alcohol taken in sufficient quantity produces all the effects of drunkenness.”
The vultures had been gathering over Wilde for some time before his trial; there was strong anti-decadent feeling in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It is noticeable that when absinthe is mentioned in English poetry of the time, it is – with the honourable exception of Dowson and Symons – usually a sign of either Frenchness or wickedness, or both. To understand more of absinthe’s public image at this period, we need to plumb the d
epths of bad verse.
The French connection is natural enough, and it figures in W.S.Gilbert’s song ‘Boulogne’ (which includes the immortal rhyme “You can sit in a café with gents rather raffy”). More than that:
If you’re French in your taste, you can pull in your waist, and imbibe, till all consciousness ceases
Absinthe and vermouth, with the Boulonnais youth, and play billiards like mad for franc pieces –
Which all seems like fair comment. Robert Williams Buchanan, on the other hand, has more of an axe to grind. Buchanan is – as they say – ‘not much read these days’. And deservedly so. But in his own day he was a prolific versifier, and a great man for the moral high ground. If he is remembered at all now, it is for his rooting out of decadence and depravity, notably in his attacks on Swinburne (“unclean”, “morbid”, “sensual”) and the Pre-Raphaelites, whom he attacked in his 1871 essay ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’. There were a lot of people Buchanan disapproved of, and in one of his poems, ‘The Stormy Ones’, he puts them all on a ship. The “stormy ones” are the writers Buchanan hates – Byron, Alfred de Musset, Heinrich Heine, and others, all of them “Lords of misrule and melancholy” – aboard their ship of fools:
For up at the peak their flag is flying –
A white Death’s head, with grinning teeth, –
‘Eat, drink, and love, for the day is dying’
Written in cypher underneath.
‘Vanity! Vanity! Love and Revel!’