The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

‘Take a sip of absinthe, my dear!’

  ‘Religion’s a bore, but I like the Devil!’

  These are some of the words you hear…

  Heinrich Heine was a German Romantic poet who lived and died in Paris, and who was disapproved of in Victorian England. When Charles ‘Water Babies’ Kingsley was asked by his children who Heine was, all he felt the need to say was, “A bad man, my dears, a very bad man”, a reply which seemed to George Saintsbury to be one of the touchstones of bone- headed Victorian moralism. Buchanan wrote another poem about Heine in his own right, in which he figures as a morally dodgy gnome:

  In the City of absinthe and unbelief

  The Encyclopaedia’s sceptic home

  Fairies and trolls, with a gentle grief

  Surrounded the sickly gnome.

  The gnome ends up dead and buried in Montmartre cemetery, which Buchanan no doubt felt was the best place for him. And there (where he’s “laid asleep”) “in the moonlight and the gloom, / The spirits of Elfland creep!”

  Buchanan puts up a far less fey performance when he gets his teeth into wicked French novels, breeding like pullulating reptiles and promoting world-weary ennui:

  … what d’ye call the dreary

  Heavy-hearted thing and weary

  In old weeds of joy bedizen’d?

  By the shallow French ‘tis christen’d

  Ennui! Ay, the snake that grovels

  In a host of scrofulous novels

  Leper even of the leprous

  Race of serpents vain and viprous

  Bred of slimy eggs of evil

  Sat on by the printer’s devil

  Last, to gladden absinthe-lovers

  Born by broods in paper covers!

  There are more scrofulous novels to come with “F.Harald Williams” (otherwise F.W.D.Ward, 1843–1922) in his 1894 Confessions of a Poet. He is another prolific churner-out of moral doggerel and it is not easy to say whose verse is worse, Buchanan’s or Williams’. In Williams’ poem ‘The Triumph of Evil’ we meet a devil, Goniobombukes. Goniobombukes is congratulating himself on the success he is having with those writers who are really his puppets, writing “with devilled pens”. He knows that the times as a whole are going his way:

  And the sty of absinthe and French novels

  In their nude and naughty stage undress

  Is the temple in which fashion grovels

  Still more low the louder to confess.

  It is a pleasure to turn from Buchanan, Williams, and Goniobombukes to Robert Hichens, author of the brilliant anti-decadent satire The Green Carnation, published anonymously in 1894. Wilde had instructed some of his friends to wear green carnations in their buttonholes for the 1892 premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Since one of the characters on stage was also wearing one, without any further explanation, this gave the public the deliberately mystifying impression of an obscure and cryptic secret fraternity of some kind. These dyed carnations could be obtained from a shop in London’s Royal Arcade, and since they never occur in nature they fitted in with the decadent cult of artificiality, and became the emblem of aestheticism.

  If The Green Carnation has a fault it is that it is too subtle, and comes perilously close to the attitudes it is supposed to be parodying. It is only occasionally that its inventions are unequivocally comic, like the practise of secret Bovril drinking (“It makes one feel so wicked!”).

  Hichens was a member of the Wilde circle, and his novel features a “Mr.Amarinth” (Wilde) and his friend “Reggie” (Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas). Ellmann comments that its fictional veneer was so thin that it reads more like a documentary than a parody.

  “And who started the fashion of the green carnation?”

  “That was Mr.Amarinth’s idea. He calls it the arsenic flower of an exquisite life. He wore it, in the first instance, because it blended so well with the colour of absinthe.”

  The green-yellow colour of absinthe did chime perfectly with the 1890s, where green and yellow were ‘aesthetic’ colours. In the anti-aesthetic comic opera Patience (1881), W.S.Gilbert had already lampooned the “greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery” sort of young man, and green and yellow are the colours in Wilde’s ostentatiously, provokingly aestheticized 1889 vision of London, ‘Symphony in Yellow’, where the buses are like yellow butterflies and the pale green Thames is like a rod of jade.

  Even in its heyday – in England, though not in France – the aura of faintly ludicrous aestheticism and damnation surrounding absinthe was ripe for parody. It is mentioned earlier in Hichens’s novel when Reggie vaunts his own divided nature, split between the very good and the very bad, with an explanation that skips elegantly from absinthe to psychogeography:

  When I am good, it is my mood to be good; when I am what is called wicked, it is my mood to be evil. I never know what I shall be like at a particular moment. Sometimes I like to sit at home after dinner and read The Dream of Gerontius. I love lentils and cold water. At other times, I must drink absinthe, and hang the night hours with scarlet embroideries. I must have music, and the sins that march to music. There are moments when I desire squalor, sinister, mean surroundings… The mind has its West End and its Whitechapel.

  The Green Carnation spelt the end of friendship between Wilde and Hichens, and Wilde was particularly mortified by rumours that he had written it himself. Hichens may have done Wilde more damage than he intended with the book’s depiction of the relationship between Amarinth and Reggie. The Marquis of Queensberry – Bosie’s father, and Wilde’s nemesis – was not amused when he read it.

  Wilde’s disgrace took The Yellow Book down with it. This notorious periodical had been published by John Lane at The Bodley Head in Vigo Street, but after Wilde’s arrest in 1895 the public mood turned against aestheticism and decadence. A mob attacked The Bodley Head – or “The Sodley Bed”, as Aubrey Beardsley called it – and smashed its windows. John Lane lost his nerve and sacked Beardsley; Wilde was arrested on April 5th and Beardsley was fired from the art editorship on April 11th. The Yellow Book’s successor was The Savoy, edited by Arthur Symons: Beardsley’s original cover featured a cherub urinating on a copy of The Yellow Book.

  In 1895 Symons, Beardsley, and Dowson all went to Dieppe, and in August the artist Charles Conder wrote to William Rothenstein that Arthur Symons had arrived in town, taken a room in the same hotel, and had “just written a poem as to the Dieppe sea being like absinthe – original, n’est-ce pas?”

  The oppressive atmosphere in London was one of the main reasons why the decadents and aesthetes gathered in Dieppe, although even there Beardsley didn’t feel entirely safe. “There isn’t a gendarme in France”, he complained, “who hasn’t got a photograph of me or a model of my penis about his person.”

  One of the leading lights of the Anglo-absintheurs at Dieppe was the publisher Leonard Smithers, a pivotal figure in the literary world of the 1890s, remembered by Rothenstein as “a bizarre and improbable figure” and described by Symons as “My cynical publisher Smithers, with his diabolical monocle.” Smithers’ life story has been exaggerated and largely told by his enemies, so he is remembered as a shady pornographer with evil proclivities. There was more to him than that.

  Smithers prided himself on publishing “what all the others are afraid to touch”. He rallied to support the Decadents after the Wilde affair, and set up The Savoy with Symons and Beardsley at the helm. It was named after the hotel, which was then a mere six years old. The Savoy Hotel promised electric lighting and “artistic furniture throughout”, and it also happened to be the location where Wilde’s offences were alleged to have taken place. The Savoy was Smithers’s flagship, but his other achievements are impressive. He published Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (originally published anonymously as the work of prisoner C.3.3.) and The Importance of Being Earnest. He also published books by Max Beerbohm, Beardsley, Symons and Dowson, along with more curious and scrofulous items such as Aleister Crowley’s White Stains: The Literary Remains of George Archibald Bishop, a
Neuropath of the Second Empire, and the simply unclassifiable, such as the memoirs of Marie-Antoinette’s hairdresser Leonard, or Alone: An Introspective Work, described as the internal ramblings of a female lunatic of lesbian and religious tendencies.

  As for Smithers’s murkier side and his reputation for depravity – which caused many people, such as Yeats, to shun him – his business was firmly grounded in the clandestine, sub rosa world of Victorian pornography. This was a gigantic subterranean industry in which almost anything was available, from explicit daguerreotypes to books bound in human skin (something which Smithers occasionally used to sell in his antiquarian catalogues, although there is no suggestion that he had any bound himself). At the height of his career Smithers had his premises at 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, off Old Bond Street, from where he sold “continental literature” and material of the kind that booksellers used to catalogue as “curiosa” and “facetiae”. Wilde described Smithers as a publisher of very limited editions, “accustomed to bringing out books limited to an edition of three copies, one for the author, one for [himself], and one for the Police”.

  Wilde seems to have liked Smithers, describing him as “a delightful companion and a dear fellow.” He described him to Reggie Turner: “His face, clean-shaven as befits a priest who serves at the altar whose God is Literature, is wasted and pale – not with poetry, but with poets, who, he says, have wrecked his life by insisting on publishing with him. He loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his passion. He is the most learned erotomaniac in Europe.” Can this really be as sinister as it sounds to our modern ears? We just don’t know. But whatever it means, it doesn’t seem to have bothered Wilde. In a rather inscrutable 1898 letter to Robbie Ross, Wilde writes that Smithers had been to visit him in Paris: “He was quite wonderful, and depraved, went with monsters to the sound of music, but we had a good time, and he was very nice.”

  Smithers seems to have been one of those people for whom drinking absinthe was a sacrament and a mark of caste; like a member of a special club he wrote to Wilde from London

  Since I last wrote to you I have neglected absinthe, and have drunk whisky and water, but I have distinctly seen the error of my ways, and have gone back to absinthe.

  “Dowson sends his love”, Smithers added at the bottom of the letter, “and he is gushing over the poem at the present moment.” This was Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, which Smithers was in the process of publishing.

  In due course Wilde would write from France and ask Smithers to lay flowers on Dowson’s grave for him. Smithers too came to a bad end. He lived hard: Rothenstein, among others, thought that absinthiated late nights with Smithers were ruining the health of Dowson and Beardsley. Smithers not only went bankrupt – confirming the old Victorian adage that if you really care for art you end up poor – but he graduated from absinthe to chlorodyne (a mixture containing chloroform, morphine, ether, and ethanol). He was probably driven to this by the pain from a stomach complaint, itself aggravated by alcohol and lack of food, and he finally died from gastric trouble and cirrhosis of the liver. One of his former authors, Ranger Gull, recognised him in the gutter of Oxford Street, starving, and gave him some money. Six months later he was dead, in what have been called, “circumstances of extreme horror”, and described as being like, “something out of a Russian novel”.

  In 1907 Smithers’ wife and son were called to a house near Parson’s Green, Fulham, on what would have been Smithers’ forty-sixth birthday. The house had been stripped completely bare; this alone must have been a strange sight for the people who found it, considering the cluttered domestic interiors that the Victorians and Edwardians were accustomed to. Except for a couple of wicker baskets and fifty empty bottles of chlorodyne, there was nothing in the house except Smithers’ dead body. This had also been stripped completely; even the diabolical monocle was gone.

  † The second edition of Machen’s book Hieroglyphics, “has for frontispiece a photograph of myself. It seems to express great gloom, righteousness and austerity. What it really expresses are my sentiments during the process of ‘sitting.’

  ‘Oh Lord!’ I was saying to myself, ‘why should I waste my time being photographed at Baron’s Court this blessed Sunday, when I might be drinking my absinthe…?’”

  Chapter Three

  The Life and Death of Ernest Dowson

  William Rothenstein’s picture of Ernest Dowson. According to Max Beerbohm, Rothenstein was a rare witness to the existence of Enoch Soames. Photo copyright National Portrait Gallery.

  The definitive member of the “tragic generation” of 1890s decadents was Ernest Dowson, who wrote some of the most quintessentially Nineties poetry. Dowson’s melancholy and self-destructive absinthe-drinking life has been extensively mythologised and romanticised, beginning with Arthur Symons’ 1896 piece on him in The Savoy. There was “something curious in the contrast of a manner exquisitely refined, with an appearance generally somewhat dilapidated”, says Symons, and “without a certain sordidness in his surroundings he was never quite comfortable, never quite himself”; in fact he had “that curious love of the sordid, so common an affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so genuine.” One of Dowson’s friends said that after his death an autopsy would find ‘Art for Art’s sake’ engraved on his heart, and his biographer Jad Adams has written that “his dedication to art was nothing short of religious; his life was a human sacrifice.”

  Dowson’s melancholy view of the world circles around themes of wistful yearning for an impossible ideal, and a sense that decay is inevitable – or that it has happened already – and everything is lost. His poetry is centred on erotic devotion, unrequited love, lost love, and parting by death. Influenced by the French Symbolists and by Latin literature, Dowson’s work might be relentless but it is never laboured, and he brings it off with a musical lightness of touch. A contemporary reviewer noted his, “almost morbid grace and delicacy, which can only be conveyed by Rossetti’s word gracile, and a decadent melancholy”. Some of his phrases have an almost Biblical simplicity and resonance, and have since become film and novel titles: “gone with the wind”; “stranger in a strange land”; “days of wine and roses”. And if the latter sounds cheerful, the context is “they are not long, the days of wine and roses”.

  Dowson was liked by almost everyone who knew him, Aubrey Beardsley being one of the very few exceptions. Beardsley was commissioned by Leonard Smithers to decorate the cover of Dowson’s Verses, which he did with a Y- shaped arabesque. He liked to say that it meant “Why was this book ever written?” Beardsley was a waspish character, and he disliked both Wilde and Dowson. If Frank Harris can be trusted, Oscar Wilde once likened Beardsley’s drawings to absinthe:

  “It is stronger than any other spirit and brings out the subconscious self in man. It is like your drawings, Aubrey, it gets on one’s nerves and is cruel.”

  Despite Beardsley’s own reputation, he disliked the Decadent movement and resented his public identification with it. It may be that Beardsley – who was dying young through no fault of his own, slowly fighting a losing battle with tuberculosis – particularly despised Dowson for his suicidal lifestyle.

  Dowson was never quite the same, said a friend, after both his parents committed suicide. This was perhaps an exaggeration: his father may have died of natural causes, although there was a widespread belief among Dowson’s friends and possibly family that he had killed himself. Six months later Dowson’s mother, who had always been unstable, unquestionably did kill herself.

  Dowson’s father owned a failing dock in East London – Bridge Dock, later called Dowson’s Dock – and it ruined the Dowsons’ lives with financial worry and eventual bankruptcy. But even this wasn’t the worst thing in Dowson’s existence. He fell desperately in love with a twelve year old girl named Adelaide, or ‘Missie’, the daughter of a restaurant owner in Sherwood Street, Soho. Dowson’s motives were honourable, and he waited faithfully (“in my fashion”, as we shall see) for this v
ision of purity to grow old enough to marry him. When she finally came of age she married a waiter, and Dowson never really recovered.

  Dowson’s adoration of little girls was not a purely personal kink. An outgrowth of the Romantic cult of the child, it was one of the more absurd nineteenth-century fashions, and seems to have been something of an Oxford thing, Lewis Carroll being another famous case. It is worth disentangling Dowson’s passion for girls from paedophilia in the modern sense: for Dowson, the whole point of adoring little girls seems to have been precisely that there was nothing sexual about it. Dowson was deeply shocked by newspaper reports about a man who ran off with a schoolgirl and lived with her in Hastings, eventually receiving six months in prison. “The worst of it”, he wrote to a friend in September 1891, “was that it read like a sort of foul and abominable travesty of – pah, what is the good of hunting for phrases. You must know what I mean… This beastly thing has left a sort of slimy trail over my holy places.” This cult of the little girl was a widespread decadent phenomenon, and Punch, wielding its commonsensical humour like a truncheon, gave the whole business a sharp tap on the head with its spoof poem published in September 1894, ‘To Dorothy, My Four-Year-Old Sweetheart.’

  Dowson’s friends found his love for children to be charming evidence of his purity of heart. Dowson himself wrote about the ‘cult of the child’ and related it to the pessimism and disillusionment of the age. His own temperament was deeply pessimistic: he described the world as “ a bankrupt concern” – shades of Dowson’s Dock – and life itself as “a play that ought to have been damned on the first night.” When a friend reminded him that there were still books, dogs and seven- year-old girls, Dowson replied that in the end the books make you yawn, the dogs die, and the little girls grow up. A not untypical Dowson poem, ‘Dregs’, includes the lines