by Baker, Phil
Cros’s more cynical and sardonic side earns him a place in Joris-Karl Huysman’s A Rebours, the original “Yellow Book” (Lord Henry Wotton lends Dorian Gray a copy of this yellow-bound book in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dorian finds it to be “the strangest book that he had ever read”). Huysman’s hero, the ultra-decadent Des Esseintes, keeps a book by Cros in his extraordinary library and admires Cros’s satirical story ‘The Science of Love’, “which was calculated to astonish the reader with its chemical extravagances, its tight-lipped humour, its icily comic observations.”
Cros also figures in Marie Corelli’s Wormwood, where she praises him as an underrated genius and notes his recent death, “surrounded by the very saddest circumstances of suffering, poverty and neglect”. She quotes his poem ‘L’Archet’ in full and commends his collection Le Coffret de Santal (The Sandalwood Box). More than that, the unattributed poem ‘Lendemain’ – the poem that inspires Gaston Beauvais on his career of “making some dramas” with absinthe and women – is by Cros.
With flowers and with women
With absinthe and with flame
One can divert oneself a little
And play a role in some dramas
Absinthe drunk on a winter evening
Lights up in green the smoky soul
And flowers on the loved one
Give a heavy scent before the clear fire.
Then the kisses lose their charm
Having lasted a few seasons;
Back and forth betrayals
Make us part one day without any tears.
We burn letters and bouquets
And the fire consumes our nest;
And if the sad life is spared
Absinthe and hiccups remain…
The portraits are eaten by flames…
The twitching fingers tremble…
We die from having slept too long
With flowers and with women.
Not the least extraordinary thing about Cros’s scientific discoveries is that they seem to have been real, which was not always the case with the results of absinthe-fuelled researches. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg spent years in Paris delving into alchemy and other subjects, during a period of increasingly paranoid mental turmoil recorded in Inferno and From An Occult Notebook.
“I wonder if we shouldn’t go out and be bohemian…” he suggested to a friend in 1904, “I long for Montparnasse, Madame Charlotte, Ida Molard, absinthe, merlan frit, du Blanc, Le Figaro and [Café Closerie des] Lilas! But! – but!!!” In practice, absinthe hadn’t always agreed with him. A few years earlier he had written in his dairy, “Concerning absinthe, several times this autumn I have drunk absinthe with Sjostedt, but always with unpleasant results.” He goes on to describe these, with an impressive balance of paranoia and insight: the café “became filled with horrid types” and on the street ragged people “covered with filth as though they had come out of the sewers” appeared and stared at him: “I have never seen such types in Paris, and wondered if they were ‘real’ or ‘projected’.” He had, however, seen such people before in London: there were hellish, filthy people teeming at “the mouth of London Bridge, where the throng bears a truly occult appearance”.
In addition to alchemy, Strindberg’s projects and researches included colour photography, telescopy, “air electricity as motor power”, “nickel plating without nickel (transmutation of metals)”, “silk from a liquid without silkworms”, and much more. Writing later, Delius remembered a time when he believed in Strindberg’s scientific genius, even if his insights could be hard to follow. One day Strindberg showed Delius a photograph of Verlaine:
Paul Verlaine had just died, and Strindberg had in his possession a rather large photo of the poet on his deathbed. He handed me the photo one day and asked me what I saw on it. I described it candidly, namely, Verlaine lying on his back covered with a thick eiderdown, only his head and beard visible; a pillow had dropped on the floor and lay there rather crunched up. Strindberg asked me if I did not see the huge animal lying on Verlaine’s stomach and the imp crouching on the floor?
Delius wondered if Strinberg was sincere about this, or if he was trying to mystify him. “However,” he adds, “I may say I believed implicitly in his scientific discoveries then …”
For instance, Rontgen rays [X-rays] had just been discovered, and he confided to me one afternoon over an absinthe at the Café Closerie des Lilas that he himself had discovered them ten years ago.
Strindberg’s biographer, Michael Meyer, cites a number of authorities who believe Strindberg’s mental condition was exacerbated or even caused by his chronic indulgence in absinthe.
Casting a characteristically jaundiced eye on “the idols of the youth of today”, Edmond de Goncourt despatches the top three with a brief character assassination: “Baudelaire, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and Verlaine: three men of talent admittedly, but a sadistic Bohemian, an alcoholic, and a murderous homosexual.”
Long before he became anyone’s idol, Villiers de l’Isle Adam had already made a striking appearance in the Goncourt journals, one September evening in 1864:
“He was a typical literary Bohemian or unknown poet. His hair, which was parted in the middle, kept falling in stringy locks over his eyes, and he would push it back with the gestures of a maniac or an illuminati. He had the feverish eyes of a victim of hallucinations, the face of an opium addict or a masturbator, and a crazy, mechanical laugh which came and went in his throat. Altogether, something unhealthy and spectral… He looks as if he were descended from the Templars by way of the Funambules.”
Writing of Paris cafés at this period, François Fosca gives a role call of casualties with Villiers de l’Isle Adam at the head: “There were many who had to suffer for their weakness for the Green Fairy: Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Charles Cros, Glatigny, the artist André Gill, and the Communard Eugène Vermesch, whom it led to a padded cell…”
Learning that the throne of Greece was vacant, Villiers de L’Isle Adam immediately announced his claim to it by a telegram to The Times. This might have seemed to his contemporaries to be exactly the sort of lunatic scheme an absinthe drinker would embark on, but Villiers de l’Isle Adam was in earnest. He gained the support of two of his cousins – one a governor of Siberia, the other the English Lord Buckingham – and eventually went to see the Emperor to discuss his claim. He went heavily made up, bent double, and plastered with foreign medals and decorations (looking, says Goncourt, just like an old broken down King of Greece ought to look). But nothing came of it.
Villiers de l’Isle Adam is particularly remembered for Axel, which W.B.Yeats says he studied as if it were a “sacred book”. It has also been influentially discussed by the American critic Edmund Wilson, who took it as a key point in the Symbolist rejection of ordinary reality. Gothic and Wagnerian, loaded with Rosicrucian symbolism, Axel is the story of Count Axel, who lives in remote and ancient castle in the depths of the Black Forest, absorbed in the study of alchemy. Hidden in the crypt below the castle is a vast treasure, its whereabouts unknown even to Axel. Meanwhile the location of the treasure has been discovered by another Rosicrucian adept, a young woman who has escaped from the convent where her family have placed her. Pressing the secret button on a heraldic death’s head in the crypt, she unleashes a torrent of gold, diamonds and pearls.
Although at first she attempts to shoot him, she and Axel fall in love, and she suggests that they should travel together to the fabulous Orient. She paints a lush picture of the East and its heroic possibilities, but Axel’s reply is definitive. Her dreams of the Orient are so beautiful, he says, it would be foolish to try and make them real. “If only you knew what a heap of uninhabitable stones, what a sterile and burning soil, what dens of loathsome creatures, those wretched places are in reality – although they seem glamorous to you, with memories far away in that imaginary Orient which you carry within yourself.” It is in this same speech against the external world and mere reality that Axel utters
his most famous line: “Live?” he says, disgusted: “Our servants will do that for us.”
It was a favourite line of Lionel Johnson. Unlike most writers with a taste for aristocratic hauteur, Villiers de l’Isle Adam was a real Count. He died in vastly reduced circumstances, attended by his illiterate mistress. His writing was admired by Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Verlaine, who included him as one of his poètes maudits, and by Breton, who includes him in the Anthology of Black Humour.
Writing in the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Breton lists some of his chosen precursors of surrealism and says what they are supposedly surrealist “in”. Rimbaud, as we have seen, is proto- surrealist “in life and elsewhere”, Jonathan Swift “in malice”, the Marquis de Sade “in sadism”, and Baudelaire “in morals”, followed by “JARRY in absinthe”.
Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) was a bizarre figure. His own life was as much of a creation as his stage works, and eventually it became inseparable from them. Dwarfishly short, speaking with deliberately staccato or robotic intonations, and wearing a cape and an enormous stovepipe hat “taller than he was”, Jarry immediately attracted attention in literary Paris. He lived in a tiny room at the foot of a dead-end alley off the Boulevard Port-Royal, and the spiral staircase leading up to it was decorated with handprints in blood on the walls. The room was draped with black velvet, filled with owls, and adorned with religious paraphernalia of crucifixes and censers.
Jarry consumed alcohol, absinthe, and ether in appalling quantities, with essentially magical or shamanistic intentions and disastrous results. Something of a misogynist, he was nonetheless a close friend of Madame Rachilde, older novelist and author of The Marquise de Sade, and she has left a vivid picture of his drinking:
Jarry began the day with two litres of white wine, three absinthes followed at intervals between ten o’clock and midday, then at lunch he washed down his fish, or his steak, with red or white wine alternating with further absinthes. In the course of the afternoon, a few cups of coffee laced with brandy or spirits whose names I have forgotten, then, with his dinner, after, of course, further aperitifs, he could still take at least two bottles of any vintage, whether good or bad. Now, I never saw him really drunk, except on one occasion when I took aim at him with his own revolver, which sobered him up instantly.
Jarry’s drink of preference was, notoriously, absinthe, although later – when he ran low on money – he turned to ether, which was even worse. He liked to call absinthe “l’herbe sainte” (the holy herb, punning as “erbsant”) and his “holy water”. He cultivated a thoroughgoing aversion to the other kind of water; in that respect he was not unlike the American comedian W.C.Fields, who used to say, “How can you drink that? Fish have been fucking in it.” “Anti-alcoholics,” Jarry said:
are unfortunates in the grip of water, that terrible poison, so solvent and corrosive that out of all substances it has been chosen for washings and scourings, and a drop of water, added to a clear liquid like absinthe, makes it muddy.
Jarry was never in the grip of water, which seems to have disagreed with him. Somebody once slipped him a glass as a practical joke, and – thinking it was a clear spirit such as marc – he threw it back in one. He then pulled, “the most horrible of faces” and was unwell for the rest of the day.
Jarry came to exist in what Rachilde remembers as, “that state of permanent drunkenness in which he seemed to quiver instead of living normally”. It was from her that he borrowed the pair of bright yellow high-heeled shoes that he wore to Mallarmé’s funeral. For the most part people liked him – Oscar Wilde took to him at once and described him as “most attractive. He looks just like a very nice renter” (rent-boy) – but it is clear that he could be a strain on the nerves. Very pale but ultra-fit, Jarry did almost everything to excess. He was a fanatical cyclist, and he used to race trains on his pushbike (he had a very expensive state-of-the-art racing cycle, a Super Laval 96, which he bought on credit in 1896 and still hadn’t finished paying for when he died in 1907). He was also keen on firearms, and used to walk around Paris at night, intoxicated and carrying a pair of revolvers and a carbine rifle. When somebody asked him for a light in the street, he pulled out a revolver and blasted it in their face (it works as a sort of pun in French). Mercifully they weren’t hurt. When he was in the country he used to hunt grasshoppers with his revolvers. Once, when he was engaged in target practice against a garden wall and a woman complained that he was endangering the lives of her children, he reassured her that if any did get shot he would help her to make some more.
‘The Argonaut’s Dinner’ chapter of André Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters contains a scene in which Jarry, drunk on absinthe, fires a revolver at a man in a café. It is inspired by a real incident when Jarry fired at a sculptor named Manolo (he is also reported to have shot at a man named Christian Beck during a banquet). He missed, probably on purpose. Like Wilde, Gide also took to Jarry, and remembers him as he was in about 1895: “It was the best period of Jarry’s life. He was an incredible figure whom I also met at Marcel Schwob’s, and always with tremendous enjoyment, before he became a victim of frightful attacks of delirium tremens.”
Gide goes on to remember him as a “plaster-faced Kobald [a kind of gremlin], got up like a circus clown and acting a fantastic, strenuously contrived role which showed no human characteristic”. Jarry’s terrible, programmatic drinking was ultimately an attempt to break down the distinction between external and psychic reality, and his theatricality also tried to erase the boundaries between art and life, and to fuse the two. Jarry came to identify himself with his monstrous stage creation Père Ubu, the grotesque but comic anti-hero at the centre of his play Ubu Roi.
Ubu Roi takes place, “In Poland, that is to say, nowhere”, with a minimalist set design that notionally included “palm trees growing at the foot of the bed so that little elephants standing on bookshelves can browse on them.” Dimly based on the tragi-comic figure of a teacher that Jarry remembered from his schooldays, Père Ubu is a farcically gross figure who murders his way to the Polish throne – poisoning his enemies with a lavatory brush, which he carries like a monarch’s sceptre – and institutes a reign of terror and debauchery. He is finally defeated by the king’s son and the Tsar’s army, at which point he flees to France, where he promises to commit further outrages. Jarry had performed the play with puppets in his attic as far back as 1888, but it was premiered on stage in 1896, with a set painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.
Toulouse-Lautrec and Jarry knew each other from La Revue blanche, an anarchist journal, where Jarry would turn up to the office in a woman’s blouse and a pink turban. Both dwarfish, both outrageous, and both absintheurs, Jarry and Lautrec seem to have hit it off at once. Lautrec’s most recent biographer, David Sweetman, notes that Henri would be the first to die, “but first there was still a lot more drinking and… laughing to do, now joined by another doomed figure [Wilde], before illness and the Green Fairy would claim them both.”
Sweetman describes the play as, “scatological, outrageous, absurd and just downright crude”. The actor playing Ubu came on, wearing an obesely padded costume with a spiral squiggle on the front, and uttered the single opening word “Merdre!” – a personal modification of “merde”, perhaps roughly equivalent to “shite”. The audience immediately went berserk, and fighting broke out for and against the play. The shambles continued for fifteen minutes or so, before the play could continue.
W.B.Yeats and Arthur Symons were in the audience, and Yeats found the experience profoundly disturbing. He shouted in support of the play, feeling he should back the radicals, but the whole business left a nasty aftertaste. Instead of the more introspective and Symbolist aesthetics that Yeats favoured, he saw in the play something of the harshness, ‘objectivity’ and ugly vitality that would characterise much of the twentieth century, and perhaps even the rise of totalitarianism. Breton later described the Ubu plays as anticipating “both the fascist and the Stalinist”. For Yeats, Ubu was the harbinger of bad th
ings to come: “After us”, he wrote, “the Savage God”.
It is not obvious from Ubu, but Jarry was an immensely erudite individual. Well versed in Latin and Greek classics, his enthusiasms included neo-Platonism, heraldry, and Thomas De Quincey. He had more in common with Yeats than Yeats realised, because Jarry had been touched by the occult revival in nineteenth-century France, and he was well versed in the arcane. He had read seminal French occult writers such as Stanislas de Guaita and Joséphin Péladan, and it is against this background, and the conscious cultivation of hallucinatory states, that Jarry drank absinthe not to stupefy himself but to drive himself mad, beyond rationality.
Jarry sought to live a waking dream. Oscar Wilde had already written of the need to fuse art and life, but Jarry did it with an intensity that looks forward to surrealism rather than back to Wilde. When he was being dragged away after shooting at Manolo he exclaimed, “Wasn’t that a beautiful work of literature?” “We can say,” Breton wrote, “that after Jarry, much more than after Wilde, the distinction between art and life, long considered necessary, found itself challenged and wound up being annihilated as a principle.” After Jarry, said Breton, biography seeps unstoppably into literature: “The author imposes himself in the margins of the text … [and there is] no way to rid the finished house of that workman who’s taken it into his head to fly a black flag over the roof.”