The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  More than just the fusion of art and life, often seen as the central project of avant-gardism, Jarry had a potentially more disturbing project to fuse dreaming and waking. Arcane and esoteric as much as avant-garde, Jarry stands – as Roger Shattuck says – in the tradition of Jean-Paul Richter, Rimbaud and especially Gérard de Nerval, whose professed end was to “direct his dream”. As Breton would later write “I believe in the future reconciliation of those two states, which seem so mutually contradictory, of dream and reality, in a kind of absolute reality, of super-reality.” Jarry tried to take the liquid shortcut.

  Jarry’s thinking on these subjects is visible in his novel Days and Nights, about an absinthe-drinking conscript named Sengle who deserts from the French army. Jarry himself had been conscripted, but was released again for “precocious imbecility”. Sengle’s desertion is not only literal but metaphorical; he is profoundly absented in spirit, having gone ‘away’ by escaping into himself.

  The days and nights of the title are reality and dream. Jarry writes that Sengle, following Leibniz, “believed above all that there are only hallucinations, or only perceptions, and that there are neither nights nor days (despite the title of this book, which is why it was chosen) and that life is continuous.” It is continuous in the same way that consciousness is seen as continuous – and as being all that there is – in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book that Jarry might have liked; it wasn’t translated until after his death†.

  Preceding this passage (in the chapter entitled ‘Pataphysics’) Sengle’s thoughts have taken on a distinctly magical – or psychotic – colouring. He finds that his thoughts can control the outside world: “Sengle came to believe, on the strength of testing his influence on the behaviour of small objects, that he had the right to assume the probable obedience of the world at large.” Playing dice, intoxicated with absinthe and brandy, he finds he can control the dice, predicting to his opponent what they will do and envisaging it in his mind’s eye before it happens.

  Jarry’s external life was not proceeding as smoothly. Poverty had him in its grip. He fished his own food out of the Seine, partly from eccentricity (he dyed his hair green as well) but also from necessity. He was now in cramped and dingy lodgings at 7 rue Cassette, which he called Our Grand Chasublerie because there was a manufacturer of ecclesiastical vestments on a lower floor. On the mantelpiece was a stone phallus, a gift from Félicien Rops, covered with a purple velvet skullcap. Jarry’s ceiling was so low that even at his height his head brushed it. Other people had to stoop. The bed had no legs – he said low beds were coming back into fashion – and he wrote lying flat on the floor. As Roger Shattuck reports, “It was said that the only food that could be eaten conveniently in the place was flounder.”

  Jarry’s drinking was unabated; if anything it was worse, because now he turned to ether when he couldn’t afford absinthe. Keith Beaumont quotes a late Jarry prose work in which the hero, Erbrand, is in a final descent not unlike Jarry’s own:

  he drank alone and methodically, without ever succeeding in reaching a state of drunkenness, and without any hope of becoming what it is fashionable these days to call an alcoholic: his doses were too huge for them not to slide over his cells as a river filters through an eternal and indifferent bed of sand and disappears…

  And he drank the very essence of the tree of knowledge at 80 proof… and he felt at home in a Paradise regained…

  But soon he could drink no more in the darkness, since for him there was no longer any darkness, and no doubt like Adam before the Fall… he could see in the dark…

  And he often went without food, because one cannot have everything at once and drinking on an empty stomach does more good.

  Erbrand’s ‘seeing in the dark’ sounds less like acuity of sight than hallucination; perhaps it is the kind of ‘seeing in the dark’ that can be done while floating in an isolation tank.

  Finally, Jarry became very ill, and had to be attended by what he called “merdcins” (“docturds”). Drinking on an empty stomach does more harm, and Jarry’s health was worsened by starvation. It is often said that what kills alcoholics is not just the drink but the lifestyle that goes with it, and this was true in Jarry’s case. He wrote to friend that “the rumour has been put about … that Père Ubu [that is, of course, Jarry himself] drank like a fish. I can admit to you, as an old friend, that I had somewhat lost the habit of eating and that was my only illness.”

  To Madame Rachilde he wrote, “We must rectify the legend – for Père Ubu, as I am called, is dying not of having done too much drinking, but of not having always had enough to eat.” He also told her, characteristically, that he believed the brain functioned after death during its decomposition, and that it was these dreams that constituted Paradise. Jarry’s last request was for a toothpick. They brought him one just in time and he was delighted, dying almost immediately afterwards.

  Roger Shattuck’s brilliant chapter on Jarry in his book The Banquet Years is aptly and succinctly entitled ‘Death by Hallucination’. Jarry leaves behind him not only his own work but a growing legacy of his admirers, ‘The College of Pataphysics’. The Société des Amis d’Alfred Jarry publishes a Jarry journal entitled L’Etoile-Absinthe.

  Not everybody who drank absinthe was a highly acclaimed genius, as we shall see in the next chapter. Alphonse Allais’ prose piece ‘Absinthe’ looks at its effect on that quintessential turn-of-the-century figure, the struggling man of letters. Allais, a friend of Cros and Verlaine, was an oddball comic writer who has the distinction of painting the first completely monochrome colour-field pictures. It was often said that contemporary artists couldn’t paint, so Allais and some others – mostly writers, not artists – formed the Salon des Incoherents, whose members really couldn’t paint. Allais’s masterpieces include a white rectangle, ‘Anaemic Young Girls Going to their First Communion in a Blizzard’ (1883) and his entirely green canvas of 1884, ‘Some Pimps Lying in the Grass Drinking Absinthe’.

  ‘Absinthe’ is an early stream-of-consciousness piece, following the progressive intoxication and changing perceptions of a struggling writer sitting on a boulevard during ‘L’Heure Verte’, surrounded by the great urban mystery of other people.

  ‘ABSINTHE’

  Five o’clock.

  Rotten weather. Grey sky… dreary, mind-chilling sort of grey.

  Oh, for a short, sharp shower to get rid of all these stupid people milling around like walking cliches… Rotten weather.

  Another bad today, dammit. Devilish luck.

  Article rejected. So politely, though:

  ‘Liked your article… interesting idea… nicely written… but not really in the style of the magazine, I’m afraid…’

  Style of the magazine? Magazine’s style?? Dullest magazine in the whole of Paris! Whole of France.

  Publisher preoccupied, distrait, mind elsewhere.

  ‘Got your manuscript here somewhere… yes, liked your novel… interesting idea… nicely written… but business is very slow at the moment, you see… already got too much stuff on our hands… ever thought of writing something aimed more at the market? Lots of sales… fame… honours list…’

  Went out politely, feeling stupid:

  ‘Some other time, perhaps.’

  Rotten weather. Half past five.

  The boulevards! Let’s take to the boulevards. Might meet a friend or two. If you can call them friends. Load of worthless… But who can you trust in Paris?

  And why is everyone out tonight so ugly?

  The women so badly dressed. The men looking so stupid.

  ‘Waiter! Bring me an absinthe and sugar!’

  Good fun, watching the sugar lump melt very quietly on its little filter as the absinthe gradually trickles over it. Same way they say a drip of water hollows out granite. Only difference, sugar softer than granite. Just as well, too. Can you imagine? Waiter, one absinthe and granite!

  Absinthe on the rocks! That’s a good one, that’s a good one. Very funny. For
people who aren’t in a hurry – absinthe and granite! Nice one.

  Sugar lump’s almost melted now. There it goes. Just like us. Striking image of mankind, a sugar lump…

  When we are dead, we shall all go the same way. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule. Dissolved, dispersed, returned to the Great Beyond by kind permission of earthworms and the vegetable kingdom.

  Everything for the best then. Victor Hugo and the meanest hack equal in the eyes of the Great God Maggot. Thank goodness.

  Rotten weather… Bad day. Fool of an editor. Unbelievable ass of a publisher.

  Don’t know though. Perhaps not so much talent as keep telling self.

  Nice stuff, absinthe. Not the first mouthful, perhaps. But after that.

  Nice stuff.

  Six o’clock. Boulevards looking a bit more lively now. And look at the women!

  A lot prettier than an hour ago. Better dressed, too. Men don’t look so cretinous either.

  Sky still grey. Nice mother-of-pearl sort of grey. Rather effective. Lovely nuances. Setting sun tingeing the clouds with pale coppery pink glow. Very fine.

  ‘Waiter! An absinthe and anis!’

  Good fun, absinthe with sugar, but can’t stand around all day waiting for it to melt.

  Half past six.

  All these women! And so pretty, most of them. And so strange, too.

  Mysterious, rather.

  Where do they all come from? Where are they all going to? Ah, shall we ever know!

  Not one of them spares me a glance – and yet I love them all so much.

  I look at each one as she passes, and her features are so burnt on my mind that I know I will never forget her to my dying day. Then she vanishes, and I have absolutely no recollection what she looked like.

  Luckily, there are always prettier girls following behind.

  And I would love them so, if only they would let me! But they all pass by. Shall I ever see any one of them again?

  Street Hawkers out there on the pavement, selling everything under the sun. Newspapers… celluloid cigar-cases… cuddly toy monkeys – any colour you want…

  Who are all these men? The flotsam of life, no doubt. Unrecognised geniuses. Renegades. Eyes full of strange depths.

  A book waiting to be written about them. A great book. An unforgettable book. A book that everyone would have to buy – everyone!

  Oh, these women!

  Why doesn’t it occur to just one of them to come in and sit down beside me… kiss me very gently… caress me… take me in her arms and rock me to and fro just as mother did when I was small?

  ‘Waiter! An absinthe, neat. And make it a big one!’

  † Jarry also quotes a Chinese legend which he had found in a thirteenth- century book translated by the Marquis Hervey de St Denys, the Orientalist and writer on dream-control. It concerns the Leao people and their ‘flying heads’, which detached themselves at nightfall and flew away, returning at morning.

  Sengle is walking in the forest with his friend Valens, feeling “in a state of mind as if he had taken hashish” and experiencing a hallucinatory sensation of his soul having detached itself from his body and flying like a kite in the air, attached only by a fragile thread. The idea of the ‘astral body’ is referred to in the same chapter.

  Chapter Six

  From Antiquity to the Green Hour

  L’Absinthe by Apoux: lechery, buffoonery, and death. Copyright Roger-Viollet.

  Like so many things that end badly, the story of absinthe begins well. In the ancient world the absinthe plant – artemisia absinthium, or wormwood – was widely known as one of the most valuable medicinal herbs. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian papyrus from 1600 B.C., recommends wormwood as a stimulant and tonic, an antiseptic, a vermifuge, and a remedy for fevers and period pains. Pythagoras thought that wormwood leaves in wine would ease childbirth, and Hippocrates also recommended it for period pains, as well as anaemia and rheumatism. Galen recommended it for fainting and general weakness, while the Roman naturalist Pliny believed it was good for the stomach, for bile, and for digestion in general, and Dioscorides, writing in his De Materia Medica, considered it a good antidote for drunkenness†.

  Apuleius writes that the plant was first given to the centaur Chiron by the goddess Artemis, hence its name, and it is with the Greeks that it gets its more widespread modern name, from apsinthion; “undrinkable”, because of its bitterness.

  Paracelsus, the Renaissance alchemist and physician, rediscovered the Egyptian practice of using wormwood against fevers, particularly malaria, while Nicholas Culpeper’s seventeenth-century English Physician offers a trove of unreliable information:

  Wormwood is an herb of Mars… hot and dry in the third degree. Wormwood delights in Martial places, for about forges and iron works you may gather a car load of it. It helps the evils Venus and the wanton boy produce. It remedies the evils choler can inflict on the body of a man by sympathy. Wormwood, being an herb of Mars, is a present remedy for the biting of rats and mice. Mushrooms are under the dominion of Saturn, if any have poisoned himself by eating them, Wormwood, an herb of Mars, cures him, because Mars is exalted in Capricorn. Suppose a man be bitten or stung by a martial creature, imagine a wasp, a hornet, a scorpion, Wormwood… gives you the present cure.

  Better yet, Culpeper tells us that it will prevent both drunkenness and syphilis, free virgins from “the scab”, and cure melancholy in old men, although it will also make covetous men splenetic.

  Wormwood had always been found reliable for getting rid of intestinal worms in humans and animals, and it would also repel moths – like its relative, camphor – and kill insects. The fifteenth century Saint Albans Book of Hawking recommends wormwood juice to kill mites on a hawk: “Take the Iuce of wormewode and put to ther thay bei and thei shall dye.” Tusser’s 1580 Husbandrie rises to instructive rhyme:

  Where chamber is sweeped, and wormwood is strowne

  No flea for his life dare abide to be knowne.

  What is more

  It is a comfort for hart and the braine

  And therefore to have it is not in vaine.

  Wormwood is not the only insecticide that has been used for making drinks; in 1950s America, the “Mickey Slim” cocktail was comprised of gin with a minute quantity of DDT. This was thought to give the drink an extra ‘kick’, and give the drinker a jittery or shaky effect that some people found pleasant. We shall see the logic of this, and its relation to absinthe, in Chapter Six.

  On a more pleasantly psychotropic note, wormwood was associated with visionary dreams. It was once believed that on St.Luke’s Day a person could see their “heart’s desire” if they drank a concoction of vinegar, honey, wormwood and other herbs. Lady Wilkinson writes in her 1858 Weeds and Wild Flowers that:

  An old belief continues to be connected with the circumstance of the dead roots of wormwood being black, and somewhat hard, and remaining for a long period undecayed beneath the living plant. They are then called ‘wormwood coal’; and if placed under a lover’s pillow they are believed to produce a dream of the person he loves.

  There is an account that wormwood “grew up in the winding track of the serpent as she departed from Paradise”, and the Book of Revelations features the descent of the bitter star from heaven, after the Seventh Seal has been opened. “And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” In Russia, the name for wormwood is “chernobyl”, lending a distinctly apocalyptic note to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, while in the French bible it is simply called “absinthe”.

  Rue is probably the most bitter plant known, but wormwood comes a close second. This is due to a compound called absinthin (C30H40O6), which has a bitterness detectable at one part in 70,000. Pliny records that after Roman chariot races the victor would be given a wormwood drink, as a reminder that even victory has its bitter side. This bitter quality has given wormwood a long metaphorical career in con
nection with things “grievous to the soul” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. “The sight of other people’s good fortune is gall and wormwood to a vast number of people”, for example, or “It was wormwood to the proud spirit of Agrippa to be treated as a mere astrologer”.

  There is a hard edge to several of the instances cited in the O.E.D., like Benvenuto’s, “Absinth and poyson be my sustenance”, from his 1612 Passenger’s Dialogues. John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The White Devil includes an exchange between Vittoria and the Machiavellian Flamineo, who has caused the death of Vittoria’s husband, murdered his own brother, and driven his mother mad with grief:

  Vittoria: Ha, are you drunke?

  Flamineo: Yes, yes, with wormewood water; you shall tast Some of it presently.

  It is a characteristically Jacobean exchange, of the sort that usually leads to maniacal laughter and a stage covered in corpses. As one of John Ford’s characters says in another Jacobean play, “There’s wormewood in that laughter.”

  There were a number of wormwood drinks before absinthe proper. “Absynthites” or wormwood wine, made by steeping leaves in wine rather than fermenting them, was drunk in the Renaissance just as it had been in Greek and Roman times; it is described in Morwyng’s 1559 Treasure of Evonymous and Cooper’s Thesaurus of 1565. Wormwood water or eau d’absinthe was widely recommended for stomach aches, and there was also wormwood beer, known as “purl”. Samuel Pepys drinks this in his Diary, while visiting a seventeenth- century London brothel, and in the nineteenth century Robert Southey records it as being drunk at All Soul’s, Oxford: “Their silver-cups… are called ox-eyes, and an ox-eye of wormwood is a favourite draught there. Beer with an infusion of wormwood was to be had nowhere else.”