The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  Magnan’s work was reported, somewhat sceptically at first, in the London Lancet of March 6th 1869. Magnan had given essence of wormwood to a guinea pig, a cat and a rabbit, all of which went rapidly from excitement to epileptic-type convulsions. “It is not the first time we have had to notice discussions on this subject”, said The Lancet, “and to comment upon the inadequacy of the evidence produced in order to prove that absinthism, as met in the Parisian world, is something different from chronic alcoholism.” Magnan is reported in The Lancet again on Sept 7th 1872, this time with less scepticism. He has now succeeded in isolating an “oxygenated product” from absinthe, which has proved “powerfully toxic”: it has caused a large dog to suffer violent epileptic attacks, ending in death, with “an extraordinary rise in temperature from 39 centigrade to 42.” In 1903 a Doctor Lalou demonstrated that the substance principally responsible for the toxicity of absinthe’s essential oil was thujone.

  The slang “Charenton Omnibus” – there was a large lunatic asylum at Charenton – had become current for absinthe from around 1880. It was now firmly associated with madness, and “Absinthe rend fou” (absinthe drives you mad) became a well known temperance warning. Statistics were produced to show that a person was no less than 246 more times more likely to become insane from drinking absinthe than other forms of alcohol, and a French temperance leader, Henri Schmidt, described it as “truly ‘madness in a bottle’”.

  By now the writing was on the wall for absinthe, but the drinkers were undeterred. People had been getting quite drunk enough in 1874, when French consumption stood at 700,000 litres a year, but by 1910 it had increased to thirty six million litres a year. Absinthe had become a proletarian vice associated with epilepsy, epileptic offspring, tuberculosis, neglected children, and spending the food money on drink: a popular anti-absinthe song of the period rhymes “misère” with “proletaire”, which says it all. This is absinthe at its most powerfully unglamorous, as one of the opiates of the people. A Jacques Brel song, ‘Jean Jaures’, about the assassinated socialist leader, looks back and asks what our grandparents had to live for, “between absinthe and High Mass”. And the spectre of degeneration was never far away from the contemporary discussion, either:

  The French medical authorities are overwhelmed by this slow but sure poisoning of the population. The race is degenerating; the stature of men is lessening; in some places soldiers up to standard height are difficult to find; the minimum height in the army has had to be lowered. Absinthism is much more pernicious than alcoholism; its influence on the brain is particularly bad. In the last thirty years the number of lunatics has increased threefold. In Paris, at the hospital where such cases are especially nursed, statistics show that nine out of ten are due to absinthe poisoning.

  Absinthe may have “democratised itself”, but as the century came to a close Bohemia drank on, undeterred by popular competition. Absinthe has a special place in the mythology of French painting and, as we all know, it was the favourite drink of the creature that Lawrence Alloway has nicely identified as “that late nineteenth century Bohemian monster, the aristocratic dwarf who cut off his ear and lived on a South Sea Island.”

  Born into an aristocratic family who suffered badly from in-breeding, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was not a true dwarf – he was about five feet tall – but his legs were stunted and his head disproportionately large, making him seem shorter than he was. Having started out painting sporting subjects, Lautrec found his real metier in his mid-twenties, when he started to paint and draw the music halls, theatres, cafés, and low-life of Paris, particularly the Montmartre area and the Moulin Rouge. In the course of his work he revolutionized poster design and at the same time immortalized figures such as La Goulue (The Glutton, once known as Louise Weber), who was the Moulin Rouge’s star can-can dancer.

  Gustave Moreau described Lautrec’s pictures as “entirely painted in absinthe”, and Julia Frey gives an account of Lautrec’s acclimatisation to it:

  At the end of the day, Henri would hobble from the atelier down the curved rue Lepic… He liked to go in the twilight to étouffer un perroquet (literally: choke a parrot – a Montmartre expression meaning to down a glass of green absinthe, commonly known as a perroquet)… It is ironic to see the parrot of Henry’s childhood, his infant emblem for evil which had haunted his sketchbooks, reappear in the form of a liqueur – a symbol of his downfall. The image of the diabolical parrot and, by extension, the evil green of absinthe, seemed to have a special importance for him, even in his art. He later said to a friend, ‘Do you know what it is like to be haunted by colours? To me, in the colour green, there is something like the temptation of the devil.’

  Lautrec became a notoriously heavy drinker, and his preferred mixture was a lethal combination of absinthe and brandy known as an Earthquake (Tremblement de Terre). “One should drink little but often” was Lautrec’s prescription, and to help him maintain this regime he possessed a hollow walking stick that contained a supply of absinthe; precision made, this alcoholic’s vade mecum contained half a litre, and even unpacked a little glass. Lautrec also put goldfish in the water jug when he gave dinner parties, Alfred Jarry style.

  “No, I assure you, Dear Madame, I can drink safely,” he once remarked, “I’m so close to the ground already.” But drink and fast living took their toll on Lautrec, who was also suffering from syphilis. He could at times be rude and boorish, his temper was unpredictable, and his tendency to drool on his chin grew worse. He also started to get very drunk on small quantities of alcohol, in the classic manner of terminal alcoholism. Worse than that, paranoia – soon to be the subject of Yves Guyot’s monograph, L’absinthe et le délire persécuteur – had begun to set in.

  Lautrec started to see things such as a beast with no head, and the elephant from the Moulin Rouge began to follow him about. It can’t have been as funny as it might sound. He saw dogs everywhere, and he now slept with his absinthe cane to defend himself in case he was attacked by policemen in the night. Ernest Dowson knew Lautrec slightly, and on the 1st March 1899 he ended a letter to Leonard Smithers with some sad news from Paris: “Toulouse-Lautrec you will be sorry to hear was taken to a lunatic asylum yesterday”.

  Lautrec was confined in a private asylum at Neuilly at the end of February 1899. There are varying accounts of how he got there: he either collapsed in the street with delirium tremens, or he was kidnapped by two asylum staff on the orders of his mother. Once in the asylum – an expensive private clinic in an eighteenth century mansion – he was not free to leave, and the rights and wrongs of his imprisonment were debated in the newspapers. Lautrec was unlucky enough to have an early version of electro-shock treatment, but despite that his mental health improved in the asylum, largely because he was prevented from drinking. On his release he started drinking again; at first more discreetly, with the help of his absinthe cane. He finally died peacefully from drink and syphilis at his family home in 1901, aged 36, with his father in attendance. Ever the sporting aristocrat, the old Count had started hunting flies round the room by flicking his elastic laces at them. “Old fool”, said Lautrec – and they were his last words.

  If people like Toulouse-Lautrec needed to be protected from themselves, it was even more true of the lower orders. It is perhaps surprising that absinthe lasted as long as it did, given the extraordinary publicity that was now ranged against it. The final impetus for the ban came with the First World War, and the fear that beer-drinking Teutons would annihilate the decadent, absinthe-drinking French. The distinction between their drinking habits had already been widely noted in connection with France’s catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. A 1914 French propaganda postcard in Marie-Claude Delahaye’s collection shows an attractive woman sitting at a café table, holding up her absinthe to admire it and wearing a Prussian helmet, the classic pickelhaube with the ornamental spike on top the Ruritanian eagle crest on the front. The clear message is that absinthe and the Boches on the same side. The banning of absinthe
would mark the end of an era, and all the more so because it coincided with the war: just as the 1960s are often reckoned to have lasted until around 1974, so the nineteenth century really lasted until the First World War.

  Absinthe makes its last great appearance in art, just before the ban, in Pablo Picasso’s 1914 cubist sculpture Absinthe Glass. It had already figured in Picasso’s work during his ‘Blue Period’ of 1901–1903. Picasso had gone to Paris in 1900 with his friend Carlos Casagemas, but in February 1901 Casagemas committed suicide. For the next couple of years Picasso’s pictures were predominantly melancholy studies of poverty and depression-ridden subjects, painted in tones of blue and green. Absinthe-drinking seems to figure in these pictures as an instance of addiction, angst and psychic extremity. It is the ‘hope of the hopeless’, and an emblem of terminal Bohemianism, although it also has more positive connotations in Picasso’s work. Absinthe fitted in with a generally Baudelairean tradition of low-life urban and café subjects and, in particular, Picasso associated it with Alfred Jarry. He was fascinated by Jarry and tried to emulate him in several respects, which included drinking absinthe and carrying a revolver.

  Woman Drinking Absinthe of 1901 features a woman dressed in blue sitting at a table in the corner of a red café, with a glass of absinthe before her. She is clasping herself with her abnormally long, expressively distorted arms and unusually large hands, one hand supporting her chin and the other snaking up her arm towards her shoulder. She looks at once rapt and troubled. Woman Drinking Absinthe has a somewhat post-impressionist quality, like the work of Gauguin. In The Absinthe Drinker of the same year, the painting has become rougher and more blurred with bolder, thicker brushstrokes on the table top and a distinctive speckling on the woman’s clothing. The picture as a whole is darker, with a small warm light in a distant window, while the composition is intensely concentrated down a line that runs from the woman’s peaky, crimson-lipped face through the hand and spoon to the glass of absinthe.

  Two Women Seated in a Bar of 1902 features the two women sitting on bar stools with their bare backs to the viewer. On the surface just beyond them, the viewer can see a glass of absinthe. The two figures have a heavy sculptural plasticity, and their dresses and the wall are absinthe coloured. It is a relatively calm composition, but feelings of angst come to the fore again with The Poet Cornutti (Absinthe) of 1902–3. The haggard and sparsely bearded Cornutti is sitting beside a woman at a café table, like the two figures in the Degas picture. Cornutti’s hands are expressively long and thin, and there is a touch of controlled craziness in his feline face, which has a slightly Chinese quality. On the table are the spoon, carafe and glass of absinthe. A note added to the back of the picture by Picasso’s friend Max Jacob explains that Cornutti was an ether addict who died in obscurity.

  Picasso’s Blue Period came to an end in 1903, and absinthe doesn’t significantly figure in the happier period which succeeded it, the so-called Rose Period. But with Picasso’s Cubist works, absinthe is back again. Now, in these far more intellectual, less emotional works, the objects are fragmented into facets as if seen from several directions at once, and absinthe bottles are now used, without any melodrama or angst, as basic props for structural dissection, along with guitars, tables and chairs. The Glass of Absinthe (1911) is a classic work of analytical cubism, although the viewer would be hard pressed to say where the glass of absinthe actually is. It is presumably all over the picture, along with what might be a spoon and a book. Bottle of Pernod and Glass (1912) is easier to read, with bottle, glass and table all clearly visible, and other works include bottles of ‘Ojen’ anisette and ‘Anis del Mono’.

  This attention to brand names has an almost proto-Pop quality, although nobody can agree what it means. Things are clearer when Picasso paints the soup and stock brand, Bouillon Kub, which is probably a pun on Kubism. It may be significant that Picasso’s absinthe is part of a more urban and synthetic ‘Modern’ world, as opposed to the apples and wine bottles in the work of painters such as Matisse and Cezanne. Like many artists, Picasso was caught up in art wars, and his hated rival around 1907 was Matisse, who he said was worse than absinthe: Picasso encouraged his friends to go around writing “La peinture de Matisse rend fou!” (Matisse’s painting drives you mad) on walls, twisting what was by then the old cliché “Absinthe rend fou!”

  Picasso’s absinthe masterpiece is his ‘Absinthe Glass’ sculpture of 1914, a painted bronze in an edition of six, all of which were painted differently. Brooks Adams has discussed this glass in a virtuoso piece of interpretation. By way of a doomy opening comparison, Adams quotes Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas on the feel of Paris light just after the First World War had begun, when the Battle of the Marne was under way and things looked bad for France. Stein’s friend Alfred Maurer remembers being in a cafe:

  I was sitting said Alfie at a café and Paris was pale, if you know what I mean said Alfie, it was like a pale absinthe.

  Adams comments: “That absinthe conveys the vacuum, peculiar light, weather, and vibrations of Paris in a state of imminent siege and reflects its hallucinatory power as symbol for the end of an era.”

  Picasso had just published some pictures of a cubistically deconstructed guitar and violin in a little magazine edited by Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Soirées de Paris. The magazine only had fourteen subscribers, and after Picasso’s instruments appeared, thirteen of them wrote in and cancelled their subscriptions. Undeterred, Picasso embarked on the absinthe glass, which has a stable, glass-like base but an opened out, sliced up body. On top rests a real absinthe spoon and a painted bronze sugar cube: “insouciant, crowning touches”, says Adams, “like a Wallenda high wire routine, they’re brilliant but dumb.” As for the subject, Adams sees it as a bomb thrown at high seriousness, an emblem of Picasso’s youth and a passing era’s excess, and a defiant celebration of the now clearly endangered drink. More sombrely, “Since absinthe is ultimately fatal, all of Picasso’s Glasses qualify as sculptural memento mori”. The speckling on several of them recalls the speckled painting on Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker picture, but one glass in the series is largely black, apart from some stippling on the edges and the inside. This one, for Adams:

  recalls the Satanic lull of absinthe taking effect, beginning to light up the body. Black conveys the vacuum produced by absinthe, and stippled colours conjure up its magic, tranquilizing effect. The verbal equivalent for Picasso’s twinkling colour is la fée verte, green fairy – a common French phrase for absinthe.

  Adams goes on to suggest that by painting each glass differently, Picasso is celebrating the individual’s freedom of choice in alcoholic consumption, and moreover that the open form of the sculptures suggests Picasso’s open attitude to drug control.

  The glasses have also been seen to contain references to, among other things, a face, a woman with a hat, and the crucifixion. Symbolism aside, anybody who has ever toyed with an absinthe glass and spoon, resting the spoon on the glass, will feel the sheer sculptural fascination that the subject must have held for Picasso, with its different materials assembled in different planes. The sculptures also play with three orders of representation: the spoon is actually real, the sugar cube is a realistic counterfeit, and the glass is diagrammatic. Whatever their complexities and ramifications, the six glasses certainly represented an endangered object, as Picasso knew. Germany declared war on 13th August 1914, and on 16th August the Minister of the Interior took emergency measures to prohibit the sale of absinthe. In March 1915 the Chamber of Deputies at last voted to prohibit absinthe not just from sale, but from manufacture. Absinthe was finally banned.

  † J.-K.Huysmans also describes the Chateau Rouge in his 1898 novel La Bièvre et Saint-Severin.

  † See p. 113.

  Chapter Eight

  After the Ban

  Victor Berlemont preparing an absinthe in Soho’s French Pub, London, 1939. Photo copyright Hulton-Getty

  Nostalgia being what it is, absinthe was no s
ooner gone than at least some people started to remember it with affection. Having allegedly brought Parisians to the brink of terminal degeneracy and racial extermination before the ban, after the ban it could be remembered as the recipe for good conversation. Barnaby Conrad cites Robert Burnand on the disappearance of absinthe as a symptom of cultural decline:

  The spirit of the boulevard is dead… Where will one find again the time to stroll, to daydream, to chisel a thought, to launch an arrow?… Absinthe, the magical absinthe of the green hour, whose jade flower blossomed on every terrace – absinthe poisoned the Parisian in a delicious way, at least giving him fertile imagination, whereas the other cocktails sickened one without exaltation.

  But absinthe was gone for good, or at least for the twentieth century; even pastis was banned by the Vichy government in 1940, and not allowed back until 1949. In place of absinthe came a newer, jazz-age, American-style cocktail culture, an early step in the Americanisation and globalisation of Paris. Gradually the French forgot absinthe.

  James Joyce remembers it in his 1922 Ulysses (retrospectively set one day in 1904) where absinthe drinking figures as part of the young Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic character and Continental aspirations, like his “Latin Quarter hat”. His Parisian memories include the “green fairy’s fang” and “froggreen wormwood”, and a bout of absinthe drinking with his student cronies throws up the Latin toast: