by Baker, Phil
Nos omnes biberimus viridum toxicum diabolus capiat posteriora nostra
(We will all drink the green poison and the devil take the hindmost). Later Leopold Bloom has to apologise for Stephen, because he’s been drinking the “greeneyed monster”. Absinthe is remembered again in the great swirling dream of Finnegans Wake, with Paris once more a major association, when “Brother Intelligentius” is “absintheminded, with his Paris addresse” [sic].
In America, meanwhile, absinthe had developed very specific cultural meanings: absinthe is more Gothic, doomy and wicked in America than anywhere else. It is possible that the American sense of absinthe was influenced by the fact that absinthe has a more than passing similarity to paregoric, a bygone opiate panacea that consisted of a 90% alcohol base, anise oil, camphor, and tincture of opium; like absinthe, paregoric was mixed with water and turned cloudy.
A short story published in 1930, Coulson Kernahan’s ‘Two Absinthe-Minded Beggars’, presents two young men who have read about Parisian life and feel they need to research further into absinthe. After all, they are, “literary men, or hope to be, and one day we may give the world a work of art in which we shall have to picture an absinthe- addict, or the effect of absinthe upon the taker, and our knowledge ought to be first-hand.” They want to learn the secret of Verlaine’s inspiration, and they want to experience the “magical” effect of absinthe in lifting the mood. They order their absinthe:
The waiter… set before each of us a tumbler half-filled with a thinnish liquid of some sort. Within the tumbler, as within a receptacle – we wondered whether he was about to show us a conjuring trick – stood a wine glass, also filled, but to the brim, with a liquid of some sort, which was viscous… and which, by the look of it, might have been gum. Then bowing, the waiter withdrew, and we two children, who fancied ourselves men of the world, were left wondering what in the same world we were next supposed to do.
They have to ask the waiter, who makes no reply but proceeds silently with the business:
[he] said nothing, but, lifting the wine-glass, first tilted and finally inverted it over the tumbler until the gum-like liquid had oozed heavily and stickily – to writhe, snake-like, and smoke-like, in nacreous curls, coils, and spirals, until the two liquids within the tumbler, in combining, assumed the colouring and the cloudiness of an opal. I did not like the look of the stuff, and by the heavy and drugged smell, felt sure I should dislike the taste. “It is an unholy looking dope,” I said. The stealthiness with which the thicker liquid curled, coiled, and spiralled itself around the thinner liquid made me think of a python enfolding and crushing its victim.
They order repeatedly, hoping to feel the exhilaration that they have been promised, but all they experience is despondency. Aside from whatever literary merit it might or might not have, Kernahan’s story offers a 1920s picture of the ‘two glasses’ method described by George Saintsbury, and a fanciful picture of absinthe as liquid evil. This is not how absinthe clouds; Kernahan’s description is more like watching milk in tea. Absinthe is not thicker than water but thinner and lighter, being mostly alcohol, so that by adding water slowly it is possible to have the lower half of the liquid opaque and the upper half translucent.
Kernahan’s fantastically Expressionist description of absinthe is half Chinatown and half Dracula’s Castle: the bowing of the silent waiter; the unholy-looking “dope”; the predatory behaviour of the python liquid as it ravishes the innocent water in the glass; the evil attributes of viscosity and ooze; and above all the uncannily familiar visual imagery of curling, coiling and spiralling in tendrils. It is like the movie poster for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, with its wickedly sinuous smoke. Kernahan gives us absinthe as Sax Rohmer might have described it in one of his Doctor Fu Manchu books.
An earlier story, ‘Over an Absinthe Bottle’ by William Chambers Morrow, is no less lacking in literary merit but considerably more morbid. A mysterious stranger invites a starving young man to have some absinthe with him, and play dice in a restaurant’s private booth. The stranger is flush with money and keen not to draw attention to himself, and it transpires that he is a bank robber on the run. He sends the young man to the bar for their drink, and they continue to play dice. When the police open the door of the booth, they find both men sitting there, dead.
Edgar Allen Poe had been an absinthe drinker, as part of his more general alcoholism, and he would drink a mixture of absinthe and brandy with his publisher John Sartain, who was himself a heavy absinthe drinker. Poe managed to give up alcohol altogether for a short spell towards what was to be the end of his life, but he was encouraged to relapse by some friends and died shortly afterwards in Washington College Hospital suffering from hallucinations and delirium tremens.
Aside from morbidity, the signification of absinthe in America was also very much associated with the image of New Orleans. It was a place where the somewhat decayed elegance of French-American culture, with its peeling stucco and sinuous wrought-iron balconies, met the swampland wickedness of Louisiana. Doris Lanier discusses the culture of New Orleans at length in her book, Absinthe: Cocaine of the Nineteenth Century. Absinthe was not a particularly widespread drink in America outside of New Orleans, but it was made better known by a popular song, ‘Absinthe Frappé’, with lyrics by Glenn McDonough:
At the first cool sip on your fevered lip
You determine to live through the day
Life’s again worth while as with a dawning smile
You imbibe your absinthe frappé.
This is understood to be happening first thing in the morning. Absinthe Frappé, absinthe with crushed ice, was a speciality of the Old Absinthe House. A 1907 article in Harper’s Weekly, ‘The ‘Green Curse’ in the United States’, blamed McDonough’s lyric (sung to Victor Herbert’s “catchy air”) for making absinthe more popular, and claimed that it was known to be “almost as fatal as cocaine in its blasting effects upon mind and body.”
Writing in his superb study of American literary alcoholism, The Thirsty Muse, Tom Dardis notes during his discussion of Eugene O’Neill that absinthe was regarded as the most extreme terminal point in intoxicating drinks. O’Neill, writer of The Iceman Cometh, attended Princeton for a single inglorious academic year in 1906–7, where he liked to shock his fellow students with his drinking. “Social drinking”, says Dardis, “was largely confined to beer and wine, while the harder stuff was regarded as the proper comfort for people these students thought of as bums. When the shock of his whisky drinking had worn off, O’Neill determined to show his friends the effects of absinthe, widely regarded in those days as the ultimate in its power to intoxicate”:
After persuading Louis Holladay, a Greenwich Village friend, to bring a bottle of the infamous fluid to the Princeton campus, O’Neill consumed enough of it to throw him into a frenzy of violence in which he destroyed virtually all the furniture in his room. He had been searching for his revolver; when he found it he “pointed it [at Holladay] and pulled the trigger. By good fortune it was not loaded.” Two of his classmates recalled that “O’Neill had gone berserk… It took three to pin him to the floor where he shortly collapsed and was put to bed.”
What may have begun as a pose became a serious problem later, but O’Neill confronted his alcoholism and substantially gave up drinking, although he was still far from happy with life and relied instead on quantities of chloral hydrate and Nembutal. He composed his own epitaph for his tombstone, to be chiselled below his name:
THERE IS SOMETHING
TO BE SAID
FOR BEING DEAD
Before America’s ill-advised general Prohibition in 1919, concerns about absinthe in particular had already led a Senate committee to conclude it was “indeed a poison” and the Senate voted in 1912 to prohibit “all drinks containing thujone”, ahead of the French ban. Americans famously continued to drink, and for a while at least absinthe and pastis must have been a healthier alternative to bathtub gin, with an added Southern elegance and a renegade q
uality in defiance of a Washington directive. Dardis cites a friend of William Faulkner on the party scene in the 1920s, remembering life in the Vieux Carré quarter of New Orleans: “The favourite drink at that time was Pernod, made right there in New Orleans and it cost six dollars a bottle. We made it up in great pitchers for all our parties.”
Elizabeth Anderson, wife of the short story writer Sherwood Anderson, wrote “There was a great deal of drinking among us, but little drunkenness. We all seemed to feel that Prohibition was a personal affront, and that we had a moral duty to undermine it… . The great drink of the day was absinthe, which was even more illegal than whisky because of the wormwood in it… It was served over crushed ice, and since it did not have much taste of alcohol that way, it was consumed in quantities.”
The American writer who has written most persuasively and evocatively about absinthe’s real merits as a drink is undoubtedly Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s enduring contact with absinthe, long after the French ban, came from his experience of Hispanic culture in Spain and Cuba. Absinthe was never outlawed in Spain, and Pernod shifted operations to Tarragona when the French ban descended. Some of the best absinthes currently available are Spanish, and English writer Robert Elms has written atmospherically about his encounter with absinthe in the early 1990s in Barcelona’s notorious Barrio Chino†.
Hemingway was always a heavy drinker, and Dardis notes that for a long while Hemingway seemed to have a special talent for drinking, “despite occasional signs that all was not as benign as it might appear”. In 1928 he suffered the first of a long series of self-inflicted accidents when he pulled the chain in his apartment’s hallway lavatory; at least, he pulled a chain, and brought the glass skylight down on top of himself. It left a lifelong scar on his forehead. It is not clear what part alcohol played in this and various other accidents, says Dardis, but Hemingway “seems to have been drinking before virtually all of them”.
When Hemingway lived in Florida he was able to obtain his absinthe from Cuba, where he owned a house and fished. Barnaby Conrad quotes a 1931 letter in which Hemingway writes “Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano.” As for the damage, he liked to claim “the woodworms did it”, and Conrad nicely notes the comic transposition of “wormwood”, which may be unconscious on Hemingway’s part.
Hemingway spent a lot of time in Spain, where he was a great devotee of bullfighting. In his bullfighting book, Deathin the Afternoon, he explains why he gave up bullfighting himself: “it became increasingly harder as I grew older to enter the ring happily except after drinking three or four absinthes which, while they inflamed my courage, slightly distorted my reflexes.”
Hemingway’s great paean to absinthe comes in his Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Robert Jordan is an American guerrilla leader on a mission to blow up a bridge, and one of his few comforts is absinthe, the “liquid alchemy” which can replace everything else, and which can even stand as a part-for-the-whole drop of the better life he has known in Paris:
… one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosks, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guaranty Trust Company and the Ile de la Cité, of Foyot’s old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.
Jordan is drinking with Pablo, an untrustworthy member of his partisan band who finds absinthe too bitter. “That’s the wormwood,” Jordan explains “In this, the real absinthe, there is wormwood. It’s supposed to rot your brain out but I don’t believe it. It only changes the ideas. You should pour water into it very slowly, a few drops at a time.” Later comes Hemingway’s definitive judgement: whisky with water is “clean and thinly warming”:
But it does not curl around inside of you the way the absinthe does, he thought. There is nothing like absinthe.
Hemingway’s writing about absinthe is notable for its absolute authenticity, right down to the way that Robert Jordan feels a “delicate anaesthesia” on his tongue. The other notable American absintheur, Harry Crosby, was as much in love with the idea of absinthe as with the reality, just as he was taken with the idea of Baudelaire.
Crosby was a young millionaire American who travelled around 1920s Europe with his wife Caresse (formerly the first ever Girl Scout in America) and their dogs Narcisse Noir and Clytoris. They made their base in Paris, with a flat on the Ile St.Louis, and set up the renowned Black Sun Press at 2 rue Cardinale. Crosby was an extraordinary mix of vitality, naivety and extremity, and he has been mythologised as part of Twenties American Paris by Malcolm Cowley in Exiles Return. Together, Harry and Caresse – who had been called Polly Peabody when she met him – embarked on an extraordinary and ultimately disastrous work of self-creation together: “We can”, Harry told her, “become very cultured and improve ourselves.”
In theory Crosby was blessed with almost everything – looks, money, intelligence, a beautiful wife – but he was a deeply disturbed young man, obsessed with decadence and death, who wore a black flower in his lapel and tried to live his life according to Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Clearly unbalanced to begin with, he had been made worse by a traumatic experience in World War One (during which he won the Croix de Guerre) when an ambulance that he was driving took a direct hit from a cannon shell, leaving Crosby miraculously unscathed beside his dying co-driver.
In his marvellous biography of this tragic but more than faintly absurd character, Black Sun, Geoffrey Wolff quotes from Crosby’s list of words that he pre-assembled for future use in his poems, demonstrating the influence, as Wolff says, of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Poe and Wilde:
absurd, bleak… chaos… desolate… disconsolate, disillusion, envenomed… entangled… fragrant, feudal, fragment, gnarled… grandeur, heraldic… illusion… idolatry… labyrinth… legend, lurid… mediaeval, mysterious, macabre, merciless, massacre, nostalgia… obsolete, orchid… primeval… perfume, pagan, phantom…
And so they went on. Much of Crosby’s trouble came from an over-indulgence in Baudelaire, particularly Baudelaire’s desperately miserable poem ‘Spleen IV’. It is not hard, says Wolff, to see how this must have affected Crosby: “He recognized its beauty, shining like a black pearl in a cup of dead-green absinthe.”
Crosby bought black irises for Baudelaire on the anniversary of his birth, and in 1925 he wrote a sonnet, the work of a latterday Enoch Soames, notable (says Wolff) for its “preposterous, outré, unmotivated gloom”
I think I understand you Baudelaire
With all your strangeness and perverted ways
You whose fierce hatred of dull working days
Led you to seek your macabre vision there
Where shrouded night came creeping to ensnare
Your phantom-fevered brain, with subtle maze
Of decomposed loves, remorse, dismays
And all the gnawing of a world’s despair.
Within my soul you’ve set your blackest flag
And made my disillusioned heart your tomb
My mind which once was young and virginal
Is now a swamp, a spleen filled pregnant womb
Of things abominable; things androgynal
Flowers of Dissolution, Fleurs du Mal.
Crosby published it in his book Red Skeletons, illustrated by the belatedly decadent artist Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt, who had already been working with John Lane at the Bodley Head). This featured poems such as ‘Black Sarcophagus’, ‘Futility’, ‘Desespoir’, ‘Orchidaceous’, ‘Dance in a Madhouse’ and ‘Necrophile’, and it attracted the praise of a now ageing Arthur Symons (“a strange originality, something macabre, vi
olent, abnormal, sinister, and also – ‘shadows hot from hell’”). But Crosby came to feel that the whole book – with its epigraphs from Wilde and Baudelaire, and Alastair’s Beardsleyesque illustrations – was too derivative, and he blasted his remaining copies to pieces with a shotgun.
Conrad comments astutely that for Crosby, the drink of Baudelaire, Wilde, Lautrec, Rimbaud and others “was worth an ocean of associations, a morbid green paradise” [my emphasis]. Crosby’s diaries contain some atmospheric references to absinthe. One day in 1927 he met Caresse at the Gare du Nord, and he records her “running down the platform carrying two ponderous volumes of Aubrey Beardsley and two bottles of absinthe.” Always a great bibliophile, Crosby found some rare and curious things in bookshops: in 1928
I went and procured in a bookshop a bottle of very old absinthe (it was a choice between this or an erotic book with pictures of girls making love) and the man in the bookshop recommended Ramuz Le Guérison de Maladies [The Cure of Ills] but as I already had the Guérison to all maladies i.e. the absinthe I did not buy the book but went instead to an apothecary’s where I bought two empty bottles marked hair tonic into which I decanted the absinthe…
Harry graduated from absinthe to opium, which was finally his drug of choice. A friend remembers that Harry and Caresse kept their opium, which looked like a pot of blackberry jam, in her toy chest, and that shortly before the opium appeared “there was a Verlaine jag with absinthe, so we had a great deal of absinthe around the flat.”
The Crosbys knew Hemingway, who introduced Crosby to James Joyce, and Harry seemed to be progressing beyond decadence. He joined the board of the avant-garde periodical transition and his press – having published books by Poe and Wilde – became more Modernist, publishing work by Joyce, Hemingway, Hart Crane and D.H.Lawrence. But Crosby was still obsessed by death, and his last diary entry includes the credo “one is not in love unless one desires to die with one’s beloved.”