by Baker, Phil
So how does thujone work? Researchers gradually banged more nails in the coffin of the thujone and cannabinoid receptors theory, which was conclusively laid to rest by Meschler et al in 1999, and in 2000 Karin M.Hold and her co-authors at last established that thujone instead works on the brain’s GABA receptor system. GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) inhibits or moderates the firing of neural synapses, but when GABA-blockers such as thujone are in operation, the neurones fire too easily, and their signalling goes out of control as they run wild. The inhibiting effect of GABA is essential to the “fine tuning” of the brain, and its loss leads to tremor and convulsions. Benzodiazepine tranquillisers such as Valium have their calming effect by increasing the effectiveness of GABA, and they are the opposite of and antidote to GABA blockers; nicotine, on the other hand, makes the effect of thujone worse, in as much as it lowers the convulsant threshold. As well as finding that thujone blocks GABA receptors in the mammalian brain, Hold and her colleagues established that thujone poisoning is similar to the effects of the prototypical GABA-blocker picrotoxinin, a plant convulsant found in a variety of “loco weed”, with similar symptoms and antidotes.
Further, a number of organochlorine insecticides such as dieldrin and DDT work by GABA-blocking, and a strain of fly resistant to dieldrin proved equally resistant to thujone. The symptoms of acute DDT poisoning (excitability, clonic and tonic convulsions sometimes approximating epilepsy, and so on) have a familiar ring to the student of wormwood and thujone. None of these effects are related to alcohol. In fact alcohol, like benzodiazepine tranquillizers, is listed as an antidote to convulsive poisoning by thujone, DDT and dieldrin.
So it seems that absinthe can be said to make you lose your inhibitions in more than one sense. Finally, the pharmacological operation of wormwood (“organically grown” or not) has more in common with DDT – recalling the Mickey Slim cocktail of the 1940s – than it has with cannabis.
It sounds grim, but then so do the effects of acute nicotine poisoning: reading them, you would never think that Liszt once said, “A good Cuban cigar closes the door to the vulgarities of the world.” The wormwood buzz is agreed to be pleasant in moderation, and the increased firing of neurones must account at least partly for the feelings of mood lift, excitation and inspiration associated with real absinthe. The crucial factor is the correct dose.
It seems probable that nineteenth-century absinthe contained more wormwood than modern absinthe, not least because it was apparently so bitter. I have never had an absinthe that was in need of sugaring. This is borne out by figures, although estimates vary. European Union regulations prohibit absinthe containing more than 10 parts per million, or 10mg per kg, and Hill’s contains a token 1.8 ppm (while Sebor and King of Spirits apparently contain the full ten). But the thujone content of absinthe back in the Belle Epoque era has been calculated to have been 60/90 ppm, while one source puts it as high as 260ppm, with a suggestion that with the further thujyl alcohol in wormwood this could go as high as 350 ppm
The strongest commercially manufactured absinthes today are the Swiss ‘La Bleue’, which seems to have a dubious legal status even its own country and contains 60ppm of thujone, and ‘Logan 100’, a Czech brand which contains 100ppm and a slightly lower alcohol content than is usual with absinthe, specially designed for the drinker hell-bent on experiencing a thujone jolt. A drinker of La Bleue reports that, “After one glass – I was very present, after two – extremely present, after three – stone-cold sober and very light sensitive, and after four – I was starting to have difficulty with spatial relationships, but was still very mentally focussed. Based on that personal experience, I’d guess that it’s quite high in thujone…”
Given that alcohol is a depressant and thujone a stimulant, real absinthe fits into the so-called “speedball” family of classic drug combinations consisting of an ‘upper’ and a ‘downer’ together. These range from coffee with brandy, through the ugly combination of amphetamines and alcohol, to the ‘speedball’ proper of cocaine and heroin, and indeed ‘Vin Mariani’ cocaine wine. This distant relative of Coca-Cola contained 6 mg of cocaine per fluid ounce of wine and enjoyed great popularity during the heyday of absinthe. It was greatly appreciated by Ibsen, Zola, Jules Verne, and Pope Leo XIII, among others; the Pope even awarded Mariani a gold medal for services to mankind.
Speedball or not, the jury is still out on whether absinthe is any worse than other alcoholic drinks simply because it contains wormwood. People have argued about this for the last 150 years. Although at least since Dr. Magnan’s time it has been clear that wormwood can make absinthe worse, whether it does so for most drinkers is still debatable. Certainly it was, and is, possible to get a kick out of thujone, but the real villain of this book must be the alcohol. Medical writers still routinely note that in practice this is the most dangerous and damaging component of absinthe, and it is with alcohol that we should end.
True absinthe involves two paradoxical effects. The alcoholic strength actually protects the drinker from the wormwood, because it is difficult to drink enough to be poisoned by the small amounts present. But on the other hand, it is the water that makes the alcohol so dangerous. While one might regard a neat triple brandy with respect and even distaste, a good absinthe just slips down, cool, clean and refreshing; it is, as it were, the menthol cigarette of lethal alcoholic drinks.
Most of the writers and artists in this book have been alcoholics, from Verlaine and Toulouse Lautrec to Malcolm Lowry and Ernest Hemingway. They have belonged to that large and unhappy band of whom Cyril Connolly once wrote, “I never want to read about another alcoholic; alcoholism is the enemy of art and the curse of Western civilisation. It is neither poetic nor amusing. I am not referring to people getting drunk but to the gradual blotting out of the sensibilities and the destruction of personal relationships involved in the long-drawn social suicide.”
Why do writers drink? Not all writers do, of course, but Tom Dardis has shown in his book on American literary alcoholism that American writers were under cultural pressure to drink in order to live up to an American idea of what being a writer involved. He cites Glenway Westcott – a friend of Hemingway and Fitzgerald – on the difference between American and French literary life. “In France no one expects much of anyone who drinks, but in America the drinker is supposed to drink and to produce. Some American writers have done it, but the management of drinking and what is expected of the drinker are very different in France.” Absinthe may have inspired some of the figures in this book, but its far more tangible effect on most of their careers, and indeed lives, was to cut them short.
Aside from American cultural pressure, writers in general seem prone to drink. Some may have a grain of bitterness in their characters, either there from the start or brought on by the writing life, and there are distinctive long-term stresses involved, notably not being able to demarcate between life and work. Work always hangs over the writer, who has no real escape from it. Drink, wrote Hemingway, “makes it possible to put up with fools, leave your work alone and not think of it after you knock off… and be able to sleep at night.”
Frederick Exley similarly reports drinking to switch off, and to think a little less: “Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.” That awful ‘exhilaration’ recalls Baudelaire’s brilliantly counter-intuitive note on writing: “Inspiration comes always when man wills it, but it does not always depart when he wishes.”
There is a strange beauty to Carolyn Knapp’s evocative description of alcoholism in her brilliant autobiographical account, Drinking:
… somewhere during that second drink, a switch was flipped… a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass… discomfort was diminished, replaced by something that felt like a kind of love.
Like drinking stars. That’s how Mary Karr describes i
t in her memoir, The Liar’s Club… she felt that slow warmth, almost like a light. ‘Something like a big sunflower was opening at the very centre of my being’, she writes… the wine just eased through me, all the way through to my bones…
Enough? That’s a foreign word to an alcoholic, absolutely unknown… . You’re always after that insurance, always mindful of it, always so relieved to drink that first drink and feel the warming buzz in the back of your head, always so intent on maintaining the feeling, reinforcing the buzz, adding to it, not losing it. A woman I know named Liz calls alcoholism “the disease of more”, a reference to the greediness so many of us tend to feel around liquor, the grabbiness, the sense of impending deprivation and the certainty that we’ll never have enough.
There is another spot-hitting description of the drinking life in Patrick McGrath’s novel, The Grotesque: “Doris is one of those in whom the first drink of the day can arouse a sense of consummate fulfilment unrivalled in the spectrum of human gratification.” “I wonder”, adds the narrator:
has it ever occurred to you that a certain analogy can be drawn between drinking and suicide? … But what the drinker would doubtless spurn is the sudden death, the sudden blessed cessation of experience, and the liberation from the self, that the suicide craves. Sudden death is anathema to the drinker, for the approach to the void must be gradual, it must be attenuated.
Gradual and attenuated? Indeed so. When the French authorities mounted a public health campaign in the 1950s with posters that said “L’alcool tue lentement” (alcohol kills you slowly), the abrasive avant-garde group the Lettrists went around writing underneath them “On n’est pas pressés” (“We’re in no hurry”)†.
The leading figure among the Lettrists, and later the Situationists, was Guy Debord. He prided himself – in his impeccably clear Classical prose style, with its icy clarity and paranoid grandiosity – on the fact that “Even though I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.” Like much of what he wrote, Debord’s lapidary description of drinking deserves to be graven on stone. For that matter, it reads as if it already is:
First, like everyone, I appreciated the effect of slight drunkenness; then very soon I grew to like what lies beyond violent drunkenness; when one has passed that stage: a magnificent and terrible peace, the true taste of the passage of time.
† Or more abrasively, “On s’en fout. On a le temps.” (“We don’t give a fuck. We’ve got the time.”) [Hussey p.56]
Appendix One
Selected Texts
Félicien Rops’ engraving La buveuse d’absinthe, subject of Joséphin Péladan’s poem ‘To Félicien Rops’. Copyright Marie-Claude Delahaye.
A LONDON PHANTOM by R. Thurston Hopkins
R.Thurston Hopkins atmospheric “memoir” of Dowson is the source of a famous Dowson quotation, but it may be closer to a short story. Hopkins’ veracity has been questioned, not least because he later became a hack writer of mystery stories in the same vein. He was also instrumental in creating the legend of the Mummy’s Curse. Still, as Dowson’s biographer Jad Adams has written, “it gives the fantastic flavour of evenings spent with Dowson and shows how, even in his wrecked and sometimes deranged state, Dowson could be fascinating company for the right companion.”
Towards the end of the eighteen-nineties I was a student at University College, Gower Street, London. That seems to be all that is necessary to say about a fact that is not of the faintest interest to anyone but the writer of this narrative. But what may be of interest to the reader is that it was during this time that there walked into my life (via the Bun House†, a haunt of bohemianism in the Strand) that amazing and erratic poet Ernest Dowson. Thin, small-boned, light brown wavy hair which was always curiously upstanding, blue eyes, a tired voice and nerveless, indeterminate hands, with thin fingers, such as are in the habit of letting things fall and slip from them. That is Dowson as I resurrect him from the mists of the dear dead London of the eighteen-nineties. He wore a disreputable out-of-elbows coat that seemed to be distressingly short above his rump. His collar was, I distinctly remember, tied together with a piece of wide black moire ribbon which acted as a poet’s bow and a fastening for his shirt at the same time.
Dowson seldom smiled. His face was lined and grave, and yet it was the round face of a schoolboy and sometimes one might catch a gleam of youth in his blue eyes. At such moments a ghost of a smile would flit over his sombre features and wipe out the fretful expression which generally lurked there.
At that time he carried a small silver-plated revolver in his hip pocket and he seemed ridiculously proud of it. He would produce it, and hand it round for inspection in bars and cafés, without comment, and for no apparent reason at all. I never discovered what risky tortuous paths impinged on Dowson’s life, that he should think it necessary to carry a gun; but perhaps he was toying with the idea of suicide. God knows, he must have found life a very distressing affair, for his thirty years existence on earth had been one long catalogue of disillusionments, financial worries and heartbreaks.
I spent many evenings with Dowson in the Bun House. Though the name of this rendezvous has a doughy sound, it never at any time offered buns to its customers. It is just a London tavern, but it was part of the literary and newspaper life of the eighteen-nineties. It was there that I saw Lionel Johnson, the poet, John Evelyn Barlas, poet and anarchist who tried to ‘shoot up’ the House of Commons, Edgar Wallace, just out of a private soldier’s uniform, Arthur Machen in a caped ‘Inverness’ coat which he told me had been his regular friend for twenty years. “I hope to wear out four of these magnificent cloaks during my lifetime – anyway I can make four last out a hundred years!”
At that time absinthe was a popular spirituous drink amongst the young poets and literary vagabonds, and I can still see Dowson sitting on a high stool, lecturing on the merits of this opalescent anaesthetic. “Whisky and beer for fools; absinthe for poets”; “absinthe has the power of the magicians; it can wipe out or renew the past, annul or foretell the future” were phrases which recurred in his discourse. “Tomorrow one dies” was a saying which was often on his lips, and he would sometimes add, “and nobody will care – it will not stop the traffic passing over London Bridge”.
After I had met Dowson a few times at the Bun House we would sometimes rove forlornly about the foggy London streets, initiated bohemians, tasting each other’s enthusiasms. Sharing money and confessions, Dowson wielding a cheap Austrian cigar artfully and blowing smoke rings through his nostrils. As we wandered about London at night we often played a sort of game which we called Blind Chivvy. The idea was to find short cuts or round-about-routes from one busy part of London to another by way of slinking alleys and byways which then were not known to the average London man.
One evening we were blind chivvying in a puzzle of by- ways, yards, courts and alleys when we became aware of a dark form following us – a figure wrapped up, intent and carrying a Gladstone bag. We turned and twisted and he turned and twisted. We could not be mistaken – he was following us. Soon our unwanted ‘companion’ was so close on our heels that we could hear him heavily breathing. At this a foolish feeling of alarm gripped me, but I struggled to save myself from getting panicky.
Nevertheless as soon as we turned into a busy main street I pulled Dowson across to the friendly gas lamps and said to him: “Run like the Devil!”
When we had shaken this unwelcome wayfarer off I asked Dowson if he had had caught sight of the man’s face. No, he had not; nor had I. But we both had an idea of a dark wrapped-up scarecrow following us through the empty courts with a debauched looking Gladstone bag in his hand.
A few nights later Dowson and I were in a bar parlour having a couple of frugal ‘beers’ when I noticed Dowson patting his pockets to locate his cigarette case. Dowson – who wrote that poem ‘Cynara’ that has since been popularised all over the world by its use as a title a
nd a motif in one of Ronald Colman’s famous films – was an absent-minded dreamer who never could return his cigarette case to the same pocket twice running. At that moment somebody slipped through the swing door of the bar. He was tall and thin; carried a horrible old Gladstone bag; a mummified figure in an overcoat with a crazy old mackintosh over it. His face was almost hidden by a dirty silk scarf which was bound round his jaw as though he had toothache.
Yes! It was the same man who had followed us through the back streets only recently. It is a funny thing to say, but I felt that this figure (or ‘personage’ shall we say?) was not bound by the limits of youth or age – there was some strange quality about him that was otherworldly. I found it difficult to think of him as a live human being.
Meanwhile Dowson fumbled for his cigarette case with ineffective fingers, without result.
Then a voice came from the mummy-like figure: “Try your hip-pocket.”
Dowson dived into the hip pocket and found the elusive cigarette case. We looked up and met the eyes of the visitor. Afterwards we tried to recall why we felt that this man – this personage – was so horrible: why he filled us with the essence of terror and repulsion. I do not remember that we could find any sound reason for thinking that he was so ghastly and abnormal. But certainly we did both agree about one thing. That was that our visitor had a cold kind of face which as Dowson remarked “reminded him of a bladder of lard.” It may be guessed that we did not linger over our beer. The idea of speaking to this personage was intolerable to us and so we emptied our glasses and vamoosed.