The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  Yet once again we were to run into this sinister personage. One evening we had walked towards the house in which Dowson lodged (I think it was 111 Euston Road) and when we were about a hundred yards from the iron railings which stood before the basement we saw once again the man with the dissipated Gladstone bag. We watched (with frightful perplexity) as the man walked up the front steps of Dowson’s lodgings. That was enough for us. Somehow the idea of sleeping in the same house with this personage was intolerable to Dowson – for we had guessed that our visitor was looking for a bedroom – and so Dowson arranged to sleep at my home at Crouch End for a night or so.

  Before we went to sleep that night we spoke, together and to ourselves, asking each other: Why a derelict hawker with a Gladstone bag could appear to us so evil and dangerous?

  Dowson could not be persuaded to return to the Euston Road caravanserai until several days had passed. But when he did enter the house he could not help but observe that his landlady was very agitated about something. She told him that a man who had called and engaged a bedroom for a week had been found dead in his bed the following morning. She said that he had not a penny in his pockets and his Gladstone bag, when opened by the police, contained nothing but garden mould or soft fine earth. No one ever came forward to say who the dead man was, so he was buried in a pauper’s grave. He had told Dowson’s landlady that his name was Lazarus. As far as I remember, the police could not trace any of his kinsmen or friends.

  I asked Dowson what he made of the affair some time afterwards; and the poet shrugged his shoulders and said in his low and hesitating voice: “Let me tell you something, Hopkins. That mould in his bag was graveyard mould… And was it not Lazarus ‘that had been dead that did come forth from his grave bound in a winding sheet and his face bound about with a napkin’?”

  Even after all these years I can still see Dowson’s rather pallid face, and the sombre light in his eyes as he said these words.

  There are times when I believe that Dowson and I were inclined to exaggerate the strangeness of a not very unusual set of coincidences, but that I must confess is not my final decision about this case. I am more than convinced that this wretched errant soul was dying on his feet – possibly starving and looking for someone who would take pity on him. But his appearance was so forbidding that no one would heed him. Also I believe that, in truth, he may have possessed some abnormal gift of hanging on to his body some days after death had really claimed it.

  WORMWOOD: A DRAMA OF PARIS

  by Marie Corelli

  Marie Corelli (1855–1924) was a best seller in her day, holding the Victorians spellbound with her melodramatic imagination. Even in her own lifetime she was seen as ridiculous, and that is how she is remembered now, although she has some surprising admirers. Erica Jong recalls that when she was getting to know Henry Miller, “he used to rave to me about Marie Corelli”.

  Weighing in at around 800 pages, Wormwood is a ‘triple- decker’, a popular Victorian format in three volumes – savagely abridged here – during which Corelli maintains a level of unflagging excess. Insanely morbid, it is a book that cries out to have been illustrated by Edward Gorey.

  Young, wealthy, and well-bred, Gaston Beauvais has a good position in his father’s bank, along with less auspicious literary tendencies. Gaston falls in love with Pauline de Charmilles, whose father is a Count and a friend of Gaston’s father, and he asks her father for her hand in marriage. They become engaged.

  Unfortunately Pauline falls in love with Silvion Guidel, a handsome and saintly young man who is going to enter the clergy. He is the nephew of Monsieur Vaudron, an old priest much loved and respected by the other characters in the book. Silvion loves Pauline too, and at last she begs Gaston to break off their engagement. Gaston is devastated.

  Gaston runs into an acquaintance in park, a wretched artist named André Gessonex. It is a meeting that is going to change his life, because Gessonex introduces Gaston to absinthe:

  “Absinthe!” [says Gaston] “Do you like that stuff?”

  “Like it? I love it! And you?”

  “I have never tasted it.”

  “Never tasted it!” exclaimed Gessonex amazedly. “Mon Dieu! You, a born and bred Parisian, have never tasted absinthe?”

  I smiled at his excitement.

  “Never! I have seen others drinking it often, – but I have not liked the look of it somehow. A repulsive colour to me, – that medicinal green!”

  He laughed a trifle nervously, and his hand trembled […]

  “I hope you will not compel me to consider you a fool, Beauvais! What an idea that is of yours – ‘medicinal green!’ Think of melted emeralds instead. There, beside you, you have the most marvellous cordial in all the world, – drink and you will find your sorrows transmuted – yourself transformed! […] Life without absinthe! – I cannot imagine it!”

  He raised his glass glimmering pallidly in the light, – his words, his manner, fascinated me, and a curious thrill ran through my veins. There was something spectral in his expression too, as though the skeleton of the man had become suddenly visible beneath its fleshly covering, – as though Death had for a moment peered through the veil of Life. I fixed my eyes doubtingly on the pale green liquid whose praises he thus sang – had it indeed such a potent charm?”

  “Again!” he whispered eagerly, with a strange smile.

  “Once again! It is like vengeance, – bitter at first, but sweet at last!”

  Beauvais finds himself coming to like it, and he begins to be persuaded by Gessonex’s speech: “You mean to tell me” I asked incredulously, “that Absinthe, – which I have heard spoken of as the curse of Paris, – is a cure for all human ills?” Things are going well, and Gessonex is feeling benevolent: “the only good I can possibly do you in return for your many acts of friendship is to introduce you to the ‘Fairy with the Green Eyes’ – as this exquisite nectar has been poetically termed. It is a charming fairy! – one wave of the opal wand, and sorrow is conveniently guillotined!” Gaston is now under the influence of the new substance:

  “I let him run on uninterruptedly, – I myself was too drowsily comfortable to speak. I watched the smoke of my cigarette curling up to the ceiling in little dusky wreaths, – they seemed to take phosphorescent gleams of colour as they twisted round and round and melted away. A magical period of sudden and complete repose had been granted to me…

  Gessonex enquires if Beauvais is feeling better: “The ‘green fairy’ has cured you of your mind’s distemper?” Yes, says Beauvais, “whatever was the matter with me, I am now quite myself again.” This sets Gessonex laughing like a madman – which indeed he is – and it is the cue for his great speech:

  “Good! I am glad of that! As for me, I am never myself, – I am always somebody else! Droll, is it not? The fact is” – and he lowered his voice to a confidential whisper – “I have had a singular experience in my life, – altogether rare and remarkable. I have killed myself and attended my own funeral! Yes, truly! Candles, priests, black draperies, well-fed long-tailed horses – toute la baraque, – no sparing of expense, you understand? My corpse was in an open shell – I have a curious objection to shut-up coffins – open to the night it lay, with the stars staring down upon it – it had a young face then, – and one might easily believe that it also had fine eyes. I chose white violets for the wreath just over the heart, – they are charming flowers, full of delicately suggestive odour, do you not find? – and the long procession to the grave was followed by the weeping crowds of Paris. ‘Dead!’, they cried. ‘Our Gessonex! The Raphael of France!’ Oh, it was a rare sight, mon ami! – Never was there such grief in a land before, – I wept myself in sympathy with my lamenting countrymen! I drew aside till all the flowers had been thrown into the open grave, – for I was the sexton, you must remember! – I waited till the cemetery was deserted and in darkness – and then I made haste to bury myself – piling the earth over my dead youth close and fast, levelling it well, and treading it down! Th
e Raphael of France! – There he lay, I thought – and there he might remain, so far as I was concerned – he was only a genius, and as such was no earthly use to anybody.

  Gessonex is unmistakably insane, like a stage maniac (“his voice had a strange piteous pathos in it mingled with scorn – and the intense light in his eyes deepened to a sort of fiery fury from which I involuntarily recoiled.”) Eventually they part, and as Gessonex disappears around the corner, walking his madman’s walk (“his customary half-jaunty, half-tragic style”) Beauvais realises what has happened to him. He has become an absintheur.

  “I could have shouted aloud in the semi-delirium of feverish intoxication that burnt my brain! …my casual meeting with him had been foredoomed! – it had given the Devil time to do good work, – to consume virtue in a breath and conjure up vice from the dead ashes – to turn a feeling heart to stone – and to make of a man a fiend!”

  And there endeth the first volume.

  Early in Volume Two comes a quotation from Charles Cros† which is pivotal for unfolding the action, and for Gaston’s motivation. Gaston’s earlier sense of moral good is now, he says, not just diminished but “reversed” due to absinthe. “Glorious Absinthe! What is it the poet sings?-

  Avec l’absinthe, avec ce feu

  On peut se divertir un peu

  Jouer son role en quelque drame!

  With absinthe one can divert oneself a little, and play a role in a few dramas; this is going to be the rationale of Gaston’s mad and callous behaviour. By now, Beauvais talks of himself as a confirmed absintheur, with an addict’s craving:

  The action of absinthe cannot more be opposed than the action of morphia. Once absorbed into the blood, a clamorous and constant irritation is kept up throughout the system, – an irritation which can only be assuaged and pacified by fresh draughts of the ambrosial poison… I made my way down to the Boulevard Montmartre, where I entered one of the best and most brilliant cafés, and at once ordered the elixir that my very soul seemed athirst for! What a sense of tingling expectation quivered in my veins as I prepared the greenish- opal mixture, whose magical influence pushed wide ajar the gates of dreamland! – with what lingering ecstasy I sipped to the uttermost dregs two full glasses of it, – enough, let me tell you, to unsteady a far more slow and stolid brain than mine! The sensations which followed me were both physically and mentally keener than on the previous evening, – and when I at last left the café and walked home at about midnight, my way was encompassed with the strangest enchantments. For example: there was no moon, and clouds were still hanging in the skies heavily enough to obscure all the stars, – yet, as I sauntered leisurely up the Champs Elysées, a bright green planet suddenly swung into dusky space, and showered its lustre full upon my path. Its dazzling beams completely surrounded me, and made the wet leaves of the trees overhead shine like jewels; and I tranquilly watched the burning halo spreading about me in the fashion of a wide watery rim, knowing all the time that it was but an image of my fancy. Elixir vitae! – the secret so ardently sought for by philosophers and alchemists! – I had found it, even I! – I was as a god in the power I had obtained to create and enjoy the creations of my own fertile brain…

  … we of Paris care nothing as to whether our thoughts run in wholesome or morbid channels so long as self- indulgence is satiated. My thoughts, for instance, were poisoned, – but I was satisfied with their poisonous tendency!

  Gaston’s hallucinations continue as he reaches his front door:

  I found the door draped with solemn black, as if for a funeral, and saw written across it in pale yet lustrous emerald scintillations –

  LA MORT HABITE ICI

  Gaston develops a new callousness in his dealings with Pauline: “I had the ruling of the game, I and my ‘green eyed fairy’, whose magical advice I now followed unhesitatingly.” He has changed, so that good seems unnatural and absurd, and his former habits and ideas are completely reversed due to absinthe, as he explains

  Give me the fairest youth that ever gladdened his mother’s heart, – let him be hero, saint, poet, whatever you will, – let me make of him an absintheur!- and from hero he shall change to coward, from saint to libertine, from poet to brute! You doubt me? Come then to Paris, – study our present absinthe-drinking generation, absintheurs, – and then, – why then give glory to the English Darwin! For he was a wise man in his time, though in his ability to look back, he perhaps lost the power to foresee. He traced, or thought he could trace, man’s ascent from the monkey, – but he could not calculate man’s descent to the monkey again. He did not study the Parisians closely enough for that!

  Darwinism is one of several contemporary strands Corelli introduces into the book: there are also strong links with Zolaesque ‘Naturalism’, and with ideas of pathological ‘Degeneration’, as expounded by Max Nordau in his book of the same name.

  Silvion has meanwhile joined the priesthood, so he is unable to marry Pauline, and Gaston offers to marry her after all. “I know why you do it”, says Pauline, “- for my father’s sake – and for the sake of good M.Vaudron, – to save honour and prevent scandal”. Little does she know that Gaston is simply playing his role in a drama, Charles Cros-style. The night before their wedding he drinks his “favourite nectar, – glass after glass” until he starts to hallucinate. The walls of his room seem to him like “transparent glass shot throughout with emerald flame. Surrounded on all sides by phantoms – beautiful, hideous, angelic, devilish – I reeled to my couch in a sort of waking swoon, conscious of strange sounds everywhere.”

  He feels himself divided into “two persons, who opposed each other in deadly combat”, and the next morning:

  I was seized with a remarkable sensation, as though some great force were, so to speak, being hurled through me, compelling me to do strange deeds without clearly recognising their nature… I though of that white half- naked witch who had been my chief companion in the flying phantasmagoria of the past wild night. How swiftly she had led me into the forgotten abodes of the dead… Oh, she was a blithe brave phantom, that Absinthe-witch of mine!

  At the altar he suddenly refuses to marry Pauline, publicly accusing her of being Silvion’s cast-off mistress. Pauline collapses, but Gaston feels it all merely as a little drama: “a curious scene, – quite stagey in fact, like a set from a romantic opera – I could have laughed aloud”.

  When Gaston meets his father in the street, Beauvais senior is disgusted by what Gaston has done to Pauline. A madman, he says, or “a delirious absintheur. .a beast” might be capable of such useless ferocity, but not a rational human being. Gaston doesn’t let on his secret, but later he relishes his situation: instead of marrying Pauline, “in my heart of hearts a wondrous wedlock was consummated, – an indissoluble union with the fair wild Absinthe-witch of my dreams! – she and she alone should be part of my flesh and blood from henceforth, I swore!”

  Pauline has now gone missing, and her cousin Héloïse St.Cyr begs Gaston to help find her. Like Baudelaire’s address to his ‘hypocrite lecteur’, Gaston then addresses his readers directly, believing they are secretly as selfish as he is:

  Let us then metaphorically shake hands upon our declared brotherhood, – for though you may be, and no doubt are, highly respectable, while I am altogether disreputable, – though you may be everything that society approves while I am an absinthe-drinking outcast from polite life, a skulking pariah of the slums and back streets of Paris, we are both at one – yes, my dear friend, I assure you, – entirely at one! – in the worship of Self!

  Pauline’s father, the Count, summons Gaston. A servant shows Gaston to the Count’s study, where the Count is sitting rigidly upright in an armchair. On the table is an open case of pistols, and Gaston realises – while simultaneously sneering at the idea of honour – that the Count intends to fight a duel with him. But what of the Count, sitting there and saying nothing? The Count seems to be looking at Gaston with “old world dignity” and “speechless but majestic scorn”, when sud
denly his jaw drops; he is already dead. Gaston’s actions have effectively killed him, but, “My career was stainless, save for the green trail of the Absinthe-slime which no one saw.” He blames Pauline: “I took a sort of grim and awful pleasure in regarding her as a parricide!”

  “From his period”, says Gaston, “I may begin to date my rapid downward career”: a career which has nonetheless “brought to me, personally, the wildest and most unpurchasable varieties of pleasure.” Gaston checks into an obscure hotel under a false name, in order to live out his new life to the full. And when he goes walking around Paris he keeps carefully to the back streets, not only to avoid a chance meeting with old acquaintances but because that is where he is most likely to find Pauline, now that she is disgraced.

  On one of his walks by the Seine, Gaston sees a priest standing by the river, and he recognises him. “You! – you!” he whispers, choked with rage, “Silvion Guidel!” Silvion is unaware of the terrible story; he thinks that Gaston and Pauline have married. Gaston fills him in: Pauline is on the streets, and her father is dead. Silvion reminds Gaston that Pauline never loved him, and Gaston falls on his throat, strangling him after a fierce struggle and throwing his dead body into the river.

  A week or so later, in a miserable back street, Gaston catches a glimpse of Pauline, but he loses her again. In the same district he suddenly hears a loud laugh; it is Gessonex, the laughing madman, who lives in this slum: “with the oddest gestures of fantastic courtesy he invited me to follow him!”

  Gessonex’s domestic arrangements are not very pretty. He lives with a half-feral child who catches rats and eats them (Gessonex, in contrast, has reached a stage where he considers food “a vulgar superfluity”). The child, says Gessonex, is “a production of absinthe… of Absinthe and Mania together”. As in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels, tracing the effects of poverty and alcohol on a family over several generations, the child is a study in heredity and environment, the offspring of a line degenerated by absinthe. His grandfather was a renowned scientist, but his father drank absinthe and became an actor. He took up with a dancer named Fatima, but the “emerald elixir” drove him mad, until he became convinced that Fatima was “a scaly serpent whose basilisk eyes attracted him in spite of his will, and whose sinuous embraces suffocated him.”