by Baker, Phil
King of Spirits is distinctive in colour; it’s much more organic-looking. After the chemical blue-greens of some other brands, this one has the colour of green olive oil. But it doesn’t move like olive oil; it positively jumps and leaps while you examine the label, like the thin, volatile, highly alcoholic liquid it is. And in the bottom of the bottle, like a little compost heap, lies a pile of leaves, stalk, seeds and what have you.
It is agreeably bitter – some people find it too bitter – and for me at least it produces a distinct mood lift and a perhaps paradoxical sense of ‘sharpening’, along with a tendency to laugh. This is the stuff, I thought, when I first tried it, and then the word “herbedaceous” erupted into my head, bringing memories of a circa 1970 children’s TV programme called The Herbs (“I’m Bayleaf, I’m the gardener…”). I recommended Maniac to a friend, who similarly reported that “it puts a smile on your face”, and quickly. Someone rang him after he’d been drinking it, and he found he couldn’t stop giggling on the phone. Nonetheless he stopped drinking it after suffering from stomach pains.
This and Sebor are distinctly akin, although this is stronger and more bitter. For my part I’m very fond of this, in moderation, and I feel the world would be a sadder place if they stopped making it.
Dowson rating: four
MARI MAYANS (70% alcohol) Spanish
Manufactured in Ibiza and coming (at least sometimes) in serial-numbered ‘collector’s bottles’, this has apparently been going strong since 1880. Absinthe was never banned in Spain. Mari Mayans is pleasantly smooth and full with a very strong, fresh, fairly uncomplicated aniseed flavour like Pernod, with liquorice around the edges. The almost confectionary cleanness and purity of flavour masks the great alcoholic strength; bear in mind that Pernod, for example, is only 40% alcohol, and even that is still stronger than whisky. This is the most aniseedy brand tested.
It is a somewhat electronic pale green and louches with an opalescent vengeance; you half expect the resulting radioactive-looking substance to glow in the dark. Very good indeed, and another personal favourite.
Dowson rating: five
LA FÉE (68% alcohol) French
This is the hot new contender from France, where it is now manufactured for export only. It is apparently based on an authentic nineteenth-century recipe and it comes with the enthusiastic franchise-style endorsement of Mrs. Absinthe herself, Marie-Claude Delahaye, who runs the Absinthe Museum and is probably the world authority on the subject; her signature is blazoned across the back label. It owes its existence to her complaints about Hill’s and belongs to the same importers, Green Bohemia, the outfit with The Idler connection.
This is less ‘clean’ than Mari Mayans, less sweet, and less overwhelmingly aniseedy, with a greater herbal complexity. There is a medicinal note of sweetish linctus at the front, and plenty of aniseed, followed by hints of woodland pond and even an undertaste reminiscent of the brown spirits such as whisky and rum; possibly due to the presence of caramel. Its woody notes give it not just the flavour of aniseed but a taste of aniseed seed, like getting to the centre of an aniseed ball and finding the bitter, roasty little black bit in the middle. This seedy quality slightly recalled drinks such as kummel.
Adding water makes it pleasantly opalescent, and it also cleans the flavour up to some extent, removing the sweet linctus and allowing aniseed and herbal bitters to predominate. Like Mari Mayans, the addition of a fair quantity of iced water – the label recommends diluting it as much as six to eight times – makes a very refreshing drink, if one can ever use such an innocuous word about something so lethally alcoholic. This is again very good indeed, and likely to eclipse Hill’s. It ended joint favourite with Mari Mayans, the two of them retaining their distinct and separate identities.
Dowson rating: five
It would be ephemeral to include prices, but at the turn of the century (twenty-first) Hill’s, Mari Mayan, King of Spirits and Sebor were all in the region of forty to fifty pounds.
This modest selection is nothing like all the absinthes there are, but it includes the major brands. I have also heard good reports of the Spanish brand Deva. There are now forty or fifty absinthes worldwide, including curiosities like Absenta Serpis (which is red) and rare beasts like La Bleue, a Swiss brand with informal, semi-underground distribution, which contains a solid 60ppm of thujone, and Logan 100, a phenomenally expensive Czech brand, which contains 100 ppm.
A New Orleans chemist and biologist named Ted Breaux has spent several years studying absinthe and has recreated the recipe for Belle Epoque Pernod, aided in his research by a couple of very scarce century-old bottles of the real thing. Breaux is reportedly soon to launch his own brand commercially, for distribution outside of the USA. This is eagerly awaited in some quarters.
NOTES
PROLOGUE
This miserable tale can be found in Zolotow (1971), and subsequent books.
CHAPTER ONE: WHAT DOES ABSINTHE MEAN?
“… do you know what that means?” Marie Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris Vol.III p.36.
“… putting straitjackets on …” Georges Ohnet, cited in Barnaby Conrad, Absinthe: History in a Bottle p.6
“… cocaine of the nineteenth century” R.Nadelson ‘Sweet Taste of Decadence’ Metropolitan Home Nov.1982 cited in Doris Lanier, Absinthe: The Cocaine of the Nineteenth Century (Jefferson, McFarland and Co., 1995) p.1. A comparison between absinthe and cocaine had already been made by Robert Hughes in a 1979 Toulouse- Lautrec review in Time, reprinted in Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (Harvill, 1990) p.127
“… deliberate denial of normal life …” Conrad p.x
“… eroticism and decadent sensuality” Lanier p.1
“… eat through solid rock.” Don Conklin ‘Absinthe is making a comeback’ College Hill Independent
… transgression and death.” Richard Klein Cigarettes are Sublime p.x
“… not good, not beautiful, but sublime.” ibid. p.2
“… not entirely a fake” Somerset Maugham The Magician, together with A Fragment of Autobiography p.viii.
“… Garcon! Un Pernod!” Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley p.574
“… graces and virtues that adorn no other liquor.” Crowley, ‘The Green Goddess’
“… without bodily disturbances” ibid.
“… exalts my soul in ecstasy” ‘La Légende de l’Absinthe’
“deliciously colonial” Crowley, Confessions p.499
“… not really a wholesome drink …” ibid.
“Social mission” see C.Baldick The Social Mission of English Criticism (O.U.P. 1983)
“… such a skunk as that.” George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Gollancz, 1937) p.167
“… neither had done”. Cited in John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969) p.142
“… more than one absinthe a day.” George Saintsbury, Notes on a Cellar-Book pp.141–5
“ideal drink …” Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes p.96
“… PARTY LIKE IT’S 1899!” advert, The Idler No.25, 1999
CHAPTER TWO: THE NINETIES
“… the words ‘vieux jeu’ and ‘rococo’ were faintly audible.” Max Beerbohm, ‘Enoch Soames’ in The Bodley Head Max Beerbohm p.58
“… trusting and encouraging” ibid. p.62
“… fantastic attenuations of weariness …” Holbrook Jackson The Eighteen Nineties (Jonathan Cape, 1927), new preface
“… strange litany of fluted lust and hopelessness.” Peter Ackroyd, introduction, A Catalogue of Rare Books Offered for Sale from the collection of Giles Gordon: Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and the 1890s (London, Gekoski, 1994)
“… so very 1890 …” Richard Le Gallienne The Romantic ‘90s p.192
“I hope you drink absinthe, Le Gallienne …” ibid.
“… diabolism and nameless iniquity.” ibid.
“Did not Paul Verlaine drink it …” ibid.
“So it was with a pleasant shudder …” ibid.
“too fierce a potion” ibid. p.193
“… effect on the intellectual and imaginative faculties.” ibid. p.194
Johnson is generally reported to have died after falling from a bar stool, but Le Gallienne attributes his end to being hit by a hansom cab.
“… the Café So-and-So” Lionel Johnson ‘The Cultured Faun’, in The Anti-Jacobin 1891, cited in R.K.R.Thornton, Poetry of the Nineties pp.20–21
“… globes of some unnatural fruit” Arthur Symons, ‘London’ Arthur Symons: Selected Writings p.60
“… Rocked on this dreamy and indifferent tide” ‘The Absinthe Drinker’ ibid. p.34
“… and drown deliciously” ‘The Opium Smoker’ ibid. p.29
“… powers, effects and variations.” ibid. p.90
“… the last trumpet should have sounded …” cited R.Ellmann Oscar Wilde p.301
“… through which he got his visions and desires.” ibid. p.346
“… has no message for me” ibid. p.562
“… suits my style so well” ibid.
“… glass of absinthe and a sunset?” ibid.
“… why it drives men mad” ibid. 469
“… when I might be drinking my absinthe?” Arthur Machen: A Bibliography by Henry Danielson, with Notes by Arthur Machen, pp.31–2
“… – tulip – heads – brushing against my shins.” J. Fothergill My Three Inns p.139
“The Morgue yawns for me …” Ellmann Wilde p.580
“One or the other of us has to go.” ibid. p.581
“… life and soul of the party.” ibid.
“… produces all the effects of drunkenness” ibid. p.562
“If you’re French in your taste …” William Schwenk Gilbert, Lost Bab Ballads p.100
“… These are some of the words you hear” The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Williams Buchanan p.399
“… a very bad man.” Gross p.145
“… the sickly gnome.” Buchanan p.390
“… Born by broods in paper covers!” ibid. p.393
“… the louder to confess.” F.Harald Williams Confessions of a Poet p.461
secret Bovril drinking: Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation pp.13ff.
“… blended so well with the colour of absinthe.” ibid. p.18
“… The mind has its West End and its Whitechapel.” ibid. p.9
“… like absinthe – original, n’est-ce pas?” The Savoy: Nineties Experiment ed. Stanley Weintraub p.xviii
“… model of my penis about his person.” Peter Raby, Aubrey Beardsley and the Nineties p.85
“… diabolical monocle.” James G.Nelson Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson p.65
“… and one for the Police.” Wilde Letters p.1063
“… erotomaniac in Europe” ibid. p.924
“… very nice.” ibid. p.1101
“… have gone back to absinthe.” Smithers to Wilde, ibid. 1012 n.
“Dowson sends his love …” ibid.
“… extreme horror” Ranger Gull, cited in Jad Adams Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent p.173
… Russian novel – R.A.Walker cited in Nelson p.283
CHAPTER THREE: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ERNEST DOWSON
I have been indebted throughout this chapter to Jad Adams’s superb biography of Dowson, Madder Music, Stronger Wine (I.B.Tauris, 2000)
“… that curious love of the sordid …”Arthur Symons, ‘A Literary Causerie: On a Book of Verses’ The Savoy No.4 (August, 1896) p.93
“gone with the wind” from Dowson’s poem ‘Cynara’; “Since Death is coming to me … . Let me meet it, a stranger in a strange land” from Dowson’s Savoy short story, ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’ (Savoy No.4, August 1896); “days of wine and roses”, from Dowson’s poem ‘Vitae Summa Brevis’.
“Why was this book ever written?” Nelson p.235
“… gets on one’s nerves and is cruel.” Raby, p.36
“… over my holy places.” Dowson Letters p.213
“To Dorothy … ” Adams p.55
“a bankrupt concern” ibid. p.15
“… the drear oblivion of lost things.” ‘Dregs’ cited Adams pp.156–7
“… whether subtly or defiantly.” William Thomas, cited Adams p.12
“… like a protoplasm in the embryo of a troglodyte..” Dowson, Letters p.77
“… absinthe has the power of the magicians …” Cited in Thurston Hopkins ‘A London Phantom’
“… How wonderful it is!” Dowson, Letters p.175
“… as many things seem nowadays.” ibid. p.174
“… madman when he got drink or drugs.” Adams p.92
“… some act of absurd violence.” ibid. p.102
“… and vomiting insults.” ibid. p.101
“… clean or dirty”, W.B.Yeats ‘The Tragic Generation’ in Autobiographies p.311
“… like Browning and Mrs Browning!” ibid. p.327
“… my head is full of noises.” Dowson Letters p.307
“Whisky v Absinthe” ibid. p.35
“Good Old Café Royal” ibid. p.94
“… that may restore me.” ibid. p.96
“… be it never so deleterious.” ibid. p.107
“… putting money to the wrong account.” Vincent O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (1936) cited Adams pp.125–26
“… The picture on Hunger grows more like Ernest daily” Wilde Letters 1151; 1153
“… and Ernest Dowson, who is here, never.” ibid. p.898
“… under the apple trees.” ibid. p.900
“… les saouls ne soient pas toujours poètes” Ellmann p.542
“… it will entirely restore my character.” Adams p.145
“I decided this morning to take a Pernod …” Wilde, Letters p.901
“… and we want you.” ibid. p.907
“… we dare not even look at them.” Dowson Letters p.317
“… message from Satan …” ibid. p.325
“… an absinthe and afterwards a breakfast.” ibid. p.326
dipping his crucifix into his absinthe – Ranger Gull, cited Adams p.155
“… through the whole crowded congregation.” Dowson Letters p.327
“… out of the ordinary.” Adams p.146
“… a most extraordinary series of hallucinations …” Conder cited Adams p.158
“… come down off its shelf and strangle me.” Adams p.159
“… His conversation is undiluted vitriol.” Adams p.159
“in the future” Adams p.166
“… God bless you.” Adams p.168
“… for he knew what love is.” Wilde, Letters p.1173
Eighteen Nineties Society and The Lost Club: personal communication from Ray Russell
“… if they did I have forgotten.” W.B.Yeats The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 p.xi
CHAPTER FOUR: MEANWHILE IN FRANCE
“Dr. Martin told me …” Pages from the Goncourt Journals ed. Robert Baldick p.392
“Mad dog” and “absinthes himself”; anecdotes in Conrad p.viii
Edmond Bougeois poem cited Delahaye L’Absinthe: Art et Histoire p.74
“… the mark of a neurasthenic idler.” Baudelaire, Intimate Journals p.50
Jules Bertaut, Le Boulevard, cited in Marie-Claude Delahaye L’Absinthe: Art et Histoire p.86
“always with this hard gem-like flame …”, Pater The Renaissance p.236
“… gorgeous iridescence of decay:” Eugene Lee-Hamilton, in R.K.R.Thornton, Poetry of the Nineties p.41
“… meant that he took sugar with his absinthe” cited Conrad p.ix
“a hideous mug …” Antoine Adam, cited Lanier p.50
“like an orang-utan escaped …” Lepelletier, cited Lanier p.50
“… great trouble in dragging him away.” Joanna Richardson Verlaine p.26
“… absint
he day and night.” A Poet’s Confession cited Conrad p.25
“… laden with perfumes of dreadful delight.” Richardson p.288
“… One absinthe, if you please, mademoiselle.” ibid. p.95
“… incapable of getting back to the school without assistance.” Lanier p.63
“… Excuse all horrors” cited Conrad p.33
“… absinthe-corollas” Edmund Gosse, ‘A First Sight of Verlaine’ The Savoy No.2 (April, 1896) p.113
“Chinese, if you like …” ibid. p.116
“… installed in front of a splendid verte.” cited Richardson p.247
“… all his happiness, all his life.” Bergen Applegate, cited Lanier p.47
“degeneracy … melancholy magic” Max Nordau Degeneration pp.119–127
“… long been considered an absolute monster …” Richardson p.292
“… I have my reasons.” ‘A François Coppée’, in Dédicaces p.10
“… Absinthe!” Paul Verlaine: Confessions of a Poet trans. J.Richardson pp.105–7
“… liberals.” Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud p.155
“… the dark dream by which he is surrounded.” Baudelaire, cited Enid Starkie Rimbaud p.117
“I is an other” [Je est un autre] 1871 letter to Georges Izambard, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters ed. Wallace Fowlie p.305
“… derangement of all the senses” ibid. p.307
“… poisons taken by the Sybil!” Starkie p.132
“… lie down in the shit!” Rimbaud: Complete Works p.315
“… Near some floating bits of wood.” ibid. p.132
“… pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks.” ibid. pp.115–17
“… I liked stupid paintings, door panels, stage sets …” ibid. pp.193–5
“columns of amethyst, angels in marble and wood …” Starkie p.369
“… life, and elsewhere.” ‘First Surrealist Manifesto’ (1924), cited in Breton, ‘Surrealism, Yesterday, To-day and Tomorrow’ in This Quarter Vol.V No.1, Surrealist Number (September 1932)