by Iain Gately
After spending two years recovering from this first bout with absinthe, Verlaine came across an ideal sparring partner in Arthur Rimbaud and prepared for another contest. Rimbaud was significantly less stable than his new friend and lover. In addition to attacking people with sword sticks, he cut at them with knives or put sulphuric acid in their beer. He was a vigorous proponent of intoxication. In his own words, “The poet must make himself a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses . . . they must be roused! Drugs, perfumes! The poisons taken by the Sybil!” Verlaine and Rimbaud enjoyed a tempestuous affair that took them to a surprisingly ordinary series of places, including Tottenham Court Road in London and Belgium, where Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist. The state of mind of Rimbaud during the liaison, during which he, too, took sanctuary in absinthe, can be gauged by the following letter, written to a friend, at its height:
PARISHIT, JUNISH 72
My friend,
There’s one watering hole here I prefer. Long live the Academy of Absomphe, despite the malevolence of the waiters! It is the most delicate and most tremulous of garments, drunkenness thanks to that sage of the glaciers, absomphe! Only, afterward, to go to bed in shit!
The master at work with his muse
Rimbaud was burned-out by the age of twenty. He gave up poetry and started a new life as an adventurer and arms trader in Africa. Verlaine became a schoolteacher, although his absinthe habit, which rendered him incapable every afternoon, and his affair with one of the boys entrusted to his care, soon lost him his job. Thereafter he dedicated his hours to the cafés of the Latin Quarter, where he became part of the literary tourist trail. Visitors recorded sightings in their diaries; journalists went in search of him. He was a fixture well into the 1890s and might be spotted scribbling away with a glass of the good fairy on the table beside him.
French painters were likewise entranced by absinthe and paid homage to their muse with portraits of absintheurs. Edouard Manet led the field with The Absinthe Drinker (1859), a Goyaesque canvas of a Baudelarian ragpicker, with a glass of the sorceress by his side. This vessel emits a pale green light, and like a candle, it casts no shadow of itself. The subject’s arms are wrapped inside his cape, and his shadow on the wall behind him resembles the silhouette of a woman, sitting back to back against him, as if she were a spirit that had arisen from his drink. There is yet more allegory. The drinker’s left leg sticks out toward the viewer with its foot at an odd angle, as though it had been paralyzed by a stroke. A splash of green, between trouser and shoe in the same place, echoes the color of his pick-me-up. It is possible to read the painting as a temperance tract. The venom in the glass beside the ragpicker has crippled him and filled his head with delusions, the demons once imprisoned in the empty bottle at his feet have escaped and done their work. In its time, The Absinthe Drinker received more criticism than praise. It was considered to be coarse and drab, and very different from the prevailing views in France as to what constituted a great painting.57
Manet and his fellow Impressionists assembled in the Café Guerbois in the evenings, which, like other Parisian cafés of the period, served as a nursery to the arts. Each one attracted distinct cliques of painters, poets, critics, and grisettes.58 Absinthe was a fixture on all their drinks lists. It was pictured in its element by Edgar Degas in Dans un café (1876), which shows a couple sitting together, but apart, at a marble table in a café, each privately meditating on some mutual disappointment. The girl has a full glass of absinthe in front of her, but even this happy prospect is not enough to make her smile. Despite its innovative use of perspective, the painting drew critical fire, principally because it showed miserable people in a humdrum setting. That it portrayed a sickly-looking grisette doing the drinking attracted little comment, for women had been acknowledged as patrons of Parisian cafés and participants in the absinthe craze ever since their respective inceptions.
Frenchwomen were considered to have an irresistible weakness for absinthe—more so than for any other drink. Although the wormwood that gave it its identity had long been associated with the feminine— the Greeks, for instance, prescribed apsinthion to relieve the pains of periods and childbirth—the fondness of Parisiennes for the emerald goddess was attributed to modern causes: It would be more comfortable, in the imagination of male commentators, to get tipsy inside a corset on absinthe than on wine or beer. Alongside convenience, women were believed to prefer absinthe for its influence over the emotions, because, according to a later writer, it “accentuated certain traits of the capricious temperament.”
While the unisexual appeal of absinthe was an echo of the gin craze, the enthusiasm of the French public for the Charenton Omnibus was very different from the affection that British drinkers had bestowed on their Old Tom and Strip-Me-Naked. Absinthe was considered to provide an aesthetic, rather than brutish, kind of intoxication. This difference was made plain in the last part of the nineteenth century, when absinthe drinkers let go their inhibitions, with the aim of fusing their lives with their art. From the 1880s onward a fresh generation of absintheurs, including Alfred Jarry and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam in writing, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin in painting, gave both creativity and absinthe drinking a bad name.
Alfred Jarry set the benchmark for both disciplines. He hated water, “that terrible poison, so solvent and corrosive that out of all substances it has been chosen for washings and scourings” and which, perhaps the worst of its many sins, when “added to a clear liquid like absinthe, makes it muddy,” and did his best to live without it. His consumption of alcohol, in contrast, was prodigious. A contemporary recorded that on an average day he drank two liters of white wine first thing, followed by a swift three large absinthes. At lunch he took wine and absinthe with his food and rounded off the meal with a few café-Cognacs. Dinner was accompanied by “at least two bottles of any vintage, whether good or bad.” Thus fortified, Jarry was ready for a proper night’s drinking. The same writer also noted that she “never saw him really drunk, except on one occasion when I took aim at him with his own revolver, which sobered him up instantly.”
It is interesting to imagine what an American temperance writer of the same period would have made of Jarry. Prima facie, he was a fine example of the dangers of alcohol—a talented young man who frightened others and destroyed himself before he had realized his potential. Unfortunately, his appearance (a dwarf, he usually exaggerated his diminished stature by dressing in a cape and a top hat), his obsession with bicycle racing and physical fitness, his deliberately robotic speech and penchant for firearms, all militated against a place for him in a temperance novel—he was far too exciting to be a credible fictional character.
Jarry’s masterpiece, the play Ubu Roi, premiered in 1896 with a set decorated by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, his closest equivalent among painters as an excessive absinthe drinker. Toulouse-Lautrec, also stunted, took Impressionism back indoors, to Parisian dance halls such as the Moulin Rouge. “Nature has betrayed me,” he claimed, alluding to his deformity, and he ignored it in return. His work, which focuses on artificial paradises of the night filled with spectral hedonists, as they might appear to someone on the spot and equally drunk, has been described as having been “entirely painted in absinthe.” When he felt the need for a glass of his muse, Toulouse-Lautrec would declare an urge to “étouffer un perroquet” (strangle a parakeet )—a slang term for the liquor then in use around Montmartre. Syphilis and parrot-wrestling soon ruined his health, and his behavior under their influences embarrassed his aristocratic family. His father, who was fond of dressing up in chain mail and carrying around a sword an ancestor had employed in the conquest of Jerusalem in the First Crusade of 1096, complained, “Why doesn’t he go to England? They scarcely notice the drunks over there.” An attempt was made to dry him out, which Toulouse-Lautrec frustrated with his absinthe cane, which had been hollowed out to conceal a flask containing nearly a pint of the fluid. He died in 1901, convince
d he was being hunted by dogs and the elephant from the Moulin Rouge.
By the time that Toulouse-Lautrec and Jarry had been laid to rest, absinthe had acquired an evil reputation among the medical profession in France. Parisian physicians, alarmed that an Anglo-Saxon-style spirits craze was in progress, published warnings as to the damage that too much of the green stuff could cause. Their prophet was Dr. Auguste Motet, who contended that absinthe, more so than any other alcoholic drink, caused rage and decay in the drinker. His disciples followed up his work by killing animals with extract of absinthe. Its effect on guinea pigs in particular proved to be startling, and cautionary cartoons were drawn up for distribution to French soldiers, which showed the little creatures dancing with their paws held high, before keeling over dead after being injected with too stiff a measure. The change in perception toward absinthe in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was summed up by a Dr. Ledoux. Whereas “our fathers still knew the time when absinthe was an elegant drink—on the cafe terraces, old Algerian warriors and bourgeois idlers consumed that louche beverage with the aroma of mouthwash”—it had since become a favorite of degenerates and the proletariat, whom it hastened to their ruin.
Opposition to absinthe was not limited to the medical profession. As the casualty register of famous or notorious people who were reckoned to have succumbed to this most virulent of drinks lengthened, politicians and journalists also raised their voices against the sorceress. Their hysterical tone was caricatured by Gustave Flaubert in his Dictionary of Received Ideas: “ABSINTHE: Exceedingly violent poison. One glass and you’re dead. Journalists drink it while writing their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouins. Will be the destruction of the French army.”
Although absinthe was considered to be uniquely dangerous on account of the wormwood it contained, other kinds of alcoholic drink also started to receive a negative press in France. Intoxication was portrayed not merely as a state of aesthetic rapture, or a necessary preliminary to artistic composition, but also as a curse, albeit principally of the laboring class of citizen. The coal miners of Émile Zola’s novel Germinal, for instance, drink themselves into beer-bloated stupors on their rare holidays: Like the slaves on an American plantation they gain a temporary illusion of freedom via intoxication. In Zola’s other works, alcoholics destroy themselves, their families, and their descendants. Moreover, their drunkenness is of the degrading sort that characterized the villains of Anglo-Saxon temperance noire. Hitherto, the disgusting, obsessive alcoholic had been rare in French literature, just as the miser, a stock-in-trade character of French novels, was similarly rare in English books.
However, negative sentiments about alcohol in some quarters were outnumbered by positive and even rapturous feelings toward it in others. Absinthe continued to receive the homage of poets, and, a result of the phylloxera-induced shortage of wine, beer began to acquire a reputation as a civilized drink in France. Its progress is apparent in the paintings of the Impressionists. The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) by Auguste Renoir shows a group of young people drinking under the striped awning of a riverside inn on a sunny summer afternoon. The men are in singlets and straw boaters, the women wear elaborate dresses hemmed with frills and sport bouquets and ribbons in their hats. Their faces are flushed, their expressions convivial. A certain relaxation in their features confirms that they are tipsy—that happy state in between sobriety and intoxication—and at the focus of the work a pretty girl is draining a glass of beer.
Manet also celebrated beer in his canvases. His late masterpiece, Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), shows a tired and pensive young waitress with her hands on the marble bartop of the celebrated nightclub. Neatly arranged on its surface are bottles of champagne, rose wine, absinthe, and Bass IPA, brewed in Burton-on-Trent, with its venerable red triangle trademark. This detail is emblematic of the great changes that had occurred in French art and society, post-phylloxera and -absinthe. It is hard to imagine David, the champion of vast and epic canvases, depicting French heroes at crucial moments, including anything but French wine in his paintings, let alone a Swiss cordial or an English brand of beer.
The market for Bass IPA in Montmartre was not entirely French, for the district had become a tourist attraction in its own right. It was home to nightclubs, the cancan, absintheurs, poets, and impressionists galore. Visitors from Europe, Africa, and the Americas poured into Montmartre and Paris during the 1870s and came in torrents for the Centennial Exhibition of 1889, which celebrated the temporary end of the French monarchy a hundred years before. The exhibition was crowned with a newly built monument—the Eiffel Tower. This enchanting folly, a celebration of iron in the same material, evoked mixed reactions among Parisians. The Church and traditionalists hated it. According to the men of God it was “a hideous, horrible phallic skeleton,” which left, in the opinion of establishment writers such as Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant, “a stain on the honor of Paris.” The common people, in contrast, were delighted with the erection, and their hearts beat with pride when the French tricolor was hoisted at its pinnacle, and its engineer boasted to the world, “This is the only flag to fly on a staff three hundred meters long.” The general enthusiasm for the Eiffel Tower was reflected in material culture: Its silhouette was adopted as a motif for absinthe spoons; indeed, it soon became a quintessential symbol of the city itself.
After the exposition of 1889, Paris waited until the next century to play host again to the exhibition-goers of the world. These returned in 1900 to find that its artistic center of gravity had shifted to Montparnasse; that Impressionism had drifted into Postimpressionism en route to somewhere entirely new; that modern had replaced decadent in poetry; but that absinthe was still drunk with the same abandon, indeed, if anything, had become more popular. This last perception was supported by statistics: In 1874, at about the time that Degas was painting his uncomfortable couple, France drank roughly seven hundred thousand liters of absinthe per annum; by the end of the first decade of the new century it was consuming nearly thirty-six million liters in every year.
The export market for absinthe, in contrast to its domestic counterpart, matured at a sickly pace. Overseas demand was greatest in French imperial possessions, including Vietnam and Tahiti, where the Postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin kept his habit alive, and in ex-possessions, like New Orleans. However, it made slow progress outside of Francophone places. The British, as a rule, with the exception of a few poets and their single Impressionist of merit, Walter Sickert, did not take to it. Perhaps its reputation for filling the drinker with thrilling gothic visions was the problem. Why flirt with the occult when one already lived in Stygian gloom? Most British cities, including the capital, were choked with smog for weeks on end. The streetlamps in London were still on at noon, but even so, visibility was measured in yards, and after dark Jack the Ripper butchered women on the sidewalks. Conditions were too ugly to risk seeing on absinthe.
To each culture, a counterculture. The Aesthetic Movement, with figures such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley in its prows, sailed into the gloom of late Victorian London, bearing the important news of the discovery that the point of life was to admire, and to enjoy, everything beautiful in it. The concept of beautiful extended to stimulantssuch as cocaine, cigarettes, ether, and absinthe. Aesthetes were enchanted by the daring reputation the green-eyed temptress had acquired in France, and felt they should drink her in preference to the Highland whisky of neoromantics or the bottled ale of retrospective country squires. This sense of duty was articulated by Oscar Wilde: “I could never quite accustom myself to absinthe, but it suits my style very well.” He slipped it neatly into his philosophy via an anecdote, which dressed absinthism in Aesthetic costume: “Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clearheaded and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust. The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies, and roses sprang up and made a garden of the café. ‘Don’t you see them?’ I said
to him. ‘Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien.’” (“No sir, there’s nothing there.”)
26 HATCHETATION
I can resist everything but temptation.
—Oscar Wilde
In 1882, Oscar Wilde took his message of flower power on a coast-to-coast tour of the United States. He found decadence alive and kicking at the sunset end of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. The people of California and its neighboring states maintained a gold rush mentality toward drinking—more was their eternal ideal and more there was. Whiskey aplenty arrived by rail, and the West itself produced ever-increasing quantities of wine, brandy, and beer. Wilde got his first taste of western hospitality during a visit to the Matchless silver mine in Leadville, Colorado. “At the bottom of the mine,” he recorded, “we sat down to a banquet, the first course being whiskey, the second whiskey, and the third whiskey.”
Other British writers followed Wilde west, and all were equally enamored with the liquid hospitality they received in Pacific America. Rudyard Kipling, who found San Francisco a “mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of remarkable beauty,” was much taken by the Pisco punch, a drink then in vogue, whose principal ingredient was a clear Peruvian brandy. Sweet to the taste, yet highly potent, this ambrosia inspired Kipling to speculate on its composition: “I have a theory it is compounded of cherubs’ wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and fragments of lost epics by dead masters.”