Absinthe Returns in a Glass Half Full of Mystique and Misery

[Guest guest]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/arts/12conn.html?pagewanted=all

 

November 12, 2007

Connections

 

Absinthe Returns in a Glass Half Full of Mystique and Misery

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

 

Dear reader! Should this column impress you as being more than usually

lyrical, recalling perhaps the imagery and elegance of poetry by

Baudelaire or Verlaine; should it seem a bit decadent, redolent of

Oscar Wilde's withering hauteur; should it have a touch of madness or

perversity, combining, say, the tastes of Toulouse-Lautrec with the

passions of van Gogh; should it simply sound direct and forceful and

knowing like one of Ernest Hemingway's characters; should it do any or

all of that, let me credit something that each of these figures

fervently paid tribute to: the green fairy, the green goddess, the

green muse, the glaucous witch, the queen of poisons.

 

Absinthe.

 

For this column was conceived under the influence of a green-colored,

high-proof herbal liquor that was illegal in the United States for

more than 95 years. And not just here, for when that mini-Prohibition

began in 1912, alarm bells were ringing all over Europe. In 1905 a

Swiss man murdered his family after drinking absinthe, leading to the

liquor's banishment from that country, where it originated. The French

thought they risked losing World War I to robust beer-drinking Germans

because of the dissolute influence of absinthe, so it was banned in

that nation as well.

 

The medical evidence was also damning. As early as 1879 The New York

Times warned that absinthe " is much more perilous, as well as more

deleterious, than any ordinary kind of liquor. " A 19th-century French

doctor, who made a lifetime study of absinthism, chronicled its

symptoms: " sudden delirium, epileptic attacks, vertigo, hallucinatory

delirium. "

 

But recently this anise-flavored spirit has been seeping back into the

mainstream. In 1994 a museum devoted to absinthe opened in

Auvers-sur-Oise, outside Paris. With its limited availability and

exotic reputation, the drink inspired cultish devotion. It tantalized

with its promises of visionary consciousness, so elaborately

celebrated by a century of artists and writers.

 

Now absinthe has been widely restored. The European Union gradually

jettisoned a hodgepodge of bans and widened absinthe's availability.

And this year two brands of absinthe made according to traditional

recipes have been legally imported to the United States.

 

Last spring a French brand, Lucid, made its debut here, using

19th-century distilling methods and replicating chemical analyses of

pre-ban absinthe. A Swiss absinthe, Kübler. appeared on the American

market a few weeks ago, using a 1863 family formula.

 

One reason legal barriers have fallen is that, as The New Yorker

reported in 2006, the regulated chemical thujone, found in wormwood

and once thought to have been the cause of absinthe's lure and its

dangers, did not show up in any significant quantities in analyses of

historical absinthe. So these authentic replicas, despite containing

wormwood, do not pose a legal challenge. And the alarmed

pronouncements about absinthe made from the beginning of the Belle

Époque have been proved groundless, which was decisive, a Kübler

spokesman said, in swaying United States government regulators.

 

This still leaves open the reasons behind absinthe's reputation as an

intoxicating source of creativity and invention, a power that led

Hemingway's character Robert Jordan, in " For Whom the Bell Tolls, " to

carry around a flask of this " opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing,

brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy. " It also

leaves unsettled the cause of what led absinthe to be attacked, as one

19th-century poet put it, " the Devil, made liquid. "

 

Wormwood might still account for some of absinthe's effects.

Pythagoras prescribed wormwood steeped in wine for labor pains. In the

17th century it was used to treat venereal disease, intestinal worms

and, yes, drunkenness. By the 19th century absinthe was used by French

soldiers fighting in Africa as an antiseptic, to ward off insects and

to treat dysentery.

 

But once I sat down with bottles of Kübler, Lucid and some friends,

the cause of absinthe's reputation didn't matter, nor did the absence,

in these brands, of the pearly green color of legend. What I did find,

along with flavors of anise, fennel, coriander, mint and other herbs,

was something different in the liquid's effect, a kind of relaxed

alertness accompanying the lulling impact of alcohol.

 

But I may have also been intoxicated by the drink's cultural heritage,

some of which is surveyed in recent books like Jad Adams's detailed

study " Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle, " as well

as Barnaby Conrad III's " Absinthe: History in a Bottle " and Phil

Baker's " Book of Absinthe: A Cultural History. " (More information is

available at Web sites like feeverte.net and oxygenee.com.)

 

Whatever the effects of heavy absinthe use, this was, almost from the

start, never just another drink. It has a special place in the history

of modern culture. Poems were written hailing the " green muse, " yet

19th-century writers like Alfred de Musset also fell prey to

intoxication. At the Académie Française, where he was working on a

dictionary, it was said that he " absinthes himself too often. "

 

Toulouse-Lautrec was so wedded to absinthe that he had a special cane

made that hid a glass. He may have also introduced the drink to van

Gogh, who threw himself into it with abandon. Aside from drinking the

liquor, van Gogh painted it, and once threw a glass of it at Gauguin.

Manet and Degas painted absinthe drinkers. So did Picasso. Munch drank

it heavily and Strindberg fed his insanity with it. Verlaine felt

enslaved to what he called " the green and terrible drink. "

 

But any dissolution that pockmarks this history is more attributable

to alcoholism or madness than absinthe's effects. It also seems that

absinthe had a peculiar relationship to the birth of modernism, as if

it distilled some aspect of the cultural revolution that began in the

mid-19th century and came into its prime just as the drink was banned.

Absinthe was the premier bohemian drink, as inseparable from the

avant-garde of mid-19th-century Paris as was scorn the bourgeoisie. It

played the role well; absinthe helped overturn that bourgeois world

with seductive visions of another.

 

But even those who hailed absinthe saw unsettling shadows. Wilde

explained: " After the first glass, you see things as you wish they

were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see

things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the

world. "

 

Absinthe's effects suggested, it seems, an inherent instability to

perception, as if mixing and distilling the shimmer of Impressionism,

the nightmares of Expressionism and the skewed images of Surrealism.

Van Gogh made a glass of absinthe vibrate with energy. And when Manet,

Degas or Picasso painted absinthe drinkers, they appeared

introspective, alienated, not because they have been drugged into

oblivion, but because they have seen too much.

 

At least in imagery, then, absinthe reflected a certain view of

modernity: A firm, reliable order weakens, giving way to bleak

uncertainties. For some this was a danger. A children's anti-absinthe

poem taught that the drink undermined " love of country, courage and

honor. " During the Dreyfus Affair in France in the 1890s, when the

French right considered Jews a threat to the old order, absinthe was

denounced as a " tool of the Jews. "

 

In tasting absinthe now, older associations with bohemian modernism

still resonate. But the lucidity absinthe supposedly creates may not,

history tells us, always be reassuring. Who can't help but feel a bit

of unsettling vertigo when sipping this drink that once filled

Parisian cafes, even if that vertigo, which once produced allusive

French poetry, now just inspires newspaper columns.

 

Connections is a critic's perspective on arts and ideas.

 

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company