Book Review
Devil in a Bottle
Author Jad Adams explores whether absinthe or other factors fueled the creativity and madness of some of the 19th century’s most renowned artists.
By Charles R. Meyer, M.D.
Addictive drugs acquire their own mythology. Opium conjures visions of smoky dens in China with dazed addicts cradling pipes. Cocaine calls to mind stories about Sherlock Holmes grabbing his syringe from the Moroccan leather case as well as of the crash-and-burn lives of rock stars. And alcohol evokes images of writers such as Dylan Thomas, who penned impassioned poetry with the drink at his side that would kill him by age 39. As medical science and addiction therapy have progressed, much of the romance and mystery of these drugs that are still with us has faded. But the legend of absinthe, the cloudy green liquid that was favored by artists in smoky Parisian cafes in the 1800s, lives on and is documented in Jad Adams’ book Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle.
Although recipes varied, classic absinthe was distilled from wormwood, anise, and fennel and fermented to produce an emerald-green liquid with an alcohol content ranging from 50 percent to 75 percent that turned cloudy when drinkers added water in a process called “louching.” Used for centuries as a medicinal herb, wormwood lent a sharp, bitter taste to absinthe that was moderated by the licorice taste of anise and fennel and by the addition of sugar, frequently eluted through perforated silver spoons in the louching maneuver. Modern chemical analysis of wormwood has identified thujone as a main active ingredient and a possible culprit in the mental aberrations blamed on absinthe.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, French soldiers serving in Algiers acquired a taste for absinthe and began asking for une verte when they returned to Paris. Adams contends that France was an ideal place for the gestation of absinthism. “In a nation known for its range of aperitifs, absinthe was ideal: It was startlingly different in taste, had an intriguing colour change when water was added, and was reassuringly expensive,” he writes. Production and consumption of absinthe blossomed during the 19th century and quickly attracted the coterie of writers, painters, and poets who built the absinthe myth and became “the advertisers and propagandists of what came to be called the green fairy.” The “hour of absinthe” became a daily ritual for the Bohemians in fin de siecle Paris.
Adams’ book is a series of mini-biographies of these artists, replete with speculations and facts about the contribution of absinthe to their art and to their lives and deaths. It is a carnival of larger-than-life characters. Art critic Theodore Pelloquet paraded in fantastic hats, strange coats, and an enormous white cravat, always with pipe and absinthe in hand, dying at age 48 half-paralyzed and mumbling “abs…” as his dying word. Consorting with prostitutes and frequenting the Moulin Rouge, Toulouse Lautrec was rarely without his liquid green mistress, occasionally hidden in his hollowed-out cane. Lautrec, Manet, Van Gogh, and Picasso richly documented the absinthe culture in intriguing paintings that are reproduced in the book.
The physical dissipation and mental aberration of many of the Parisian bohemians fostered the notion that drinking absinthe led to insanity. Medical reports in the 1860s identified absinthe as “leading to mania and softening of the brain” and as “a fast track to the madhouse.” In the 1890s, one report claimed that nine out of 10 lunatics in Paris hospitals were victims of absinthe. An American pharmacologist in 1868 opined: “Absinthe affects the brain unlike any other stimulant; it produces neither the heavy drunkenness of beer, the furious inebriation of brandy, nor the exhilarant intoxication of wine. It is an ignoble poison, destroying life not until it has more or less brutalized its votaries and made driveling idiots of them.” Adams disputes this, claiming that alcohol and psychosis were adequate to explain the mental illnesses of Van Gogh and his friends.
The shady reputation of absinthe was enough to lead to its banning in France in 1910 and in the United States in 1912. But, like all alcohol during Prohibition, absinthe merely went underground and became fodder for a new wave of Bohemians. Writers Robert Service, Ernest Hemingway, and Harry Crosby embraced absinthe as “a man’s drink for sailors, war correspondents, and other manifestations of the tough guy in world literature” such as the aging bullfighter in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon who needs three or four absinthes before he enters the ring.
The characters in Adams’ pages are so fascinating that they almost obscure deficiencies in the book. But his sometimes vague sentences provoke an irritating second reading, and his mini-biographies’ declarative, encyclopedic style threaten to render even Toulouse Lautrec boring.
But the story of absinthe eclipses stylistic boredom, and that story doesn’t end with its ban and illicit life afterward. A March 13, 2006, New Yorker article featured Ted Breaux, a 39-year-old environmental chemist from Louisiana who in a Loire Valley distillery boils and bubbles through alembics and copper tubing to perfect the ancient formula of absinthe. Fueled by the Internet, absinthe is undergoing a 21st century resurgence. The legend lives on. MM
Charles Meyer is editor in chief of Minnesota Medicine.