The Dedalus Book of Absinthe by Baker Phil

Author:Baker, Phil
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907650475
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2011-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Within my soul you’ve set your blackest flag

And made my disillusioned heart your tomb

My mind which once was young and virginal

Is now a swamp, a spleen filled pregnant womb

Of things abominable; things androgynal

Flowers of Dissolution, Fleurs du Mal.

Crosby published it in his book Red Skeletons, illustrated by the belatedly decadent artist Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt, who had already been working with John Lane at the Bodley Head). This featured poems such as ‘Black Sarcophagus’, ‘Futility’, ‘Desespoir’, ‘Orchidaceous’, ‘Dance in a Madhouse’ and ‘Necrophile’, and it attracted the praise of a now ageing Arthur Symons (“a strange originality, something macabre, violent, abnormal, sinister, and also – ‘shadows hot from hell’”). But Crosby came to feel that the whole book – with its epigraphs from Wilde and Baudelaire, and Alastair’s Beardsleyesque illustrations – was too derivative, and he blasted his remaining copies to pieces with a shotgun.

Conrad comments astutely that for Crosby, the drink of Baudelaire, Wilde, Lautrec, Rimbaud and others “was worth an ocean of associations, a morbid green paradise” [my emphasis]. Crosby’s diaries contain some atmospheric references to absinthe. One day in 1927 he met Caresse at the Gare du Nord, and he records her “running down the platform carrying two ponderous volumes of Aubrey Beardsley and two bottles of absinthe.” Always a great bibliophile, Crosby found some rare and curious things in bookshops: in 1928

I went and procured in a bookshop a bottle of very old absinthe (it was a choice between this or an erotic book with pictures of girls making love) and the man in the bookshop recommended Ramuz Le Guérison de Maladies [The Cure of Ills] but as I already had the Guérison to all maladies i.e. the absinthe I did not buy the book but went instead to an apothecary’s where I bought two empty bottles marked hair tonic into which I decanted the absinthe…

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