In the late 20th Century, absinthe became a decadent reference point among a new generation of writers based in latter-day Bohemian outposts like San Francisco and New Orleans. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Hemingway even invented a Death in the Afternoon cocktail for a 1935 celebrity drinks book: “Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway explains he stopped bullfighting because he couldn’t do it happily “except after drinking three or four absinthes, which, while they inflamed my courage, slightly distorted my reflexes.'

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan brings along a canteen of the stuff. His character Jake Barnes consoles himself with absinthe after Lady Brett runs off with the bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises. There were occasional echoes of its power, though mostly nostalgic.Įrnest Hemingway sipped the Green Fairy in Spain in the 1920s as a journalist, and later during the Spanish Civil War.

The Green Fairy faded as a cultural influence for most of the 20th Century, to be replaced by cocktails, martinis and, in the 1960s, a panoply of mind-altering drugs. Blamed for causing psychosis, even murder, by 1915 absinthe was banned in France, Switzerland, the US and most of Europe. It may even have precipitated Vincent Van Gogh cutting off his ear. From that moment he forgets everything, and wakes up naked in a strange bed.Ĭontemporaries cited absinthe as shortening the lives of Baudelaire, Jarry and poets Verlaine and Alfred de Musset, among others. He drinks so much absinthe he tries to waltz with his chair and then falls to the ground. His A Queer Night in Paris features a provincial notary who wangles an invitation to a party in the studio of an acclaimed painter. Guy de Maupassant imbibed, as did characters in many of his short stories. Rimbaud’s manifesto was unambiguous: he declared that a poet “makes himself a seer through a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses.” Absinthe, with its hallucinogenic effects, could achieve just that. Rimbaud, who “saw poetry as alchemical, a way of changing reality” Edmund White notes in his biography of the poet, saw absinthe as an artistic tool. In the poem Poison, from his 1857 volume The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire ranked absinthe ahead of wine and opium: “None of which equals the poison welling up in your eyes that show me my poor soul reversed, my dreams throng to drink at those green distorting pools.' They wrote of its addictive appeal and effect on the creative process, and set their work in an absinthe-saturated milieu. Jarry insisted on drinking his absinthe straight Baudelaire also used laudanum and opium Rimbaud combined it with hashish. Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Émile Zola, Alfred Jarry and Oscar Wilde were among scores of writers who were notorious absinthe drinkers. It’s more likely that the damage was done by severe alcohol poisoning from drinking twelve to twenty shots a day. Contemporary analysis indicates that the chemical thujone in wormwood was present in such minute quantities in properly distilled absinthe as to cause little psychoactive effect. But this was an aperitif capable of creating blackouts, pass-outs, hallucinations and bizarre behaviour. Its licorice flavor derived from fennel and anise. Dozens of artists took as their subjects absinthe drinkers and the ritual paraphernalia: a glass, slotted spoon, sugar cubes – sugar softened the bitter bite of cheaper brands – and fountains dripping cold water to dilute the liquor.Ībsinthe was, at its conception, not unlike other medicinal herbal preparations (vermouth, the German word for wormwood, among them). It shaped Symbolism, Surrealism, Modernism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism. Absinthe solidified or destroyed friendships, and created visions and dream-like states that filtered into artistic work.

During the Belle Époque, the Green Fairy – nicknamed after its distinctive colour – was the drink of choice for so many writers and artists in Paris that five o’clock was known as the Green Hour, a happy hour when cafes filled with drinkers sitting with glasses of the verdant liquor. The spirit was a muse extraordinaire from 1859, when Édouard Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker shocked the annual Salon de Paris, to 1914, when Pablo Picasso created his painted bronze sculpture, The Glass of Absinthe. It’s hard to overstate absinthe’s cultural impact – or imagine a contemporary equivalent.

That is where the legendary aromatic drink that came to symbolise decadence was invented in the late 18th Century. Arthur Rimbaud called absinthe the “sagebrush of the glaciers” because a key ingredient, the bitter-tasting herb Artemisia absinthium or wormwood, is plentiful in the icy Val-de-Travers region of Switzerland.

Absynth the drink