Absinthe (Re-) emerging

Funny thing happened the other day.  As part of her anniversary present, my wife gave me a copy of France magazine, a lovely periodical published both in the UK and the US for English-speaking francophiles.  Every article and every photograph makes you realize just how badly you want to go back.  Later, in bed, I was reading the magazine only to realize that I'd read this issue already.  I looked at the cover date: July 2011.  She'd accidentally given me a magazine we already owned.  We'd re-gifted ourselves!  As I looked further into the issue, however, I came across an article I'd somehow missed the first time round: on France's new producers of absinthe.  (In 1988, the EU declared legal again the production and consumption of absinthe, after an 80 year ban.)  The article explained that today's brands of absinthe, while still around 70 proof, have a much lower wormwood content than the brands produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Wormwood, of course, is the ingredient that it is usually credited for giving absinthe, in its heydey, its famously psychoactive quality.   As I wrote in a post many months ago, there is disagreement over the spirit's true psychoactive strength, with some commentators claiming that absinte was, and is, no more potent than any other spirit.  Then again, the France article quotes from distiller Dominique Rousselet as he remembers his first drink of absinthe--produced by the traditional method during the years the ban was still in effect.  "One 

glass--bof!" Rousselet says.  "I was reeling, but reeling.  [My friend] told me to call home to get someone to collect me, but when I got to the phone I couldn't remember my number.  I was too embarrassed to tell him, so I pretended to have a conversation.  It was all over the place, my mind.  My brain was swimming. . . .  I had to confess to my friend that I'd completely forgotten my number.  He had the bright idea of using the phone book.  I could at least remember my name!"

At the turn of the nineteenth century, "the Green Fairy" was widely seen as a destroyer of men, savager of minds, and killer of families.  It was blamed, often with little evidence, for murder, insanity, and a new society of benumbed drunkenness.   As I mentioned in my earlier post, part of absinthe's problem was that producers began making inferior but cheaper versions, sometimes--for the sake of holding down cost--substituting for traditional ingredients ingredients that were less expensive but actually proved poisonous.  Van Gogh lived in Paris exactly during absinthe's height of popularity, and he befriended exactly the bohemian types of people who adored and popularized the spirit.  His name is frequently associated with absinthe.  Indeed, the France article only follows this trend.  Beneath the article's title runs a subheader: "From Van Gogh to Oscar Wilde, artists and writers have been devotees of absinthe for decades."  But there is little actual evidence from Van Gogh's letters that he was an enthusiastic consumer of the spirit.  However, the common perception, I think it is fair to say, is that Van Gogh was addicted to the stuff.  Problem is, Van Gogh would likely not have been introduced to absinthe until he moved to Paris in the mid-1880s.  And the years he lived in Paris he wrote fewer letters than in any other period of his adult life.  Thus, there is precious little primary material available from which to draw conclusions.  I suspect that the myth--if that's what it is--of Van Gogh's absinthe addiction can be traced to an account, written by Paul Gauguin years after the fact, of their last weeks together in Van Gogh's Yellow House in Arles.   Shortly before Van Gogh's infamous December, 1888 breakdown (when he cut off his ear and gave it to a prostitute), Van Gogh and Gauguin took a trip to Montepelier to see the Fabre Museum.  What was supposed to be a trip that would renew their friendship turned sour and even turbulent as the housemates argued vociferously over matters of art.  According to Gauguin, that night, in an Arles cafe, and without provocation, Van Gogh stood up and tossed a full glass of absinthe in his face.  A few days later, the "madman" was cutting his own ear off.  The issue here is Gauguin's credibility.  Almost none of what Gauguin writes in his account can be verified.  It isn't backed up by any other source or any eyewitness account.  And all of it--per Gauguin habit--seems designed to make Gauguin come off as brilliantly as possible, and Vincent as badly as possible.  (We know, for instance, that following Vincent's death Gauguin told lies about the extent of his artistic influence over Van Gogh, even taking credit for advising Van Gogh during the composition of Sunflowers, despie the fact that the Sunflowers series was completed long before Gauguin even arrived in Arles!) 

We'll never know the full truth about Van Gogh and absinthe--or Van Gogh and Gauguin, for that matter--but it's clear that certain myths are bound to remain.  

Mail slot minutia

You can consider this blog as another in my series of "Little Things I Learned On the Way To Writing a Historical Novel." In looking over a scene in Arles, one in which the point of view character is not Van Gogh but Gauguin, I was reminded of one of those little bits of historical detail that I want to make right before I declare my novel done. In the scene, Gauguin reclines on his bed in the Yellow House, enjoying a cigarette and an hour free from Vincent's company. The postman delivers the mail. From upstairs Gauguin hears it drop through the slot and on to the floor. Gauguin, enjoying his leisure, is slow to check on the delivery, but finally he does. The mail contains both positive and annoying news for Gauguin, and how he reacts to that news throws light both on his character and his relationship with Van Gogh. It also contributes to his initial decision to leave Arles and the Yellow House behind.

But my immediate concern as I looked over the scene yesterday wasn't the thematic but the mechanical. To wit: Would the mail have entered the Yellow House through a slot? I wrote the scene and revised it several times without worrying too much about this point, although it did cross my mind a time or two. Old homes have mail slots, I figured. So I guess that's how this mail comes in. But would it have? Really? It's become a question I can't ignore, as the clock ticks down on this last flurry of revisions on the book. I wasn't sure if I could find an answer that would satisfy me, and I'm not sure I have, but think I've got an answer that my book and I can live with. After a little internet research, I've learned that mail slots did not become common in Europe until the mid-1800s. In some parts of Europe, they did not become common until the late 1800s. Well, what about Arles? (And is 1888 "late" enough to be the late 1800s?) I don't know, but I do know that in Paris mail slots began to appear in the late 1700s. Whatever happens in a country's captial will eventually find its way to the provinces, and since Paris was one of the first world capitals to employ mail slots, it seems logical that the provinces of France would begin using them before other parts of Europe. Since I don't want Gauguin to show any hurry in getting the mail, I'd rather not have him get up to answer a knock from the postman. So the only reason I'd ditch the mail slot is if the evidence is obviously against it. That not being the case, I'm keeping it.

By the way, do you know why mail slots were invented in the first place? No, not to look all gold and glittery on a wooden door front. The reason is that prior to their use the postman would indeed have to knock and wait for someone to answer the door to receive his or her mail. The amount of time wasted standing at the door convinced someone to introduce the mail slot. (And later, in the United States--in 1915--the all too familiar tunnel-shaped mailbox, invented by one Roy J. Joroleman, a U.S. Post Office employee.) I'll count this knowledge as a one more peripheral benefit to starting down the long Van Gogh road five years ago.

Et tu, Adam?

Last time I began responding to Adam Gopnik's well-written and provocative, but I think problematic, essay in the New Yorker titled "Van Gogh's Ear." A number of

speculations--regarding the reasons why Vincent moved to Arles, regarding the "Christmas Crisis" between he and Gauguin, regarding how the esteemed place Van Gogh occupies in art history was essentially determined by this crisis--are presented as facts. I responded to some of these in my last post. But none of the above represents the most serious weakness in Gopnik's essay. The worst fallacy in the essay is Gopnik's acceptance, indeed his propagation, of the notion that Van Gogh turned "mad" during the Christmas crisis and remained so the rest of his life. In point of fact, Van Gogh's "madness" was never that. Like the manic-depressives and epileptics of today, he suffered from a physical ailment that had psychological consequences. His "attacks" came on only semi-regularly, every few months or so; in between them he was more than lucid. In between attacks he was not, and did not act, crazy in any recognizable way. The letters he wrote at Saint-Remy testify to the essential soundness of his mind. While generally more despondent than his earlier letters, they are in no way irrational, manic, or delusional. In fact, because of his steadiness, relative to other patients, he was granted significant and unusual privileges--such as the right to paint at all, and a separate room to use as a studio, and the freedom to walk the outside grounds in search of subjects, even to travel unaccompanied to Arles! If one did not know of his earlier attacks one would have wondered what in the world this man was doing at a mental hospital. (Btw, Gopnik misrepresents St. Paul's when he calls it "an insane asylum," which suggests raving lunatics locked up for life. While the hospital was often proved ineffectual in doing so, the point of anyone being admitted to St. Paul's was to be treated, cured, and released. Its raison d'etre, if you will, was therapeutic not punitive or merely restrictive.) Theo Van Gogh's wife Joanna was surprised to see how healthy Vincent looked when he visited in May, 1890, after withdrawing himself from St. Paul's. Vincent, she thought, looked healthier and stronger than Theo did! (Click here to read a memoir of Joanna by her son.)

But here's the thing that really chews me up about the Mad Artist myth. Van Gogh never saw his illness as anything but debilitating, because that's what it was. During an attack he was completely taken outside of himself. He had no control. He had to be restrained. It was not as if he was enjoying a beautiful, ecstatic experience that he then transferred to canvas. In fact, when the attacks finally passed he couldn't remember what he did or felt or thought or witnessed during them. And the attacks left him completely enervated, useless to do anything. For weeks on end he could do nothing but rest and recover; certainly, he could not paint. And when he finally found himself feeling reasonable normal again and able to start working anew, he did not set down on canvas any brilliant insights or perspectives from his "madness," he merely went back to work painting the world around him, as he had his whole life. The few truly immortal pictures he did create in Saint-Remy were managed in spite of not because.

Van Gogh was so soul-sickened by this illness that he began to resent ever having gone to the south in the first place, because he suspected that there might be something in the southern air that led certain individuals astray. (In an era when the treatment of mental patients was a pitifully no-nothing enterprise, baseless theories like this one circulated frequently.) As productive as his years in Provence were, he almost wished they had never happened. Not the kind of talk you'd expect if his illness had finally allowed him to be the great painter he always wanted to be. No. Because he'd already become that: in Arles, in the spring, summer, and fall of 1888. (See my previous post.) After the Christmas crisis, Van Gogh was only so much treading water: hoping just to get better, hoping to simply be able to work, less concerned about making masterpieces than returning to the same level of life energy he'd enjoyed before the onset of his attacks. Sadly, this last hope was never to be realized.