“I have discovered that alcohol taken in sufficient quantity produces all the effects of drunkenness.”
—OSCAR WILDE
“I never could quite accustom myself to absinthe,” English poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) once confessed, somewhat wistfully. His contemporary, Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), however, had no such reservations about the Green Fairy.
“Dowson is very talented! I am a great admirer of his,” painter Fritz von Thaulow once said to Wilde. “But it is a shame. It’s so sad that he staggers so much and drinks too much absinthe.”
“If he didn’t do that,” Wilde replied with a shrug of his shoulders, “he would be quite a different person.” If it is difficult to imagine any of the Decadents sans absinthe, then it is virtually impossible to imagine Dowson—the prototypical English Decadent—without the drink.
Dowson was practically predestined to be a poet of ill repute. His father was friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, and the long-haired writer gave Dowson piggyback rides and played dominoes with him when Dowson was six. Dowson was then educated for a short time at Queens College, Oxford, where he was introduced to absinthe. “Whisky and beer for fools; absinthe for poets,” he later wrote. In 1887, he dropped out and moved to London, where he joined the Rhymers’ Club.
The Rhymers’ Club, founded by Irish poet W. B. Yeats and British writer Ernest Rhys, met at London pubs, cafés, and private residences. They drank, smoked, recited poetry, and discussed their mutual love of the French Decadents—a borderline treasonous love affair, due to frosty relations between Great Britain and France. “The sight of young Englishmen discovering an unworthy side of France would have been disgusting had it not been mainly comic,” Dowson’s friend Victor Plarr wrote.
Dowson was as decadent as one could get without actually being French. He was well read in French literature and counted Balzac, Swinburne, and Baudelaire among his favorite authors. He also fashioned himself after Flaubert: the idea of finding “the right word” was terribly romantic to Dowson. The Rhymers’ Club only lasted for two or three years, but its influence would be felt far beyond the two books of verse that were published as a result of the meetings.
In his twenties, Dowson fell in love with the underage daughter of a local restaurant owner. While the girl never returned his admiration, she entertained his affections for many years. When she turned fifteen, Dowson proposed to her—and, seeing the look of shock on her face, quickly withdrew his proposal. His friend Plarr said, “The love affair? We will cut a long story short by saying simply—it failed.” Dowson fared much better with prostitutes, whom he visited nightly when he had the money.
Dowson treated his sorrows with liquid therapy. “Absinthe has the power of the magicians,” he wrote. “It can wipe out or renew the past, annul or foretell the future.” An uncharacteristically sarcastic Flaubert once wrote of the drink, “Absinthe: exceedingly violent poison. One glass and you’re dead.” Luckily for Dowson, Flaubert was exaggerating—although he might have benefited from heeding the warning.
“The absinthe I consumed on Friday seems to have conquered my neuralgia [nerve pain], but at some cost to my general health yesterday!” Dowson once wrote to a friend. Rather than help his state of mind and physical well-being, it was clear to all, including himself, just how damaging his drinking was. And not just to his health: he was arrested so frequently for being drunk and disorderly that a magistrate once said, “What, you here again, Mr. Dowson?”
“Sober, he was the most gentle, in manner the most gentlemanly of men, unselfish to a fault, to the extent of weakness; a delightful companion, charm itself,” remembered Arthur Symons. “Under the influence of drink he became almost literally insane, certainly quite irresponsible. He fell into furious and unreasoning passions; a vocabulary unknown to him at other times sprang up like a whirlwind; he seemed always about to commit some act of absurd violence.”
Dowson drank as often as he could afford to, following Baudelaire’s motto: “It is necessary to be always a little drunk.” Dowson could often be found at the Cock tavern in London, a pencil in hand and a glass of absinthe on the marble table in front of him. Since he barely made ends meet as a poet and translator, he had to make do with composing his poetry on the backs of business letters. When he ran out of room on his papers, he was said to have continued scribbling on tabletops (always to be erased by the bartender).
He often skipped meals—and prostitutes—in order to keep his glass of absinthe full. “I tighten my belt in order to allow myself a sufficiency of cigarettes and absinthe,” he once wrote.
“Why are you so persistently and perversely wonderful?” Oscar Wilde once asked Dowson in a letter. These were words of high praise indeed—few writers were as successful at being degenerate as Wilde, and few paid as high a price as Wilde.
The Evening News called Wilde “one of the high priests of a school which attacks all the wholesome, manly, simple ideals of English life, and sets up false gods of decadent culture and intellectual debauchery.” It is likely the high priest of decadence had never been familiar with the “wholesome, manly, simple ideals of English life” of which the Evening News spoke. Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 1854, into an unconventional family. His father, a respected surgeon, was a notorious philanderer and had numerous children from extramarital affairs; Wilde’s mother was a poet and fighter for women’s rights who wrote under the pen name “Speranza.”
Wilde took up writing, and found steady work as a journalist upon graduation from Oxford. Following a self-published volume of poetry (simply titled Poems), Wilde toured the United States as a lecturer in 1882. When U.S. Customs asked the twenty-seven-year-old “professor of aestheticism” if he had anything to declare upon entering the country, he reportedly said, “Nothing but my genius.”
Thousands of Americans attended his lectures on the “Principles of Aestheticism.” Wilde, a self-proclaimed aesthete, believed in art for art’s sake. “We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art,” Wilde pontificated. In a lecture titled “The House Beautiful,” Wilde even offered practical tips on using the principles of aestheticism to beautify the home.
Were crowds really showing up in droves to hear Wilde’s thoughts on interior decorating, or were they just trying to catch a glimpse of the strange Englishman whose “aesthetic costume” was already a source of ridicule in England? “He dressed as probably no grown man in the world was ever dressed before,” a New York Times reporter noted. Wilde wore his hair long under broad felt hats, dressed in fabulous coats of fur and velvet, and brandished an ivory cane, all the while chain-smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes. When a crowd of Harvard students showed up at his lecture in Boston wearing ridiculous garb to mock him, Wilde said, “Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.”
Upon his return to England, Wilde made a further name for himself as a successful playwright. Still, the press continued to have fun with Wilde’s effeminate dress, makeup, and mannerisms. Some reporters even noted that he spoke with a lisp, and people gossiped about his “undecided” sexuality. In fact, there was nothing ambiguous about his sexuality: while he was married to a woman and had two children, Wilde was unabashedly homosexual.
One of his longest-running affairs was with the young Lord Alfred Douglas, whom Wilde first met in 1891 when Douglas was an undergraduate at Oxford. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, vehemently objected to his son’s involvement with Wilde. “You cannot do anything against the power of my affection for Oscar Wilde and his for me,” Douglas wrote to his parents. But that didn’t stop his father from trying.
On February 18, 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle, a members-only bohemian writers’ club. The inscription read: “For Oscar Wilde, posing as somdomite” [sic], the marquess had inscribed on the card. Since sodomy was a felony crime in England, the allegation could have carried severe legal consequences. Wilde sued for libel. When the case finally went to court in April, the defense stacked the deck with witnesses describing all manner of depravity on Wilde’s part, and Wilde realized, too late, that he—and not Douglas’s father—was the one effectively on trial.
The public was looking for a scapegoat for the ills that were suddenly befalling society in the latter half of the nineteenth century. There was widespread concern that Western civilization was in decline and the peace of the Victorian era was in peril. Absinthe use by the lower classes was increasing, and the liquor had become known as “Charenton Omnibus” for its association with madness (Charenton was the same French asylum that had once housed the Marquis de Sade). Worse, middle- and upper-class women were becoming addicted in droves to morphine, which had surpassed laudanum as the opiate of choice. Jewelry stores had even begun carrying silver and gold-plated syringes for the discriminating drug addict. As the face of the Decadents, Wilde became the fall guy for the apparently widespread breakdown of societal values.
His private life of “blackmailers and male prostitutes” was dragged from out of the Victorian underground and into the open. When the Marquess of Queensberry’s lawyer, Edward Carson, asked Wilde if he had kissed a particular servant boy, Wilde exclaimed, “Oh, dear, no. He was a particularly plain boy—unfortunately ugly.” Carson replied that it shouldn’t have mattered if the boy was ugly ... unless, of course, Wilde was a homosexual.
When he was asked about his books’ subject matter, Wilde used the old Realist defense as articulated in his introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” Only “brutes and illiterates,” whose views on art “are incalculably stupid,” would dare to judge books on moral grounds, Wilde testified.
The marquess was declared not guilty of libel and Wilde was ordered to pay restitution for the defendant’s legal expenses. Unfortunately for Wilde, the judgment would be the least of his worries: as he left the courtroom, authorities applied for an arrest warrant on charges of sodomy and gross indecency.
Wilde had faced controversy before. When his play Salome was banned for its portrayal of biblical characters, the controversy had proven beneficial for his career and reputation. The latest accusations would not do the same for him, at least not in his own lifetime. Wilde’s friends advised him to leave for France before he could be arrested. “The train has gone,” Wilde said of his window to flee the country. “It’s too late.” After authorities arrested him, Wilde pled not guilty.
“What is ‘the love that dare not speak its name’?” prosecutor Charles Gill asked Wilde on the witness stand.
Wilde was defiant as ever in his answer: “‘The love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.” He also referenced Plato, perhaps hoping that the prosecution would gloss over the fact that Plato and his students regularly engaged in homosexual activities as part of their “studies.”
The jury was unable to reach a verdict; Wilde was released on bail. The reprieve would only be temporary, however, as a judge handed down a guilty verdict on May 25. Wilde and Alfred Taylor, a “procurer of young men” (a pimp), were convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labor in prison. The judge described their sentences as inadequate, but, luckily for Wilde and Taylor, two years was the maximum punishment allowed for their convictions. Ernest Dowson was the only major player associated with the Decadents in attendance at the hearing.
“There is not a man or woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the Marquess of Queensberry for destroying the High Priest of the Decadents,” Wilde’s former friend W. E. Henley wrote in the National Observer. Theater owners papered over Wilde’s name on playbills, and the plays themselves soon shut down. An angry mob shattered the windows of a bookstore where The Yellow Book, a quarterly Decadent publication, was prominently displayed.
Wilde lost legal custody of his children while he was in prison. His mother died during his time in jail, and when his wife visited him to bring him the news of his mother, it was the second to last time he would see his wife before she too passed away in 1898.
Meanwhile, The Yellow Book closed up shop. In its place, Arthur Symons started a new journal called The Savoy, slyly named after the Savoy Hotel, where many of Wilde’s homosexual trysts were said to have taken place. “We are not Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents,” Symons wrote in the first issue, attempting to distance the new periodical from the tarnished decadent image. Perhaps he should have embraced it: The Savoy, failing to stir any public interest, shuttered its doors after just eight issues.
After serving his prison term, Wilde attempted to prove his decency to the public by visiting a brothel in France. Dowson encouraged him to have sex at the brothel as a way to repudiate his homosexual image. Wilde entered the establishment, cash in hand. A crowd gathered outside, awaiting the infamous sodomite’s vaginal rechristening. When he emerged, he told Dowson that it was his first woman in ten years, “and it will be the last. It was like cold mutton.” He addressed the crowd using a more upbeat tone, asking them to tell about his adventure in England, “for it will entirely restore my character!”
Unsurprisingly, the brothel visit did not restore his character. Wilde continued his relationship with Douglas. Though he was just entering middle age, Wilde felt the grave tugging on the sleeves of his fur coat. “The Morgue yawns for me,” he wrote to a friend. He even visited the morgue in Paris to inspect his next place of lodging.
When he was forty-six, Wilde fell ill with cerebral meningitis following ear surgery. As his body fought against the infection, Wilde tired of lying on his deathbed and went to a nearby café for a glass of absinthe. “You’ll kill yourself, Oscar. You know the doctor said absinthe was poison for you,” his friend Robbie Ross told him.
“And what have I to live for?” Wilde said, returning to his bed. He slipped into a coma and passed away shortly thereafter.
Wilde’s friend Dowson was found the same year in Paris drunk and incoherent, slumped over a table sticky with absinthe. Dowson’s drinking had escalated in recent years because of his grief over the deaths of his parents. While they had been sick with tuberculosis, neither had died of it. Their deaths were grim: his father had overdosed on chloral hydrate, and his mother hanged herself. Dowson was now sick with tuberculosis himself.
At one of the final Rhymers’ Club meetings, he had been asked if he had anything new to read for the group. Dowson pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. He stared at the words. They had become meaningless to him. He shook his head solemnly and pocketed the poem. “Literature has failed for me,” he told Robert Sherard, the friend who found him at the Parisian café. “I shall look somewhere else in the future.”
After a second encounter between the two men some months later revealed Dowson to be in a state of rapid physical and mental decline, Sherard took him back to his place at Catford, where Dowson would spend his final weeks. “I have no lungs left to speak of, an apology for a liver, and a broken heart,” he told Sherard, apologizing for his dilapidated state. His coughing grew worse, and Sherard left to fetch a doctor.
When Sherard returned and propped Dowson up into a sitting position, the poet expired at the age of thirty-two. The end had been a long time coming. “I cannot conceive Ernest Dowson otherwise than supremely unhappy. He was not of this world or for it,” Sherard wrote.
Dowson’s favorite saying defined the 1890s: après nous, le deluge, meaning when this is over, all hell is going to break loose. And that’s exactly what happened in the next century, as the world erupted in the first of two world wars.