Hashish, Wine, Opium
Hashish, Wine, Opium
Théophile Gautier
Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Maurice Stang
Introduction by Derek Stanford
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The Opium Pipe first published in French in 1838
Hashish first published in French in 1843
The Club of Assassins first published in French in 1846
Wine and Hashish first published in French in 1851
Hashish, Wine, Opium first published in this translation by Calder and Boyars Limited in 1972
Translation © Calder Publications Limited, 1972
This edition first published by Oneworld Classics Limited in 2009
Cover design by Will Dady
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe
isbn: 978-1-84749-093-3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Introduction
Théophile Gautier
The Opium Pipe
The Club of Assassins
Hashish
Charles Baudelaire
Wine and Hashish
Notes
Introduction
The sketches and essays brought together here have three claims upon our attention. First, they constitute a body of picturesque documents on an aspect and phase of French Romanticism. Secondly, they explore and analyse, through the words of two great masters of language, the experience and effect of three psychedelic elements: opium, hashish and wine. And thirdly, they help to explain – in terms of the status accorded these two authors – a certain vein of experiment and escape in our own literature of the 1890s: that represented, say, by such poems as Arthur Symons’ The Opium-Smoker (“I am engulfed, and drown deliciously…”), The Absinthe-Drinker (“Gently I wave the visible world away…”) and Haschisch* (“And yet I am the lord of all…”), or that escapade of the poet Dowson (“whose copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal was annotated from cover to cover”) in which he, Symons and a group of young people from the Stage took hashish together. Alas, the experience of this “elaborate experiment in visionary sensation” was not a very successful one: “it ended in what should have been its first symptoms, immoderate laughter”. Arthur Symons was, by the way, a translator of Baudelaire’s verse, his prose poems and Les Paradis Artificiels – a book of analytic and poetic prose on the procedure, experience and effect of taking hashish and opium. While Ernest Dowson – who took “bhang” (or hashish) three times when at Oxford – resorted, in his early manhood, somewhat over-liberally to absinthe – a drink made from wormwood and wine, probably the most potent and virulent of alcohols consumed in the West (“O Lord! O my liver! O my nerves! O my poor blasted constitution!”). He also recorded his devotion to this spirit in a poem Absinthea Teatra (“Green changed to white, emerald to an opal; nothing was changed”).
Many of the naughtinesses of fin-de-siècle English culture appear as no more than belated imitations of French attitudes and achievements current up to thirty or forty years later. The chapter entitled “Opium and Hashish” in the history of French Romanticism opens in the 1830s. It is a large and fertile chapter in which some of the eminent names are those of de Musset, Dumas, Gautier, de Nerval, Baudelaire and Merimée. It reveals, too, what can be described as a medical-literary collaboration – an interest both scientific and aesthetic.
Here, one can give only a précis; a simplified chronology of dates and events. In 1838, Théophile Gautier published in La Presse, a newspaper of the day, a short story called The Opium Pipe. The tale combined fantasy and fact in a manner which Gautier often employed, and featured Gautier being initiated into opium-smoking by his friend Alphonse Karr. This was followed in 1843 by a piece of factual subjective reportage, published in the same paper and entitled Hashish. In this article, Gautier did not reveal by name the source from which he had obtained the drug; but in a learned work published in 1845 – Hashish and Mental Alienation – a Doctor Moreau of Tours released the story behind the scene. Moreau reprinted Gautier’s article, in its entirety, in his book, prefacing it with a few lines in which he told how its author had expressed a keen desire to judge for himself the powers of the drug, though little disposed to believe in them. He tells us that he was able to grant Gautier his desire, and that the effect of its administration was “lively and satisfying”.
The next phase concerns a loosely constituted group or céracle of artists interested in the drug: Le Club des Hachichins, or Club of Assassins. In the year in which Moreau’s book appeared, Fernand Boissard – a young amateur and patron of the arts – wrote to Gautier in the following terms: “My Dear Théophile, we shall take hashish at my apartment next Monday, 3rd of October, under the supervision of Moreau and d’Aubert Roche. Do you wish to be present?…” D’Aubert Roche, it should be said, was the doctor whose treatise on Typhus in the Orient had turned Moreau’s attention to the nature and behaviour of hashish. Another note from Boissard reads: “Hashish is decreed for Monday the 22nd…”
Those present at these and other gatherings, either as spectators or participants, included the author de Nerval, the painter Chenevard, the musician Barbereau – and presumably Charles Baudelaire. “Presumably”, since Gautier writing his impressions of Baudelaire in 1868, six months after the poet’s death, as a preface to the posthumous publication of Les Fleurs de Mal – though describing him as present (if “but rarely”) at these occasions, says he did not meet him till 1849. Whether or not Gautier’s memory misled him as to the date, he gave a vivid portrait of Baudelaire (“a dandy strayed into Bohemia”). Gautier tells us that Baudelaire came “only as a spectator to the seances at the Hotel Pimodan, where our circle met to take the ‘dawamesk’”, and that “After some ten experiments we renounced once and for all this intoxicating drug, not only because it makes us physically ill, but also because the true littérateur has need only of natural dreams, and does not wish his thoughts to be influenced by any outside agency”.
In 1846, Gautier published his hashish-fantasy The Club of Assassins in the Revue des Deux Mondes, revealing some twenty-two years later that he was describing the seances at the Hotel Pimodan, even as claimed in the fantasy itself. What he did not remark was that this piece of psychedelic writing contains much beside a description of fact.
Gautier’s piece was followed in 1851 by Baudelaire’s essay Wine and Hashish in Le Messager de l’Assemblée, an altogether more intellectual effort than anything
from the pen of Gautier. The intellectuality of Baudelaire’s approach is, indeed, suggested by the subtitle of the composition: Wine and Hashish, Compared as Means for the Multiplication of the Personality. Although on Gautier’s evidence, Baudelaire “came but rarely and then only as a spectator” to the Club of Assassins, professing that “This happiness, bought at the chemists, was repugnant to him”, he had – prior to this – experimented with the drug. It is known that he partook of it immediately after – possibly even before – his voyage to the islands of Mauritius and Réunion, when he was away from Paris between May 1841 and March 1842.
If Baudelaire
, though “amorous of new and rare sensations”, declined to take hashish at the Hotel Pimodan, the reason may have been, in part, hygienic. It is fairly certain, or at least highly likely, that shortly after Baudelaire’s return to Paris, he knew he had contracted a venereal infection. His formulation of an attitude of sobriety and austerity (“Orgy is not the sister of inspiration – Inspiration is definitely the sister of daily toil,” he declared in an article entitled Advice to Young Writers published in 1846) may well have been part of a prophylactic programme devised by the poet to guard against a recurrence of exacerbation of the dormant disease.
Whatever the reason behind his attitude, we know that Baudelaire increasingly became both a more chastened man and a less indulgent, more reflective, thinker. Speaking in a lecture at Brussels of his work Les Paradis Artificiels (1860) just three years before his death, he said that he wished to write a book not merely of physiological interest but rather one with a moral concern. “I wished to show that those who search for an artificial paradise create their
own hell.”
Baudelaire’s essay Wine and Hashish can be thought of as a prelude to his book Les Paradis Artificiels published nine years later; and nothing reveals his greater stature, compared with that of Gautier , than a juxtaposition of their own attitudes to opium and hashish. In a novel written by Gautier (The Cross of Berny) in collaboration with three other authors, the hero Edgar de Meilhan – for whose words Gautier was responsible – declares that “Hashish has nothing of that ignoble heavy drunkenness about it which the races of the North obtain from wine and alcohol: it offers an intellectual intoxication”.
This novel was serialized in La Presse in 1845, and it was another fifteen years, admittedly, before Baudelaire expressed himself fully on this subject in Les Paradis Artificiels. By that time Gautier himself had changed his opinions, stating that he was opposed to opium and hashish, when employed by the artist, since it prevented him, through its side-effects, from engaging in his proper work of creation and because, he held, such a person did not need such stimulants to his art. Gautier’s response to the issue is clearly straightforward and round enough; but for him it was a practical matter in which aesthetic values were the only ones involved.
How much more complex and ethically minded was Baudelaire’s position can be seen by a summary of it, as offered by Gautier himself, writing after the poet’s death. “Baudelaire,” he stated, “while admitting a taste for the creation of an ‘artificial paradise’, by means of some stimulant, opium, hashish, wine, alcohol or tobacco, seems to follow the nature of man – since one finds it in all periods, in all conditions, in all countries, barbarous or civilised – he saw in it the proof of original perversity, a means of escaping necessary sorrow, a satanical suggestion for usurping, even in the present, the happiness reserved as a recompense for virtue and the persistent effort towards the good and the beautiful.”
Indeed, the degree of this moral commitment in this matter was so great that Flaubert wrote to him – a little surprised and a little disapproving at finding what he took to be the taint of orthodoxy in Les Paradis Artificiels. “Here,” commented Flaubert, “is my only objection. It seems to me that in a subject treated at such a high level… in a work of observation and induction, you have more than once insisted too much (?) on the Spirit of Evil. One feels a leaven of Catholicism here and there. I would have preferred you not to have condemned hashish, opium, excess. Do you know what will emerge from them later?”
In asking the last question, Flaubert has in mind any such artistic production as might seem to stem from such moral aberrations and intransigencies. For him, it is a matter of the suspect moral means justified by an aesthetic end. It is all a part, psychologically, of that failure of nerve, that arrogance of defeat, which led Mallarmé to proclaim (after a spiritual crisis, at the age of twenty-four in 1866) that “everything, in the world, exists in order to culminate in a book”.
When Flaubert wrote to Baudelaire, the latter had only seven years to live; only four of which were to prove profitable working ones. On the last page of his private journal My Heart Laid Bare, the tail-end of the last sentence reads thus: “obey the principles of the strictest sobriety, the first of which is to suppress all stimulants, of whatever kind” – a fit concluding gesture from a critic of artificial paradises.
The notion that the arts in Britain invariably lag behind those of France is one requiring some qualification. It is true that English poetry and fiction aped those modes prevailing in France from the time of Baudelaire and Flaubert to those of Zola and Verlaine, but this is to speak in general terms. Just as Delacroix studied Constable, in much the same way as Monet studied Turner, so Baudelaire formulated his aesthetic theory, and enriched and modified his aesthetic practice by a careful and obsessive study of two earlier Anglo-Saxon authors: Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas de Quincey, both of whose resort to alcohol and opium profoundly affected the style, form and content of their work. The laggardness of the arts in Britain, with regard to those of France, is a rule whose exceptions should never be forgotten.
Baudelaire first wrote on Poe in 1852 – a long critico-biographical essay published in the Revue de Paris, the revised version of which he appended to his translation of Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque published in 1856. A second essay Further Notes on Poe served to introduce a second volume of Poe’s shorter fiction translated by him.
The influence of Poe’s theories and practice on French Symbolism, as funnelled through Baudelaire and Mallarmé, has been several times chronicled and many times assessed. It is vast, and cannot be examined here. As great, in its own way, was the impact of Thomas de Quincey on Baudelaire. In 1857 de Quincey died, having – despite his enormous consumption of laudanum (at one time augmented to 8,000 drops a day!) – lived to the age of seventy-four. The following year Baudelaire published his free adaptation of the Confessions of an Opium-Eater in the Revue Contemporaine, which with Baudelaire’s own Poem of Hashish made up the contents of his book Artificial Paradises (“a study which is the beginning of a natural science,” as Flaubert hailed it) which appeared in the same year.
There is a fine translation of Baudelaire’s Le Poeme du Haschische by the late Norman Cameron in My Heart Laid Bare and other prose writings edited and introduced by Peter Quennell, 1950.
In The Cross of Berny – that novel which Gautier wrote with three collaborators – the hero Edgar de Meilhan, speaking of his experience when under the influence of hashish, says: “All my senses seemed displaced. I saw music and heard colours.” This psychedelic occurrence, known as “synaesthesia”, is one of the gifts which artificial stimulants can claim to have bequeathed to the armoury of artistic expression.
Already in 1899, Arthur Symons had begun to appropriate the French practice of synaesthesia to English poetry, when, in The Opium-Smoker, he wrote:
I am engulfed, and drown deliciously.
Soft music like a perfume, and sweet light
Golden with audible odours exquisite,
Swathe me with cerements for eternity.
In 1890, Oscar Wilde put the device to more original use, in one of his critical dialogues contained in his book Intentions, when he spoke of certain compositions of Dvorak as “passionate curiously coloured things”.* Wilde made increasing use of this interpretative notation. “You have got to publish his next volume,” he wrote of Lord Alfred Douglas’s poems to his friend Leonard Smithers, “it is full of lovely lyrics, flute music and moon-music, and sonnets in ivory and gold.”
Closely related to this practice of synaesthesia (and probably stimulated though not created by it) was the interpretation of a work of art in terms of imagery drawn from unrelated fields of reference. Huysmans had employed this method both in his formal essays on painting (L’Art Moderne and Certains) and in all the many passages on the arts contained in his novel Against the Grain. Profoundly influenced by this work of fiction, Wilde speaks of Huysm
ans’s procedure, in the pages of The Picture of Dorian Gray, just in Huysmans’s own terms. “There were in it (i.e. Against the Grain),” wrote Wilde, “metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour.” What can be called the synaesthetic image (a term to include both figures of speech referred to here) imparted to criticism a whole range of metaphors which could be used creatively towards an appreciative end. It became a part of the staple equipment of what was spoken of as Impressionistic Criticism; and – more discreetly employed – is still to be met with today.
It was though, naturally, primarily in verse that the future of synaesthesia lay. Arthur Symons, in his opium poem, had made a fitting use of it, but he did not develop the device to speak of non-narcotic experience, though in his prose book Spiritual Adventures he employed it superbly. The pianist Christian Trevalga, in the story of that name, sees the music he is playing projected in a spatial fashion just above the level of the strings on the top of the piano. “It was like a grey smoke, forming and unforming as if it boiled up softly out of the pit where the wires were coiled up.” (Shortly after, Trevalga becomes insane).
Influenced by the French Symbolists, Edith Sitwell – in her early poems – was one of the first English poets consciously to cultivate synaesthesia, a device of much picturesque and decorative effect in her highly artificial world of rococo nursery and fairy-tale verse:
Jane, Jane, tall as a crane
The morning light creaks down again
Sunlight whose shrill soprano plays
A duet with the dust of days
…the furry wind whose grief age
Could not wither.
An essay permitted the length of a treatise might go on to discuss how far the presence of parallels and “correspondencies” in poetry and imaginative literature since the time of Baudelaire derive from the authors’ experience or knowledge of narcotically induced psychedelic states. From Rimbaud’s enigmatic Sonnet of the Vowels to many of Joyce’s planned similitudes, they constitute a curious gallery or two in the literary museum of modernism. Rimbaud is known to have smoked hashish.