Strychnine

 

One of the books I took along to read in our Devon holiday cottage last week was In Love With Hell by William Palmer, a series of short biographies of modern writers who were very heavy drinkers or alcoholics. The usual suspects are present and correct: Patrick Hamilton, John Cheever, Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis  etc. The chapter on Malcolm Lowry (see earlier post) contained some information that shed light on a passage that I often include in my talks on Decadent London.

In a letter from July 1894 dipsomaniac decadent poet Ernest Dowson wrote about a journey to alcoholic oblivion with his friend the actor Charles Goodhart: 

'Goodie and I met in the evening, he had a charming man with him, a twenty-ton opium eater, who had run away with his cousin and is now to marry her. We met at 7 and consumed 4 absinthes apiece in the Cock till 9 [in Shaftesbury Avenue - demolished]. We then went and ate some kidneys- after which two absinthes apiece at the Crown [now a KFC in Charing Cross Road]. After which, one absinthe apiece at Goodie's club. Total 7 absinthes. These had seriously affected us - but made little impression on the opium eater. He took us back to the Temple in a cab. This morning Goodie and I were twitching visibly. I feel rather indisposed; and in fact we decided that our grief is now sufficiently drowned, and we must spend a few days on nothing stronger than lemonade and strychnine.'

I had assumed the 'lemonade and strychnine' was a joke, but it turns out that 'suitably diluted, strychnine was in the past given as a stimulant to patients suffering from the palsy from lead poisoning, beriberi, and the shakes induced by alcoholism' [William Palmer, In Love With Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers p.82] In Lowry's masterpiece Under The Volcano, based on one day, the Consul's breakfast consists of a bottle half-full of Johnny Walker and a glass of strychnine mixture. Later he mistakenly takes a second draft of the strychnine mixture and passes out. Needless to say, don't try this at home. 

For a scientific overview see here.

Also immortalised in 1965 by The Sonics (and later covered by The Fall) here

'Some folks Like water, Some folks like wine, but I like the taste, of straight strychnine.'