I’m planning on rereading Against the Day next month, as I’m taking it with me on an international expedition (which may or may not be Drunk Pynchon related…). What better preparation could there be for journeying back into Pynchon’s titanic opus than drinking that most Against the Day of liver-provocations, a cocktail of absinthe and Champagne?

Said cocktail these days usually goes by the name of “Death in the Afternoon.” Its pedigree is literary; Ernest Hemingway gets the credit for inventing the thing. In a 1935 collection of “cocktail recipes by 30 leading authors” titled “So Red the Nose (or Breath in the Afternoon),” Papa Hemingway opens proceedings with this number. He instructs readers as follows:

Pour 1 jigger of absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink 3 to 5 of these slowly.

So Red the Nose, p. 3.

Pynchon lifts Hemingway’s recipe and refracts it back three decades, giving it to one Pléiade Lafrisée to mix up. Kit is in Ostend, Belgium, staying at the Grand Hôtel de la Nouvelle Digue (“grand hotel of the new dyke”). He runs into some quaternionists having their conference, and they head to the casino at the Kursaal. (This casino was destroyed during WWII; its replacement still operates on the same spot, and is the largest building in Belgium.) There, he meets Pléiade. The next night, things get weird:

Next evening Kit, having against his better judgement accompanied Pléiade to her suite, found himself in some perplexity, for at some point in the deep malediction of the hour she had mysteriously vanished. Only a moment before, it seemed to him, she’d been there at the seaward window, poised against the uncertain marine light, carefully mixing absinthe and Champagne to produce a strange foaming louche. Now, with no sensible passage of time, the rooms were resonant with absence.

Against the Day, p. 542.

Should Kit have taken the hallucinogenic haze and vaguely sinister green hue of the absinthe/Champagne louche as presaging Pléiade’s increasingly dislocated and ominous place in his life? Not long after, you may recall, she tries to arrange his Death by Mayonnaise.

My Death in the Afternoon features a nice Devaux Cœur des Bar Blanc de Noirs with the Pernod absinthe we’ve had pumping since the Absinthe Frappes way back (just kicked the bottle in fact!). It is… pretty full on. Intense aniseed, filled out with a bit of Champagne pastry and spritz. Can’t say I really love it. Hemingway’s point about drinking them “slowly” holds up; it must have taken me upwards of an hour to get through a glass.

Delicious or not though, the combo of absinthe and Champagne is just too Against the Day to resist. The Chums of Chance crack a case of Champagne on just about every other page, and there’s plenty of green fairy haunting the pages too. I might even claim absinthe and Champagne are to Against the Day as Madiera and corn liquor are to Mason & Dixon.

They should serve a Death in the Afternoon free at bookshops with every copy sold.