Mild white vapours ... smoking
Photograph: Graham Turner
'"What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapours among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more -"'
'He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made.'
Like Captain Ahab, you may be gearing-up to toss your pipe (cigarettes/ cigarillos/ cigars/ roll-ups) overboard. Not because you are obsessively pursuing a white whale (feel free to share if you are) but because you are being pursued by a different sort of Leviathan: the modern phenomena of a state-imposed smoking ban.
James Walton, editor of The Faber Book of Smoking wonders if "putting in any kind of good word for tobacco these days risks asking for trouble". I agree with Walton that to deny "the delight and relief, the stimulation and relaxation that this peculiar, dual-acting drug has brought to so many millions of people over so many hundreds of years would be - at the very least - dishonest". Smoking is a human thing and literature as always is that place (whatever the government may think) where nothing that is human is alien. And the joys (yes, joys) of smoking are no exception.
When the match is struck and the ciggie lit in literature, a state of mind is evoked. Alan Sillitoe describes smoking your way through the working day: "having a fag in the mouth, it passed the hours along in the factory quite well - if you were earning a living nobody could tell you what to do, you were your own man". How times have changed.
Smoking in literature is caught up with being "your own man", capturing that private moment, a small flash of the individual unseen before. From Leopold Bloom's bravado in Joyce's Ulysses - "And Bloom, of course, with his knockmedown cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. Phenomenon!" - to Wendy Cope's heartfelt attachments to both lover and fags in "Giving Up Smoking". John Clare movingly describes the deeply-felt solace of a smoke in his "Song on Tobacco": "But a pipe of tobacco will soothe his despair,/ And bring him sunshine in the shadows of life." Clare wasn't simply waxing lyrical. He spent the last 23 years of his life in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum and when he was allowed out would go to a nearby church and exchange poems for tobacco from passers by. Clare's homage to tobacco should remind us of the concerns of many mental health workers about the smoking ban and its effects on patients.
There is something perversely sanctimonious about a smoking ban that would deny a disturbed mind one of its few pleasures. Far rather the disrespectful perversity and audacity of smoking itself. Even if it is the fag-end of audacity such as Joe in Brendan Behan's The Borstal Boy, who literally lights up the Bible: "Smashing thin paper for rolling dog-ends in. I must 'ave smoked my way through the book of Genesis, before I went to court." Or Huck Finn (bless him). Or the throwing of a woman's lap-dog out of a train's window to follow the cigar she has just disposed off in Dostoevsky's The Idiot.
Smoking punctures the mundane mores of life. When asked for his favourite smoking moment in literature, James Walton proffered Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister. Marlowe is being hired by a seemingly prissy young woman, who voices her disapproval of liquor, adding "I don't think I'd care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don't even approve of tobacco." To which Marlow rejoins "Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?"
Rebels and mavericks will still puff on, ban or no ban. That's their choice. My favourite smoking moment in literature is one where the protagonist's choice to smoke is strangely and profoundly humanising. At the end of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, the eponymous hero faces execution smoking a pipe: "then they hacked off one of his arms, and still he bore up, and held his pipe; but at the cutting off the other arm, his head sunk, and his pipe dropped, and he gave up the ghost, without a groan or a reproach."
I know blog readers will as always have their own smoking moments to offer. Go on - have a fag (even metaphorically). What do you mean you have oranges to be peeling?
