Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

CIGARETTES ARE SUBLIME

After a long wait, I finally obtained a copy of Richard Klein’s book in praise of smoking, Cigarettes Are Sublime —but I put it on a shelf and have not opened it yet. Why? I suspect that I may unconsciously fear that this book achieves something I have vaguely dreamed of doing myself. (Whenever you have a good idea, do not put it into practice, there is no need for that — sooner or later, someone else is bound to hit upon the same concept, and will do a better job of it.)

What I had in mind actually was a sort of anthology — pictorial and literary — celebrating tobacco. For the pictures, I would have started with seventeenth-century Tabagies by the old masters from the Low Countries — Brouwer, Van Ostade, Teniers, etc. Then, for the modern times, there would have been Baudelaire with his pipe, as seen by Courbet; Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé, showing the poet wrapped in the blue smoke of his cigar; Van Gogh’s Pipe on a Chair , Cézanne and Degas’s various portraits of smokers. Even musicians could have been mobilised for my purpose: Bach, for instance, once professed in the same breath his serene faith in God and the trust he put in his pipe — the only pity is that, having already made a cantata praising coffee, he did not go one step further and compose a Tobacco Cantata.* What a magnificent anthem this would have constituted for today’s embattled smokers!

On the literary side, my anthology would have been faced with an embarrassment of riches. Balzac could have contributed many quotable passages on cigars. (For instance, there is a memorable episode in La Fille aux yeux d’or , after young de Marsay finally succeeds in winning the favours of the mysterious and elusive Girl With the Golden Eyes and spends a wild night of passion with her. As he walks out of her house in the early dawn, he lights up a cigar and, drawing a long puff, says to himself: “This at least is something no man will ever tire of!”) Yet the opening quote should naturally belong to Samuel Johnson; it is no surprise that this inexhaustible font of wisdom on all sublunary topics should have repeatedly celebrated the virtues of tobacco; for example, he attributed the admirable placidity of the Dutch to their habit of smoking (and of playing draughts). For Johnson, who was haunted by a neurotic fear of madness, tobacco appeared as a powerfully soothing influence, and Hawkins heard him say: “As smoking is going out of fashion, insanity is growing more frequent.” Today, the manic fanaticism of the anti-smoking lobby eloquently confirms the accuracy of this observation.

Actually, the current antics of the anti-tobacco activists would have provided rich material for an entire section of my anthology. Some time ago, it was reported in an English magazine that in a fairly crowded railway compartment, a couple who had been engaged in passionate kissing for some time eventually came to perform full sexual intercourse under the impassive eyes of the other passengers; it was only when, post coitum , the lovers attempted to light a cigarette that their co-travellers abandoned their reserve and reminded them indignantly that it was most improper to smoke in a public place.

This revealing anecdote finds an odd corollary in another railway episode, which the father of C.S. Lewis was fond of recounting; A.N. Wilson reproduced this story in his biography of Lewis. The scene is in Ulster at the beginning of the century; Albert Lewis (the father of C.S.) “was travelling in an old-fashioned train of the kind which has no corridor, so that the passengers were imprisoned in their compartments for as long as the train was moving. He was not alone in the compartment. He found himself opposite one other character, a respectable-looking farmer in a tweed suit, whose agitated manner was to be explained by the demands of nature. When the train had rattled on for a further few miles and showed no signs of stopping at a station where a lavatory might have been available, the gentleman pulled down his trousers, squatted on the floor and defecated. When this operation was completed, and the gentleman, fully clothed, was once more seated opposite Albert Lewis, the smell in the compartment was so powerful as to be almost nauseating. To vary, if not drown the odour, Albert Lewis got a pipe from his pocket and began to light it. But at that point, the stranger opposite, who had not spoken one word during the entire journey, leaned forward and censoriously tapped a sign on the window, which read NO SMOKING . For C.S. Lewis, this anecdote of his father’s always enshrined in some insane way a truth about Northern Ireland and what it was like to live there.”

There is no doubt that, if the Anti-Smoking Brigade had its way, the whole world would soon be turned into one grim and lunatic Ulster. This, I think, must be the reason why, even though I hardly smoke anymore, whenever I am offered the choice I always instinctively opt for the smoking section in coffee shops, waiting rooms, restaurants and other public places: the company is better . In one respect, smokers do enjoy a spiritual superiority over non-smokers — or, at least, they possess one significant advantage: they are more immediately aware of our common mortality. On this particular point, they certainly owe the anti-smoking lobby a debt of gratitude. The warnings that, by law, must now be printed on all tobacco products unwittingly echo a beautiful ancient ritual of the Catholic Church: on Ash Wednesday, as every faithful is marked on the forehead with the blessed ashes, the priest reminds him, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Most of the time, modern life endeavours to blunt or to obliterate this awareness of mortality. It should not be confused with a morbid cult of death — which is abhorrent to Christian humanism. ( ¡Viva la muerte! was an obscene fascist slogan: when one of Franco’s generals launched it at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Unamuno — who was then at the end of his life — denounced it in a speech of sublime passion); on the contrary, this awareness is a celebration of life. Mozart confessed in a letter that the thought of death accompanied him every day, and that it was the deep source from which all his creation sprang. It certainly explains the inexhaustible joy of his music.

I do not mean that the inspiration which can be drawn from the ominous warnings issued by the official Health and Correct Thinking agencies will turn all smokers into new Mozarts, but they will certainly endow smoking with a new seduction — if not with metaphysical meaning. I confess when I look at them, I am seriously tempted to buy cigarettes again.

*Actually, it seems he did.

SOME TIME ago, newspapers reported the results of an inquiry conducted among the general public to determine “the hundred most beautiful words in the English language.” Predictably enough, motherhood, peace, love, liberty, spring, etc. duly appeared on the list. Yet from the outset this rather silly exercise was doomed to insignificance, for the simple reason that it was predicated upon the illusory notion that words can have a value by themselves. Actually, words are to some extent like colours, of which Delacroix could say, “Give me mud, I shall turn it into the most luminous female flesh — as long as I am free to choose which colours to put by its side.”

By their very nature, words are neutral and indifferent. It is only from their context that they draw their most pungent emotional charge. Racism and sexism are a form of leprosy of the mind and should be mercilessly fought; yet for the most part the fight against racist and sexist language aims at the wrong target. I know of a righteous American journal that censored a contributor who referred to The Nigger of the “Narcissus. ” And some equally righteous French publications endeavour to feminise words such as auteur (author) and écrivain (writer) into the hideous monsters auteure and écrivaine … Yet words are innocent. No perversions are to be found in dictionaries; they lie solely in people’s minds — and that’s the battlefield where the good fight ought to be fought.