What is it about the cigarette?
This paper tube packed with tobacco has beguiled generation after generation. Despite the adverse publicity on medical grounds that it has sustained over the past two decades, it has never yet lost its magical allure or its tempting power.
In the 1920s and 1930s it became both a fashionable item and a symbol of sociability. This remained very strong through to the end of the 1970s. There is hardly a Hollywood film from that period where the main characters are not seen lighting up a cigarette like a punctuation mark in the drama. It became almost an essential item to demonstrate strength or sophistication in a character. This applied to both sexes. In the case of the female, it signified a liberalised womanhood, a girl who knew her own mind and was cooly out to fascinate her man. In the male, as with the many roles of Humphrey Bogart, it showed a character in control, calculating his chances and poised to be tough when needed.
The definitive smoker of the 1930s was probably Marlene Dietrich, who gave her first portrayal of a sultry femme fatale under the autocratic, Svengali-like direction of Josef von Sternberg in Die blau Engel (The Blue Angel). As the nightclub singer Lola, she sang ‘Falling in Love Again’ to great cynical effect, ensnaring, humiliating and finally destroying the unfortunate Professor Rath (Emil Jannings).
The cigarette was therefore an unmistakable fashion accessory in Berlin, mixing sophistication with decadence, and even becoming a weapon of seduction in the sex war. Under the Weimar Republic, before the advent of the Nazis, the night life of Berlin was littered with the most desirable and louche cabarets, the ladies in their chic outfits brandishing long cigarette holders in a renowned flirtatious manner. Smoking became an artistic gesture that introduced a sexual frisson previously unimagined and an added element of the intriguingly sluttish.
But by contrast, even as late as 1961 in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Audrey Hepburn was perfecting the decorative sophisticated cheekiness of smoking through a long cigarette holder.
Recently a new French television channel, Cinémoi, has been showing exclusively French films to the British public, both classic and contemporary. These reinforce the theory that the cigarette (in this case the iconic Gauloise) is part and parcel of almost every French classic film you can name. For Jean-Paul Belmondo, in the films of Jean-Luc Godard and others, he chain-smoked to such an extent that the modern viewer is likely to become highly irritated by the intervention or imposition of yet another cigarette where the scene does not strictly require it.
Whatever the genre of a film from those earlier times, whether gangster or high romance, the cigarette seems to feature everywhere with its coded messages. We may not see love-making taking place in detail, but we know it has happened through the postcoital cigarette that follows. An important telephone call will be preceded by a cigarette, for it is known that this can quieten the nerves under stress. Again a cigarette is necessary when waiting to meet a lover, for how else can anyone avoid the pain of the wait being too hard to bear? Even following rejection, a cigarette has its essential place in soothing damaged pride. And what could be the best possible tonic in facing a crisis except a cup of coffee and a cigarette?
All these have been among the attributes of the cigarette as fed into the public imagination, but to what extent are they fact or myth?
I remember how, as a teenager, I smoked my first cigarette. I was told to inhale, and felt sick and dizzy, but for some unknown reason I persevered. Then the pleasure principle kicked in. It quickly became an enjoyable habit as the nicotine seeped into my veins and coursed through my body, and I was soon addicted to the weed in all its varieties. I progressed to smoking cigars, and had a period as a pipe smoker. During the early 1960s, I smoked cannabis as a treat on occasions, without ever deserting the cigarette. That was the bohemian phase in my life when I underwent a few years of search and discovery, experimentation and a total disregard for handed-down regimentation. I was undergoing a reaction to my life as a child under a despotic father who was neurotically concerned over the threats posed by life’s dangers. It was a strategy to free myself from the psychological oppression that had been so much a part of my growing up. I needed to feel I was maturing under my own terms, to rebel and prove to myself and others that I had become a free spirit, devoid of convention or imposed discipline.
In fact my ‘smoking years’ were the most glorious and satisfying period I could imagine. I truly enjoyed them, bereft of worries and finding a new freedom I never had before. Whereas, as a child, I had seen the world passing me by from an over-protected viewpoint on a third-floor apartment balcony, I now felt I was a part of it, free to do what I wanted and to roam in it where I wished.
You might say that I saw the light. I discovered my body and for the first time began to enjoy its physical aspects, be it through smoking, drinking or sexual congress. Perhaps I enjoyed it most of all through being the master of my unknown destiny. The unknown that lies ahead is far more exciting than many may think. It makes your adrenaline flow and overflow. If you feel anxious, the anxiety is pleasurable rather than painful. You are high in the clouds, and the feeling of ecstasy, encountered when young, is one that you rarely recapture, but with the passing years you evolve into a different being. Sometimes you yearn for your past life, but your evolutionary development is so steeped in every fabric of your being that going back is no longer possible. You become too entrenched in your new environment to contemplate any fresh beginnings. Dangers to your health from over-indulgence grow to be the primary motivation. You have responsibilities, a family to support and a legacy to uphold. So you stop smoking. You discipline yourself to the extent where the regimentation you rebelled against in your youth has become part of your current mode of life.
Any regrets for those lost days of freedom? Would you go back to change anything in them if you could? Emphatically not. Without your graduation through the perils of youth and living through its hedonistic phase, you would never have arrived where you are today. You would never have achieved the wisdom and the serenity that come from the experience of a life fully lived, punctuated by its many struggles for survival.
The Cigarette Book by Chris Harrald and Fletcher Watkins, published by Quartet, is a nostalgic reminder for those who no longer smoke, and a semi-celebration, so to speak, for those who defy the health warnings and continue to embrace the cigarette for better or worse. For them it will be an enduring marriage, till death do they part.
‘One day,’ the authors conclude, ‘the last cigarette on earth will be smoked. One final puff will be sent heaven-bound, leaving a lingering, evanescent smoke-ring… The truth is that cigarettes are pleasurable… A pleasure in the choreography of smoking the cigarette, pleasure in the aesthetics of packaging, pleasure in all the cultural resonance of the cigarette over the last century. In novels, in art, in films, in sex, in politics, in war. The ubiquity of the cigarette is astounding. But soon it will be no more.’
Meanwhile we have this book, rich in social detail, to evoke the days that have been and explain the smoking phenomenon to future generations who might otherwise not be able to make head nor tale of it.
