The Faber Book of Smoking
ed James Walton
334pp, Faber
£17.50
Buy it at BOL
Smokers, if not now persecuted, then at least made to feel uncomfortable about themselves, huddle together in comforting conspiracy. Our bonds are sympathy and generosity. I once met the editor of this volume outside the London Library; fagless, I asked him for one, and he obliged. Which smoker would not offer their last under almost any circumstances? Well, their second last. In Captain Corelli's Mandolin , Velisarios the Greek places a cigarette in the dead Carlo's mouth; earlier, they had forgotten they were enemies and smoked together. You might not do that if you were in prison, as a lengthy quotation from Porridge reminds us.
My wife and daughter disapprove of my habit. There is a chapter here called "Women and Smoking" and it would appear that the relationship between the two has been problematic for some time. It is not just that the odour of smoke compromises the very domesticity of a home, but that women, for a long time, were not meant to smoke. After a time it became unclear whether this was the cause or the effect of their not liking the stuff as much as men. Here's this, from Jerrold's Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures, a work that predates yet deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder with The Diary of a Nobody (in it, an almost imperceptibly errant husband suffers tirades from his scandalised wife, on a number of subjects): "Faugh! Pah! Whewgh! That filthy tobacco-smoke! It's enough to kill any decent woman. You know I hate tobacco, and yet you will do it. You don't smoke yourself? What of that? If you go among people who do smoke, you're just as bad, or worse. You might as well smoke - indeed, better. Better smoke yourself than come home with other people's smoke all in your hair and whiskers." And so on. Mrs Caudle is, sadly, not in this book: understandable, as it had not yet been reprinted while Walton was compiling his anthology. (It is, though, out now at a very reasonable £8.99 from the unfortunately named Prion Books.)
Walton's book can be read, if you like, as a kind of history of the weed, with a bit on snuff thrown in too. There has to be, for the ground version supplanted the combustible one for a long time indeed. Smoking's residue may be a mildly toxic or irritating ash but snuff's, as I recall when I tried it, is a day-long river of streaky snot and incessant sneezing. Strange how John Arbuckle could write, in 1719 "With Snuff the beauteous Celia hides her face,/ And adds a foil to every obvious grace." Was Christopher Hitchens thinking of this when he wrote, in his great 1992 essay "Booze and Fags", "smoking is, in men, a tremendous enhancement of bearing and address and, in women, a consistent set-off to beauty"? Another quotation from this piece is in Walton's work.
V G Kiernan, whose book Tobacco: A History Hitchens was reviewing, asked whether, as non-smokers multiplied, the creation of literature would still be possible; and it is true that I have been happy to observe a correlation between tobacco intake and creativity. The world, as P G Wodehouse once remarked, is our ashtray (remark not in book, but other very good Wodehouse quotes are, such as the advice to doctors to try to give up killing cats by placing nicotine on their tongues. "Conquer the impulse for the after-breakfast cat, and half the battle is won").
It is difficult to imagine any serious writer giving this book a bad review. I have pointed out a couple of omissions, cheekily blowing a smoke ring through Walton's much more substantial one. I salute his efforts with this book, although any anthology struggles against its form; the readers' needs, if I may paraphrase Martin Amis, both are and are not being met. But that, too, was inevitable. The book is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
