Not very long ago, the whole world smoked, no room was truly furnished unless it contained an ashtray, and all of waking life was measured out in cigarettes. Doctors smoked in their consultation rooms. Chefs smoked in restaurant kitchens. Mothers smoked while dandling their babies. Mechanics smoked in oil-flecked garages. Athletes smoked on the sidelines. Teachers smoked in classrooms. Patients smoked in hospital solariums. Television presenters smoked on camera. Shoppers smoked in the produce aisle at the supermarket. We smoked in the rear halves of airliners, in the balconies at movie theatres, between courses at formal dinners, on crowded dance floors while gyrating, on elevators despite the signs, on the subway if the hour was late enough. We smoked in the office and at the beach, in the waiting room and at the hair salon, in the art gallery and at the stadium. We smoked in bed: just after waking and just before sleep, after making love and sometimes during it. We often smoked without being aware we were smoking.
Here, have a light. No, no matches. “Real smokers use a lighter,” as the esteemed Lil Flip expressed it in his ballad Da Roof Is on Fire. Yes, if you’re going to be a connoisseur about it, you should hold the flame a couple of centimetres under the end
without touching, so that you avoid the rush of carbon - although actually I don’t know anyone who has ever observed that rule besides cigar bores. So after inhaling you wait one beat and then release the smoke through your nostrils, do you? That’s one way to do it, although it tends to communicate impatience. They make you look like a dragon, those twin jets rushing downward from your nose. It’s the sort of exhale you might employ while negotiating with someone over whom you have an advantage, or when arguing with a lover. In a calmer or more tender moment, you are better off letting the smoke out through your mouth, in little puffs, like clouds for cherubim to ride upon. Yes, little puffs - a long stream of smoke is another matter altogether. It can often indicate hostility, especially if you aim it at someone’s eyes. By contrast, moments of poetic idleness are best conveyed with smoke rings. You curl your tongue like this. Yes, I know it’s not easy. Learning that skill cost me many hours that might otherwise have been spent studying ancient languages or higher mathematics. But who impresses friends with their erudition any more? The smoke ring, on the other hand, is a surefire crowd-pleaser. It establishes you as a sport, a flâneur, someone with a large share of that most precious of commodities - time. And finally there is the fabled “French” exhale, in which you expel the smoke from your mouth only immediately to take it in again through your nose. Yes, it’s difficult, too - although you will probably find yourself doing it accidentally from time to time.
I notice that you’re holding the cigarette in what used to be called the “American” manner, pinched between the forked index and medius of your right hand. That has become as universal as Marlboros, but there was a time when in most of the world cigarettes were poised between thumb and index. Your style was initially associated with American movie actors, who naturally gave it tremendous cachet, since everyone in Split or Macao or Port-Bou wanted to be just like Tom Mix or whomever. The thumb-index version, which Americans in turn considered effete, is really the most obvious and intuitive approach. When you pick up a pencil or a coin, isn’t that how you do it? The American fashion, for all its he-man mystique, is really the more affected of the two.
So how did the Americans arrive at their manner? Perhaps by its resemblance to a forked stick, used to pick up a burning coal to light a brazier. Or maybe it was simply a desire for differentiation. You would not, after all, deploy a cigarette holder in that way, so maybe the fork was intended as a symbol of common-man solidarity. The cigarette holder, very dramatic when properly flourished, came to be associated with lounge lizards and poules de luxe - people who needed an extension to keep cigarettes from fuming up the stones on their many rings. And so, if you were a rugged individual who had started out with nothing and now controlled the world’s supply of sorghum, you would naturally want to dispel any suspicions that you might be some mere remittance man: you would wear your ten-gallon Stetson at the Court of St. James and hold your cigarette like a farmhand. Conversely, since the thumb-index grip allows one to smoke the cigarette all the way down to the end - to the last, red-hot quarter inch - the fork grip is a sign that one is above such miserly practices.
Another matter to consider is pacing, which of course varies not only according to the individual but also according to the mood, the circumstances, the time of day, the weather, and so forth. We’re all familiar - that is, we were once all familiar - with the sort of smoker who takes two puffs, possibly three, and then hastily or angrily stubs the thing out. Frequently, these were older women, whose butts could be identified not only by their length but also by the generous smear of lipstick on each. The other extreme, that of sucking the thing down to its burning end, or its filter, was inevitably associated with deprivation, and scorned in polite company as a symptom of the blurred line between hunger and greed. Then there was the distinction between the sort of smoker whose butts spent most of their brief existences burning down in the ashtray runnel and those who never seemed to take the things out of their mouths. You remember what Raymond Chandler said about “the boys who eat and talk and spit without ever disturbing the cigarettes that live in their faces”. That was a very mid-century thing in America, the petty hoodlum custom of parking the cigarette in a corner of the mouth and employing the other corner for all other business; by the Sixties you hardly ever saw it except at the racetrack. In Europe and especially in France, however, you had the art of gluing the cigarette paper to the lower lip with saliva and allowing the butt to perform a merry little dance every time its owner got to talking.
Between the negligent smokers who ignored their butts and the indulgent ones who kept theirs as pets was a larger group composed of those who liked to have something in their hands at all times. In between inhalations they employed their cigarettes as props. They could gesture and wag and stab the air and draw curlicues with their smoking sticks. The cigarette could be a conductor’s baton, a colonial officer’s swagger stick, a conjurer’s wand. It functioned as an extension of the body, an exoskeletal limb with potential menace at its glowing tip. To give someone a cigarette was to confer power.
In Europe - actually, in most parts of the world other than the US - everyone was perpetually offering everyone else a smoke. Sit down at a table with three people and instantly out come four packs, an expertly gradated trio of ends poking out of a corner of each, and of course you have to take one, even if it’s a brand you abhor, just as they must take yours. To refuse would be an act of aggressively bad manners, like spurning the proffered tea in an Arab country or the bread and salt in Russia. In America, by contrast, prison yard customs prevailed. The pack was kept in a shirt pocket and one pill was drawn out at a time and inserted into the owner’s mouth. This was not viewed as a breach of etiquette since, it was reasoned, everyone you encountered would already have his or her own pack. Keeping your pack to yourself was a sterling example of the American ethos, like fencing your land and shooting trespassers and considering that basic societal benefits belong to those who can afford them. The extreme of this behaviour was exemplified by a mannerism briefly in vogue in my long-ago youth: opening the pack from the bottom. We saw older hipsters doing it and had to follow suit. It actually did derive from the mores of the prison yard, where no one would think of prevailing upon a fellow inmate to break open a fresh pack. An unbroken seal would preserve a pack to the end, although the owner’s shirt pocket would fill up with tobacco crumbs. Yes, in those palmy, distant days, the very summit of impeccable, unmatchable, glacial suavity was represented by a pack of filterless Kools, opened from the bottom, accompanied by Ohio Blue Tip matches, the kind you could strike on the wall, on your shoe, or on your stubble.
Nationalities and classes and personality types and occupations were all represented by their brands of cigarettes. Conformists the world over smoked Marlboros, so you could figure that at least 60 per cent of every crowd carried that red-and-white package somewhere on their person. This may have been because of the associated imagery - those cowboys - or perhaps because Marlboros somehow claimed the dead centre of the flavour spectrum. They were neither too harsh nor too mild, neither downmarket nor effete. They certainly functioned as a metonymic representation of American culture then, like Levi’s jeans; in the Eastern Bloc they were currency, and they may occasionally have given rise to self-doubt among countercultural youth in Western nations.
According to folklore, truck drivers smoked Chesterfields, farmers Raleighs, middle managers Winstons - and factory workers went for Viceroys, which made them popular with pretentiously unpretentious youths. Older and more prosperous New Yorkers smoked Nat Shermans - preferably the black ones - or else Balkan Sobranies, or English Ovals. African Americans favoured the menthol brands: Kools, Newports, Salems. The hardcore smoked filterless Kools, until they became obsolete, circa 1973. Housewives were believed to smoke Kents. I never met a woman who smoked Virginia Slims or, for that matter, Eves, although I remember that the latter were for a time favoured by drag queens.
Bohemians and intellectuals predictably went for Camels or Luckies. Raymond Loewy’s Lucky Strike package was a triumph of design, even after the green background was excised in the Forties so that the dye could be saved for the war effort. In the Twenties it was stylish for cigarettes to allude to the Near East, hence Murads, Fatimas - and Camels, now the last survivor of the trend. (Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade smoked Fatimas.) Supposedly, there were dirty pictures concealed within the image of the camel on the package, but though I nodded yes when they were pointed out to me, I was never able to make them out. Both Camels and Luckies appealed to a certain purism, to a nostalgia for fedoras and speakeasies, to a peculiar impression that the brands were so elemental as to be something like produce, not really commercial brands at all. Nothing was better at conveying cosmopolitan style and culture in America than possession of a pack of Gauloises, or Gitanes. The aroma of black caporal tobacco was so distinctive you didn’t need to flash the pack to stand out in a crowd.
I picture a tableau from some secondary Last Judgment, when all the cigarettes I have smoked shall be made whole again; all of them piled up like cordwood in a space the size of a hangar. Let’s see, 30 years approximately, an average of two packs a day, that would be one million two hundred seventy-eight thousand, give or take a few thousand. A million and nearly a third, filtered and unfiltered, more than half of them hand-rolled, all but a handful white-papered. All of them passed through my mouth, my throat, my lungs. Smoked in every possible circumstance and setting. All of them utterly eradicated by fire. But now they have returned, in their original form, with their biographies appended: this Marlboro consumed outside the head shop in 1967 and immediately followed by a breath mint - I was barely adolescent. This Gauloise with a filter of tightly rolled paper smoked while waiting to buy a ticket to 2001: A Space Odyssey on its original release. This Newport bummed from a friend, sucked down in despair after the collapse of a crush that then seemed mountainous. This hand-rolled Samson, wobbly and not cylindrical, representing an effort to learn made in response to Scandinavian cigarette prices - so bumped up by taxes even 30 years ago that they cost four times what they did in America. This nameless evil-smelling thing made by rolling up the contents of butts harvested from ashtrays the day after a wild party. This American Spirit, the last bit of recidivism after quitting.
The lives of cigarettes are seldom very interesting, besides perhaps that of the one placed between the lips of the blindfolded man facing the firing squad. Cigarettes, like factory-farmed chickens, are born to die. They are anonymous, regarded collectively, appreciated fleetingly and impersonally, forgotten immediately. Nevertheless, cigarettes, like sundry zoological parasites, are the secret sharers of countless lives, of moments of impenetrable intimacy. They have witnessed romance, rage, epiphany, confusion, elation, despair, serenity, chaos. Significantly, cigarettes were not just present in those moments, but according to their consumers they played an active role, either in enhancing the sensation or in attempting to assuage it. And yet, for all their heroism, like frontline infantry their fate is to be expended, to be knocked off immediately and replaced by an identical copy.
