Nicotine Read online

  ‘The act of reading is always a dialogue between reader and writer, and in Hens I have found my ideal interlocutor; which is a great relief to me, because for the committed smoker there’s only one thing worse than not being able to smoke, and that’s not being able to talk about it.’

  — Will Self, author of Umbrella

  ‘Every cigarette I’ve ever smoked now seems, in retrospect, like little more than preparation for this remarkable essay – though nothing in me could have anticipated its exquisitely surprising brilliance, the precision and play of its intellect. It’s about smoking, sure, but it’s also a luminous and nuanced exploration of how we’re constituted by our obsessions, how our memories arrange themselves inside of us, and how – or if – we control our own lives.’

  — Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

  ‘This is not a story about quitting, but an accomplished and unsettling meditation on one’s own addiction.’

  — Die Zeit

  ‘This book is not an advice manual, nor an attempt to account for an addiction, but rather a gripping investigation: What was that first cigarette like, that first conscious inhalation of nicotine, which moments are inseparable from smoking and always will be?’

  — Deutschlandradio Kultur

  ‘A passionate attempt to banish the addiction through words.’

  — sf-magazin

  NICOTINE

  GREGOR HENS

  Translated by

  JEN CALLEJA

  Contents

  Title Page

  FOREWORD

  Epigraph

  NICOTINE

  POSTSCRIPT

  Appendix

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  It happens all the time – how could it not, since the very repetitive nature of the habit calls it forth? In response to my deployment of one or other of my nicotine delivery systems, an interlocutor will ask after my dependency, and so I’ll begin talking about some aspect of it – but after a few seconds I’ll pause, with a catch in my throat not unlike the epiglottal spasm that precedes a tobacco-induced coughing fit. At these times I can feel it all banking up inside me: a great twisted mass of tics, compulsions, culturally transmitted attitudes, complexes and neuroses; swooning, I picture the baroque façade of my forty-year relationship with La Diva Nicotina – its myriad niches and grottos (each one suitable for a swift fag break), its blue-faced gargoyles and hand-rolled finials which rise up, row upon foil-wrapped row, to where an upended bellicoso cigar of a spire chars the heavens. How, I think to myself, how can I possibly convey to this person – for all that they may have smoked themselves, may indeed be still smoking – the all-pervading nature of my addiction to this psychoactive substance, which has tangled up my psyche in its writhing convolvulus of highs and lows, even as it’s toxified every cell in my body? The answer is, of course: I can’t – and so after a few desultory remarks about whatever smoking cessation therapy I’m currently engaged in, I’ll usually nudge the conversation in the direction of clearer skies.

  The other evening, cycling across the small park surrounding the Imperial War Museum (formerly the lunatic asylum known as Bedlam), I was hailed by a passer-by who recognised me. ‘How’s it going with the vape, Will?’ he called out, and since I’d just finished smoking a cigarette and contemplating my grim new addictive dispensation, I stopped to tell him: ‘Dreadful. My wife gave me the vape for Christmas, and rather ironically – since I’d just managed to pack in smoking, although I was still chewing nicotine gum – I found myself more heavily addicted to nicotine than ever after 24 hours of suckling compulsively on this!’ I withdrew my silvery, top-of-the-range vaporiser from my pocket, ‘Which is why I call it “the witch’s tit.”’ The man was bemused – he’d only wanted a glancing acknowledgement, not the prologue to a lecture which then continued: ‘I tell you, I became so fixated on this bloody thing it didn’t take long before I began casting surreptitious glances at cigarettes, and wondering whether smoking might constitute an effective substitute for vaping. Now I’m doing both! I’m nailed up on a crucifix the upright of which is a vaporiser, while the crossbar is a Gitanes – sans filtre, bien sur…’

  Ah! Gitanes, with their elegant blue flat-pack, adorned with a Carmen-a-like silhouette of a full-skirted woman seemingly dancing the tarantella in a cloud of their own smoke. I could’ve expatiated to the man at length simply on my relationship with French tobacco – beginning with the origins of the state monopoly in the strong black shag issued to the Grande Armée, and dubbed ‘le petit gris’ after the colour of the cubic paper packets it was wrapped in. (And still is two centuries later.) I could’ve painted him a picture: the pale sable dust of a village square somewhere in the Midi shaded by planes and chestnuts; the café-bar-cum-tabac with its zinc counter and scowling patron; the grand noir and a small balloon of Marc de Bourgogne; the just purchased packet of Boyards Maïs and its reverent unwrapping: silky cellophane slipped off, cardboard lappet unlimbered and the thick cigarette in its yellowy binding of maize paper eased out. The coffee, brandy and tobacco are so inextricably bound up with one another – and with those overnight drives I regularly undertook in my twenties, beginning in London and ending in Provence – that I cannot catch a whiff of the French stuff without hearing the ghostly chinking of boules and the mechanical flutteration of a two-horsepower engine.

  And this would’ve been merely a prologue-within-a-prologue: had the man in the madding park displayed the least inclination I’d have gone on – detailing ex-haustively not only my relations with French tobacco, but those I’ve cultivated with the weed of many other nations as well. I shan’t overshare here when a few vignettes should suffice: for the past decade or so I’ve often agreed to give lectures and readings in Berlin solely so I can visit the tobacconist in the Alexanderplatz Bahnhof. Here I buy hand-rolling cigarette tobaccos of a stygian darkness and Samsonian strength unattainable in England – my favourite is the threatening-sounding Schwarzer Krauser No 1. It’s the same with Tuscany, which I visit not for the astonishing Mannerist frescos of Modena’s Palazzo del Te, but its pleasingly cheap and tasty eponymous cheroots. Cuba, alas, is to far a-finca for me, but for a number of years I had a cigar dealer who’d arrive at my house with a Gladstone bag full of Havanas – including so-called ‘specials’; which, as their name implied, were accorded the very best ever to be rolled, and superior to the established marques. As with all illicit dealers (he transhipped the cigars through Estonia and smuggled them from there into England, thus avoiding the hefty customs duty), I felt under an obligation to smoke enough to justify his risks. Ridiculous, I know – but that’s how I ended up with a £15 per day Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robusto habit, on top of the cigarettes.

  The first cigarettes I ever smoked were bone-dry Senior Service that had long lurked in one of the silver cigarette boxes scattered about my grandparents’ house. Certainly I was nauseated – I may even have vomited, but this is all lost in the blue-grey curlicues of the past. By the time I was at secondary school, and walking a couple of miles there each morning, I was a confirmed smoker who’d stop off in the park for an 8.00 a.m. fag break. As the advertising slogan of the period put it: ‘People Like You Are Changing…’ The agent of change being a harsh and wood-smoky Player’s No. 6 or its still harsher and wood-smokier, scaled-down stable mate: a No. 10. In funds I smoked Peter Stuyvesants in the soft packet, or Kensitas in a red flip-top box. I never liked Embassy much – the smoke felt oddly ‘woolly’ in my mouth – but had a thing for old men’s filterless fags: Navy Cut, Woodbines and Park Drive. Soon enough, as my smoking increased, I sought out cheaper whiffs – settling on half-ounces of Old Holborn tobacco, each of which could be concocted into nearly thirty, whippet-thin roll-ups.


  Even aged thirteen, I was hip to the powerful ways smoking could alter my perception. Certainly nicotine was psychoactive – yet it transported me in paradoxical ways, tugging my feelings about in its choppy wake. The first few drags after a period of abstinence induced head-spin and dry mouth, while a drowsy numbness crept over my extremities. Soon enough, though, this narcotic phase was succeeded by excitation: spit balled in my mouth, my palms itched, my heartbeat accelerated – in my own small and unsophisticated way, staring at the algal scurf on the duck pond, I believed I could achieve something. Really, the narcotic effects of nicotine – since they’re so paradoxically up and down – are best understood by analogy: it’s the lightweight and socially-integrated version of Drinamyl, better known by its slang name: the Purple Heart. The agents of the first real drug craze to hit Britain, purple hearts were the original mother’s little helpers: a combination of speed and barbiturate which calmed you down even as they zizzed you up. Of course any parabola reaches its zenith – or its nadir – but the appeal of Purple Hearts or nicotine is that up and down cancel one another out, which is why those who use them simply keep on going. For a while.

  This glowing ember of awareness came cupped in a gestural hand. True, by the early 1970s those who were truly hip to the zeitgeist were packing the habit in. Some had beaten government legislation to the punch. I once asked my friend, the writer and former gangster John McVicar, when he stopped smoking, and without pausing to draw breath he snapped: ‘I read the so-called “Doctor’s study” linking smoking and lung cancer when it was popularised in the mid-fifties. I stopped immediately.’ This is the behaviour of a true man of action: having received a reliable reconnaissance report of trouble ahead he immediately changes his line of advance. My own mother, although disqualified by sex from the epithet, nonetheless had her own moment of clarity – the sight of my grandfather dying of lung cancer – and so took action. She expeditiously canned her own forty-a-day habit – although medical research would suggest it was already too late for me, aged three, who’d been sucking on the witch’s tit more or less continually since conception. It was too late for her as well: the crab took her aged 64. So, messages were mixed when I was in my nicotinic infancy: on the one hand cigarette advertising on British television was already banned (although not cigars – a cognitive dissonance personified by a Hamlet panatela smouldering to the strains of J. S. Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’); yet between the truncated fingers of another hand – one belonging to the Irish comedian Dave Allen – a fag merrily combusted on TV at primetime each Saturday evening. At school, if we wanted to smoke we went to the little park by the library across the road. Until we were in the lower sixth form, that is – because, of course, smoking was allowed in our common room.

  As soon as I could get away with smoking in the street I acquired a fedora, angled its brim, and struck Bogartian attitudes while glimpsing my reflection in shop windows. I also stared with forthright narcissism at my neotenous smoking self in the windows of tube and train carriages – and surely nothing summons up the once solid social structure of mass smoking than this phenomenon: puffing in transit. I smoked in cars and on buses, I smoked in trains and on planes. I had a cigarette on the tube I took from Caledonian Road to King’s Cross on the evening of 18 November 1987; which was pretty cognitively dissonant of me, since I was in one of my fitness phases and en route to a karate class at the dojo on Judd Street. I remember stubbing the fag out on the floor of the smoking carriage – remember because of the way the rubberised grooves always seemed to me purpose-designed to accommodate butts. Remember also, because a scant hour or so after I loped up the Piccadilly Line escalator, a fellow puffer dropped their still-smouldering cigarette in the grooves of a tread, and it was carried into the oily, fluffy highly combustible netherworld. The ensuing fire killed 31, injured a further 100, and put a stop to smoking on the London Underground forever.

  At the risk of making me out to be a sort of Zelig of tobacco – in the wrong place at the right historic time, every time – I was also a passenger on the last scheduled plane flight out of Heathrow on which smoking was permitted. Coincidentally, I’d been awarded an upgrade – so it was that as the 747, en route to New York, broke through the cloud cover, and the first class cabin was flooded with unearthly light, I lit up. I’d already been given a bottle of champagne to cuddle during take-off, and as I sipped and sucked, I was fully aware that the entire baroque edifice of socialised nicotine consumption was staggering before my eyes, as a swirl of cigarette smoke released into a car’s confines staggers for a split-second after you’ve cracked the window open, before disappearing into the void.

  In his superb essay, Nicotine, Gregor Hens animadverts on the origins of this oft-quoted sentiment: ‘I’ve given up smoking more than any man alive, every time I stub one out I swear it’s my last.’ Hens says it’s often misattributed to Mark Twain, but I’d always assumed it was from Italo Svevo’s novel Confessions of Zeno, which is – among much else – a minatory portrait of the way habit crimps the psyche. When I was writing my own smoke-cured novel, The Butt, I went looking for the line to use as a frontispiece quote, but unable to find it had recourse to this one instead: ‘Who knows, whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one’s own latent greatness.’ Which frankly, fitted the bill far better, because Svevo grasps the real nettle here: in a culture in which using a particular intoxicant is accorded the status of a quasi-acceptable vice, the individual smoker’s self-conception becomes hopelessly divided: on the one virtuous hand there’s nary a yellowy stain, while on the other main sale the taint is deep and jaundiced. The problem for the long-term (the deranging expression in English is ‘committed’) smoker, is that as public prohibitions have increased and become more egregious, so his notion of ‘the strong virtuous man’ he might become if he jacked the sordid business in is rendered increasingly tenebrous − a blue-grey smirch filtering the harsh glare of public health policy. After all, if tobacco smoking is held to be universally bad, not to do it may only be accorded common sense rather than a virtue.

  I gave up smoking in 2000 using Allen Carr’s celebrated manual of piety The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. I followed Carr’s catechism to the letter, continuing to smoke as I read the short text, and stubbing out my last as I turned the final page. Carr’s method is really a sort of proleptic aversion therapy; his point being that smokers are victims of a false consciousness: there’s nothing at all pleasant about smoking, and we naïve and immature wannabes were deluded by its social cachet, while simultaneously compelled by physical addiction. According to Carr, given the rapidity with which nicotine is absorbed by the human body, the smoker is almost constantly in a state of withdrawal – and thus mistakes the relief of these symptoms for the semblance of pleasure. Schopenhauer, a heavy smoker who fervently believed all pleasure to be merely the cessation of pain, would undoubtedly have approved. I cavilled a little at this – hadn’t I done everything possible over the years to make my nicotine habit a species of Epicureanism? Was I not the proud possessor of several humidors, scores of briar and meerschaum pipes, cigarette holders, and all sorts of other paraphernalia? (The day I bought a specialised pipe-reaming tool can be accorded either the zenith or the nadir of my habit.) While, as I think I’ve indicated above, I ceded ground to no one in the breadth and variety of what I was prepared to smoke, when it came to deaccessioning it took days to empty my tobacco cellar of all its exotica, from Indonesian clove cigarettes to Burmese cheroots via Vietnamese hand-rolling tobacco – and that’s just the south-east Asian section. Carr’s typical smoker, by contrast, was a compulsive bottom-feeder, shovelling down machine-rolled filter-tip after filter-tip, always the same mass-produced brand.

  Still, I bought the programme and allowed myself to be reconditioned. It was an odd year, the one I went without. As Carr had preached,
the physical addiction was easy enough to beat – while after three months I barely thought about tobacco at all. I exercised, I felt better if not exactly more virtuous. I was able to write a novel, albeit only a rewrite of Oscar Wilde’s one. Of course, I say I barely thought about tobacco at all – but what I mean is, I barely thought about having a fag there and then. I still thought about tobacco a lot, and in my version of The Picture of Dorian Gray – the action of which was brought forward ninety-odd years to the 1980s – the epigram-spouting fop, Henry Wotton, is a deeply committed smoker, his own habit being moulded firmly on my own recently abandoned one. Only when Wotton is actually dying of AIDS does he pack it in – and even then he still manages to aspirate: ‘Au fond, I believe I shall always be smoking.’ Prophetic words, because who else could my Wotton have been modelled on (besides Wilde’s Wotton) but moi?

  The other incident that, in retrospect, marked the beginning of the end of my life as a non-smoker occurred on the shores of Lake Wannsee outside Berlin. I was giving a reading at the old DDR Literaturhaus, more or less opposite the villa in which the Final Solution was plotted. The man introducing me was a journalist, a critic, and – more importantly – a smoker. He was overweight as well, and as he gave his spiel he sweated and puffed acridity into my smarting eyes. In order to prevent myself from punching the insensitive bastard in his fat self-indulgent face, once the event was over I asked him – in a polite and non-judgemental way – about his obviously unhealthy lifestyle: the glass-after-glass of wine he was knocking back, the canapés he was shovelling down, and of course the smoke which plumed from his porcine snout. ‘It’s perfectly simple,’ he explained ‘almost every morning I wake up feeling shit and think about packing in my drinking, my eating and my smoking. But then I remember my grandfather, who was in the Wehrmacht and died at Stalingrad, and I contemplate the terrible suffering and deprivation he must have experienced for months before finally being killed. Surely, I admonish myself, it’s up to you to experience all the pleasures he was denied? And then I reach for my cigarettes.’