Smoking

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

MY complaints against smoking are not those of the Puritan outsider. My innocence, in fact, was early lost. Already at thirteen my friends and I were guiltily aware of the joys of corn-silk cigarettes and catalpa-bean cigars. Our bravest would even confess the voluptuous delights he found in strange stogies compounded of dried autumn leaves, and he would wistfully wonder if any nicotinish weed could ever seduce him from their discovered charm. I remember our going far out of our way to find illicit smokes. Opium and hashish were out of the range of our New Jersey town, but there were the thick fumes of ground coffee which I smoked in a pipe with hot and blinding relish, and there were less happy experiments for which I was jeered by my more conventional friends.

We came to tobacco, therefore, with some slight boredom from these weird and exotic pleasures. At first the neat little packages of cigarettes appealed to our æsthetic taste. My dried-leaf friend had a long debauch of twirling cigarettes with one hand out of a thin sheet of Rizla and a pinch of tobacco. We never succumbed to cigars, and the innocent novelty of cigarettes finally palled, so that I think we never smoke now except for purely social and gregarious reasons, especially when ladies press tobacco upon us and we yield for fear of mollycoddledom. Most burdensome is the cigarette-smoking lady who forces you into an unholy competition of numberless cigarettes, merely to keep up the reputation of your sex. Masculine solicitation I can refuse with a wearied air. The only time I find I really crave a smoke is as the crowning touch to an unusually bad dinner. The stale and strident taste which smoking always leaves with one is the healthiest reminder to avoid all those occasions which make one crave it.

The cigar I always look upon as the most manifest symbol of blatant maleness. It can apparently be held in the teeth only at a certain angle, and this angle always gives a peculiarly rakish expression to the most benevolent faces. The cigar has a tendency to bring out unconsciously in a man’s expression all of those saloon-keeper and tough-politician traits which are latent, I suppose, in every man. I am often amused to see how the faces of devout clergymen or cultivated lawyers change as soon as they get a cigar into their mouths. The hat unconsciously slips back on the head, the cheeks unconsciously become jowlish, the eye sly and beery. An estimable human being has, with the cigar as a pencil, drawn a caricature of himself as a predatory male. The cigar-smoker leaves a trail behind him. His staleness is ever with you. About every smoker there clings an atmosphere of noisomeness. Odor follows everywhere like the rumor of graft or the fact of a prison sentence.

The cigarette, on the other hand, shared by both sexes, has an undeniable æsthetic charm. It is friendly, sociable, light. Its odor does not cling boorishly to every curtain and garment. It passes with the light thoughts which it creates. Of a man it tends to make a poet, just as the cigar tends to make a dive-keeper of him. For a woman it is the symbol of emancipation, the temporary substitute for the ballot.

The pipe, warmly defended as the true smoke, is the most amusing of all the smoking manifestations. To see men smoking pipes is a spectacle irresistibly funny. If the cigar brings out their latent, blatant maleness, the pipe puts it all to sleep. Pipe-smokers always invest the act with a religious solemnity. They refer to it as an aid to calm contemplation. Meditative thought is supposed to be the undercurrent of the long and fragrant pipe. But if the smoker is conscious of his smoking, how can he use his attention for thought? And if he is unconscious, what is the use of doing it? One decides that smoking is really a substitute for thought, and that it is this that accounts for its perennial popularity. At the best, it may be the fixation means for a hypnotic reverie, the bowl of the pipe taking the place of that navel which the East Indian saint is supposed to contemplate. But normally it is a mere escape from care, a harmless submersing of the mind in sensuous and tobaccoish fog.

To see a man peacefully smoking a pipe is to witness a triumph over nature. It is to see aggressive masculinity soothed and pacified to an idyllic harmlessness. Fierce and lustful man rendered as tame as a tabby-cat! For pipe-smoking does always make me think of cats. Women smoke with nervous alertness. They have something of the air of the kitten putting up the electric back at this puppy of a world. But the pipe-smoking man is the blinking, dozing domestic tabby. Pipesmoking is merely the way men purr. One can almost hear the murmur of their contented souls. The rising smoke registers the gentle gurgle of their nicotinish purr. Blessed be the civilizing pipe, which brings out the tabby in otherwise unbridled man!