My Lady Nicotine

There's not a Shakespeare sonnet

Or a Beethoven quartet

That's easier to like than you

Or harder to forget.

You think that sounds extravagant?

I haven't finished yet —

I like you more than I would like

To have a cigarette.

(Giving Up Smoking – Wendy Cope)

I grew up in a household of smokers. Fortunately, the household was a small one.

My father, like many men of his generation, chain-smoked. When I first became aware of him smoking, his cigarettes were ‘Senior Service’ – untipped and very strong. Later, in a futile attempt to  limit the damage smoking was doing to him, he switched to tipped cigarettes – ‘Players’ No.6’ if memory serves - but he still died of a smoking related illness when he was 63.

My maternal grandfather smoked a pipe – Condor Slice was his tobacco of choice. This arrived in its packet dark brown, dense and sticky. I enjoyed shredding it for him to make it more pipe friendly. He puffed away for over twelve hours each day, reading Wild West novels and watching the cricket on TV when it was on (this was the 1960s, sports programmes, like every other TV genre were limited). He was pretty deaf so conversation was limited but I enjoyed his stories of his career as a Hampshire police sergeant and his experiences as an accomplished (so my mother said) amateur bass.

My father too was a useful amateur singer (tenor) and I have just passed on to his baritone grandson, whom he never met, certificates he was awarded at The Bournemouth Musical Festival in 1935 and 1936, signed by Herbert Howells and Frederick Austin, for winning the Open Singing (Tenor) section. Conversation with my father was even more limited than that with my grandfather – we were both reserved by nature and I now realise that, as I entered my teens, Dad was beginning to be affected by the arteriosclerosis which brought on his premature senility. It is a lingering regret that I didn’t ask him about his singing but I have at least the happy memory of singing beside him in chapel he took me to a Baptist Chapel in Cardiff – that is worth a Blog to itself).

When he came home from work Dad joined my grandfather (‘Grampy’) in our living room where they smoked in, more or less companionable, silence. My mother (she deserves her own Blog too) had stopped smoking when she became pregnant with your humble servant but started again when I was in my teens, frazzled by having to look after her very difficult mother-in-law, Dad, Grampy and complex only child.

I was not inconvenienced by all this smoking – I was used to it after all – but I did notice the walls and ceiling gradually turning brown, leading my mother to redecorate every two years or so. When friends and relatives came round they would smoke also, my friends’ parents smoked, passing cigarettes around was the lingua franca of social interaction, indeed one fond memory of my father was travelling with him on a bus and him being asked, by someone obviously down on their luck if he would sell them a cigarette. Dad said he was more than happy to give him a cigarette and I felt proud of this simple act of generosity.

In due course, inevitably, my friends and I started experimenting with smoking, Consulate (‘Cool as a mountain stream’) being the cigarette of choice, as they were mentholated and less likely to provoke an embarrassing coughing fit. My father smoked so much that I never dreamt he’d object to my adolescent puffing, but finding me smoking in the kitchen with a few of my mates he became seriously upset and told me to stop. It was then I realised that smoking was far more a curse for my father than a pleasure so stop I did. My life has been complicated by various addictions but smoking and gambling have not been among them.

These more or less random memories of the role smoking played in my teenage years were prompted by the huge shift in attitudes to smoking in the last fifty years, from a health point of view of course, but also socially and, to finally get to the point, artistically.

Smoking was once seen as immensely cool – the epitome of this being the final scene of the film ‘Now Voyager’ where Paul Heinreid and Bette Davis settle for the stars rather than the moon and ‘have a cigarette on it’, Heinreid putting both cigarettes in his mouth and lighting both before passing one to Davis – WOW! I like to think of my parents (pre me) watching this in the cinema, feeling the intense frisson with the rest of the audience and having a go at the manoeuvre themselves in the comfort of home. Like many I suspect, I was introduced to this scene by Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’, Scripps and Tibbs acting it out in the vain belief Hector will not recognise it. Of course, he does: ‘It’s famous, you ignorant little tarts!’

As for singing, things get really interesting. Until comparatively recently, in line with most of the population, a lot of singers smoked: Enrico Caruso favoured a very strong Turkish brand but his habit did not end well (see below). Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a heavy smoker (Sir Geraint Evans, when singing in Berlin, would take DF-D duty free Capstan Full Strength – seriously powerful), and his early publicity photographs show him with a cigarette (as do those for Caruso and Tito Gobbi). American tenor, Richard Tucker, and baritone Robert Merrill, advertised cigarettes and their compatriot, helden tenor Jess Thomas, when he asked if he thought singing was bad for the voice replied, ‘Of course it is, but then so is singing…’. Frederick Sharp (my teacher at RCM, and in the original casts of ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ and ‘Albert Herring’) kept a cigarette in his mouth while applying stage make-up, even lipstick). Anglo-Belgian baritone, Raimund Herincx, used to smoke twenty fags on a day he was singing Verdi’s ‘Requiem’, to give his voice more of a bass timbre. Chris Robson, one of today’s most versatile and dramatically gifted counter-tenors, with a beautiful voice has, by his own admission, smoked a wide range of substances and is still going strong.

What is particularly noteworthy is that singers seem to have given up smoking because of health risks, not because of any negative effect on the voice. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that singers feel smoking has made no difference to their singing – this might be bravado, of course, but Fischer-Dieskau’s voice remained in superb form throughout most of his long career, despite chain-smoking.

PLEASE DO NOT THINK I APPROVE OF SMOKING IN ANY WAY!! It is a fatally dangerous habit and, as well as killing my father, hastened the end of Caruso and Pavarotti, for example, and, of course, millions more, singers and non-singers, besides

Despite this, smoking has inspired many creative artists. I began this essay with Wendy Cope’s charming love poem; greater literary depths are plumbed by Edwin Morgan’s ‘One Cigarette’:

No smoke without you, my fire.

After you left,your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray

and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey

I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal

of so much love. One cigarette

in the non-smoker’s tray.

As the last spire

trembles up, a sudden draught

blows it winding into my face.

Is it smell, is it taste?

You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.

Out with the light.

Let the smoke lie back in the dark.

Till I hear the very ash

sigh down among the flowers of brass

I’ll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.

‘A Farewell to Tobacco’ by Charles Lamb is splendidly tortured:

May the Babylonish curse,

Strait confound my stammering verse,

If I can a passage see

In this word-perplexity,

Or a fit expression find,

Or a language to my mind,

(Still the phrase is wide or scant)

To take leave of thee, GREAT PLANT!

Or in any terms relate

Half my love, or half my hate:

For I hate, yet love, thee so,

That, whichever thing I shew,

The plain truth will seem to be

A constrained hyperbole,

And the passion to proceed

More from a mistress than a weed.

(These are just the first lines of a far longer poem…)

‘Smoke’ by W.S. di Piero is full of American urban grit:

We loiter in the cobblestone alley,

Beans, Clams, Yom Yom and me

smoking punk. Snip the wiry stem,

trim the nubby end, scratch fire

from a zipper then pass the stink around.

William Penn designed these blocks

squared off, brick, crosshatched by alleys

to prevent the spread of fire. So fire

runs down my throat, reed

turning to iron inside my lungs.

Yom-Yom has an uncle in Bucks County.

Country boys sneak behind barns and puff

on cedar bark. Smoke’s the only thing

we have in common. Smoke when our breath

meets cold moist air, though no smoke rings

in winter, while sullen cars drag gray on gray

down city streets or country roads.

Someday I’ll smoke Camels, my father’s brand,

then Gauloises to prove I’m stronger than him

in burning whatever’s inside that won’t sleep.

Billy Collins tellingly links smoking with the act of creativity:

The Best Cigarette

There are many that I miss

having sent my last one out a car window

sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:

after sex, the two glowing tips

now the lights of a single ship;

at the end of a long dinner

with more wine to come

and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;

or on a white beach,

holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations

of flame and gesture;

but the best were on those mornings

when I would have a little something going

in the typewriter,

the sun bright in the windows,

maybe some Berlioz on in the background.

I would go into the kitchen for coffee

and on the way back to the page,

curled in its roller,

I would light one up and feel

its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,

trailing behind me as I returned to work

little puffs of smoke,

indicators of progress,

signs of industry and thought,

the signal that told the nineteenth century

it was moving forward.

That was the best cigarette,

when I would steam into the study

full of vaporous hope

and stand there,

the big headlamp of my face

pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

There is a link between alcohol and creativity (and singing) also, but that is for another Blog…

Tobacco has inspired a motley crew of composers. Tobias Hume (1579-1645) lived an eventful life judging from the titles of his songs and viol pieces (we know very little about him) and he was the unusual combination of professional soldier, composer, and bass viol player. His song ‘Tobacco’ was written when smoking was still quite a new-fangled idea. Hume considered tobacco to be like love …

(Sorry for the change of format here - I'll enlist technical help to fix it asap.)

Love maketh lean the fat men's tumour,

 So doth tobacco.

Love still dries up the wanton humour,

 So doth tobacco.

Love makes men sail from shore to shore,

 So doth tobacco.

'Tis fond love often makes men poor

 So doth tobacco.

Love makes men scorn all coward fears,

 So doth tobacco.

Love often sets men by the ears,

 So doth tobacco.

The cigarette girls in Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ are equally cynical where smoke is concerned:

We gaze after the smoke
as it rises in the air,
sweet-smelling,
towards the skies.
Gracefully it mounts
to your head,
so gently
it exhilarates you!
Lover's soft talk -
it's smoke!
Their raptures and promises -
smoke!

Sadly, most present day opera chorus ladies are not very convincing smokers…

Perhaps the most curious smoking inspired composition is by Elgar. His ‘Smoking Cantata’ lasts all of 42 seconds. I am grateful to The Guardian for the following:

 The work, for heroic baritone soloist and very large orchestra, including eight horns and swirling harp. The score is headed "specimen of an edifying, allegorical, improving, expostulatory, educational, persuasive, hortatory, instructive, dictatorial, magisterial, inadautory work" for soloist and orchestra. Elgar gave it the opus number 1,001 and dated the three-page score July 10 1919. It was apparently written at Ridgehurst, the Hertfordshire home of the wealthy banker Edward Speyer. Three months before the first performance of the cello concerto Elgar went to Ridgehurst to try it out with Felix Salmond, who was to be the soloist at the premiere. Speyer was a good host but repeatedly asked his guests not to smoke in the hall or on the stairs. In response Elgar reached for his sheets of 20-stave manuscript paper and began composing - and doodling. He cast Speyer as the soloist who declaims, in neurotically rising pitch, "Kindly, kindly, kindly do not smoke in the hall or staircase" and then exits. In the middle of the score Elgar added a medieval hell's mouth with smoke belching from it and curling up the page.

(The Guardian Nov 11 2003 David Ward – edited PSW)

This little squib has been recorded by Andrew Shore and Roderick Williams.

But surely the greatest song about smoking (and laziness) must be ‘Hotel’ by Francis Poulenc setting a poem by Apollinaire.

Ma chambre a la forme d'une cage,

Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre.

Mais moi qui veux fumer pour faire des mirages

J'allume au feu du jour ma cigarette.

Je ne veux pas travailler - je veux fumer.

(My room is shaped like a cage
The sun slips its arm through the window
But I who want to smoke to make mirages
I light my cigarette on daylight's fire
I do not want to work I want to smoke.)

Trans. Richard Stokes

Poulenc’s languorous, archetypally ‘French’ chords, support the gorgeous lassitude of the vocal line that barely has the energy to conclude these five brief lines. Pure genius…

If you have any sense, you will want to listen to the version sung by Pierre Bernac accompanied by Poulenc himself – a version as dryly aromatic as Noilly Prat, but, if you don’t have any sense, there are many other versions to choose from, notably by Gerard Souzay, Simon Keenleyside, Veronique Gens, and Angela Kirschlage.