Tobacco: A Muse For Writers

Ernest Hemingway loved his cigars so much, they named a brand after him. Rudyard Kipling, Hemingway's hero (and fellow poet of machismo), wrote an entire long poem listing the reasons he considered a cigar preferable to a wife. And John Ruskin, almost alone among nineteenth-century English writers in his opposition to tobacco (he thought it a corrupter of youth morals), still understood enough its appeal to his fellow essayist Thomas Carlyle that he sent a box of good cigars to the latter as a token of friendship.

Tobacco has a long history as a muse--and occasionally, a problem--for writers. (For a recent example, see Jonathan Franzen's farewell letter to smoking in his masterful essay collection, How To Be Alone.) This can take many forms--the existentialists with their cigarettes, Samuel Johnson with his pipe. Pipes, no longer widely used, continue in popularity among some writers: the 1970s literary giant John Gardner often greeted would-be interviewers with his finger-tips yellow from pushing tobacco into the horn of his pipe.) Oscar Wilde's love for cigarettes even led to one of the great quotes in the history of smoking: "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?" A cigar, other writers have answered to Wilde's question. For sheer contemplative heft, class associations and smoking pleasure and satisfaction , the cigar has often taken precedence among writers, as among so many others.

That relationship goes back a long way. The great seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick celebrates smoking in his lyric poem "The Tobacconist," which was only added to his collected works during the twentieth century. Some sample lines:
Will you exchange a whiff or two! come, smother,
In clouds of smoke, envelop one another;
A match; you, sirrah, bring the best you can.

Or else I swear I am a gentleman.

He goes on to laud smoking as "the poets' Moly, richest Nectar./The gods's Ambrosia, our pure Elixir," and praises its ability to act as "restorative/ For wasted spirits" before going on to register thanks that it also "prompts the memory, invention/ Clears, it quickens apprehension." Maybe it was such similar powers as a stimulant that led Lord Byron to praise what he called "sublime tobacco." Writing is a hard, distracting business; it often takes up to half the day's working hours simply to banish the "real" world sufficiently to concentrate on the making of a new one from sentences and paragraphs. Writers often appreciate any device, however dubious, that aids them in gathering such concentration.

J.B. Priestley, the twentieth-century British novelist, also enjoyed a good cigar. P.G. Wodehouse, the great British comic writer and inventor of such beloved figures as Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Uncle Fred, and Piccadilly Jim, loved his cigars so much that he would hand out cigarettes to dinner guests he thought incapable of appreciating good cigars--not out of a lack of hospitality, but simply because it hurt him to see a good cigar go unappreciated, carelessly smoked by a dutiful guest.

Legal-thriller maestro John Grisham told Cigar Aficionado magazine several years ago that he likes to smoke three or four premium cigars a week. As one of America's most commercially successful writers, he can afford good ones.

Now-forgotten British writer Compton MacKenzie, who effused dozens of novels during the first half of the twentieth century, credited his powers of concentration in part to tobacco. He wrote a book-length paean to smoking in all forms, including cigars, entitled (after Byron) Sublime Tobacco. In that book he even advances the theory that the older Shakespeare, too, was a smoker, putting forward as evidence the dreamlike atmosphere of his later plays (perhaps the Bard was pipe-dreaming) and the smoke-imagery in Prospero's final speech in The Tempest. Not much evidence exists to confirm this theory--or, perhaps, fancy. But as writers go, Shakespeare might have been in good company.

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