In one of the best smoking scenes in English literature, Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte are motoring to Brideshead. Julia is behind the wheel of her open-topped car and nods towards a box of cigarettes: ‘Light one for me, will you?’
‘As I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers,’ writes Charles, ‘I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.’
But, of course, we all heard it.
Imagine for a moment that, instead of lighting her cigarette, Charles had offered Lady Julia a pull on his vape. Things would have turned out so very differently. Why? Because vaping can never be cool. Smoking, on the other hand ...
Smoking, for all we know about it today, used to have a place not only in literature but also in film, photography and public life. It was usually a stylish one, and one that had narrative and symbolic potential.
Film-makers understood this. Take Now, Voyager (1942): Charlotte (Bette Davis) and Jerry (Paul Henreid) have just made an emotionally constrained deal about their romantic future.
‘Shall we smoke on it?’ asks Henreid. The music wells (along with Davis’s eyes) as she delivers the famous closing line: ‘Don’t let’s ask for the moon; we have the stars.’
What the bare dialogue doesn’t reveal is that, between the two spoken lines, there are more than 30 seconds of distinctly smoky, visual storytelling: the offering of the silver cigarette box, the lighting of two cigarettes in (again) one mouth, the click of the lighter, the flash of the flame, the exchange of exquisitely art-directed smoke. Sound and vision combine; sentiment, cinema and cigarettes.
Actors know (or at least knew) about the craft of smoking as ‘business’ on stage and screen. It’s not just a part of narrative and timing, but also of character – what different people smoke and how they smoke it: seductively, needfully, angrily, resignedly, classily (even). And, when they have finished, how do they stub it out – or even dismissively throw it away? Try that with a vape.
And what about the style of the cigarettes themselves? Think of James Bond and his custom-made Morland & Co cigarettes with the three gold bands.
Pipes send out different signals: solid, avuncular, affable, thoughtful. Take Sherlock Holmes and his trademark calabash, put to contemplative use in The Red-Headed League (1891).
That, declares Holmes, ‘is quite the three-pipe problem and I beg that you won’t speak to me for 50 minutes’. That’s 50 minutes – not just of smoking but also filling, tamping, lighting, re-lighting...
Ah, yes! The paraphernalia of smoking. Who ever heard of a ‘vaping jacket’?
For Joseph Conrad’s narrator Charles Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1899), it was cigars. ‘Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar ends.’ We can see the cane chairs, feel the stillness and smell the cigars.
Cigars speak differently than pipes. They share the need for leisure, but signal success, wealth and sometimes celebration. Give that man a cigar! But never a vape.
Think of a French intellectual and it is hard not to think of a smoker. Roland Barthes understood the symbolic value of signs, symbols and visual images, and frequently posed for photographs with a smoke in hand: a ‘semiotics of smoking’, if you like.
You do not have to be French to understand this – as Harold Wilson certainly did. Like any good actor, he knew the power of a prop. The late Labour Prime Minister and his pipe were seemingly inseparable in public (even though it was both rumoured and denied that in private he favoured cigarettes and even cigars).
In Ruskin Spear’s portrait of Wilson in the National Portrait Gallery, the pipe is supreme, in the process of being lit, with quantities of obscuring smoke between the politician and the viewer.
For Churchill, the cigar was the thing, signifying confident Tory leadership and old-school values.
Look for a photograph of Churchill with a cigar and you will be spoiled for choice. Read about his iconic photograph by Karsh and the mythology is all about the cigar that was not there.
It would be hard to find a mainstream politician today who would be happy to be photographed smoking, but harder still to catch one vaping. Not even Nigel Farage.
We know now that smoking tobacco is extremely bad for both smokers and the people around them. But there once was a time when at least the act of smoking could be performed with style. Vaping is a utilitarian, electronic delivery-system based not on pleasure but purely on the need for nicotine.
That can never be stylish – or cool.
The Oldie September 2023
