Introduction
George Orwell
Joe Simpson, mountaineer
Ian Hamilton, poet and editor
Tadeusz Stepniewkski, anti-Nazi
Claude Lanzmann and 'Shoah'
Roofers
A cellist
LinkEssential background information is the fact that I've never smoked - not even once. Nothing here is in conflict with the fact that smoking is a major cause of premature death and ill-health. Anyone who smokes would be well advised to give up as soon as possible, if possible. Anyone who doesn't smoke would be well advised never to start. This page isn't so much a defence of smoking as a defence against some common attacks on smokers.
Is smoking one of the most important things about a person or one of the least important?
Surely, the answer has to be: one of the least important. A campaign in this country used the slogan, 'If you smoke, you stink,' but it's the advertizing campaign which stinks, not smokers, a campaign based on rubbishy values, on unexamined assumptions. If you disagree, try answering these questions. Some of them are based upon thought experiments or extreme situations - but these can reveal vividly the values of a person, the depth or superficiality of a person. So:
If you have a son or daughter, a teenager, and you warn them about the dangers of smoking and the costs of smoking - but despite all that, they begin to smoke - do you love them any the less? Do you value them any the less? Do they 'stink?'
In many worlds, in almost all worlds, the tragic world of mass murder and the worlds of intellectual and artistic achievement, for example, smoking is irrelevant. Do you, for instance, know or care which great physicists or chemists or biologists smoke or don't smoke? Which great poets or novelists?
To feel superiority to someone is very easy. The issue of smoking is only one of the tactics by which people try to become dominant the easy way. A non-smoker who believes all the anti-smoking propaganda may be a moral coward, deficient in any number of ways, but feel superior to smokers. If so, self-examination is an urgent necessity. Again, do you agree or disagree?
As long as people confine themselves to the modest aim of avoiding cigarette smoke, of guaranteeing their right not to be exposed to cigarette smoke in most circumstances, then I've no quarrel at all. It's understandable that people should not like the smell of cigarette smoke and want to avoid it. As long as the modest and restricted aim of avoiding cigarette smoke is free of moral overtones and moral disapproval, then well and good. But time after time, people don't do that. They indulge in disproportion, condemning and attacking smoking, making opposition to smokers a main aim of life, when responses of this degree are better reserved for far more serious matters.
I myself am not too bothered by cigarette smoke, unless it's very dense. Given the choice between exposure to cigarette smoke and exposure to a mobile phone user's interminable, moronic conversation (all the more irritating because only half a conversation, of course), I'd far rather be exposed to the cigarette smoke. I'd claim that some people who complain about cigarette smoke are making too much of it, but I agree - non-smokers should not be exposed to cigarette smoke.
In the terms I use, fanatical opposition to smoking is a typical product of the mechanical mind, based on false linkages, automatic responses, a completely inadequate survey and distorted weightings (all, in this case, concerned with the question 'what are the most important things about a person?')
Strenuousness isn't highly valued now. The exceptions are few and include working out at the gym, some big business deals and athletics and sporting activity (but only if they attract massive sponsorship, massive television coverage and massive financial rewards.) And, very creditably, to be fair-minded, the courage and determination of ordinary people in the face of sickness and danger. These have a prominent place in the media. But the strenuous work of roofers, miners, writers, thinkers, scholars, scientists, mathematicians and others is generally of less account or no account at all to the public. There are many lazy non-smokers who condemn strenuous smokers.
There are large numbers of outstanding smokers, and large numbers of mediocre, dull, dismal, cold, unimaginative, retarded anti-smokers - as well as non-smokers and even anti-smokers who are anything but. George Orwell, a smoker, was uncompromising, honest, inquiring, morally courageous as well as physically courageous, and a writer of lucid prose which is sometimes searing, sometimes funny and very enjoyable, nearly always, despite its superficial 'plainness,' completely distinctive.
'Homage to Catalonia' is the unforgettable record of his courage, honesty and humanity during the Spanish Civil War. At the front, he was shot in the throat. Later, in Barcelona, he lived the life of a fugitive, in acute danger. At the close of the book, he mentions ' ... the smell of the trenches, the mountain dawns stretching away into inconceivable distances, the frosty crackle of bullets, the roar and glare of bombs; the clear cold light of the Barcelona mornings, and the tamp of boots in the barrack yard ... '
He was in acute danger at the front and later, in Barcelona, where he had to live as a fugitive, sleeping, on one occasion, 'in some long grass at the edge of a derelict building lot,' at a time when there was 'the horrible atmosphere of suspicion and hatred,' 'lies and rumours circulating everywhere' but he managed to leave the country and to cross the border to France. He writes, 'A winder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets ... It was several days before I could get used to the idea that you could buy cigarettes whenever you wanted them.'
From a medical view of George Orwell written by George Ross:
'A heavy smoking habit probably also contributed to his gaunt appearance. Perhaps due to his childhood respiratory illnesses, Orwell developed bronchiectasis, a condition characterized by perpetually dilated bronchi and fits of coughing.
'In 1938, Orwell went to a sanatorium because he was coughing up blood, and was eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis. The peripatetic author could have been infected in his childhood in India, as a police officer in Burma, as a soldier in Spain, or "during years of tramping, poverty, and vagabondage" in France and England, according to author John Ross, MD, of Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston. His treatment consisted of simple bed rest and good nutrition - both of which improved his health enough for him to be discharged several months later.
'Eight years later, depressed by his wife's death, Orwell moved to a windy and damp Scottish island. His health worsened significantly just as he was working on the first draft of 1984. Fever, weight loss, and night sweats sent him to the hospital, where he underwent "collapse therapy," a treatment designed to close the dangerous cavities that form in the chests of tuberculosis patients. Orwell described his experience with collapse therapy in detail, and the treatment "may have influenced the depiction of the tortures of Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love" in 1984, according to Dr. Ross. "But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs, the curvature of the spine was astonishing," Orwell wrote, perhaps drawing on his firsthand knowledge of the wasting effects of tuberculosis.
'Orwell's poor health and apparent infertility (based on his own musings in his letters as well as the medical evidence linking some respiratory ailments to infertility) probably contributed to the despondency in his writing. "Orwell himself told his friends that 1984 would have been less gloomy had he not been so ill--it was a very dark, disturbing, and pessimistic work," Dr. Ross said. The author's severe illness "gave him a tremendous amount of focus," perhaps by making him aware of his own mortality.
'George Orwell died in 1950, ending a life plagued by sickness. That sickness, though, contends Dr. Ross, "made him a better and more empathetic writer, in that his sense of human suffering made his writing more universal."'
All this will be incomprehensible to many anti-smokers, those who find any artistic or spiritual benefits of suffering impossible to conceive. I maintain that language isn't complete and is far from perfect, so that it's often necessary to use a word where another word, a replacement word would be far better. For lack of a better word, I use the word 'spiritual,' even though I'm an atheist. The contrast between the spiritual benefits of suffering and the humanitarian urge to reduce suffering, the understandable instinct to avoid personal suffering, is stark, but necessary. (Another example of the spiritual linkage between suffering and artistic achievement - this at the highest level - comes from the late Beethoven, as in, for example, the slow movement of the Quartet Opus 132, titled, 'Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesen an die Gottheit, an der lydischen Tonart,' 'the thanksgiving of a convalescent.')
There are doctors, like Dr Ross, quoted above, who have deep insights, and doctors who are shallow. In general, the emphasis in medicine on good health rather than poor health is not just understandable but obviously necessary - but may be a source of bias and {distortion}. The phrase 'a healthy mind in a healthy body' is one of the most trite of all trite phrases. Very often, a choice has to be made. This is a consequence of {separation}. If you have to choose, do you approve more of the person in perfect, glowing health who is bland, humdrum, limited, very severely limited, or the person of depth and intense compassion whose body is wracked by coughs? (Perhaps the result of smoking)?
I imagine an anti-smoking campaigner of a limited sort who reads Orwell and misses the humour of 'Down and Out in Paris and London,' its unforgettable depiction of the abyss of poverty and only becomes interested - in a prim and censorious way - when he finds a comment such as 'Boris slept the night at the house of a cobbler, another Russian refugee...Meanwhile, I had eight francs left, and plenty of cigarettes...'
When George Orwell met Henry Miller before going to Spain to fight for the republic, Henry Miller was scornful of the idea of defending democracy. Alfred Perles gave George Orwell's reply, 'that...where the rights and very existence of a whole people are at stake, there could be no thought of avoiding self-sacrifice. He spake his convictions so earnestly and humbly that Miller desisted from further argument and promptly gave him his blessing.' (Quoted in Bernard Crick, ('George Orwell: a life.') But there are anti-smoking campaigners who wouldn't be impressed, oblivious to almost everything in 'Homage to Catalonia' except comments such as 'The shortage of tobacco was the worst of all. At the beginning we had been issued with a packet of cigarettes a day, then it got down to eight cigarettes a day, then it got down to eight cigarettes day, then to five. Finally there were ten deadly days when there was no issue of tobacco at all.' This gives them their chance to show 'superiority' to someone who can be regarded as no more than a poor nicotine addict. Simple issues which can be grasped very easily are usually given more emphasis than complex issues which need thought. See also my page which is critical of some aspects of the green movement: Green: immature, unsophisticated, or gullible.
By what right does a non-smoker feel superior to Joe Simpson, the author of 'Touching the Void?' In 1985, he and Simon Yates set out to climb the remote west face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. It was 1985 and the men were young, fit, skilled climbers. The ascent was successful, after they had climbed for over three days. But then Simpson fell, and broke his leg badly. There was no hope of rescue for them. They had to descend without any help. Yates was lowering Simpson on the rope but lowered him into a hidden crevasse. He couldn't hold him and was forced to cut the rope. Simpson wasn't killed by the fall, He managed to drag himself out and drag himself down the mountain, dehydrated and injured, until, at last, he reached base camp.
From the same book, 'Heavy smoking had never affected my performance in the Alps, but I was forced to agree that it might be wise to stop during this expedition. The risks of high-altitude sickness and pulmonary oedemas, about which we had heard so much, were all that helped me through a few days craving tobacco.'
I write about the courage of mountaineers in the page on bullfighting.
Ian Hamilton ("High Tar Hamilton") was a poet and editor of 'The Review 'and later 'The New Review.' Quotations below are from 'Another Round at the Pillars: Essays, Poems and Reflections on Ian Hamilton,' edited by David Harsent. 'The Pillars' is 'The Pillars of Hercules,' a pub in the same street as the offices of The New Review.
Editing a magazine which publishes poetry or literary fiction or both is intensely demanding. Of course, it offers no or next to no financial 'reward' for the exercise of sensitive artistic judgment and all the other qualities which literary editing demands. It can lead to confrontations with the bailiffs (although at the offices of the New Review, these were avoided with the exercise of imagination), or even to bankruptcy.
Blake Morrison: 'Some of his best friends were rich and famous (or have since become so), but for him the literary life meant rent arrears, spent advances and coffee jars filled with pennies - the pram in the hall and the bailiff at the door.' Julian Barnes, writing of 'The New Review:' '...the magazine was sustained far less by public money [An Arts Council subsidy, money well spent] than by the devotion of an impoverished staff. Most literary magazines are like this, of course.'
The non-financial difficulties can easily be underestimated, but shouldn't be - having to decline the work of someone who's been published by the magazine in the past, perhaps many times, someone who may be a personal friend, because of pressure of space in the magazine, or because now the work isn't quite as good. In general, people hate having to disappoint others. An editor has to do that time after time.
Ian Hamilton's critical standards were exacting. Colin Falck quotes him on 'the poetry of the tradition:' 'Today, I think many poems are being written by people who have no poetry in their heads...they don't know where they are when you present them with a poem by Hardy or Frost. They're not prepared for the immediate sense of difficulty or strangeness because they have no background in poetry. If it doesn't hit them in the face or make them laugh it has no value for them.'
Ian Hamilton was a very heavy smoker. Peter Dale: '...speaking of nights, Ian regretted that you couldn't smoke while sleeping.' Colin Falck writes of his 'by-now-serene indifference to his own bodily welfare.' Non-smokers who aren't short of money and who spend most of their free time viewing, reading or listening to undemanding pap, whose only strenuous 'leisure activity' is, perhaps, working out at the gym, haven't earned the right to sneer at Ian Hamilton the smoker, and his demanding vocation.
I have a book, a very important one in what I call Humanitarian History, Martin Gilbert's 'The Righteous: the unsung heroes of the holocaust.' This isn't a book about grey areas. It depicts clearly, unforgettably, two different kinds of people: those who saved Jews, or did everything they could to save Jews, taking huge risks, the risk of summary execution - for their families as well as themselves - or of being carted off to a concentration camp - and those who did the dirty work of informing the authorities, finding hidden Jews, executing them and executing the people who had risked their lives to hide them. The photographs in the book are matter of fact but moving in the extreme. So, we have a photo of two Dutch farmers, Willem and Johannes Bogaar, 'with two of the Jewish children whom they hid on their farm.' Is it important to you that you should know whether these two farmers were smokers or non-smokers? I don't know the answer, but the answer, of course, is completely unimportant. In the case of one of the heroic people described in the book, the answer is known: Tadeusz Stepniewkski, a member of Zegota, the Polish Council for Assistance to the Jews, is actually smoking in the photograph! There was no country, of course, in which the penalties for helping Jews were more extreme than in Poland. Does Tadeusz Stepniewski seem diminished now that you know that he smoked? Did he 'stink?' Don't you think now, if you didn't think so before, that to use a word like 'stink' is disgusting?
And what of the Jews' persecutors? Would a member of the Einsatzgruppen - the groups who shot men, women and children - and babies - become less loathsome in your sight if you knew that he was a non-smoker rather than a smoker? Are you favourably disposed to him, because he 'didn't stink?' The Germans who executed fifteen people in the town of Wierzbica, including a two year old girl, when they learned that three families in the town were hiding three Jews, the Germans who executed a Polish woman, together with her one year old child, for hiding Jews at Pilica in Southern Poland, the Germans who executed ninety-six villagers at Bialka for helping Jews, the German who hanged a Polish peasant for selling an egg to a Jew, hanging the Jewish mother at the same time, at Sosnowiec, the Germans who executed Dr Roger Leforestier, of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon for providing medical care for Jews - whether these Germans were smokers or non-smokers is irrelevant. The village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, and its surrounding area acted heroically. Mordecai Paldiel: 'Almost all the people of the plateau were involved in saving these Jews, and no one said a word.' (Quoted in 'The Righteous.') There's a world of supremely important values where smoking isn't of negligible importance but of no importance at all. Do you agree or disagree?
Claude Lanzmann's film 'Shoah' is extraordinary: nine and a half hours in length and surely one of the most important documentaries of all time, on the worst horrors of all time, the Holocaust. (For all that, the film has flaws - the criticism that the film neglects the suffering of non-Jewish Poles and neglects Polish action on behalf of the Jews, is justified.) The achievement of Claude Lanzmann is qualified by these flaws to an extent, but not in the least by the fact that he (and his translator) are seen smoking again and again in the course of the film.
Roofers who smoke can serve to represent so many others: people who are completely unknown whose work - whose achievements - are liable to be completely discounted by anti-smokers. Not all strenuous and difficult activities are physically demanding activities, but many are. Roofers carry out physically demanding work at a height in almost all weathers. Anti-smokers who work in comfortable conditions without aching muscles - or without strenuous non-physical demands - aren't entitled to sneer at them.
The ban on smoking in public places in this country can be defended. I'd defend it. But nobody should have any condescending pity for the smokers huddled outside buildings, imagining that they must be lacking in will power. I attended a string quartet concert recently - Beethoven Quartet Opus 59 No. 2, Bartok's 4th Quartet and Haydn's Emperor Quartet, Opus 76 No. 3. And a short time later a recital given by the cellist of the same quartet and a pianist: Beethoven Cello Sonatas Opus 5 No. 1 and Opus 102 No. 2. The young cellist has a wonderfully accomplished technique, a very ardent yet mellow style of playing. After the second concert, as I left, she was outside the building having a cigarette. She obviously had the will and the self-discipline to acquire the exacting technique of the cello, and the artistry to use the technique wonderfully well. I think that any anti-smoker who claims that she's nothing but a poor smoker has lost the right to be taken seriously.
A Web site which campaigns for smokers. The extensive set of links it provides is very fair-minded. It includes anti-smoking sites and sites which help smokers to stop smoking as well as pro-smoking sites.
