by Donald Hall
Everyone smoked in 1955. When adults had a party, they set out cigarettes in leather boxes on every table, every mantelpiece, every flat surface, beside silver Ronson lighters among myriad ashtrays. There were round crystal ashtrays, and square ones with deep receptacles over ceramic bottoms; there were ashtrays that sprouted from the floor on black steel stems; there were ashtrays with cork humps in the middle, for knocking cinders out of a pipe. In Durham, North Carolina, there is the Duke Homestead and Tobacco Museum. I imagine multiple busy artifacts overcrowding its showcases. There are museums elsewhere, but it would be tedious to visit them all. In Shanghai there’s the China Tobacco Museum with Cigarette Exhibition, and there’s another in Indonesia.
In her attic, my friend Carole Colburn found a large, impressive volume. The American Tobacco Company published “Sold American!” The First Fifty Years to celebrate its birthday, 1904–1954. In 144 pages, nine inches by twelve and bound in bright red, the industry illustrates its development from the sixteenth century, when explorers and colonists first enjoyed the leaf, proffered by generous Indians. There are many companies that were founded to cure tobacco, and there were three means of induction. You could sniff it or chew it or burn it. Fire required devices like pipes, or tobacco wrapped in tobacco, or tobacco rolled inside an alien substance. Paper won out, and in 1904 ten companies combined into the American Tobacco Company.
A foreword by the company’s president, Paul M. Hahn, gives us history. Sir Walter Raleigh helped to spread the addiction to tobacco. George Washington sought it for his troops. We hear of King James I as “the first great tobacco-hater”—a surgeon general of the sixteenth century. Despite the book’s many anecdotes, Mr. Hahn never mentions that firing squads pulled their triggers when victims threw away their last cigarettes. He doesn’t tell us that Christopher Marlowe, murdered in 1593, died declaring, “All they that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools!”
We hear of cigar store Indians. We hear of Sweet Caporal, LS/MFT (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco), Herbert Tareyton . . . We see woodcuts of farmers growing tobacco, commissioned by the American Tobacco Company and executed by Thomas Hart Benton. We hear how Franklin Delano Roosevelt switched from cigars to cigarettes, which he sported in a fashionable long holder. It was during the Great War that cigarettes conquered both sides of the trenches. From the Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War, tobacco enhanced and facilitated slaughter.
Nowhere can I find the American Tobacco Company’s centennial sequel: “Harmful to Your Health!” The First Hundred Years. I tried Amazon.
For fifty years, all American living rooms turned dense with smoke, as did bars, restaurants, hardware stores, hotel lobbies, cabins, business offices, factory floors, sedans, hospital rooms, pizzerias, sweatshops, town meetings, laboratories, palaces, department stores, supermarkets, barbershops, McDonald’s, beauty parlors, art galleries, bookstores, pharmacies, men’s rooms, corner groceries, women’s rooms, barns except for my grandfather’s, movie houses, dairies, airports, offices of thoracic surgeons, depots, tearooms, Automats, cafeterias, town halls, Macy’s, gymnasiums, igloos, waiting rooms, museums, newsrooms, classrooms, steel mills, libraries, lecture halls, emergency rooms, auditoriums, parks, Mongolian yurts, and beaches—not to mention funeral parlors.
Tidying up living rooms after parties, host and hostess filled garbage cans with a thousand cigarette butts. Ashes and ground-out cigarettes outweighed burned toast, eggshells, paper towels, tin cans, hypodermic needles, and kitty litter. In 1954 twenty-three cents bought a pack of cigarettes. (Now it takes maybe six to nine dollars, even more depending on state taxes.) Hotels didn’t need to designate smoking rooms, because people smoked in all the rooms. The back page of every magazine—Time, the Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, Life—carried a full-color ad for cigarettes. Retiring boomers remember the Marlboro Man, who suggested that cigarettes enlarged one’s penis. Virginia Slims deepened one’s cleavage. A prominent advertising theme was medical. A solemn man looked us straight in the eye and pointed his finger at us, the way Uncle Sam recruited us during the Great War. The man wore a white coat with a head mirror and—in case you didn’t recognize his profession—a stethoscope draped around his neck. “Old Gold,” he told us firmly, “is good for you!”
Then the surgeon general put terrifying labels on each pack, and by the millennium everyone decent knew that smoking was unforgivable, like mass murder or Rush Limbaugh. My dear friend Alice Mattison twice bopped me on the face to dislodge a Kent. At first there were smoking areas in bars and restaurants, but shortly all smoking was forbidden in all public places. Guilty, grubby men and women gathered on sidewalks in front of buildings. Despite blizzards or record heat, people in johnnies stood outside hospitals, a cigarette in one hand and an IV pole in the other. Everyone huddled in shame, bending heads to conceal identity, and took deep drags of emphysema, congestive heart, high blood pressure, heart disease, COPD whatever that is, and cancers of the mouth, esophagus, and lung.
For a moment I interrupt myself. Ah, that’s better.
My friend Carole smokes cigarettes, the only friend who does. When she visits we sit opposite each other, smoking and talking about death. We speak of how, when we’re driving or watching a game on TV or reading, we pick up a cigarette, light it, and inhale—in order to have something to do. Is it a masturbation substitution? There’s one advantage to smoking, about which we agree. When our breathing starts to vanish, we will not ask, “Why me?”
Sentient, sensible human beings flee into the bushes when we exhale. When Linda stays with me, I step outside on the porch to smoke. (From cars passing at night I feel the horror and rage of motorists who witness the red tip of my culpability.) It puts off for a moment the agony of deprived addiction. Depraved. Something I haven’t mentioned about the benefit of cigarettes. When I am twisted by a hacking cough—which interrupts me as I read obituaries, or Ira Byock on palliative care—guess what I do to stop the coughing?
Linda praises, with reluctance, another result of my smoking. She accompanies me on poetry readings, and says that my ravaged throat keeps my voice low and resonant. At the end of a reading, people line up for signatures; sometimes, interrupting the customers, I pretend to use the men’s room. When I was offered the Poet Laureateship I decided I must turn it down because I couldn’t smoke in the Laureate’s office; I changed my mind when I learned I could avoid the office. When I visited it, just once in my tenure, a librarian unscrewed a long window that opened onto a secure balcony. At an AWP convention—a writers’ group—eight thousand people registered at a Chicago hotel. When I walked through the lobby to lumber outside and smoke, I was assailed by four hundred emerging poets, and fled as soon as I could. If you smoked in your hotel room, the fine was seven hundred dollars. I cracked the window and smoked in the hotel room. The chambermaid did not snitch.
Kendel Currier is my assistant, who types my drafts and my letters, who bookkeeps, who solves my technical problems, who explains legal and financial documents, and who drives me places. Once she found a cigarette butt in the leather case that I leave for her on my porch. A misplaced cigarette had torched my revisions. “I couldn’t find it. I figured it went out.” Once when the snow melted, she harvested a bushel basket of soggy butts from the garden by the porch, which I had hurled all winter into snowdrifts. Another time, she drove me in my car all the way to New York, and I courteously opened the window to smoke. Somewhere around Springfield, Massachusetts, she told me I could not smoke in my own car. She parked and I walked up and down a gutter, inhaling relief. Kendel is kind, but Kendel is a hard case.
I came late to cigarettes. When I was young, I smoked cigars in Exeter’s butt rooms. (All prep schools provided smoking retreats in each dormitory.) Later I smoked cigars in lecture halls when I taught, and on all social occasions. One friend told me that whenever I smoked coronas at her cocktail parties she sent her drapes to the cleaners. Of course I didn’t inhale—I didn’t know how—but when I blew out a lungfu
l of cigar smoke, I choked on the murk around me. Everybody did. I even smoked cigars during psychotherapy. Dr. Frolich was a psychoanalyst, the only one in Ann Arbor who did therapy. (There were seven analysts in the city, seven more than in Vienna.) Therapy instead of analysis kept the two of us face-to-face—I didn’t lie on a couch—and we met only three times a week, for only four years. While I sat with a smoldering Judges Cave, Dr. Frolich smoked Camels, sometimes lighting a new one from the butt of the old. He had smoked from early adulthood through four years of medical school, while a medic in World War II, during an internship, two years of psychiatric residency, analytic training for five years at an institute, and decades of practice. He was seventy and told me that he finished three cartons a week. During a session late in our progress I noticed that he was not smoking, and remembered that he had not smoked for days. I asked him why, and he told me that his elder son had asked him to stop. Dr. Frolich answered that it would not help him after all these years. When his son replied that he was thinking of secondary smoke and himself, Dr. Frolich stopped smoking. He told me it was easy. He lived to be ninety-two.
Like all smokers I quit from time to time. Once in my sixties I stopped for good, as it seemed. Someone told me about a hypnotist in Concord who cured smokers. I’ve always been easy to hypnotize; if you have an overdeveloped ego, you are not scared of surrender. The moment I met the doctor, I knew he was a fraud. With a starched white coat, he was as handsome and suave as the model who recommended Old Golds for your health. (I expected him to offer me shares in his Bernie Madoff investment firm, annual dividends guaranteed at ninety percent.) But what the hell? I decided to go ahead and try. In a small room he spoke to me soothingly, his tone impersonating a hypnotist’s. When I felt sleepy he turned on a tape of his own voice and left the room. When the recording finished, I knew I would never smoke again. I left his office feeling ecstatic. Illicitly, I threw a pack in the gutter. For seven weeks I continued to feel blissful without nicotine. Then one night at suppertime, before I would fly to Arkansas in the morning, the phone rang. My dearest friend from school and college, best man at my first wedding, had dropped dead at the age of fifty. Driving to Logan Airport on my way to the reading, I stopped at the first open shop and bought cigarettes. A week later I returned to the hypnotist and told him I had failed. He put me under again, but nothing happened. He told me, “If this doesn’t work, we’ll try psychoanalysis.”
I was forty before I smoked a cigarette, about the time the surgeon general issued his fuddy-duddy warning. I was a college teacher, separated from my wife, and had entered a fringe of the counterculture that took over the sixties. My students’ greatest sport was to turn a professor on. Never did I need to buy a joint, and unlike Bill Clinton I accepted instruction in inhaling, learning to enjoy the pain. Alas, I had another, deeper reason for seeking humiliation and harm. I endured a volcanic love affair with a beautiful young woman who was not psychotic but whose utterance sounded like surrealism. She had other attractions, of which she was aware, but she felt devastated by one unforgivable flaw: she could not stop smoking Kents. In our assignations the foggy air trembled with erotic joy. She adored our sex but abhorred her own fog. Then, viciously, she dumped me. I went crazy, I daydreamed suicide, I took up Kents for revenge. I have not seen her for decades, and at eighty-some I am still proclaiming, “Look what you did!”
If my tender father had not smoked so much, by now he would have turned one hundred and fifteen. From the late sixties into the millennium, American living rooms have become smokeless, as well as bars, restaurants, hardware stores, hotel lobbies, cabins, business offices, factory floors, sedans, hospital rooms, pizzerias, sweatshops, town meetings, laboratories, palaces, department stores, supermarkets, barbershops, McDonald’s, beauty parlors, art galleries, bookstores, pharmacies, men’s rooms, corner groceries, women’s rooms, barns except for mine, movie houses, dairies, airports, offices of thoracic surgeons, depots, tearooms, Automats, cafeterias, town halls, Macy’s, gymnasiums, igloos, waiting rooms, museums, newsrooms, classrooms, steel mills, libraries, lecture halls, emergency rooms, auditoriums, parks, Mongolian yurts, beaches, and definitely funeral parlors.
Physical Malfitness
MY TRAINER, PAMELA SANBORN, works me out Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She’s tiny and strong, four foot ten and a hundred pounds of muscle. If she had to, I’m sure she could carry my two hundred pounds slung over her shoulders. For half an hour each session she has me do cardio on the treadmill, squat with five-pound weights, lift tenners over my head and out from my sides, stretch muscles, stand up no hands with a beach ball between my knees, and do push-ups (as it were) standing against a wall. Exercise hurts, as well it might, since by choice and for my pleasure I didn’t do it for eighty years. (Once in my fifties I walked four miles.) Pam is cute and loves to work out. When her marriage ended, she found a new companion on an Internet site called Fitness Singles. At the moment, the two of them are bicycling through Italy.
When I divorced, I looked for women who lazed around after poetry readings.
Exercise is boring. Everything is boring that does not happen in a chair (reading and writing) or in bed. Sculptors and painters and musicians live longer than writers, who exercise only their fingers with pen or on a keyboard. Sculptors chisel or weld or mold clay. Painters work standing up. They drink quarts of cognac every night but return to physical activity the next morning. A tuba player holds a weighty object and breathes deeply. Even a harmonica requires more fitness than writing.
People have tried to encourage my mobility. Jane for years cherished cats. This house is full of Jane’s cat presents from friends—cat night-lights and cat doorstops and cat china dolls. In time she found herself mooning after dogs at the house of a writer friend. When she adopted Gus, Jane (who called me Perkins) invented an excuse: “It will get Perkins off his ass.” Thus for several years I walked fifteen minutes a day. The husband of a friend, who went dog walking with me, swears that I parked the car on a dirt road, let Gus out to walk alone, and whistled him back. Then Jane died of leukemia, the dog’s hindquarters failed, and my hindquarters failed. I sit on my ass all day, writing in longhand, which Kendel types up. Sometimes in a car I would pass Pancake Road, two miles away, and see a man walking his collie, the dog stepping out on his forepaws, two wheels harnessed to his backside. These days I no longer drive past Pancake Road or anywhere. I push wheels ahead of me instead of pulling them behind me like the dog. With my forepaws holding the handles of a four-wheeled roller, my buckling hindquarters slowly shove my carcass forward. I drool as I walk, and now and then I sniff a tree.
I have been told that as a baby I crawled up on a kitchen table and devoured a quarter pound of butter. I spewed it out quickly, and mouth-memory has endured in my distaste for yellow milkfat. Because it was so athletic to climb the table, perhaps my misadventure also led to my athletic malfitness. Or maybe it came from my mother Lucy. On the farm as a girl, she didn’t chop trees or hayfields or haul ice from the pond. With her mother Kate she helped wash overalls, squeeze clothes through a mangle, and hang them out to dry. She carried cans of corn and peas up from the root cellar to the kitchen. Otherwise she was not a muscular sort. Her mother mopped the hardwood kitchen floor every night while Lucy studied Latin for the mill town high school. Later, they sat under an oil lamp while they knitted, tatted, and darned socks. Everything my mother did was useful and her hands were nimble, but nothing my mother did stretched a tendon, nothing firmed a muscle.
Upstairs in the back chamber, where everything goes when it dies—a green rocking chair with a broken rocker, long-dead long underwear, oil lamps retired after electricity—I found a pair of wooden skis with runners two inches thick, heavy as a hayload, on which I was told my mother slid down a slope. Her lift had to be a horse that trudged uphill as she hung on to a rope. When I moved into the farmhouse in middle age, I decided to try cross-country skis. I bought a pair, and in a flat field next to the barn I stood up and fell down, s
tood up and fell down, stood up and fell down. I retired the skis to the back chamber. With snowshoes I didn’t fall down so much, but it was harder getting up. I did not try ice skates.
My father remembered skating on January ponds, playing shortstop, even running sprints at school. In Hamden he and I played catch on Greenway Street and I threw the baseball over his head. He trotted up the pavement to retrieve it. Trotted. We played ping-pong in the cellar, and it wasn’t until he started shaking that I beat him two out of three games. Every Saturday morning he golfed with his foursome. He acquired his golfing passion when he caddied for spare change as a boy. As a grownup he became a member of the New Haven Country Club and hired his own caddies. When my parents were first married, my father tried to teach my mother golf. She found it hard to hit that little white ball with that long wooden stick. Once when my father walked a few yards in front of her, my mother’s golf ball flew up the fairway past him. He turned around, ecstatic, to congratulate her on her drive. She didn’t tell him right away that she had thrown it.
I did not love golf. Sometimes on a family ride we would stop at a driving range. My mother would sit on a bench as my father bought two pails of exhausted golf balls and we stood at a rubber tee and swung away. Mostly I missed, or tapped the ball three inches, but occasionally I caught it flush and it rose majestically into the air and landed a graceful thirty-seven yards downrange. There was a target two hundred yards beyond it.
