SMOKING
How to kick it
BENNY GREEN
On the evening of 19 October last, at ten minutes to ten, I placed a clean sheet of paper in the typewriter and lit a cigarette, my eight- eenth of the day. As I struck a match and held it to the, tip of the cigarette, I thought I detected a slight tremor of my hand. It was nothing really, a small cloud across the sun, as they say, and only the ridiculously sen- sitive seismograph of my own conscience would have registered anything at all. I took a long draw, placed the cigarette in the ash- tray at my side and began typing, wondering as I did so which would be finished first, the sheet or the cigarette.
The flu took its course, and on the third day my chest was rattling like a Biggles story. A basin was placed at the bedside. On the fourth morning the doctor, a young chap deputising for our regular. glanced casually at the contents of the basin and said,'That's not the flu. That's smoking."Really?', I answered, and followed his gaze into the bowl, not knowing that I was about to en- dure one of the very few spiritual experiences of my life. As I gazed at the gobbets I was overcome by waves of revulsion so violent that I quite exhausted myself. Emotions well- ed to the surface whose nature I will describe later, but for the moment all that need be said is that I had suddenly been faced by the idea that to stop smoking would change my bodily chemistry.
The history of my smoking career was rather bizarre. Unlike most people, I had never tried it as a schoolboy, preferred athle- tics as a teenager, had always sought out non-smoking carriages and non-smoking girl friends. There was no hereditary explanation for all this. My father, for instance, a pretty fair judge of a cigar by the time he was eleven, always contemplated by abstinence with a kind of stupefied admiration. My mother smoked cork tips, as they were knows► in those days, all my aunts and uncles smoked, my grandfather achieved the triple play of cigarettes, pipe and cigars. Nor was there any moral reason for my detachment. Nor was there any medical rea- son for it. Or any financial one. It was sim- ply that the smoke stank. If you had men- tioned lung cancer to me I wouldn't have known what you were talking about. On the contrary, there was a vague empirical theory in the working class that smoking was actu- ally good for you. because it choked the germs. My objection was purely aesthetic, and it was reinforced when I began studying the saxophone. How filthy to blow a mouth- piece reeking of stale smoke. It was when I started touring with dance bands that the change of heart began. Every- body smoked in that unique little world, even the non-smokers. It was something to do, I suppose, on the long journeys through the night to nowhere. I think My colleagues found it odd that I never indulged, but to their great credit they never made an issue of it. But one night some time in 1954 it occurred to me that I was being a wet blanket. Our coach drew up at a Yorkshire transport cafe, and there was the usual buffalo rush for the cigarette counter. A sudden inspiration hit me, which was, 'When in Edwinstowe, do as the Edwinstonians do', and I stepped up to the counter and
bought my first packet of cigarettes.
By 1960 I was averaging ten a day and the great Cancer Hunt was on. By 1966 1 was up to fifteen a day, by 1970 up to twenty. More significant, ever since 1964 1 had made hun- dreds of resolutions to give up without ever making it even to the end of the first day, and had learned that the repeated failure of this kind of resolution is immensely damaging to the psyche. Indeed, the realisation that you are too weak to stop can be more damaging than the actual act of smoking. That pioneer chronicler of the problem, ludo Svevo, was the first to point this out, in The Confessions of Zeno. But there was something else which Svevo noted, and I believe it holds the key to the entire problem. Svevo realised that 'all cigarettes are important as an assertion of one's own freedom, and when one lights them one still has a vision of that future of health and beauty, though it has moved a little further off'. With that observation, Svevo, whom I first read in 1964, the very year of my first failed resolutions to stop, provides the key to the garden of innocence.
I have said that my original objection to smoking was an aesthetic one. And here was Svevo using a word like `beauty' as a sym- bol of abstinence. In 1968 f began working from Svevo's text, telling myself that all I had to do to look and feel young again was to stop smoking. Laboriously I constructed the false syllogism. When I was young life was uncomplicated. When I was young I didn't smoke; therefore not to smoke would now uncomplicate my life.
But there was something wrong. It should have worked, but each time I screwed myself up to the point I collapsed into a packet of twenty filters before lunchtime. I told myself 1 would recapture lost youth if only I stop- ped. I told myself I could return to the pas- tures of the past in Proustian triumph if only I stopped. And still I went on smoking twenty a day. It was not till the moment of truth over the gobbets that 1 saw why.
When I gazed at those foul pellets I felt that I had desecrated an attractive park, namely myself. In other words, the reason why it had been a waste of time telling my- self 1 could recapture my old magnetism was that I had never really believed l had lost it. Not till I saw my handiwork in the basin was I convinced that Svevo's beauty had been mis- laid. How could a desirable, wholesome, at- tractive man like me perform such loathsome tricks as the gobbets? My ego was outraged at last, as I had tried to outrage it for years. I stopped smoking from that moment. There was no struggle, it was a walkover, a massacre, an annihilation. I have been desirable, whole- some and attractive again for twelve weeks now. Eighty-six days actually, but who's counting?
'Sorry, I've given them up'
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