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Afterthought

By ALAN BRIEN

IT seems very probable that I have given up smoking. One sign of success is that I have given up telling people that I have given up smok- ing and I can no longer cal- culate exactly how much time has passed since I did so. For a while I had it measured to the minute,

• then to the day, but the

nearest I can get now to the date of the victory is 'between seven and eight weeks ago.' Another sign of success is that I have ceased thinking of it as a success. The way I see it I have simply stopped regularly doing some- thing which it seems, looking back, I never really wanted to do regularly all that much. After all, you don't go around boasting and boring for England because you have given up eating roasted peanuts or reading the Daily Sketch. (It will not have escaped the scrutiny of close students of psychopathic thought processes that I am never- theless betraying some anxiety about the achieve- ment by elevating my personal reactions into gen- eral rules.) In a way, the final scientific clinching proof that I have given up smoking is that I still smoke from time to time. There is something childish and undignified about the heavy smoker who is so afraid of his own habits that he can only escape addiction by never, never, touching his lips to the filthy tube again. The alcoholic who has to join the AA to keep him from downing another drop during the rest of his life has not ceased to be an alcoholic—he has simply become a non- drinking alcoholic. I have no intention of becom- ing a non-smoking nicotinic.

The whole justification of voluntary self-control (or internal democracy) as a way of life is that it permits the maximum of self-indulgence with the minimum of self-mortification. Just as the ideal working system for us averagely sensual men in the alcohol area is to establish ourselves as non- drunken drinkers, so in the nicotine field we should aim to find a formula for becoming non-smoked smokers. (Our close student will notice that I am trying to restrict the discussion to neutral-sound- ing, non-emotive terms, like the advertising copy for contraceptives, despite the inevitable damage to my prose style.) That word, 'contraceptive,' slipped in without conscious intention on my part but it sets me wondering whether this approach is also valid (sorry, viable) in the sexual, er, dimension—I mean, should the ordinary, com- mon-or-garden, monogamous Casanova,(like you and, possibly, me) remain forever a non-philan- dering adulterer? (But this is another topic for another article.) The very fact that I can take a single cigarette to lubricate the leap from one paragraph to another (memo—did I always feel the need to have a glass of wine standing by the typewriter?) without falling into the old periodic habit of light- ing up every half-hour, is the best of guarantees. that I am no longer an addict. Now I smoke, at the very most, twenty cigarettes a week where only seven (or eight) weeks ago I smoked, at the least, twenty-five a day. When the temptation becomes irresistible, I irresist. It would be wonderfully galling to non-smokers and over-smokers alike to be able to say that these occasional drags send me into heights of Wildean ecstasy—the perfect pleasure, my dear Sebastian, exquisite and yet un- satisfying, like making love to a lovely unknown one would never see again, or drinking the last

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drop of wine from a vineyard long under the sea, while the moon hung like a crystallised orange from a crepe-de-chine sky; etc. But you can't have everything, well, not all at once : you should not expect to kick a habit and still enjoy its kicks.

No cigarette for twenty-five years has packed the sweet, suffocating upper-cut to the trachea and side-swipe to the solar plexus I used to roll back from, coughing and sweating and dizzy, on the top deck of a school-bound tram in Sunderland long ago. No cigarette for twenty-five years has carried the symbolic significance which wreathed itself around the crumpled fag of war-time days in the RAF when it was a demonstration of afflu- ence, a breach, or anyway a relaxation, of disci- pline, a signal that danger was passed or authority had withdrawn. You lit it to keep warm, as a purely illusory heater cupped in the hand, on the icy extremities of Scottish airfields. You lit it as a beacon to frighten off the loneliness which prowls in the dark in overcrowded barrack huts before dawn. You lit it and stubbed it out one- third consumed, in front of tobacco-starved civilians in blacked-out pubs on a Saturday night to show everyone that aircrew were the pampered Praetorian guard of a nation in arms.

As the years passed, the cigarette declined in prestige and usefulness. At Oxford, just after the war, people felt that cigarettes were rationed even though they were not. At stag parties in college, around three in the morning, unforgivable accusations of hoarding and round-dodging would be launched between old friends as nico- tine-hunger seized the group. I remember once in such famine circumstances being reduced to buy- ing a many-sectioned, over-priced, Bavarian pipe from a profiteering friend (it looked like a cross between a euphonium and one of those sucking things dentists hang on your lip to drain off saliva) simply to gain a palmful of tobacco and a whiff of the old narcotic. In the year after I went down from Oxford, I was even poorer than in the years when the Government had financed my mad, spendthrift career , as a National Assistance scholarship boy. I often used to look at the pipe and wish back the fifteen shillings foolishly lav- ished on that immoment toy. ,

Throughout my time as a journalist, cigarettes have retained some value as a ritual for the hands, as a gesture of intimacy, as a punctuation between writing blocks, as a substitute for a sock on the jaw or a resignation in the face. I suppose this reduces my value as a pioneer of moderate abstentionism, but I must admit I was beginning to find smoking a tedious nuisance, an unneces- sary interruption of the real Fleet Street business of drink and gossip, rather like shaking hands in France. I had my first cigarette later and later each day —like some Arabian devotee of carezza, I began to find my pleasure in withdrawal from pleasure rather than in full consumption. On the day, seven (or eight) weeks ago, that I reached after-theatre supper time without coating my lungs with smoke, I decided on a new policy- what I didn't need, I wouldn't practise. Oddly enough, the trigger which fired the gun which stopped the race was not the thought of cancer. I have no doubt that smoking is a cause of cancer, but I reared back when my mother-in-law told me I was suffering from emphysema due to smok- ing. Emphysema—the Critic from Emphysema— it sounded like a bossa nova. ] didn't want to die from a disease I couldn't even dance. I ignored her diagnosis for a while—then suddenly, I was no longer a smoker—though I still smoke.

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