WRITERS HAVE PROBABLY SMOKED more enthusiastically than any other class of human being, with the possible exception of trade union officials. Novelists and poets have explored the ritual and romance, the mystery and misery of tobacco for centuries while steadily smoking themselves to death. Great writers have often tended to be great smokers, although the greatest of all did not inhale: no Shakespeare play mentions tobacco.

But as anti-smoking culture spreads, so the evil weed is steadily being weeded out of literature. The US postal service plucked the cigarette from the hands of Thornton Wilder, the playwright. André Malraux, the philosopher and author, was seldom seen in life without a cigarette dangling from his lips, but the French Government insisted that he stub it out, airbrushing the cancer stick out of a commemorative stamp.

In a new edition of Goodnight Moon, the children’s classic by Margaret Wise Brown, the publishers digitally altered a photograph of the illustrator, Clement Hurd, to remove a cigarette from his hand: Hurd was left making an unintended V-sign at the camera.

The crusade against smoking is changing literature itself. This week Scotland became the first part of Britain to ban smoking in public places, rekindling rumours that one of the country’s favourite fictional figures might emigrate in protest. Inspector John Rebus, the chain-smoking detective created by the novelist Ian Rankin, has spent much of his literary life in bars, in an atmosphere of “glazed smiles and cigarette smoke”.

Rebus is not the sort to be found shivering outside the pub door, sucking a smoke in the rain, and Rankin has hinted that the detective might quit Scotland altogether so that “he can find a country where it is possible to smoke in a bar”.

Fictional characters, such as Bridget Jones,who do smoke are usually desperately trying to give up, while authors, like film-makers, are trying to cut down on cigarettes, using them only to make a point. As the novelist Alexandra Campbell wrote recently, smoking in fiction is “often used as a short cut to convey emotions such as anxiety (and) character traits such as rebelliousness or cynicism”. Writers, she said, should “consider their responsibilities” before allowing a character to smoke:

“Portraying cigarettes negatively is a wasted cause. It’s much better not to have them there at all.”

The literary smoker is a dying breed. Even imaginary people must now be healthy. Fictional smokers, like real ones, must hide themselves away in corners, or give up.

Smoke suffuses the literature of the past. Where would Sherlock Holmes be with his Meerschaum? Philip Marlowe’s cigarettes are as integral to his character as his wisecracks. Bertie Wooster lights up straight after breakfast.

Readers of the future will look back on the nicotine-stained literature of the past with bafflement, for the process of writing is inextricably bound up with the pleasure of smoking.

Some writers simply could not do one without the other. Sir Compton Mackenzie wrote 81 books by the age of 74, having smoked, according to his own estimate, at least half a ton of tobacco. “The harder I work,” he declared, “the more I need to smoke because tobacco is the handmaid of literature.”

A less likely apostle for smoking was J. M. Barrie who wrote My Lady Nicotine: A Study in Smoke, 14 years before the arrival of Peter Pan. Barrie taught generations of children to believe in fairies; he, on the other hand, believed in the magic of smoking. With the introduction of tobacco, England woke up from a long sleep, he wrote in 1896. “Suddenly a new zest had been given to life.”

Mikhail Bakhtin may be the only writer who actually smoked what he wrote. Driven to distraction by a wartime shortage of cig-arette papers, the Russian literary theorist ended up smoking the manuscript of his book on the Bildungsroman. Others found the joys of smoking superior to all other earthly temptations: “A woman is only a woman,” Rudyard Kipling wrote in The Betrothed, “but a good cigar is a smoke.”

Anyone who has written while smoking, and vice versa, knows how tobacco can become an addictive form of punctuation: a pause for reflection, a reward for a completed sentence, a spur to memory, a brief pocket of smoky idleness. “The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote.

Addicted smoker-writers tend to believe that their writing is improved by nicotine. Martin Amis once admitted: “I’m sure if I stopped smoking I would start writing sentences like: ‘It was bitterly cold.’ Or ‘It was bakingly hot’.”

In Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun write: “The smoking of tobacco has shaped invention and culture, capturing the imagination like nothing else in history.” Smoking has always had a mystical aura. For the Aztecs, possibly the first smokers, tobacco smoke was a goddess who protected them from witchcraft (and snakes).

Given the writerly addiction to tobacco, both as a writing aid and a literary device, giving up will not be easy, and we can expect some withdrawal symptoms as literature kicks the 7,000-year-old habit. In the words of A. P. Herbert: “I have given up smoking again . . . God! I feel fit. Homicidal, but fit. A different man. Irritable, moody, depressed, rude, nervy, perhaps; but the lungs are fine.”

As every reformed smoker can attest, literature may be healthier for giving up smoking, but it will never feel quite the same again.

Smoke: A Global History of Smoking
by Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun
(Reaktion Books)

The Faber Book of Smoking ed James Walton

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