Must I declare an interest? James Walton does, in the introduction to The Faber Book of Smoking; he got through 40,000 cigarettes while compiling the volume, and we should all buy it if only to help him pay for that consumption (roughly £8,000, at current prices). I will get more than a carton for writing this review, which is more than I will have smoked while writing it. But smokers participate in an alternative economy, as many excerpts from this book prove; tobacco is, and not the same as money. The similarity to money becomes more apparent in prisons, and at times of war or scarcity. At other times, it takes on more abstract values; Sartre discusses the apparently earthy and banal matter of giving up smoking in Being and Nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. Though the funnier part, as revealed by Walton, is that Sartre smuggling fags past Simone de Beauvoir, even after he has been told to decide between the weed and the loss of his legs.
As anthologies go, Walton's could not be improved on, and I am delighted to puff it. His amiable introduction and chapter prefaces are down-to-earth, even-handed, alert to fun; but his choices, and where he places them, illuminate both sides of a debate that has often been conducted in farcical terms, even when dealing with grave issues. Literature, medicine, law, history, imperialism, philosophy and economics get an airing in a book that doesn't dispute the pleasures of tobacco, but doesn't shirk the damage either; nor does it ignore the eternal gulf between the smoker and the anti-smoker. Walton also shows the way that debate has both evolved (the medical discoveries in the twentieth century and the tobacco companies' desire to hide the truth remind us that an obligation to shareholders will always outweigh a sense of wider responsibility), and has remained the same (James I's famous polemic is here). There is a wealth of panegyrics to the weed – as a token of exchange or gift in various cultures, as a respite from deprivation, as a stimulus to work or a relief from it – in verse and prose; and, as his favourite writers on tobacco, Walton cites Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Martin Amis and J. M. Barrie. (It is a contemptible habit of anthology reviewers to talk of "omissions", as if an anthology were an encyclopaedia, but, that said, Walton has missed my favourite Amis line, from Money: "Unless I specifically tell you otherwise, I am always smoking another cigarette.")
The Devil has, as ever, the very best tunes. On the other hand, some of the early non-smoking stuff is fantastic in its hyperbole; all plummy, Pathé-toned expert reportage about boys with no blood left in their veins – "A fine young boy of 18 sits in a dark room, his eyes swollen and painful, the cause – cigarette smoking" – but utterly serious. The deaths of the famous Marlboro men are, of course, more sobering; Walton cites the cancer surgeons who refer to their operating theatre as "Marlboro Country". There is a Doonesbury cartoon by Gary Trudeau (not in this book) in which Mr Butts, the cigarette-shaped symbol of American tobacco, fends off Asian suspicions of the product's health risks with the immortal line, "Sure, but those are only statistical deaths! Anecdotally you'll live to be one hundred!"
The American comedian Dennis Leary, in his show No Cure For Cancer, did a grotesquely funny imitation of a tracheotomized man smoking through a tube in his throat. But cancer, of course, is the opposite of funny, and it precisely why Walton's book, thematically encompassing book quotes the statistics, initially shocking but, on reflection, unsurprising, that "among those surviving surgery for lung cancer, about 50% resume smoking. In smokers suffering heart attacks, 70% take up smoking again within a year (40% while still in hospital) and among those undergoing a laryngectomy, 40% try smoking again." Forty per cent while still in hospital! (Walton offers a good excerpt, from a nineteenth-century memoir, on this very subject, with an errant smoking patient tracked down by the trail of blood from an amputated toe.) Smokers acknowledge these risks, but choose not to dwell on them. Smoking delivers apparent benefits which – mirabile dictu – are not absent from the lives of non-smokers, who seem able to write, enjoy entertainments, view landscapes and have sex with the same pleasure and gusto as smokers. Someone said that alcoholism is the only disease that tells you you haven't got it. But drug addiction is the only disease that tells you you would be worse off without it.
As Leary says, in a section directly after that medical revelation, "We're addicted. It's a drug." What smokers enjoy (and enjoy even more when ghettoized) is the shared addiction; not unlike alcoholics or addicts of harder drugs. When Celestia Noel says, of banning smoking at parties, that "you may end up with the two-party syndrome – all the amusing people standing outside in the garden", she unwittingly reminds one of student parties where the dope-smokers ended up in a room together, while in the latter case, the most amusing people are not necessarily as likely to be – but they are having at least as much fun, none the less. Drugs (legal or otherwise) are like that.
This is the crux. The brilliant descriptions of the pleasures of smoking – better concentration, peacefulness, friendship, relaxation, meditativeness, sharing – are both true, and, also partly, the result of the fact that doing without the addictive substance makes life hellish. Yet there is also, these days, a touch of Cavalier vs Roundhead sneak-cocking; the anti-smoker – pooh, pooh, wafting away imagined particles – always sounds so dreary and intolerant; it takes an effort (made, in a few places, in this anthology) to still that stupid antipathy. The fact that smokers are now in a demographic and moral minority only adds to their wounded sense of persecution and unreciprocated concession. Besides (as an excerpt from Yes, Prime Minister jovially establishes), British smokers provide roughly a third of the NHS's funds, more, in fact, than is spent on them.
Those who damn addicts of prohibited drugs are often the same people who regard legislation on tobacco as state nannying. Legal and cultural tradition are everything. The "arguments" on either side, beautifully juxtaposed and contextualized into narratives and dialectics by James Walton, are so much rhetoric, so much smoke and mirrors. We're addicted. We'll pay for our deaths several times over. It's up to you whether you want our lives or our money. We're not holding our breath.