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"Is this the end of English literature?"
Current mood: anglophonic
Category: anglophonic Writing and Poetry
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessi..NEB2IDPMMU00JQFIQMGCFFOAVCBQUIV0?xml=/opinion/2007/08/20/do2005.xml
Is this the end of English literature?By A. N. Wilson
What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis? The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown's Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or café, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustained them during the most creative phases of their lives. The moment they popped their favoured cigar, cigarette or pipe between their lips and lit up, they would have been fined on the spot. There were, we must concede, books before there was tobacco in Britain But is it mere chance that the lifetime of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?-1618), who introduced tobacco-smoking to England, was also the time when the great story of English literature really began? Milton - a smoker -and Ben Jonson - a smoker - ensured that the Elizabethan glory-age was not to be a flash in the pan. I have been racking my brains to find a single non-smoker among the great English poets or novelists of the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries. Possibly, Keats had to lay off the pipe tobacco a bit after he developed tuberculosis. Otherwise, from Swift and Pope to Cowper and Wordsworth, from Byron to Charles Lamb, they were all smokers. Tennyson, who only stopped smoking in order to eat and sleep, describes in one of his letters sitting in a pub with a friend and doing very little except "staring smokey babies" at one another. Nowadays, this harmless experience would cost the publican £1,200, and Tennyson himself £600, while appallingly self-righteous non-smokers at neighbouring tables, rather than being pleased that they had enjoyed a glimpse of the greatest Victorian poet, would be complaining about the fumes which they chose to believe were causing them some kind of damage. I do not really care whether anyone smokes or not. I do so myself in phases, and then give up - not for health reasons, but simply to remind myself that I can. Summer holidays, however, seem a natural time to light the occasional cigarette, while sitting with friends in a bar, or puzzling over the crossword puzzle. Cornwall, where I am writing this, has completely changed since the Ban. My wife and I have found formerly much-loved pubs all but empty or, worse, filled with middle-class eight-year-olds sitting on the bar stools, slurping J2O through straws and giving their views on global warming in the high-pitched tones of Fulham or Hampstead. The grizzled old smokers of yore are still smoking, but, rather than enjoy one another's companionship, they sit melancholily at home with their six-packs and watch telly. It is no substitute for the pleasure (albeit sometimes a boring pleasure - an oxymoron which all pub-goers will recognize as apt) of meeting real people. Sitting with my drink in such now-empty bars, my mind has turned to the great smokers of the past - to C S Lewis, who smoked 60 cigarettes a day between pipes with his friends Charles Williams (cigarette smoker) and Tolkien (pipe-smoker); to Thomas Carlyle, whose wife made him smoke in the kitchen of their house in Cheyne Row, but who is unimaginable without tobacco, to Robert Browning, who quickly adapted to the new cigarette craze, to the great John Cowper Powys, who continued to smoke cigarettes, and to produce fascinating novels, into his nineties. This great nicotine cloud of witnesses made me have two thoughts. One was the simple question - why did the people of England accept this draconian ban on their private pleasures? As far as I am aware, David Hockney, among public figures, was alone in giving vociferous condemnation of the bossy and un-English law. The so-called Opposition parties, of course, were all so anxious to appease the health-fanatics who make up a proportion of the electorate that they did not dare to say: "Halt! Let the men and women of England, and the publicans of England, be the ones who decide who should smoke, and where, not some risible Government minister". But another, sadder thought occurs to me. This attack on basic liberty, which was allowed through without any significant protest, might mark the end not merely of smoking, but of literature. Heroic Beryl Bainbridge keeps on smoking for England, but will there be any more writers in the years to come, following in her heroic steps?
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Release date: 02 July, 2002
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