Bumming Smokes in Paris and London: George Orwell’s Obsession with Tobacco

Eric Blair, alias George Orwell, wrote some of the 20th century’s most haunting and influential books. While best known for his fiction, Orwell also wrote brilliantly perceptive essays and produced some of the finest works of journalism ever attempted. His politics and writing have been debated and dissected for more than 50 years, yet there is one common theme running through nearly all of Orwell’s books that has yet to be seriously explored — the use of tobacco. Cigarette smoke so permeates Orwell’s stories it almost stains one’s fingers to read them.

Cigarettes, for Orwell, represent comfort, camaraderie and all that is essentially good about civilization. It’s a curious and ironic stance for someone as opposed to colonialism and predatory capitalism as Orwell was, as tobacco figures prominently in the history of both. Yet he used the act of smoking as a literary device almost compulsively, reaching for it hundreds of times over the course of his career in order to achieve a diverse array of effects.

In an age where cigarettes are routinely airbrushed from photos of famous people, and where smoking is now banned in most public places, Orwell’s over-invoked and often misused name has been appropriated by modern-day propagandists on both sides of the tobacco argument. With anti-smoking groups labeling Marlboro ads “Orwellian” and libertarians railing against the “doublethink” of anti-tobacco messages, Orwell’s constant overtures to nicotine seem quaint, glaring and odd.

Born in 1905, an age when the only serious opposition to tobacco came from schoolmarms and teetotalers, Orwell started smoking well before he adopted his famous pseudonym. As a middle class teenager at Eton College the young Eric Blair, who had always felt isolated and removed, played at radical politics and affected the air of a bohemian poet. Knowing that smoking was strictly forbidden at Eton, Blair took up the habit at his first opportunity — it evidently appealed to the rule-breaker in him.

Hand-rolling cigarettes from Turkish tobacco, smoking imbued the young Blair with an aura of rebellion and virility, two qualities he would self-consciously cultivate throughout his life and career. From the time he was 16 or so until his death at 46, Orwell could scarcely be photographed without a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Smoking, with its ephemeral and ritualistic qualities, might also have appealed to the mystic in Blair, who despite his Marx-inspired atheism and outward rationality, was by nature superstitious, a trait that led him to a series of flirtations with the occult. Smoking also went along with Blair’s pessimistic and existentialist view of life, showcased in the bleak settings and suicidal protagonists of his novels.

As we know today, heavy smoking can itself be considered a slow form of suicide. This was no less true for Blair, who suffered from lung ailments his entire life. Bronchitis, Pneumonia and at least one “lung lesion” made him “wheeze like a concertina” from an early age. Damp English winters, Burmese mosquitoes and a complete disregard for his own health brought bouts with dengue fever and Spanish Flu. At some point, Blair was also exposed to tuberculosis, a bacterial disease which attacks the lungs and which smoking is known to exacerbate.

It’s a cruel irony that Blair loved smoking so much, because for him, it was the deadliest of vices. He died of Tuberculosis in 1950, the year the American Medical Association published its first study on the link between smoking and lung disease.

To understand Orwell’s incurious attitude toward tobacco, it might help to understand the history of its use. For centuries, smoking was considered therapeutic. Tobacco’s first known application was as a medicine and a sacrament, enjoyed by South American Indians as far back as 5000 B.C. When Europeans first took up the habit in the 1500s, it was for medicinal purposes, as smoking was thought to cure dozens of ailments, from syphilis to “dropsy”.

Tobacco use eventually became common among European aristocracy, not specifically as a cure for anything, but as a “tonic” and a pastime. The demand for tobacco eventually became so high that entire forests in North America were cleared to make way for plantations. The cultivation of tobacco in the English colonies of the New World funded the American Revolution and initially provided the impetus for the expansion of African slavery in North America. (“History of Tobacco Use and Abuse”, Walter Reed Army Medical Center) Thus an addictive and unhealthy habit of upper-class whites brought misery to millions of black slaves, while at the same time providing the means for degrading the power of the British Empire.

The complicated role tobacco played in world affairs was not something Orwell chose to write about. If he had, he might have found commonality between the leaf he so enjoyed and another plant, one that came to represent his own divergence with the British Empire.

Orwell was born in India, to a father (Richard Blair) who worked his entire life as an imperial opium agent. A staunch if somewhat underachieving servant of the crown, the elder Blair’s job was to supervise Indian poppy farmers, ensuring they made efficient use of their land and resources. At that time, the British forced many Indian farmers to grow opium instead of food so it could be sent to China, where it kept the Chinese population both dependent on the British and complacent to their rule, allowing for easier exploitation of that country’s resources. Using an insidiously addictive drug to subdue the Chinese people was perhaps the most shameful abuse of imperial power in history, and his father’s role in it gave Orwell pangs of guilt that would haunt him his whole life.

The Burning Tip: Orwell’s Repudiation of Imperialism

The Burning Tip: Orwell’s Repudiation of Imperialism

In his first novel, Burmese Days, Orwell repudiates the imperialism that his father worked so long to uphold. Orwell had at one time intended to follow in his father’s footsteps, taking a job as an imperial policeman in Burma. But the experience left him irreversibly jaded, and his politics took a decidedly leftward turn.

Smoking shows up early in Burmese Days, with the toad-like magistrate U Po Kyin, symbol of the corruptive tendencies inherent in colonial rule, ordering a servant to bring him a green Burmese cigar. “He never smoked English Tobacco, which he declared had no taste in it,” Orwell writes about Kyin.

Perhaps Kyin’s rejection of English tobacco is emblematic of his relationship with his English rulers. Kyin is a scheming and inherently evil man who uses his position as a colonial magistrate to enrich himself at the expense of his fellow Burmese. His rejection of English tobacco in favor of the homegrown variety reinforces a key theme of the novel; that colonial subjects can’t always be counted on to adopt the culture of their rulers. Even though he profits from British rule, Kyin neither accepts nor endorses it.

Book: Burmese Days

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Archeion

Publication date: 2008-01

Length: 316 pages

Format: Paperback

Price: $15.99

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/o/orwell-burmesedays-cvr.jpgThe next tobacco reference in Burmese Days dovetails with the first. In Chapter Three, protagonist John Flory visits his friend Dr. Veraswami, who symbolizes the decent colonial native, the one who tries — pathetically and in vain, as it turns out — to take on the airs of his colonial “betters”. Veraswami eagerly pushes English cigarettes on Flory, so the two can be comfortable while having “civilized conversation”.

The naïve and eager-to-please doctor represents the urge among some oppressed people to become more like their oppressors. While Kyin shows he is still culturally Burmese, Veraswami’s preference toward western cigarettes is in keeping with his character’s unashamed and futile desire to be white. Using characters’ smoking habits to define their ideals and intentions would become an Orwell trademark.

The first time the protagonist is seen smoking in Burmese Days is in an emotionally charged scene with Ma Hla May, Flory’s Burmese mistress, whom he mistreats horribly. Flory’s smoking in this scene speaks to the anxiety incurred by those whose job it is to oppress others. The scene personifies the main theme of the book: that imperial relationships have as much of a corrosive effect on the ruling class as they do on the subjugated masses.

This idea would continually resurface in Orwell’s writing, often expressed through the actions of deeply conflicted protagonists, men who seek freedom but find it constantly receding into a future ruled by thuggish bureaucracies and rigid social mores. Flory, a typically conflicted Orwell protagonist, dumps his Burmese mistress to woo a young Englishwoman. May’s first act of revenge is to steal Flory’s cigarette case.

Smoking in Burmese Days is kept to a minimum compared with Orwell’s other works at the time. While he wrote Burmese Days first, he initially had trouble getting it published. Writing careers are always crapshoots, but writing in the economically depressed ‘30s, especially when one had the prospect of getting a “real job”, was considered romantic at best, and stupid by most. But Orwell had a deep desire to write and an even deeper desire to atone for his family’s role in oppressing the impoverished people of Southeast Asia. Upon returning from Burma, Orwell set out to document and understand poverty in his own country.

At that time, smoking was an integral part of everyday life for millions of people, due in part to the invention of the industrially rolled cigarette, which appeared in Europe in the mid-19th century. What had once been a habit only affordable to aristocrats and wealthy merchants was now, thanks to the industrial revolution, a vice of equal opportunity. Smoking was enthusiastically taken up by soldiers and sailors, who brought the habit back with them after completing their tours of duty.

By the time World War I broke out in 1914, cigarettes were thought of as crucial supplies for soldiers, who were issued them by the millions on behalf of governments and charitable groups such as the Red Cross. Many of the soldiers who fought in World War I became addicted to tobacco for the first time on the battlefield, and since many of those soldiers came from, and would return to, lower class lives and vocations, it’s easy to see why so many of Orwell’s lower class characters smoked.

“A Belly with a Few Accessory Organs”

“A Belly with a Few Accessory Organs”

There are no less than 41 references to smoking in Orwell’s first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London, which is just over 200 pages long. Orwell manages to mention the habit at least once every five pages, often in a pining, wishful sense, as throughout most of the book the author was destitute and thus always wondering where his next meal, and afterwards, his next smoke, would come from. His addiction adds to the book’s excitement in many ways, producing tension through contrasting bursts of half-desperate desire and almost-but-not-quite satiation. This sense of anxiety quickens the emotional pulse of the book.

In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell also appears, in some cases, to be writing about tobacco because he has very little else to write about. One of the worst aspects of poverty, Orwell writes, is the boredom and hunger which turns a poor man into “a belly with a few accessory organs.” Cigarettes, hunger and boredom, as every smoker knows, are the best of friends. In the less-inspired half of the book concerning London, Orwell performs the literary equivalent of chain-smoking, bringing up tobacco 33 times in 88 pages.

Book: Down and out in Paris and London

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publication date: 1972-03

Length: 228 pages

Format: Paperback

Price: $14.00

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/o/orwell-downout-cvr.jpgThe references to smoking in Down and Out in Paris and London can be classified based on what they represent to Orwell relative to his work, as well as what attributes of character and social theory Orwell is trying to illustrate. By far the most common symbology expressed by smoking in Down and Out in Paris and London has to do with deprivation. This is made possible by the fact that Orwell equates smoking with life-sustaining activities, mostly eating.

There are several references to the effect that the author “had nothing to eat or smoke” for varying periods of time, an experience he describes with a detached sense of dread. The embarrassment of being poor hits him when “the tobbaconist keeps asking why [he] has cut down on [his] smoking”, and longing for cigarettes causes him to seek the dubious company of Boris, a Russian layabout who “had not had a bath for months” but was still a good man to know, as he could reliably produce discount cigarettes:

It was tobacco that made everything tolerable. We had plenty of tobacco because some time before, Boris had met a solider (the soldiers are given their tobacco free) and bought 20 or 30 packets at 15 centimes each . He would lie till evening in the grayish, verminous sheets, smoking and reading old newspapers.

The most charming example of Orwell’s likening of tobacco to a staple commodity is in his characterization of a desperately poor London pensioner. The man lived on ten shillings a week, dividing this sum between lodging (five shillings and three pence a week), shaving, (five shillings and sixpence) and a monthly haircut (sixpence), leaving “about four an’ fourpence for food and ‘bacca”. Upon hearing this account, Orwell questions not the man’s smoking habit, but his proclivity toward neatness, exclaiming, “With an income of ten shillings a week, to spend money on a shave — it is awe-inspiring.”

Aside from showcasing the deprivation of the poor through their lack of cigarette buying power, Orwell also uses smoking to portray camaraderie among working people, expressed through their sharing of tobacco. This type of social transaction is one of the main reasons humans smoke in the first place, as evidenced by the sharing of tobacco in traditional Native American societies as a way of breaking the ice at gatherings. Even today, this ritual is carried out at bus stops and nightclubs around the world, where asking for a smoke or a light is one of the most surefire ways to engage a stranger in conversation.

Orwell exploited this social dynamic in order to befriend many of the tramps and plongeurs (French hotel workers) that populate Down and Out in Paris and London. His friendship with Paddy, the grizzled Irishman who teaches Orwell the ins and outs of tramp life in England, is facilitated by Orwell’s offer of a smoke, to which Paddy replies, “By god, there’s sixpennorth of good ‘baccy here … You ain’t been on the road long.”

Paddy, who is constantly on the lookout for discarded cigarette butts, takes Orwell on a tour of the homeless shelters surrounding London, many of which officially ban smoking but look the other way when the inhabitants light up. Orwell’s chief complaint about Salvation Army shelters, aside from the mandatory prayer services, is that they won’t allow residents to smoke. In Orwell’s view, smoking civilized the tramps, allowing them a few brief moments of pleasure in a life that was hard, short and often cruel.

The fact that Orwell saw tobacco as a necessity rather than a luxury belies an innocence about tobacco that was deeply ingrained in Orwell’s generation, to the point where tobacco use went not only unexamined, but almost beyond the realm of examination. It’s a strange place for Orwell to be, as his entire writing life was spent examining, often meticulously, the intricacies of human behavior and their implications to social and political power.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Orwell ignored the health risks or political ramifications of addiction among the smoking classes, as there was little scientific evidence at the time to indicate smoking was unhealthful. While there were several groups and individuals over the years who had decried the habit, smoking was simply so pervasive by the ‘30s, to question its use among poor people would be, if not unthinkable, certainly quixotic.

Orwell might also have found it uncomfortable to question the habit because he existed throughout the research phase of Down and Out in Paris and London as something of an interloper among his subjects. While he was no doubt as broke as he portrayed himself to be, he was not without prospects — he could have earned a comfortable living somewhere if he’d had the temperament for it.

It’s possible that his smoking and obsession with cigarettes was part of an attempt to mask his middle class identity. It stands to reason that if smoking was thought of as a lower class or “bohemian” thing to do. Orwell might have embraced the habit as both a way of identifying with that class and perpetuating his masquerade within it.

Yet there is little to suggest that smoking was confined to the lower and working classes in early 20th century Europe. The evidence actually points to the contrary, that tobacco use had become common among all classes. In that light, one could postulate that smoking, for Orwell, was a way of equalizing and reconciling class differences.

This idea is reinforced by the way he portrays the smoking habits of his characters. In the presentation of a Parisian restaurant owner who is desperately trying to present himself as wealthier and more genteel than he really is, Orwell uses the man’s smoking as a way of exposing his fraudulent character:

The only person who never forgot his manners was the patron. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but he had no work to do, as it was his wife who really managed things. His sole job, besides ordering supplies, was to stand behind the bar smoking cigarettes and looking gentlemanly, and he did that to perfection.

A poor man smokes to appear as a gentleman; a virtue of the poor becomes a vice of the rich. While the lower caste works and takes smoke breaks, the upper caste smokes and works at their leisure. This type of class envy (and class confusion) is examined in more detail in Orwell’s 1936 book, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which is based on his conflicted emotions regarding class in a capitalist society.

Perishing for a Smoke

Perishing for a Smoke

Keep the Aspidistra Flying begins with its protagonist Gordon Comstock, an only slightly exaggerated version of Orwell as a bookstore clerk and sometimes-aspiring poet, lamenting that he has only four cigarettes to last him until payday. He is “perishing for a smoke”, but the melancholy Comstock can’t afford to buy cigarettes because has embarked on a war against money, meaning that he has purposely propelled himself down the class ladder instead of up.

This leaves him hopelessly confused as to his station in life (another key trait of Orwellian protagonists.) His self-imposed poverty leaves him constantly either hungry, bored, anxious or angry, all of which he momentarily cures by smoking. Comstock smokes when he is able, and when he isn’t, he frets about where he will get cigarettes. This obsession with money makes him an insufferable wretch, and Orwell uses scenes involving cigarettes to bring out both Comstock’s pathos and his humanity.

Book: Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publication date: 1969-03

Length: 264 pages

Format: Paperback

Price: $14.00

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/o/orwell-aspidistra-cover.jpg

In one such scene, Comstock is on his way to a literary tea party, but he has not enough money to buy a pack of smokes. He finds an empty carton of “Gold Flakes” and buys a single cigarette from a vending machine to put in the empty pack, explaining:

You can’t, of course, go to other people’s houses with no cigarettes. But if you have even one it’s all right, because when people see one cigarette in a packet, they assume that the packet has been full. It is fairly easy to pass the thing off as an accident … after that, of course, your hosts press cigarettes upon you.

Comstock’s scheming reveals a craven, moochy side to his character that exposes his “war” against “the money-god” for what it is — a pose designed to mask his social problems under a cloak of affected eccentricity. Comstock may hate money, but he seems to hate himself even more.

When he shows up and finds the party has been cancelled, he decides he must have been intentionally snubbed, and though he knows he will spend the rest of the night in withdrawal, he immediately lights that last cigarette. “It gave him no pleasure to smoke, walking fast. It was a mere reckless gesture,” one that momentarily balms his hurt feelings. But the image of the scorned protagonist striding hatefully down a quiet sidewalk, trailing a cloud of smoke, is one that stays in the reader’s mind. It gives the full impression of Comstock’s pathetic and self-flagellating nature. Not every reader will identify with this puffed-up anti-hero, but at least Orwell does his job in rendering him, and he does so by referencing tobacco.

Smoking in Keep the Aspidistra Flying takes on other roles, as well. It simulates torture, as when Comstock confesses to having ground out cigarettes on the Aspidistra houseplant in his room, which for him symbolizes the chintzy allure of middle-class existence. It also plays a large part in Comstock’s character development, as when he saves and scrounges to take his girlfriend Rosemary on a trip to the country, even knowing he will have to sacrifice cigarettes for a week afterwards.

The trip goes badly and Comstock runs out of money, but he refuses to take even bus fare home from his more well-off girlfriend. At the end of the chapter, Rosemary, in an act of kindness and generosity, stuffs a pack of cigarettes into Comstock’s pocket before running into a subway car. Here, cigarettes symbolize love and acceptance — traits sorely lacking in Comstock’s personality. (Chapter VII, pg. 165, Penguin, 1989)

The act also symbolizes the pervasive nature of commodities such as cigarettes, for by accepting the smokes, Comstock violates his own rules regarding gifts from Rosemary. While he won’t take her money, deeming such a gesture somehow improper and crude, he will take her cigarettes, basically a cash transaction once-removed. Somehow, Comstock reasons, it is alright to be addicted to tobacco but not to the money necessary to buy them with.

Orwell’s own addiction to tobacco was by this time well established. But far from cursing the weed, he continued to celebrate it as a fundamental necessity of life. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s 1936 nonfiction masterpiece about his stint with an anarchist militia in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War, it takes him a full 21 pages to mention cigarettes — a record for Orwell at this point in his career.

But he makes up for it by proclaiming tobacco to be one of the five essential needs of a soldier at the front. (The other four are firewood, food, candles and the enemy.) Orwell’s love of smoking is apparent in each of the 26 passages of Homage to Catalonia that have to do with tobacco. The tone is set with the first reference and reinforced about once every ten pages.

Book: Homage to Catalonia

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publication date: 1969-10

Length: 264 pages

Format: Paperback

Price: $14.00

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/o/orwell-homage-cover.jpg

In Homage to Catalonia, cigarettes come to symbolize the defeat of the Spanish Republic by Franco’s fascists, and by extension, the defeat of international socialism as a revolutionary movement. In the beginning of Orwell’s account of the war, smokes are plentiful, issued to militiamen at the rate of one pack per day. There is such a feeling of class unity and esprit d’ revolution among Republican soldiers, that “If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious.”

But as the Communists and fascists take over and the war begins to slip away from the workers, cigarettes grow more and more scarce, until only the bourgeoisie are able to afford them. After a few months on the lines in Aragon (by which time the cig ration has been dropped to five a day), Orwell returns to his starting point in Barcelona to find that the fledgling classless society he had seen on the way to the front has been smothered in its sleep. To portray this development, Orwell reaches for a tobacco reference:

A small but significant instance of the way in which everything was now oriented in favor of the wealthier classes could be seen in the tobacco shortage. For the mass of the people the shortage of tobacco was so desperate that cigarettes filled with sliced liquorice-root were being sold in the streets. I tried some of these. (A lot of people tried them once) … Actually there was a steady supply of smuggled foreign cigarettes of the more expensive kinds, Lucky Strikes and so forth, which gave a grand opportunity for profiteering. You could buy the smuggled cigarettes openly in the smart hotels, and hardly less openly in the streets, providing you could pay ten pesetas (a militiaman’s daily wage) for a packet. The smuggling was for the benefit of wealthy people and therefore connived at. If you had enough money there was nothing you could not get …

Orwell goes on to explicitly blame Franco for the tobacco shortage, as “he held the Canaries, where all Spanish Tobacco is grown.” This accusation captures Orwell’s associations between tobacco and freedom. Obviously he did not travel to Spain in order to fight for smoker’s rights. But the freedom to work, to assemble, to write and even to smoke, were one and the same for Orwell, who nearly gave his life opposing Franco and the usurpation of personal liberty he came to represent.

When Orwell is shot in the neck by a fascist sniper in Homage to Catalonia, his first thoughts are “conventionally enough, for [his] wife,” yet as soon as he is stabilized in a field hospital not far from the front lines, he immediately asks the nurse for a cigarette.

Smoking in hospitals today is considered by most to be at best, comical, and at worst, repugnant, but in 1936 it was accepted, and even endorsed, by medical experts. In Gunshot Injuries a late 19th century field manual for military surgeons, one of the preeminent doctors of the day declared:

The use of tobacco in field hospitals is to be recommended … on account of its sedative qualities. No one can doubt that it has a soothing effect on men suffering from the pain of wounds, and produces a state of calm which is very beneficial under the circumstances … Perhaps none of the presents from aid societies as in time of war have been so much appreciated in hospitals as the presents of tobacco …

The hospital staff has no cigarettes for the wounded Orwell, but luckily some Spanish chaps, “kids of about 18”, do. They, “as a way of demonstrating to me that they were sorry I was wounded,” Orwell writes, “suddenly took all the tobacco out of their pockets, gave it to me and fled before I could give it back.” This episode, reminiscent of Rosemary’s gift in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, is exemplary of another common theme illustrated through tobacco in Homage to Catalonia — that of the honest and generous character of the Spanish people.

“How typically Spanish,” he proclaims the “kids” who gave him tobacco. “I discovered afterward that you could not buy tobacco anywhere in town and what they had given me was a week’s ration.”

Orwell also mentions a group of laborers from southern Spain who “had an extraordinary dexterity in rolling the dried-up Spanish tobacco into cigarettes … It was so dry that even when you had succeeded in making a cigarette, the tobacco promptly fell out and left an empty cylinder. The Andalusians, however, could roll admirable cigarettes… ” High praise from George Orwell.

A decade later, the tobacco-falling-out-of -the-cigarette motif would resurface in Orwell’s final work, 1984, where it is used to encapsulate the general shabbiness of life under totalitarianism.

Smoking Ruins

Smoking Ruins

As in Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell’s fellow soldiers in Homage to Catalonia build up trust and camaraderie through the act of smoking and sharing cigarettes. In one scene describing the street fighting after the Communist takeover of Barcelona’s telephone exchange, Orwell gratefully acknowledges the “small act of heroism” performed by a fellow militiaman, who is able to procure two packs of Lucky Strikes during the fighting.

Later, Orwell shows that camaraderie among smokers apparently trumps the ideologies that the war is being fought over, as he shares tobacco with a wounded Assault Guard, part of an outfit Orwell had battled against. “He was friendly and gave me cigarettes. I said: ‘In Barcelona we should have been shooting one another,’ and we laughed over this.’”

Fighting and smoking in Spain took an enormous toll on Orwell’s already fragile health. He developed a nasty case of bronchitis, which caused him to hack up blood and sent him into a hospital for several months. At the hospital, it was confirmed that he had tuberculosis, as well as bronchiectasis of the left lung and fibrosis of the right. This news did not cause him to quit smoking, but it did help him come up with an idea for a new novel, which he hoped to write as he convalesced. It would be called, most fittingly, Coming Up for Air.

Book: Coming Up for Air

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publication date: 1969-10

Length: 288 pages

Format: Paperback

Price: $14.00

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/o/orwell-upforair.jpg

Coming Up for Air would be something of a departure for Orwell, who seemed of a mind to turn inward — to himself and to the more innocent England of his youth, a place he prophetically saw as endangered by the coming world war. There are only a few smoking scenes in Coming Up for Air, but they each represent an important facet of the story, in which a fat, middle-aged insurance salesman named George Bowling takes a vacation from family life in order to revisit the countryside of his youth.

Bowling smokes cigarettes out of habit, and cigars when he wants to celebrate or think deeply about something. Often, Bowling’s Churchill-like cigar-smoking sets the scene for a meditation on the hazy future of Britain, the smoke becoming a metaphor for the mystical process of seeing into the future. Smoke also comes to represent Bowling’s fears that England will be destroyed in the coming war, the fumes of his cigar suggesting the smoking ruins that would come to dominate the urban landscape of England after the 1940 Blitz bombings, which occurred only three months after Coming Up for Air was published.

Just as smoking helps Bowling visualize the future, it also connects him to his past, as when he looks up an old flame named Elsie, and finds her working (where else?) in a tobacco shop. As an excuse to observe her, Bowling follows Elsie into the store and asks for a pipe, even though he has no use for one. As she hands him a pipe, their fingers touch briefly, yet Bowling feels “no kick, no reaction.” The past is gone, Bowling finds — up in smoke.

As Orwell predicted in Coming Up for Air, real-life England was soon embroiled in World War II, which brought with it paper shortages and financial trouble for book publishers. Orwell, who had yet to make much money on his novels, turned to writing film reviews, columns and essays for periodicals.

Orwell was a prolific and gifted essayist, but he wrote very little about tobacco in that form. His one essay that deals with the subject, “Books vs. Cigarettes”, compares the amount spent on cigarettes with the amount spent on books by the average working-class Brit. The essay, which really has little to do with smoking, makes the case to factory workers that reading is not an expensive hobby.

The case is made well enough, but perhaps more interestingly, “Books vs. Cigarettes” gives a concise record of Orwell’s own tobacco consumption. Orwell in 1946 states that he smokes six ounces of Player’s tobacco a week, spending 40 pounds a year to sustain the habit, 15 pounds more than he spends on reading material. With most hand-rolled cigarettes containing about a gram of tobacco each, Orwell must have smoked close to 170 cigarettes a week, a little more than a pack per day.

Not a wise pastime for someone in as poor health as Orwell, yet there is evidence that he felt unable to write without cigarettes. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock, a largely autobiographical character, says “he could no more write without tobacco than without air.” In another 1946 essay, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”, Orwell describes his reviewing process as one where “the room grows colder and colder while the cigarette smoke gets thicker and thicker.” With smoking tied in his mind to writing, it’s no wonder he continued the habit, even while his lungs turned black and feeble.

Smoking and the Humanization of the Pig

Smoking and the Humanization of the Pig

Orwell wrote his most famous and lasting works, Animal Farm and 1984, in the five years prior to his death. Animal Farm, due to its largely non-human cast, can be found in the non-smoking section of the Orwell library. It includes only one tobacco reference, in which Napoleon the Stalinesque pig appears “strolling in the farmhouse garden with a pipe in his mouth.”

Here, smoking represents the humanization of the pig (which works in a much more sinister way for Orwell than it does for, say, E.B. White), as it allegorizes the farm’s political transformation from revolutionary utopia to communist dictatorship. The pipe was also a nod to real-life dictator Josef Stalin, whose pipe-smoking became not only iconic, but a barometer of his famously mercurial mood swings.

Book: Animal Farm

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: 1st World Library

Publication date: 2004-09

Length: 116 pages

Format: Paperback

Price: $10.95

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/o/orwell-animalfarm-cover.jpg

While Orwell’s reliance on tobacco as a literary device waned in his later years, especially when compared to the excessive smoking references in Down and Out in Paris and London, he again found much use for the device in his most well-known book, 1984. The first reference occurs early and helps set the bleak tone of the novel. It also hints at themes that will be brought out later, giving the reader insight into the doomed life of protagonist Winston Smith and the hopeless and bizarre world he inhabits. As Smith attempts to steel himself for the criminal act of writing in his diary, he slugs a belt of gin and tries to light a cigarette:

He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out onto the floor.

This seemingly innocuous sentence brings out several key aspects of Smith’s struggle. First, it speaks to the general shoddiness of life in Oceania, where nothing seems to work right and nothing is as it seems. A society that can’t produce a decent cigarette, Orwell seems to be saying, can’t be a decent place to live.

But aside from this rather obvious meaning, a second fundamental aspect of life in Oceania is highlighted by Orwell’s use of the VICTORY brand, which is featured on every commodity available in Oceania. There’s a double irony intended here, as one wonders how a country can win a victory in anything if it can’t keep tobacco from falling out of a cigarette. But the more subtle and sour half of the joke only becomes clear after Orwell describes how Oceania works.

Because the country’s economy is based on constant warfare, the word “victory” has come to mean something far short of winning, something closer to “Sisyphean struggle”. For while the people of Oceania are constantly urged to make sacrifices in the name of victory, an actual victory would mean the cessation of hostilities, and therefore the economic death of state.

In this way, the ubiquitous and duplicitous brand name introduces the concept of Doublethink, in which the word for one thing carries the meaning of its opposite. Control of language is essential to controlling the population in 1984, and the VICTORY brand shows how culturally embedded the technique has become.

Book: 1984

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Penguin

Publication date: 1950-07 (reissue)

Length: 336 pages

Format: Paperback

Price: $9.99

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/o/orwell-1984-cvoer.jpg

Much of 1984’s emotional traction comes from Orwell’s frightening vision of a state that has the means to control the most intimate and private details of its citizens’ lives. The most effective and fearsome example of this is found in the inner party’s control over the sex lives of Oceanians.

Orwell delves into this theme explicitly, using Smith’s relationship with his strident young lover, Julia, to explore the link between erotic passion and political power. Smith is drawn to Julia for many reasons, the most important being, according to Smith, that “The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion.”

This revelation is made by Smith in the process of describing a nauseating hook-up with an aging prostitute, whom Smith writes about in his diary. But the setup to the diary scene occurs two pages earlier, when Smith is struck by “a horrible pang of terror” because Julia glances at him in a crowded cafeteria. After he looks away, “the remaining tobacco fell out of his cigarette.”

This reference to a suddenly limp cigarette, sandwiched as it is between Smith’s painful longing for Julia and his embarrassment over the two-dollar-whore affair, is clearly symbolic of impotence, both the sexual variety and as a manifestation of political powerlessness. (The limp cigarette as a symbol of impotence was also used as in a recent anti-tobacco ad campaign designed to convince smokers that the habit makes one unable to achieve an erection. Evidence that smoking can cause or exacerbate impotence has been presented by the American Journal of Epidemiology, the British Medical Association and others.)

Smith’s ability to perform sexually is a cornerstone of his rebellion against the state, and helps create his self-image of being “The Last Man in Europe” (the original title for 1984). In this context, there can be no doubt that Orwell intended to link the state’s anti-sex stance with its production of self-deflating cigarettes. Just as VICTORY gin keeps the public stupid and sedate, VICTORY cigarettes keep them flaccid and sexually dead, and thus unable to feel real passion for life.

Without that passion, Orwell asserts, people are little more than livestock, easily manipulated for political or economic gain. Smith’s eventual betrayal of Julia reinforces this concept, as his love for her is coercively transferred to the sexless and oppressive image of Big Brother, a clear example of the state’s ultimate control over his most intimate desires.

Orwell also uses tobacco to show the discrepancies between standards of living among the different classes of Oceania, where the vast majority smoke VICTORYs and the inner party smokes “very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper.”

Smith learns this when he calls on O’Brien, the inner party inquisitor whom Smith stupidly unburdens himself to. Smith and O’Brien’s interaction over the sharing of tobacco is a classic Orwell moment, showing how small commonalities can momentarily transcend vast differences in class and ideology.

O’Brien, pretending to be a fellow revolutionary, offers a smoke from a silver case while Smith watches him in homoerotic awe: “… there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette.” O’Brien, of course, has no intention of leaving the inner party for some imagined revolution. On the contrary, he later tortures Smith ruthlessly in order to cleanse his mind of such thoughtcrimes. In the meantime though, as long as they are smoking together, O’Brien and Smith are pals.

1984 turned out to be Orwell’s swan song. Just as Smith is aware from the first page onward that his own demise is imminent, Orwell must have known while he was writing the book that his illness would soon destroy him. But he was able to stave off death long enough for his name to be thrust into the English lexicon as shorthand for the dystopian society he created in 1984.

Appropriation Unbecoming

Appropriation Unbecoming

The fact that Orwell’s name is now commonly used to describe anything supposedly oppressive or misleading is both a testament to his works and an affront to his legacy. Scarcely a day goes by when the term “Orwellian” is not applied to some facet of modern-day life, usually by people with little understanding of Orwell’s true ideals.

Unsurprisingly, one of the debates in which Orwell’s name is continually misappropriated is in public discussion on the role of tobacco in society. When smoking was banned in British pubs in 2006, dozens of newspaper columnists and hundreds of op/ed and blog writers declared that the age of Big Brother had arrived.

But the problem with invoking Orwell to decry a smoking ban in pubs is that it pits Orwell against himself, exposing the great conflict already existing between Orwell’s romantic attitudes toward the common man and his innate mistrust of authority. It is known today that heavy smoking is a disastrous burden on poor and working-class people, just as it was for Orwell. One of the main reasons given for banning smoking in public places is that it protects the health of hotel, restaurant and bar workers — the very same people Orwell found slaving for the rich in Parisian hotels.

In Orwell’s England, more than 80 percent of the male population smoked. ( Cancer Research UK.org) Today, smoking in the UK is mostly a habit of the lower classes. If Orwell had known what we know now about smoking, he might have rethought his addiction, particularly in light of the amoral behavior of the modern tobacco industry.

How would Orwell, “the wintry conscience of a generation”, have felt about cigarettes had he known that, according to the World Health Organization, smoking “contributes to poverty through loss of income, loss of productivity, disease and death?” (“Tobacco and Poverty: A Vicious Circle”, World Health Organization, Sweden, 2005) If Orwell had been aware that more than 10.5 million starving people in Bangladesh might have an adequate diet if they spent their money on food instead of tobacco, might he have kicked the habit, either in life or literature?

We will, of course, never know. The notion that allowing the government to ban smoking is a step on the road to totalitarianism might well have been something Orwell agreed with. Yet banning smoking in public is hardly the same as banning books, thought or sex, as was the case in Orwell’s Oceania, where one was barred from doing important things but still had the freedom to light up a state-rolled cigarette in the middle of a crowded hate rally.

In the real world, the freedom to smoke is in direct opposition to nonsmokers’ rights to be free from the forced inhalation of smoke in a public place. (The Centers for Disease Control, Environmental Protection Agency, World Health Organization, U.S. Surgeon General and most medical associations have found that long-term exposure to others’ cigarette smoke carries many of the same health risks as actively smoking.) Seen in this context, the smoking debate becomes one in which the right of the individual is set against the survival of the collective, a conflict that Orwell wrestled with his entire life but never quite solved.

This can be seen in Orwell’s longtime advocacy of socialism, which sometimes seems to contradict his unflattering portraits of leftists, his frightening visions of communism, and his unrequited love for the England of his youth — hardly a classless utopia. Like most idealists, Orwell was better at articulating what was wrong with the world than he was at positing solutions.

If he were alive today, Orwell might well mourn the days when one could smoke inside a pub, but he would surely be too busy writing about the more important threats to freedom we now face — wage slavery, neocolonialism, corporate and government surveillance, media consolidation, official historical revisionism, the rise of the “public relations” industry, etc. — to get too worked up smokers’ rights.

Yet that hasn’t stopped modern pundits from using Orwell’s name to assist their political arguments. This practice has led the word “Orwellian” to become one of those shopworn phrases that Orwell implored writers to stop using in his oft-cited essay, “Politics and the English Language”. Such “dying metaphors,” Orwell wrote, “are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

How many modern writers give much thought to what the term “Orwellian” really means? The dictionary defines it as anything invocative of the author George Orwell, but in common usage, “Orwellian” only refers to the oppressive qualities of 1984’s Oceania and not to any of his other (and often far better) works.

Such an ambivalent word is begging to be misused. Most people wouldn’t describe the experience of sharing a cigarette with an anarchist, or of picking the butts out of an ashtray, as “Orwellian”, yet the term would be far more accurate in this context than in most modern uses of the term.

It is to be expected that when a writer creates as powerful a setting as Orwell does in 1984, that the setting will be remembered, and that over time, the memory of it will take on a cultural life of its own, even eclipsing what is in the actual text. This explains how nearly every modern political movement is able to claim Orwell as an adherent, no matter how preposterous the affiliation might be.

Conservatives, neoconservatives, liberals, religious groups, unionists — basically any mob one can think of has tried at one point or another to ally themselves with Orwell. So too have the partisans of the great smoking debate. Anti-tobacco groups would send every smoking reference Orwell ever wrote down the memory hole if they could, just as smokers’ rights advocates would have us forget that cigarettes helped speed Orwell to a tragically early grave.