MEET THE STUFF OF BURNING DESIRE
Author writes well about his nicotine addiction to remind addicts of their folly
The best cigarette you will ever smoke, Gregor Hens writes in his new memoir, Nicotine, is the relapse cigarette. It tastes better, he adds, “the longer the prior abstinence”. This is dangerous knowledge. Some of us barely keep the urge at bay. There’s a dark sliver in a former smoker’s mind that half-longs for dire events so as to justify lighting up again. But it’s not as if we need large cues, Hens writes, when small ones will do.
“Every form of cigarette ad gives me a pang of longing, every scrunched-up, carelessly thrownaway cigarette packet at a bus stop, every trod-on cigarette butt, every beautiful woman holding a cigarette between her fingers or just looking like she could be holding one,” he writes. “My reading chair in Columbus gives me a pang, and M’s balcony in Berlin, and my old Jeep because I’ve smoked some of the best cigarettes while driving.”
Hens is a German writer and translator who has lived and taught in the United States. Nicotine is the first of his own books to be issued in English. It’s a hybrid volume: part memoir, part philosophical lament.
It doesn’t always click. There are passages (“I saw myself as a part of a field of tension”) that, in this translation by Jen Calleja, veer close to psychobabble. But when Nicotine stays dry, earthy and combustible, like a Virginia tobacco blend, it has a lot to say and says it well.
The author does not resemble your idea of a former serious smoker. There Hens is, blueeyed and dimpled, in his author photo on the back flap. He looks as if he were ready to bag organic carrots during his weekend stint at the food co-op.
Indeed, he is a serious cyclist, a participant in triathlons and a member of the German Alpine Association. He’s been a health nut all along, at least in between long bouts of smoking. I can’t decide if this is suspicious or insane.
“I’ve smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes in my life, and each one of those cigarettes meant something to me,” Hens writes. “I’ve smoked cold cigarette butts, cigars, cigarillos, bidis, kreteks, spliffs and straw. I’ve missed flights because of cigarettes and burnt holes in trousers and car seats. I’ve singed my eyelashes and eyebrows, fallen asleep while smoking and dreamt of cigarettes — of relapses and fires and bitter withdrawal.”
He sees this book as a chance finally to put the urge behind him, to comprehend it, seal it and bury it. He writes about his childhood. His father smoked so much that the author thought smoking was the older man’s job. His mother, a stylish woman who drove a steel-blue Range Rover, smoked more when she was depressed.
There’s a faded romance in the European brand names of the cigarettes his family smoked: Finas Kyriazi Freres, Kims, Murattis, filterless Senior Services, Erntes, Van Nelle Halfzwares.
He is especially good on how those who quit become vicarious smokers. “Sometimes I walk around the city and imagine that others are smoking on my behalf,” he writes. “I silently thank the smokers in front of the cafes and office buildings and in smoking areas, imagining that they do it for me, for my inner contentment. I have people smoke for me.”
Like any author worth reading, Hens is sometimes best when he goes off-topic. He is brutal about the Midwest. (“The most insignificant city in the United States is Columbus, Ohio.”)
He’s interesting about aphorisms and our need to attach them, usually erroneously, to famous people. He considers how often we utter the phrase “no worries” when, in fact, we are murderously aggrieved. He charts the passing of time by noting how the white tennis balls of his youth have become neon green.
This book is not a deep dive into smoking and literature or into smoking and films. He doesn’t go out of his way to conjure the romance of two lit cigarettes and a corner table. Nicotine mostly omits the social pleasures of smoking. Hens is, with a metaphorical carton of American Spirits under his arm, a smoking section of one.
His lapidary prose will sometimes put you in mind of the chain-smoking Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The book includes an introduction by English writer Will Self that belongs in the hall of fame of bad introductions.
This seems like the place to mention that Hens compares the cottony insides of a cigarette filter, perfectly, to “artichoke hair”.
Some day, surely, smoking will be outlawed. Who will smoke the last unfiltered Camel? Some of us who quit years ago like to imagine that we will start again at the end of our lives. We agree with the English writer Charles Lamb, who hoped that “the last breath I draw in this world will be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun”.