AND CAPTAIN HADDOCK

Courtesy of a friend, I have read a fun article with keen-o photographs about pipe smokers: Where Have All The Pipes Gone?. The main gist of which seems to be that calm rational cultured people used to smoke a pipe, and now they and their pipes have disappeared.
It used to be a common phenomenon among thoughtful and creative people.

I agree and I disagree. As a pipe smoker I feel flattered, but Joseph Stalin also smoked a pipe, and I detest the Hobbit phenomenon. Before the war, over eighty percent of all tobacco was smoked in pipes, but the entire generation that went in to combat as pipe smokers came out with a cigarette habit. And having survived the biggest conflagration in human history they were more jangly and excitable than they had ever been, they had more or less won the lottery by still being alive, and cigarettes were at that time advertised by medical men.
Cigarettes were convenient, no-nonsense, and cheap.


"More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. Yes, in a repeated national survey, doctors in ALL branches of medicine, in ALL parts of the country, when asked "what cigarette do YOU smoke", answered..."


While I like the concept of calm rational cultured men smoking a pipe as a natural expression of their gravitas and intellect -- Simenon, Faulkner, Einstein, Weill -- there are also the hod carrier, rowdy young man at school, alcoholic village priest, and general all round ne'er do well in the mix. I ended up smoking pipes almost by accident. As a teenager, the idea of sitting quietly discussing literary things with thoughtful companions while we each puffed our pipes never even crossed my mind. Or theirs.


Yeah, Simenon and Kipling smoked pipes, as did characters in their writing. My father, my uncle, and several of their old college classmates smoked pipes, or had done so. Fighter pilots, ships captains, and generals smoked pipes. And several of my high school friends and acquaintences did too.

The categories of pipe smokers were so broad as to be nearly meaningless.

Men of action smoked pipes. Men of indolence. Men.
Very few women smoked pipes.
Still.


It isn't that pipes and good tobacco are necessarily masculine things, but I suspect that cigarettes are far easier to hide or indulge in out of sight. A more discreet way of dealing with tobacco. Also socially accepted.

Originally, both Lucky Strike and Marlboro were aimed at the female market. As a rational and slightly risqué alternative to bon bons or cake. Better for your girlish figure, and more sophisticated.

TOBACCO INDEX


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