by Clive James
The serious writer who vaunts himself on not being a commercial prospect had better realize that his publisher can afford to publish him only because some other writer of less refined ambitions is earning cash. From the publisher’s angle, the difficult question, when it comes to the next Dan Brown, is how to spot him. If you yourself were picking talent for a publishing house, you would be inclined, on the basis of his manuscripts, to report that the next Dan Brown could scarcely write English. You would be right, but you would be wrong. The executive who turned down the Beatles had tastes too fastidious for the job. It follows that the most vital piece of recruiting a publishing house can do is to choose the dim but keen editor whose heart genuinely races when the manuscript of the next The Da Vinci Code is carried in. Somewhere just below board level in every successful publishing house there is at least one chump. These chumps can be most easily identified by their excellent tailoring and large cars.
SMOKING THE MEMORY
Dates of show: 3 and 5 August 2007
At my age, achievements become few and small. One enters the era of tiny triumphs. The other morning, as I walked along slowly beside the Thames on my way to my favourite coffee bar – walking slowly because I was deliberately minimizing my impact on the environment – I reflected, in the style of one of those old essayists who were always reflecting on narrow areas of experience that turned out to have a wide area of implication, I reflected, as I walked slowly upstream beside the south bank of the Thames and turned up the spanking new glass-lined avenue that calls itself More London, I reflected that the now virtually complete restrictions on smoking would have driven me to violence if I still smoked, but I don’t, so they haven’t.
I did it. I finally quit. Two and a half years ago I smoked my last tin of cigarillos, and although I still dream of taking them up again on my death bed – more of that later – I am now at one with the non-smoking world. I almost pity, instead of envy, those who are still caught up in it. Outside the entrance halls to the tall glass buildings of More London – what a name, so exactly conveying that it has less of everything – there were groups of people smoking at each other. Occasionally they talked to each other as well, but you could tell they were talking about smoking. Some of them were arriving late for work and were having a quick one before they went inside. Some of them had arrived for work earlier and had come back outside for the first smoking break of the day, or perhaps the second.
Cigarette butts surrounded each group in a sort of fairy ring. Already these fairy rings seem to be moving further away from doorways, and one foresees the day when the fairy rings disappear altogether. In California it was already happening ten years ago when it was decreed that you not only couldn’t smoke in the outside section of the restaurant, you couldn’t smoke within fifty yards of the entrance. When the entrances were less than fifty yards apart, smokers in Bel Air had to walk to Hollywood Boulevard before they could light up. Now it’s happening in Britain. It’s already happened in Scotland, where any space with three walls is designated a non-smoking zone. After that law came in, you could see otherwise sane-looking people counting walls and you knew that they were smokers.
I was just such a smoker from my early teens until my early thirties, quickly working up from a twenty a day habit to the dizzy eighty a day peak that some so-called experts declare impossible because you would have to wake up in the night. But of course I woke up in the night. It was an expensive habit but I never subsequently thought of suing the manufacturers to get my money back. Revenge on the tobacco companies was always a branch of the compensation culture that I thought especially ungracious, like suing a host for having served you champagne before you fell into his swimming pool. At the age of eleven it was already clear to me that inhaling cigarette smoke was likely to do to my lungs the same thing that it had done to my Uncle Harold’s.
Coughing himself inside out, Uncle Harold would reach for the next cigarette. By the time I quit, I was doing the same. Impressed by the news that if I stopped cold before I was thirty-five it would probably undo any damage I had already caused, I didn’t have another drag for thirteen years. But I missed it every day, so how, you might be asking – and if you’re trying to quit you’ll certainly be asking – how did I manage it?
I used the offset method, i.e. I spent the money on something else, something that I could see accumulate instead of burn away. The same amount of money I would have spent per week on cigarettes I spent on recordings of classical music. They were all on vinyl in those days and eventually I built up a collection weighing a couple of tons, almost as much as the pyramid of the butts of all the cigarettes I had ever smoked would have weighed if they had been swept together in the one place, which would have had to be as big as Trafalgar Square. As I sat there listening to, say, the Mozart String Quintet K 516, I could reflect that its limitless sublimities almost outranked the pleasure of sucking on the fiftieth filter tip of the day.
But there was the catch. I was still thinking of that pleasure, and eventually I took up smoking again, but this time with new hopes of smoking in moderation. I had been impressed by the way Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti Westerns chewed a cigarillo instead of saying anything. Taciturnity had always been among those dreams for myself I knew to be hopeless, but I correctly assessed that he smoked far fewer cigarillos than he would have smoked cigarettes. Alas, the same was not true for me, and within a year I was chain-smoking the little cigars, often carrying a third tin of ten for when the first two ran out.
So it went on for a further twenty years on and off, and usually more on than off, while the final whistle was blowing for smokers in the Western world. The cigarettes which had been the only stable European currency in 1945 gradually but inexorably became branded as evidence of the lethal conspiracy of big business against populations helpless to choose their own fate, and the freedom to choose death was rolled back under the imperative to lead a healthier life.
Eventually even I was convinced, and I gave up again, partly because of my job. Flying all over the world to make films for television, I was sometimes faced with thirteen hours in the air without a smoke. The thirteen hours might as well have been thirteen years. After most of the airlines turned on the non-smoking signs for keeps, a smoker who wanted to keep his fires burning had to plot a circuitous route across the globe, and often he would have to fly with an airline that allowed not only cigarettes in the cabin, but live chickens.
There was also the matter of a cough that became harder to conceal from my family. The smoking I could conceal, or thought I could, by going out into the garden for a quick dozen drags before always burying the butt in the soil of the same pot plant and sticking a peppermint in my mouth. Why a man thinks the sweet stench of peppermints from his mouth will offset the foul reek of smoke in his clothes is a question that has so far puzzled science. Anyway, it soon transpired that only I was fooled.
So I would give up for another year, offsetting the money this time with a plan to spend the same amount on health food in order to halve my weight. Having doubled it, I would hit the cigarillos yet again. Finally it was the Australia run that spelled the end of my smoking career. After thirteen hours we arrived at Bangkok airport and I raced for the smoking room. Smoking room was a big name for a small Perspex cubicle that was opaque from the outside because of the grey pressure of the fumes within. I opened the door, saw all the other smokers sitting there face to face in two tight rows, and I realized that I would have to smoke in the standing position. Then I realized I didn’t have to light up. All I had to do was breathe in. It was the moment of truth.
But then, I had always known the truth. The truth is that I love smoking. Hence the failure of all my attempts to give it up, because every method I used was predicated on the assumption that a desire could be eliminated once it was seen to be absurd. I tried nicotine patches and kept sticking them on until they joined up at the edges. I looked like the flesh-pink version of the jade warrior. There is a book out now which teaches th
at every cigarette you have from your second cigarette onwards does nothing for you except raise your nicotine level up to what it was. Possibly so, but in my case it also satisfied a deep longing, the memory of which lingers like lost love.
So how did I finally quit? I learned to smoke the memory. When the longing hits you, don’t try to repress it. Savour it. The actual thing wouldn’t be any better. In fact it wouldn’t be as good, because it would last only as long as the cigarette or the cigarillo, whereas the memory lasts as long as you like. Reflect on the frivolity of your desires all you wish, but you will never conquer them unless you first admit their urgency. And since I’m being positive in this series, let me record that I feel better. I still quite like the idea of taking a crate of cigarillos with me when I go into the nursing home, but that day will be further off now than it would have been if I hadn’t stopped lighting a fire in the lower half of my face every few minutes. I would have been in the same condition as the pot plant. The pot plant died.
Postscript
This broadcast has a sad resonance for me when I read it again and I can scarcely listen to it without tears of shame. Within a year of having written the script, I was smoking cigarillos again. And this time, having made such a public boast about my powers of self-control, I was obliged to smoke in secret. There was many a furtive disappearance on many an absurd pretext. Remorse, however, was not the worst consequence. On the first day of the year 2010 my lifetime’s dereliction caught up with me, and I was diagnosed for COPD. This fancy set of initials sounds like an American television police series but the quickest way to explain it is that it used to be called emphysema. I was lucky it was only that. Judging by the cough I had developed, I was fully expecting that the X-rays would come back as a picture of lung cancer, but it seems that I am one of the lucky two-thirds of smokers who don’t get it. (Readers who are relieved by those odds should try expressing them another way, and contemplate the proven fact that a full third of smokers do get it: a pretty ominous statistic to be fooling with.) My lung X-rays were scarcely a clean sheet – they looked like a battlefield on the moon – but there was no cancer. So I got away with it after all. It’s a little stroke of luck to be blessing myself about as I lug an oxygen tank onto the aircraft when I want to fly anywhere. Apparently the chances are good that I will be able to ditch the tank soon. I’ll try not to celebrate by lighting up. No, smoking was never worth the money, and certainly not worth the danger. But my real trouble was – I tried to be honest about this – that I liked it. Loved it, in fact. At the time of writing, when I haven’t had a smoke for an entire year, I’m on seven different medications per day. Two of them are inhalers, and guess what, one of them gives me a blast not very different from those first few hundred cigarettes I smoked when I was still in short pants.
DESIRABLE DEVICES
Dates of show: 10 and 12 August 2007
On my way to work I made my weekly stop-off at the mega-super-hypermarket in the shopping area-precinct-mall just between the motorway exit from the north and the outer rim of the congestion charge zone. As I chose a shopping trolley from the ranks of hundreds of shopping trolleys in front of the vast retailing edifice, I at last realized the significance of the sign on the trolley that said it would stop when it got to the red line.
I vowed to be positive in this series and yet it’s taken me all this time to notice the most positive sign of the lot. For years I have been disgusted by the sight of shopping trolleys poking some of their structure above the surface of otherwise pleasant brooks and creeks in which they have been merrily immersed by the nation’s infinite supply of casual vandals. How can this be fixed? I would ask myself. It can’t, I answered, because so large a proportion of the population can’t be re-educated. But here we are already, looking at the day when nobody will be able to wheel a shopping trolley any further away from the supermarket than the red line before the wheels lock and the trolley stops. Unless the shopper wants to pick up the fully laden trolley and carry it to his boombox car, that’s where the trolley will remain. Triggered by the signal from the red line, the microchip built into the trolley has done its job. A problem posed by technological advance has been solved in the best way: by more technological advance.
Surely the best answer to the plastic-bag plague also lies in physics and chemistry, rather than in a change of morality. Ireland has got its total number of plastic bags down by about eighty per cent just by taxing them, but the twenty per cent left over are still enough to make the landscape hideous. Also it’s undoubtedly a huge fuss always to remember to take your durable shopping bag with you to the store.
I can’t remember whether I’ve said this before, but I’m getting to the time of my life when I can’t remember anything, and although I can see myself buying a designer-label permanent shopping bag, I can’t see myself remembering to have it with me. What I want, what every sensible person wants, is a plastic bag that biodegrades. Some of them claim to do that already, but only by a percentage. Again, it’s usually twenty per cent. If the bag starts its twenty per cent biodegradation immediately, you’re left holding eighty per cent of the bag, with one hundred per cent of your purchases all over the road. If the process takes time, then the effects will make little aesthetic difference. Nobody’s going to look at the hedgerow lining a narrow country road and cheer that twenty per cent of each plastic bag has gone, while there are still the usual few thousand plastic bags almost entirely present.
What industry has to do is come up with a bag that turns to a puff of dust after a certain date, preferably some time before the sea rises to drown civilization. It shouldn’t be all that hard and I’m sure some great globalized company is already working on it. Until then, boneheads with boombox cars will go on loading a dozen bulging plastic bags each into the back after the trolley has been abandoned, and will make sure, when they unload them, that the plastic bags are added to the landscape as usual. If people who travel in boombox cars were open to rational persuasion not to dump their junk, they wouldn’t be driving around in a broadcasting station.
What should be done, then, about boombox cars? Only a few days ago the car I was a passenger in was trapped just behind a four-by-four boombox car in a traffic jam. The bass notes of the witless hip-hop anthem it was transmitting along with its emissions hit me repeatedly in the stomach. When I was young I might have walked up and said something to them and got hit in the stomach for real. As things were, I sat there planning the technology to retaliate. It needs to be introduced into the boombox car at the point of manufacture. There will be set levels of volume and duration so that the prospective purchaser and his dreadful friends can briefly get the stimulus they find necessary to life, but at anything beyond those levels the air-conditioning system will instantly lower the temperature by 150 degrees centigrade. Suddenly they’ll be sitting there in a block of ice, silent for the first time in their benighted lives.
Public silence is a dying concept, as we know. We’ll never get it back if we rely on the return of good manners, because the people who make a lot of noise have no idea that they are crossing a boundary: they think they are exercising a freedom. People who yell into mobile phones would look sincerely puzzled if you dared to interrupt them. How can you be bothered by a little thing like noise? Only last week I was making a long train journey and there was a man in my carriage who maintained his cacophonous part in a single telephone conversation for a hundred miles. During this intermittent uproar I feebly worked on mental plans for the kind of Heath Robinson device that would deal with him.
The carriage would need a noise detector that reacted to any violation of a set limit by tripping a switch under the perpetrator’s seat that would eject it and him through a flap in the roof and out into the speeding landscape. But fitting every seat in the train with such a facility would cost too much, and there would be the problem of littering, as the plastic bags in the hedgerows were joined by all those startled bodies.
No, once again the matter will have t
o be dealt with by a technological advance included at the point of manufacture. What every new mobile phone needs is a small, simple, retractable hypodermic syringe to inject barbiturates into the phone user’s earlobe when he or she exceeds the volume limit. The howling monologue would thus rapidly be replaced by a deep silence. There could be a problem about the same system if the user is at the wheel of a car, because innocent people might be involved in the resulting crash. I’m still working on that, but there is no reason why competent engineers and pharmacologists should not be working already on the technology.
Public-address systems in the park are another threat that could be easily neutralized. The park in front of our house would be bliss in summer if not for a rising incidence, on the weekend, of pre-charity-run gatherings in which the chief irrepressible enthusiast of the local community-spirit committee asks the assembled multitude if they are all right. For some reason this worthily motivated pest always asks crowds of any size the same question, and at the top of her voice. She is already yelling when she asks this question of a group of three people she meets in the street, and when she is turned loose behind a microphone in front of three hundred people in the park she makes so much noise asking whether they are all right that she can probably be heard on the moon. What she needs is a microphone with a small attached reservoir primed to react to excess volume by plugging her mouth with a squirt of quick-drying polymer.