Smoking writing

Flaubert was a fearless smoker, as was T.S. Eliot. Faulkner smoked a pipe, saying there were only three things he needed when writing--paper, tobacco, and a little whiskey. John Cheever chainsmoked. Steinbeck gave up cigarettes when writing a book, going back to cigarettes after the book was written. Albert Camus fingers were yellow with nicotine from the powerful Galouises he smoked; I don't know what kind of cigarettes James Baldwin smoked, but he smoked many during the many tv interviews featured in the recent feature film about him, "I Am Not Your Negro." As did the poet W.H. Auden whom I first encountered as a teenager while watching "The Dick Cavett Show." Auden's face looked like an old pen & ink drawing of the rivers of Great Britain. Beckett smoked little cigars. Freud smoked seven cigars a day, and died of mouth cancer; whether Freud was a writer in the way Beckett or Auden were writers is not germane--Freud did write the classic, "Civilization and its Discontents" and claimed he couldn't think properly unless he was smoking. Other smoking writers include Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming, Shirley Hazzard, Voltaire, Patricia Highsmith, John Barryman, Ingeborg Bachmann (who fell asleep smoking in bed and died in the subsequent fire), Pessoa, Knut Hamsun, e.e. cummings, Albert Cossery.

The first book of serious poetry I bought, Stanley Kunitiz's "Selected Poems, 1928-1958" (from Moe's Books in Berkeley, California, in 1969 or 70) came with a nice little surprise inside, like a box of CrackerJacks: a pack of Camel cigarettes, sans cigarettes, artfully deconstucted to serve as a booksmark. I still have the book and bookmark.

Kunitz lived to be 100, which makes me think he did not smoke or smoked when he was young and then gave it up. The bookmark marks the page with one of my favorite Stanley Kunitz poems, "End of Summer"  of which the third stanza has been committed to memory:

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.