Intellectuals

In a small room crowded with books a man hunches over a typewriter, the black and white camera perfectly capturing the curl of smoke from a nearby ashtray. In another, larger room, a man sits in an overstuffed club chair, pen in hand and pipe in mouth. In a private library, a man in a tweed jacket sits in a leather armchair, perusing a book and holding a cigar.

Dressed in black, the typist might be Jean Paul Sartre; in a jacket of less determinate color, he might be George Orwell. The pipe smoker is perhaps Albert Einstein; if fictional, Sherlock Holmes. And the gentleman with the cigar could be any number of vaunted thinkers, from H. L. Mencken to Thomas Edison, Mark Twain to Sigmund Freud. These men are both particular and generic: they are writers, scholars, thinkers, and above all, intellectuals.

The link between smoking and intellectualism undoubtedly owes something to the link between smoking and individualism. Even had tobacco not proved a reigning cash crop for centuries, it almost begged for antiauthoritarian status (and popularity) when use of the plant Elizabethans commonly called "divine" was contemporaneously excoriated in King James I's Counterblaste to Tobacco and deemed punishable by excommunication by Pope Urban VIII. As tobacco became increasingly accepted, individualism rested less in the choice to partake and more in the particularity implied by one's tobacco preferences. It is almost impossible to imagine Sherlock Holmes without his pipe or Jean Paul Sartre without Gitanes (a French brand of cigarette)—subtle but telling proofs of Mark Twain's assertion in "Concerning Tobacco" that "Each man's own preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him."

While factory workers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were presumed to smoke to pass the time, intellectuals commonly cited tobacco as productive of creativity or erudition. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, for example, referred to a particularly difficult case as a "three pipe problem." And though Sigmund Freud is perhaps best remembered for his unsubstantiated insistence that "a cigar is just a cigar," in Freud's case, it was also an oft-noted source of inspiration he deemed essential to his work. The inspiration sought in the bright leaves produced an intellectual smoking culture spanning broad ideological, philosophical, and disciplinary gaps, and stretching from the Mississippi River to the Left Bank.

Since most academies in the Western Hemisphere have effectively banned smoking in many common areas, and since intellectuals are not uniquely incapable of understanding risks associated with tobacco use, the culture of smoking among intellectuals has shifted dramatically in the final decades of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, tobacco has remained remarkably consistent in its presumptive humanizing of the intensely cerebral. While the so-called decadence of smoking once safely humanized the intellectual by asserting his or her baser sensuality, this function is now more readily identifiable in a tableau visible on campuses and at institutes across the globe: the huddled professor having a cigarette with a student who shares her distinctly corporeal and increasingly unpopular vice, both in open (if somewhat guilty) defiance of the Romantic poet Charles Lamb's prescient homage, "For thy sake, tobacco, I would do anything but die."

See Also Class; Literature; Psychology and Smoking Behavior.

? CARA BAYLUS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gately, Iain. Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

Goodman, Jordan. Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Klein, Richard. Cigarettes Are Sublime. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

Stern, Lesley. The Smoking Book. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999.

Walton, James. The Faber Book of Smoking. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.

individualism an independence of spirit; the belief that self-interest is (or should be) the goal of all human actions.