The Complete End to Literature As We Know It

N. J. Furl — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:00:00 +0000

The Telegraph has finally said what we (read: I) all (read: me, again) knew to be true. Smoking bans kill literature—in this case, English lit. Overblown poppycock, you say? Bollox. Tongue-in-cheek, it may be, but read and feel shame for the last time you selfishly complained that fear of inoperable cancer was ruining your Yorkshire pudding. Here’s a taste:

This attack on basic liberty, which was allowed through without any significant protest, might mark the end not merely of smoking, but of literature.

A little over the top? Perhaps. Or maybe is not nearly a little over the top enough¹.

¹ In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I am, indeed, a smoker; I romanticize death by consumption; I sternly believe that etc.; etc.; etc., . . .

Great Britain's Anti-PSA

Chad Post — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 15:27:18 +0000

Counteracting Stuart Walton’s Guardian blog in which he basically declared that drinkers make bad writers,, today we have A. N. Wilson’s that banning public smoking is pretty much the end of English literature.

What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?

The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown’s Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or café, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustained them during the most creative phases of their lives.

Not afraid of taking a few steps beyond the bounds of rational thinking, Wilson pretty much declares that non-smokers putting pen to paper are destined for mediocrity:

I have been racking my brains to find a single non-smoker among the great English poets or novelists of the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries. Possibly, Keats had to lay off the pipe tobacco a bit after he developed tuberculosis.

Otherwise, from Swift and Pope to Cowper and Wordsworth, from Byron to Charles Lamb, they were all smokers.

Heroic Beryl Bainbridge keeps on smoking for England, but will there be any more writers in the years to come, following in her heroic steps?

smoking – Three Percent

The Complete End to Literature As We Know It

Great Britain's Anti-PSA