Nicholas Lezard

The smoking diary of Gregor Hens

In Nicotine, Hens memorably describes being ‘repulsed and overjoyed’ to have spotted a smoking area (‘a kind of suffocation chamber’) at the airport

The link between smoking and self-expression is long-established. The only thing worse than not being able to smoke, says Will Self in his excellent introduction, is ‘not being able to talk about it’.

‘Scriva! Scriva! Vedrà come arriverà a vedersi intero.’ ‘Write! Write! See what happens when you look into yourself.’ That’s the advice given by a psychiatrist in Italo Svevo’s The Confessions of Zeno, his 1923 novel about giving up smoking again and again, as per the line apocryphally from Mark Twain about giving up being so easy, he’s done it hundreds of times. ‘That was a very important last cigarette’ is, so to speak, that book’s essential joke, and Gregor Hens acknowledges not only that joke, abbreviating ‘last cigarette’ to LC, but explicitly acknowledges Svevo as (and I use the word advisedly here) an inspiration.

All smokers remember their first cigarette. Me: Benson and Hedges, garden shed, aet. 11. In this elegant, lucid and consistently entertaining memoir (or essay; or prose work; or 150-odd-page long extended plume of smoke; it is punctuated by black-and-white photos, à la W.G. Sebald, which on the page look as though they have been captured through a veil of the stuff), a six-year-old Gregor Hens is handed a glowing Kim by his mother so that he can light one of the fireworks his family traditionally let off for the New Year. ‘It is remarkable how clearly I can remember this night,’ Hens writes, and he’s not kidding: an action that I calculate can have taken no more than five seconds, and that at a stretch, takes six pages to describe. But there’s a good reason for this:

Now that the initial dizziness had subsided my awareness took on a new, never before recognised clarity; it was as if a curtain had been pulled back to let in a breeze, a fog bank had been blown away… I felt and saw, for the first time, a great experiential context… I not only saw images, not only heard single words or sentences, but experienced an inner world.

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