We all need to be let alone —not just Greta Garbo

‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier:

In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains for most people a pleasure that, whatever its social significance, can be enjoyed in entire solitude, and a pleasure that remains entirely individual.

At the time, 80 per cent of British men and 40 per cent of women were regular smokers. Smoking was not just a means of inhaling death and of escaping the dead hand of others’ sociability, but briefly put the unbearableness of life behind a smoky veil. When fags were cheap, no wonder they were especially popular among the working poor, for whom snatched moments of peace and quiet were breathing spaces from otherwise unremitting grind, noise and worry.

True, smoking had risen in popularity during the second world war as a means of brokering sociability at a time of troubling loneliness. After the war, its continuing vogue was fuelled by an opposite impulse — to disconnect from the hell of other people. Like masturbation (which David Vincent unaccountably omits from his book), smoking is a solitary pleasure, though unlike masturbation sometimes acceptable among others.

Vincent regards smoking as the defining example of abstracted solitude, the capacity to remove the self from present company. It’s no coincidence that the cigarette packet is roughly the same size and shape as today’s fetish object, the smartphone. But while the smartphone offers abstraction from others, it is also the culmination of another kind of solitude. The penny post, news-papers, telephone, film, television, the internet and iPhones have offered networked solitude, keeping us in touch with distant people while letting us remain alone.