Dwight Garner: The stuff of burning desire

The best cigarette you will ever smoke, Gregor Hens writes in his new memoir, Nicotine, is the relapse cigarette. It tastes better, he adds, “the longer the prior abstinence.”
 
This is dangerous knowledge. More than a few smokers relapsed after September 11. Others did after the recent presidential election, as if heeding the poet James Dickey’s dictum that “guilt is magical.” Some of us barely keep the urge at bay. There’s a dark sliver in a former smoker’s mind that half-longs for dire events, so as to justify lighting up again. But it’s not as if we need large cues, Mr Hens writes, when small ones will do.
 
Hens is a German writer and translator who has lived and taught in the United States. Nicotine is the first of his own books to be issued in English. It’s a hybrid volume: part memoir, part philosophical lament.
 
It doesn’t always click. There are passages (“I saw myself as a part of a field of tension”) that, in this translation by Jen Calleja, veer close to psychobabble. But when Nicotine stays dry, earthy and combustible, like a Virginia tobacco blend, it has a lot to say and says it well.
 
The author does not resemble your idea of a former serious smoker. There Hens is, blue-eyed and dimpled, in his author photo on the back flap. He looks as if he were ready to bag organic carrots during his weekend stint at the food co-op.
 

Author: Gregor Hens
Translated by: Jen Calleja
Publisher: Other Press
Price: $16.95

Indeed, he writes, he is a serious cyclist, a participant in triathlons and a member of the German Alpine Association. He’s been a health nut all along, at least in between long bouts of smoking. I can’t decide if this is suspicious or insane, like that famous photograph of the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson, taking a deep drag on a cigarette in the locker room during halftime of Super Bowl I in 1967.
 
“I’ve smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes in my life, and each one of those cigarettes meant something to me,” Hens writes. He goes on: “I’ve smoked cold cigarette butts, cigars, cigarillos, bidis, kreteks, spliffs and straw. I’ve missed flights because of cigarettes and burnt holes in trousers and car seats. I’ve singed my eyelashes and eyebrows, fallen asleep while smoking and dreamt of cigarettes — of relapses and fires and bitter withdrawal.”
 
He sees this book as a chance finally to put the urge behind him, to comprehend it, seal it and bury it. He writes about his childhood. His father smoked so much that the author thought smoking was the older man’s job. His mother, a stylish woman who drove a steel-blue Range Rover, smoked more when she was depressed.
 
There’s a faded romance in the European brand names of the cigarettes he or his family members smoked: Finas Kyriazi Frères; Kims; Murattis; filterless Senior Services; Erntes; Van Nelle Halfzwares.
 
Like any author worth reading, Hens is sometimes best when he goes off-topic, dispatching obiter dicta. He is brutal about the Midwest. (“The most insignificant city in the United States is Columbus, Ohio.”)
 
This book is not a deep dive into smoking and literature, or into smoking and films. He doesn’t go out of his way to conjure the romance of two lit cigarettes and a corner table. Nicotine mostly omits the social pleasures of smoking. Hens is, with a metaphorical carton of American Spirits under his arm, a smoking section of one.
 
His lapidary prose will sometimes put you in mind of the chain-smoking Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s, though Knausgaard is generally more penetrating. The small black-and-white photographs in Nicotine recall the images in some of W G Sebald’s books.
 
Someday, surely, smoking will be outlawed. Who will smoke the last unfiltered Camel? Some of us who quit years ago like to imagine that we will start again at the end of our lives. We agree with the English writer Charles Lamb, who hoped that “the last breath I draw in this world will be through a pipe, and exhaled in a pun.”

© 2017 The New York Times News Service