A lasting affair - smoking - How To Forget The Election - Cover Story

National Review, Nov 25, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

I WAS a juvenile delinquent and began smoking at 15. The addiction was so strong that I soon found it influencing my life. Seniors at the Millbrook School were solemnly invited to have after-dinner coffee with the headmaster on Wednesday and Saturday, at which moments we were permitted to smoke, and did so lustily. That was high wartime in America, a year and a half after Pearl Harbor. The war created a labor shortage, and students were asked to volunteer to pick apples at neglected orchards nearby. The pay was fifty cents per hour (approximately the minimum wage). I promptly volunteered for two hours' apple-picking the following afternoon, the whisper having circulated that Millbrook's labor force would not be chaperoned, which meant . . . Exactly. For those who have not tried picking apples, I warn that it is as disagreeable as any activity devised by nature to wring bread from the soil. This is because in order to spare the withes of the tree, one is required to grip them solidly with the left hand, while the right twists the apple free.

Apple-picking tested my loyalty to cigarettes, and I think that I even had a seizure of infidelity; but cigarettes remained important boosters to my life. In the last year of the war, cigarettes were scarce in the domestic market. But every American civilian stranded with weird brands, fitfully available, had at least one brother, son, or cousin in the army. American ingenuity immediately went to the rescue. My habit was to go to the PX and order ten cases of Lucky Strikes, and mail them off to two of my especially stricken sisters. But, of course, the Establishment caught on to the bizarre 1,000 per cent increase in cigarette sales at army camps. Effective at 0100 on 6 Nov 1944 we were permitted to buy a maximum of two packs, which made life tedious, during the half hour we were free to patronize the PX. It was as simple as that you bought your two packs, and rejoined the line. Ten minutes later you were at the head of the line, bought another two packs; and so on, until time ran out.

It was two years later that I confronted the abject state of my servitude to tobacco. It was Lent -- even at Yale -- and of course I had to give up something. My father had a close friend and associate who had a regime to which he had submitted rigorously throughout his adult lifetime. It was: No cigarettes until sundown. Mr. Montgomery seemed to live happily with this regime, and I made the pledge.

It so affected me that I found myself doing the inconceivable. There I was at college, studying, editing, even teaching. The day was never long enough; I'd turn off my light at about two in the morning. And what was I doing on the typical afternoon? I was going to the movies! Yes, to accelerate the movement of the day toward sundown. Nobody was permitted to smoke in movie houses, and so it did not feel a burden to be without. At the end of the movie it would be -- dark! I'd light up and walk happily back to my room or the library or the Yale Daily News, free until dawn.

Six years after we were married, my wife and I awoke with heavy heads, following the celebration of the New Year the night before. We stared at each other in self-disgust and decided jointly that the time had come for a little mortification of the flesh: We would give up smoking. The following morning, we decided we would divorce. That translated, of course, into: One of us had to resume smoking. We drew cards. I lost. That is how I then thought of it, but my dear wife continues to smoke; so that, in fact, I won.

It was a dreadful week, kicking the habit. But of course these things do work out, and a couple of smokeless years went by before I thought to accept the cigar routinely handed out to gentlemen after dinner, when the ladies had withdrawn and the brandy was served.

I don't remember whether I inhaled, or choked, but I do remember that the cigar engendered no craving for the cigarette, none at all. But, in due course, I did begin -- to inhale.

A moment's pause here is warranted. The true believer in cigars does not inhale, satisfying himself, much as wine tasters do, with the essence, not the deposit. No doubt the habit of inhaling affects one's taste in cigars. I enjoy a variety, but I have one true love, and this is largely because when you inhale, you want a very easy draw.

A wonderfully thoughtful young man, under the guidance, I have reason to believe, of his father, on arriving at my boat for a weekend's sail presented me with a bulky package. The most prodigious variety of cigars ever assembled in a single container, specially got together by Trader Fred (Mascolo). Fred, as he is universally known, lives and practices his profession in Martha's Vineyard, where he has a reputation equivalent to that of Davidoff in Geneva. The standouts in my basket were the Cuesta-Reys: the 8-9-8, Cabinet. No. 95, and Cabinet No. 1884. These were grand, unassertive, deeply satisfying. There were some lovely Hemingway Short Stories, little cigars, about which, once again, a comment. It is that cigars that are too small, approaching cigarette size, are to be avoided, in part because they tempt you in the direction of cigarettes, in part because there isn't enough heft in them to husband a true cigar flavor. The Short Stories were fine. There were also AF Classics and Signature. And then . . . then . . . the Hemingway Masterpiece. These were nine-inch tree trunks, the very same cigar got together for the President of the United States when he summered at Martha's Vineyard that year and blew smoke all over the place.