Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Nicotine
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 11/25/1965
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: German
http://www.otherpress.com/authors/gregor-hens/ * https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/nicotine-gregor-hens/513140/ * https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/the-smoking-diary-of-gregor-hens/#
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 25, 1965, in Germany.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and translator.
WRITINGS
Also translator of works by Will Self, Jonathan Lethem, and George Packer.
SIDELIGHTS
Writer Gregor Hens has translated the works of several Anglophone authors into his native German, including Will Self, Jonathan Lethem, and George Packer. He has also translated Thomas Bernhard’s Trilogie der Künste into English. Hens’s short stories have been collected in the anthology Transfer Lounge: Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichten. In addition, he has written two novels, Himmelsturz and In diesem neuen Licht, as well as the memoir Nicotine, his first book to appear in English.
As indicated by the title, Hens reflects on his life as a smoker in Nicotine. His father, grandfather, mother, and aunt all smoked heavily through most of their adult lives, and Hens was mesmerized by cigarettes and smoking from an early age. He remembers how, at age six, he was charmed when his mother handed him a lighted Kim from which he was to set off the family’s New Year’s fireworks. While taking his first puff from this cigarette, Hens writes that he immediately felt something special: “I . . . experienced an inner world . . . I was offered an experience that was narratable for the very first time.” Hens believes that smoking gave him access to an enhanced perception of reality and permanently changed his patterns of thinking and behaving, allowing him to become a writer.
Yet much as Hens loved smoking, he eventually gave it up out of concern for his health after learning of a family friend’s fatal cancer. As Atlantic reviewer Sophie Gilbert pointed out, although nicotine has often been considered more benign than street drugs such as heroin or cocaine, in actuality it is far more addictive and deadly. In the United States in 2015, deaths related to smoking outnumbered fatal drug overdoses by nearly a factor of ten. Although he owns up to his addiction to nicotine and the damaging consequences of smoking, Hens refrains from lecturing his readers about the many health risks of cigarettes. He writes nostalgically about the euphoria he had always found in smoking. He also writes about how he struggled to quit smoking. He describes the strenuous exercise routines he adopted to improve his health, which included cycling and mountain climbing. But when a serious bike accident sent him to the hospital for eight days, he succumbed to temptation immediately after his release. Still in considerable pain, he lit up in a bar. “I staggered, held on tightly to the rickety balustrade running around the bar and cried with happiness,” he writes. “My legs were shaking. I was back.” Reflecting on this relapse, which was temporary, Hens stated: “I sometimes wish that . . . something comparably dreadful would throw me off track [again]. Because if something bad, something really awful happened, I could start smoking again.”
In her review of Nicotine in the Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert described the book as “an addiction memoir that doesn’t deal in horror stories, but in nostalgic pangs.” Noting the author’s insistence that every single cigarette that he had ever smoked had been a good experience despite its physically toxic effects, Gilbert expressed willingness to believe that “maybe smoking really is his muse.” Nicholas Lezzard, writing in the Spectator, expressed a similar view and found himself persuaded by Hens’s argument that smoking provided a means of achieving heightened thoughts and creative expression.
In a review in the New Statesman, Stuart Evers identified several weaknesses in the book. Although he acknowledged that Hens explores in detail his introduction to cigarettes and his efforts to deal with his addition, Evers thought that Hens “seldom examines the decades that he spent smoking” and “does not go deep enough into the smoker’s psyche, into the self-delusion of smoking, into how it affects the way one’s life is lived.” As a result, Evers found that Nicotine lacks cohesion and comes across more as a collection of anecdotes and musings than a finished memoir. While impressed with Hens’s obvious literary talents, Evers felt that despite the memoir, despite its concision and “vivid language,” is not consistently convincing.
New York Times contributor Dwight Garner also suggested that the book “doesn’t always click,” adding that some passages seem “close to psychobabble.” Even so, Garner maintained that when the book “stays dry, earthy and combustible, like a Virginia tobacco blend, it has a lot to say and says it well.” In a more favorable review, a contributor to Kirkus Reviews called Hens an “idiosyncratic stylist” whose thoughts on smoking are “both poetic and unforgiving.” Writing in the New Yorker, Joan Acocella recommended the book highly, describing it as at once “dark, lovely, [and] funny.” Washington Post reviewer Timothy R. Smith hailed Nicotine as an “honest exposition of the emotional complexity of quitting” cigarette smoking. Comparing the book to the writing of W.G. Sebald, Smith described Nicotine as a “a slim but plaintive [memorial] to a lost love–a philosophical medication on the nature of addiction, the listlessness, the frustration and the sense of grief one feels at the loss of a fix. “
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Hens, Gergor, Nicotine, translated from the German by Jen Calleja, Other Press (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2016, review of Nicotine.
New Statesman, February 19, 2016, Stuart Evers, review of Nicotine, p. 55.
New Yorker, January 9, 2017, Joan Acocella, review of Nicotine.
New York Times, January 11, 2017, Dwight Garner, review of Nicotine, p. C5.
Publishers Weekly, October 24, 2016, review of Nicotine, p. 71.
Spectator, December 12, 2015, Nicholas Lezard, review of Nicotine, p. 90.
Washington Post, January 18, 2017, Timothy R. Smith, review of Nicotine.
ONLINE
Atlantic Online, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (January 18, 2017), Sophie Gilbert, review of Nicotine.
Counter Punch, https://www.counterpunch.org/ (April 28, 2017), Charles R. Larson, review of Nicotine.
Globe and Mail Online, https://www.theglobeandmail.com (January 6, 2017), Vit Wagner, review of Nicotine.
Other Press Web Site, http://www.otherpress.com/ (July 19, 2017), Hens profile.
Gregor Hens
Gregor Hens is a German writer and translator. He has translated Will Self, Jonathan Lethem, and George Packer into German.
for OTHER PRESS
On Writing, Smoking, and the Habit of Transcendence
Gregor Hens’s Nicotine describes a life spent chasing moments of heightened power.
Kenishirotie / photomelon / Fotolia / Paul Spella / The Atlantic
SOPHIE GILBERT JAN 18, 2017 CULTURE
Share Tweet …
TEXT SIZE
Like The Atlantic? Subscribe to The Atlantic Daily, our free weekday email newsletter.
Email
SIGN UP
Writers have long found rich fodder for their work in their leisure pursuits. John Updike, writing about golf in The New York Times in 1973, described the pastime as “a non-chemical hallucinogen” that “breaks the human body into components so strangely elongated and so tenuously linked, yet with anxious little bunches of hyper-consciousness and undue effort bulging here and there, along with rotating blind patches and a sort of cartilaginous euphoria.” Sketching out a particularly lucid paragraph about the act of preparing for a stroke, he confessed, “got me so excited I had to rush out into the yard and hit a few shots, even though it was pitch dark, and only the daffodils showed.”
RELATED STORY
Finding Meaning in Going Nowhere
Updike’s experience of transcendence while playing golf—his sense of tapping in to a kind of acute concentration that alters perception—is echoed vividly in the German writer Gregor Hens’s new memoir of sorts, Nicotine. It’s a slight and meandering work that essentially recounts the author’s life in cigarettes, but its most vital passages describe how smoking shifted Hens’s reality, allowing him to access a meditative state in which he felt truly connected with himself and the world. Describing his very first cigarette, Hens writes, “I not only saw images, not only heard single words or sentences, but experienced an inner world ... I was offered an experience that was narratable for the very first time.”
In that sense, Nicotine enters a kind of sub-genre of literary memoirs focused around a single practice or obsession, in which the object or activity enables the writer to achieve sharper focus, heightened consciousness, and creative fire. Like Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Updike’s writing on golf, it illuminates the writerly quest for the elusive state the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi named, simply, “flow.” Smoking, Hens seems to believe, transformed him into a writer by expanding his sense of what was real and what was perceivable. It physically and irreparably altered the pathways in his brain. And it punctuated and constructed the order of his professional life. “Even though I’ve not smoked for a long time, I still think and work in a constantly repeated rhythm of about half an hour,” he writes.
But unlike, say, running or golf, or even taking minute doses of LSD to increase focus, smoking is, of course, an extremely toxic habit. While Nicotine is at its most interesting when Hens expounds on his chosen subject as though it’s the magical source of his inspiration, he considers it primarily as a mental act rather than a physical one. The great irony of Nicotine is that Hens no longer smokes. So his meditation on cigarettes and their transcendent power has the feel of an artist chasing something out of reach: half an ode to the pleasures and promise of smoking, half an elegy for the power he’s lost in giving it up.
Addiction memoirs tend to be stories of recovery, of battling demons and emerging stronger on the other side. But nicotine is different, and so is Nicotine. It’s a truth universally repeated that as a drug, nicotine is more addictive than heroin or cocaine, but it’s considerably less mind-altering. The vast majority of smokers are high-functioning addicts, even as they’re killing themselves at vastly higher rates: An estimated 480,000 adults die each year in the U.S. from smoking-related diseases, almost ten times the number who fatally overdosed on drugs in 2015.
Hens is aware of the bargain he’s made on behalf of his health. As a nonsmoker, he writes, he exercises daily and climbs mountains, switching out one compulsive behavior for other, considerably more healthful ones. But even a short passage about how cycling is his strongest physical discipline quickly evolves into a description of a terrifying road accident, in which he hits the side of a delivery van at forty kilometers an hour. After eight days in bed, he painfully makes his way to a bar near his apartment where he smokes his first cigarette in eight years: “I staggered, held on tightly to the rickety balustrade running around the bar and cried with happiness. My legs were shaking. I was back.”
The bargain then, is a a reluctant and fragile one: It’s harder to rhapsodize over the ecstasy of breathing clearly than it is to ponder the promise of the first cigarette in a crisp new pack. Nicotine is laced with moments that capture the truths most ex-smokers would shudder to admit. Seeing a hypnotherapist, Hens confesses, “I sometimes wish that I would have another accident. I wish that something comparably dreadful would throw me off track. Because if something bad, something really awful happened, I could start smoking again.”
It’s hard to assess where addiction ends and obsession begins. Often, Hens seems to be mistaking the euphoric state induced by nicotine intoxication for something more potent, more otherworldly. Certainly, his writing about smoking is focused, clear, and lyrical, while on other subjects he tends to wander about the page. After a period of abstinence, he writes, “When I smoke the first cigarette—and I always smoke it alone—it’s as if I can look inside my own brain, as if I can discover every thought in its formation, every thrill in a neural pathway, every synaptic leap, every seminal feeling developing from my thoughts.” Even thinking about the sensation of smoking offers a glimpse of the same feeling, the elevated pulse, the heightened consciousness.
For smokers, this description might spark the same rapid heartbeat, the same liminal hit. For ex-smokers, Nicotine should probably come with a trigger warning. Hens writes so fondly of cigarettes and their role in his life that it’s almost difficult to understand why he gave up: The reasons, he writes, are so obvious that they don’t need explaining, but their absence is nevertheless notable. Nicotine is an addiction memoir that doesn’t deal in horror stories, but in nostalgic pangs. There are a handful of scenes that shock (Hens had his first cigarette at the age of five, when his mother gave him one to light a firework with and told him to puff on it to keep it lit), but Hens seems to believe that smoking made him the person—the writer—he is now. “I regret nothing,” he writes. “Every cigarette I’ve ever smoked was a good cigarette.”
But perhaps Hens is right: Maybe smoking really is his muse. After all, Nicotine is his first book translated into English, his most high-profile published work. Still, if the process of writing the book seems to have involved a kind of exquisite torture, it also brings him closer to resolution. Toward the end of the book, within the space of eight pages, Nicotine goes from pondering the “giddy clarity” of cigarettes, their “private, tranquil joy,” to an almost hysterical aversion to second-hand fumes. “Smoke,” he writes, “makes it apparent that something permeates us that has just escaped the body, the moist, bacteria-populated bodily orifice of a stranger.” With this, he takes the first step toward the non-smoker’s self-righteous disgust, and, it might seem, toward freedom.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Nicholas Lezard
Spectator. 329.9772 (Dec. 12, 2015): p90.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Listen
Full Text:
Nicotine
by Gregor Hens, translated from the German by Jen Calleja
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 224 ISBN 9781910695074
Spectator Bookshop, 10.99 [pounds sterling]
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! Vedra come arrivera a vedersiintero.' '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. In this manner, I was offered
an experience that was narratable for the
very first time.
If this strikes you as precious, as something too far removed from the conventionally expressed experience, i.e. 'I felt sick', then this book may be wasted on you. I could go so far as to say that smoking is wasted on you. But I suspect that even the most lumpen of smokers has an inkling of the potential nicotine has to increase self-awareness, to create a fermata, a suspension of time, a fag break in which an inner world can awaken. Even the cigarette smoked while performing a task--say, writing a book review--allows for and creates a series of micro-pauses for contemplation. You smoke to think; or to suspend thought. Call it meditation and it's more or less the same thing.
It is, of course, a disgusting habit. Again, I use the word advisedly: it interferes with the process of taste. Again and again Hens alludes to the way that there is something transgressive, and wrong, about smoking. He spots a smoking area in an airport, 'a kind of suffocation chamber'. He is, he says, 'repulsed and overjoyed'. What other habit is going to allow you to ram those two adjectives next to each other? And what other habit allows disgust and desire to work hand in hand? There's a beautiful scene towards the end of the book when a girl, long-desired, sits on the end of his bed the morning after a party; he realises he is about to be kissed, but at the same time realises his mouth has turned overnight into, basically, an ashtray. So she lights a cigarette herself and then passes it to him. And then takes it back to her own lips.
She bent over me and released the smoke,
and the shimmering blue veil that caught the
first autumnal sunshine sank over my face
and caressed me. A kiss, better than a kiss ...
Well, it is. Hens has--so far--been successful in his relinquishing of the smoke; but 'I envy anyone that can relive this experience'.
Hens, Gregor: NICOTINE
Kirkus Reviews. (Nov. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Hens, Gregor NICOTINE Other Press (Adult Nonfiction) $16.95 1, 10 ISBN: 978-1-59051-793-2
A memoir about cigarette smoking whose meditations provide an intellectual frame for the addictive habit.In his unorthodox and candid memoir, German writer and translator Hens discusses his longtime addiction to cigarettes, his eventual recovery, and the ongoing battle with his addictive personality to fight the ever present urge to smoke. However, the author's writing surpasses the redemptive arc of many other addiction narratives. Hens does not portray himself as a pitiable figure seeking sympathy, nor does he tout a sense of moral superiority for kicking his habit. Instead, he offers a meditative, philosophical inquiry into his addiction and the pleasure he derived from smoking. From an account of his very first cigarette, which was handed to him as a child of 5 or 6 by his mother to light a New Year's rocket, to a description of the nicotine rush as the moment "I became myself for the very first time" to an exegesis on the psychology of the "last" cigarette, Hens is sentimental about the lost pleasures of smoking, but he does not dwell in nostalgia. The author is interested in plumbing his memory for vignettes that narrate but do not explain away his addiction. For Hens, the greatest pleasure of smoking is the quotidian, the reflective moment afforded by smokers to observe the world and themselves more attentively. Moreover, the author does not preach the negative health effects of smoking. As someone who admits to smoking more than 100,000 cigarettes before quitting, in his postscript, Hens rather fittingly invites readers to enjoy a smoke. The author is an idiosyncratic stylist whose sentences are often terse and elliptical, and Calleja's translation ably captures his unique voice. In a book that is as much a paean to smoking as it is a eulogy, Hens is both poetic and unforgiving about the pleasures and pains of smoking.
Nicotine
Publishers Weekly. 263.43 (Oct. 24, 2016): p71.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Nicotine
Gregory Hens, trans. from the German by Jen Calleja. Other Press, $16.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-59051-793-2
This book is part memoir and part meditation on the power of memory as shaped by addiction; it is not a self-help manual in the vein of "How I quit smoking and how you can too!" Hens's short book is an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking essay on the grip of nicotine, how it shaped his life, and how it still factors into his life despite having quit smoking decades ago. Born in 1965 Germany, Hens grew up with cigarettes as an integral part of his childhood. His early memories include taking family trips in cars filled with smoke and watching his aunt share her monthly allowance from the cigarette company where she worked. Cigarettes continued as a constant companion throughout his life, never more so than when he tried to quit. Smokers, former smokers, and even those who have never smoked will appreciate the desperate humor in Hens 's description of a smoker's nicotine deprivation when crammed into a plane, and the physical meltdown upon finally being released onto the sidewalk outside an airport. Hens gives readers an understanding of what it is like to have an addiction, albeit a legal one, and how the end of an addiction can be felt as a loss. Jan.)
Low-tar brand
Stuart Evers
New Statesman. 145.5302 (Feb. 19, 2016): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Nicotine
Gregor Hens. Translated by Jen Calleja
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 159pp, 12.99 [pounds sterling]
Real-life tales of addiction occupy an ever-popular, if squalid, space in the literary landscape: squalid not so much because of their subject matter but because of the motivation behind both their composition and their consumption. No matter their literary worth, no matter the noblest of intentions, any such writer knows that a good proportion of the readership is motivated by voyeurism: "straights" wanting vicariously to experience the swelling, blooming highs and the guttering, stinking lows without ever having to turn to Anna Kavan's heroin or Charles Bukowski's morning beer. It's a trade-off, a literary contract: I'll spill what it's like, if you're willing to follow me to wherever I might wander.
It is a contract that works well for the Four Horsemen of addiction--sex, booze, drugs, gambling. For other addictions, the returns are rather small: they lack dirt. For the reader, the short-term risks appear too small; the desperation for another hit not desperate enough. This is perhaps the reason why the most read and probably most important account of cigarette addiction is not contained in a memoir or novel--not even one as consistently inventive as Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience--but in a self-help book. Allen Carr's necessarily visceral tale of his addiction to tobacco in his bestseller The Easy Way to Stop Smoking is totemic in the literature of smoking. No other description has been read more often, nor written with such a clear-eyed understanding of the precepts of real-life tales of addiction. It has a moment of rock bottom and a road to recovery. It has sympathy for fellow addicts and it offers real hope.
There is a similar story recounted by Gregor Hens in Nicotine--a memoiristic essay, finely translated by Jen Calleja--that plunders his obsession with smoking. Hens pere is an 80-a-day man, "a cigarette with a body attached to it", to borrow Raymond Carver's striking self-portrait. One day, he is lighting up when looks down and sees that he already has a cigarette burning in the ashtray. "He understood," Hens writes, "that he no longer had his cigarette consumption in hand, control had slipped away from him." He passes from one state of being to another.
"I've always either smoked or done intensive endurance sport," Hens rather smugly points out, as if this is a commonality between all smokers. Later, he hits on something far more universal: "Whether I actually smoke or not," he writes, "my personality is a smoker's personality." It's the kind of spare, insightful line that Hens is excellent at teasing out. Unfortunately, there are rather fewer of them than one might hope.
Although Hens does not smoke now--he tells us this repeatedly, a leitmotif that many a reformed smoker will recognise--he seldom examines the decades that he spent smoking. He does not go deep enough into the smoker's psyche, into the self-delusion of smoking, into how it affects the way one's life is lived: when smoking becomes not just the punctuation but the grammar of day-to-day existence.
Hens is more concerned with beginnings--how he became hooked, the cigarettes he first sucked on. This gives the essay the feeling of a loose assortment of recollections on a theme rather than a cohesive whole. There is no doubt that Hens is a hugely talented writer with an exceptional eye for the telling detail--his description of his first night in the US, for example, is a master-class in concise and vivid language--but Nicotine doesn't quite convince as a whole. I couldn't help but feel that he is, despite his protestations, more of a dilettante than an addict.
The foreword by Will Self does more to address a life of addiction and obsession in 12 pages than Hens manages in more than ten times that number. Hens's family history, trips to hypnotherapists and relapses feel like mere vapes in comparison to Self's lungfuls of Gauloises Disque Bleu. While Fitzcarraldo Editions is probably the most exciting publishing house in the UK right now, Nicotine is not as addictive as one might expect--nor quite as persuasive as its foreword.
Stuart Evers's books include "Ten Stories About Smoking" (Picador)
Book World: The emotional up and down of lighting up
Timothy R. Smith
The Washington Post. (Jan. 18, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Byline: Timothy R. Smith
Nicotine
By Gregor Hens. Translated from German by Jen Calleja
Other Press. 176 pp. $16.95
---
When I was a boy, I would plead with my dad to quit smoking -- long, tearful entreaties that fell on stiff ears.
"Uh huh," he'd say. "Maybe later."
Sometimes, I hid his cigarettes under a potted plant or stashed them in the cupboard under the stairs, behind an old rotary telephone and a box of books.
Funny, then, that years later, a smoker myself, I would buy him a carton of Marlboro Blacks on the way to the hospice where he eventually died of cancer. "Maybe later" came to an urn.
I've smoked, by my estimate, 5,023 cigars since my first: a Monte Cristo white label, bought for the name when I was a college freshman. Of all those cigars, I never enjoyed one with my dad.
He asked once, maybe three months into his illness. I was smoking a cigar under a tree in the front yard, reading, when he wobbled out. We sat and chatted, and he asked me for a cigar, or maybe he suggested that he'd like to have one with me one day. I demurred, uncomfortable given his condition. Perhaps I hadn't accepted that he would be dead so soon. Perhaps he had accepted that he wouldn't be alive much longer. That was the last chance. I cry just to think of it.
There's always the person you want to share a smoke with. For the German writer Gregor Hens, it was his grandfather. "He died too soon," Hens writes in his book "Nicotine."
"I'm convinced that he died because his cigarettes were taken away from him when he was admitted to hospital after a fall, even though he smoked only five to ten a day for sixty years."
Hens, though, decided to kick his cigarette addiction once and for all after a close friend's mother died of cancer.
"My decision owed less to the fear of an early death (what, after all, is too early?) and a lot more to the immediate worry about my quality of life," he writes. "I wasn't doing well."
"Nicotine" is a chronicle of his year overcoming the habit. The book is a slim but plaintive memoria to a lost love -- a philosophical meditation on the nature of addiction, the listlessness, the frustration and the sense of grief one feels at the loss of a fix. Its structure is reminiscent of the memoryscapes of W.G. Sebald, including the strange, captionless photographs. This intelligent, literary volume plumbs Mark Twain, Italo Svevo and Van Morrison.
But make no mistake: "Nicotine" isn't a self-help book. It's not an anti-smoking screed. Nor is it a love sonnet to tobacco. It's an honest exposition of the emotional complexity of quitting.
Hens' chances of kicking the habit are poor. Only about 8 percent of smokers quit permanently, he notes. And this isn't the first time he's tried.
The truth is that no matter how long you've stopped smoking, you're never fully recovered -- and temptations and reminders abound. Hens recounts such moments with honesty and solemnity. One day he's strolling through Brooklyn when he sees a young couple lighting a cigarette: "They straighten up and take the first drag. ... I close my eyes; I know what they're feeling."
Hens also remembers the specific locations of his favorite smokes: by lakes, in airports, after a bicycle accident when the smoke salved his pain, shooting fireworks on New Year's, when he was 5 or 6 years old. That was the first cigarette. He visits a hypnotist to whom he admits that sometimes he wishes he'd have another accident, so he'd have reason to light up again.
"No one, least of all myself, could criticize me, no one would condemn me for it," he says.
But he's managing his addiction well enough.
"The craving seldom overpowers me and, when it does, I know how to bypass it," he notes.
So what of me and cigar 5,024? I plan on smoking it Wednesday night.
Caring friends and overbearing doctors often suggest I quit.
"Uh huh," I say. "Maybe later."
I know where that might end, but so does life, and there's no stopping the inevitable. Why not enjoy it? "There's peace in a Larranaga, there's calm in a Henry Clay," as Kipling put it.
I like Hens' opinion on the matter: "Light up if you feel like it. ... Smoke one for me."
I'll smoke one for Dad, too.
Burning Desire That Lingers
Dwight Garner
The New York Times. (Jan. 11, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC5(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Listen
Full Text:
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 Sept. 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.
''Every form of cigarette ad gives me a pang of longing, every scrunched-up, carelessly thrown-away cigarette packet at a bus stop, every trod-on cigarette butt, every beautiful woman holding a cigarette between her fingers or just looking like she could be holding one,'' he writes. ''My reading chair in Columbus gives me a pang, and M.'s balcony in Berlin, and my old Jeep because I've smoked some of the best cigarettes while driving.''
Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
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,'' Mr. 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 Freres; Kims; Murattis; filterless Senior Services; Erntes; Van Nelle Halfzwares.
This book takes us to unusual and evocative locations, too, such as the Frisian island of Borkum. Mr. Hens recounts a drive to the German city of Balderschwang, which sounds like a word an American politician would utter when something livelier than ''poppycock'' was required.
He is especially good on how those who quit become vicarious smokers. ''Sometimes I walk around the city and imagine that others are smoking on my behalf,'' he writes. ''I silently thank the smokers in front of the cafes and office buildings and in smoking areas, imagining that they do it for me, for my inner contentment. I have people smoke for me.''
Like any author worth reading, Mr. 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.'')
He's interesting about aphorisms and our need to attach them, usually erroneously, to famous people. He considers how often we utter the phrase ''no worries'' when, in fact, we are murderously aggrieved. He charts the passing of time by noting how the white tennis balls of his youth have become neon green.
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. Mr. 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 Mr. Knausgaard is generally more penetrating. The small black-and-white photographs in ''Nicotine'' recall the images in some of W. G. Sebald's books.
This edition of ''Nicotine'' includes an introduction by the English writer Will Self that belongs in the hall of fame of bad introductions. Mr. Self (never has his name seemed so apt) tries to one-up Mr. Hens by bragging at length about his own peerless nicotine addiction. This introduction is profitably torn out, the way smokers of unfiltered cigarettes tear the filters from Marlboros.
This seems like the place to mention that Mr. Hens compares the cottony insides of a cigarette filter, perfectly, to ''artichoke hair.''
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.''
NicotineBy Gregor HensTranslated by Jen CallejaIllustrated. 176 pages. Other Press. $16.95.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: PHOTO; Gregor Hens (PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER VON FELBERT)
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
Nicholas Lezard
(Photo: Getty)
12 December 2015 9:00 AM
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Whatsapp
Nicotine
Gregor Hens, translated from the German by Jen Calleja
Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp.224, £12.99
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. In this manner, I was offered an experience that was narratable for the very first time.
If this strikes you as precious, as something too far removed from the conventionally expressed experience, i.e. ‘I felt sick’, then this book may be wasted on you. I could go so far as to say that smoking is wasted on you. But I suspect that even the most lumpen of smokers has an inkling of the potential nicotine has to increase self-awareness, to create a fermata, a suspension of time, a fag break in which an inner world can awaken. Even the cigarette smoked while performing a task — say, writing a book review — allows for and creates a series of micro-pauses for contemplation. You smoke to think; or to suspend thought. Call it meditation and it’s more or less the same thing.
It is, of course, a disgusting habit. Again, I use the word advisedly: it interferes with the process of taste. Again and again Hens alludes to the way that there is something transgressive, and wrong, about smoking. He spots a smoking area in an airport, ‘a kind of suffocation chamber’. He is, he says, ‘repulsed and overjoyed’. What other habit is going to allow you to ram those two adjectives next to each other? And what other habit allows disgust and desire to work hand in hand? There’s a beautiful scene towards the end of the book when a girl, long-desired, sits on the end of his bed the morning after a party; he realises he is about to be kissed, but at the same time realises his mouth has turned overnight into, basically, an ashtray. So she lights a cigarette herself and then passes it to him. And then takes it back to her own lips.
She bent over me and released the smoke, and the shimmering blue veil that caught the first autumnal sunshine sank over my face and caressed me. A kiss, better than a kiss …
Well, it is. Hens has — so far — been successful in his relinquishing of the smoke; but ‘I envy anyone that can relive this experience’.
Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £10.99 Tel: 08430 600033
APRIL 28, 2017
Review: Gregor Hens’ “Nicotine”
by CHARLES R. LARSON
The cover of Gregor Hens’ non-proselyting memoir, Nicotine, shows a bisected cigarette, complete with filter, and cut down the middle so the tobacco is visible. The book itself is neither a warning about the consequences of smoking, nor a diatribe aimed at either side of the issue. Rather, Nicotine is simply one former addict’s account of his smoking, from the first cigarette when he was a child, until the last one after previous attempts to stop. The writing of the memoir was, hopefully, cathartic; but we don’t know if Hens has remained clean. We all know that stopping smoking is never easy and many smokers lapse, yet in recent years there’s pretty remarkable evidence that a decisive number of people have managed to stop.
Will Self, one of Hens’ friends who wrote the introduction to the volume, comments on his own smoking life, mentioning—among other things—the enormous expense. “Ridiculous, I know—but that’s how I ended up with a £15 per day Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robusto [cigar] habit on top of the cigarettes.” He also recalls the years when smoking was permitted virtually everywhere. In 1987, after he hopped off the London underground, a fellow smoker “dropped his still smoldering cigarette in the grooves of a tread [part of the floor of a carriage], nicotine1and it was carried into the oily, fluffy, highly combustible netherworld. The ensuing fire killed thirty-one, injured a further one hundred, and put a stop to smoking on the London underground forever.”
If you’re of a certain age and a non-smoker, you can probably remember a time when it appeared as if everyone else did. I recall teaching creative writing classes in the 1970s when it seemed as if almost everyone smoked, and I remember, also, a couple of students who sat in the hall in order to avoid the classroom fog.
And I certainly have vivid memories of the several occasions when I lit up a cigarette itself. Especially the time I let a bidi in Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan, one night, and immediately felt as if I might fly right off the fort. Jaisalmer is such a magical place that I wouldn’t have been surprised if a flying carpet had passed by. I was flying myself, and hadn’t been able to stop the temptation to purchase a package of bidis for about three cents. But one was enough. I think I brought the rest of the cigarettes back to the United States, but I never smoked another one.
Hens’ first experience with a cigarette was one New Year’s Eve when he was about five or six. His mother (a smoker) handed him a lit cigarette so that he could use it to light the fuse of one of the rockets his father purchased to celebrate the occasion. When the cigarette appeared as if it would burn out, his mother told him to take a puff on it. At the time, he considered the lit cigarette the greatest gift that one person could give another. After initially coughing and then another puff, he tells us, “I felt a mental tingling, as delirium, and I remember that my brothers and the adults present, even my parents, appeared strange to me. Triggered by the nicotine penetrating the mucous membranes in my mouth and nose, entering my bloodstream and within a few seconds shooting into my young, malleable brain, I felt and saw, perhaps for the first time, a great experiential context.”
Afterwards, he could hardly wait until the next New Year’s Eve.
He grew up in a family of smokers. His aunt worked for a cigarette manufacturer in Bremen. When she retired, in addition to her retirement, she received a weekly stipend of cartons of cigarettes guaranteed for a hundred years. His father smoked so much that Hens believed that smoking was his father’s job. The secondary smoke in their house was overwhelming but even worse when they were in the family car. His father would chain smoke, his mother would also puff away, and the windows of the car, of course, were closed. Riding with the family, he would “routinely feel ill.” Sometimes the smoke was so thick that he would get out of the car and throw up. But, then, one day his father abruptly stopped smoking. Cold turkey. Well, not exactly. His office had caught on fire.
Much later, Hens would also stop, but this was way after smoking—by his estimation—100,000 cigarettes and his truthful observation that “Every cigarette I’ve ever smoked was a good cigarette.” That’s why it’s so difficult for most people to stop. When Hens was at boarding school, all he wanted to do was read books and smoke. Ideally, at the same time, “a dominating factor in my life.” Once when he tried to stop, with the aid of a hypnotist, he was asked how often he thought about smoking. Here’s his answer, which I assume is typical of addicted people:
“Every time I see a smoker, every time I smell cigarette smoke, when my neighbor steps out onto his balcony to have a break from his many children and lights up…. Every form of cigarette ad gives me a pang of longing, every scrunched-up, carelessly thrown away cigarette packet at a bus stop, every trod-on cigarette butt, every beautiful woman holding a cigarette between her fingers or just looking like she could be holding one…. When I’m working I feel a compulsion, when I hold a pen between my fingers, when I’m hungry, when I’ve just eaten, when I drink coffee or tea or when I’m only thinking about drinking coffee or tea….” That’s only part of Hens’ list.
But he stopped.
There were two reasons, the first because he has always been a runner, entering triathlons, and the smoking was clearly inhibiting his breathing. But the other explanation is more interesting. Hens writes of a book by Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious, and he quotes a passage: “Negating an act is somehow similar to changing the direction of a moving body. A break, a zero velocity, is necessary in between switching from one to the other.” We have control over our habits; we can change them. A learned behavior can be unlearned. What it takes is discovering a new way to circumvent the addiction.
We should all be so lucky. But it worked for Gregor Hens who states that people can find new ways to alter their addictions, especially when the problem is a learned behavior. Still—and I find this quite charming—Hens writes, “”Sometimes I walk around the city and imagine that others are smoking on my behalf. I silently thank the smokers in front of the cafés and office buildings and in smoking areas, imagining they do it for me, for my inner contentment. I have people smoke for me.”
Charming, indeed.
Gregor Hens: Nicotine
Trans by Jen Calleja
Other Press, 176 pp., $16.95
January 9, 2017 Issue
Love, Terror, and Cigarettes
In “Nicotine,” the German writer Gregor Hens uses smoking as a vehicle to tell the darkly funny story of his life.
By Joan Acocella
In a memoir by the German writer Gregor Hens, smoking provides a vehicle for a story of domestic and national trauma.Photograph by Horacio Salinas for The New Yorker
The German writer Gregor Hens smoked his first cigarette when he was five. His mother gave it to him. It was New Year’s Eve, and the Hens family, like many Germans, were out in the snow setting up fireworks. But they couldn’t light the fuses, because Gregor’s two older brothers were fighting over the lighter. Frau Hens finally lost patience: “She pulled out a cigarette, lit it and held it out to me.” Little Gregor took this wonderful thing and held it to the fuse of one of the rockets, which shot into the sky. Then he saw that the cigarette’s ember had ceased to glow. “You have to take a drag on it, my mother said out of the half-darkness.” He took a drag, the ember glowed again, and the child suffered a near-collapse from coughing and joy.
As Hens tells us in his memoir, “Nicotine” (Other; translated from the German by Jen Calleja), this experience eventually landed him with a decades-long addiction to nicotine. It also, he believes, gave him the beginnings of a personality: “I became myself for the first time.” He means this literally. In his mind, the entire episode—the coughing fit, his mother’s blue hat, his almost uncontainable pride in the fact that he, not his brothers, detonated the first rocket—comes together into a story, the first memory he has that is a story rather than just an image or a sensation. And, because he is a writer, he sees this birth of a story as the birth of his personality. How nice: to have the emergence of one’s self marked by a rocket exploding!
In any case, it is by association with nicotine that Hens shows us what he wants us to know about his life. People will connect his book with Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception,” and I’m sure Hens had that volume in mind, but if “Nicotine” has a literary progenitor I would say that it is “In Search of Lost Time,” in which Proust made the material of seven volumes bloom out of one French cookie dunked in a cup of tea. “Nicotine” is much shorter, only a hundred and fifty-seven pages, but Hens uses a similar alchemy to transform the things of his world—the family in which he grew up, in Cologne; his former home in Columbus, where he taught German literature at Ohio State; his apartment in Berlin, where he lives with his wife, and produces novels and translations—into whole relay stations of poetic force, humming and sparking and chugging.
The mother first. Hens had to work on her for months to get permission to stay up for the New Year’s Eve festivities. She insisted that he take a nap before the fireworks. He agreed, and from nine to eleven-thirty he lay in bed wide awake, rigid with excitement:
When my mother came to wake me I was already standing in the middle of the room putting my trousers on in the dark. She turned on the light, got me the checked shirt I’d been wearing during the day, went to the wardrobe smiling silently to herself and pulled out the thickest jumper [sweater] she could find. I stretched my arms up into the air, she pulled the jumper over my head, then stroked the hair from my forehead.
This is a tender scene—he allows himself to cherish the little boy as she did (“I stretched my arms up into the air”)—but as the book progresses the mother turns out to be a mixed business. She had a cycling depression. When she was doing badly, she read romances, lots of them, and smoked heavily. When she was better, she smoked less and read loftier literature: Musil, Mann, Joseph Roth. Gregor grieves for her, but this does not prevent him from letting us know, in small ways, the difficulties her illness created for her sons. She didn’t really cook. Also, is it customary for German mothers to teach their five-year-old children to smoke? At the age of ten, Gregor was dispatched to a boarding school of truly Dickensian awfulness. (If you committed a misdeed, you had to ask for punishment. Then you were locked in a closet.) He says that he never knew why he was sent away from home, but his brothers were shipped off, too. It seems probable that the mother was getting worse. By the time Gregor was eighteen, she was dead. He never tells us what she died of, though there are hints that she committed suicide: “She succumbed to her own melancholy.” From page to page, this beloved woman is glimpsed only partially. All around her there are silences, empty places, held breaths—an extraordinary act of literary finesse.
Hens recalls ruefully that she did not try to shield her sons from their brutal father. Once, when the oldest boy, Stefan—the troublemaker and, it seems, Gregor’s favorite—did something bad, the entire family was imprisoned, for days, in the father’s wrath: “We sat in silence in the dining nook spooning our soup with heads bent, profoundly frightened, avoiding eye contact. My mother gave not a word of defence for her eldest son, who cowered beside me crying with quivering legs, not trusting himself to wipe his fogged-up glasses, while my father talked himself into a rage for the hundredth time.” What must it have been like for Gregor, four years younger than Stefan, to see the older boy, whom he loved and respected, weeping so hard that his legs were shaking?
On another occasion, the family was headed home after a purgatorial vacation—Stefan had recently been caught smoking on the roof of his school—when the father pulled the car over to the side of the road and switched off the engine: “He swiveled round and screamed at my brother, who had dissolved into tears long before this: If I ever catch you smoking up there again I’ll bring you down from the roof with a pickaxe, I’ll ram a pickaxe into your arsehole and pull you down, I’ll rip you open and kill you.” The tirade went on for twenty minutes, Hens says. “Though it wasn’t directed at me, I have never endured such physical fear in my life.”
I believe him, but just as Frau Hens’s image is shaded, and thereby rescued from sentimentality, by suggestions of her shortcomings as a mother, so the father is spared a horror-movie monstrousness by what—you can’t believe it at first—are tinkling little notes of comedy. Herr Hens made his living as an inspector of damage from industrial explosions. Because of this, and because a blaze once broke out in his home office, he was very strict about fire safety. After the office fire, he bought a hundred and twenty Gloria-brand fire extinguishers to send out as Christmas gifts. He had to order that many in order to get a discount, but, as it turned out, he didn’t know a hundred and twenty people, so there were a lot of leftovers, and every room in the Hens house, even Gregor’s tiny bedroom, was outfitted with a bright-red fire extinguisher. (The boy used to lie in bed and gaze at it, longing to pull the silver pin.) After Stefan’s disgrace for smoking on the school roof, the brothers concluded that their father’s vehemence may have had less to do with school rules being broken than with fire safety.
Surely it also had to do with Herr Hens’s attitude toward smoking. He, too, had once been a smoker—indeed, a four-pack-a-day man—but he had decided that his habit had got out of control. That was the end of that. Overnight, without the help of books or pills or hypnotherapy, he had quit smoking. He loved to tell the story, “as proof of the enormous willpower of its heroic storyteller. It’s true, he seemed to say, that most people don’t manage it, because it’s actually a perilous addiction. But I can do it. It’s damn hard, but if you have a strong will like mine it’s actually no problem at all. If you can’t do it with the power of your own will you are simply a weak person.”
All this is fun. It’s nice to see that bully ridiculed. But later Hens describes how his father, while wooing the woman who became his second wife, used to urge her two beautiful teen-age daughters to give up smoking: “It doesn’t suit you, my father would say. Women who smoke don’t make suitable Aryan wives and mothers, I added in my head.” Hens may have been traumatized by his father’s talk of enlarging Stefan’s asshole, but I think that almost all Germans, even those born some time after 1945 (Hens was born in 1965), still bear the mark of their country’s role in the Second World War. Hens, to judge from his book, truly hated his father. So do many people, but his story becomes captivating—laced with a saving irony—by being told through the medium of something as humble as tobacco.
Everything is told through that medium. Disgust is a parking-lot attendant who, in fetching Hens’s car, has filled it with “smoke particles . . . pumped out of his moist, mucus-filled lungs. Something that was deep within his body is now in mine.” (The sexual note makes this moment particularly unsettling.) Fear is a colony of red ants that, living in Hens’s front garden in Columbus, reminds him that his smoking habit, once broken, might return:
The entire parcel of land was infiltrated. A passer-by, throwing only a fleeting look over the place, would have been completely unaware of it. Maybe they would have delighted in seeing the freshly painted, light blue wooden façade, the glorious irises. But the moment I stuck a spade into it, the moment I pulled up just a single patch of weeds or disturbed a mossy slab with my foot, whole armies of combat-ready army ants gazed up at me; powerful, shimmering red specimens evidently waiting only for me. They streamed into the daylight in their thousands, the earth would appear to be in motion, and I’d be seized by vertigo.
Shimmering red specimens, streaming into the light: this is beautiful in an appalling way. Elsewhere, an episode that should have been frightening—Hens, on his bike, speeding down the road to buy a pack of cigarettes, rams into a Toyota Land Cruiser and crashes onto its hood—turns into a comedy. An ambulance arrives, but, as it rushes to the hospital, it runs over an old lady, so it stops and picks her up, too. “Welcome aboard, I called out to her,” Hens writes. But, instead of returning his greeting, she screams abuse at him all the way to the hospital. Only there does he discover that his face is caked with blood and that there is a long, gaping laceration on his right temple. The story is funny—“I think even I sprang backwards when I saw myself in the bathroom mirror”—but its subject is the same deep-lying terror that is the main concern of most of the book.
Not all of it. In some scenes, Hens achieves a kind of middle tone, where, while still producing little horrors, he remains stoic, or reticent. In an early chapter, he and Stefan, grown men now, drive to the house of their great-aunt Anna, in Bremen. She has just died, and they are going to collect her keys. The house, of course, fills Gregor with memories. The peat in the garden reminds him of the time his aunt told him about a peat bog that lay just outside the town: “Out there, my young brain imagined, it was teeming with the eternally restless undead, ditch wardens, feral spirits and doppelgängers. Out there beyond the town the peat diggers uncover the skeletons of entire chain gangs, the tiny bodies of unwanted children, the corpses of abortions, bastards.”
The vast armchairs in Aunt Anna’s living room make him think of Deng Xiaoping. Why? We don’t know, but printed on the page where he tells us this there is a photograph of Deng, in a mammoth armchair, with antimacassars, such as Aunt Anna had, contentedly having a smoke. The book is full of these muddy little snapshots, showing things—a racing bike, a lighter, a Gloria fire extinguisher, Aunt Anna—that seem surprised that someone is bothering to photograph them. They call to mind W. G. Sebald’s novels, in which, with a similarly muffled emotion, photographs like these often document the lives of people who fled the Nazis.
Aunt Anna fled no Nazis, but much of her story, as Hens tells it, seems to be about love that wasn’t properly returned. She never married. She devoted herself to her job at the Brinkmann cigarette factory. It was said that she was in love with the company’s president, a married man whom she would visit at his lakeside property on her vacations. “They were the Romeo and Juliet of the German cigarette industry,” Hens writes. And that may have had something to do with the fact that when Aunt Anna retired she was given, along with her pension, a hundred-year supply of the factory’s product. Once a month, a courier from Brinkmann would arrive at her front door with two cartons of cigarettes. Now she was dead, but the stipend was to continue until 2071, so that, like the house, it passed to her great-nephews. As the chapter ends, Stefan pours shots of schnapps for himself and Gregor: “To Aunt Anna, Stefan says, raising his glass. To her love, I say.” And Gregor lights up one of her cigarettes.
The book, too, ends with love and cigarettes. Gregor is eighteen. He is in love for the first time, with the beautiful Eliana. He has been to a party at her house, where, feeling outclassed by the other boys, he got terribly drunk and had to sleep over. In the morning, Eliana appears in his room in a gray robe and sits on the edge of the bed. He wants to pull her into the bed—he’s sure that she is naked under the robe—but he has too horrible a taste in his mouth (beer, cigarettes) to dare to kiss her. She senses his discomfort, takes a cigarette out of his pack, lights it, and holds it to his lips. He doesn’t remove his hands from under the covers. He just lies back:
It was quite possibly the most wonderful drag of my life. And then Eliana led the cigarette to her own full, slightly parted lips and took a deep, sensual drag. She bent over me and released the smoke, and the shimmering blue veil that caught the first autumnal sunshine sank over my face and caressed me. A kiss, better than a kiss . . . her lips, where my lips had been. Her breath and the smoke that we shared . . . I closed my eyes and sucked it in to the tips of my lungs. My first true love’s kiss was smoke, nothing but smoke.
It is a strange combination, love and smoke, but there is a long streak of strangeness in German art—colors you didn’t expect (Caspar David Friedrich, Max Beckmann), Venuses who aren’t pretty (Cranach, Altdorfer)—which nevertheless feels like life. I don’t know what Aunt Anna got in place of consummation, but Hens got this dark, lovely, funny book. ♦
Review: In Nicotine, Gregor Hens reflects on a life with cigarettes
VIT WAGNER
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jan. 06, 2017 10:47AM EST
Last updated Friday, Jan. 06, 2017 10:47AM EST
0 Comments
Print
Title Nicotine
Author Gregor Hens, translated by Jen Calleja
Genre memoir
Publisher Other Press
Pages 208
Price $22.99
“Smoking I once quit/ Now I got one lit/ I just fell back into it.” This simple lyric from songwriter Nick Lowe’s wryly confessional Lately I’ve Let Things Slide isn’t the most profound observation I’ve encountered during a lifetime of struggling with – but mostly succumbing to – the sneakily seductive allure of cigarettes. But I’ve yet to come across a tidier summary of my own addiction.
After puffing my way through late adolescence – and especially fiercely through university and my first years as a journalist, when smoking in newsrooms was not only permitted but practically de rigueur – I have stopped and started too many times to count. I once went for two entire years without firing up a single cigarette. I don’t remember why I quit. Probably the sensible litany of health-related reasons. I don’t even recall often wrestling with the urge to resume.
I can, however, vividly recollect the occasion of falling back into it: It was a late-afternoon birthday gathering for a newsroom colleague demanding a third or fourth celebratory glass of wine, and suddenly, there I was, bumming smokes (yes, plural) off a fellow writer in the restaurant parking lot. I wasn’t starting up again, I confidently assured myself. No, no, no. Hadn’t I decisively tested my mettle during the intervening two years of abstinence? Cough.
In his short, perceptive and thoroughly absorbing memoir, Nicotine, German author and Ohio State University linguistics professor Gregor Hens differentiates between the putative “last cigarette,” the one butted out on New Year’s Eve or other such occasion of swearing off for good and the “relapse cigarette,” the first one inhaled after a period of going without. And there’s no question which of the two has afforded him greater pleasure.
The New Year’s vow to quit smoking remains alive and well – cracking 2017’s top 10 resolutions according to a recent poll – even as the use of tobacco continues to decline dramatically, at least in many Western countries, where smoking has become about as socially acceptable as spitting on the sidewalk. It is also, not surprisingly, considered the hardest resolution to keep. Three out of five smokers who quit at the start of the year will be smoking again before the end of January, according to fresh data from Britain’s Royal Society of Public Health, and a scant 13 per cent will make it to the end of the year without backsliding. These tendencies will hardly surprise Hens, who writes unabashedly about how much pleasure he has derived over the years from renewing the acquaintance.
Hens, about 50 at the time he quit, fondly summons his first, youthful relapse in characteristically luxuriant detail. After a two-week cessation due to insufficient funds, he recharges his dopamine level while sitting alone on the hood of his late mother’s Range Rover and pausing to take in the scenery of a countryside quarry. “I closed my eyes and felt the nicotine shoot through my veins after the long abstinence, it crackled in my brain like a thousand tiny explosions. I felt this magnificent firework, the titillation in my nerves, the rush of my first fall-back cigarette!”
The memory of this experience, and too many others like it, prevents the author from regarding his present, smoke-free circumstances complacently. In his experience, the last cigarette is more often prologue than epilogue. “Since this day at the quarry, I’ve always smoked the last cigarette because I could already sense that a new first one was awaiting me at some point in the future, a relapse cigarette that would surpass all other cigarettes and trigger a giddy clarity within me that had up to that point been waiting in the shadows.”
Passages such as this leave little doubt that Hens’s purpose in writing the memoir wasn’t to crow about his own deliverance from nicotine or to hector recidivists, one of whom, the novelist Will Self, has furnished Nicotine with a suitably knowing introduction. Not only is this not a self-help book, it doesn’t appear to have helped Self, at least not to the point where he was sufficiently inspired to follow Hens’s example.
Hens leavens his anecdotal recollections with appreciable humour. This review will allow readers the immense pleasure of discovering for themselves the foundational story of how Hens actually tasted his first cigarette at the age of 6. Suffice it to say that both of his parents were heavy imbibers who billowed like coal stacks in the presence of their offspring, including on long road trips with the car windows sealed shut. There is also a hilarious section involving a Columbus, Ohio, psychologist/hypnotist, who advises Hens not to beat himself up if he surrenders to the urge and has a cigarette or two. “What’s he thinking?” an incredulous Hens wonders. “Doesn’t he realize that there can only be one possibility: for me to believe that I’ll never, never ever again even touch a cigarette?”
The narrative, colloquially translated from German by Jen Calleja, is enlivened by cultural references. Particular heed is paid to Smoke and Blue in the Face, a pair of related films written by novelist Paul Auster and set in a Brooklyn tobacco shop. Hens is especially fond of the scene in which a client, played by Jim Jarmusch, tells the tobacconist (Harvey Keitel) that he’ll have to foreswear sex now that he’s about to smoke his last cigarette because he can’t fathom not lighting up after intercourse. We also learn, perhaps disappointingly, that Mark Twain never made the remark famously attributed to him about his personal ease with quitting smoking based on the number of times he’d done it.
But readers shouldn’t expect a rigorous investigation into the cultural, botanical, medical or legislative history of tobacco. Mostly, the author sticks to documenting his own experiences with cigarettes, as well as his comparatively brief time without. In the process, he revels in language, identifying “tobacco chippers” as enviable smokers who can make do with one or two cigarettes a day, and coining “fumotopes” to describe the gaggles of smokers huddled on sidewalks outside workplaces and bars.
Hens, eight months clean and counting when he started the book, circumvented the freighted, last-cigarette drama by not deciding to quit until hours after he’d smoked it. Quitting by afterthought, rather than forethought, is the closest he comes to offering advice. His purpose in writing Nicotine was twofold: to make the act of quitting stick by fixing it on the page, and to share some universal truths on the subject of smoking and, more broadly, addiction. On the first objective, the jury necessarily remains out. In the case of the second, there isn’t the slightest whiff of doubt. Prepare to be hooked from the first sentence.
Vit Wagner is a Toronto writer and teacher.