The year the smoking ban came in there, I visited Ireland.
This was Bloomsday 2004, and the Davy Byrne Short Story Award had just been won by Ann Enright. For a few of the runners up, the booby prize was a week’s residency with me.
The upside was that this took place at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, County Monaghan.
It’s a big old loveably symmetrical house with a gentle slope in front of it that ends at a wide lake. They put me in Lady Guthrie’s Room.
The runners up group was five or six, plus Stinging Fly editor Declan Meade (who’d organised the whole thing).
Among the attendees was the wonderful Kevin Barry, who went on to publish the collection There Are Little Kingdoms (2007) — including at least one story we’d workshopped — and then the novels Dark Lies the Island (2012), Beatlebone (2015) and The Heart in Winter (2024).
Kevin was already a very confident writer, and I don’t think he learned much that week.
The second day, we all went to Annie McGinn’s pub to watch the Euros. England drew 2-2 with Portugal, and then lost 5-6 on penalties. I don’t remember seeing much of the second half — I think I went and sat in the empty front bar, and guessed the score from the celebrations (quiet when England scored, very rasping for Portugal). But I’d managed to sit through those first 45 minutes.
I can’t recall any of the on-pitch action. What I remember most clearly is a young man who wanted to see the match but also to enjoy a smoke. As he puffed his cigarette, he stood in the doorway with the toes of one sneakered foot touching the ground outside the door, but with the rest of himself inside. He was, sort of, obeying the letter of the law.
Back at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, we resident writers gathered each evening around a very long table in the kitchen. There was alcohol, but no-one was hitting it mercilessly. And there was absolutely no smoking. No-one cheated or bent the rules. If you wanted a fag, you went outside into the yard. The smokers complied.
Several people had been to the Centre before — before the smoking ban — and they agreed it just wasn’t the same. The craic was depleted.
Ever since then, as public spaces but also as writers have become more and more predominantly non-smoking, I’ve wondered what else was lost?
Was it just the craic between authors relaxing at the end of the day? Wasn’t it also some kind of hedonism or recklessness or death-hauntedness in the writing itself?
There are novels you read from the 1930s, for example Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky that reek of booze and fags. You could say the same of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Voyage in the Dark.
Even as late as Martin Amis’s Money, we get this unforgettable line —
“Yeah,” I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.”
Do writers who take care of themselves, and go to the gym rather than the bar after a day at the desk — do they write differently? Are they not, by definition, less committed to the pleasures of the present moment? And doesn’t that make their novels just that bit tamer, perhaps even blander?
(I’m not advocating the Bukowski life here. Just asking some questions, as a lifelong non-smoker.)
When I started, a lot of my fellow writers used smoking as an intimate, unvarying part of their work routine. They would light up when reconsidering what they’d done. This was the very rhythm of prose.
Cigarettes were a beautiful pivot-point of writerly being: Write whilst within the tension of increasingly craving a smoke; re-read whilst within the relaxation of smoking; exhale creatively, inhale critically.
Write, smoke, rewrite, repeat.
Again, I know that giving up smoking — which most of them did for the sake of lungs and longevity — was an agony, and a grief, and probably many other things.
For many of us, the very image of a writer involved a desk, a typewriter and an ashtray. You almost didn’t need the person, just the props.
Of course, many writers still smoke, perhaps defiantly, perhaps guiltily. But the air of literary events, of literary talk, of literary thought, is these days generally pretty clear.
What intensity did we lose, when we lost the fug?
[Image credit: Willy Ronis, ‘Gaston Berlemont’s pub, The French House, Soho, London’, 1955.]
The paragraph in italics appeared in my lecture on Sustaining.
A writers' culture of fag packets. I don't buy it. Surely writers who smoked in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, were only following the general behaviour of society in those days. People smoked everywhere. I smoked tobacco from 1972 to 1997. Smoking never seemed to have any positive or negative impact upon my creativity. Campfire smoke though. Campfire smoke is different. Campfire smoke from nice wood is a bit magical and spiritual. The main difference with campfire smoke is that we are outside. That glorious feeling of being outside. Fresh air, weather --- Cold and rain meets warmth and fire. I love the campfire smoke and the crackling flames. Indoors is a bad place for smoke, creates permanent headaches, fug and gloom. Humans are the only animals in the world who are daft enough to stick something into their mouths and then set fire to it.
Good piece, and a good question. I still smoke, though haven't indoors for decades. Don't think it affects my solitary writing. But those pub meetings to break story or hatch new plans? Definitely a depleted or at least changed experience. Not least because the smokers have to leave once in a while to go outside, which breaks the vibe and flow. THOUGH sometimes it's while standing outside having that smoke (or for the others, sitting at the table, a moment of quiet) that new ideas suddenly come.
So I guess we adapt...