THE SOT-WEED FACTOR

by James Lincoln Warren

  We had each of us Stuck in our Mouths a lighted Pipe of Sotweed. (1698)
  The sot-weed factor; or, a voyage to Maryland. (1708)
  To add a small Composition of high-flavoured Sot-Weed. (1747)

My chief vice is smoking. In these health-conscious days, this is not a small fault. I have been roundly criticized in any number of forums (fora?) for this abject failure of character. I have been pleaded with, threatened, rejected, cursed, and pitied. So please, no sermons, because I’ve heard them all before, more than once — or twice, or thrice. Anyway, I am not advocating tobacco abuse here.

But over a bowl of MacBaren’s Scottish Blend the other night, I got to thinking about how the various forms of tobacco consumption are regarded vis-a-vis social class. This kind of knowledge is useful to the errant Scribbler as a sort of shorthand for describing character, like certain forms of alcoholic beverage. Habits, and especially bad habits, are signals to personality. So indulge me.

There are essentially six methods to indulge in ’baccy:

(1) Chew.
(2) Dip.
(3) Snuff.
(4) Cigarettes.
(5) Cigars.
(6) Pipes.

These various methods are each associated with different social standings, some of which have changed significantly over the years. Cigarettes, for example, which used to be the Height of Cool back when Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne were sucking noxious fumes into their lungs, is now relegated to social misfits and rednecks. It even used to be romantic — remember Paul Henried lighting Bette Davis’s cigarette in “Now, Voyager”? Nowadays not even James Bond, who used to pride himself on his custom made Turkish cigarettes with the double gold bands, is brave enough to laugh in the face of death by firing up a fag.

Twenty-five years ago, I knew college graduates who regularly placed plugs of powdered tobacco ’twixt lip and gum and scowled ferociously at anybody who lit up. Back in my Navy days, I was the only officer on one ship who smoked, and my roommates informed me in no uncertain terms that our shared stateroom was a smoke free zone, an attitude that irritated the hell out of me because it assumed that I had no consideration for my fellow travelers — in fact, I would never have smoked in a stateroom that was the shipboard home of a nonsmoker. These two hot-running lieutenants, however, both dipped Skoal — I don’t know why they thought dip was so bitchin’, because neither one had graduated from a hayseed school — and they regularly discharged their vile black spittle into paper cups, which they left precariously balanced on the surfaces of their desks. One night in the Tyrrhenian Sea — we were headed for Villefranche on the French Riviera from the Strait of Messina — we hit some really rough weather, and the ship actually took a forty-six degree roll. Everything in the stateroom got underway except me, clutching desperately to the steel beam in the overhead above my rack while every object in the room turned into a missile.

Including the soggy spit-filled paper cups. I don’t think I need to describe the aftermath of the disaster. I calmly told my roommates that I never wanted to hear them say a word to me about how disgusting smoking was ever again.

Cigars, which in the first half of the 20th Century were considered The Very Symbol of Success, suffered a grievous downfall for an entire generation, being regarded as a relic of smelly Old Fartdom — stogies are for fogeys, as it were — suffering also from the completely false reputation that all cigars stink, no doubt aided by the once almost tradition of passing out cheap green paper-wrapped cigars to celebrate the birth of a child, cigars like White Owls and Dutch Masters, which truly do burn as noisomely as four-month unwashed gym socks. I was perfectly content to let it stay that way. But fine cigars, much to my dismay, had a resurgence of hipness and respectability in the late ’80s, which sent the price up by a factor of at least four and sent the quality plummeting while the manufacturers struggled to keep up with the new demand. Cigars that should have been aged for four years were now only aged for two. I had smoked one or two cigars a week for more than a decade, but ever since those doleful days, it’s down to one or two a month — I can’t afford them anymore.

But some conceptions endure.

Chew and dip are clearly the most proletarian methods of tobacco abuse, perhaps because their indulgence comes with a requirement for a spittoon. Spittoons are truly nasty, if not as horrid as sodden paper cups or empty soda cans that might be unpleasantly mistaken for full soda cans. Chewing tobacco has the edge here for being low class, if only because it is slightly less discreet and usually cut with generous amounts of sugar to make it peripherally palatable. It was virtually an unwritten law that baseball players in days of yore chew tobacco, and baseball players were the heroes of the American common man until very recently. Therefore a plug was a symbol of in-your-face masculinity, like scratching your balls in public. Dip became very popular in the ’70s as an alternative — mostly, I think, because it provided a quick legal somatic high much more intense than leaf. Where I grew up in Texas, it was almost exclusively the preserve of cowboys, an alternative to Marlboros, since smoking a cigarette is very difficult to do while bull-riding. But essentially both methods are essentially blue collar. You might say that in drinking terms, chew and dip are the equivalents of white lightning and Everclear punch.

Snuff is too precious for words, evoking effete upper-class eighteenth century twits who sneeze into lace handkerchiefs. It is upper class to the point of parody. It’s hard to find good snuff these days, anyway, although not impossible. The contemporary habitual user of snuff is obviously a deep eccentric. Probably dangerous, too. It’s the nicotine counterpart of crème-de-violette and Benedictine.

Cigarettes are the tequila shooters of nicotine-delivery systems. Tough guys and broads have fags dangling from their lips. There is something about a cigarette that says, “Don’t mess with me, buster.” Maybe it’s because the very fact of smoking a cigarette suggests that such a person probably has the IQ of a rhinoceros, or maybe it’s the always present threat of the smoldering butt being used as an instrument of torture à la Gestapo interrogators. I think most cigarette smokers use them to get a quick fix, to invigorate their sluggish brains on fifteen minute breaks from mind-numbing plod-like work, so there’s always a sense of immediacy attending them. The point of a cigarette is the instant rush that comes with a lungful of toxic smoke, after all. Besides tequila shooters, cigarettes are also analogous to gin (particularly Martinis), anything containing vodka, and beer when it is chugged.

The cigar has already been mentioned as the Epitome of Success — with the attention paid to wrappers, binders, and fillers, and the Myth of the Cuban Smoke, the trappings of the Best Things in Life and the Wealth Required to Afford Them, good cigars are like vintage clarets, aged single malt Scotch, and limited release single-barrel Bourbon. How I love a good cigar, but I sneer at those who smoke them for the sake of status, like the Beverly Hills type who runs around town in a Hummer.

The pipe — well, everybody knows that pipes are intellectual, or even better, pseudo-intellectual. College professors and free verse poets. Why this should be so, I have no idea, except that it takes a lot of patience to learn how to correctly smoke a pipe, and that pipe smokers are as particular about their pipes as serious philatelists are about postage stamps. And of course, being a pipe smoker, I am well aware of being vastly mentally superior to the masses myself, so there might be some psychoactive ingredient in Latakia or Burley that encourages delusions of cerebral grandeur. Also, pipe tobacco, comparatively speaking, is much less expensive than cigarettes or cigars, although the pipes themselves, especially good Danish briars, cost an arm and a leg, but they last a lifetime (however truncated). Anyway, I think that the analogs for pipe smoking are cognac, Pernod, and ruby port.

So when your tough private eye fires up a Lucky, he’s somebody different than Holmes with his three-pipe problem, or Sir Percy and his pinch. Philip Marlowe, of course, was a pipe-smoking chess-problem-solving tough guy, but he’s the exception rather than the rule. Anyway, as far as developing character goes, you got to admit that the guy swilling suds with the boys and stubbing his smokes out in an overfilled ashtray is someone radically different from the gent who savors his Havana with a crystal sherry-glass brimful of amontillado served at exactly 60 degrees. And the guy with the calabash with the pouch of Cavendish stuffed in his coat pocket is looking down at them all.

It’s enough to make you cough.