This revealing anecdote finds an odd corollary in another railway episode, which the father of C.S. Lewis was fond of recounting; A.N. Wilson reproduced this story in his biography of Lewis. The scene is in Ulster at the beginning of the century; Albert Lewis (the father of C.S.) “was travelling in an old-fashioned train of the kind which has no corridor, so that the passengers were imprisoned in their compartments for as long as the train was moving. He was not alone in the compartment. He found himself opposite one other character, a respectable-looking farmer in a tweed suit, whose agitated manner was to be explained by the demands of nature. When the train had rattled on for a further few miles and showed no signs of stopping at a station where a lavatory might have been available, the gentleman pulled down his trousers, squatted on the floor and defecated. When this operation was completed, and the gentleman, fully clothed, was once more seated opposite Albert Lewis, the smell in the compartment was so powerful as to be almost nauseating. To vary, if not drown the odour, Albert Lewis got a pipe from his pocket and began to light it. But at that point, the stranger opposite, who had not spoken one word during the entire journey, leaned forward and censoriously tapped a sign on the window, which read NO SMOKING. For C.S. Lewis, this anecdote of his father’s always enshrined in some insane way a truth about Northern Ireland and what it was like to live there.”
There is no doubt that, if the Anti-Smoking Brigade had its way, the whole world would soon be turned into one grim and lunatic Ulster. This, I think, must be the reason why, even though I hardly smoke anymore, whenever I am offered the choice I always instinctively opt for the smoking section in coffee shops, waiting rooms, restaurants and other public places: the company is better. In one respect, smokers do enjoy a spiritual superiority over non-smokers — or, at least, they possess one significant advantage: they are more immediately aware of our common mortality. On this particular point, they certainly owe the anti-smoking lobby a debt of gratitude. The warnings that, by law, must now be printed on all tobacco products unwittingly echo a beautiful ancient ritual of the Catholic Church: on Ash Wednesday, as every faithful is marked on the forehead with the blessed ashes, the priest reminds him, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Most of the time, modern life endeavours to blunt or to obliterate this awareness of mortality. It should not be confused with a morbid cult of death — which is abhorrent to Christian humanism. (¡Viva la muerte! was an obscene fascist slogan: when one of Franco’s generals launched it at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Unamuno — who was then at the end of his life — denounced it in a speech of sublime passion); on the contrary, this awareness is a celebration of life. Mozart confessed in a letter that the thought of death accompanied him every day, and that it was the deep source from which all his creation sprang. It certainly explains the inexhaustible joy of his music.
I do not mean that the inspiration which can be drawn from the ominous warnings issued by the official Health and Correct Thinking agencies will turn all smokers into new Mozarts, but they will certainly endow smoking with a new seduction — if not with metaphysical meaning. I confess when I look at them, I am seriously tempted to buy cigarettes again.
*Actually, it seems he did.
TELL THEM I SAID SOMETHING
SOME TIME ago, newspapers reported the results of an inquiry conducted among the general public to determine “the hundred most beautiful words in the English language.” Predictably enough, motherhood, peace, love, liberty, spring, etc. duly appeared on the list. Yet from the outset this rather silly exercise was doomed to insignificance, for the simple reason that it was predicated upon the illusory notion that words can have a value by themselves. Actually, words are to some extent like colours, of which Delacroix could say, “Give me mud, I shall turn it into the most luminous female flesh — as long as I am free to choose which colours to put by its side.”
By their very nature, words are neutral and indifferent. It is only from their context that they draw their most pungent emotional charge. Racism and sexism are a form of leprosy of the mind and should be mercilessly fought; yet for the most part the fight against racist and sexist language aims at the wrong target. I know of a righteous American journal that censored a contributor who referred to The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” And some equally righteous French publications endeavour to feminise words such as auteur (author) and écrivain (writer) into the hideous monsters auteure and écrivaine… Yet words are innocent. No perversions are to be found in dictionaries; they lie solely in people’s minds — and that’s the battlefield where the good fight ought to be fought.
It is not the words themselves, but the circumstance and manner in which they are uttered that give them meaning and impact. Stendhal (who served in Napoleon’s army) liked to recall that when General Murat was charging the enemy at the head of his cavalry, he used to stir the spirits of his horsemen by shouting to them: ‘My bum is round, round as a plum.’ Under enemy fire, in the heat of battle, these idiotic words became simply sublime — and the men were all willing to get themselves killed, just for the privilege of following such a hero.
In his first theatrical triumph, La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano), Ionesco exploited with great originality — and to splendid effect — the dichotomy that can exist between, on the one hand, the original meaning of words and, on the other, the meanings suggested by the tone, intention and gestures of the speaker. A good half a century earlier, Anatole France made use of the same conceit. In Le Livre de mon ami, the narrator recalls an episode from his adolescence: he had developed a passionate admiration for a beautiful female pianist who gave private recitals in his parents’ house. One night, at the end of a piece, the pianist suddenly turned towards her young admirer and asked him: “Did you like that?” “Oh yes, sir!” the hapless boy stuttered, overcome with emotion. His blunder plunged him into such a distress that he swore never to appear again in the beautiful musician’s presence. Forty years later, however, he met her perchance at a social gathering. Chatting about the successes of her long and brilliant career, the pianist confessed that eventually one became blasé about applause; yet once, in her earlier days, she received a compliment that she never forgot: a young man was so moved by her music, he called her “sir.”
The circumstance that lends words their greatest weight is the proximity of death. The “swan song” image does not pertain to the Western tradition alone. It is there already in The Analects of Confucius: “When a bird is about to die, his song is sad; when a man is about to die, his words are true.” Shakespeare seems to echo it: “The tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony.” Besides, in Anglo-Saxon common law a statement made by a dying man possesses a special evidentiary status, since “a dying man is presumed not to lie.”
No wonder the last words of the great are piously collected. The famous “Mehr Licht” (“More light”) of Goethe — assuming that he actually said it, and that he did not merely mean to ask that the shutters be opened — seems to suggest a lofty aspiration towards enlightenment and wisdom. By comparison, Thomas Mann’s ultimate query, “Where are my glasses?” sounds rather flat. At the moment of giving up the ghost on a hospital bed, the colourful Irish playwright Brendan Behan still had the wit to thank the nun who was wiping his brow: “Thank you, Sister! May all your sons become bishops.”