By James Leavey
Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez, poet, critic, anthologist and poker player, whose autobiography, Where Did It All Go Right? was published in March 2002, pipes up...
JL: Where did you first start smoking?
AA: At home in London, in the garden. I first started when I was seven or eight, or something like that. I used to smoke old tea leaves, that I'd dried and mixed with lavender. I once tried it again when I was in my twenties, and I nearly died. The point was you could buy very pretty, very sweet-smelling, cherrywood pipes for sixpence. Then I started collecting pipes. I had some marvelous ones that my mother gave all away when I went off to boarding school. I got very ill this time last year, got some flu' that wouldn't go away. I used to be a chain-smoker. I haven't stopped, but I now have one pipe a day, and I make it last.
JL: How many pipes do you own?
AA: Quite a lot.
JL: What's your favourite pipe?
AA: It varies. The thing about pipes is that it's a bit like some relationships – they go sour. You don't go off them but it's as though they've got soaked or something, and however rigorously you clean them and ream them out and all that stuff, it gets to a point when they get a bit old. I've got a very beautiful pipe that my daughter gave me – it's a French one and terrifically beautiful, but it's getting to that point when it's not smoking as well as it might.
JL: What do you smoke when you're playing poker?
AA: That's very interesting. I play always at the clubs – largely because I don't seem to be able to get invited anywhere. The clubs, God knows why, have decided they don't want pipe smokers. You can smoke cigarettes but you can't smoke a pipe.
JL: Would they allow you to smoke cigars?
AA: They've stopped them too. It's very very weird. Even in America, cigars and pipes aren't allowed. And considering how offensive, in a way, that cigarette smoke can be, pipe smoke is rather pleasant.
JL: One thing I'd associate with playing poker is either cigars, smoked by high rollers, or cigarettes, which players would smoke nervously. But pipe smoking is almost too fiddly for poker, isn't it?
AA: I can remember reading books about poker, where they show that when a guy smokes a pipe, it means he's very patient. So if a pipe smoker comes in, it usually means he's got a good hand.
JL: So if you want to throw them off, you could start smoking cigarettes?
AA: Well in fact what I'm trying to do now, because I'm really trying to cut it right down, I've got to the point where the seat either side of the dealer tends to be a non-smoker, so I try and sit there. And then I can't go kind of crazy, wanting a smoke, 'cos I know I'm not going to be able to get one. I tend to have a pipe in my pocket, just in case, or for a smoke on the way home.
JL: Do you play poker as well with a pipe, as without it?
AA: Well, it's a really interesting point. I always assumed I wouldn't be able to play at all, without it. I love the objects, I think they're very beautiful things. Once you know about pipes you can see how beautifully some of them are made. Some of them are made very badly…I love the smell of pipe tobacco. I don't like the smell of cigarettes, never have.
JL: Does smoking a pipe do much for your creativity as writer?
AA: I dunno. The thing about pipe-smoking is that it is a wonderful time-waster. And since you spend a lot of time when you're sitting at your desk not writing – a pipe gives you a wonderful excuse not to write. It's like email.
JL: Of all the writers in the world, alive or dead, who's the one you'd love to share an ashtray with, and why?
AA: John Donne, absolutely without any question at all. The man who started me off on everything.
JL: Did Donne smoke?
AA: I don't know whether John Donne smoked, or not. You can't tell. If he'd smoked, it would have bound to have been a pipe, of course, because Raleigh had brought tobacco in.
JL: Have you ever written a poem about smoking? If not, do you know a good one?
AA: No, I haven't. There's a wonderful poem by Ezra Pound, called 'The Lake Isle'
Oh God Oh Venus Oh Mercury Patron of thieves
Give me in due time, I beseech you
A little tobacco shop
With the little bright boxes piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant Cavendish in the shag
And the bright Virginia loose under the bright glass cases
And a pair of scales, not too greasy
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing
For the flip word and to tidy their hair a bit
Oh God Oh Venus Oh Mercury Patron of Thieves
Lend me a little tobacco shop
Or install me in any profession save this damned profession of writing
Where one needs one's brains all the time
JL: Did you ever share an ashtray with your friends, Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes?
AA: Oh shit, I don't even remember. It wasn't something you registered. Everybody smoked, as it were. So maybe they did, maybe they didn't.
JL: How do you feel about all this anti-smoking hysteria?
AA: What I find very peculiar is the American thing of anti-smoking. You'd think it'd be against their Constitution to ban people from smoking. You imagine it's got to be some Amendment that's to do with absolute basic human rights, and how you live. You feel, when you get to California, they'd put you in fucking chains if they see you smoking. This is a form of paranoia. Everybody loves that un-earned moral superiority, where they feel that anything that infringes what they prefer is an offense. I think it's post-Stalinism; everybody wants to be told what to think and what to do. They love the Thought Police and now they've got Health Police. I try not to light up until one or two o'clock in the afternoon – to have my one pipe, which I make last. But if I'm out and smell a boring old cigarette, it just smells so good.
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