Some Ruminations on Smoking from 1922: "Latakia touches the nerves, Perique the heart, and Cavendish the digestive organs."

(The New Republic) Somewhere in a later historian I hope to find, if I live long enough, a Lecky-like chapter on The Rise of Pipe Smoking in the United States among the Well-to-Do and their Friends in the Early Years of the Twentieth Century. The fact is patent that pipe-smoking has increased and is increasing in the class or classes referred to. Thirty years ago I had a penniless friend who emigrated to Chicago and began to accumulate the first of the two millions he still possesses. For a year or so he would make occasional visits to our, smaller city, and on one of these he found me, in my office, in the act of loading a corn cob with cut plug. "Not a pipe," he said with distaste, "it looks so cheap." In vain did I try to extenuate my cheap habit by pointing out that the cheapness was notable. In weight, I said, there is a great difference between one pipe and one cigar. Psychologically speaking, this difference is much less. Take perfectos as an example. If a thousand perfectos weigh about fifteen pounds, which is somewhere near the right figure, then you get between sixty and seventy smokes per pound of tobacco consumed in perfecto shape. My pipe, not the corn-cob but this briar, is what a dealer could call of normal size, and I keep the bowl pretty well scraped. Out of a pound of tobacco I get from a hundred and sixty to a hundred and ninety pipes, depending on the tobacco's cut and dryness. The most costly American tobacco, which I suppose is Spilman at $3.30 a pound, comes to something like two cents a smoke. My friend was not to be persuaded, thirty years ago, that a habit which appears cheap should be acquitted if one can prove that its cheapness is also real. Last winter I saw him at a luncheon club smoking a briar, one of those modern briars whose "ringing lines and hard" are as beautiful as a sloop's. Whether pipes are nowadays things of a severer beauty than they need to be because the men who smoke pipes are more exacting, or whether aesthetically fastidious pipe-smokers are more numerous because pipes are better to look at, "though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture." But the fact that pipes are nowadays seen in high and higher places is incontestable- I can think of a club in which, within the memory of men of middle age, pipe-smoking was permitted in the pipe-room only, and in which it is now forbidden nowhere except in the dining-room.
It is pleasing to believe that the low cost of pipe-smoking accounts for its diffusion among well-to-do Americans, yet I fear this belief has its roots in failure to envisage all the relevant facts. One might even maintain that pipe smoking increases among conspicuous wasters because the reproach of cheapness is passing away. Thirty years ago four dollars was about as much as you could pay for 1 briar, even if you went in for those amber mouthpieces which even at that period were beginning to signify that the man who sported one was a showy outcast. Today, unless you are indifferent to curves and grain, it is not easy to buy a good plain briar, one that will last seven or eight years, for less than six dollars. Straight grains, lovelier and in my experience less durable, come higher. Twenty dollars was the price of the most exquisite straight grain I have seen, but I've heard of a shop where more than twenty is asked.
Once a man has laid in a supply of pipes it is not easy, I must admit, for him to proceed with any grandeur. Spilman, in a world of rising prices, still sells for $3.30 a pound; I can't think off-hand of an American tobacco which costs more; two cents a pipeful is nothing for any conspicuous waster to rejoice at. He can pay more, to be sure, by choosing a tobacco which has voyaged from Virginia to Great Britain, there to be blent with a Loadicean or other tobacco upon which, with shining eyes, the Syrian stars-look down, and then enriched again at one of our custom-houses. Yet no matter how nicely he chooses he cannot bring the price of a pipe within measurable distance of any cigar he would condescend to smoke, except out-of doors, perhaps, in a high wind. Not that I wish to accuse smokers of imported mixtures with either affectation or a genuine taste for display. Until quite lately it was in Great Britain, and not in this country, that the attempt was made to suit the widest variety of exigent individualists.
Among married men the spread of pipe-smoking is due, no doubt, partly to their conviction that pipes are more baffling than cigars to a wife who thinks you are smoking too much. Cigars may be counted, throughout the longest evening, by a woman whose vigilance has been trained, but with two pipes almost exactly alike in his pocket, and a little dexterity, a man who is smoking much may easily pass for a man who is smoking slow. Many wives, moreover, are still of the opinion that pipes are more wholesome than cigars. Nothing shall tempt me to disabuse them of this error, for such I take it to be. "Speaking of digestion only," I heard a physician say.a few years ago, "cigarettes arc tobacco in its least injurious form. Next come cigars of small diameter, like panatellas. If you want tobacco to do its worst to your digestive system, stick to a pipe."
When my doctor said this I was unable to retort by quoting, for I did not then know, another expert's opinion, richer in light and shade. "Those who wish to study or must consider their physical well-being," says Mr. Alfred Dunhill of London, "should remember that strong Latakia touches the nerves, Perique the heart, and Cavendish the digestive organs. Also that the common coarse Virginias used in many mixtures tend to cloud the brain and induce dizziness." If wives could be compelled to specify the kind of harm done by tobacco, men armed with Mr. Dunhill's authority might cease to fear them. All of which I shall go into more fully, one of,these days, when I write that chapter on The Rise of Pipe Smoking in the United States, etc. , P. L

Photos: Library of Congress