C.S. Lewis and smoking - question

[Lenona]

According to one source, Lewis, who smoked 60 cigarettes a day, plus his pipe, didn't just dislike nonsmokers - he "despised" them. (This should be no surprise to anyone who remembers Lewis' apparent need to spell out that "Nikabrik was not a smoker" - even though we already knew from the earlier scenes that Nikabrik is not just anti-social but potentially dangerous.)

Besides Trumpkin, Puddleglum, and Rhince, at least one other good guy in the Chronicles smokes - Poggin the dwarf.

What's interesting, though, is that while NONE of the first three seems to think there are any real rules to be followed when it comes to smoking in the presence of others (this was in the early 1950s, after all, when half of all adults in the UK and the US smoked), in The Last Battle (1956), we read this:

"...the Dwarf (with permission both from Jill and from Tirian) lit his pipe."

So, I wonder why Lewis felt the need to write it that way. Does anyone know? Thanks.

[Kevrob]

I'm in my 7th decade, so I can remember when certain social spaces tolerated or
enabled ciggie smoking, but discouraged the use of pipes and/or cigars. My
understanding was that they emitted more pungent smoke, especially if the
smoker had purchased..."economy brands"... of their version of tobacco. I seem
to remember that cigar smoking wasn't allowed on the air lines, while the coffin
nails still were. I dabbled in pipe and cigar smoking when I was young, but gave
both up before I got addicted. I never bothered with the cancer sticks.

Spitoons had long disappeared from even dive bars by the time I was frequenting
those.

--
Kevin R

[Lynn McGuire]

I flew on Taca Airlines from Belize (South America) to Miami, Florida in
1989. After we got in the air, the guy next to me pulled out a Cuban
Churchill cigar, cut off the end, and fired it up. It made a miserable
trip in an old 737 that was full to the last seat even more miserable.

Lynn

[J. Clarke]

Geez, I'd have asked him if he had another one. Last time I smoked a
Cuban cigar I got righteously stoned off of it.

[Lenona]

Just so you understand, ALL four characters smoked pipes.

It looked to me as though Lewis was finally admitting that maybe his generation wasn't right about everything. (E.g., that maybe nonsmoking IS a good lifestyle so long as you don't go around being self-righteous about it, the way the Scrubbs probably did.)

The question is, can anyone confirm that?

[Lynn McGuire]

Yeah, I got a non-contact high off it. By the time we landed in Miami,
we were in the last row of the plane, there was a serious fog back there.

Lynn

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <f378f6ed-fb73-4eff...@googlegroups.com>,

Cf.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/26/on_call/

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/

[peterw...@hotmail.com]

That's THREE packs a day! Some of the old time SF writers were also noted for smoking
like chimneys; Edward E. Smith comes to mind. When someone like that dies the question
is not what killed them but how did they manage to live so long. John W. Campbell was
apparently somewhat aware of the danger and devised an early type of filter before
filter-tipped cigarettes were marketed.

Peter Wezeman
anti-social Darwinist

[Mike Spencer]

Kevrob <kev...@my-deja.com> writes:

> I'm in my 7th decade, so I can remember when certain social spaces
> tolerated or enabled ciggie smoking, but discouraged the use of
> pipes and/or cigars. My understanding was that they emitted more
> pungent smoke, especially if the smoker had purchased..."economy
> brands"... of their version of tobacco.

At the very tail end of my 8th decade. I was once, long ago, in a
coffee house in Portsmouth, NH. A busy night with dozens of patrons.
A stratum of tobacco smoke hung in the air all across the room and I
was sitting next to a fireplace with an open wood fire. Smoking my
pipe.

I happened to notice a man emerge from the kitchen on the far side of
the room, appeard to sniff the air, scanned the room. Wandered to
another vantage point and scanned again. Made eye contact with me and
made a bee-line to my table, said, "Excuse me. Are you smoking
Balkan Sobranie?"

I confessed that I doing that very thing.

"Will you please stop? It makes me sick."

Amazing!

Balkan Sobranie -- sadly no longer produced these many years -- was
not an "economy brand", quite the opposite. But heavy to Latakia and
imbued with Yenidje leaf, it did have a unique aroma.


--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

[J. Clarke]

On 17 Oct 2021 02:36:16 -0300, Mike Spencer

A name I have not heard in many a year. While I doubt that there is
any relation other than the name, I have a pack of Sobranie Black
Russians that I am slowly using up. They are not available in the US
anymore. When travel resumes I am going to see if I can prevail upon
one of my Polish co-workers to obtain a carton the next time he visits
his family. Until then I keep them in a humidor and consume one on my
birthday.

[Quadibloc]

On Saturday, October 16, 2021 at 11:36:51 PM UTC-6, Mike Spencer wrote:

> Balkan Sobranie -- sadly no longer produced these many years -- was
> not an "economy brand", quite the opposite. But heavy to Latakia and
> imbued with Yenidje leaf, it did have a unique aroma.

I had heard of that form of tobacco because in reading a book about
the twentieth-century avante-garde in music, I came across the composition
"Balkan Sobranie Smoking Mixture" by Greg Bright from 1970. The book
could have been "Theoretical Foundations of Music".

Being a non-smoker, l have no direct experience of it.

John Savard

[Robert Carnegie]

Context is relevant. I believe they are at a tower
which presumably belongs to Tirian as King of Narnia,
so it's his house, and his country. I don't know if Jill
has a status in Narnia beyond "Daughter of Eve" and
agent of Aslan. She gets some fancy clothes on later.

I would speculate that Poggin asks the King if he may
smoke, and the King asks Jill if she would prefer
that Poggin does not smoke.

In Victorian Britain, and later, men would smoke
after dinner and after the women had gone to the
"(with-)drawing room", so the serious smoking
was not done with women present.

And it became known that smoking was causing
lung cancer and other diseases. E.g. see
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Doll>

[Jonathan]

And it wasn't full of goats and chickens too?

in
> 1989.  After we got in the air, the guy next to me pulled out a Cuban
> Churchill cigar, cut off the end, and fired it up.  It made a miserable
> trip in an old 737 that was full to the last seat even more miserable.
>
> Lynn

--
BIG LIE From Wiki - "The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler
when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, to describe the use of a lie
so *colossal* that no one would believe that someone "could have the
impudence to distort the truth so infamously."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

[Jonathan]

Irony of ironies, my dad was the Dean of the Medical...Education Dept
at a major university, and he smoked two packs a day in his
sealed tight office right to the end. You walk into his office
and could barely see the other side of the room.
I never understood that.

I smoked for a few years so I know how addicting it can be
but once I decided to give it up the withdrawal was over
in a few days with only minor effects. Although to this day
I still get a nicotine fit at lunch time every week or two.
As if my mind saying it's never going to let go of
the addiction.


> Peter Wezeman
> anti-social Darwinist

[Lenona]

On Sunday, October 17, 2021 at 8:37:23 AM UTC-4, Robert Carnegie wrote:

> Context is relevant. I believe they are at a tower
> which presumably belongs to Tirian as King of Narnia,
> so it's his house, and his country. I don't know if Jill
> has a status in Narnia beyond "Daughter of Eve" and
> agent of Aslan. She gets some fancy clothes on later.
>
> I would speculate that Poggin asks the King if he may
> smoke, and the King asks Jill if she would prefer
> that Poggin does not smoke.
>
> In Victorian Britain, and later, men would smoke
> after dinner and after the women had gone to the
> "(with-)drawing room", so the serious smoking
> was not done with women present.
>
> And it became known that smoking was causing
> lung cancer and other diseases. E.g. see
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Doll>

But, in Prince Caspian, Trumpkin has already accepted Caspian as the King (and they're not at Trumpkin's dwelling).

Plus, in The Last Battle, they're all outdoors (and that's the case in all the other smoking scenes as well, as I recall).

[pete...@gmail.com]

OTOH, the people he asked were all full-fledged Royalty, and he may have wanted
to defer to their preferences, even if he'd have not bothered with a fellow commoner.

Pt

[Quadibloc]

I did a little web search in response to this topic.
I didn't really find anything that bore directly on the question,
although I see the discussion here has addressed the issue.
But, quite surprisingly, at least to me, I found results that
asked if C. S. Lewis could be considered a Christian...
because he smoked, and in addition, he also drank. And he
believed in evolution, to boot!
To be fair, though, those sites were talking about how
evangelical Christians in the U.S. found C. S. Lewis' forays
into Christian apologetics of interest.
As my own acquaintance with the Christian faith comes from
another direction, what was surprising to me was that they
bothered about such trifles as reasons to doubt Lewis' faith,
when there was the rather glaring matter of the openly
adulterous relationship in which he spent the last years
of his life!
Adulterous... by some standards, of course, but they _are_
Biblical standards, aren't they?
Not that Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump, also beloved of
Evangelical Christians, would be in any position to throw
stones at C. S. Lewis (quite the reverse, in fact, at least in
the case of Donald Trump).
Not that my personal sympathies aren't in favor of love
in preference to religious dogma, and so I am not one of
those who think that the influence of Shadowlands (1993)
was pernicious, but given the apparent priorities of those
who profess Christianity the loudest, well, I was surprised.

John Savard

[Robert Carnegie]

On Sunday, 17 October 2021 at 20:36:56 UTC+1, Quadibloc wrote:
> I did a little web search in response to this topic.
> I didn't really find anything that bore directly on the question,
> although I see the discussion here has addressed the issue.
> But, quite surprisingly, at least to me, I found results that
> asked if C. S. Lewis could be considered a Christian...
> because he smoked, and in addition, he also drank. And he
> believed in evolution, to boot!
> To be fair, though, those sites were talking about how
> evangelical Christians in the U.S. found C. S. Lewis' forays
> into Christian apologetics of interest.
> As my own acquaintance with the Christian faith comes from
> another direction, what was surprising to me was that they
> bothered about such trifles as reasons to doubt Lewis' faith,
> when there was the rather glaring matter of the openly
> adulterous relationship in which he spent the last years
> of his life!
> Adulterous... by some standards, of course, but they _are_
> Biblical standards, aren't they?
> Not that Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump, also beloved of
> Evangelical Christians, would be in any position to throw
> stones at C. S. Lewis (quite the reverse, in fact, at least in
> the case of Donald Trump).

Joy Davidman's first husband had already set her aside
for adultery. He was committing the adultery but evidently
that is still a legitimate reason.

I don't think Lewis's friends considered Joy a married woman
at the time she married Lewis (twice). She was a divorced
woman. For Roman Catholics, and Anglicans who not very
secretly want to be Catholics if only that was legal in England,
that was and possibly is just as bad or worse. If she murdered
her first husband, /that/ would be all right.

[Kevrob]

Only _some_ Christians decried moderate alcohol use and tobacco
use, on religious, rather than medical grounds. They also tend towards
the "low church" variants - Baptists, Methodists - as opposed to Catholics
and Anglicans/Episcopalians.

--
Kevin R

[J. Clarke]

On Sun, 17 Oct 2021 16:38:02 -0700 (PDT), Kevrob <kev...@my-deja.com>
wrote:

I remember my surprise as a teenager to visit the Episcopal rectory
and find the Episcopal priest and the Catholic priest sharing a bottle
of Scotch and arguing over whether the Devil made the Catholic throw
his tennis racket when he lost the match (his view, "it was a wee
leprechaun"). And both had their pipes going.

[Quadibloc]

On Sunday, October 17, 2021 at 3:39:12 PM UTC-6, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> For Roman Catholics, and Anglicans who not very
> secretly want to be Catholics if only that was legal in England,

1) Even if marrying a divorced woman is legal under British _law_,
it still isn't permitted according to the teachings of the *Anglican*
church either.

2) Although the Roman Catholic church _was_ suppressed in Britain
under King Henry the Eighth, and for some time thereafter, the
people of the United Kingdom today enjoy religious freedom, even
if the Anglican Church still has the official status of an "established
church" in direct contravention of the first of the Ten Amendments.

John Savard

[Kevrob]

Anglican churches have to have a rector in order for the living quarters
to be a rectory. RCC parishes are looser about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clergy_house

> and find the Episcopal priest and the Catholic priest sharing a bottle
> of Scotch and arguing over whether the Devil made the Catholic throw
> his tennis racket when he lost the match (his view, "it was a wee
> leprechaun"). And both had their pipes going.

Besides the diocese transferring sickly priests* to my boyhood parish,
they would send ones who hit the bottle too hard - whiskey priests.
I remember ones who would only allow a dribble of altar wine into his
chalice during mass, and others who barely cut it with water. Yes,
I was an altar boy for several years.

* Our local hospital was close to Brookhaven National Lab, and
what I had heard or read was that it was an early adopter of
nuclear medicine.

--
Kevin R

[Paul S Person]

I wasn't aware the Brits had the Ten Amendments.

I'm stll not.
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."

[Andrew McDowell]

We do in fact practice religious discrimination - but on a small number of people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Settlement_1701