The stereotypical image of “the writer” is familiar to anyone familiar with Hollywood. The camera pans up to the fifth floor of a run-down building, into a room overlooking the street, then comes to rest on a desk in the corner. On the desk are the artiste’s essentials: a typewriter, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. The writer need not even be present: we have been taught to recognize his traces as surely as we read the proverbial writing on the wall.

Not that alcohol and cigarettes are somehow private property of an American cultural elite. In France, for example, this literary combination took root early as well and has remained alive—thanks to Hollywood and its imitators and the star power of locals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus—down to the present day. Nevertheless, I propose that booze and smokes as necessary tools for the writer’s craft represent a particularly American myth—and also one of America’s most successful and enduring cultural exports.

It is curious indeed to move from American literature of the Nineteenth Century into that of the Twentieth. From the rare figures of an Edgar Allan Poe supposedly writing himself into a drunken stupor, or a Herman Melville hard at work with brandy and a good pipe, we suddenly find ourselves in a world of smoky jazz bars and hard liquor flowing out of speakeasy pipes—in short, the celluloid world of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Where did this made-for-the-big-screen universe suddenly come from? This is a complex question with complex answers, of which I can but suggest a few here. An in-depth analysis of this question would have to consider issues as diverse as the persistence of drugs such as opium in literature through the mid-Nineteenth Century, their relative eclipse, and the rebirth of literary drug culture after World War II; the increasing focus on poetic madness among artists of the generations who came of age after the Twenties; the role of music, be it jazz or rock & roll, as code for sex, which was often another way of saying freedom; etc.

Disclaimers aside, let us briefly trace the parallel careers of alcohol and cigarettes in literature separately, before more closely examining their abrupt crystallization in American cultural production early in the Twentieth Century.

One need look no further than the figure of Dionysus to locate the origin, in Western thought at least, of the association of artistic creation with alcohol consumption. Initially the god of wine and sexual fertility, Dionysus was later promoted to patron of the arts who could endow his worshippers with divine creativity.

The thus “inspired” artist became a commonplace in the Romantic era, as writers and revolutionaries alike (often one and the same) looked back to Greek and especially Roman models for their own inspiration. The image of the writer that emerged out of this retrospective was a contradiction. At once clearsighted and intoxicated, prophet and fool, poet and rebel, he would come to be known by many names—Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Jim Morrison.

The literary career of cigarettes is a comparatively more modern—and arguably, more American—affair. Cigarette smoking actually originated in the West Indies and parts of Central and South America, before being exported to Europe by Spanish explorers in the late 1500s. Until the Twentieth Century, however, the cigarette remained largely foreign to literary appropriation, appearing famously in the biography of Walter Raleigh, but elsewhere toiling in obscurity.

The failure of cigarettes to enter the world of belles lettres was undoubtedly related to the difficulty of producing them en masse, which was only to be resolved around 1875 with the introduction of cigarette manufactories in England and America. There was also the problem of image competition—particularly in England—from pipe smokers such as Charles Dickens and Conan Doyle, whose genteel descendants in the past century boasted the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and naturalized Englishman T.S. Eliot.

An early indication of the new American aesthetic which would combine alcohol and cigarettes may be found in Henry James’s anthologized novel, THE AMBASSADORS. Conceived in 1895 and published in serial form in 1903, THE AMBASSADORS participates vigorously in the Jamesian project of defining America against the backdrop of a wiser, more civilized Europe. The novel’s protagonist, Lambert Strether, travels to France on an “American” mission to recall his patroness’s wayward son Chad from a supposedly corrupt life in Paris, but what Strether learns over the course of his mission profoundly alters his perceptions not only of himself but of the America he purports to represent.

In effect, James pits two very different Americas against each other: the traditional America of puritanical and mercantile values (symbolized by Mrs. Newsome, Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh) against an emerging America infused with a new, freer spirit through its contact with Europe (symbolized by Chad, Little Bilham, and Strether himself). This positing of two antipathetic countries within a single one suggests a number of oppositions which the novel sketches in varying degrees of completeness, including: a rigid moral code versus a purely aesthetic one, and an outmoded literature versus a developing one which will incorporate this new “moral” aesthetic.

James thereby serves as American prophet and role model for what Malcolm Cowley will condemn as the “religion of art” in EXILE’S RETURN. Gertrude Stein, among others, credited James with thus ushering in the aesthetic formalism of the Twentieth Century, remarking of herself from the perspective of Alice Toklas, “It is rather strange that she was not then [in her days at Radcliffe] interested in the work of Henry James for whom she now has a very great admiration and whom she considers quite definitely as her forerunner, he being the only nineteenth century writer who being an american felt the method of the twentieth century.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked of himself and his fellow countrymen, “We go to Europe to be Americanized.” It is perhaps no accident that in THE AMBASSADORS the straight-laced Strether, while delving into what it means to be an American, takes up cigarette smoking. At the same time he gives himself over increasingly to what might be called recreational drinking, particularly during his lunches with Madame de Vionnet.

In one sense, of course, Strether is merely “letting his hair down.” But on a deeper level he would appear to be constructing a new identity for himself, a new American identity, a hybrid of the Old World and the New, one modeled on the seemingly unconscious grace of the poet Little Bilham. Indeed, Strether appears consciously to imitate Little Bilham, both in the latter’s attitude of expatriate flâneur and in his habit of smoking cigarettes (which characteristics, for that matter, seem inseparable). Insofar as the older Strether stands in for his author—James himself admitted as much—, this flattering imitation might be read as an approval of the lifestyle and symbols chosen by the up-and-coming generation of artists.

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the combination of alcohol and cigarettes was something new, something truly “American,” full of both pioneer spirit and a kind of carelessness, and young writers seized upon it with all the fervor of youth, and all the excitement occasioned by the dawning of a new century. These symbols constituted at once a rejection of the old America and the making of a new one, a move from provincial puritanism to urbane aestheticism.

In a country thus internally divided between two moralities, what more fitting vices than a depressant and a stimulant combined? And for the once culturally advanced Europe, now suddenly following America’s lead after “America created the twentieth century,” to use Stein’s phrase, what less surprising than that these symbols should become the norm worldwide? Years before the Marlboro Man graced the billboards of foreign cities, our ambassadors were already hard at work writing their novels in Europe, and more would soon join them. Hollywood took care of the rest.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and the newly released POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out http://www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously explore the role of imagination in creating reality. A respected New York publisher, whose authors feature a National Book Award finalist and dozens of prestigious award winners, made an offer (declined in favor of self-publishing) for the six-volume BEGINNER’S LUKE Series, which was selected out of a “slush pile” of 8,000 manuscripts—a rare and wonderful feat. Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting http://www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at http://www.CrowRising.com.]