Subject+Object

I hardly know where to begin when it comes to describing a single object in my writing room. We’re talking the literary equivalent of Francis Bacon’s studio here, for the room is a dusty, mildewed slew of stuff, a terminal moraine of yellowing paper, and a slurry of tat. The walls are covered with a myriad Post-it notes upon which are inscribed ideas, gags, aperçus, images and tropes; the floor is piled with books and typescripts; the shelves have more books, pill pots, Band-Aid boxes, disposable toothbrushes (I like these a lot and collect them assiduously whenever I fly long haul), shoelaces – and so forth.

The desk, which runs around two sides of the room, has been purpose-built to be slightly scaled up (I’m six feet five), and while there are favoured objects studding the papers on it – an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, a bust of Schumann with a speech bubble stuck to his forehead reading TAKE ME TO THE BRIDGE, a Neolithic handaxe, a giant ball bearing, etc. – there is no single thing that typifies that whole, no synecdoche, or exemplar.

Now I am not a collector per se.To collect seems to me an acknowledgement of defeat; the substitution of a set for its setting. Rather, I think of my relationship with these things as akin to that of a shaman with his symbol set: they may be arranged and rearranged to produce remote and magical effects, such as texts. However, the tobacco pipes that are ranged along the mantelpiece are of a different order: these are transactional objects, at one time invested with enormous power and significance, but now merely briar monuments, a Woodhenge around which I once danced, heavily intoxicated.

We’re talking drugs here. I gave up smoking for a year from 2002 to 2003. I could cope without nicotine – I could even write. I just couldn’t bear people. I wrote my novel Dorian during this period, in which the character Henry Wotton says, ‘Au fond, I think I will always be smoking.’ Prophetic words, but part of the reason I’d given up cigarettes was that I was beginning to think ‘pipe’, and even look at them lovingly in the windows of tobacconists. When I relapsed and resumed sucking the miasma I tried a pipe and discovered – gulp! – that it was an infinitely more effective nicotine delivery system than cigarettes, or even cigars.

As with every other kind of drug-taking I’ve ever indulged in, once bitten, for a long time smitten (there’s even a phenomenon known to pipe smokers as ‘tongue bite’, when you puff so heavily that it feels like just that). My first pipe purchases were modest enough – a churchwarden, a London-style ‘bent’ – all costing around thirty-five pounds, but soon enough I learnt about the mechanics of pipe construction, how the straightness of the briar grain imparts a certain coolness and balance to the smoke, how the bigger the bowl, the looser the fill.

I toyed with meerschaum – I flirted with clay. I haunted specialist tobacconists, spending quite obscene quantities of money on pipes: a natty Savinelli straight set me back £150 (predictably, while the Italians make beautiful pipes, their tobacco blends suck). I awoke in the night dreaming of pipes, and I got up to surf the Internet looking for them. Marc Quinn, the artist, told me about a ‘car pipe’ he’d seen in Milan, the magnetized bowl of which you could stick to the roof of your vehicle – I longed for it.

But most of all I longed for the big black pipe in the window of Jayems, the tobacconist on Victoria Street. It was in all respects pretty standard pipe – not notably different to the iconic pipe of which the painter says ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, but writ large. Very large.That’s what I liked about it – it seemed to me as near as possible to being the ur-pipe, the fount of all smoky wisdom. Being very black and very large and very straight-grained, it must’ve required a huge chunk of briar root to make it (briar, being the only kind that carbonizes without burning, is the sole wood that pipes can be made from). I goggled at that pipe, I went inside and hefted it, I checked out its ‘grip’, which is for the pipe smoker as key as a saxophonist’s embouchure. It was inevitable that despite the insane price tag – £500 – sooner or later I was going to buy the thing.

And there it sits in the rack on the mantelpiece: a parenthesis of an implement that brackets nothing, for soon after its acquisition I more or less gave up pipe-smoking. The hit was great – but the effects,my dear! A tongue like a carpet and an exponential increase in bronchitis I couldn’t be doing with. Instead, to explain what I now feel for the pipe I must paraphrase the writer Robert Stone’s remarks on hard drugs: I admire it from afar.

Well, perhaps not that afar – only a few feet in fact – but such is the queer jumble of this room, it might as well be miles.