The holiday season is upon us, bringing eggnog, fruitcake, plenty of brandy – and a lot of stress.  Time to take a break, light up, have a smoke, and postpone that “quit” pledge till 2012…

Stop!  Consider this post a Public Service Announcement.  My article from earlier this week, from a new book about smoking, is perhaps the best Christmas present I can give to the readers of The Book Haven:

The cigarette industry is not dying. It continues to reap unimaginable profits. It’s still winning lawsuits. And cigarettes still kill millions every year.

So says Stanford’s Robert Proctor, author of the new bombshell study, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, a book the tobacco industry tried to stop with subpoenas and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Proctor, the first historian to testify in court against the tobacco industry (in 1998), warns that the worst of the health catastrophe is still ahead of us: Thanks to the long-term effects of cigarettes, “If everyone stopped smoking today, there would still be millions of deaths a year for decades to come.”

“Low-tar” cigarettes? “Light” cigarettes? Better filters? Forget it, he said. They don’t work. Today’s cigarettes are deadlier even than those made 60 years ago, gram for gram.

Half the people who smoke will die from their habit. A surprising number will die from stroke and heart attacks, not cancer.

Moreover, he asks, “How many people know that tobacco is a major cause of blindness, baldness and bladder cancer, not to mention cataracts, ankle fractures, early onset menopause, ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion and erectile dysfunction?”

Six trillion cigarettes are smoked every year – that’s 6,000,000,000,000. Proctor said that’s “enough to make a continuous chain from Earth to the sun and back, with enough left over for a couple of round trips to Mars.”

His 750-page book, a decade in the making, has already earned high praise, with terms like “a real page-turner,” “a must-read,” “the most important book on smoking in 50 years.”

“This book is a remarkable compendium of evil,” wrote Columbia’s David Rosner, an author of Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. “It will keep you spinning from page one through the last. … It is the type of book that makes you wonder how, in God’s name, this could have happened.”

According to Donald Kennedy, Stanford president emeritus and former editor of the journal Science, the book “unpacks the sad history of an industrial fraud. [Proctor’s] tightly reasoned exploration touches on all topics on which the tobacco makers lied repeatedly to Congress and the public.”

The hefty book has not only won him accolades, but it’s personally cost Proctor $50,000 in legal fees to defend himself against the industry, which subpoenaed his email and unpublished manuscript.

According to an article in The Nation last year, Proctor is one of only two historians who currently testify on behalf of smokers injured by tobacco products; 50 have testified on behalf of the industry. Academics from virtually every discipline have been collaborating with the Marlboro Men – and made big money doing so.

“This is the biggest breach of academic integrity since the Nazis,” he said, and “certainly the most deadly.”

Such language is typical for Proctor. When it comes to cigarettes, he speaks in provocative superlatives, pulling no punches.

Cigarettes are “the deadliest artifact in the history of civilization” – more than bullets, more than atom bombs, more than traffic accidents or wars or heroin addiction combined. They are also among “the most carefully and most craftily devised small objects on the planet.”

“The industry has spent tens of billions designing cigarettes since the 1940s – that’s from the industry’s own documents,” he said.

He also marshals evidence to show that smoking contributes substantially to environmental damage, even global warming: “When we finally decide to take seriously the problem of global climate change, cigarettes will come under increasing scrutiny. Tobacco agriculture and cigarette manufacturing have heavy carbon footprints – think deforestation and petrochemical pesticides – and cigarettes are leading causes of fires and industrial accidents. There’s not much room for cigarettes in an environmentally conscious world.”

For the industry, though, the cigarette represents the perfect business model. “It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive,” says investment guru Warren Buffett. Proctor notes that “by artfully crafting its physical character and chemistry, industry scientists have managed to create an optimally addictive drug delivery device, one that virtually sells itself.”

“There’s hundreds of things people don’t know about smoking,” said Proctor. Myths have instead lulled the public into complacency. He listed a few of the most common:

Myth #1. Nobody smokes anymore. If you read the media, smoking sounds like a dying habit in California. That’s far from true, said Proctor. Californians still smoke about 28 billion cigarettes per year, a per capita rate only slightly below the global average.

So why do we have this illusion? “We don’t count the people who don’t count. It’s not the educated or the rich who smoke anymore, it’s the poor,” said Proctor.

Also, look at popular social trends – the recent trendiness of cigars, for example. Or the current fad for hookah parties. He recalled one such event at Stanford: “They would never have a Marlboro party. But hookah is just as addictive, and just as deadly.”

Myth #2. The tobacco industry has turned over a new leaf. “The fact is that the industry has never admitted they’ve lied to the public or marketed to children or manipulated the potency of their project to create and sustain addiction,” Proctor said. “A U.S. Federal Court in 2006 found the American companies in violation of RICO racketeering laws, and nothing has changed since then. And the same techniques used in the past in the U.S. are now being pushed onto vulnerable populations abroad.”

Myth #3. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. Proctor pointed out that most people begin smoking at the age of 12 or 13, or even younger in some parts of the world. “Do they know everything?” Proctor asked rhetorically. “And how many people know that cigarettes contain radioactive isotopes, or cyanide, or free-basing agents like ammonia, added to juice up the potency of nicotine?”

Myth #4. Smokers like smoking, and so should be free to do it. And the industry has a right to manufacture cigarettes, even if defective. Proctor called this “the libertarian argument.”

“It is wrong to think about tobacco as a struggle between liberty and longevity; that tips the scales in favor of the industry. People will always choose liberty, as in ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ What people don’t realize is that most smokers dislike the fact they smoke, and wish they could quit. Cigarettes are actually destroyers of freedom.”

There are tobacco industry documents, he noted, in which smoking is compared not to drinking but rather to being an alcoholic. Proctor also points to how we handle other forms of toxic pollution: “We don’t allow kids to play with toys coated with lead paint. We don’t drive cars that don’t meet safety standards.”

The upshot: “People should be free to smoke wherever it harms no one else, but cigarettes as now designed are too dangerous to be produced or sold.”

Myth #5. The tobacco industry is here to stay. Global tobacco use would be declining were it not for China, where 40 percent of the world’s cigarettes are made and smoked. Proctor has a bet with a colleague, though, that China will be among the first to bar the sale of cigarettes, once their financial costs are recognized. Governments throughout the world have benefited from tobacco taxes, which he calls “the second addiction.” The costs of paying for diseases caused by smoking are high, however – especially when you count lost productivity – and governments will start winding down on tobacco, he says, once this is taken seriously.

Proctor also said that in the United States, a “Kafkaesque world” divides smokers and non-smokers. The industry has computerized databases of virtually all smokers and spends over $400 per smoker per year on special offers, coupons, sign-ups and other direct mail approaches – an unseen world to non-smokers. “This is precisely how the industry wants it; a fungus always grows best in the dark,” he writes.

Proctor admits to a personal motivation for his research. Three of his grandparents died from smoking – one from emphysema, another from lung cancer and a third from a heart attack in his mid-50s. The family blamed the last death on eating too many eggs. “That’s the story,” said Proctor, “but he smoked nonstop.”

For Proctor, then, his engagement with Big Tobacco is more than just research: “It’s part of my sense of what it means to be an ethical human being, using my expertise to do what’s right for humanity on the planet.”

Roland Greene, our hero

The Book Haven is moving to a different server this week, and will have a new home with Arcade.  Frankly, we’re very pleased about our new digs.  Arcade is kind of a Huffington Post for academics and others, under the benevolent guidance of Stanford’s Roland Greene, the site’s director, and an editorial and consulting board that includes some of the nation’s most eminent scholars.

You’ll be able to reach us via the same URL, and it will be the same Book Haven – it’s just that we’ll be neighbors with an elite crew instead of sitting out here all by our lonesome.

As I wrote last year:

Pretty much by word-of-mouth alone, and some nifty technological know-how, it’s now attracting more than 5,000 visitors a day.

Arcade provides a venue for scholarly articles, an intellectual network, a public conversation, a digital salon and a sounding board for ideas before they wind up between hard covers. “In my field, it’s really a boon,” said Greene, professor of English and of comparative literature. “There’s nothing like it on the web.”

The site hosts two digital-only journals – Occasion and Republics of Letters. It includes podcasts and videocasts on “The Arcade Channel” and discusses works in progress on “ArcadeWorks.”

“The Art of Translation,” in conjunction with San Francisco’s Center for the Art of Translation, also nests on the site, along with about 35 bloggers (discussions are pending to add about 20 more).

Arcade describes itself, in a brochure, as “curated but participatory” and “technologically rich in the service of ideas.”

Fine company indeed.  So, thanks, Roland!  And thank you, Arcade! And be patient, gentle readers (in the last day alone, from Uganda, Palestine, Slovakia, Guyana, Latvia, Sri Lanka, Belarus, and Kuwait, among other more or less exotic locales), there may be a few bumps during the transition from the Stanford News Service, but all shall be well.

Has she been "slimed"?

The internet has been warmed this week by the fires between Harvard critic Helen Vendler and former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove.  The upshot: Vendler didn’t like Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and Dove didn’t like that Vendler didn’t like it.  Angry letters have been pouring in against Vendler.

Vendler’s Nov. 24 article in the New York Review of Books, “Are These Poems to Remember?” notes: “Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Anthologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as ‘elitism,’ and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom. … Which of Dove’s 175 poets will have staying power, and which will seep back into the archives of sociology?” Why only six pages for Wallace Stevens, and no more than the single poem from James Merrill?

Vendler takes particular aim at Dove’s introduction:

“She denigrates Frost’s ‘Design’ and ‘Acquainted with the Night,’ for instance, as ‘blunt and somewhat smug,’ calls Eliot ‘a sourpuss retreating behind the weathered marble of the Church,’ and says that Elizabeth Bishop ‘somehow managed to chisel the universe into pixilated uncertainties.’ Merrill, whose ‘formal verse placed him squarely on the side of the poetry establishment,’ is said to have shed ‘the jeweled carapaces of formalism in favor of the rules of the Ouija board.’ Can Dove think that a poet of Merrill’s depth can be confined to the putative space of a vague ‘poetry establishment,’ or that placing poets on one side or another of such an assumed ‘establishment’ says anything about their abilities? And as a poet herself, she must know better than to refer metaphorically to formal verses as ‘jeweled carapaces’: carapaces belong, after all, to insects and tortoises. Such cartoonish remarks are not helpful to the understanding of poetry. …

She stands by her review.

These are the kind of passages that makes every writer cringe.  Who among us can throw the first stone?  Haven’t we all written hastily, sloppily sometimes?  On the other hand, that’s exactly what critics are for: to spank us when we do.

Dove responded in a 1700-word letter.  She could have done it more effectively with far fewer words.  She has some good points to make. Taking on Vendler’s comment,  “Did Dove feel that only these poems [five early poems by Stevens] would be graspable by the audience she wishes to reach? Or is it that she admires Stevens less that she admires Melvin Tolson, who receives fourteen pages to Stevens’s six?”

Ah, here we go, totting up pages of poetry rather than the poems themselves. Tolson is represented by two poems (actually, one poem and one section of a book-length poem); Stevens by six. Should Tolson be denied representation because he writes long poems? As far as the selection of early Stevens goes, my original choices included several middle-period poems, but rights problems prohibited their final inclusion. I can’t expect Vendler to know this, and though it is a sad comment on the deplorable state of the American reprint permissions process, I accept responsibility for the resulting omission. However, in juxtaposing a great Anglo-American poet with a great African-American one, Vendler immediately draws unsubstantiated conclusions that fit her bias.”

But then Dove goes too far.  She accuses Vendler of racism, and stoops to attack the critic rather than the criticism. Finally she foams: “I would not have believed Vendler capable of throwing such cheap dirt, and no defense is necessary against these dishonorable tactics except the desire to shield my reputation from the kind of slanderous slime that sticks although it bears no truth … she not only loses her grasp on the facts, but her language, admired in the past for its theoretical elegance, snarls and grouses, sidles and roars as it lurches from example to counterexample, misreading intent again and again.”

Vendler’s response is short: “I have written the review and I stand by it.”  It’s not a “cheeky” reply, as The Atlantic Wire wrote.  It’s professional.  And The Atlantic is also wrong in asserting that “what they’re really fighting about” is “each other’s credentials.”

Largely, the two women have a different idea of what anthologies should do, and it’s a discussion worth having.  Is Vendler looking for a “Top Ten,” Dove asks?  Truly, there is a lot to be said for favoring a minor, relatively unknown poet who lights a fire in a few souls over some widely accepted canonical poets. How to balance the worrying, risky – and inevitably biased and unfair – process of winnowing against the easy out of letting 175 flowers bloom?

Also, Vendler is reacting to a literary world where poets often have an eye to classroom sales. Bashing off a quick anthology with a breezy introduction is a cash cow for an otherwise poorly remunerated profession.  I’ve seen some shamefully sloppy stuff from some very prominent poets – they get away with it because their names are big.

Fortunately, James Fenton at the London Evening Standard takes a more even-handed p.o.v., and slaps down political correctness and Penguin, too, while he’s at it:

The best thing Dove could have done was shut up and let people draw their own conclusions. Vendler is known to “bear, like the Turk, no rival near the throne”. Perhaps this was just another example of territoriality.

Excepting that it wasn’t. In most, though not in my opinion all, of her criticisms, Vendler put her finger on blatant weaknesses, although she ignored the most obvious weakness of all: nothing by Sylvia Plath, and nothing by Allen Ginsberg. Dove explains in her introduction that her permissions funds did not run to such expensive poets, and she says to the reader: “For these involuntary gaps, I ask you to cut me some slack.”

This is just not good enough, and the fault here is largely with Penguin for not seeing the difficulty Dove was in and coming to her aid. A small publisher might plead for the reader’s understanding over such omissions. A large one has to decide whether it is prepared to stump up the money to do the job properly.

Fred Viebahn offered this tidbit in the comments section of the London article, pointing out Dove’s words in the Dec. 2011 edition of The Writer’s Chronicle: “… the worst offender by far [demanding outrageous fees] was the publisher of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg, whose ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude resulted in none of this house’s authors being included … Negotiations dragged on literally until the day when the anthology went into production; seeking common ground, I offered several solutions, including reducing the overall number of poems … while meeting their exorbitant line fees … The answer was nothing less than shocking: All or nothing. In other words, if I didn’t pay the same high line fees for all their poets as well as, unbelievably, take all the poems I had initially inquired about, I couldn’t have Ginsberg nor Plath … Pleas from upper Penguin management and even from one of the affected poets, who declared his willingness to forgo royalties, fell on deaf ears; the day before the anthology went into production, [the publisher of Plath and Ginsberg] withdrew all pending contracts and declared the negotiations closed.” He adds that  paying more for some permissions would have violated agreements with other publishers that did not permit to “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

He ought to know. He’s Rita Dove’s husband.

Helen Vendler will be speaking on “Wallace Stevens as an American Poet” at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 17, in the Stanford Humanities Center. The event is free and open to the public.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the world anxiously awaiting the final third volume of William Manchester’s The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm:  “I know, I know,” I wrote. “It’s going to be written not by Manchester, who died in 2004, but by Paul Reid, and everyone is wondering if it will be up to snuff.  So much so it’s a wonder that Reid doesn’t just hide under his bed and refuse to write anything at all.”

Relax, everyone!  He’s fine!  Paul Reid emailed me over the weekend to say: “I have emerged from under my bed to assure you that The Last Lion is being edited, all 470,000 words, every man-jack of them composed, proofed, and sourced while I labored with just ten inches of head room.  It’s so cramped under there even the rats are stoop-shouldered.”

Then he invited me to chat:  “Please allow the phone to ring several times, as it takes me a while to crawl from under the bed, climb the ladder from the bunker to the padded room, and reach the phone.”

Chat we did, and it was great fun.

He recalled the October night when his friend Bill Manchester, in failing health, asked him to continue the series.  “We were watching a Red Sox game – the Red Sox lost, as usual.”

“The night he asked me to do it, I said, ‘Gee I don’t know, Bill.’”

Both men had been feature writers for daily newspapers, banging out articles of about 800 words.  Manchester’s advice to the budding author: “String together a thousand short feature stories and you’ll have a book.”

“If I imagined 800 pages, I would have been pretty daunted,” Paul admitted. He also said that he would have been cowed if asked to write about, say, Paganini.  However, Paul had been a World War II buff from way back:  “I knew the battles, I knew Montgomery, ‘Bomber’ Harris – my whole life, that’s been my hobby. I loved history, from my earliest memory.”

Speaking out from the bunker

“You can do it, just write,” Manchester exhorted Paul. “I’ll have my red Number 2 pencil. I’ll edit; you write.”

That was the plan.  “But he died 7 months later,” Paul said.  Then the younger author was on his own, guided by 4,000-5,000 pages of Manchester’s notes.

Manchester was “an organization guy.” But it was an organization not necessarily recognizable to anyone else.

“He had his own system for putting his notes together.” Manchester had called them “clumps” of notes, formed by taking a hundred sheets of paper, taping or gluing pairs of them together to form one long sheet, and binding them at the top to create his own “tablet.” He would tape or glue Xeroxes of speeches and official documents.  He left behind dozens of these makeshift tablets.

Manchester also had his own notation system. On the lefthand margin of the manuscript, he would jot one of at least a hundred “topic codes” (for example, De Gaulle, Nazi Germany).  A little pound sign would indicate information on Churchill’s family.

He marked the righthand side with cryptic “source codes.”  Paul cracked one early: HAR was a code for Averell Harriman’s memoir. But the others?

“I finally had a brainstorm,” he said.  He called the Wesleyan Library where Manchester did his research, and asked for a list of all the books Manchester had borrowed.  It didn’t keep any such list.  “Because I knew Bill,” Paul said he had another flashbulb moment:  Could have a list of all Manchester’s overdue books? “That ran to dozens of pages.” The code was cracked again.

“I went out and purchased everything,” including collections of Hitler speeches, Roosevelt speeches, diaries of generals.  The Bostonian’s North Carolina bunker has about 25 linear feet of World War II books.  “The war is 85 percent of the story, and that what a lot of people are waiting for.”

Manchester’s manic writing habits were famous (Vanity Fair wrote about Manchester here) – 7 days a week, for 12-14 hours a day.  Paul, however, is a bit more leisurely: he spends about 5 or 6 hours going over sources about a particular week in the war, writes for a few hours, and starts over the next day.

So what does Churchill have to say to us today? “For Churchill, courage – moral courage – was the first virtue in the Aristotelian sense.”

Paul recounted an incident where the prime minister talked to 8 and 9 year old schoolboys at his former Harrow school in 1940.  “That’s when he said, never give in, never give in, to tyranny, to evil.  These are not dark days, best days of our lives.”  This lesson, for 8 and 9 year children, Paul emphasized.

He had a system.

“There was no guile with Churchill.  He didn’t know how to be dishonest.  Stalin knew that.  He [Churchill] was a brave man, but not foolhardy man.”

Nor was he a despot, like his famous foes:  “He pursued knowledge, not power,” said Paul. His pugnacious stances were not just based on opinions, but on his wideranging study:  “He read everything – Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides, Cicero, The Aeneid, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, British empiricists,  Macaulay, and all of Gibbons, Yeats and Keats and Byron and Shelley, Longfellow and Emerson.  Everything.”

Manchester and Churchill both threaded through Paul Reid’s mind as he worked, but the final work?  “The work is not only yours, it’s you.”

Now he is close to the finish line.  He won’t prophesy exactly when the book will be out – “it’s a big project, and it will take some time.”

“Churchill would just push ahead. That’s what you have to do.”

Just like I said a few weeks ago.”

"A resemblance of the divine mind"?

During my recent London sojourn, I passed the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.  I hadn’t visited in years, and didn’t this time. Yet I remembered an old friend there: the Leonardo da Vinci charcoal cartoon of the Madonna, Child, St. Anne and John the Baptist.  I remember sitting contemplatively in the darkened alcove that housed it after I first moved to London years ago.

I should have stopped in last month.  Little did I know that a megawatt exhibition of Leonardo’s paintings had just kicked off.  On the other hand, a friend reminded me, do I want to fight my way to spy Leonardo intermittently through large mobs of chattering people?

My desire was piqued more than assuaged when I saw a magazine on a friend’s coffeetable, with another old friend on the cover.  No wonder the Lady with an Ermine was not available for viewing when I went to Kraków last spring (I’d introduced myself in 2008).  She was being gussied up for London.

“Yet what is even more impressive is the way that these spectacular loans have been devised, not simply to draw crowds – although they will, of course, do that – but to encourage us to think more deeply about Leonardo as an artist. Far more even than Michelangelo, he has come to stand as the archetype of universal genius – an anatomist, inventor and theorist pursuing his pioneering studies alone – to such a degree that the fact that he was primarily a painter operating in the commercial and courtly world of Renaissance Italy has been in danger of being forgotten.  The exhibition focuses on the 18 years he spent in Milan at the court of Ludovico Sforza.”

The article, by Michael Hall, was the cover story on a magazine I hadn’t thought about for years, ye olde Country Life, which I had always thought a stuffy, snooty sort of affair, filled with the names of people I’d never heard of.  It’s been revamped, and now it’s rather fun. There’s still a lot of pricey estates in the English countryside (though now it looks a bargain when compared to the Bay Area housing markets), but it also discusses a William Golding centenary exhibition, “Lord of the Flies and Beyond,” at the Bodleian, and a small tidbit on how the proceeds of the sale of two sketch-leaves of Edward Elgar‘s unfinished 3d Symphony are going to the great-great-granddaughter of the woman he he loved madly (she’ll be using the money to study at the Royal College of Music).

Meanwhile, the Leonardo exhibition continues till February 5, though I’m unlikely to catch it. It brings together more than half of his known paintings.  It also includes the first painting in over a century to be accepted as a hitherto unknown Leonardo:

“…an emphasis on perfect beauty that is strongly evident also in the newly discovered Christ as Salvator Mundi, begun in about 1499. … Leonardo strives to go beyond reality to embody an approach to art that he described thus: ‘The divinity which is the science of painting transmutes the painter’s mind into a resemblance of the divine mind.'”

Back in the U.S.S.R.

At first I mistrusted M.G. Stephens‘s “Sunday Morning at the Marlin Cafe,” which was published in Ploughshares in autumn 2008.  It recounts an encounter with Russian poet Joseph Brodsky as a Sunday morning drunk at a seedy café near Columbia University, sometime in the mid-1980s.  I wrote about the tale in a recent post, “M.G. Stephens on Brodsky: “It is the voice that seduces us” (And wrote about J.B. more recently here.)

Then I got a note from M.G. Stephens himself, writing at 6 a.m. from the U.K.  He insists that it’s all true.  “Going to the Marlin was a kind of slumming for people from Columbia. It was a run-down old-man’s bar at 110th & Broadway. I taught my creative writing classes there. Other profs frequently hung out there. It was quite dodgy, but also a place where Morningside Heights intellectuals let down their hair, away from the glare of academe. It was more intimate, too, than the West End Café up the road.”

Moreover, he told me, “I did not write that Brodsky essay for many years until I could verify my facts.” Ten years, actually, “checking with as many people as I could to be sure it was him.”

It's true.

He noted that “upwards of fifty people from Columbia, where he taught, and I also taught, his former students, people from the neighborhood, and three of the bartenders in that bar all verified that he frequently came to the Marlin, drank vodka, and sometimes got too drunk.”

“That was my only encounter with him, though I did see him in there myself many times,” he added.

Stephens is also a theater historian, from Yale, who has taught at University of London, though he is retired now. Hence, he was not intimidated when challenging the Nobel laureate’s perceptions regarding Greek drama, especially its comedy. They had differences of opinion about whether “Aristophanes was a kind of Richard Pryor of his time.”  Read the rest here.

“My next project is to read his poetry more thoughtfully. Many Russians in London have told me that I should, and I believe them.” Indeed, he should.