UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
All writings (c) David E. Goldweber

STUDY TIPS from Prof Goldweber

1. FOCUS. Minimize distractions and set yourself to the task at hand. Do things one at a time. Don't try to read a book and watch TV at the same time; if you do this you'll forget what you've read AND what you've watched. Do not "multi-task."

2. SLOW DOWN. Read slowly, write slowly, think slowly. American society is too impatient and fast-paced; don't let it get to you. Take your time and you will understand things and remember things better.

3. STRENGTHEN YOUR MEMORY. Memory is the foundation of intelligence. Without remembering things you cannot do anything else with them (compare, classify, divide, analyze, comment, etc). By discouraging rote learning, American society places too little emphasis on memory. We need more rote learning in American schools, not less, especially for younger students. Rote learning strengthens memory, and memory is required later in life when we must make judgments and formulate ideas. Besides memorizing by rote, other memory-building techinques include visualization (i.e. associate things you want to remember with relevant visual images) or writing (the physical act of writing things down will help our minds remember). See what works for you.

4. SEEK RELATIONSHIPS. Many ideas in one field have counterparts in other fields. When you learn a new concept, relate it to other concepts you already know. Note how concepts change when related to one another.

5. MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND. Can you restate new ideas in your own words? If so, then you understand them. Imagine you are teaching the ideas to someone else; if you can teach the ideas, you can be sure that you know them well.

6. TEST YOURSELF. As time goes by you might forget. Test yourself to see what you remember. Make up questions that a professor might put on a test. Answer these questions to solidify your knowledge.

7. FORM GOOD HABITS. One great habit is discussing new things you have learned with other people. Tell people what you have learned and ask their opinions. Apply your ideas to your daily life.

8. ASK QUESTIONS. Good learners are always asking questions. Questions keep your mind nimble. Seek explanations, details, causes, and implications.

9. LISTEN CAREFULLY TO OTHERS. Recognize that you are just one person and that you know very little. Give time and attention to the ideas of others, especially others with whom you disagree. Be intellectually humble, no matter how smart you are.

10. QUESTION YOURSELF. Make a habit of occasionally re-evaluating your own beliefs. Are you sure you believe what you believe? Examine even your most cherished political and religious beliefs from time to time. Learn your strengths and weaknesses as a thinker and as a person.



THE PIERROT FIGURE IN LANGSTON HUGHES (2002)

What are we to make of Langston Hughes’s appropriation of the French clown-figure known as the Pierrot? Are Hughes’s Pierrot poems mere anomalies, or are they essential components of his oeuvre? Are they lyrical aberrations from the political protest poems, or do they have a social element themselves? Is the Pierrot a stand-in for the poet himself, or is he more of a symbol or a type? How might Pierrot relate to figures such as Jesse B. Simple or Madam Alberta K.? In what follows, I will compare Hughes’s Pierrot to the Pierrots of his cultural predecessors and to other recurring characters in Hughes’s work. I suggest that, while Hughes’s Pierrot character is himself a figure of escape and fantasy, Hughes’s Pierrot poems often carry an undertone of race-consciousness and social protest.

Pierrot is a very malleable and culturally accommodating figure, so there is no definitive archetype, but we can trace the steps of his development and note the various forms in which he appeared.1 His origins can be traced to the ‘Pedrolino’ character of sixteenth-century Italian theater, an energetic and carefree rustic who loved music and dancing. The Pedrolino character made his way to France in the late seventeenth century where he was given his white clown-costume, his white-powdered face, and his ‘Pierrot’ name. Through the eighteenth century Pierrot continued in France as a happy rustic, although in some productions he was a simple loner, while in others he was a game-player and ‘Don Juan’ lover with an intelligence that punctuated his simplicity. He was a sympathetic figure, enjoying life even when troubles brewed around him. If he got himself into a fix, he would find his way out of it using nothing more than his good-natured innocence and candor.

In the late 1700s, the white-faced Pierrot occasionally faced a black-masked rival, Harlequin. In these performances, Pierrot was the hero (associated with angels) while Harlequin, though not necessarily evil, was the villain (associated with devils).2 In the early 1800s, Pierrot himself acquired a dark side. Saddened by the failures of the Revolution and the excesses of Napoleon, the French Romantics used Pierrot to explore their own self-consciousness, sorrow, and disillusion. Pierrot could now be a rejected lover, and a loner by circumstance rather than choice. Yet he remained a sympathetic figure. He was spurned by others not because of freakishness or immorality but because he was better than they were, because he was too sensitive or too idealistic for them to understand.

But by and large, Pierrot was presented as a happy character and not a hopeless one. It was in this happy mode that he reached his greatest popularity, in mid 1800s France. After the efforts of the theater critic Théophile Gautier and actor Jean-Gaspard Deburau, Pierrot became more of a complete human being and less of a two-dimensional character type. He became more powerful and less timid, and acquired the ability to poke fun at others by only pretending to be foolish when he might, in fact, be wiser than anyone else. In some productions, Deburau even gave Pierrot a wife - Madame Pierrot.

Though never again as popular as when played by Deburau, Pierrot continued to entertain widespread audiences in the late 1800s. At times, he took on a darker dark side than that given him by the Romantics, appearing in black-face like Harlequin and occasionally becoming a decadent murderer like Mr. Punch of the Punch and Judy shows also popular in Europe at the time. But these interpretations were rare. At the close of the century, Pierrot was typically as happy and honest as he had been for centuries, and, though often uneducated, always loved and appreciated music, and so was never completely simple or crude.

Pierrot easily made his way from the stage into art and literature. He appeared in the seventeenth-century Fables of Jean de La Fontaine and the eighteenth-century paintings of Antoine Watteau, and he blossomed in the nineteenth-century poetry of Albert Giraud, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, and, most famously, Jules Laforgue. Laforgue, a Symbolist poet, appropriated the Romantic version of Pierrot as outcast and dreamer. Appearing, among elsewhere, in Complaintes (1885), Laforgue’s was a sad and angry Pierrot, a “Pierrot fumiste” spurned by an unappreciative lover. Due largely to Laforgue’s influence, Pierrot appeared in numerous late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century works of art including the paintings of Ensor, Rousseau, Roault, Picasso, and Gris; drawings by Beardsley; drawings and photographs by Daumier; and poetry by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and, at last, Langston Hughes. As Arnold Rampersad notes, it was most probably through Laforgue that Hughes discovered Pierrot.3

There are four Pierrot poems in Hughes’s corpus which together were reprinted six times in Hughes’s lifetime. “A Black Pierrot” was published first in the United States in 1923, then in a Paris journal in 1924, then included in The Weary Blues (1926), The Dream Keeper (1932), and Selected Poems (1959). “For Dead Mimes” was published first in 1926 and then later included in Fields of Wonder (1947). “Pierrot” was published in The Weary Blues. “Heart” was first published in 1932 and then included in Fields of Wonder.4 I’d like to briefly discuss each of these poems in connection with their usage of Pierrot. These poems do not form a series, and neither do they offer a consistent appropriation of the Pierrot character. Yet they are related in their use of the character to expand their meanings beyond their ostensibly simple lyric format.

Here is the poem that Hughes simply calls “Pierrot”:

I work all day,
Said Simple John,
Myself a house to buy.
I work all day,
Said Simple John,
But Pierrot wondered why.
For Pierrot loved the long white road,
And Pierrot loved the moon,
And Pierrot loved a star-filled sky,
And the breath of a rose in June.
I have one wife,
Said Simple John,
And, faith, I love her yet.
I have one wife,
Said Simple John,
But Pierrot left Pierrette.
For Pierrot saw a world of girls,
And Pierrot loved each one,
And Pierrot thought all maidens fair
As flowers in the sun.
Oh, I am good,
Said Simple John,
The Lord will take me in.
Yes, I am good,
Said Simple John,
But Pierrot’s steeped in sin.
For Pierrot played on a slim guitar,
And Pierrot loved the moon,
And Pierrot ran down the long white road
With the burgher’s wife one June.

Pierrot here is akin to the pre-Romantic fun-loving ‘Don Juan’ Pierrot of eighteenth-century France. This Pierrot “most often regards women as succulent morsels to be stolen” (Jones 42). He contains “a mixture of simplicity and intelligence, of independence and naive candor” (Storey 22). He “can sing his way through a scene as easily as talk; and when deprived of song and speech altogether he can still manage a successful, though mute, adjustment” (Storey 67). Theater critic Jules Lemaître, writing in the late 1800s, described this type of Pierrot thus: “He represents human vice with an air of insouciance and innocence which makes it extremely attractive. Pierrot is outside the law and, thus, outside of sin. He makes us dream of a life which is purely sensual and freed from the yoke of conscience” (quoted in Jones, 165).

Much the same could be said for Hughes’s character. Pierrot here also recalls Laforgue’s Pierrot in his vigor and assertiveness, and in his love of the moon. But while Laforgue’s Pierrot loves the moon because he sees it as akin to his lonely self, Hughes’s Pierrot seems to like the moon because it provides light for his evening antics: playing on his “slim guitar” and seducing the wives of unsuspecting locals.

There are a number of other interesting things in this poem. Pierrot is said to love “all maidens”; does this mean he makes no distinctions based on race? Is there something about his carefree carpé le diem attitude that has shown him the absurdity of segregation, or of constricting social policies or constricted lifestyles in general? We should note that the road at the poem’s conclusion is referred to as a “white road.” Perhaps this road is white simply because it is lit up at night by the moon, but perhaps it is a road symbolic of “white” society in some way. On one hand, this could be a white society of segregation, and thus Pierrot subverts this white power structure by running off with the wife of someone who has supported this structure. On the other hand, this could be a white capitalist society, with the burgher not a politician but a sort of bourgeois Babbitt.

Indeed, Pierrot is distinguished from his opposite, Simple John, first and foremost because unlike Simple John he does not “work all day.” Pierrot throughout his French and Italian history was known as a simple man, but in this poem it is Pierrot’s antagonist who is referred to as simple. Perhaps John works “all day” because he has become part of a misguided capitalist system, materialistic, status-seeking and promotion-seeking, looking for a slice of the proverbial pie, but never stopping to enjoy the things around him day by day. Pierrot is free from such concerns, free to enjoy whatever comes his way, and it is this freedom that makes him more sophisticated than the people around him, who cannot imagine possibilities beyond the entrenched systems of society. Pierrot does not seem contemplative or philosophical in this poem; therefore we may assume it is his intuition that leads him beyond the immediate ‘simple’ attitudes of those around him.

“Pierrot” is probably the most autobiographical of Hughes’s Pierrot poems, not in the sense that it is based on any actual events in Hughes’s life but in the sense that it is the sort of fantasy he might have had. As Arnold Rampersad has noted, “At some level, Hughes saw himself ideally as a child - a dreamy genius child, a perfect child, a princely child, a loving child, even a mothering and maternal child - but first and foremost as a child.”5 Like the child in “Genius Child,” Pierrot is a rather “wild” creature who thinks and acts as others do not and therefore cannot fit into society. And as Hughes wrote in “It Gives Me Pause”: “I would like to be a sinner/Sinning just for fun/But I always suffer so/When I get my sinning done.” If only he could sin with impunity like Pierrot! There is a related wish in “Ballad of the Fool,” in which Hughes observes a simple man who “just sits and grins/And laughs in the sun/And looks like/He’s having fun./He don’t know there is a war./He ain’t on WPA.”

This fool “don’t have no place except/Up and down the block,” yet Hughes is charmed by his obliviousness to pain: “Gee! Sometimes I wish I/Was a fool that way.”

We may also connect this Pierrot with the ‘tricksters’ of African and African American folklore. Some tricksters don’t know the difference between good and evil, and act purely on impulse, while others are conscious and deliberate, aware of social values. As Bill R. Hampton notes, it is this latter type of tricksters who helped inspire Hughes’s Jesse B. Simple, who enjoys imagining turning the tables on whites (for example, having black generals command white troops, in “Simple Pins on Medals”).6 But perhaps the first type of trickster helped shape this version of Hughes’s Pierrot. If we do not wish to read socio-political commentary into the poem, and if we prefer to see it as timeless rather than historical, we can easily see this Pierrot as an unselfconscious freebooter, living life the only way he knows.

This Pierrot is not really a dreamer because he is a physical and impulsive sort, more of a doer. Yet he acts on his own initiative and on his own time, and should be distinguished from the many public performers we meet in Hughes’s poems who dance, sing the blues, or play jazz. We may therefore connect Pierrot as he appears in this poem with the laugher and roamer characters of poems such as “Laughers,” “Walkers with the Dawn,” “Harlem Night Song,” “Free Man,” and “Carolina Cabin.” But we get quite a different version in “A Black Pierrot”:

I am a black Pierrot:
She did not love me,
So I crept away into the night
And the night was black, too.
I am a black Pierrot:
She did not love me,
So I wept until the dawn
Dripped blood over the eastern hills
And my heart was bleeding, too.
I am a black Pierrot:
She did not love me,
So with my once gay-colored soul
Shrunken like a balloon without air,
I went forth in the morning
To seek a new brown love.

This Pierrot is akin to the Romantic Pierrot who is, even more than the pre-Romantic Pierrot, “outside the normal structures of social order” (Jones 22). He is spurned by society, but this is because he is above it. The interesting twist is Hughes’s use of blackness, rather than whiteness, to suggest innocence. Whereas whiteness on the French stage could suggest a kinship with things angelic or childlike, blackness here suggests a kinship with nature: “the night” and, through the night, “the dawn” and “the eastern hills.” This is a Romantic nature, uncorrupted by modern society. And of course, Pierrot being professedly black in this poem, unnatural modern society is a white-dominated one.

Hughes’s social concerns in mid twentieth-century America were not completely different from the concerns of the Romantics in early nineteenth-century France. As Hughes felt betrayed by the promises of democratic America, the Romantics felt betrayed by post-revolutionary and post-Napoleonic France. They felt that the nation worshiped birth and wealth rather than “a noble soul or sensibility” and that truly honorable folk were thus “forced into debasing disguise by a society incapable of understanding them” (Jones 12-22). One thinks of black American slaves such as the mythic “John” who pretend to be happy simpletons, but who are actually shrewder than their ‘masters’ and able to subtly subvert them or take advantage of them. In one of Deburau’s performances, Pierrot is denied his just wages but is then asked to check whether his lord’s mail has come. Pretending not to fully understand the order, Pierrot heads to the mailbox, “he goes, and sees, but does not bring it back with him” (Jones 43). Similar scenarios could be imagined in stories about John and his kin. Like Pierrot, John was neither big nor strong, and had to use his wits to subvert and yet retain the love of his ‘Old Marster.’7

One wonders what sort of lady this black Pierrot first tried to love. Because his “new” girlfriend will be “brown,” it seems likely that his old girlfriend was something else. One might perhaps suppose that the lady who rejected him was “black,” but after the rejection he sought refuge in the night, which was black like himself, and it is unlikely that he would find solace in something that reminds him of the lady. It seems, then, that he had been in love with a white woman. Perhaps this poem is political, with the white woman symbolizing an insensitive white majority that refuses to acknowledge love offered to it by its black neighbors (as in Hughes’s famous short poem, “The White Ones”), or perhaps this poem is best read as a lyric, with a sad acknowledgement of the fact of unrequited love.

The Pierrot of this poem can also be connected with figures we meet in other Hughes poems. Certainly, he can be connected to the speaker of “The Jester” who, like the Black Pierrot, states “I am the Black Jester” and who shares the mixture of hoped-for happiness and disillusioned sorrow: “Tears are my laughter./Laughter is my pain.” The black Jester is also akin to the Romantic black Pierrot in the reasons for his separation from society; he is “The booted, booted fool of silly men./Once I was wise./Shall I be wise again?” He is not really foolish, but the “silly” people around him see him as such. We should also note that, unlike the roaming Don Juan Pierrot, the Romantic Pierrot “is largely a static figure” (Storey 73). If this black Pierrot is a wanderer, he is akin not to the roamers of “Walkers with the Dawn” but with those of “Vagabonds” who are desperate, hungry, and sad.

Although I see “A Black Pierrot” as less autobiographical than “Pierrot,” one might convincingly argue the opposite. The “Black Pierrot” poem is the only one of the Pierrot poems to be written in the first person voice, and the protagonist is the only one to be unambiguously specified as a black man. And while Hughes was not a lonely bachelor who longed for the love of women, he certainly did fear being separated and isolated from others, black and white alike. Rampersad has noted Hughes’s fear of abandonment (Life of Langston Hughes 1:377), and many critics have noted that, although Hughes loved the American black masses and their culture, he himself was in many ways quite unlike them: educated and literate, not practicing Christianity, not singing, not playing any instruments. “A Black Pierrot” may be like “Minstrel Man,” “Cabaret,” or the many other poems that show an unhappy interior beneath a smiling façade.

The Romantic outsider-type of Pierrot also appears in Hughes’s “Heart”:

Pierrot
Took his heart
And hung it
On a wayside wall.
He said,
“Look, Passers-by,
Here is my heart!”
But no one was curious.
No one cared at all
That there hung
Pierrot’s heart
On the public wall.
So Pierrot
Took his heart
And hid it
Far away.
Now people wonder
Where his heart is
Today.

We might connect this poem with “The Dream Keeper,” which calls for “You dreamers” to “Bring me all of your/Heart melodies/That I may wrap them/In a blue cloud-cloth/Away from the too-rough fingers/Of the world.” Akin to Cullen’s “For a Poet,” the dreamers and their dreams are too precious to be tainted by the imperfect present-day world. The same thought appears in Hughes’s “Dreamer” who makes his dreams into “a bronze vase... a wide round fountain... a song with a broken heart” and asks us, “Do you understand my dreams?” but concludes that “It doesn’t matter” and declares that “I continue to dream.” There is also a bit of a trickster element here, as Pierrot doesn’t seem to give his fellows many chances to notice his heart before it gets hidden away for good. They had an opportunity, they blew it, and too bad for them. There is no indication that Pierrot is unhappy or angry about being spurned, although we may infer as much from the sad tone and slow pace of the lines.

“Heart” seems essentially a lyric poem, but there may be some political implications to it. The speaker tries to connect with people around him but is ignored. We may assume these people are white, and if we read this Pierrot as black, we might be reminded of the “Black Pierrot” who tried to love an apparently white woman but was rejected. We may also think of the Simple episode “A Toast to Harlem” in which Boyd suggests extending a friendly hand to white people, but Simple responds that every time he does so he gets put back “in his place.” We might even wonder if the hanging in this poem has something to do with lynching. Like the “Nigger Christ” in “Christ in Alabama,” Pierrot here may be Christlike in his offering love to mankind but meeting with refusal and hostility.

The Pierrot of “For Dead Mimes” is toughest to classify. He seems an idealistic (and idealized) Romantic, yet he has a faithful lover and may not necessarily be an unhappy loner. Here is the poem:

O white-faced mimes,
May rose leaves
Cover you
Like crimson
Snow.
And may Pierrette,
The faithful,
Rest forever
With Pierrot.

Although we get a mention of white faces in the very first line, it may be inappropriate to read race into this poem. Whiteness here seems to be that of white powder used on stage to give Pierrot a white face and suggest innocence. This white-faced mime may indeed be black. But is Pierrot innocent here? While Pierrette’s faith is mentioned here, Pierrot’s faith is not. It may well be that his girlfriend remained faithful, while Pierrot himself strayed to seek amours elsewhere. If we read the poem this way, it would be a sequel to “Pierrot,” where the character leaves Pierrette for any number of other women, is “steeped in sin,” and is innocent only in the sense that he is not conscious of what he does. This would make the poem rather sad, with Pierrette the sympathetic sufferer able only to rejoin her lover in death.

A happier reading would dissociate this poem from “Pierrot” and instead connect it with “Heart.” Pierrot has led a life apart from most of his countrymen, but still there is one person, his Pierrette, who understands him and remains faithful to him and his ideals. This is not the fickle wandering Pierrot but the Romantic dreamer Pierrot, yet here his dream is in part fulfilled. The rose leaves may imply Pierrot’s connection with the wonders of nature (as in “breath of a rose in June” in “Pierrot”), but more probably they imply the presence of true love. It may also be that this poem is a sequel to “The Black Pierrot,” with Pierrette the “new brown love” that the black Pierrot went to seek. Whichever way we read it, “For Dead Mimes” is the most lyrical and least political of Hughes’s Pierrot poems.

The French Pierrot’s influence on Hughes extends beyond these four poems. Many readers and critics have perceived the importance of moon imagery in Hughes’s poems, and it has been noted that Hughes’s moon imagery seldom carries the traditional connotations of purity and chastity; instead it is associated with feminine sexuality, youthful romance, primitive passion, and (most often) unfulfilled desires.8 These are the same associations in Jules Laforgue’s Pierrot poetry. Laforgue’s poem “Pierrots” describes the sad clowns as “dandys de la Lune” (dandies of the moon). They woo young ladies with “plus folles phrases” (wildest rhapsodies) but yet are rejected. With no ladies to sing to, Pierrots become “blanc parias... purs Pierrots... Blanc enfants de choeur de la Lune” (white parias, pure Pierrots, white choirboys of the moon). So much do they identify with the moon that they are “lunologues eminents” (eminent lunologists). But we realize, reading “L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune,” that the moon “est stérile.” As Storey notes, Laforgue’s moon is the rejected and lonely moon: “her purity is that of stone, of marble; she brings forth no redeemer; she is barren, not virgin” (149). Yet despite all this, the Pierrot must persevere. Like the many Hughes characters who laugh to keep from crying, Laforgue’s Pierrots learn “de vivre de but en blanc” (to live regardless, growing older) and “De hausser à tout les épaules” (to shrug their shoulders at everything).9

If there is something readers are intended to learn from reading Hughes’s Pierrot poems, it is perhaps a particular type of laughter in the face of adversity, a type involving the fantasy of a hedonistic or solipsistic escape from it all. Even for the yearning Pierrots of “Black Pierrot” and “Heart,” the fantasy element seems inescapable simply because the subjects are costumed clown-figures rather than everyday people from the streets of Harlem. Other Hughes characters such as Simple or the speakers in the blues poems (such as “Homesick Blues”) remain involved with real life day-to-day, but Pierrot remains separate from society. It is remarkable that Hughes chooses to show Pierrot as an actual human being in real life and not as a human being acting as a clown on stage, yet Hughes’s Pierrot is essentially a misfit. And unlike, for example, Madam Alberta K., Pierrot does not insist on confronting others or claiming a place within society. If we refuse his offers of openness and love, he will yet dance on, even if his dances are tinged with sadness. In this sense, Pierrot is one of the freest personages that Hughes has given us.

NOTES:

1. Most of the following historical information is gleaned from Louisa E. Jones’s Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1984) and Robert F. Storey’s Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978). Storey’s book contains illustrations of Pierrot on stage and in drawings and paintings.

2. Unlike Pierrot, Harlequin wore a colorful patchwork costume and a black mask. While Pierrot was unarmed, Harlequin carried a bat which could be used as a weapon. He was more sinister than Pierrot, more of a cynic and trickster, and usually more mobile and protean. For more on Harlequin in comparison to Pierrot, see Jones, chapter two.

3. The Life of Langston Hughes (NY: Oxford, 1986):1:62. See also Rampersad’s note in Collected Poems, 622. For more on Hughes’s involvement with French poetry, see Alfred J. Guillaume “And Bid Him Translate: Langston Hughes’s Translations of Poetry from French.” Langston Hughes Review 4.2 (Fall 1985): 1-8. See also Michael Fabre “Hughes’s Literary Reputation in France.” Langston Hughes Review 6.1 (Spring 1987): 20-27. Guillaume notes that most of the poets Hughes translated were communists or Haitians. Fabre discusses Hughes’s reputation in France as a left-wing writer. See Jones for more on Pierrot in Laforgue. See Storey for comments on Pierrot in Eliot and Stevens.

4. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Arnold Rampersad, ed. New York: Vintage, 1994). All excerpts from the poems are taken from this edition.

5. “The Origins of Poetry in Langston Hughes” in Modern Critical Views: Langston Hughes (Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea, 1989):184. See also Rampersad’s suggestion in Life of Langston Hughes 1:62 that Pierrot is a fantasy-self for the poet.

6. Bill R. Hampton. “On Identification and Negro Tricksters.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 31.1 (March 1967): 55-65.

7. For commentary on ‘John’ and ‘Old Marster’ in relation to Hughes’s Simple character, see Susan L. Blake “Old John in Harlem: The Urban Folktales of Langston Hughes” in Modern Critical Views: Langston Hughes (Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea, 1989):127-35.

8. Susan Koprice. “Moon Imagery in ‘The Ways of White Folks.’” Langston Hughes Review 1.1 (Spring 1982): 14-17. For similar images in the poetry, see especially “To a Dead Friend,” “March Moon,” “In the Mist of the Moon,” “Moonlight Night: Carmel,” and perhaps “Moonlight in Valencia: Civil War.”

9. All Laforgue excerpts are from Poems (Patricia Terry, trans. Berkeley: U of California P, 1958). Paul Verlaine also associated Pierrot with the moon. His poem “Pierrot” calls Pierrot “le rêveur lunaire” - a moonstruck dreamer (Selected Poems. C.F. McIntyre, trans. Berkeley: U of California P, 1948). We might also note the popular song lyrics: “Au claire de la lune, mon ami Pierrot” - by the light of the moon, my friend Pierrot.


THE PLEASURES OF SMOKING (2002)

Nary a single day passes without some kind of anti-smoking message hurtling our way from television, radio, billboard, or magazine. I won’t argue with these messages, and I won’t pretend that smoking is healthy. It’s not. But I do believe that this continuing barrage of one-sided proclamations might blind us to the many underappreciated pleasures of smoking.

Let me first confess that I myself am only an occasional smoker. My habit is to purchase a pouch of fresh tobacco, roll two or three cigarettes a day until the pouch runs out, and then go the next few months smoking nothing at all. If you count the odd packs that I buy on my occasional travels, my total is only about 100 cigarettes each year.

And let me next confess that I only smoke outdoors. To my sensitive nostrils, the reek of stale tobacco smoke absorbed into coats or carpets is rivaled only by extreme olfactory horrors such as ammonia, mothballs, dog vomit, or cat pee. None of that for me, thanks. But let me now proclaim that I love the pleasures of smoking, especially cigarette smoking. What pleasures in particular? Glad you asked.

Let’s start with packs. Most smokers buy their cigarettes in packs, and with good reason. Packs are sleek. Packs are trim little boxes with flip-top lids. They fit right in your pocket, any pocket. Twenty cigarettes nestle comfortably inside each pack like babies in a cradle. Once while on vacation in Japan, I bought a bunch of small-sized packs that held only ten cigarettes each. Tiny little packs! As neat and cute as possible. I smoked the cigarettes but saved the boxes.

There’s lots more to say about packs, such as the fact that some of those artsy company logos are the same ones that originated way back in the 1920s. That’s a link with history. But I’m going to leave aside the subject of packs because, to me, the keenest pleasures of smoking call for doing it yourself with fresh tobacco. There is a true art to preparing and rolling a cigarette, and every step of the way offers a tiny taste of pleasure.

First, you’ll want to enjoy the keen anticipation that arises before you open your pouch for the first time. You can keep your tobacco purchase fresh for many weeks (just store it in the refrigerator and place a piece of wet lettuce in the pouch before you reseal it), but it will never be quite as fresh as in that moment when you first dig in. Break that seal slowly and inhale. It smells good, doesn’t it? Breathe deeply, my friends. Some brands of tobacco, like some Chinese or Indian foods, smell even better than they taste.

Next, you’ll want to enjoy the feel of the moist plant fibers as you spread a generous pinch of tobacco before you. The fibers are delicate, but they will hold their shape as you remove any large and unsmokeable pieces of stem. Fresh tobacco has the consistency of evening moss. It is sweet and comforting to handle. And don’t miss the rich brown colors of the fibers. Some fibers are darker brown, like java, and others are lighter, like a ripe bosc pear. Some have a hint of yellow or orange.

If your tobacco is particularly moist, you’ll need to let it dry for an hour before rolling it. This is the time to appreciate your rolling papers. There is much to appreciate, from the logos and illustrations on the packages to the lithe translucent papers themselves. What could be more charmingly fragile than a cigarette rolling paper? Different brands have different porosities, all specially designed for rolling tobacco. I find it interesting that smoking is often associated with being “rough and tough” when actually so much about it involves precision and finesse.

Rolling a good cigarette is a challenge, requiring skills. One should take pride in one’s rolling prowess. There are many choices here. I prefer the “two thumbs” technique, wherein, after moistening the glue strip ever so lightly with my tongue, I use my thumbs to roll down each end of the cigarette simultaneously; then I slide my thumbs in to meet at the center, finishing it off.

But the prime pleasures come from the act of smoking itself. Savor the smooth rush of the smoke as it glides through your mouth, over your tongue, into your lungs. Remember, this is not smoke from charcoal, or wood, or (heaven forbid!) plastic or rubber. This is tobacco smoke, good smoke, the kind of natural smoke that was meant to be inhaled and enjoyed.

Now savor the flavor. Try to distinguish it from other flavors of other tobacco brands. Each has its own distinctive taste. Mmm, and can you sense the freshness? I recommend smoking any hand-rolled cigarettes the same day that you create them. Some smokers don’t seem to mind old or dried tobacco, but I am not one of them. Too old, and cigarettes taste empty, like ash. But extra fresh means extra delight.

Tilt your chin upwards as you exhale, and then watch the smoke dissolve into air. Depending on wind and humidity, your exhaled smoke might hang in the air for a moment, shifting like a cloud. Enjoy the sight of your smoke drifting into nothingness, ephemeral.

Blow smoke rings if you choose. To some, the blowing of rings is the main reason for smoking. Remember not to actually “blow” your rings. The key is to let a small amount of smoke sit in your mouth for a few moments and then “click” your lower jaw, exhaling just barely, letting the ring drift outward. Like rolling your own, blowing rings is an art requiring practice and skill. Yet after all your efforts, the result, however pretty, is so slight and brief. One might say that smoke rings convey at once the beauty and impermanence of life, like a mandala.

And as you smoke, take pleasure in how you are making connections with great figures from our collective human history. Tobacco plants are native only to North and South America, and it was our own Native Americans who began smoking tobacco way back around 2000 years ago. Pipe smoking became popular in Europe in the 1600s and remained popular even after health risks were first recognized in the late 1700s. My favorite things, cigarettes, originated in Turkey around 1800 and were mass-produced throughout Europe by the 1850s.

Don’t forget the myriad artists and writers from all manner of times and places who have enjoyed smoking. My favorites include Joyce, Hemingway, Tolkien, Lord Byron, Mark Twain, Samuel Johnson, Johann Sebastian Bach, Charles Baudelaire, Davy Crocket, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Ulysses S. Grant, Herman Melville, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and, of course, Groucho Marx.

Should anyone smoke regularly? Of course not. Smoking is bad for you. But so is ice cream. So is coffee. Heck, so is sunshine these days. And besides: what is the point of all our good health if we are afraid to have fun? C’mon, let’s loosen up a bit! Let’s not fear the pleasures of smoking.


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