Elena Ferrante: ‘Writing while smoking was a deceptive pleasure’

Cigarettes, alcohol and cocaine give users the illusion of coping with reality better

Elena Ferrante

Saturday 19 May 2018

T

he only dependency I’m familiar with is tobacco: I started smoking when I was 12. I was curious about taking other drugs, but not tempted. I wanted to write, and it didn’t seem that doing so under the influence of alcohol or other narcotics could help: I was afraid of losing myself. Of course, quite a number of writers have obtained great results thanks to whisky or other substances, and my fear of letting go depressed me. What sort of writer could I be, if I didn’t use substances that would disrupt me?

But in fact I already had my stimulant: tobacco combined with a lot of coffee. How much caffeine, how much nicotine I’ve absorbed over time. I stopped drinking coffee, but for decades there was nothing in my existence that wasn’t accompanied by a cigarette. Pure joy for me was writing while smoking, smoking while writing. I knew it was a deceptive joy, I knew I should stop, I knew I was hurting myself and others. And at regular intervals I’d try to break out of that bondage; I’d proclaim it from the rooftops. But then I’d start up again, in secret – a clandestine passion that has more power than most, precisely because it’s clandestine.

Meet strangers and not smoke? Terrible. Read and not smoke? Terrible. Write and not smoke? Terrible. Finally, for many reasons, I stopped, but it was painful. Not having a cigarette between my fingers made me anxious. I would refuse to see people I admired, whom I was fond of, whose respect and friendship I valued. I was convinced that I would do something wrong, say something rude, that nothing intelligent would come to mind, and that those people I admired would no longer respect me. In other words, I felt more inadequate than usual; I was afraid of finding out that I was much worse than I had imagined.

I discovered that I couldn’t let go of cigarettes, because I was afraid of seeing the world in all its sharp-edged clarity. Cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine are to varying degrees dark glasses, and give us the impression that we can more readily tolerate the collision with life, more comfortably savour it.

But is that true? That what enslaves us empowers us? For months I believed that, without lighting a cigarette, I would be unable to write even half a line, that writing, the thing I most cared about, would be barred to me for ever. Sometimes even today, when I haven’t smoked for many years, I feel convinced of that and am on the point of giving in. I’ve saved myself only because a very weak part of me murmurs that it’s nonsense, that, really, soothing myself with 40 cigarettes a day for so long kept me from writing as I should have.

• Translated by Ann Goldstein

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