Author, Author
The Savinelli 320, my favorite pipe
Lately, I’ve been mourning the fact that I have not been able to avail myself of some of my favorite pleasures simply because I have no time. My Laphroaig bottles sit on the hutch in my living room without having been moved in over a year; the only time I touch them is to remove the dust. Stacks of books waiting to be read grow taller and impede my movement in my home office. Movies from the Criterion Collection lineup sit in their cases with the cellophane intact.
All these things take time, at least two hours of blissful solitude, two hours in a vacuum unmolested by the attendant nuisances of obligation and other people. The thing that is the hardest to do even when I have the time is smoking, because the physical location has to the available. Even as I wrote the word smoking, I felt the bile rise at the back of my throat. Historically, it was not a dirty word not so long ago. To say I’m a smoker today is to don the mantle of a social pariah. Filthy habit, bad for your health, bad for the environment, blah, blah, blah.
So, some clarification may be in order. My smoking is entirely occasional (again, the lack of time) and is limited to the enjoyment of cigars and pipes. That they are both mid-century vices (back then, they wouldn’t have been referred to as “vices”— “diversions” would be the better descriptor) and affectations drew me to them in the first place, and I do not consider them to be as insidious or as offensive as cigarettes. I have only had a single experience with cigarettes in college, and I did not care for it for various reasons, not the least of which was that it did not taste good. Life is too short to put anything in your mouth that doesn’t taste good.
The first inkling I ever had that I’d like to one day try smoking came from admiration of an image portrayed, but cut me some slack, please—I must have been about six years old at the time. I saw Disney’s 101 Dalmatians for the first time (It had been released in 1961, during America’s golden age of style before I was born but was rereleased in Honolulu theaters when I was in preschool or kindergarten). One of the first humans appearing onscreen in the movie was Pongo’s owner, Roger Radcliffe. He was a piano player and a songwriter of some kind, and I was captivated by the image of him at work at the piano, alternating between hammering out a tune on the keys and making notations on a score with a pencil, all the while smoking a pipe. The image was so influential that I would always associate the pipe with the most cerebral of creative endeavors.
I would start my pipe and cigar diversions while I was in college in New York, a place with things we didn’t have in Honolulu, like tobacconists. One of my wrestling teammates from New Jersey and I purchased Jamaican-made Macanudo robustos to smoke together after an end-of-season team dinner. The tobacconist where we made the purchase was in midtown Manhattan on Madison Avenue near the Brooks Brothers flagship store. While we were there for the cigars, an array of briar pipes on the wall caught my eye, and the image of Roger Radcliffe at work at the piano grabbed my heart and twisted. This was also at a time when I had discovered and started reading the detective novels of Raymond Chandler, the narrative that spoke to me like no other, and photographs of Chandler on the inside of the jacket almost always showed him smoking a pipe. His detective protagonist, Philip Marlowe, while a cigarette smoker, also smoked a pipe in his office while trying to mentally untangle case facts, usually while duplicating famous moves on a chessboard. I was also exposed to the work of Arthur Miller, playwright, sharp dresser and, yes, pipe smoker.
I returned to the same tobacconist a week later and purchase my very first pipe, a Jobie Sunburst briar made in France. It was lightweight and easy to hold in the mouth. At first, I tried some Captain Black, a cheap aromatic which tasted worse than its cloying aroma, then a bag of the tobacconist’s house black cavendish, which was worlds better. I would eventually try their own aromatic blends.
Fast forward a few decades into the future. After a government mission to Istanbul, where I acquired a meerschaum pipe made by Turkish artisans, I sought a briar pipe as a companion to the meerschaum. I acquired a couple of bent billiards online and was looking to expand my collection. Choosing the right pipe is like buying the right hat. It should be functional, but it should also look good attached to your head.
That’s when I ran across an image of what would become my favorite pipe, the so-called “author”. With its wide, generous bowl, the graceful slope of its bent stem and stout silhouette, it seemed the perfect vessel for the Virginia-Perique blends I had started to favor.
The quintessential author pipe is the Savinelli 320. I owned a few examples of other shapes made by the Italian house, this year celebrating its 150th anniversary, and appreciated the quality and craftsmanship of their products. I got a hold of my first author pipe, the Savinelli 320 Trevi, with a handsome silver band around the shank where it meets the stem and a lustrous dark brown briar bowl. It remains one of my favorite pipes today.
After acquiring the Trevi, I started collecting vintage 320s whenever I could find them in good condition. I also added to my 320 collection one of Savinelli’s “St. Nicholas” models, their yearly Christmas-themed offerings, though I purchased the 321, the 320’s little brother with a smaller bowl (it was the only St. Nicholas model that year that was still available) but still in the author silhouette. The crown jewel of my author collection is the Savinelli Punto Oro 320, which I obtained to celebrate winning the Eliot Cades Award for Literature. The Punto Oro line is made of Savinelli’s highest quality grain briar and are often made in m limited quantities. I have yet to fill it and smoke it, though, never having had the right moment or the time to do so. I’ll make it a point to do so at the next milestone, though. I’m not getting any younger.
Unfortunately, I don’t have much occasion to smoke my author pipes while doing the work of an author. Unlike Roger Radcliffe, I’m not able to smoke and compose in my own household as the women who run it have understandably forbidden it indoors. I have yet to create an outdoor space which would allow for a windbreak and protect my fountain pens and notebooks from the elements. It’s possible, but it will take time I don’t have at present. It may seem counterintuitive to be productive while availing oneself of such opulence, but for me writing is relaxation.
It’s the act of getting others to read it that’s the real chore, and I’ll light up a bowl once that job is done.
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