Smoking in ERB’s Fiction III
by Alan Hanson
Blue smoke spiraling upward, cigarettes for nerves, for relaxation,
for courage, for musing, for late night parties with friends, and for facing
death. Peaceful pipes, pompous cigars, jeweled cigarette cases, packs in
shirt pockets, makings in back pockets, blazing matches, coffin nails,
and plugs in the cheek.
The images tobaccoism are many and varied in the works
of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but, for the most part, those images occur with
no apparent pattern. Burroughs utilized smoking in his stories when he
wanted to create a certain mood or a certain type of character. However,
there were two lifestyles that ERB found particularly romantic, and, while
in most other cases he portrayed smoking as being a degenerating habit,
when he wrote about the lifestyles of the hobo and the cowboy, smoking
was a constant and romantic image.
The Hoboes
The Sky Pilot, Dopey Charlie, Soup
Face, Columbus Blackie, The General, and Dirty Eddie. These members of
the bumbling hobo band found in The Oakdale Affair were a
tightly knit group, loyal to each other, distrustful of outsiders, and
always on the lookout to make a dishonest buck. They slept in hay barns
and deserted houses and in the open under the moonlight. They didn’t have
much to share, only their loyalty to each other and a smoke. The reader
first sees them through the eyes of “The Oskaloosa Kid,” who looked
through the wall of an abandoned building and saw, “a small fire built
upon the earth floor in the center of the building and around the warming
blaze the figures of six men. Some reclined at length upon old straw; others
squatted, Turk fashion. All were smoking either disreputable pipes or rolled
cigarets.”
Smoking was an important part of the hobo group’s lifestyle,
and Burroughs perpetuated the image. Sharing a smoke was a signal of closeness
in the group, and when Columbus Blackie invited “The Oskaloosa Kid”
to join the group, he did so in the traditional way. “Have a smoke?”
he asked the Kid. “Here’s the makin’s.” The newcomer joined them
by the fire, unaware, of course, that the hobos were less interested in
brotherhood than they were in the jewels and cash he had displayed. Through
a curtain of smoke, the hoboes plotted the fleecing of the newcomer. “The
two sat silent for awhile, The General puffing on a short Briar, Dopey
Charlie inhaling deep draughts from a cigarette, and both glaring through
narrowed lids at the boy warming himself beside the fire.” Later in
the story, still on the hunt for “The Oskaloosa Kid’s” swag, Columbus
Blackie, The Sky Pilot, Soup Face, and Dirty Eddie met again, and, over
their ever-present cigarettes, planned their dishonest work. “In an
old brick structure … four men were smoking as they lay stretched upon
the floor.”
Although his portrayal of the Sky Pilot’s hobo band is
colored with romanticism, surely Edgar Rice Burroughs never imagined himself
a member of that group of rogues. Certainly, ERB’s alter ego of the road
was Bridge, whose background and character were quite different from those
who followed the Sky Pilot. In addition to being a man of high ethical
and moral standards, Bridge was an educated and cultured man, who, for
reasons of his own, gave the materialism and pressures of civilized society
for simplicity of life on the road. “Simplicity” is the key word in the
summing up ERB’s view of the hobo lifestyle. Bridge had simple needs and
was content with simple pleasures, and among those simple pleasures was
the rolling and smoking of a cigarette.
As was the case with “The Oskaloosa Kid,” the entrance
of Billy Byrne into the company of Bridge was cemented with a cigarette.
“The poetical one (Bridge) drew a sack of tobacco from his hip pocket
and a rumpled package of papers from the pocket in his shirt, extending
both toward Billy. ‘Want the makings?’ he asked. ‘I ain’t stuck on sponging,’
said Billy; ‘but maybe I can get even someday, and I sure do want a smoke,’”
For many minutes thereafter, the two sat smoking beside the fire without
making conversation.
Since both Billy and Bridge were going the same place
(“nowhere in particular”), they decided to travel together. Their
subsequent adventurous but simple life together was filled with references
to smoking. The morning after their first meeting, Billy chopped wood for
a farmer to earn a takeout meal for them. “When they had eaten, they
lay back upon the grass and smoked some more of Bridge’s tobacco.”
Several nights later the two men were smoking by the camp fire talking
about another simple pleasure — poetry. “You know so much of that stuff,”
said Billy, “that I’d think you’d be able to make some up yourself.”
Later, after nearly being nabbed by Detective Sergeant Flannagan in Kansas
City, Billy told his road mate of his decision to flee into Mexico. “Bridge
finished rolling a brown paper cigarette before he spoke.” Then he
told Billy he was going with him.
Six weeks and many adventures later, they shared another
adventure. Both received bullet wounds in a shootout with Mexican outlaws.
The next day, they parted company for good, Billy returning to Chicago
to marry his Penelope, while Bridge went back out on the road looking for
his. No doubt Billy’s lifestyle changed drastically in Chicago, but when
Bridge is next seen in “The Oakdale Affair,” he was still on the road.
It is in this short novel that the reader learns the source of ERB’s close
identification of cigarette smoking with the hobo lifestyle. It is the
same source from which Burroughs drew his overall romantic notion of life
on the road. After sharing a quiet breakfast with “The Oskaloosa Kid,”
Bridge producer a pouch of tobacco and paper from his inside pocket and
began to recite the poetry of Henry Herbert Knibbs.
“ I had the makings and I smoked
“And wondered over different things,
“Thinkin’ as how this old world joked
“In callin’ only some men kings
“While I sat there a-blowing’ rings.”
It’s not hard to envision Edgar Rice Burroughs at his
desk “a-blowin’ rings” from a cigarette, taking a break from his
writing and imagining himself on the road with Bridge sharing a smoke beside
a camp fire under a clear and quiet sky.
The Cowboys
Romanticized characters and situations,
moving against a background of realistic detail, mark Edgar Rice Burroughs’
Western novels. The descriptions are based on the author’s first-hand knowledge
of the American West at the turn of the century. ERB often made reference
to the use of tobacco to create the notion of a carefree lifestyle or the
American cowboy.
The cowboy at rest — it’s a peaceful image, and one that
is invariably associated with the cigarette in ERB’s Western novels. Early
in the day, the Burroughs cowboy took advantage of any free moment to have
a smoke, as in this scene from The Bandit of Hell’s Bend.
“The men resumed their preparations for the work of the day, or, if
they were ready, lolled in their saddles rolling cigarettes.”
However, it was when a cowboy’s work was done at the end
of the day that he was most likely to find time for a smoke. Again, in
The Bandit of Hell’s Bend. “At the Bar Y Ranch the men
sat smoking after the evening meal,” and later, “a smoke, a little
gossip and rough banter and the men jingled away through the darkness in
search of their bed-rolls.” When not on the range, the men found the
bunkhouse a popular place in the evening for a smoke and some conversation.
Early in The Bandit of Hell’s Bend, Bull, “rolling a cigarette,
sat down on the edge of Colby’s bunk and commenced to talk.” Later
in the novel, again in the bunkhouse, the cowboys “smoked for awhile
and then, one by one, lay down upon the rough boards to sleep.”
Of course, rather than in the bunkhouse, real cowboys
spent most of their time in the saddle, and, that being the case, real
cowboys had to be adept at rolling a cigarette with one hand. In addition
to its practicality, the ability to smoothly roll a cigarette with one
hand was portrayed by Burroughs as a way of differentiating between a real
cowboy and a tenderfoot. For example, a cigarette rolling competition occurred
between foreman Hal Colby and Harvard grad Jefferson Wainright, Jr., as
they jockeyed for position beside Diana Henders in The Bandit of
Hell’s Bend.
Wainright “paused to roll a cigarette — an accomplishment
he had only recently brought to a state even approximately perfection.
He used both hands and was rather slow. Colby eyed him, guessing that he
was merely fighting for time in order to force the foreman to go first.
Slowly the latter withdrew his own pouch of tobacco from his shirt pocket.
‘Reckon I’ll roll a smoke by the light of your fire, Di …’ he remarked.
He creased the paper, poured in a little tobacco, and, as he drew the pouch
closed with his teeth and left hand, deftly rolled the cigarette with his
right, bending in slightly in the center to keep it from opening up. Wainright
realized that if he had a conversational advantage over Colby there were
other activities in which the foreman greatly outshone him. Rolling a smoke
was one of them.”
On another occasion, ERB used the rolling of a cigarette
as a device to give the reader some inside information. It happened in
Apache Devil, when “Dirty” Cheetim and a secret partner
were engaged in stealing cattle from Witchita Billings. Cheetim gave Luis
Mariel half of a jack of spades when he hired the Mexican to guard the
stolen cattle. Luis was to turn the cattle over to the man who brought
the other half of the card. Later, in a conversation between Witchita and
“Smooth” Kreff, the reader learns the identity of Cheetim’s partner
in crime.
“‘But you’ll think it over, Chita?’ he (Kreff) asked,
drawing a sack of Durham and a package of brown papers from his shirt pocket.
‘You dropped something, ‘Smooth,’ she said, gesturing toward the ground
at his feet. ‘You pulled it out of your pocket with the makings.’ He looked
down at a piece of pace board, at one half of playing card that had been
torn in two — one half of a jack of spades.”
In addition to cigarettes, tobacco was used in other ways
in the Old West of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Again, as is often the case the
Burroughs, the particular way a character used tobacco was an indication
of his personality. Take the quiet, pipe-smoking Hi Bryam in The
Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County. The inscrutable Bryam is seen
several times smoking his pipe while sitting in the doorway of his shack
far up toward the head of Mill Creek Canyon. Bruce Marvel knew Bryam was
connected with the mystery he was trying to solve, but he wasn’t sure how
to approach the man. “After supper that night, Marvel strode over to
Bryam’s camp, where the hunter was sitting upon his doorstep, puffing on
his pipe … Marvel seated himself upon the doorstep at the hunter’s side.
In the silence that followed, Bryam puffed intermittently at his pipe,
while Marvel bent his eyes upon the ground in thought.”
It was a pipe for the quiet man, but neither pipe nor
cigarettes would do for one of Burroughs’ most colorful western characters,
Wildcat Bob in The Bandit of Hell’s Bend. Bob is described
as, “the little old gentleman with the tobacco-dewed whiskers.”
Of course, having a cheek full of chew could occasionally be inconvenient,
as Bob discovered when Mary Donovan broached the subject of marriage to
him. “Bob essayed reply, but a mouthful of tobacco juice prevented.
Rising, he walked into the office, cross the room, opened the front door
and spat copiously without.” It’s a scene drawn surely not from ERB’s
Chicago or Tarzana days, but rather from his pre-writing days in the American
West.
Other anecdotes involving tobacco use appear in ERB’s
Western novels, such as the time Bill Gatlin nearly swallowed his quid
of tobacco in The Bandit of Hell’s Bend. Then there’s the
scene in The Mucker when Billy Byrne casually rolled a cigarette
as he cased the Mexican bank he planned to rob. And then there are other
times when ERB used tobacco in a symbolic way, as with the arrogant black
cigar protruding from the mouth of the crooked Maurice Corson in The
Bandit of Hell’s Bend. Of course, there are the smoking habits
of Geronimo and Shoz-Dijiji and the rest of the Apaches, but that is another
story altogether. However, too much has already been written on this subject
to interest the average Burroughs fan. In closing this look into tobacco
in Burroughs’ fiction, let’s give ERB the final words.
As with the hobo lifestyle, Burroughs found the romantic
lifestyle of the cowboy could best be conveyed through poetry. However,
Burroughs did not borrow someone else’s verse, but wrote his own. His mouthpiece
was Texas Pete in The Bandit of Hell’s Bend. One of Pete’s
verses neatly capsulizes ERB’s romantic notion of the cowboy and the place
in it of the hand-rolled cigarette.
“And thet wasn’t jest jaw—when it come to a draw
This here guy was like lightnin’ turned loose.
Then we rolled us a smoke an’ neither one spoke
Til he said, ‘Climb aboard your cyuse.’
Then he reined the hill each a-puffin’ his pill
To the town ’neath its shimmer o’ heat
An’ heads up to the shack that’s a-leanin’ its back
‘Gainst the side o’ The Cowboys’ Retreat.”
— The End —
