BOOK REPLIES/REVIEWS (2014): Camus, Abadzis, & Probst’s (2014) The Cigar That Fell In Love With A Pipe

Framing/Background for Replies

If you’ve read this section previously, you can skip it.

Two years ago in 2012, I set myself the task to read at least ten pages per day; last year, I did so. Continuing from then, I now have the task to read fifteen pages per day,[1] and I’ve added that I will write a book reaction (or reply) for each one that I finish (or give up on, if I stop). I plan also to devise a way to randomly select books to read (given certain constraints) from the public library; this, to avoid the tendency only to read books that pique my already existing interests.

These replies will not be Amazon-type reviews, with synopses, background research done on the author or the book itself, unless that strikes me as necessary or if the book inspired me to do so when I read it. Rather, these replies amount to assessments of the ways I found the book helpful somehow. More precisely—and this describes what I mean by a reply, as opposed to a reaction (review) or a response—I try to focus in these pieces on what I could not have said (or would not have known what to say) except that the intersection of this text and my consciousness brought it about.

Consequently, I will sometimes say stupid stuff, poorly informed stuff, &c. Some in the world expect everyone to possess omniscience and won’t bother to engage in a human dialogue toward divining how to make the world a better place. To the extent that each reply I offer provides a I found this helpful in this book, then it becomes up to us (you, me, us) to correct, refine, trash and start over, or do something else we see as potentially helpful as part of attempting to make our world a better place. If you won’t bother to take up your end of that bargain, that signals of course part of the problem that needs a solution.

A Reply To: Camus, Abadzis, & Probst’s (2014)[2] The Cigar That Fell In Love With A Pipe

The more I think about this graphic novel, the less I have to say.

I selected it because the illustrator Nick Abadzis & H. Sycamore’s (2007)[3] Laika had much to recommend it (more narratively than visually); and in the case of that book, Abadzis wrote the story as well as provided the illustrations (along with Sycamore).

Here, it seems that Camus leans far too much on the namedropping that comes with Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, and it seems unlikely—perhaps I get this wrong—that the central conceit of the story, that an (actual_) cigar producing enterprise in Cuba had a legendary, overweight, female cigar roller, Conchita Marquez. Not only her style of rolling, but the fact of the sweat arising from being overweight adds—in the conceit of the narrative—to the experience of smoking a cigar by her.

Ultimately turning out as allergic to nicotine, she gets shipped by her (greedy) husband to a Swiss sanatorium for treatment, but never makes it. Rolling cigars to the end, even though she reacts allergically, she dies but not before meeting a pipe-carving sailor on the ship who inspires love in her. &c. Hence, the cigar that fell in love with a pipe.

I could isolate throw-away details in the text that functionally unintentionally ironically. Orson Welles, for instance, has a black maid, who does little more than merely appear in the text, and one could have leveraged some kind of link between her and Conchita, but the authors decline to do this. significantly, the single-mindedness of Conchita Marquez’s cigar-rolling makes her immune to the usually nonsense surrounding women and love; i.e., she has more important things to do than play Steppin Fetchit for someone with a penis. However, not only does the book explain this as a result of her fatness and ugliness—at least she doesn’t suffer from the financially mercenary marriage of convenience her employer tricks her into—she does in fact “lose her mind” over the sailor she sees on the boat. This, because he smokes tobacco from her beloved factory, but the narrative still (1) paints her as neurotic rather than accomplished in her cigar rolling, and (2) not properly fulfilled except by a quixotic quest for union or at least proximity to the sailor, or his symbolic stand in, his pipe.

In fact, the whole of (male) (cigar-puffing) pleasure devolves to her ugliness and obesity; because of it, her sweat adds a tinge to the puffing pleasure that has no peer, all the more so as Orson Welles smokes the last three that Conchita ever rolled, dying of allergic toxicity as she did. Although you’d think otherwise, there seems nothing in the text to suggest we should read this as an allusion to the cigar delectations of then-President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky’s vaginal tang.

Poe declared no more compelling story exists than the death of a beautiful woman; or, in this case, the death of a fat, ugly woman who nonetheless has a quality that titillates or serves male pleasure; i.e.,, it proves the rule without providing an exception. The tragedy of Conchita’s story as the novel constructs it, then, does not involve the social circumstances that result in her death (the male privilege that demands her literal blood, sweat, and tears) but her frustrated longing for love as the only thing that can bring her true satisfaction.

Supposedly this echoes in a kind of reverse way. Orson Welles discovers Conchita’s spirit in the last cigar and places it with the pipe so that she can attain her desired happiness. But Rita Hayworth, presented as a relentlessly selfish and inadmirable bitch, decides to smoke the cigar, just to make Orson mad, and doesn’t even enjoy it, stamping out the remainder without finishing it. As a quintessential antithesis of Conchita (svelte and beautiful, but also selfish and heartless) we have a wealth of possible themes and connections that the author(s) might have explored, but in the end, Rita exhibits simply a (patriarchally conceived and) Eve-like perversity, ruining everything. So that Orson’s (paternalistic) kindness—placing the cigar and the pipe together—gets as negated as Conchita’s desire to be with the pipe.[4]

So we see a frustrated desire on the part of Welles (a male). His noble gesture—rather not in keeping with the rest of his presentation—gets ruined by female connivance. I think the authors except us to infer some simpatico between the frustrated desire of Conchita and the frustrated gesture that Welles makes, but the parallels bear almost zero similarity. Conchita’s sacrifice involves in the first place her life and then passively rely upon male agency to bring about that which she (implausibly) gets written as most desiring. Welles’ sacrifice involves not smoking the last (of three) cigars—hardly a full denial of pleasure when he has indulged it at least twice already—and then the actively self-congratulatory act of placing the pipe and cigar together, in effect making a great show of his generosity and self-denial. He certainly had no care whatsoever for whatever travails Conchita had gone through to make all of the other cigars she’d ever made (and the two Welles had smoked). In fact, precisely her suffering makes the sweetness of the two all the more poignant. Only when confronted with her ghost, which expresses a desire not to roll cigars (self-fulfillment) but to get placed near the pipe (masculine fulfillment) does Wells change his tune and “become generous”.

Since ghosts thematically refer to how the past haunts us, we do not have to read the ghost story element of this book in literal terms. What does this haunting mean, for instance, for Welles? In a banal way, we see Conchita’s devotion (to the pipe) as an antithetical contrast to Hayworth’s ugly selfishness. Haunted by a devotion he desires to have (or had once, in Hayworth or someone else), Welles takes pity on himself, as it were, and grants Conchita’s wish. In this context, it matters that the pipe says nothing. In fact, on the ship he specifically rejected Conchita, perhaps without words., and so it continues here. The pipe never indicates one way or another whether it desires proximity with the cigar, and so Conchita’s desire (filtered through Welles’ sensibility) gets turned into mere license, the same sort exhibit by the men who except Conchita to ultimately kill herself for their pleasure. This same lens makes Hayworth into a raging “ugly” bitch, the Conchita/Hayworth ugly/beautiful axis getting reversed in a typically conventional way.

One would like something more than this in the haunting—after all, the narrative involves Cuba—but it seems that the possible hauntings that might arise in that context get sacrificed to the typical tropes of patriarchy. In this respect, the cover of the book speaks volumes. It brags that it features Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, but only Welles features in any kind of significant way. The threat to the union of the cigar and the pipe arises initially from a little boy, and Hayworth only steps in to finish that gesture. All the same, presumably Welles and Hayworth get selected for this text for some kind of sumptuousness of relationship, I suppose—Liz Taylor and Richard Burton might have sufficed, had Burton been a cigar aficionado. But the cover of the book also provides the image of Hayworth smoking a cigar—and looking like she happens to enjoy this one (with her eyes closed). This suggests that the authors never had anything broader in scope than “frustrated” love.

Of course, the back of the book asks, “can love triumph over adversity, or does it all go up in smoke?” But it insists also that the book ranges “from the heyday of the cigar industry to the glamorous heights of Hollywood’s Golden Age,” which simply doesn’t happen. Almost all of the action in the United States occurs in Welles’ study, and nothing of the “glamorous heights of Hollywood’s Golden Age”. As a failed conceit, we might still wonder if this points to a haunting as well?

Of course, the mere facts of human history but also the specific facts we now have in abundance about the history of Hollywood attest that the entire façade of such a Golden Age has as much reality as a Hollywood set or a Potemkin village. The glamor of that age got purchased very much at the expense of women and the lone Black person (in the United States) playing the inevitable role of “black maid”. Abadzis’s previous book (see here) seemed amply informed by his own geographical displacement, but here he has no access (presumably) to dictating that theme find presence in this book. Perhaps Conchita’s displacement from Cuba toward Switzerland resonated for him and made it appear in this book. Precisely because she smells the tobacco of her lost home country does she lose her mind for the man who smokes it—one could almost say that she falls in love with that and not the sailor at all.

But what lost place haunts Welles then? To the extent one may read this theme (of displaced persons) out of the text at all, it certainly doesn’t seem present on the principal author’s part.

Endnotes

 [1] More precisely, I will continue to read my usual ten pages but I will also read five pages per day of Burton’s (1620) Anatomy of Melancholy, a gigantic book that at five pages per day I will finish reading near the end of December 2014. I have wanted to read this book for a while, but various features of it make getting through it a challenge.

[2] Camus, D., Abadzis, N., & Probst, J. (2014). The cigar that fell in love with a pipe: [Featuring Orson Welles & Rita Hayworth]. London, England: SelfMadeHero, pp. 1–110.

[3] Abadzis, N., & Sycamore, H. (2007). Laika. New York: First Second, pp. 1–205.

[4] Just logistically speaking, the novel has to go rather out of its way to provide the contrivance to permit Rita access to the locked cabinet where the pipe and cigar rest. The pair (the pipe and the cigar) have already narrowly averted one disaster, when Rita’s visiting brat-nephew gets discovered trying to steal the cigar. As soon as Rita prevents this, she then proceeds to smoke the cigar herself. The narrative suggests that Welles has taken adequate precautions to protect the cigar and the pipe, while only an unreasonable degree of perversity on Hayworth’s part drives her to (1) find the key, (2) decide to smoke the cigar—not for any real good reason, I must add, (3) and actually follow through on the plan. One very readily will find little fault with Welles and all fault with Hayworth, but in a patriarchal world some woman-baiting rings disingenuously. If Rita must act the bitch, this arises from a social environment that inequitably treats even a world-renown star like her as less than Welles (or other males), &c. The authors present her as a parasite, producing nothing (but trouble), in contrast to Conchita, who unselfishly sacrifices even her life for the sake of making cigars (that men consume with inordinate pleasure and gusto).