Message to the Younger Generation

Postscript to my previous post.

When Alexander Waugh, who died on Monday, told me in 2019 he was ‘editing a 43-volume scholarly edition’ of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, he added that he had come across an advertisement his grandfather had written for Havana Cigars before the war.

Published in The Times and Daily Mail on 22 November 1938, it read:

Vivat Havana!
by EVELYN WAUGH
 
The author of ‘Decline and Fall’ and ‘Scoop’ dedicates this message to the Younger Generation.
 
It always strikes me as odd that cigars should, almost universally, be regarded as symbols of wealth. I know of no other physical pleasure which can be purchased as cheaply, and leaves behind it so few regrets or responsibilities. 

Cigarette smoking is a habit, pipe smoking a hobby, but smoking Havana Cigars is a delicate and profound delight. I think perhaps the reason why, in fiction and films and caricatures, we always see cigars associated with the elderly and opulent, is that it is one of the pleasures we can share with them. 

How little we count most of their possessions and habits; their great traffic-logged motor cars; their secretaries and surgeons, their divorces and remarriages, their super-taxes and death duties, their air-conditioned offices and penthouse apartments! And how much in their harassed routine they need those exquisite hours when the Tobacco of Havana comes to calm their apprehensions and woo them into self-esteem. 

We, too, have our worries and we, too, turn to the same source of comfort. The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana cigar.
 
Issued by the Cuban Government to further the smoking of HAVANA CIGARS

See also: Alexander Waugh, 1963-2024