What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (16 page)

T
HE THREE TRAITS
of the smell-minded artist find their greatest creative expression in the field of literature. We all know the power of the printed word to conjure images as we read; less well known is that written descriptions evoke appropriately scaled mental images of light, sound, and smell. For example, the phrase “a very very bright light” produces a brighter mental image than the phrase “a weak light.” Similarly, a written description allows a reader to accurately imagine a smell’s intensity and character. Further, merely reading an odor-related word is enough to activate olfactory regions of the brain. According to an fMRI brain imaging study, “odour words automatically and immediately activate their semantic networks in the [brain’s] olfactory cortices.” Despite the muchdiscussed Verbal Barrier, it would seem that olfactory prose offers a potent channel of communication.

Anyone can drop a smell cliché into a story, yet only a few authors bring a true olfactory sensibility to their work. In a letter to
The Nation
in 1914, the English professor Helen McAfee mourned the fact that the smells in contemporary American fiction were all clichés: “For example: the complementary smell of a New England spinster story, lavender; of a tale of camp life, pines; of a June romance, roses.” She praised Russian authors like Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, whose smells “are keen and fresh…not dragged in simply for form’s sake.” When smell is used in this way, she wrote, “the impression on the reader is correspondingly deep.” Inspired by Professor McAfee, let’s take an unapologetically nasocentric point of view and ask, Who are the writers that bring an olfactory dimension to their work, and how do they make it succeed?

“This all started on a Saturday morning in May, one of those warm spring days that smell like clean linen.” So begins Anne Tyler’s novel
Ladder of Years,
about a woman who walks away from her family during a beach vacation in Maryland and starts a new life of anonymous domesticity. Tyler plays on the theme of interchangeability—of people, places, and entire lives—and supports it with deliberately generic odors. A doctor’s office smells like a “mixture of floor wax and isopropyl alcohol,” a town library exudes “a smell of aged paper and glue,” and so on. The heroine notes these familiar odors, but they don’t touch her emotionally.

The smell of freshly baked bread drifts through Jay McInerney’s
Bright Lights, Big City
amid constant references to snorting coke and its nasal complications. The story begins with the protagonist’s reminiscence of waking up to the smell of an Italian bakery in Manhattan’s West Village, in an apartment he shared with an old girlfriend, now his ex-wife. The scent turns up in a passage about his mother at home, and again when his sympathetic coworker Megan buys him a loaf to see him through a coke-fueled downward spiral. At the burned-out end of a nonstop weekend of partying, he trades his Ray-Bans to a bakery deliveryman who tosses him a bag of hard rolls. The aroma returns in the book’s famous last lines: “You get down on your knees and tear open the bag. The smell of warm dough envelops you. The first bite sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.” (Skeptical readers might object: Wouldn’t heavy use of Bolivian marching powder have devastated the hero’s sense of smell? After all, long-term snorting results in sniffling, nasal crusting, ulceration, bleeding, postnasal drainage, and, most spectacularly, a perforated septum. The only study of smell in cocaine abusers found that ten of eleven had a normal sense of smell; even the patient with a perforated septum could smell just fine.)

O
NE
A
MERICAN WRITER,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, embodied all three traits of olfactive genius. His novel
The House of the Seven Gables
is filled with smells. Here is the New England village feast celebrating the completion of the house: “The chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen-smoke, impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes, spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance. The mere smell of such festivity, making its way into everybody’s nostrils, was at once an invitation and an appetite.” Clearly, Hawthorne was a man who liked to eat.

In
The Scarlet Letter,
Hawthorne describes the Inspector of the Custom-House, a man who was the son of a Revolutionary War colonel. The Inspector was remarkable for “his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat.” Not only could he recall the sensory details; he could vividly summon them up for the appreciation of others: “His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor of pig or turkey under one’s very nostrils.” We see the Inspector before our eyes and work up an appetite just reading about him.

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” is perhaps the best smell-based story in American letters. Set in Padua, Italy, around the turn of the seventeenth century, Hawthorne’s tale concerns a medical student who becomes infatuated with the beautiful daughter of Dr. Rappaccini. The dour physician breeds poisonous plants, and has deliberately raised his daughter in close contact with them so that she is not only immune to their effects, but has become a repository of their toxins. She exudes an intoxicating and toxic fragrance. As the student courts her, he too becomes saturated with the debilitating scent. The story ends tragically when a rival doctor provides the lovers with an antidote.

Hawthorne was keenly aware of smells, he had an empathic sense of how they affected others, and he could express them in a sustained way in the course of wonderful stories. Although he was descended from austere New England Puritans who rejected sensuality, Hawthorne himself was blessed with a joyful nose.

The Creative Spark

There is a well-worn anecdote about smell and literary creativity. It’s about the German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller. One day his good friend Goethe paid him a visit. Goethe was cooling his heels in Schiller’s study when he noticed an overpowering and somewhat nauseating odor. He asked Frau Schiller about it, whereupon she pulled open a desk drawer filled with rotten apples. She told Goethe that her husband couldn’t get the creative juices flowing without a whiff from the old apple stash. Whether she rolled her eyes when she said this is not recorded.

This story is supposed to illuminate the psychology of olfactory inspiration, but that’s always seemed a bit of a stretch to me. Did Schiller write particularly well or often about apples? Did he have a theory linking apple scent and inspiration? Did he ever try peaches? As far as I can tell, Schiller’s apple-sniffing was nothing more than a compulsive warm-up ritual.

There are better places to seek the link between scent and creativity. A good place to start is with the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). This near-recluse lived her entire life at the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was knowledgeable about botany and obsessed with flowers, of which she grew many kinds on the property and in an indoor conservatory. Cultivating flowers was a hobby for many women of her time, but unlike them Dickinson could not have cared less about showy, scentless orchids. Her exclusive passion was scented flowers. Her favorites make an impressive list: French marigold, mignonette, peony, primrose, Sweet Sultan, Sweet William, roses of various kinds, lilac, mock orange, honeysuckle, jasmine, heliotrope, and sweet alyssum. Dickinson was not into subtlety; she preferred the strong perfume of tropical jasmine and ripe “Bourbon” roses. Her conservatory was saturated in scent. Given the Victorian sensibilities of the time, these lush blossoms were considered too suggestive for the drawing room. Instead she placed pots of them in her bedroom and next to her writing desk.

Not surprisingly, flowers are a major theme in her work; one in five of her poems refers to flowers in some way. She was known around town for sending people her odd little poems tied to a homegrown bouquet. This is how most of her poems became public during her lifetime; very few were published. Once her complete works were issued in 1955, Dickinson finally was showered with critical praise, especially for the way her poems displayed a “cultivation of emotional intensity.”

Camille Paglia challenged this admiring consensus in 1990, when she portrayed the poet as a death-obsessed vampire feeding on the emotional intensity of others. Calling Dickinson “the female Sade,” Paglia pointed to the poet’s “unrecognized appetite for murder and mayhem,” and described her poems as “screenplays of agony and ecstasy where someone is tortured, dying, transfigured.” This reassessment was so ferocious that I didn’t believe it at first—but then I browsed through Dickinson’s poems. In addition to flowers, her poetry is mostly about bees and death. Of 1,175 poems, roughly 400 are about flowers. Yet only two mention fragrance directly (“spicy carnations” and an “aromatic” pink); a handful of others allude to it. This is weird: her life revolved around the growing of scented flowers; she wrote her poetry surrounded by them; she even used them as a metaphor for creativity—so why doesn’t she describe their scent in verse?

The answer is that Emily Dickinson didn’t inhale fragrance like a normal person—she drank it. In her poems, the scent of flowers is nourishment. Describing the scent of spring, she calls herself “a drinker of Delight.” She gets drunk on fragrance: “Inebriate of Air—am I—/ and Debauchee of Dew.” She and the bee “live by the quaffing,” she on Burgundy, the bee on clover nectar. She raises flowers in order to consume their fragrance, which fuels her creative powers. There’s no denying it: Emily Dickinson was a fragrance vampire.

In Amherst one day, Miss Dickinson cut some bee balm and put a pot of jasmine out in the rain. Purely innocent actions had anybody noticed them. But inside the S&M hothouse of her imagination, these become: “Kill your Balm—and its Odors bless you / Bare your Jessamine—to the storm / And she will fling her maddest perfume / Haply—your Summer night to Charm.” In other words, death and violent exposure lead to blessings and nocturnal ecstasy. Dickinson’s flowers yield up their scent in the act of dying: “And even when it dies—to pass / In Odors so divine / Like Lowly spices, lain to sleep / Or Spikenards, perishing.” Dickinson sucks the scent-soul out of a dying blossom and begins scribbling lines of verse. “They have a little Odor…spiciest at fading.” To the ghoulish Belle of Amherst, the fragrance extracted at the moment of death was the tastiest.

I now think Camille Paglia got it right: our poet had an appetite for murder and mayhem. “Essential Oils—are wrung / The Attar from the Rose / Be not expressed by Suns—alone—/ It is the gift of screws.” Ouch! Dickinson tortured the perfume out of flowers.

This casts a sinister new light on the poet’s album of pressed flowers, lovingly preserved in the Emily Dickinson Room of the Houghton Rare Book Library at Harvard. Scholars celebrate it as a beautiful record of her passion for flowers. I think the album is a creepy thing—it houses the trophies of a serial killer.

T
HE COMPOSER
Richard Wagner was another fragrance freak. He used mass quantities of scent in his daily bath and dusted his outrageous silken and fur outfits with aromatic powders. His personal letters are filled with discussions of perfume. The scholar Marc Weiner points out that Wagner’s “fetishistic fascination with odor” carried over into his operas. When the word
Duft
(fragrance) appears in a libretto, the context is almost always titillating, dangerous, and erotic. Beautiful
Duft
scents the air at every disguised suggestion of sibling incest, as in the first encounter between Sieglinde and Siegmund in
Die Walküre.
Noticeably
Duft
-less are socially acceptable unions such as the bourgeois marriage of Eva and Walther von Stolzing in
Die Meistersinger.
To lesser beings such as the dwarves Alberich and Mime in the Ring cycle, or the cobbler Beckmesser in
Die Meistersinger,
Wagner assigns unpleasant smells. (Beckmesser stinks of the pitch he uses as shoe-black, which tags him with a satanic theme.) In
Siegfried,
a trilled theme on the piccolo serves Mime (in Weiner’s refined phrase) as “a leitmotif for abdominal wind.”

Me Smell Sexy

The night is cool. I feel a slight chill. The atmosphere is heavy with the odor of flowers and of the forest. It intoxicates.

—L
EOPOLD VON
S
ACHER
-M
ASOCH,
Venus in Furs

Regular smells can become eroticized. The association of fragrance and forbidden sex was a robust literary theme in the nineteenth century. Witness Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1835–1895) and his 1870 novel about the whip-wielding mistress Wanda, which has immortalized his name: masochism. Early on, the narrator Severin tells of his fascination with Wanda and his growing fantasy of submission to her. His erotic intoxication with Wanda is drenched in scent. A typical observation: “A sultry morning, the atmosphere is dead, heavily laden with odors, yet stimulating.”

Once Severin agrees to be Wanda’s slave, everything changes. They travel to Florence; in the carriage ride to the train station she is playful, but her warmth and scent are already receding: “she even gave me a kiss, and her cold lips had the fresh frosty fragrance of a young autumnal rose, which blossoms alone amid bare stalks and yellow leaves and upon whose calyx the first frost has hung tiny diamonds of ice.”

As the domineering Wanda becomes more remote, odors become coarse and repellant to Severin. Wanda rides in a first-class train car, but makes Severin sit with the plebes: “Then she nodded to me, and dismissed me. I slowly ascended a third-class carriage, which was filled with abominable tobacco-smoke that seemed like the fogs of Acheron at the entrance to Hades.” Here he has “to breathe the same oniony air with Polish peasants, Jewish peddlers, and common soldiers.” After a layover in Vienna they proceed to Florence. “Instead of linen-garbed Mazovians and greasy-haired Jews, my companions now are curly-haired Contadini, a magnificent sergeant of the first Italian Grenadiers, and a poor German painter. The tobacco smoke no longer smells of onions, but of salami and cheese.” The pungent odors of everyday life crowd out the heady scents of Severin’s submissive fantasy. By the end of the story he stands before his original image of the ideal mistress: the statue of the Venus of Medici. In his despair, he sees on the statue “fragrant curls which seemed to conceal tiny horns on each side of the forehead.” He has given his soul to a she-devil with a heart of stone. Sacher-Masoch created an olfactory accompaniment for the arc of Severin’s story; a descent from heady fantasy into submission and then despair.