What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (24 page)

Proustian memory is involuntary; we have no control over its recording or its recall. Because it is recoverable on demand, Adams-style odor memory is a more useful storage medium—it embodies our common past and gives us a way to preserve it. Some people improvise their own olfactory scrapbook. An attorney who was in his thirties at the time once described his method for inducing scent-fueled visions of the past:

I grew up on the Nevada desert in a small mining town. Since my seventeenth year my residence has been in California in the San Francisco bay area but I never have and never will learn to be happy in the fog and rain and dampness. I have a perpetual nostalgia for the sun, warmth, clear, clean air, the peculiar lemon desert fragrances and the great panoramic vistas and strong colors. I have spent part of several summers in the Tahoe district and each time have brought home a good bunch of sage brush which I keep in a receptacle and not infrequently smell. When I do, visual and emotional sensations arise within me in considerable clarity of the desert scene. A slight sniff doubles and redoubles that tranquil nostalgia.

The scientific study of smell memory is currently in flux. After a long and fruitless detour spent quantifying a literary fiction, the field is abandoning the idea that smell is unique among the senses. Just as the larger field of memory research has retreated from the notion of indelible flashbulb memory and questioned the veracity of eyewitness testimony, smell experts are recognizing that memory for odor is like memory for anything else—subject to fading, distortion, and misinterpretation. With this realization, we give up some long-held ideas, but throw open the windows for a breath of fresh air.

CHAPTER 11

The Smell Museum

My collection of semi-used perfumes is very big by now, although I didn’t start wearing lots of them until the early ’60s. Before that the smells in my life were all just whatever happened to hit my nose by chance. But then I realized I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn’t get lost forever.

—A
NDY
W
ARHOL

A
NDY
W
ARHOL MAY HAVE SAVED MODERN CULTURE
without even realizing it.

Memories fade and get harder to find amid the mental clutter of a busy life. For a given smell, the odds that it will produce a riveting flashback shrink with each resniffing. That special scent becomes less special, its links to the past grow steadily weaker. Warhol’s solution was ingenious: he would wear a cologne until it built up strong emotional connections, then retire it to his personal smell museum. Once out of active rotation, the cologne’s memories were locked in, never to be confused with others. The Warhol wear-and-retire method was unusual but effective. By not switching back and forth between scents, he avoided the loss of memorability that psychologists call interference.

It’s easy to reach into the past when the missing link sits on a shelf, clearly labeled. But even a cologne collection has its limits—brands don’t live forever. Commercial death occurs when the last bottle comes off the production line, and psychosensory rigor mortis sets in with the last spray from the last bottle. An extinct fragrance triggers no memories. To preserve links to the past, we must preserve the juice itself. How will we know what we’re missing when it’s not there to smell?

The James Joyce scholar Bernard Benstock concludes that the juice doesn’t matter as long as we have literature: “[E]ach work of fiction is posterity-proof. No captured smell specified in
Ulysses
is ever lost in the rereading or fails to register its full pungency for every new reader.” Why is Professor Benstock so sure that every reader gets a noseful from the novel? This seems like wishful thinking. A reader may be able to reimagine a familiar smell, but for one he doesn’t know, he’s left to guess. To reexperience the smells of times gone by, one needs the
actual stuff
; without it, written references and therefore literature eventually lose their power.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” The opening line of John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel acknowledged the reek of the fish-processing plants on Cannery Row, but by the 1950s, overfishing had flattened the local sardine population and taken the factories down with it. When he returned to Monterey in 1960, Steinbeck climbed up Fremont Peak for a last panoramic look at the land of his youth. The canneries had disappeared and so had their “sickening stench” all that was left was the smell of wild oats on the dry brown hills. It brought to his mind Tom Wolfe’s phrase: you can’t go home again. Steinbeck had immortalized the smell of Cannery Row on the printed page, but he could no longer inhale the thing itself—and neither could his readers.

When an entire smellscape fades away, especially one familiar to many people, our culture suffers a loss. Take the case of the local tavern. The journalist and pundit H. L. Mencken grew up in Baltimore and accompanied his father—a cigar manufacturer—to the saloons where he sold his product: “In the days before Prohibition, which were also the days before air-cooling, I doted on the cool, refreshing scent of a good saloon on a hot Summer day, with its delicate overtones of mint, cloves, hops, Angostura bitters, horse-radish,
Blutwurst
and
Kartoffelsalat.
It was always somewhat dark therein, and there was an icy and comforting sweat upon the glasses.”

Mencken couldn’t relive his memories in today’s gleaming, artfully designed modern brew-pub, but he might feel at home in a place like McSorley’s Tavern on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which has been serving ale in an atmosphere little changed since it opened in 1854. Patrons find something soothing in its quiet, almost gloomy interior. As one regular described it, in 1943, “there is a thick, musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves; it is really a rich compound of the smells of pine sawdust, tap drippings, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and onions. A Bellevue intern once said that for many mental states the smell in McSorley’s would be a lot more beneficial than psychoanalysis or sedative pills or prayer.” Coal-burning furnaces disappeared decades ago, and in 2003 the city’s mayor banished the sweet, warm notes of tobacco, yet McSorley’s retains its distinctive aroma: a dark, hoppy yeastiness livened by the sawdust on the floor. TGI Friday’s it’s not. McSorley’s is the Kong Island of taverns, a place where prehistory lives on—for now.

High on the list of endangered smellscapes is the heartwarming aroma of Grandma’s kitchen. Fewer families eat dinner at home, and when they do, they don’t cook: they microwave frozen food, which doesn’t pack the same emotional punch. The aroma of a tomato sauce simmering all day? Fuhgetaboutit. Chicken roasting in the oven? No one has the time. Apple pie? Pick it up at the A&P. Coffee aroma? Kiss it good-bye: half of Americans in their thirties get their hot java at a store; the proportion is even higher for those under thirty. Home-brewed coffee will soon be a game for the elderly.

The extinction of familiar smells leaves the fabric of our culture looking rather moth-eaten. It even affects movie watching. Take the scene in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
where a classroom full of students plunge their faces into quiz papers fresh off the ditto machine. The visual joke is lost on anyone born after 1982. The Wite-Outsniffing school secretary in
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
will be equally incomprehensible: Correction fluid died with the typewriter.

When most Americans lived on farms, cow manure smelled of income and family security. In rural areas today, newly arrived suburbanites feel differently; they consider dairy farms a public nuisance, and object to the spreading of manure on fields. To defend farming as a way of life, the Planning Commission in Ottawa County, Michigan, put a manure-scented scratch-and-sniff panel in an explanatory brochure for people moving into the area. Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, followed suit with its own smellustrated pamphlet.

I
T IS THE
natural order of things for smell preferences to change from generation to generation. Back in 1931, a survey ranked the popularity of fifty-five commonplace odors. The results were not surprising: pine, lilac, rose, and violet were at the top, garlic and perspiration at the bottom. It is odd to look back at some of the other smells included in the survey: witch hazel, sarsaparilla, lard, and turpentine. These were commonplace seventy-seven years ago, but today they seem exotic. When did the last drop of sarsaparilla evaporate from the national smellscape? Did it outlive witch hazel? It would be enlightening to track changes in odor perception and public opinion over the long term. What we need is a Scent Census.

The architect Rem Koolhaas knows how rapidly a smellscape can vanish. “I turned eight in the harbour of Singapore. We did not go ashore, but I remember the smell—sweetness and rot, both overwhelming. Last year I went again. The smell was gone. In fact, Singapore was gone, scrapped, rebuilt. There was a completely new town there.”

In the Northeastern United States the smell of burning leaves was once emblematic of autumn. Everyone understood Booth Tarkington’s allusion to it in
The Magnificent Ambersons
: “When Lucy came home the autumn was far enough advanced to smell of burning leaves, and for the annual editorials, in the papers, on the purple haze, the golden branches, the ruddy fruit, and the pleasure of long tramps in the brown forest.” The lazy plume of gray smoke from a smoldering leaf pile accompanied the mood of a declining season, a time of endings, sadness, and reflection. Edgar Lee Masters used it to depict an old man’s melancholy: “Now, the smell of the autumn smoke, / And the dropping acorns, / And the echoes about the vales / Bring dreams of life.”

By now, several generations of children have grown up without burning leaves. The scientist and physician Lewis Thomas thinks this is a shame: “[W]e should be hanging on to some of the great smells left to us, and I would vote for the preservation of leaf bonfires, by law if necessary.” For Thomas, playing by a curbside bonfire was fun and risky—the perfect childhood activity. “It was a mistake to change this, smoke or no smoke, carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect or whatever; it was a loss to give up the burning of autumn leaves.” Environmentalist sensibilities be damned; Thomas wanted to empty the leaf bags and toss a lit match. His nostalgic fantasy is unlikely to come true; few will ever know the acrid smoke and quiet crackle of burning leaves. The old incense of suburban lawn worship has been replaced by the new roar of leaf blowers and the fumes of half-burned gasoline.

A Blast from the Past

The need to preserve today’s smells might not seem urgent—after all, we can always use technology to recover the past. The trouble is that it takes an extraordinary effort to re-create an extinct smell. Take, for example, a 1984 study in which researchers tried to revive food aromas in order to study the composition of prehistoric diets. The smells they were after were locked into a fossilized human turd (politely known as a coprolite). The specimen in question was deposited on a cave floor in Utah about 6,400 years ago. Perfectly preserved by the desert climate, it presented the scientists with a challenge: there was no established protocol for resuscitating ancient poop. Accordingly, the research team spent a month inventing and perfecting their own technique. The first task was to produce a set of reference stool samples for training purposes. They did this by feeding a series of controlled meals (high fiber, mixed fruit and vegetable, peach only, etc.) to a selfless volunteer who saved the resulting output. His contributions were freeze-dried to create pseudo-fossils for pilot testing. To make the practice samples sniffable, they were soaked in a solution of trisodium phosphate until they released enough aroma for analysis. (Note to students planning science fair projects—this step takes a few days.) An experienced sniffer took notes as the volatiles exited the gas chromatograph. Out came a rainbow of aromas: bread, corn, peanut, beer, peach, popcorn, onion, licorice, cauliflower, and meat. The more things the volunteer ate, the more smells the team detected.

Having perfected their technique, the team was ready to analyze the turd of historical interest. They placed the ancient sample in the GC and waited for it to yield its secrets. One can imagine the tension in the lab as the instrument warmed up and the researchers hovered over the exhaust vent in anticipation. Would they get something, or was all their preparation in vain?

Within minutes secrets of the ancient bowel movement began to spill from the GC. The researchers got a noseful of the expected fecal notes, but along with them came an assortment of food aromas: green leaves, grass, and (weirdly) licorice. Next, they injected a sample from a more recent specimen, one found in Glen Canyon and dating from AD 1100 to 1300. From this one they smelled burned corn, meat, and, once again, licorice. The licorice smell was not an aberration; two plants native to the region smell of it, American licorice and sweet cicely, and both were eaten by Native Americans. Science has succeeded in turning the GC into a time portal. There are probably a lot of fossilized smells lying on museum shelves; which one will be reanimated next?

If You Build It…

With entire smellscapes going extinct, there is an urgent need for preservation. Can a scaled-up version of Warhol’s personal smell museum solve our crisis of collective memory?

In Salinas, California, the National Steinbeck Center is attempting to preserve Steinbeck’s marvelous fictional smellscapes. His inventory in
Cannery Row
of Doc’s workroom in the Western Biological Laboratory, for example, is a sustained tracking shot for the reader’s nose:

Behind the office is a room where in aquaria are many living animals; there also are the microscopes and the slides and the drug cabinets, the cases of laboratory glass, the work benches and little motors, the chemicals. From this room come smells—formaline, and dry starfish, and sea water and menthol, carbolic acid and acetic acid, smell of brown wrapping paper and straw and rope, smell of chloroform and ether, smell of ozone from the motors, smell of fine steel and thin lubricant from the microscopes, smell of banana oil and rubber tubing, smell of drying wool socks and boots, sharp pungent smell of rattlesnakes, and musty frightening smell of rats. And through the back door comes the smell of kelp and barnacles when the tide is in.

On display at the Steinbeck Center are permanent interactive exhibits in which smells are matched to the books where they appear: horse stable for
The Red Pony,
mangrove flower for
The Log from the Sea of Cortez,
and so on. (The smells are released periodically from hidden aerosol cans operated by a timer.) Olfactory realism occasionally takes a back seat to ticket sales: the Cannery Row sardine smell proved too unpleasant for visitors, who complained that something in the museum was rotting. The smell of old dog that accompanies
Of Mice and Men
is also not popular, but the curators left it in.

Scented museum exhibits are not new; the Smithsonian snuck lavender into a display of gowns in the Hall of American Costume in 1967. Today the Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side allegedly uses a scent generator to simulate the smell of a coal-burning stove in its restored 1878 tenement house. The idea is good—an overcrowded, unventilated apartment of that era would also have reeked of cooking food, BO, and chamber pots—but the execution is too faint to bring much life to the setting.

English museums are especially keen on smells; if you find yourself at a loss for entertainment in the coastal town of Grimsby, go to the National Fishing Heritage Centre and get a noseful of maritime history: seaweed, sea breeze, and dried codfish are among the offerings. Or head to York, where the Jorvik Centre uses smells to re-create life in a Viking village. At a maritime museum in Liverpool, the engine room of the restored pilot cutter
Edmund Gardner
is enlivened with the smells of diesel fuel and hot oil. In 2001 London’s Natural History Museum pushed the curatorial envelope by creating foul dinosaur breath for a
T. rex
exhibit. At the last minute, however, the curators lost their nerve. They substituted a vague, nonthreatening boggy-swampy scent meant to evoke the Cretaceous environment of
T. rex.
If you close your eyes and breathe deeply, you might think you’re standing in the New Jersey Meadowlands on a ripe day.