Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes
But more than mind discloses
And more than men believe.
GH Chesterton, "The Song of Quoodle"
I plead guilty to Chesterton's charge. Mine is a mediocre specimen of a post-lapsarian nose. As a fallen daughter of Eve—or, more accurately, a fallen granddaughter of a sharp-nosed chimpanzee—I am conscious of smell only a few times each day. I put on perfume in the morning, but because I use the same concoction every day and therefore suffer from what the perfumers call "nasal fatigue," I apply far more than I should, and end up fatiguing the noses of my fellow passengers on the train en route to work. Occasionally I sniff the milk to see if it's off, but more often I just glance at the sell-by date. Visual clues are more reliable than olfactory ones for a two-legged fallen human. On buses or tube trains, forced during rush hour into sardine-like proximity with a smelly person, I might—with due subtlety—shade my nose from the worst of his (or her) emissions. But for most of the day, it is unusual for me to notice any particular smells. I do eat food, of course, but with the illusory impression that I am tasting rather than smelling the myriad different flavours that make up even an ordinary meal.
I am not alone in my olfactory bubble.We have been turning up our noses at smell for centuries. Some 2,000 years after Aristotle blithely labelled smell the most undistinguished of all our senses, Immanuel Kant denigrated it as the "least rewarding and the most easily dispensable" of the five. He viewed it as more likely to bring disgust than pleasure and as, at best, a "negative condition" of our wellbeing. In other words, we can use smell to avoid noxious air and rotting food. Kant, perhaps, would have been grat eful for sell-by dates and the chance to abandon such an inferior sense altogether. Predictably, it was left to the French to champion the sensual in a rationalist age. In 1754 Jean-Jacques Rousseau extolled smell as "the sense of imagination" and his contemporary Jean-François Saint-Lambert lauded the nose for giving us "the most immediate sensations" and "a more immediate pleasure, more independent of the mind" than the eye. A century later, French olfactory enthusiasm had seeped across the border into Germany, where in 1888 Friedrich Nietzsche somewhat bewilderingly announced: "All my genius is in my nostrils."
Perhaps our first step in raising ourselves from our fallen state should be simply to notice the ordinary smells that surround us. The people most vociferous in their praise of smell tend to be anosmics—people who have lost their olfactory powers. In the words of one anosmic man I spoke to: "More than 24 years later, I deeply miss certain scents and smells. Life is lived rather like the boy in the bubble who suffered from total allergy. Many people have observed how 'fortunate' I am to be unaware of the many unpleasant smells in our world; many people are ignorant fools. Without the constant reinforcement one forgets… the smell of flowers, of fresh cut grass, of a lover, of one's children, a glass of wine, a bonfire, the sea, the countryside after rain. The list is endless and timeless." It is important to bear in mind that losing one's sense of smell involves losing almost all of one's sense of taste. We are able actually to taste only six flavours: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, umami (richness) and astringent, and all tastes are a combination of these. The sense of taste is comprised of 1m receptor cells, as compared with around 40m for smell, and the possible palette of smells is literally infinite. When we think we are tasting, we are usually smelling. This knowledge may help us appreciate the privations of the anosmic.
The literary champion of smell, more than Marcel Proust or Patrick Süskind, is Helen Keller. Growing up blind and deaf, Keller had to rely on her sense of smell for basic information about her surroundings, and found in the process that it became a source of intense pleasure. She lamented the fact that smell "does not hold the high position it deserves among its sisters," adding, "I doubt if there is any sensation arising from sight more delightful than the odours which filter through sun-warmed, wind-tossed branches, or the tide of scents which swells, subsides, rises again wave on wave, filling the wide world with invisible sweetness." She went so far as to claim that she could judge character by sniffing, and modern scientific studies have backed her up. Generally, partners who like the smell of each other's pheromones are more likely to get married than partners who don't. Perhaps we could teach ourselves to sniff out future irascible wives and slobbish husbands.
Reading Helen Keller, we can perhaps learn something of what life was like for our primate ancestors. In primitive animals the bulk of the brain was formed by the limbic lobe, which is still the locus for immediate sensations such as smell. Millennia of development in the brain have led to the reduction of the limbic lobe, which has become covered with cerebral cortex. Humankind, even in its most primitive form, had a brain very similar to ours now, yet we have a much weaker sense of smell than our cave-dwelling ancestors. Indeed, congenital anosmia is on the increase, so the whole human race may be heading for an anosmic future. Characteristically, Freud suggests that ancient psychosexual anxieties are behind this decline in our nasal capabilities. For him, it all began when man raised himself from the ground to walk on two feet, flashing his genitals to all and sundry. The shame of this sudden exposure, the theory goes, triggered a species-wide repression of the sense of smell. Humans found genitals less embarrassing when they were seen but not smelt. This meant that men were no longer able to smell menstruation or ovulation. Smell became less important in creating sexual excitement, and humans began to be turned on more by the look of each other's bodies than the odour. As evidence for this view of smell as a forbidden, repressed sensation, Freud cites the fact that his hysterical patients often had extremely sensitive noses.
More recently, Michael Stoddart has rethought Freud's theory in more anthropological terms. Like Freud, Stoddart believes that when humans became bipedal, it ceased to be desirable for women to advertise menstruation and ovulation through smell signals. Stoddart, however, does not attribute this to a new sense of shame, but to the increased importance of the pair bond. Upright, earth-bound offspring—toddlers—needed more looking after than their more chimp-like predecessors. It was therefore no longer socially advantageous for the father to be tempted away from the family unit by the irresistible smells of his friends' ovulating wives. The problem here, as Stoddart himself admits, is that evolution tends to fulfil the needs of the individual rather than of the community. It still seems useful for the individual male to be attracted to other women at reproductively auspicious times, just as it seems useful for his pair-bonded partner to have the attention—and seed—of other virile men. Colourful as they are, both Freud's and Stoddart's theories have a somewhat tenuous logic. The most persuasive explanation of the decline in our nasal powers remains the most obvious: in a society where food is packaged and predators tend to attack from afar with bombs, smell has become relatively unimportant.
Despite the general decline in the human sense of smell, there are still many people in the world for whom smells are a continual source both of information and of pleasure. These people tend not to live in the west. In parts of the developing world, where food comes straight from the forest rather than the supermarket and is not wrapped in plastic, people rely on their noses to stay alive. Unsurprisingly, some of these cultures privilege smell as a mystical, life-giving sense. For the Onge, who live in the Andaman islands in the south Pacific, smell provides the vital force in the universe. Onge people sign "me" by pointing to their noses and greet each other with the question "How is your nose?" A reverence for smell can persist even in cultures where it is not necessary for survival. In both China and Japan, it still forms the basis for important rituals such as the tea ceremony, and in Japan people play a game called kodo, which involves identifying specific scents. Some ordinary people can identify 2,500 different smells.
Our lamentable sense of smell in the west seems to stem from laziness as well as evolution. The example of Helen Keller suggests that we could do better if we really needed to. One contemporary daughter of Eve whose nasal powers seem to have bucked the evolutionary trend is Evelyn Lauder, daughter-in-law of Estée Lauder and chief nose for the Lauder perfume industry. While pregnant with her second child, she awoke one morning to discover that her sense of smell had become peculiarly acute. Happily, this new-found sensitivity has endured beyond pregnancy, and, like Helen Keller (but unlike Kant), Lauder finds that her nose brings her more pleasure than pain. When I spoke to her, she had just been to Central park in New York to "see" the spring flowers. But for her the experience was more about smelling than seeing. "The whole air was perfumed with all the lilac bushes which were in bloom and my delight in going up there was to smell the exquisite aromas of all the various flowers." She is saddened by how little we notice smell in the west, and points out that our children tend to be more nasally driven than we are. Lauder temporarily doffs her perfume magnate hat to caution nursing mothers against wearing perfume or perfumed creams, as they can hamper the natural bonding process and even prevent the baby from recognising the mother.
I find this rather unnerving. If perfume inhibits babies' natural reactions to other people's smells, surely adults are to some extent also affected—particularly adults with a sense of smell as precarious as ours. It is strange that, in a culture so desensitised to smell, most women still wear perfume almost every day, and, according to Evelyn Lauder, about 50 new fragrances are produced each year. Two millennia ago, Pliny made the same observation, complaining about the time and money wasted on perfume given that the wearer doesn't even derive much pleasure from it him or herself. Several men I've spoken to in the course of my research have bemoaned the way women cover up their natural smells of sweat and pheromones. One American man lamented his failure to find a vagina that really smells of vagina. He longs to bottle what he sees as the true scent of a woman.
In seeking to cover up our own pheromones and sexual secretions, we have traditionally turned to the pheromones of animals. Until recently, the majority of perfumers used musk and civet in their concoctions. Musk is produced in small quantities by young Himalayan musk deer during the mating season; the animal has to be killed in order to remove the small pod in which it is contained. Civet is scraped from the anal pouches of civet cats of both sexes: a disagreeable but not necessarily fatal procedure. Over the centuries, civet and musk have been sources both of delight and danger for perfume wearers. In 1688, Petrus Castellus extolled the wonders of civet for increasing sexual appetite, and in 1896 Gould and Pyle warned of the sticky predicament of a couple who over-indulged in musk. Perfumers can now produce a synthetic copy of both musk and civet, and nobody in America or Europe uses actual animal secretions. Nevertheless, it seems anomalous that we go to such lengths to disguise our own pheromones, merely to replace them with the simulated pheromones of other animals.
For Evelyn Lauder it is not a question of disguising, but rather of accessorising our natural smell: "Women should have a wardrobe of fragrances, the way they have a wardrobe of clothing, the way they have a wardrobe of shoes." She is adamant that perfumes complement rather than crush natural odours, and that each person's body chemistry makes the oils project differently. For her, perfume seems to be at once an aesthetic and a sensual pleasure, much like art or music. In this she resembles Coco Chanel, who also had an amazing sense of smell.
Lyall Watson, in his book Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell, points to some of the potential benefits of rescuing "our most underrated sense from obscurity." He suggests that with a little training we could smell "which way the children went, who their friends are, who last used this chair or slept in that bed, and whether they were alone, when the girl next door ovulates and is likely to be attractive to or a threat to others, what our spouses had for lunch, and who they spent that time with, and whether or not we are going to need a lawyer." These are spectacular claims, and if Watson's imaginary sniffer existed, he would surpass Coco Chanel or Evelyn Lauder, and even Sherlock Holmes, the cohort of a more famous Watson.
For Watson, the issue is not so much the sense of smell itself as the vomeronasal organs, commonly known as Jacobson's organs. These are small pits near the front of the nasal septum, about a centimetre and a half in from each nostril, just above the floor of the nose. They do not register ordinary odours. Instead, they respond to substances that have large molecules and no particular odour, including pheromones. It is Jacobson's organ, if trained well, that can help us "smell a rat" or "smell something fishy," or smell whether someone we've just met is more likely to be a future enemy or a future spouse.
If smell is the sense of the imagination, then writers are the best placed to translate it into words. Yet writing about a sense as un-literary or indeed anti-literary as smell is surely one of the most difficult challenges a writer can undertake. One time-honoured way to write fragrantly is to use synaesthetic metaphors. The poet Martial starts out on this route with his "smell of a silvery vineyard flowering with the first clusters of grass that a sheep has freshly cropped." Do we smell the sheep, we might ask, or are they part of a visual image that is somehow equivalent to the smell? Proust, of course, is the master of synaesthesia and extended metaphor. For him the countryside reverberates with odours so evocative that they assume human traits: "smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving and settled, heedless and provident." The scent of the hawthorn takes on the intensity of music: it has a "rhythm which disposed the flowers here and there with a youthful light-heartedness." More recently, Thomas Pynchon's description of breakfast in Gravity's Rainbow has undertones of Proust and of Martial. The "musaceous odour of Breakfast" is "flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the colour of winter sunlight." Like Martial, Pynchon colours the smell. Perhaps colour is one of the most effective ways of describing an odour: our reactions to both tend to be immediate and emotional.
A new arrival on the synaesthetic literary scene is Luca Turin, a chemist whose chief contribution to olfactory science is his theory of how we smell. In The Secret of Scent, he rumbustiously dethrones the widely accepted notion that the smell of a molecule depends solely on its shape, asserting instead that the vibrations within the molecule play the crucial role. However, Turin is motivated by more than just scientific curiosity in his search for the olfactory holy grail, and his perfume guide, Parfum, published in 1992 during a break from scientific pursuits, reads like a Proustian remembrance of fragrances past. Nombre Noir, for instance, is "halfway between a rose and a violet" and "glistening with a liquid freshness that made its colours glow like a stained-glass window." Turin believes that his edge in turning smell into language is due to the fact that for him "smell has always had an utterly solid reality," and he is astonished that others do not share this experience. For Turin, every perfume he has ever smelled has been "like a movie, sound and vision." While Proust's synaesthetic descriptions remain metaphorical, Turin seems genuinely to experience smell in several dimensions, and it is this that gives power to his writing.
Other writers strive to categorise smells, rather than to find emotional or visual analogues for them. Coleridge is being literal when he observes in his notebook that a dead dog smells like elderflowers. Similarly, the Depression-era novelist Thomas Wolfe conveys complex smells to the reader by itemising their component parts, listing odours that may be more familiar: "He knew the good male smell of his father's sitting room, of the smooth worn leather sofa, with the gaping horsehair rent, of the blistered varnished wood upon the hearth; of the heated calf skin bindings; of the flat moist plug of Apple tobacco." The most famous practitioner of this kind of writing is Patrick Süskind. In his 1985 novel Perfume, the smells of a baby are listed as warm stone, butter and a pancake soaked in milk, while the smell of the most beautiful girl Grenouille has ever smelt is likened to a combination of silk and pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk. Like Wolfe, Süskind provides a disparate collection of familiar smells, allowing us to home in on the exact smell. Unlike Wolfe, though, he allows the synaesthetic to impinge on his smell-collage. The baby surely feels like warm stone as much as it smells like it, and the silk and the girl share a visual and tactile rather than an olfactory beauty.
It is clear that writers in ancient Rome, modernist France and postmodern America are tackling the same problem when writing about smell. And as you sniff your way across the centuries from Aristotle to the internet, you will notice how much continuity there is, not just in writing technique but in the smells themselves. Catullus found hairy armpits as noisome as the Americans find them in France today. The 17th-century poet Robert Herrick found Julia's sweat as much of a turn-on as Napoleon did Josephine's 200 years later. (He famously sent word from the thick of battle that she should abstain from washing now that his return was nigh.) The American man longing to bottle vagina scent finds his place at the end of this trajectory of secretion-loving men.
In 1952 Le Gros Clark suggested that Descartes's cogito ergo sum should be changed to olfacio ergo cogito. Proust, perhaps, would go so far as to change it to olfacio ergo sum. Either seems a good endorsement for learning to smell. We will never again be apes or know the exquisite aromas of a pre-lapsarian paradise. This need not stop us from following Walter Hagen's advice: "You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry, don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way."
