ORWELL’S NOSE
JOHN SUTHERLAND
ORWELL’S
NOSE
A PATHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY
REAKTION BOOKS
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
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First published 2016
Copyright © John Sutherland 2016
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers
Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN: 9781780236964
Contents
A NOTE ON NOTES
Foreword
Preface
The Life
APPENDIX I: Blair/Orwell’s Smoking Diary
APPENDIX II: The Smell Narrative of A Clergyman’s Daughter
APPENDIX III: The Smell Narrative of The Road to Wigan Pier
REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
I was damned. I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly,
I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly. I smelt.
ORWELL, about Eric Blair, aetat 8
four frightful words . . . The lower classes smell.
The Road to Wigan Pier
A NOTE ON NOTES
The most comprehensive information resource is Peter Davison’s Complete Works of George Orwell. Davison’s twenty-volume work (prohibitively expensive) is hard to come by outside copyright and research libraries. I have access to such a library; many readers will not. For the text that follows I have used, where useful, the four-volume, widely available (Penguin) paperback The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968), edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell. Its contents are chronological and indexed: dates of composition and first publication are given.
Foreword
In 1928 D. H. Lawrence, as passionate a defender of the English language as Orwell, made his quixotic attempt to liberate (‘hygienise’) a small lexicon of ‘four letter words’. The UK finally gave way on the point, in November 1960, at the Old Bailey. I have used a few four-letter words, once (perhaps still in some places) thought offensive. Had he lived fifteen years longer, so, of course, would George Orwell have done.
Preface
Reading with the Nose
It would be hateful if things did not smell: they would not be real.
ADRIAN STOKES
Three years ago, in high hay-fever season, I lost my sense of smell. It has never returned and I’m told it never will. Of all the five senses one can expect to part with en route to sans everything, smell is the most dispensable.
And if the Freudians (and Jonathan Swift) are right that civilization is the distance Homo sapiens (‘Yahoos’) puts between his nose and his excrement, I am a more civilized person for living in my organically neutralized world. The 94 per cent of British adult women and 87 per cent of British men who use deodorants daily would perhaps agree. (These figures, taken from the Internet, seem high to those I’ve spoken to with the power of smell. Particularly on homeward journeys on the London Tube.)
About the same period that my nasal membranes wilted I had embarked on a reread of Orwell, in the spirit of Janeites who revisit Austen’s six novels every year, just to relax into the comfort of old literary places. The writings I had known for half a century were, I found, interestingly different. Not quite as comforting. Imagine, for example, a person born with no sense of smell. Would Animal Farm ‘read’ the same way as for someone with functioning nostrils and long familiarity with the richly mixed but detectably different aromas (cow shit, chicken shit, horse shit, pig shit) in a farmyard? And then, at the end, Napoleon walking past on two legs with – what else? – an aromatic cigar.
According to Norman Mailer, a fellow connoisseur, with Orwell, of life’s olfactions (or, as Mailer would call them, ‘olfactoids’), there ‘ain’t but three smells’ in the whole Hemingway oeuvre. Papa’s fish, to adopt the working-class insult, don’t smell. Mailer’s count, thrown out, as I recall, on the Dick Cavett talk show, was not the result of careful textual examination but nonetheless rings true.
Compare the first three richly scene-setting aromas in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The story opens with Winston Smith escaping the April cold through the glass doors of Victory Mansions. Instant nasal attack: ‘The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.’ Having slogged up to his apartment on the seventh floor (the lift, of course, is broken), Winston pours himself a reviving swig of Victory Gin. ‘It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.’ He smokes a Victory cigarette (no need to describe that acrid smell), and is called to the Parsons’ flat next door. Can he unplug the sink? begs the harassed mother:
There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which – one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how – was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.
You need a nose that a bloodhound would envy to track the perspiratory reek of someone who has been out of the house for hours. Later, in the grim waiting room for the dreaded Room 101 trip, Winston is obliged to smell, at close range, Parsons’s shit while it is still warm and at its most odoriferous. Horrible as it is, it is preferable to the smell that awaits Winston in Room 101.
There are many threads in Orwell’s fiction. But it is interesting to compile their ‘smell narratives’. I append one for A Clergyman’s Daughter, along with the most smell-referential of his non-fiction books, The Road to Wigan Pier. The latter contains the four words that have hung like an albatross around Orwell’s neck: ‘The working classes smell.’ The qualifications with which he surrounded the allegation are rarely quoted.
Smell narratives would be as terse as a 140-character tweet with some authors. I asked Deirdre Le Faye, the doyenne of Jane Austen studies and editor of her surviving letters, what smells there were in the six novels. Deirdre’s reply was interesting and perplexed:
Smell I think is only specifically mentioned in Mansfield Park, with the bad air and bad smells of the Portsmouth house. This does strike me as slightly odd, because by our standards at least, the past must have been a fairly smelly place.
The ‘lady’ who wrote Sense and Sensibility was, apparently, short of one sense.
What would the ambient smell of Jane Austen’s outside world have actually been? Easily answered. Inside the house, the communal toilet sand box. Outside, horse droppings, predominantly – whether in rural Hampshire or urban Bath. The Regency world moved on four legs. Horses deposit between 7 and 14 kg (15 and 30 lb) of excrement and 9 litres (2 gallons) of urine per day where they will. There is no such beast as a house-trained horse.
Orwell, who claimed he would have preferred to have lived two hundred years ago, with his fellow ‘Tory-anarchist’ Jonathan Swift, might have found that equine-excremental world more bearable, attractive even, than the world he was born in. He loathed twentieth-century mechanical smells – although paraffin (his commonest source of home heating and lighting, when in the country) he found oddly ‘sweet’ to his nostrils, probably because of its association with warmth and light. More than most twentieth-century authors, he did a lot of reading and writing by tilly lamp, the odoriferous heater m
eanwhile throwing its mottled pattern onto the ceiling.
One of Orwell’s perceptive observations in his 1946 essay ‘Politics vs. Literature’, on his most admired author, Swift, is that in Gulliver’s Travels the morbidly naso-sensitive hero finally accepts as his ideal the horse, ‘an animal whose excrement is not offensive’. It is a ‘diseased’ choice on Swift’s part, Orwell grants. But Gulliver’s first experience when he arrives in Houyhnhnmland is to be spattered with human shit. Of the two varieties, which would one prefer? Orwell was, whenever the opportunity came up, a smallholding farmer: horse shit he valued (there are diary entries recording him examining minutely the quality of recent droppings) as fertilizer. Pig shit (he hated the omnivorous pig) was useless for that purpose.
Human excrement, like that of other carnivores, is offensive. Herbivores and graminivores, like the horse and goose (an animal Orwell loved and kept, whenever he could), have inoffensive excrement (when walking in Regent’s Park I have to prevent my dog from eating that variety of animal dropping. Dog shit does not attract her).
Not that it’s relevant, but I’ve often wondered where vegan droppings would stand on the Orwellian offensiveness scale. But Orwell despised ‘sandal-wearers’ and ‘fruit-juice drinkers’ as cranks, and they would not have attracted his nasal interest. He despised, as he told his working-class friend the aptly named Jack Common, ‘eunuch types with a vegetarian smell’.1
The reasons Orwell, ruinously for his health, spent the best years of his adult life in Burma, are hard to disentangle. But one was surely the call of the nostalgic curries, and the fading but still pungently mingled scents of sandalwood, rattan and teak (the most long-lastingly odoriferous of woods) in the Anglo-Indian house he was brought up in. He could not, joked his friend the critic Cyril Connolly, ‘blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry’. Or sniff, one suspects, his mother’s vindaloos and chutneys, without wondering about the subcontinent and the ethics of colonialism.
There were indeed intoxicating aromas to be found in Burma for a young man. And if Orwell’s description of his hero, John Flory’s, lovemaking in Burmese Days is to be trusted, erotic nasal stimulus was a major part of the oriental package. Flory, as he embraces his house concubine, Ma Hla May, is aroused: ‘A mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil and the jasmine in her hair floated from her. It was a scent that always made his teeth tingle.’ Tingling teeth is a fine detail. And it is not metaphorical. The trigeminal nerves connect nasal and dental sensation. The English working class (as Orwell would have overheard many times) glorify the ‘knee trembler’ (sex, faute de mieux, standing up, in an alley – Orwell describes it in The Road to Wigan Pier). Tooth tinglers are less common with the cold wind whipping round your bare ankles – damned uncomfortable, but relatively smell-less.
Compare aromatic Burmese copulation with the whiffiness of the whore Winston Smith recalls using in Nineteen Eighty-Four:
He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.
Whorish filth, for Orwell (who is known to have used common prostitutes at various stages of his adult life), was as powerful as sandalwood. It too ‘allures’, like the rotten apple that Schiller kept in his desk drawer to revive his literary inspiration when it flagged. Fresh apples don’t get the teeth tingling.2
Orwell’s discrimination of the sniff reaches a pitch of sheer nasal virtuosity, as in the following, ascribed to George Bowling, on one of his time trips back to Sundays in his childhood Lower Binfield (Orwell, of course, is describing the church of St Mary he attended, as a child, in Henley-on-Thames):
How I could smell it! You know the smell churches have, a peculiar, dank, dusty, decaying, sweetish sort of smell. There’s a touch of candle-grease in it, and perhaps a whiff of incense and a suspicion of mice, and on Sunday mornings it’s a bit overlaid by yellow soap and serge dresses, but predominantly it’s that sweet, dusty, musty smell that’s like the smell of death and life mixed up together. It’s powdered corpses, really.
In his essay on Swift, ‘Politics vs. Literature’, Orwell rhapsodizes on ‘the gloomy words of the burial service and the sweetish smell of corpses in a country church’.
Biographers are sometimes surprised that Orwell, who claimed to have embraced atheism aged fourteen, should have insisted on being buried in a country church rather than the ‘sanitary’ option of cremation. He wanted, one surmises, to leave the world accompanied by his personal decaying smell as he had entered it, inter urinas et faeces.
‘Lower’ Smells
Only the proles used scent.
Adrian Stokes, in his curious essay ‘Strong Smells and Polite Society’,3 notes that for the English ‘decent’ classes all smells are bad smells. Particularly those emanating from the human (sweating, perspiring or, with ‘ladies’, glowing) body.
And what Stokes (an artist who chose to live the life of a peasant) calls, with an irrepressible patrician sneer, ‘politeness’ entails suppressive cultural inhibition. The English have, with a sense of national self-righteousness, never developed any aesthetic cultivation via the nose. For the French, by contrast, the pleasure of the ‘bouquet’ is an essential preliminary to the enjoyment of wine or liqueurs. The French value an ‘art’ of smell. Watching a Frenchman drink a fine vintage, and his British counterpart down a pint of bitter, is a lesson in national difference.4
Suppression of smell is, for the British since the puritan revolution of the seventeenth century, ‘moral’. Even cultural revolutionaries find it difficult to shake off this nasal puritanism. D. H. Lawrence, for example, fought valiantly, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to liberate four-letter (‘dirty’) words for writers’ creative use – fuck, arse, shit, piss. ‘Hygienising’, he called it. There is one four-letter word not on the liberated Lawrentian lexicon – ‘fart’. It is beyond hygienization. Why? Because as Richard Hoggart insisted in the 1960 trial (to the shattering discomfiture of the prosecution), ‘Lawrence is a puritan.’ And in that silence about flatulence one hears, distantly, his evangelically inclined woman, immortalized as Mrs Morel, saying, ‘No, please no Bert; that word is so vulgar.’
Orwell did not read Ulysses until 1933, when his cosmopolitan lover, Mabel Fierz, smuggled him, at the risk of both their prosecutions, a copy of Joyce’s prohibited book. Among the legally offensive passages was the description of Bloom ‘asquat the cuckstool . . . seated calm above his own rising smell’. Joyce, of course, wrote the bulk of Ulysses in France.
The flatulent virtuosity of ‘Le Pétomane’, the French artiste du fart, could, one feels, have originated nowhere but at the Moulin Rouge where Joseph Pujol, as a rousing finale, would nightly ejaculate an anal Marseillaise. In English theatres and cinemas, it was ‘God Save the King’. Standing to attention, buttocks decently clenched.
Henry Miller
Orwell’s obsessive relationship with smell created odd cultural comradeships: principally with Swift, Salvador Dalí (the one artist he wrote an essay on) and Henry Miller.
His decades-long fascination with the author of The Tropic of Capricorn is, on the face of it, odd. It was not a casual thing. One of the few times Orwell fell foul of the law was for illicitly having a smuggled collection of Miller’s Paris-published oeuvre. He wrote about and referred to Miller many times, and went out of his way to visit him. What principally drew him was not the ‘pornography’ (as then defined – Miller is now an American classic) but the sensory extravaganza on interesting French stench, from the gripping second sentence of the first tropic onwards: ‘Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop.’
As Orwell wrote, in his first tribute piece to Miller, he creates a Paris permeated w
ith:
the whole atmosphere of the poor quarters of Paris as a foreigner sees them – the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the green waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro stations, the cigarettes that come to pieces, the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens.5
More specifically, the smell of it. Orwell found in Miller the most congenial nasal Francophile. A brother of the nose. The company of Cyrano.
Outside the whale. Henry Miller, Orwell’s idol.
Orwell’s Smell-talent
One seemed always to be walking a tight-rope over a cess-pool.
Orwell was born with a singularly diagnostic sense of smell. He had the beagle’s rare ability to particularize and separate out the ingredients that go into any aroma. One memorably odoriferous passage, never forgotten by anyone who has read the account (‘Such, Such Were the Joys’) of Eric Blair’s (as he then was) awful prep school, describes the ablution ordeal that the pupils had, daily, to endure at St Cyprian’s. It centred on ‘the slimy water of the plunge bath’:
and the always-damp towels with their cheesy smell: and, on occasional visits in the winter, the murky sea-water of the local Baths, which came straight in from the beach and on which I once saw floating a human turd. And the sweaty smell of the changing-room with its greasy basins, and, giving on this, the row of filthy, dilapidated lavatories, which had no fastenings of any kind on the doors.
The ‘cheesy smell’ of the towels? An odd adjective, one might think. But it’s not. The ‘aromatographer’ (not, one suspects, a crowded specialism) Avery Gilbert has devoted himself to ‘olfaction – the strange and wonderful world of smell’. He offers a precise analysis (as Orwell’s is a precise description) of the exclusive masculinity of the cheese-on-towels smell. In a recent study,
Orwell's Nose Page 1
