Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  researchers . . . spent three winters collecting droplets of fresh sweat from volunteers in the sauna. It turns out that women have far higher amounts of the MSH precursor than do men, which means women (or rather the bacteria that love them) can liberate significantly more of the sulfur volatiles that smell like tropical fruit and onions. Male BO, in contrast, tends to smell cheesy and rancid.6

  That gender-distinct odour is something that only a nasal virtuoso would pick up on. Orwell qualifies as just such a virtuoso of the nostril.

  Nose or Nez?

  For eight-year-old Eric Blair, St Cyprian’s was a traumatizing culture shock, beginning with the affront to his young nose. It was not a wholly English nose, which was a major part of the problem.

  Eric Blair was half French. He was brought up by a French mother in the expatriated absence of his English father, in his formative first seven years of life. The Blair household, by the Thames, was, behind its walls, as Gallic as a household along the Loire. His essential Frenchness was efficiently camouflaged in later life by an ultra, almost theatrical, English carapace. Close friends, such as Anthony Powell, saw through it. For those not close to him he was as ‘English’ as the legendary Major Thompson (played by Jack Buchanan in The French, They Are a Funny Race, 1955).

  Orwell’s ‘toothbrush’ (pubic hair of the upper lip) and unflowing locks (‘short back and sides, please’ – in later life he would perform it himself with kitchen scissors) were the kind uniformly adopted by young English men in the early twentieth century, to proclaim that they were no Oscar Wildes (Francophile and worse). ‘Nancies’? Orwell despised them, viz. the (outrageously homophobic, by today’s standards) opening chapters of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The ‘tash’ also served as a barrier between the nose and the smelly world outside.

  Photographs bear out the fact that no great author was less the dandy than George Orwell. A cadaver with suits that hung like an unwashed shroud is the usual verdict of friends such as the dapper Malcolm Muggeridge. Gordon Bowker notes amusingly that in his Jura period Orwell actually carried a scythe and shotgun around with him – looking like something out of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. But as a small and rather touching filial tribute he chose poodles, the dandy’s pooch, as his favoured domestic pet (his mother, Ida, had bred them). One poodle, in later life, he called ‘Marx’ – the closest he ever got to reading Das Kapital, as Bernard Crick, never one to admire Orwell as a political thinker, sourly observes.

  Maternal, Gallic influence meant that young Eric was wholly unacculturated to the nasal shocks of St Cyprian’s and their underlying ideological meaning. If there were a word that summed up the ethos of schools like the one his parents sent him to, it was ‘manly’. The above ‘plunge bath’, for example, would have been ‘bracingly’ chill. The testicle-shrivelling ‘cold bath’ or ‘shower’ is, for the English, a moral, not a sanitary thing. It forms ‘character’. In A Clergyman’s Daughter, the heroine, Dorothy, takes a cold bath at 5.30 every morning to purify her mind and tame her body. The English shiver into virtue. Warm baths, the pupils at St Cyprian’s would have been ritually warned, led to the downfall of the Roman Empire. No such fate should befall England’s dominions.

  Nations, societies and groups founded on a bedrock of puritanism, like the UK and u.s., take up arms (up to the very armpits themselves) against smell, as militantly as Christians going to war. In the hazy picture that Christians traditionally have of the place, hell is horrifically odorous. Its smell (like rotting eggs but worse) is fearful. In an illuminating book, Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur: Mythology and Geology of the Underworld (2013), Salomon Kroonenberg traces our conviction that those of us condemned to suffer eternal damnation will have our noses punished, while devils go at our rumps with pitchforks, and the large worm feasts on us as the whim takes it.

  Heaven (with all those freshly laundered white robes) is as odour-free as we would like our inconveniently odoriferous bodies to be. We spray every dubious carnal pit, hole and suspect warm place. Perhaps, we fantasize, the tiniest ‘fragrance’ is permissible ‘up there’ – the ‘odour of sanctity’, for example, which hovers over the rotting flesh of those destined for beatitude when mother church gets round to it (Orwell’s first – incense-laden – primary school was run by nuns).

  Miltonic Stench

  Cosmic stink/fragrance merits a short digression. Orwell discovered Paradise Lost when he was sixteen. He read, in a small tutorial group at Eton, the whole poem aloud. ‘It sent’, he later recalled, ‘shivers down my backbone.’7 Another tingler.

  Anyone who, like Orwell, knows the poem will recall how extraordinarily, and theologically, smelly it is. There is no mystery as to why Milton should have been so sensitized. He was blind and his other senses were sharpened in compensation. To take one of many examples, the following typically extended Miltonic simile describes Satan’s (the fiend’s) use of seductive odour (Milton, puritan that he was, did not approve of perfume. Or Satan):

  now gentle gales

  Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense

  Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole

  Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail

  Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past

  Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow

  Sabean odours from the spicy shore

  Of Arabie the blest, with such delay

  Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league

  Cheered with the grateful smell old ocean smiles.

  So entertained those odorous sweets the fiend

  Who came their bane, though with them better pleased

  Than Asmodeus with the fishy fume,

  That drove him, though enamoured, from the spouse

  Of Tobit’s son, and with a vengeance sent

  From Media post to Aegpyt, there fast bound.

  (Paradise Lost, IV, 156—71)

  There are no fewer than six different smells described in these dozen lines.

  When, by contrast, in Book V the archangel Raphael comes to Eden to warn Adam and Eve, he shakes his wings and exudes a decently ‘heavenly fragrance’ – no deceptive Sabean odour or fishy fume.8

  Holy/Unholy Smell

  Smells, one agrees with Milton, are charged with religious significance. According to the Washington Post, over 90 per cent of Americans, adult and teenage, use deodorants as a gusset tribute to the puritan fathers of the nation. Most do so ‘religiously’ around the time when puritans would say their morning prayers. These applications are laboratory-designed to ‘kill’ smell – at source. They are also implausibly accused of killing their too-enthusiastic users. But a few cancers are, surely, a small price to pay for national odourlessness.

  One can fancifully draw up a list of objects and rituals that define the cultural distance created by 21 miles of channel. The bidet; the caporal cigarette with its North African ‘bite’; the stale incense of the country church at noon on a hot day in Provence; the olive-oil tang wafting from the adjoining street café; the open street ‘pissoir’ on a warm night; the fragrance that, to this day, wafts with dry, offshore winds over the Côte d’Azur from Grasse; the ‘bouquet’ of its perfumeries; the mouth-watering aroma of café express and fresh croissant; the memory-stirring madeleine.

  Only French culture could produce such triumphs of art nasale as Huysmans’ Le Gousset (in his Croquis Parisiens) – an extended rhapsody on the woman’s armpit: ‘no aroma has more nuances’ Research (there’s not much in this area) has discovered that it is maternal armpit odour that draws the baby to its food supply underneath.

  To summarize: for the Americans, it’s purifying deodorant; for the French, enriching fragrance. For the English, as the German cynic von Treitschke put it, ‘soap is civilization.’ The ‘Great Unwashed’ is a very different concept from sansculottes or Lumpenproletariat or white trash. That ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’ has been drilled proverbially into English children for centuries. The hope of resurrection requires
a carbolic bar in one hand and the Bible in the other. Salvation is hinted at by the premier soap of Orwell’s day (and mine), ‘Lifebuoy’. sos. Soap saves souls.

  In later life the rule is: ‘Working classes sweat, gentlemen perspire, ladies “glow”.’ Class and gender are subtly involved in our engagement with smell. And, of course, selfhood.

  Olfactory Narcissism

  Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.

  W. H. AUDEN

  Gordon Bowker argues that Blair/Orwell sought out ‘evil odours . . . as if to rub his own nose in them to exorcise his demons through self-inflicted suffering’. But there seems to be interest, and on occasion relish, in his fascination with smell.

  One suspects that Blair/Orwell was of that sexual group of paraphiliacs for whom Freud could only devise a French term – renifleurisme; male erotic gratification from the covert sniff.9 Freud developed the theory and practice of the renifleur in his case study of the ‘Rat Man’ (an appropriate pseudonym for Orwell). Shoes and underwear are the two popular fetish objects for the active renifleur. Both, of course, must have been used, and must still reek with the spoor of their owner.

  A relevant literary comparison comes to mind. Orwell, as has been said, was late coming to James Joyce – in 1933, as he was writing A Clergyman’s Daughter. He must have been struck by the idea that Joyce was as connoisseurial about sexual smell as he was. A ‘smell narrative’ of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would be as lengthy as any novel of Orwell’s.

  In Portrait, Joyce observes that smell is the primal sense the newly arrived human being uses to make sense of its extra-uterine environment. Freud calls this the ‘anal stage’. It is vitally important for the newborn child to recognize the smell of the milk-giver, and to clamp onto it. The autobiographical Portrait opens with little Stephen, two years old, ‘all ears’ under the table as his family argues. He thinks: ‘When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell. His mother had a nicer smell than his father.’

  It is a few years later that more complex sensory discrimination is cultivated. In his Swift essay, Orwell recalls the child’s ‘horror of snot and spittle, of the dogs’ excrement on the pavement, the dying toad full of maggots, the sweaty smell of grown-ups, the hideousness of old men, with their bald heads and bulbous noses’. It’s a little coming of age, and a toe-dipping plunge into the universal cesspit. The child, of course, whatever its dislike of the ‘sweaty smell of grown-ups’, has grown, over the years, to be fond of its own (‘my’) smells and treats them as treasured properties, privately and, usually, shamefully as it grows older. Hence Auden’s remark above about one’s own farts. Other people’s are mephitic.

  James Joyce records the olfactory narcissism (‘my smell, right or wrong’) more indulgently than Orwell. There remained enough Catholic in the Irish writer to absolve himself of this little carnal indulgence. Most interesting in Portrait is the passage describing Stephen’s self-mortification, in his religiously fanatic period. He determines to bring ‘each of his senses under a rigorous discipline’. Sight and hearing are relatively easy. But

  To mortify his smell was more difficult as he found in himself no instinctive repugnance to bad odours whether they were the odours of the outdoor world, such as those of dung or tar, or the odours of his own person among which he had made many curious comparisons and experiments.

  His most intimate body odours are dear to him, because they are his own. But what is implied by ‘many curious comparisons and experiments’? It requires an inward holding of the nose to pursue that question.

  Joyce, an unashamed coprophiliac (as, one can conjecture, was Orwell – hence his recurrent use of the word ‘faecal’), was driven to ecstasies of erotic excitement by female soiled knickers. He once disclosed that all he needed to come to climax was a sniff of his wife Nora’s underwear. In one of the famous ‘dirty letters’, he rhapsodizes,

  The smallest things give me a great cockstand – a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers, a sudden dirty word spluttered out by your wet lips, a sudden immodest noise made by your behind and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside.

  Joyce’s ‘dirty letters’ were not published until half a century after Orwell’s death.10 It’s interesting to speculate what the latter would have made of passages like the above. There might well have been fraternal sympathy.

  Madeleines and All That

  When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain.

  MARCEL PROUST, Remembrance of Things Past

  Comparisons with the so-called ‘Proust Phenomenon’ (as psychologists call it) – temps perdus recovered via the smell of a teacake – are not out of place when discussing Orwell’s fiction. As his amiable ‘Tubby’ Bowling puts it in Coming Up for Air (we first encounter him in the family ‘lav’), the past is a very curious thing:

  It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past.

  Science is as interested in the Proust Phenomenon as literature is. In what is claimed to be the largest ever investigation to date,

  the National Geographic survey gave readers a set of six odours on scratch-and-sniff cards. From a sample of 26,200 respondents (taken randomly from over 1.5 million responses), 55% of respondents in their 20s reported at least one vivid memory cued by one of the six odours and this fell to just over 30% of respondents in their 80s, remarkable proportions with such a small number of odours.11

  In his essay ‘Music at Night’ (1932), Aldous Huxley foresaw, with a shudder, cinemas of the future in which ‘egalitarians’ (Huxleyese for ‘proles’) will experience the total sensory barrage of ‘talkies, tasties, smellies, and feelies’. In the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell also played with the idea of ‘smelloscreens’. Roll on, say I. Orwell and Joyce will be rich sources for this madeleine for the people.

  The Sour Smell of Politics

  To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

  ORWELL (1946)

  Orwell’s socialism is a battleground, best avoided by those who do not wish to find themselves in a slough of hot-tempered tedium. One thing one can safely say is that his political thought is commonsensical and that the Orwellian ‘smell test’ is central to it. Who but Orwell would diagnose the current (1936) malaise of socialism nose-first, as a malodour? ‘Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship, and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.’12 It is hard to think of it inspiring a rousing call (‘We Must Reform our Smell, Comrades!’) at the annual Labour Party Conference. But it is echt Orwellism.

  Orwell trusted the ‘smell test’, and made crucial changes in his life on the strength of it. When he came back for good, after five years in Burma, ‘one sniff of English air’ confirmed that he had done the right thing. The nose knows. One inhalation, and he decided he was never going back.

  Orwell was, elsewhere, raised to heights of mirthful satire by the odour of left-wing ‘crankishness’:

  It would help enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do
his yoga exercises quietly!

  Beaujolais Socialism

  The money stink everywhere

  Keep the Aspidistra Flying

  Another kind of socialism – which Orwell repudiated more angrily – was the hypocritical, silk sheets, variety. There is a telling episode in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Gordon Comstock (a ‘moth-eaten’, short-arse, prematurely burned out, talentless, self-punitive caricature of Orwell himself) bullies his rich magazine-proprietor friend and patron, Philip Ravelston, into accompanying him into a working-class pub. Ravelston is an ungrateful caricature of Richard Rees, the ‘socialist baronet’ and proprietor of The Adelphi. It was ‘Dickie’ who assisted Orwell into authorship, publishing the nucleus of articles that became his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London.

  Comstock drags his rich best friend into the awful-smelling spit-and-sawdust boozer. What follows is usefully summarized via its ‘smell narrative’. ‘A sour cloud of beer seemed to hang about [the place]. The smell revolted Ravelston.’ They are served two pints of ‘dark common ale’ (‘mild’, for those who can remember the sickly-sweet-smelling swill). The air is ‘thick with gunpowdery tobacco-smoke’. Ravelston catches sight of a well-filled spittoon near the bar, averts his eyes and thinks, wistfully, of the wines of Burgundy.

  The two friends have their usual argy-bargy about socialism. Ravelston tries, vainly, to explain Marx. What does Marx mean, Comstock snorts, in the stinking ‘spiritual sewer’ to which £2 a week has consigned him? ‘He began to talk in obscene detail of his life in Willowbed Road [his fifteen-bob-a-week lodgings]. He dilated on the smell of slops and cabbage, the clotted sauce-bottles in the dining-room, the vile food.’ ‘It’s bloody,’ murmurs Ravelston several times, in feeble sympathy. Bad-tempered, and with a belly full of bad beer, the two men go out into the now night-time street. The discussion drags on. If you’re poor, says Comstock, those who are not poor hate you – because you have a bad smell: ‘It’s like those ads for Listerine. “Why is he always alone? Halitosis is ruining his career.” Poverty is spiritual halitosis.’