Sniff

 Thanks to the notoriously slow post in Lichfield – it's so bad that questions have been asked in the House – I've only just received my copy of November's Literary Review. In it, I review a rather wonderful book on smell – Sniff by William Tullett. (The below might differ slightly from the printed version.) 

'Smell is the most undervalued of our senses, the one that (according to surveys) most people would jettison if they had to lose a sense. We use our noses less and less, and when we do use them we encounter a confusing olfactory world, ‘a world of simulacra in which anything can smell like anything else’, as William Tullett puts it. And yet, smells – especially remembered smells from our past – still possess real emotional potency. ‘A familiar smell can catapult us back in time’ – just ask Monsieur Proust.
  Tullett’s fascinating book, written in short, lively chapters packed with fact and insight, ranges far and wide across the world of smells, past and present, pleasant and extremely unpleasant, in war and peace, in old churches and new cars, libraries and theatres, public and private places, in fungi-scented woods and churchyards bursting with bodies. And it’s full of surprises. I had no idea that ‘nose teams’ in the car industry are busy trying to create ‘new old new car smell’, i.e. a chemical mix that smells the way old cars smelt when they were new and car interiors were wood and leather rather than plastics. Similarly, I had never heard that the Stasi’s obsessive record-keeping extended to a ‘smell archive’ of sweat samples from interviewees, stored on bits of cloth in glass jars. Nor did I know that Daniel Defoe, desperate for money, once set up a civet farm, hoping to make a fortune by extracting their highly prized musk and selling it to perfumers. The venture crashed and Defoe took up writing instead, as a more reliable source of income. Sniff is full of such smell-related titbits.
 The nose-obsessed Sigmund Freud makes an appearance, theorising that sexual smells released by the genitalia enter the bloodstream, travel up to the nose, and cause migraines. In earlier times, when women’s troubles were thought to be caused by the womb wandering all over the body, and the womb was thought to respond to smell, scented ointments and fumigants were used to direct its movements up, down or sideways to its rightful place. This revelation comes in the chapter with the most arresting title, ‘Lilac Vagina’, and perhaps the most startling content, some of it gleaned from Victorian pornographic magazines with names like Randiana – Tullett, as one would expect of an academic whose other works includes Smell in Eighteenth-Century England and Smell and the Past, has certainly done his research. The chapter title, by the way, comes from a more recent pornographic magazine’s experimental scratch ’n’ sniff centrefold. Enough said.
  I was disappointed to learn that the word for the smell of dry earth after rain – ‘petrichor’, which sounds so immemorial – was coined as recently as 1964, and I was somehow not surprised to learn that Flaubert enjoyed the smell of crushed bedbugs. Talking of which, the first modern aerosol spray was used not to sweeten the air or our bodies, but to kill bedbugs; it was only later that the perfume industry took it up. The seaside smell we identify as ‘ozone’ is in fact compounded mostly of rotting seaweed and salt spray, and science has concluded that humans, far from having a deficient sense of smell, have the potential to detect more than a trillion different smells.
  Of course, many smells are seriously unpleasant, and in past times some were thought to foul that they could actually kill on contact. As Tullett’s book progresses, these appalling odours tend to come to the fore, with, for example, a grisly account of what happened to Pope Pius XII’s inexpertly embalmed body after death – no odour of sanctity there – and vivid descriptions of the gruesome state of city churchyards before burial grounds were largely moved out of town and, later, embalming sanitised the malodorous business of storing the dead. In a chapter titled ‘War Is Smell’, Tullett describes the widespread use of foul-smelling substances as weapons of war, particularly in the course of sieges, when both defenders and attackers made use of rotting bodies, faeces and carefully compounded ‘stink pots’ that combined foul-smelling substances with explosives. These last were used in naval warfare as late as the Napoleonic wars. Things have been very different in modern warfare, where the most toxic substances often have deceptively pleasant smells: the deadly phosgene gas smelled of new-mown hay, and the poison gas used by Sadam Hussein to kill the inhabitants of the Kurdish city of Halabja had the sweet fragrance of apples. This is indeed a world where anything can smell of anything.
  Tullett fears that our sensitivity to scent has been seriously weakened by air pollution. In his last chapter, he recalls some of the crises that preceded the various clean air acts, including the 1952 London smog that killed four thousand in five days. Such things, and worse, are still happening in other parts of the world, and there is clear evidence that particulates in the air are compromising our sense of smell. Tullett fears that ‘the parfum de pollution may make us nose-blind to the Eau d’Extinction’. However, the air is still ‘one vast library’ of aromas, and ‘careful and attentive sniffing’ might yet save us. ‘Open your nose,’ he urges us. ‘The more of the world we can smell, the more of it we can save.’

Air From Canada

 So many fine poets were born in the 1920s – Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Thom Gunn – and most of them, Gunn (b.1929) excepted, are now past their centenary. Three years past his now is the New York poet James Schuyler, who was born on this day in 1923. Here is one of his best, a poem imbued with the 'wonderful freshness' and Nova Scotian light that it describes, but with a very dark edge, and a stark closing image... 

Air from Canada

A wonderful freshness, air
that billows like bedsheets
on a clothesline and the clouds
hang in a traffic jam: summer
heads home. Evangeline,
our light is scoured and Nova
Scotian and of a clarity that
opens up the huddled masses
of the stolid spruce so you
see them in their bristling
individuality. The other
day, walking among them, I
cast my gaze upon the ground
in hope of orchids and,
pendant, dead, a sharp shadow
in the shade, a branch gouged
and left me "scarred forever
'neath the eye." Not quite. Not
the cut, but the surprise, and
how, when her dress caught fire,
Longfellow's wife spun
into his arms and in the dying
of its flaring, died. The
irreparable, which changes
nothing that went before
though it ends it. Above the wash
and bark of rumpled water, a gull
falls down the wind to dine
on fish that swim up to do the same.

'Evangeline' references Longfellow's epic poem – hugely popular in its day – about an Acadian girl expelled from Nova Scotia. 'Scarred forever 'neath the eye' is a quotation from Schuyler's fellow New York poet Frank O'Hara's 'A City Winter': 'You are not how the gods refused to die, And I am scarred forever 'neath the eye'. 

Two 'Minors'?

My sturdy volume of Peter Porter's Collected Poems (Oxford, 1983) – 330-plus closely packed pages – is ideal for browsing in. Last night, doing just that, I happened on this one, dedicated to a remarkable Renaissance artist who was as prolific and gifted as Porter himself, and with whom he seems to identify as an honourable 'minor' artist. 

For Sophonisba Anguisciola

So much going for you, 
a woman painter of the sixteenth century, 
dying at ninety-seven
if the reference books are right, 
and with such an elegantly
unpronounceable name.

It seems an attainment of grace
just to honour you and to forget
some undistinguished pictures, 
almost as if the procession of geniuses
with their 'Triumphs of Time'
and their 'Feasts of the Gods'
passed right through the town
and out into the countryside,
leaving you, me, my typewriter
and an honoured calling
to represent the human race. 

Yes, Sophonisba may well have painted 'some undistinguished pictures' – the price you pay for being prolific, just as Porter wrote some undistinguished poems. However, both also touched greatness in some of their work – Sophonisba chiefly in her brilliant self-portraits (like the one above) and her family portraits (like the one below – 'The Chess Game', with Sophonisba herself at the left). 

   The name Sophonisba has an unfortunate literary resonance in the notorious line 'Oh, Sophonisba! Sophonisba, Oh!' from James Thomson's 1730 verse drama of the same name. The line attracted so much ridicule that Thomson changed it in later editions to 'Oh, Sophonisba! I am wholly thine!' Which was certainly an improvement. 

Gram

 I missed a big anniversary yesterday – what would have been Gram Parsons' 80th birthday, had he not died of a massive overdose at the age of 26, young even for a self-destructive rock star. The first time I heard him would have been on the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, but soon after that a schoolfriend who had a knack of getting hold of all the latest, coolest records, often as imports, introduced me to the first Flying Burrito Brothers album, Gilded Palace of Sin, and that was it – I was in thrall from there on in. His was a truly extraordinary talent, and heaven knows where he would have taken his Cosmic American Music had he lived longer – but he was never going to. Here's a death-soaked track from the great posthumous album, Grievous Angel...

My Number One Fan

 Such is the world we live in that anyone who writes a book nowadays is going to get bombarded with AI-generated scam fan mail, aimed at extracting money for non-existent services. Everyone, that is, except me. I've had plenty of offers to work wonders for my blog (which of course I ignore), but nothing for either of my books.
  Until today. 
  In my inbox this morning was a mail from someone (or rather something) called Gloria J. Villegas. 'Dear Andrew', it began – not a great start – then 'I'll keep this short', which is invariably code for 'this is going to be punishingly long'. The lovely Gloria adores my book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment and is keen to introduce it to the BookTok reading community, whatever that might be. She offers a rather lame one-line sell for the book, then helpfully relates its contents. She has 'mapped out a full approach' for my book, including 'video angles', whatever they might be, and she offers to send me 'the complete plan' for it, if I simply reply to her email. This I shall not be doing, but I am of course deeply grateful to Gloria J. Villegas for her kind attentions. 
  This would all be good fun if it were not for the dreadful exploitative industry behind it, run by Chinese gangsters and other truly evil people. There was a revealing, deeply depressing piece about this in the Guardian recently – here's the link...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/nov/01/like-many-authors-im-bombarded-by-scam-fan-mail-i-wasnt-prepared-for-what-would-happen-when-i-wrote-back

Once again I find myself asking who, in his right mind. could ever have thought AI was a good idea? 

Library Girls

Something I glimpsed on Facebook this morning (and, of course, couldn't find again) alerted me to the existence of a literary subgenre that had somehow passed me by – midcentury 'library girl' fiction. These are novels following the adventures – too strong a word, in some cases – of improbably good-looking female library assistants. Some of them, such as Molly Qualifies as a Librarian by Bertha Lonsdale or Nancy Runs a Bookmobile by Enid Johnson, are closer to careers information than fiction, but others offer rather more.

In Jinny Williams, Library Assistant (1962), which is set in New Jersey, the somewhat saintly Jinny, while not dealing with library-related challenges (e.g. chucking out troublemaking teens), is torn between two lovers – well, boyfriends – one of them blue-collar and uncultured, the other a cultivated Princeton student whom she meets at the library. Which will she choose? No spoiler alerts here, so let's pass on...

Kitsy Babcock, Library Assistant by Joan Sargent (1958) is set in Florida, and follows the eponymous heroine as she takes a part-time job as a 'library page' (i.e. library assistant)  in order to be able to afford to stay on at university. There is romantic interest in this one too, as Kitsy is attracted to Don, a black-haired artist who also works at the library. The two of them are drawn into a mystery – and into danger – after an important collection of rare historic documents is stolen. In the course of their investigations, Kitsy and Don find themselves kidnapped and tied up in a hotel room at gunpoint. Can they figure out a way to escape and retrieve those precious documents? (Well, what do you think?).

More of a straightforward romance is Jan Marlowe, Hospital Librarian by Margaret Malcolm (1960), originally published in the UK as a Harlequin Romance. Our Jan, the hospital librarian, is, like everyone else, highly excited by the arrival of a good-looking new consultant ophthalmic surgeon. She is attracted to him – but even more so to one of the patients. What a quandary – which one will turn out to be her true love? Again, no spoilers. By the way, some of these books are now rare and hard to find. If you spot one in a charity bookshop, it might be a very good investment. 

   Reading about these 'library girl' titles, I couldn't help thinking of Philip Larkin, who of course had extensive experience of library assistants, and created the most memorable library assistant in fiction – Katherine Lind, in that haunting novel A Girl in Winter. We know that Larkin, under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman, wrote mildly erotic girls' school stories in his student days, and it would not be surprising if he tried his hand at spicy tales of goings-on in the stacks, but, alas, nothing has come to light. Had he lived long enough, he would surely have enjoyed this one, published in 2009...

Librarian By Day features 'shy, reserved librarian' Jennifer Davidson, who has a secret sideline – writing erotic spanking romances. She hasn't ever been spanked herself, but when her boyfriend happens upon one of her books, that all changes, and 'soon, Jennifer is embarking on a sensual journey of discovery where she learns that having her bottom warmed for real is better than anything she'd ever written about in her books.' Phew.

Phenomenal Talent

 Watching the final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year concert last night was wonderfully heartening. Whatever else is wrong with the world – and with music education – somehow these phenomenally talented youngsters keep emerging. The three finalists were whittled down from an original pool of several hundred video applications and forty auditionees, and, to judge by those who made it to the later stages, standards must have been very high indeed. For those who didn't see the final, the three contenders were the first-ever all-female line-up – an 18-year-old saxophonist, a 17-year-old recorder player, and an 18-year-old violinist. The saxophonist and the recorder player – who worked with six instruments on stage, including a gigantic contra-bass – performed contemporary works, while the violinist opted for Tchaikovsky's great concerto, which she played as if she had inhabited the piece for decades. A slight figure who looks even younger than her years, she played with effortless virtuosic brilliance, exquisite musical sensitivity, and every appearance of enjoyment. Her name is Sofia Demetriades, and we shall surely be hearing a lot more of her. 
   The BBC's musical activities are one of the few strong arguments for its continued existence as a publicly funded corporation. On the other hand, I'd happily pay a subscription to keep that side of things – including Radio 3 and 6 Music, of course – going. You can watch the whole of the Young Musician of the Year final on the BBC iPlayer. Enjoy.