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.’