The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [92]
—Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, 1948
Scornful of a world he saw as mindlessly hedonistic and devoted to synthetic pleasures, Huxley created a society where children are conceived in and born from test tubes and where nursing a baby is even more disgusting than wearing old clothes or using the words “mother” and “father.” One of the cardinal sins in the brave new world is retaining one’s natural aroma. The Controller’s scathing picture of the old order—a place called “home,” stuffy, unsterilized and smelly—contrasts with a scene of Lenina Crowne, bathing, massaging and scenting herself in the Girls’ Dressing Room. “Torrents of hot water were splashing into or gurgling out of a hundred baths,” as Lenina, after a day’s work in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, unzips herself out of her clothes. For an Englishman like Huxley, the prospect of a hundred baths generously supplied with hot water was still a futuristic vision in 1932; in America, it was much closer to reality.
In both countries, the after-bath facilities were the stuff of fantasy. Once she has bathed and dried herself, Lenina
took hold of a long flexible tube plugged into the wall, presented the nozzle to her breast, as though she meant to commit suicide, pressed down the trigger. A blast of warmed air dusted her with the finest talcum powder. Eight different scents and eau-de-Cologne were laid on in little taps over the wash-basin. She turned on the third from the left, dabbed herself with chypre and, carrying her shoes and stockings in her hand, went out to see if one of the vibro-vacuum machines were free.
Lenina returns from the vibro-vac “like a pearl illuminated from within, pinkly glowing.”
With Bernard Marx, a young man whose orthodoxy is rightly suspected, Lenina visits a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, one of the remnants of the old order left unreformed as an exotic and slightly revolting tourist destination. Lenina finds its squalor disorienting, and the smell of their native guide is the last straw. When Bernard tries to make light of the body odour, the dirt and dust, and the insects, she protests with one of the mantras drilled into them, sleeping and waking, as children.
“But cleanliness is next to fordliness.”
“Yes, and civilization is sterilization,” Bernard went on, concluding on a tone of irony the second hynopaedic lesson in elementary hygiene. “But these people have never heard of Our Ford, and they aren’t civilized.”
Linda, who was raised in the new world but accidentally left behind on the reserve for decades, agrees with Bernard. She tells the couple about the horror of a place where “nothing is aseptic.” In vain she tried to teach the natives the slogans she had been conditioned with as a child, including “Streptocock—Gee to Banbury—T, to see a fine bathroom and W.C.” But, she says, “they didn’t understand. How should they? And in the end I suppose I got used to it. And anyhow, how can you keep things clean when there isn’t hot water laid on?”
Linda’s question was a good one, and still relevant in Europe. By the 1930s in America, almost all urban houses and apartments were supplied with hot water, as were a smaller majority in Britain. Fifty—five per cent of all American houses had a complete bathroom in 1940. On the Continent it was more difficult to keep clean. Only 10 per cent of Italians had a bathroom in 1931. Twenty years later in France, in 1954, only one house or apartment in ten had a shower or bath. America remained the pioneer of personal cleanliness, and every time Americans went a step further-decreeing that people should bathe or shower and apply deodorant daily, or that women should shave their underarms to inhibit body odour—Europeans reacted with incredulity, scorn or both. Gradually, their plumbing improved and their washing increased, although outside the largest cities it did not often meet American standards.
“We are the first great nation in which all individuality, all sweetness of life, all saline and racy earthiness has with success been subordinated to a machine-ruled industrialism.