What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [67]
Once Severin agrees to be Wanda’s slave, everything changes. They travel to Florence; in the carriage ride to the train station she is playful, but her warmth and scent are already receding: “she even gave me a kiss, and her cold lips had the fresh frosty fragrance of a young autumnal rose, which blossoms alone amid bare stalks and yellow leaves and upon whose calyx the first frost has hung tiny diamonds of ice.”
As the domineering Wanda becomes more remote, odors become coarse and repellant to Severin. Wanda rides in a first-class train car, but makes Severin sit with the plebes: “Then she nodded to me, and dismissed me. I slowly ascended a third-class carriage, which was filled with abominable tobacco-smoke that seemed like the fogs of Acheron at the entrance to Hades.” Here he has “to breathe the same oniony air with Polish peasants, Jewish peddlers, and common soldiers.” After a layover in Vienna they proceed to Florence. “Instead of linen-garbed Mazovians and greasy-haired Jews, my companions now are curly-haired Contadini, a magnificent sergeant of the first Italian Grenadiers, and a poor German painter. The tobacco smoke no longer smells of onions, but of salami and cheese.” The pungent odors of everyday life crowd out the heady scents of Severin’s submissive fantasy. By the end of the story he stands before his original image of the ideal mistress: the statue of the Venus of Medici. In his despair, he sees on the statue “fragrant curls which seemed to conceal tiny horns on each side of the forehead.” He has given his soul to a she-devil with a heart of stone. Sacher-Masoch created an olfactory accompaniment for the arc of Severin’s story; a descent from heady fantasy into submission and then despair.
WHEN AUTHORS EROTIZE scent, they may reveal something of themselves. Take the American novelist Willa Cather, for example. She never married and lived for long periods with woman friends. Her sexual identity remains ambiguous and is the subject of much speculation in Queer Studies departments. O Pioneers! is her 1913 novel about illicit love and a doomed affair on the Nebraska frontier. Its unsentimental heroine, Alexandra Bergson, treats men as fellow workers, never marries, and never consummates a love affair. The many indoor smells of O Pioneers!—spirits, pipe smoke, damp woolens, kerosene, and noxious Mexican cigarettes—are all unpleasant, manufactured, and male. In contrast, the outdoor smells are positively emotional and almost erotic. There is the “strong, clean smell” of brown earth in the springtime that “yields itself eagerly to the plow,” the spicy odor of wild roses after a rain, ripe fields of corn and wheat, sweet clover, and evening air “heavy with the smell of wild cotton,” the “more powerful perfume of midsummer.” Alexandra has one romantic fantasy in which she is carried away by a strong, anonymous man: “She never saw him, but, with eyes closed, she could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him.” Cather’s human eroticism (such as it is) is much like her eroticizing of nature. The Queer Studies folks might be missing the point. The nose clues suggest that Cather’s sexual orientation was far too diffuse to be captured by either end of the male-female continuum.
WILLIAM FAULKNER was an old man when a student asked him about the many references to scent in his writing. Faulkner replied that “maybe smell is one of my sharper senses, maybe it’s sharper than sight.” I think Faulkner was saying what he thought the kid wanted