What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [96]
Henry Adams gives us a small sample of a true olfactory memoir—it puts you behind another person’s nose in another time and place. In his honor, I call it Adams-style odor memory. To my way of thinking, Adams-style memory beats Proustian memory because it deals with smells that are deliberately sniffed and voluntarily recalled. These are not the buried land mines of Proustian memory; Henry Adams describes a smellscape that was familiar to his entire generation, and his memory of it is open to the public. Proustian memory inhabits a private, interior place, and is open by invitation only. For Proust, smell was a tool, a reflex hammer he used to probe his own mind. For the young Henry Adams, smell was the whole world; for the old Henry Adams, it was an open gateway to the past. Breathe deep: it’s summer, the sun is hot, and the tide is low.
Adams-style odor memory is popular with American writers. A fine example is found in the opening lines of Lake Wobegon Days, where Garrison Keillor conjures up the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota:
Along the ragged dirt path between the asphalt and the grass, a child slowly walks to Ralph’s Grocery, kicking an asphalt chunk ahead of him. It is a chunk that after four blocks he is now mesmerized by, to which he is completely dedicated. At Bunsen Motors, the sidewalk begins. A breeze off the lake brings a sweet air of mud and rotting wood, a slight fishy smell, and picks up the sweetness of old grease, a sharp whiff of gasoline, fresh tires, spring dust, and, from across the street, the faint essence of tuna hotdish at the Chatterbox Cafe.
You don’t have to be a Norwegian bachelor farmer to appreciate this. Anybody can inhale the scene and experience Lake Wobegon.
Adams-style memory has a big scope: it’s about extended episodes, not single events, entire smellscapes rather than isolated odors. Adams-style memory edits an entire season down to an aromatic highlight reel that can replayed at will. Dozens of Saturday afternoons with Grandpa at his workbench are distilled into a few key molecules.
By preserving familiar scenes, Henry Adams left us a time capsule of a lifestyle that has nearly vanished. For most of our history, most Americans lived and worked on farms; agriculture was our common smellscape. Haydn Pearson was born in 1901 and grew up on a small family farm in Hancock, New Hampshire. In a memoir, he recalls the ambience: “When I was a boy, one of my favorite spots was the livery stable. When I walked into Woodward’s Livery behind the Forest House Hotel, I was met by a pungent heady fragrance compounded of hay, leather, grain, harnesses, stained and splintered floor planks, and manure.” The interior of the livery office had its own character, “the fragrance of felt leggings, rubber arctics, sheep-lined coats, and the sawdust box for tobacco juice blended very pleasantly with the over-all aroma of the establishment.”
His family stored root vegetables and preserved foods in the farmhouse cellar, which acquired its own atmosphere: “a heavy damp pungent smell compounded of moist soil, potatoes, apples, carrots, turnips, salt pork, cold crackling brine, and the old floor boards. Probably there were some rotten potatoes and possibly a decayed cabbage or two, and if there is any farm-cellar fragrance equal to the combination of decayed potatoes and decomposed cabbages, I have yet to smell it.”
For Ben Logan, born in 1920 and raised on a small farm near the Kickapoo River in southwestern Wisconsin, haying time was aromatic: “A time like that comes back now sharp and real with all its smells of dust, horse sweat, man sweat, Lyle’s oozing pipe. There is the dry whirring of grasshoppers, steel wagon wheels ringing on the hard ground, the creak of the hay rope. There is the tepid smell of water as we drink from