A Day at the Races

A perfumer was probing the other day asking for my earliest memories of smell, a topic which regular readers will know is one of my favourite themes. The more you talk about it, the more the memories return. 55 years rolled away and I remembered the notorious Strawberry Elephant. This was a toy given to my baby brother by his godfather. About the size of a generous teddy it was made, as I recall, of some kind of foam rubber in a brilliant shocking pink and its smell was as startling as its colour. It was very very heavily impregnated with the scent of vanilla and ersatz strawberries – but a bad vanilla, that terrible artificial vanilla that has undertones of parmesan cheese mixed with candyfloss. You occasionally meet it in those hanging air fresheners that come in the form of cardboard fir trees, sold in packets of 3. The strawberry was deadly sweet even to my two year old’s nose and seemed to cling unnaturally to the skin if you caressed the animal. The house was filled with the smell: visitors were repelled by the miasma, the baby was terrified of the toy and Jumbo rapidly ended up in the caring arms of the Red Cross. He was a watchword for offensive smells for many years.

On early spring Saturday afternoons we all set off for the local point to point races; my veterinary father was usually on duty to treat equine injuries. The rest of us climbed on straw bales to take the bracing air, huddled in the car if wet, grizzled, squabbled, ate and drank Vimto through straws. It was at a point to point that another child taught me the dangerous trick of licking batteries to feel an electric jolt through the tongue. As I got older I took to safer thrills and brought along the latest library book. Our elders laid bets, gossiped, flirted, consumed a lot of gin, smoked, dodged well-known bores and walked the course with the dogs. Everyone had problems with the appalling lavatory arrangements and the more fastidious sought out hedges and copses. By 5 o’clock on a bad day the grass would be so sodden and swampy that cars had to be hauled out by tractors.

The smells were fantastic and various, not just juniper gin, cigars, cigarettes and pipes but a hillside covered with cowslips in full yellow bloom; fried onions, hot dogs and wet dogs; latrines, petrol, sweating horses, fresh earth and new trampled grass; crushed violets, damp tweed, gum boots, leather saddles and boots. There were draughts of heavy penetrating perfume and make up. Horsey ladies in those days wore extra heavy make-up of almost operatic flamboyance to counteract the effects of winds and weather as they tucked into succulent pork pies, whiffy sardine sandwiches and hot tomato soup. Tupperware boxes exuded the green crispness of tomato, cucumber and shredded lettuce drenched in the tangy “liquid sunshine” of bottled salad dressing. And you smelled money – great greasy wads of pound notes and fivers; the bitterness of old coppers and silver sourly handed out by bitter old bookies, and through chicken-wire grilles in the more refined atmosphere of the Tote. And how that tent smelled after a couple of hours on a busy sodden March day.

It was lovely, even rolling home with hangovers of various kinds and everyone cold, over excited and inclined to be fractious. One last stop at a pub on the way and then back for supper – someone sent down the garden to cut a cabbage, its great purple-grey-green outer leaves full of raindrops and exuding that strange scent that is something between mackintoshes and vegetable sap. All safe in the knowledge of another outing the next weekend.

Twilight Sleep – L’Eau de Circe

I warned (or promised) you that we should return again to the theme of sleep; and what better time than now when the lurch into spring plays havoc with the body. The clocks go forward, temperatures fluctuate violently, clothes feel too heavy or too light. An Iraqi Kurdish barber once told me that the logical healthy remedy was blood letting – to drain off the poisons of the winter, to relieve seasonal tensions and impurities and that sensation of fogged vagueness. Twilight Sleep therefore strikes a chord: it’s a title I had long bagged for use, but I now find that Edith Wharton beat me to it in 1927. My great aunt was sedated with the German twilight sleep procedure in 1922: she awoke with twin daughters and a foster baby in the bed. A dream transformation indeed.

The Greeks believed that dreams come to and fro from the Valley of Sleep: those that pass out through the Gates of Ivory are mere fantasies, those that leave through the Gates of Horn are destined to come true. The dreams and thoughts of Twilight Sleep are those wandering reveries of half reality, half unconsciousness when we drift and then come to ourselves still unable for a few seconds to distinguish fact from fiction – those moments when we startle awake at our desks, on the Tube or before the tv unsure where or who we are, maybe drooling a little, bemused and half stunned.

Parfumerie Generale’s L’Eau de Circe is a magical but baffling phantasm of this realm. A soft warm damp cloud tinted with all the hues of the setting summer sun, this perfume is mysterious as it is seductive. It references the ethereal and the earthy, the grotesque and the romantic. Circe was an enchantress from a family of magicians who beguiled Odysseus on his sea voyage home from Troy. The hero’s thwarted attempts to reach his wife in Ithaca follow a classic anxiety dream pattern: like those nightmares in which one tries continually to catch a train, pack a suitcase or find the right book, Odysseus is hindered at every turn by the intervention of a supernatural being. Cyclops, Sirens, Lotus Eaters all impede him. The lovely Circe lays on a luscious feast in the gardens of a scented palace for the crew of the traveller’s ship; then on a whim, disgusted by their gluttony and drunkenness, she transforms them into swine in a typical abrupt dream metamorphosis. With divine aid Odysseus forces Circe to restore his men to human shape and in another sudden volte face the witch becomes a benevolent fairy.

Pierre Guillaume’s scent floats in an intoxicating haze of lilacs, osmanthus. The initial effect is of harmony, gentle innocence and peace; but then the animalic powdery musky lilac starts to pound and a fruity vinous note of osmanthus introduces a faintly oppressive mood, heightened by a dampness, a humidity: hypnotic yes, but maybe with a touch of feminine menace. Is osmanthus perhaps one of those trees beneath which it is dangerous to sleep? Do the sleepers awake raving like those who doze beneath the cypress, the datura or the pink and white oleander? L’Eau de Circe captures that moment just before the gorging sailors become pigs, the moment when the sorceress’s baleful beautiful green eye freezes the feasters with a basilisk stare. It reminds us of Alma Tadema’s painting of another doomy banquet – the diners frozen in time as the suspended canopies of roses let fall and millions of petals suffocate the revellers beneath. L’Eau de Circe is a riddle worthy of the sphinx; we smell it like children thrilled by the beauty and terror of a fairytale, reassured by the certainty of a happy outcome

For the Lady of the Camellias…..

I have a large pink camellia by the back door and it’s just blooming now – two months late, like everything else this year: the astonishing cold has prolonged the snowdrops for a record four months’ flowering. Camellias tend to flourish outside kitchen doors and utility rooms: for all their exotic beauty they are tough creatures and enjoy hot fumey wafts from central heating vents, washing machine drainage and Agas. They flowered like mad in clouds of steam in a grim little patch of dirt under the bathroom windows at school; coming from the hills of Asia they are cold and frost resistant but dearly love a little heat where they can find it.

Their apparently romantic name is a bit of a disappointment – they are simply called after their European discoverer, the Jesuit botanist George Kamel, and the leaves of the species camellia sinensis brews up for tea. The camellia japonica is a practical beauty: how apt that Dumas should have chosen it as the emblem of the dying courtesan Marguerite Gautier, the grande horizontale up from the country who knows how to catch a swarm of bees and graze a cow. Inevitable that Garbo should take the part on film in 1936: the tall, rather ungainly Swede who began her career in a Stockholm barber shop, counted the sugar lumps in her larder, and chose her five Renoir canvases to match the carpets had a atavistic affinity with the role.

Supposedly a favourite movie of both Hitler¤ and Mme Mao*, Camille is a asphyxiation of studio-bound artifice right from the Valentine card lace of the titles and the cardboard Paris florists of the opening scene. Garbo’s paper camellias crackle and rustle on the soundtrack as she tucks them into her décolletage and woven-in ringlets. She is the only member of the cast who reacts spontaneously, seeming (as always on film) strangely detached from the strenuous acting of her colleagues though amiably humouring them: she chuckles a lot in the first half of the film – in character to be sure, but maybe also amused by the monkey antics of the rest of the MGM prestige troupe.

The stylised look of the camellia – the white cut-out petals, the dark shiny foliage like a child’s drawing of leaves – is visually perfect on film. The nature of the flower is richly symbolic: showy but unscented (fragrance was later bred into certain species) it is a perfect incarnation of a lady of the demi-monde – a creature of showy perfect loveliness but without a heart or human feelings. Camellias are not meant to be picked, when you pluck them they bruise, the petals unravel: take them indoors and they wither and die. You cannot hold them captive any more you can a butterfly or polar bear. Alphonsine Duplessis, the girl upon whose tragic career Dumas based the novel, carried bouquets of camellias to advertise availability: white when free, red when not. This conceit was too much for Hollywood; for Garbo, they are presented more as a floral comfort blanket, an accessory to Adrian’s gorgeous crinolines and those unbecoming hats, too fussy for that wonderful angular face of planes.

Maybe, too, cinema-goers fancied that Garbo was bathed in a fragrance of camellias. Those few scents based on the plant that I recall have picked up the tea leaf note – they’ve been verdant, woody; a fragrance of stems and stalks and sap. Bronnley did one with a bath line; Chanel, a delicious limited edition in the 1990′s, which lasted just long enough for everyone to fall in love with it – and then died. For warm springs and hot summers try Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier‘s Eau de Camellia Chinois – the crispness of camellia sinensis wrapped in cool dark banana leaves and served with ice. Dazzling, refreshing, green and sweet.
The kind of fresh clean fragrance that Garbo herself, a fancier of crisp uncomplicated colognes, might have enjoyed.

¤ Hitler asked Garbo to meet him for one of his famous teas, an invitation which was declined. Later she is claimed to have regretted this, saying she should have taken a revolver with her and shot him.

* A former actress, Mme Mao wore her personal print of Camille literally to a shadow. When it was found after her downfall only a few flickers on celluloid remained. The Sound of Music had received similar treatment.

Image of Garbo and Taylor from garboforever.com, Image of Camellia by Lemon Wedge

Retail Therapy

The first perfumes I ever bought were (of course) 4711; Coty’s Rose (which I believe cost 25p – five shillings then); and the long-defunct Casablanca – a men’s fragrance which became notorious after several cases of wearers spontaneously combusting or otherwise catching fire. Before that we all used deodorants or even hairspray as perfumes, and also dabbed around with bath oils. All this fragrant booty was bought in an ugly little village which had something of Haworth about it; a gloomy grimy place but minus the moors, tourist trade or the Brontes. You crossed the culverted brook, passed the crumbling mill and climbed the hill to the butchers, church, pet shop and a chemist’s which was so crammed and dishevelled that much of the stock spilled out through the doorway crushed, crumpled, not exactly soiled but far from pristine.

From this disordered but stimulating grotto you could take home Tabac, Blue Grass, Brut, Quelques Fleurs, In Love, My Love, Charlie, Blase and Tramp (“she’s wearing Tramp and everybody loves her”) and at any time of year there were always masses of grainy gritty bath cubes, “heavily perfumed” with ersatz carnation. These are always mixed up in my mind with the same-named scouring powder (the texture of which they resembled), tinned milk and corn plasters. Kiddle Kolognes, Kiku (packaged in egg yolk yellow) and lovely comforting Yardley still ruled supreme. On a roll from all this olfactory gratification we reeled out into the street where heavy odours of smoked bacon and cheese rolled from the grocers with the tang of particularly greasy cheese and onion crisps which always tasted good when washed down with warm Campari: something to do with the herbal blending, I guess.

The post-office smelled unaccountably of powered scrambled eggs, ink and dessicated dust; the pet shop of mice, bran and rabbit. The butchers’ aroma was of fresh juicy meat which sounds obvious enough, but it’s rather rare these days in the era of multi-packaging and laboratory reared meals. Only the other day I heard retail experts pointing out that flesh must never be displayed in shop windows for fear of scaring the punters; it must sit at the back, veiled decently in shadow. Our fish shops (now so rare and we had three) were salty, lemony, golden-crispy by noon – “Kindly Note: Oil Changed Daily”. The wool shop was airless, close and full of lanolin. But the best smells came from the huge hardware warehouse: creosote, tar, new metal, Made in China crockery and fripperies, plant bulbs, peat, bolts of gaudy oilcloth, Zip fire-lighters (which I always wanted to eat, like choc ices), formica, lino, canvas, sacking, saw dust and newly cut wood. Gorgeous. We’d go in and snuff up the air like hounds upon the scent.

At least perfume shops still smell good, still smell mysterious, voluptuous and rich. If only we could bottle the scent of Les Senteurs, that wonderful accumulated pot-pourri of sillages that Dodie Smith describes so memorably in I Capture The Castle when the girls venture into a fragrance department up West. Well, we’re trying…

Photo courtesy of staff.

Fairest of All

“In winter a Queen sat at a window sewing..”: the classically simple first line of the folktale Snow White as told by the Brothers Grimm. To me, it resonated in the Arctic freeze of the past winter like the tolling of a bell, calling out over the snowbound land. We know exactly what is to follow: the words have an incantatory invocation, like the reciting of a spell, or the singing of a hymn. They release the power of the story afresh by setting out its elements in a formal familiarity from which one cannot deviate without losing essential magic.

Snow White is a parable of innumerable layers, exploring elements and psychoses of the human condition, sexuality, death and the toxic family. There is also the pervasive theme of vanity: seen not only in the jealousy of the step-mother, but in the desire of Snow White’s own mother for a perfect child in red, white and black; the baby that costs her her own life. On the first two visits of the wicked Queen to Snow White at the dwarves’ house she lures the girl with laces for her stays (pulled tight to asphyxiate her) and a poisoned comb for Snow White’s hair. Presumably even the humblest eighteenth century German peasant girl could identify with the desire for these modest luxuries: a fatal flask of perfume would maybe have been too rare ambiguous and arcane a treasure to feature in a fireside tale. Having failed to slay Snow White through vanity, the Witch-Queen then turns to another deadly sin, greed: and the fatal apple – the fruit that undid Eve.

But all through the tale you can smell scents – snow-bound castles and forests, glittering mountain peaks, flowering woods and pastures, fine leather and fabrics, snug little cottages fragrant with woodsmoke and beeswax polish. Cloon Keen‘s new fragrance Lune de Givre has a corresponding ethereal fantasy quality about it: a pale silvery green frosted moon shining over a winter landscape but stimulating warmth and growth in the earth below, budding with seeds and new life. Sharp fresh galbanum underlines the arcane chthonic qualities of vetiver and the magnificent delicate pepperiness of angelica.

There is another Grimm tale in which an enchantress gives a poor girl three seeds or tiny nuts: in each is a dress, successively magnificent, outshining the stars, the moon, the sun. Lune de Givre has this opulence about it too, graced with a soft embracing cloud of orris which unites the fragrance in a surge of twilit passion, under the darkness of the night sky or the eternal starlit forests. And like a fairy tale, Lune de Givre has a universality to it: perfect for princes as well as princesses. As Tynan said of Marlene Dietrich, it has sex but no gender: a warm and hypnotic experience both calming and arousing, glamorous and serenely timeless.

Image from candlelightstories.com

DAFFS

The daffodils have been late in coming this year. In one of those strange warm non-winters earlier this century I noted on my calendar that they were in full blow in the London parks on February 9th, which makes them now two months behind. But in the supermarkets and flower stalls they’re freely obtainable, wonderfully cheap and you can turn your home into a glowing golden glade with minimum outlay. At Easter I filled a room with bowls of hyacinths, narcissi and six vases of daffs, spending no more than on a moderate bottle of wine. The cream and tangerine narcissi smelled as pungent and heady as tuberoses, while the daffodils sprinkled motes of pollen in the sunbeams which lit up every shade of yellow in those petals like silky waxed paper.

Daffodils are such accommodating plants – cheap and easy to grow, long lasting when cut – that they are often underrated and taken for granted. Over the centuries they have been bred and developed from a modest wild flower to showy flaunting beauties. Pilgrims to Wordsworth’s lakeside daffodils are often taken aback by their delicacy, miniatures in beige or sepia rather than the giant blooms of the horticulturists in every colour of sunshine and sunset, fire and flame, pink grapefruit, raspberry and orange. Even my Tesco’s three dozen, opening slowly in a sunny cold room, attained a remarkable size. They were rightly marvelled at as though,with their frilled trumpets, weird subtle fragrance and slender jade leaves they might have been sulphurous canary cattleya orchids against a sky as blue as that of Brazil.
Hence the acuteness of Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “Daffodils” which delicately probes this ambiguity in a tale of a school mistress’s past.

The scent is wonderful, though easily missed and not a little strange. You have to be looking out for it; like that of many flowers it is perhaps not quite what you imagined. Daffodils smell dry and green and slightly peppery; a trifle rough and lightly feral – gorged with pungent raw spring pollen. They smell of growing and pulsating life, the urgent uncontrolled resurrection of the spring; of rubber gloves and gas and crisp chilled white wine. For many of us this is the first garden fragrance of the year, especially if you can no longer get down on your knees to smell the honeyed snowdrops and musky, fleshy, powdery violets. It’s a colder, fresher, more bracing scent than the swooning jasmine odour of vibernum, or the piercing sweetness of hyacinths which for some people is unpleasantly redolent of cat world – a touch of domestic civet in the herbaceous border.

Daffodil is only occasionally used as a note in perfume, sometimes peeping from older twentieth century creations. I think the flower’s familiarity works against it psychologically; it seems lacking in exoticism though rich in scent. Like the blossoms of potatoes, beans both broad and runner, wallflowers, gorse, pansies and petunias the daffodils are maybe perceived as too humble to mingle with ambergris, ylang ylang and gardenia in a crystal flacon or sprayed on ivory shoulders. For perfumers who have dared to experiment it has yet yielded effective results. Bronnley once made a delicious cologne, perfect for splashing around after a bath, sweet and naïve and refreshing. Daltroff used daffodil to add a sly faux-innocence to the top notes of Narcisse Noir, and it turns up in Jean Patou’s devastating Adieu Sagesse of 1925.

One of the dozen corkers later marketed by Patou as “Ma Collection” Adieu Sagesse (and what a name!) is a worthy sister of such weird masterpieces as Chaldee, Colonie and Moment Supreme. It was coming to the end of its long story when I knew it, one of its fans being Prime Minister’s wife and poet, Lady Mary Wilson. The Wilsons owned a house in the Scilly Islands and no doubt the scent of the warm daffodil air of the isles chimed with Lady Wilson’s favourite perfume. “Is she fragrant?” as a contemporary High Court judge famously asked of quite another political spouse of that era. This was a time when Prime Minister’s wives often seemed vague and remote; the charming, enigmatic and discreet Baroness perhaps reveals as much about herself in this lost musky floral as she does in her poems.

“Red Roses For a Blue Lady” – La Fille de Berlin

Serge Lutens’ latest fragrance, a perfume of blood-red roses and peppers, glows in its classic bottle like a liquid jewel from a medieval apothecary’s cabinet. “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies”. Its inspiration is the wreck, ruin and resurrection of post-war Berlin in the warm spring of 1945; and the work of the Trummerfrauen the civilian women who brought order to chaos clearing the rubble with buckets and their bare hands. Toiling in the dust, wives, mothers and daughters trampled underfoot the mad dreams of Hitler and Speer. Passing bricks and stones from hand to hand in an endless human chain, the women of Berlin laid the foundations of the economic miracle and the ghost of the Thousand Year Reich that had immolated itself after little more than a decade. Nightmares of the past slowly faded in the face of practicality and sanity.

And the flowers bloomed on the shattered masonry. La Fille de Berlin is a meditation on hope and the toughness of the human spirit; the perennial triumph of good over evil, light over darkness. But it is still ambiguous in its references: it offers romance in many forms, not only the marriage lines of the war brides but also the few hours of any meeting between an enamoured civilian and lonely soldier. It breathes the same air as Billy Wilder’s sour contemporary comedy “A Foreign Affair”, also set in Berlin, which implies that Americans and Nazis are brothers under the skin; that chicanery and corruption are what makes the world go round. As the old Argentine tango says ” The 20th century is unsurpassed for insolent evil…”

Wilder is equally ambiguous in his film images. He stages Marlene Dietrich (who was inevitably, though erroneously, suspected of spying by both sides) singing three masterpieces of cynicism and kitsch: Illusions, Black Market and (with silken roses at her bosom) Ruins of Berlin. Dietrich wears copies of the dresses which she wore in her war-time concert tours; her on-screen accompanist is Frederick Hollander who played for her in The Blue Angel and had known her in Weimar Berlin in the Roaring Twenties. Her female co-star is the frosty blonde Jean Arthur, representing neurotic repression (Nazi puritanism / the pursed lips of the American Mid-West) against Dietrich’s florid pre-war sexuality. The past and present, truth and fiction, are inextricably conflated.

Just so with La Fille de Berlin. At first sight and smell you are ravished by a lush Easter bouquet, a glorious spray of scarlet roses so perfectly reproduced that you can feel the petals against your cheek and the dew on your skin. But if you choose, should you let your nose have full rein and allow the fragrance its full expansion, there is something troubling beyond and beneath: a hint of a German cultural perversity – a Grimm fairy tale; Veronika Voss’s suicide as the Paschal bells peal over Munich. In his study of Berlin at war, Roger Moorhouse writes that one of the most pervasive smells of the doomed city was that of halitosis. Pace “Secretions Magnifiques“, perfumery is not quite ready for this most shattering of notes. But Lutens nonetheless alludes to something awry; a rustling beneath the flowers, like Cleopatra’s asp among the figs. Not decay, exactly, but a pourri’d ripeness, perfection that can only spoil. A rosy fruity bloom on the verge of corruption – “O rose thou art sick..”. The unmistakable dark richness of Alpha Damascone; Goethe’s morning rose unfolding only to be broken by the wild boy on the heath.

Or the Rose of Novgorod, the crimson rose that perished in the Russian snows in the corny but irresistible ballad sung by Zarah Leander – the Swedish-born “Queen of the Reich Cinema” and maybe KGB agent too. Leander’s own signature was the feral and complex Bandit – a scent which is too good to rush here and to which we shall return on another occasion.