'A Time Machine Hanging Down Over Your Lips'

“Remember the smell of the hall bookcase?” 

I do, except it was in my boyhood bedroom, one of the two bookcases my father built for me. The shelves were pine boards bolted to tall lengths of angle-iron spray-painted black. It was heavy, unpretty and raw-looking, as though assembled from parts found in a salvage yard. It scraped the wooden floor when I moved it. Here I shelved my Edgar Rice Burroughs collection, hardback and paper, and later, science fiction. All that changed with the coming of puberty. But I remember the fragrance of those old, browning books, not a conventionally pleasant smell, not flowery or sweet. Rather flat, actually, like unaired rooms, but as potent and evocative as cloves, because my grandmother carried Cloves chewing gum in her purse. I would lie on my side on the floor in front of that bookcase, admiring my wealth and reveling in the smell I still associate with old volumes and old bookstores.

 

The opening line is from “Florida Bay” (Coastlines, 1992) by Eric Ormsby, our poet of childhood and memory. The poem continues: “Inside the little mullioned panes that held / Embrittled paperbacks, you saw your face . . .” My bookcase had no windows but I certainly saw myself in the books.  

 

We all know the potency of scent as a stimulant of memory. The Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers writes in The Way of All Flesh: A Celebration of Decay (trans. Sherry Marx-Macdonald, 2000):

 

“Your eyes are for looking, your ears are for hearing, your nose is for remembering. It takes only a whiff of something and you’re suddenly back 10, 20, 50 years. When I smell aniseed, I’m helping my grandmother in the kitchen again. Let Brussels sprouts cook in the pan and my Aunt Anna looms up out of the steam. . . . That’s a time machine hanging down over your lips.”

 

Osip Mandelstam leaves out smell when recalling his childhood bookcase in Chap. 4, “The Bookcase,” in The Noise of Time (trans. Clarence Brown, p. 77, The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 1965):

 

“The arrangement of its shelves, the choice of books, the colors of the spines are for him the color, height, and arrangement of world literature itself. And as for books which were not included in that first bookcase— they were never to force their way into the universe of world literature. Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled.”

 

By recalling his bookcase, Mandelstam seems to be reclaiming a past, his own and that of all Russians Jews, or all Jews everywhere. The lower shelf of the family bookcase, he says, was “chaotic”: “This was the Judaic chaos thrown into the dust. This was the level to which my Hebrew primer, which I never mastered, quickly fell.” Mandelstam is an archeologist of memory's strata.

On the next higher shelf, “above these Jewish ruins,” are the German volumes – more orderly, of course. Next, his mother’s Russian books – Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and a name less familiar to Western readers: Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson (1862–1887). Mandelstam calls the Nadson volume “the key to the epoch, the book that had become positively white-hot from handling, the book that would not under any circumstances agree to die, that lay like someone alive in the narrow coffin of the 1890s.” Nadson was a Jew, and his poetry was popular to a degree unprecedented among Russian readers.