Bigger, sadder
on Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen and Real Life by Brandon Taylor
I had a whole outline for this. This was supposed to be a sweet little whirl on childhood and nostalgic scents, as explored by Tove Ditlevsen in this book, Childhood, the first in her Copenhagen trilogy. I did my reading, too – olfactory memory, scent as memory cue. It was supposed to be a jolly ride, I tell you. It was supposed to be tender anecdotes on scents, faraway stories on Saturday morning brunch and mountainside holidays and vanilla milk powder I recall only with fondness. I suppose it is still that. Those are selected odours from my childhood I remember as keenly today as I did fifteen years ago, now hidden as small vials of joy and nostalgia in the nooks of the universe, waiting to be freed. These are the same scents, I must add, that hold memories of a bruise, intent yet hesitant, the kind that expands ochre and grey, masquerading as skin; an oddity assimilating into the commons. I sought for vials and drowned in a barrel – larger, deeper, sadder.
I shouldn’t be surprised. “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin,” Ditlevsen wrote, “and you can’t get out of it on your own.” It’s entrapment, she thought: “You can’t get out of childhood, and it clings to you like a bad smell.” It’s true – childhood is often fetid and suffocating, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to mask the smell. Yet this quality poses a kind irony for me, and perhaps for you as well, whose childhood smells of homecooked food and the great outdoors, pleasant and comforting. The same can be said about Ditlevsen, who recalls the smell of dish soap and fresh linen – hints of a functional household, until you find that she remembers them as maternal, and they now read as gestures of domesticity. Then you find that they remind her of betrayal and death, of disappointment and grief, and you wonder what hides under the smell of your childhood. Mine, I can tell you, smells of spaghetti bolognese and newsprint – my mother’s Saturday special and traces of her day job as dressmaker. I recall them with great fondness, if only because these are moments lost forever. Should I pause for a beat longer, I would recall that we grew tired of the dish, and we stopped seeing it on Saturdays, and it is now to me the smell of my own thanklessness and the torturous dullness of wifely duties, and I have never reached for it at any meal since my teenage years because it is heavy and shameful under my nose. I could barely tolerate the odour of newsprint, dense with chemicals, a reminder of a dream defunct and lifeless. I would avoid books published on newsprint, and if I am left with no other option I would race through them, charging towards separation.
That said, the fact remains that the first inhale brings only scenes of a happy childhood: my mother tasting tomato and beef on a wooden spatula, an arm akimbo; scissors gliding gently across newsprint on satin – scenes cherrypicked from a pool of fragmented recollections. The memory is patchy at best, and the clear image, as you can tell, is bigger, sadder. Memory is fallacy. Brandon Taylor’s protagonist in Real Life likens it to “a haunting”, the unseemly simmering beneath a crest of goodness.
“Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given…Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.” Ditlevsen and Taylor are similar in this way, recalling tragedy with practiced ease and enviable clarity. Ditlevsen thinks of childhood as something alive, telling it in present tense, yet she understands its deadening power; each scene constructed like a straitjacket, strapped to seize and control. Taylor’s protagonist, Wallace, possesses a parallel insight, his childhood alive and feral, and he is afraid that it will find him behind his calculated and formulaic career. But afraid as they are, they take that pause, that extra beat, though they know what awaits them is bigger and deeper and sadder. Granted, Ditlevsen might have continued to mourn over fresh linen, and Wallace might never stomach beer. They might have continued on with tolerable fragments of their childhood, knowing it blankets over intolerable grief, and continue on with passable excuses for their aversions (“I just don’t drink,” Wallace explains to multiple parties).
You can’t get out of childhood. Pause anytime and you start noticing its volume, and it is suddenly big and sad, but each beat you take paints it clearer and sharper, and perhaps that’s enough.
Postscript
Scientists say smell is the earliest sense one develops in infancy, and it is the most resilient memory cue, staying on longer than recollections of image, sound and texture. Which makes all of this a little more tragic, really, because longevity leaves a sickening amount of room for abstraction and reconstruction, and scent, in its resilience, will transform into an unreliable narrator. Childhood and its affixed memories is a tactful warden, and it will make you believe the jailhouse was built to protect you.
