Last time I read Fahrenheit 451, I thought there was something more to Faber's comment about book smell ("Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land?") than just an innocuous remark. So when I recently re-read the book, I paid careful attention to the smells and made a note of each smell and what page* it appears on:
- Clarice says she'd be able to identify Montag with her eyes shut because he smells like kerosene (p. 6).
- The Mechanical Hound's olfactory tracking system is described (p. 25-26).
- Clarice asks Montag, "Have you ever smelled old leaves? Don't they smell like cinnamon?" (p. 29).
- The Firemen are surrounded by "the continual smell of burning from their pipes" (p. 33).
- Mrs. Blake's attic is described as "musty blackness" (p. 36).
- Mrs. Blake "made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked in [the firemen's] nostrils as they plunged about" (p. 37).
- "Kerosene fumes" and "fumes of kerosene" permeate the air immediately before Mrs. Blake's house burns down (p. 38-39).
- The smell of kerosene makes Montag ill (p. 49).
- "The smell of blue electricity" of the Mechanical Hound snoops outside Montag's door (p. 72).
- Faber describes book smell as "nutmeg" or "spice" (p. 81).
- "Beatty, smelling of the wind through which he had rushed, was at Montag's elbow" (p. 110).
- Montag creeps through "a thick night-moistened scent of daffodils and roses and wet grass" to plant some books in the Blacks' house (p. 129).
- As the televised search for Montag continues, the Hound's nose is extolled (p. 133).
- Montag tells Faber to burn his furniture, rub down the door knobs with alcohol, and turn on his air conditioning and sprinklers to disguise Montag's trail (p. 135).
- "The smell of the river was cool and like a solid rain" (p. 139).
- Montag encounters "the dry smell of hay" now that he's escaped the city (p. 142).
- Montag experiences a "million odors" and "other smells!" as he makes he way further into the country (p. 143-144)
- The smell of the fire around which the literary hobos are warming themselves is different from the smell of fire that Montag is used to, and he imagines himself as an animal that "would smell like autumn" if bled out (p. 146).
- Granger gives Montag a bottle of liquid that will "change the chemical index of [his] perspiration" and make him "smell like two other people" (p. 147).
- "The air was cold and smelled of a coming rain" (p. 162).
- The bacon that the literary hobos cook "filled the morning air with its aroma" (p. 163).
When I finished the book, I looked over this list of smells and I noticed that they fall into two main categories: there are the natural smells (leaves, spices, plants, hay, rain [ostensibly to contrast with the fire in the city]), and there are the more artificial smells (kerosene, pipes, electricity). Furthermore, the natural smells almost all occur when Montag is with Clarice, Faber, or the book people, where the artificial smells are present when the firemen are burning houses or when the Mechanical Hound is involved.
Of course, there are a few exceptions (and there's also the possibility that I missed some in my list). Beatty's "smelling of the wind" doesn't really seem to fall into either category, but I think that's because he's something of an in-between character. He has the knowledge that the books give, but he's not in favor of it. My edition of the book includes an interview with Bradbury in which he explains that Beatty "was a book reader, but after various crises in his life - his mother died of cancer, his father committed suicide, his love affair fell apart - when he opened the books, they were empty. They couldn't help him. So he turned on the books and burned them." Of course, that's going beyond the text of the book itself, but it does provide an explanation for Beatty's liminal olfactory nature.
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*Obviously, page numbers will differ by printing. These page numbers are from Ballantine Books' 50th Anniversary Edition [ISBN: 0-345-34296-8].
