Would You Like to Smell Like Your Favourite Author?

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Anais Nin, Cacharel, Colette, f. scott fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, Jasmine, Marlene Dietrich, Note (perfumery), oscar wilde, Perfume

What were the signature scents of famous authors?

Thanks to a post made at Book Riot, I got to thinking about my two favourite things in life: perfumes and books. I have a prodigiously large collection of both; yet it never occurred to me to find out what type of scents my favourite authors actually wore during their lifetime. Amanda Nelson of the irreverent book blog Dead White Guys came up with some cool concoctions of her own; and it inspired me to have a synesthete moment.

This is a bit of a tough mission, but one that yielded surprising results! Here’s what I have come up with so far…

4. ANAIS NIN

Some authors like Anais Nin have already inspired a perfume, so admired were they in their lifetime. Anais Anais was the first perfume produced by Cacharel in 1978. To me, it evokes the scent-memory of France, my mother and the sweet yet deceptive innocence at the heart of all women. I also adore the fresh green smell and the O’Keefe-inspired artwork that has been used for many decades.

Notes
Top: Bergamot, galbanum, hyacinth, honeysuckle, orange blossom
Middle: Lily, lily of the valley, rose, ylang-ylang, tuberose, carnation
Base: Cedarwood, sandalwood, amber, oakmoss, incense, vetiver

3. OSCAR WILDE

What would a notorious super-dandy and aesthete like Oscar Wilde possibly wear as a perfume? Apparently the now discontinued (yet aptly named) Malmaison of Floris of London. It is described by experts as having a linear smell – that of almost purely red carnations. At first I couldn’t imagine a carnation as being Wilde’s smell, yet there is a certain exotic woodsy, clove-like aroma to carnations that does fit in with Wilde’s character. Red is certainly his colour too! The reintroduction of Malmaison Encore by Floris means people can relive the original fragrance in a more modern version.

NOTES

Top notes: bergamot, black pepper, cardamom
Heart notes: clove, nutmeg, rose, ylang ylang
Base notes : amber, cedarwood, frankincense, heliotrope, tonka bean, vanilla

2. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Many famous people including F. Scott Fitzgerald and later Marlene Dietrich wore Lieber Gustav #14. The perfume was created by celebrated nose Albert Kriegler and he states that ‘Perfume #14 was chosen by Fitzgerald because of its depth, and the connection between Berlin and Provence.’ I also find that scents hold geographical memories for me, yet even more interesting is that Lieber Gustav #14 was inspired by a love letter between a young girl and her fiancee… Reminds me of The Great Gatsby!

NOTES

Leather, Black tea, Lavender, Musk and Woody notes.

1. SIDONIE-GABRIELLE COLETTE

Colette is another author who is epitomises sensuality and whose work’s forever obsess with the gratification of the flesh and of the soul. She owned her own beauty salon and being something of a perfumer herself used only the petals of white flowers. However, it has been recorded that she had a particular penchant for Coty’s Jasmin de Corse, which is again very hard to find. A 1925 ad described it as, ‘For the Woman of the Dreamy Elusive Type: Jasmine de Corse, La Jacinthe & Lilas Blanc.’ I can only imagine the closest we can ever get to this perfume with it’s heavy, smoky Jasmine undertones would be Lanvin’s Arpege which was created 20 years after.

So, that’s all I could find on authors and their favourite fragrance’s. Is there any I’ve missed out that should be in the list? Let me know.

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• Two New Perfumes by Caron: Piu Bellodgia + My Ylang (2013) (theblacknarcissus.com)
• Cocktail by Gorilla Perfume (pagesandperfume.wordpress.com)
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Ghost-Writers | Artists or Posers?

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charles dickens, f. scott fitzgerald, family saga, ghostwriting, Jorge Luis Borges, nora roberts, plagiarism, stephen king, virginia andrews

Cashing in on the vampire trend: behold the offending book that’s by Virginia Andrews… and not. The word ‘ghost-writer’ never felt so ironic.  

As a serious reader hoping to make the leap into ‘serious writing’, I am constantly on the look-out for different kinds of writers. This week my thoughts turned to the subject of author, the legacy they leave behind and the how that is preserved for future readers. Many state that writing is really a form of immortality, and as a semi-serious, sometime diarist I agree. The thought of death doesn’t frighten people half as much as the possibility of being forgotten. But words have a special kind of power; they can represent a small part of the soul, and can live on long after its’ author has passed on. From cave paintings to stone tablets, from papyrus to paper; people have always found ways to justify their existence and make themselves known. So it seems that our knowledge of history always passes irrevocably through the lens of some other person’s perspective. Personally, I have always found much comfort from reading the works of deceased authors. If we take it one step further; reading is really nothing but a way to contact the dead; a method by which we can access our ever-receding past, a way to rewind time and reach the impossible. Settling down with a copy of ‘Lolita’ is akin to having a conversation with Nabokov himself. Don’t believe me? Click here and just listen to the man speak! 

Yet this week I was pretty much stumped when I came across a book that seemed to almost mock these notions. The book in question was the newly published ‘Daughter of Darkness’ by Virginia Andrews. Now, as you know I’m not the Romantic / Family Saga type, but I will admit to having read the Dollanganger series and found it to be surprisingly and even addictively
enjoyable. However, the beef I have had with her novels up till now is that she’s not the one writing them! Unfortunately Andrews died in 1986 from breast cancer having wrote only eight novels. Yet due to her massive readership and the success as a writer, her family decided to hire ghost-writer Andrew Niederman to write more stories bearing her name. Well, since then the name Virginia Andrews has continued to grace bookshelves fooling the less informed reader into thinking that she left behind a vast amount of unpublished material.  

Granted, ghost-writing is a very big industry, what with more celebrities
now publishing their biographies through these services. But I can’t seem to agree with the notion of someone else taking all the credit; whether this be the person doing all the writing, or the one whose name is being bandied around for said work. From an ethical stand-point, it raises many questions that skirt along issues like plagiarism. In fact, here’s a very interesting and informative article on the pros and cons of ghost-writing for those involved with it. Looking around the internet a bit makes it clear that business-related subjects are a more acceptable field for ghost-writing, but not so much for fiction where a writer is trying to make a name for themselves.

In the case of Virginia Andrews, ghost-writing hasn’t harmed her sales figures at all, which makes her an anomaly and a success story at the same time. Her reputation as a writer is anchored to her name, which has become a commodity over the years. Ghost-writing in this instance has managed to turn an author into a ‘brand’, much like Kelloggs or Wrigley’s chewing gum. Readers still flock to buy the ghost-written material, even though they are obviously not her own work. However the latest addition to the Andrews books seems to be the final break away from the essence of Virginia Andrews the ‘author’. Having become famous for her sprawling family sagas; it feels like a desperate and wholly tasteless move to turn to the current
trend of vampire fiction. I’m not sure how that would sit with die-hard Andrews fans; but I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to tamper with a writers’ legacy in this way. 

Authors today rarely jump genres, and if they do, they use a pseudonym to avoid any negative responses affecting their established identities. Stephen King, who initially went by the name Richard Bachman and Nora Roberts who sometimes writes as J.D. Robb are both well-known for doing this. For King and Roberts, the use of a pen name was a choice they made not because of any great leap in genre. Roberts is a writer of romantic fiction, and erotic thriller was practically next-door to that. Same with King; the idea for the name Richard Bachman came simply because his publishers didn’t think readers would buy more than one story a year from an author. C. S. Lewis used two different names, one for a collection of poems and another for a narrative to avoid harming his reputation as a don at Oxford University.   

So, taking the above into consideration, I see Virginia Andrews’ now ghost-written material of paranormal/ YA fiction to be the mother of all gambles as far as the world of publishing goes.

Andrews aside, I don’t know of any other author whose name has been used in quite the same way, and whose reputation has still remained in tact. Consider Jorge Luis Borges who, as much as he deserved it, was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (a grave injustice if you ask me). There are many like me who mourn the fact that he never wrote a novel. What would it be like if his estate hired a ghost-writer to fulfill this universal desire for all Borges fans around the world? I shudder at the thought! 

Novels like ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ and ‘The Last Tycoon’ are famous for being the last unfinished works of Dickens and Fitzgerald. To literary enthusiasts they are just as precious as their completed works, even more so. So how would it feel if someone was suddenly hired to complete these works?

I suppose what I’m really trying to get at is the idea that an author’s  mind, their pattern of writing can be mimicked for the sake of making money up to a certain point. And while I find this assumption offensive, I do also acknowledge the fact that it can be terribly enticing too. Yet the mind of a person is like a fingerprint. No two are ever alike. The act of creating is fuelled by a whole slew of mental and psychological ingredients beginning with the first impressions of childhood and the influences of growing up with a particular ‘cocktail’ of people and ideologies.       

There is much to be said about the issue. What do you think? Is ghost-writing ‘fair’? Does it cheapen literature? If you are a Virginia Andrews fan who has read her ghost-written work, what do you think of the quality of it? Does it really matter? Are we conscious readers?

Book Review | ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories’ – F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Aspern Papers, benjamin button, book review, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Cut-Glass Bowl, f. scott fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, henry james, United States

This is a book of short stories aimed at encapsulating the fleeting American ‘jazz age’. Fitzgerald manages to convey the golden decadence of an era that is most famous for its ‘Lost Generation’. As Fitzgerald himself put it, the 1920’s held ‘a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.’ Throughout this collection of stories, Fitzgerald maintains a thinly palpable vein of impatient inertia, where all his characters, big or small, find that life has somehow overreached them no matter what they do. I found the damning realisation of ‘time’ (or there not being enough of it) to be the greatest source of this anxiety.    

 

What would life be like if you lived it in reverse..?

Out of the seven short stories collated in this edition, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button‘, ‘The Cut Glass Bowl‘ and ‘The Four Fists’ are probably the most dynamic and startling. This is the first time I have ever actually read Fitzgerald. There was one botched attempt at ‘The Great Gatsby‘ but that ended in failure as I grew too weary to carry on. However, I am glad to say that Fitzgerald is far more successful as a writer of short stories. For one, all the stories save two (‘May Day’ and ‘Crazy Sunday’) span the lifetime of a character, drawing attention to a certain thread of events and the often irreversible effects of the decisions made by those characters. With ‘Benjamin Button’, we have the unique and surreal premise of a young child who decides to live life backwards. Fitzgerald’s play on chronology itself is a clever plot device and added a doubled effect of absurdity and poignancy to the flow of the narrative. The unnatural chain of events lead us to look at each era of human life at a different angle, rendering every stage from childhood to old age a precious gift not to be wasted.

‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’ is again a moralistic tale of karma, using the Gothic-inspired device of attributing a physical object, this time a glass bowl, as the harbinger of death. With this story Fitzgerald studies the nature of marriage in the 1920’s. He traces with deft descriptions the early bloom and subsequent break-down of husband/wife relationships through a decidedly macabre lens. ‘The Four Fists’ is in the same vein, this time telling the story of how manhood and meaning of ‘becoming’ an adult.

For me, this book was a great re-introduction to Fitzgerald, as it helped me understand his ‘style’ a little better. I often have trouble with certain American authors, especially when their work is concentrated within a specific genre or time-period that is slightly alien to me. I almost had the same problem with Henry James until I read ‘The Aspern Papers’. So if you are like me, and worried that you can’t quite ‘get’ into the flow of certain writers, my recommendation is to get your hands on something shorter and perhaps a little less denser.

I give this book 3/5 stars, but it has helped me tremendously in learning to like Fitzgerald a bit more.

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• F. Scott Fitzgerald (akserendipity.wordpress.com)
• Bethena (1905). Scott Joplin /the curious case of benjamin button/ (rgable.typepad.com)