A fusion of beauty and thought
A few months ago I was asked to write a blurb for Tomoé Hill's new nonfiction book Songs for Olympia. I said yes, of course. Long ago I had published two of Tomoé’s early essays in my magazine Numéro Cinq. I loved her work then. She was just the sort of new writer I was always on the lookout for — elegant, witty, stylistically inventive, and original. Who’d have thought you could write a blazing literary memoir based on perfume brands?1
Here’s the blurb I wrote for the book:
Tomoé Hill’s Songs for Olympia is utterly brilliant, intimately confessional yet fiercely intellectual, insistently feminine, and outrageously playful (who knew what poetry lurked in the marketing names for lip gloss and perfume?). Her focus is Manet’s scandalous nude Olympia (nude but for a black ribbon at her throat). Her foil is the late great Michel Leiris who reflected on Manet’s painting in his 1981 book The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat. Leiris also wrote a famous book about manhood, which makes him the ideal sparring partner for Hill’s verbal legerdemain. She gently chides him for fetishizing that ribbon, for a writing style that is more a peacock’s mating dance than inquiry. She quotes him, banters with him, and challenges him to word games, all the while positioning herself and Olympia as analogues in their defiant womanhood. ‘It is only that no one asked her or me about our dreams,’ she writes. For, inevitably, Hill herself is the subject of this exquisite book—her body, her childhood, her lovers, her hidden thoughts, her delicious ironies—and she is immaculately original.
But I have more to say. I’ve read the book three times now. It’s still a wondrous and surprising thing, first for the beauty of the writing and second for the sophistication of the ideas. It’s difficult to say which I admire most. The book is a perfect fusion of beauty and thought. Over and over again, Hill delineates a complex idea with clarity and precision in prose that is always elegant and dramatic. To put it differently, her sentences think; her syntax extends her argument with metaphor and association, and new ideas blossom. And, for sure, this is a book of ideas, terse and almost bewildering in its plenitude and intimacy. Inspired by the great Continental memoirists — Barthes, Duras, and, yes, Leiris — Hill makes herself her subject and Manet's painting Olympia her metaphor.
Hill begins with the painting, Olympia, an enigmatic woman, both provocative in her nudity and guarded, even dismissive, in her look, much fantasized about by men, as Hill has been in her life. It was painted by Edouard Manet in 1863. As soon as you see it, you’ll know it — naked young woman stretched on a bed, attended by a black servant holding a bouquet. I say naked, but she is wearing a thin black ribbon tied at her throat, and her outward gaze represents a defiant and inviolate womanhood, rendering her a symbol of whatever the viewer wants to bring to the painting, from sex worker to fetish object to feminist icon.
Even if you don’t recognize this particular painting, Olympia, you’ll know the genre — naked young woman stretched on a bed — Giorgione, Tintoretto, and Goya in particular come to mind. Tintoretto’s version has a little dog on the bed and two maids looking for clothes in a chest of drawers in the background. Goya painted a second version of his young woman, this time with clothes on. Naked women have always been the go-to subject for male artists who want to represent desire and the object of desire, the revelation of nudity (the real), the orgasm of power and knowledge.
Hill's foil, her interlocutor throughout, is the late, great French ethnologist-memoirist Michel Leiris who also wrote a book about Olympia, Le Ruban au cou d'Olympia (1981. Eng. translation: The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat, Christine Pichini trans., 2019).
Leiris is much more famous in Europe than in the English-speaking world, but he is gaining traction here. Lydia Davis has translated four of his books, including three volumes of his autobiography Rules of the Game. But he is best known for his memoir L’Âge d’homme, published in English in 1992 as Manhood (Richard Howard, trans.), which famously repulsed Susan Sontag, though she allowed as she could understand the modernist torque of his antipathetic and self-depreciating style.
Leiris tended to present himself in a way he knew would grate on the reader’s nerves, but he was brilliant at it. Here he is writing about female genitals in Manhood. “Today I often tend to regard the female organ as something dirty, or as a wound, no less attractive for that, but dangerous in itself, like everything bloody, mucous, and contaminated.” He liked to describe women as wounded and dangerous: it makes sense then that he found Manet’s Olympia ripe for reflection — a powerful young woman, blazing with sensuality and a patronizing glance, with a rope around her neck.
Hill is not repulsed by this; rather, she seems mildly amused. “Michel, I know there are those who would dismiss you…” “Do I laugh? Sometimes.” She gently chides him for fetishizing that ribbon, for a writing style that is more a peacock's mating dance than inquiry. She quotes him, banters with him, and challenges him to word games, all the while positioning herself and Olympia as analogues in their defiant womanhood. "It is only that no one asked her or I about our dreams," she writes.
Then she reflects on herself, resisting all definitions as does the woman in the painting, Olympia. Then she reflects on Victorine, the model for the woman in the painting, and on Olimpia, the the robotic doll woman in E. T. A. Hoffmann's uncanny short story "The Sandman," then herself wrapped doll-like in a tight kimono as a child, and so on. She remembers playing chess with her father as a child. She remembers asthma attacks, fainting spells, a male lover so in love with his own beauty that he barely notices her (so she finds her own pleasure by imagining someone else) — what these memories have in common is that they are all ways of finding distance and escape.
And always she returns to the original structural triangle — Tomoé Hill, Olympia, Michel Leiris — the ideas snapping between the three poles, reaching out, starting afresh, then returning. “I see us as a tripartite Sibyl,” she writes. It is a beautiful, rhythmic thing to read.
The book is very short, 79 pages, 82 numbered sections, many as short as a single paragraph, one just two sentences that pulse with poetic compression.
To be held like an insect, perfectly arranged in the amber of sexual scandal, is to be part of an era all women have known. Ambre, anbar, caution.
Here and there, photographs. Tomoé and her father over a chess board, that kimono-clad little girl, a magazine jewelry ad with a necklace wrapped around a naked breast, a witty collage with a contemporary lipstick inserted to match the colour of Olympia’s lips, etc. This last is fascinating, an image of something Hill does in the text, her riffs on lipstick brands/colours (and another on scents/perfumes). She is the first writer to notice the dazzling poetry in the marketing names for lip gloss.
Serge Lutens Mauve de Swann—that is the colour of Olympia’s lips. £58 a tube. I change my mind: perhaps they are Pat McGrath Divine Nude or Venus in Furs (£28, £35). Or Tom Ford Quiver (£44). The more I search the more sex seems inexplicably linked with the dressing of lips, down to the cost—a tithe for ritual adornment. In spite of myself, I find more. Rosebud, Suspicion, Call it a Day. The relentless projection of desire, guilt, innuendo, judgement.
Her book is intimately confessional yet fiercely intellectual and insistently feminine, not in any doctrinaire way, but because she owns her body, her five senses, her thoughts, her taste, her sex. She embraces ideas without ideology. She does a paradoxical thing, writing a book of self-revelation and reflection, while repelling all attempts to fit herself (and Olympia) into easy categories (for example, the common filters of contemporary identity politics). This is a book about the truths we project (the gaze of desire) on the data, in this case Olympia, and the truth that eternally evades us.
Her sentences are aphoristic, witty, and oracular.
It is the wise man who recognizes that women are Heraclitus’s river; never identical, yet all able to drown those who dismiss her.
To play is a serious engagment, for the imaginary mimics the real and the real wishes for another reality.
…sin is not flesh but an inability to reconcile desire and humanity.
The point of a bonfire of the vanities is the fanatical love of its flames.
Sometimes she is thrillingly earthy —
…they forget that in the beginning was the word, and the word they dared not speak was cunt. What lies behind their hands has lit the world, Michel—that is why there is fire.
— sometimes sweetly vulnerable.
Hill resists categorization; she makes resisting categorization her theme. In truth, this is her method, her way of approaching reality. She describes the world by accumulating details while refusing conclusions, a method learned from Leiris, I suspect. She is both subject and object, the observer and observed, her text oscillating between those two poles. She is dual even in the syntax, writing herself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third.
But to break the gaze, look with what Barthes again refers to as ‘reversing the usual relationship in classical technique’ in an otherwise typical genre, one starts to see properly.
Of the two, the point of view of the object is the most startling and illuminating. What is it like to be Olympia — “a woman displayed but unrevealed” “a woman destined to be scrutinized for what she wasn’t” — under the gaze of art viewer? What is it like to be Tomoé Hill about whom assumptions are made from the oddness of her name, the shape of her eyes, her body, her gender? What is it like to be observed, to be defined by the gaze of the other (as they say), to say over and over, I am not that or that or that, to put up masks, to evade, to escape into her own thoughts? What if all reality is like this? “…a figure passive at first glance, but seething after.”
Scent and Memory: An Olfactory Life See also a second essay we published: Apple and Pear Trees.
Thanks for this lovely review, Douglas. I went on to read Hill's pieces in NC and will try to find her books.
Coincidentally, I'm sure, Manet's Olympia is on display at The Met 5th Avenue through Jan 7/24 as part of the Manet/Degas exhibition, a very rare opportunity to view it outside its home at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, apparently.
Doug: Thanks! I went straight to my bookstore's web site and ordered the book. Best, as ever, S