Rereadings: Judith Thurman's "Cleopatra's Nose"

This is the first in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Judith Thurman’s splendid Cleopatra’s Nose (2008). 

This is one of my all-time favorite essay collections. Thurman is an excellent analyst and a superb describer. She has a critic’s eye for aesthetic specificity and a journalist’s nose for a good story, especially if it involves sex.

Thurman loves to write about female free spirits. Cleopatra’s Nose throngs with them: Vanessa Beecroft, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Catherine Millet, Diane Arbus, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Rei Kawakubo, Marie Antoinette, Jackie Kennedy, and yes, Cleopatra, to name but a few. Also included are a number of stylish men, e.g., Cristóbal Balenciaga, Richard Avedon, Giorgio Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, Bill Blass, and Hump the Grinder.

Hump the Grinder? It’s the stage name of David Humphries, “the Don King of black hair entertainment.” In 2004, Thurman attended Hump the Grinder’s Hair Wars 10-Year Anniversary & California Hair Grammys in Los Angeles, and wrote about it in a wonderful piece called “Roots,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker. (Thirty-eight of the book’s thirty-nine essays are from The New Yorker.) Here’s her description of Hair War’s sponsor, Big Bad D:

That afternoon, D was dressed in an ensemble worthy of Galliano: a pair of high-waisted patchwork leather samurai pants evocative in pizzazz and volume of a Montgolfier; a red T-shirt inlaid with gold and gems that was slashed to display his awesome pectorals; a belt of scarified alligator skin, with claws still attached, from which hung a pouch containing, he said, freeze-dried gator meat; a rawhide “coolie” hat adorned with stones, pods, and shells; and some $50,000 worth of diamonds, including a bracelet of hazelnut-size beads and a ring, about four inches wide, shaped like a pair of scissors.

Many of the best pieces in this collection are reviews of brilliant haute-couture shows. For example, in “Swann Song,” she’s at the Centre Pompidou for a Saint Laurent extravaganza:

Most couture shows last about twenty minutes. This one roiled on for more than an hour, in waves of staggering beauty, fauvish color, and perverse extravagance – a jacket costing half a million francs, for example, perfectly replicating van Gogh’s Irises in seven hundred hours’ worth of hand-beading by Lesage. There were sumptuously embellished tributes to other painters: Picasso, Matisse, Bracque, Dalí, and Warhol; to poets and writers, among them Aragon and Cocteau; and to exotic native populations – Russian moujiks, Forbidden City courtesans, Castilian matadors, and African queens. There was plenty of cerebral whimsy to offset the noirish sex play: feather minis suitable for a showgirl’s wedding to a peer; a miniscule suede tunic from the sixties worn with high-heeled waders; swanky cocktail dresses that exposed a nipple; a transparent black baby-doll disco nighties trimmed with fur; quite a bit of immaculately white-collared Belle de Jour respectability begging to be corrupted; a strong dose of double-breasted androgyny; and a backless evening gown cut to the cleft of the buttocks, then scored with lace. But while Saint Laurent can sometimes be pedantically outré, he’s never trashy. And he displayed such encyclopedic formal invention and technical virtuosity that the occasional bomb – like a series of umbrella-shaped flowered tea frocks in what looked like a shower-curtain fabric, or a shapeless wool shrift worn with a dowager’s turban – were like a sorbet between courses rather than a disappointment.

That “quite a bit of immaculately white-collared Belle de Jour respectability begging to be corrupted” is pure Thurman. She relishes corruption. In the book’s Introduction, she says, “A mutual interest in corruption is what draws me to Pascal.” 

In one of this collection's most memorable reviews, “Broad Stripes, Bright Stars,” Thurman describes a fashion show set in a Milan canal:

Then, to universal amazement, we beheld—drifting lazily down the canal—two red boots, a white shirt, a pair of dark trousers. They were followed by a boy dressed in a thick vest of what looked like russet-colored steel wool. He lay supine and motionless, his limbs outstretched, his perfectly calm face framed by the swirling mass of his hair. There were sixteen of his fellow-volunteers to come. Though the clothes were soggy and a little blurred, one read them—as the current turned the page—like the hand-colored images in some mildewed yet marvellous old book. Poell’s idea was so poetic that the magical buoyancy of bodies and clothes (kept from sinking by an invisible flotation device) leapt the banks and infected the audience with a fit of joy. It didn’t matter, I thought, what the collection looked like on a hanger or in a shop, because the show had performed a feat that is rare enough in theatre or art and practically unheard of in fashion. It surprised a group of people with an emotion they hadn’t been expecting to feel. That is how a child experiences a sensual revelation, and how it is transformed into a memory of being happy. “Everybody follows fashion,” Poell told me later. “But change goes against the stream.”

My favourite piece in Cleopatra’s Nose is “Night Kitchens,” a delightful account of Thurman’s visit to the kitchens of two of Kyoto’s master tofu-makers. Here’s a sample: 

Kawashima bounded into the restaurant at about eight, as his pretty wife, Keiko, was clearing away the Nakazato pottery on which breakfast is served—rust-and-ash-colored vessels with a dark underglaze and a primal beauty. Tofu-making may have a Zen gestalt, but Kawashima—a sporty fifty-eight-year-old with a goatee and a crewcut—doesn’t make a monklike impression. He is the sort of character the French call a gaillard—a bon vivant bristling with rakish vigor. One keeps up with him at a fast trot. His cottage-scale factory and offices occupy a warren of rooms in a sombre two-hundred-year-old house, with blackened beams, which survived demolition when the arcade was built, and seems out of synch with its festive swags of plastic wisteria. At the back of a rather cramped, unlovely industrial kitchen, baskets of zaru dofu were moving down a conveyor belt, getting wrapped and labelled. (The tofu is handmade, and strictly organic, but the packaging is mechanized, and a small fleet of white delivery vans was waiting at the loading dock.) Kawashima’s younger brother was dressed in kitchen whites, stirring soy milk in a metal vat. It was warm but hadn’t been curdled yet, and he offered me some from the ladle. Its taste was slightly beany, yet elemental, with an ineffable sweetness, as if it came not from a plant but from a breast.

Mm, that last line is crazy-good. The whole book is like that – textured, sensuous, inspired. Highly recommended.