Tomoé Hill interviewed by Paul Sullivan.
3:AM: Songs for Olympia is described as a “conversation” but it also feels to me like a book of relationships — your relationship to Michel Leiris; to Olympia; to your parents and extended family; to yourself and your writing … as well as to a universe of inspirational writers, thinkers, critics, poets etc. How does one begin a work like this?
Tomoé Hill: Conversation as it is represented here in the book is simply connection; connection is memory in that context. These networks of memories of people and experiences play with one another, in the way you can be actively experiencing something and it reminds you of another thing or person. The mind is always reaching for things to feed it. You can define that as overthinking, or you can take a step back and realise there’s something in the mind that is more than you, even if it ultimately defines you. There’s a kind of faith at work, however you want to take that word. Writing the book was an exercise in letting go as much as it was remembrance and consideration. It only takes a single event to create a universe, and sometimes it feels like this happened in the same way.
Of course when you’re younger, you have less in the way of connections because you necessarily have less experience, fewer people. But sometimes you recognise that something or someone is marked; that they will be relevant later, even though you can’t understand at the time why you feel that way. Maybe it’s a sort of unconscious awareness regarding your context in the world. Some personal examples used in the book: my mother teaching us to play Memory with the beautiful deck of cards; the immediate parallel with the Pietà when seeing her sleeping on the sofa; being taught to play chess by my father… and so on. Art imitates nature and life, but life also wants to (often unconsciously) recapture a primal and stylistic aesthetic in order to make sense of its narratives. That was something that struck me in reading Leiris’s book. Here is a man near the end of his life, examining his own universe of memories, relationships to people and the world generally.
3:AM: You ‘met’ Olympia before you ‘met’ Leiris: can you say more about your relationship with the painting, from your first encounter during childhood to your later one in the Musée d’Orsay…
TH: I had pretty bad asthma as a child. As a result, I was regularly ill with bronchitis or suffering from the effects of attacks, and in bed a lot, sometimes for weeks. In order to breathe more easily, I had to be propped sitting up, even to sleep. You never forget what that constant ache feels like, and what you were doing when you felt it. I read a lot. In my childhood bedroom, which was originally in my paternal grandparents’ house, there was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Most of the books were actually my grandfather’s medical history, science and art books. I loved the art ones: it was a Time Life series of large hardbacks, each on a famous museum. My favourites were the Orsay, Louvre, Prado and Rijksmuseum. I spent so many hours looking at them, and though I could read the text easily, having learned to read very early on, some of it was still beyond my understanding. That’s important as I recognised sexual or graphic content without its moral or societal attachments: something of a “Garden of Eden” moment. What you see when you don’t have those ideas becomes something else entirely: what you see is your creation. And in a way, despite the world inevitably leaving its traces on you as you move through it, for me, how I saw a lot of these paintings, especially Olympia, remained fixed in that childhood gaze. That was incredibly important as a counterbalance to sexual stereotypes and how I developed and interacted with the world from my particular cultural/sexual identity.
I didn’t go to Paris until I was an adult. And I didn’t go to the Orsay at first. That happened on a later trip. I’d had three major life changes at that point — I’d either walked away from a life I’d known for years, or had something happen which affected my perspective drastically. I didn’t expect Olympia to be that large, to be honest. I thought it was going to be a much smaller painting. But there it was, taking up its own entire wall. In my head, I was ill in bed again, a phantom ache in my back from coughing and permanently sitting up; realising I was developing a sexuality while also knowing that I had to guard it to make it my own; the young woman who decided nothing would affect my sexual agency; who was stereotyped but knew there was still a life that could be hers. I always lived under the gaze of Olympia, and now, here we were, looking at each other.
3:AM: You describe Olympia as an instigator of sorts in terms of how you see women (and yourself). Can you expand a little on that?
TH: It was her gaze that I noticed, and which took me by surprise. The directness of it was out of place next to most paintings of women I’d encountered. She appeared completely self-possessed to me, though I was so young I couldn’t have told you exactly what I felt. But that inarticulate feeling was incredibly powerful: the context of the painting didn’t matter, her nudity didn’t matter. She was her own person. Her look met the world on her terms. Young as I was, I’d already started to experience what it meant to be in-between cultures and out of place in regard to other people’s judgements and assumptions. I wanted to be able to confront the world the way she did, as myself, impervious to the judgement of the gaze. I still notice and admire that look in women’s eyes sometimes, and it feels like a secret. Our gaze is the compass we use to navigate the world. Of course, now I understand the painting in full, and while feeling what I did makes even more sense, it also makes me think these things are an instinct in women.
3:AM: You’ve described your relationship with Leiris as beginning when you found yourself “talking to him in my head all the time” — when and how did you discover the Leiris book, and what was it about him or his writing style that made you feel such a potent affinity?
TH: Quite late, as I came to a lot of the French thinkers around the same time — we’re talking sometime into the 00s. I’m an organic reader, and never feel pressure to read what everyone else does. I’ve read voraciously throughout my life, but I tend to obsess and read everything by someone, then something in those works leads me to someone else, and so on. Anyway, it was like a catastrophic domino accident when I got to the French, as you might imagine. Leiris immediately stood out because his writing voice felt so internal — and it was, to a large extent, with autobiographical works like those in the Rules of the Game series or Manhood. I had no idea The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat existed until Semiotext(e) published their translation by Christine Pichini. Even though I was familiar with him by that time, it was like worlds colliding; the strangeness of this man reflecting on life via this painting, and how important that same painting had been in my life, and then the kinship of discovering a writer who wrote the way I felt and had been talking to myself in my head since childhood.
3:AM: Needless to say, you take a different perspective from Leiris for various reasons including age, nationality, gender, etc. But it’s notable that your book is not simply a rejection of his “male gaze” versus your “female” one. On the contrary, you admit to your own “ravenous” desire and emphasise a “universal human desire”. What did you find most problematic in his writings on Olympia?
TH: I hesitate to use the word problematic, only because I’m not entirely sure — despite disagreeing vehemently sometimes — that’s what I think. What he might have been most guilty of is a flippancy that doesn’t recognise the woman in terms of a sexual act, only the man, but I also recognise his book might have been written in a kind of spontaneous interior moment at times. And again, I can’t be too harsh, but it is very much an attitude that speaks of desire as a one-way street only. It’s precisely why I play with it, argue, scrutinise it. It’s the woman who is always left with the remains of a man’s desire more than a man realises he is left marked by the woman (in his writing). Yet, I think of it this way: what glorious thing could we write when both parties are fully cognisant that desire is a collaboration? When the words and the fluids combine on skin, sentences only visible to the writers? Fanciful, maybe… but half of a thing is not a whole. Which is why I wrote about the male model in the book, a half-experience I had to make whole myself to complete my desire. It’s also why I brought Gass and his voyeuristic fantasy about his neighbour’s wife from On Being Blue into it (and I love Gass on desire, generally speaking). And Gass knows! There’s that lovely quote: “…use of language like a lover…not the language of love, but the love of language, not matter, but meaning, not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs”. The ribbon wraps round two people, not one, and ink here is as much representative of a ribbon as the material hers is made of. These invisible longings and desires unwritten… it’s easy to visualise the words he writes when he speaks of his cock as a gun, but then the cunt is always pulsating in the background, the heart of the matter.
3:AM: When Olympia was unveiled at the Paris Salon in 1865 it was roundly condemned as immoral. It’s tempting to say we have come a long way since then, certainly in terms of art and representation of women — but then Deborah De Robertis was arrested in 2016 for posing naked in front of the painting, and there are constant other contemporary debates and events that seem to undermine this idea. What are your thoughts?
TH: Simply from the writing perspective, I’m not sure we’ve come far at all. Women get to write about how hard it is to write or create because of the patriarchy, but when it comes down to it a lot of female editors are rejecting narratives about desire or sexually open writing. It isn’t enough or even adequate in some cases to allow books that aim at blaming men while not actually moving forward and letting stories about agency and joy and complications be told that aren’t framed as if they were something that belonged in The Cut. Right now we’re still mostly between that sort of thing, cool-girl theory style, and that dire mid-point of Goop acceptability — and I’m not saying I don’t read any of it; I read just about everything as I think it’s important to take it all in and process it. It’s more a comment on the optics of certain women’s writing. Not long ago I read Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris (tr. Stephen Snyder) and while, to be generous, everything has a place in writing, you can’t do much but laugh a bit at how there is hand-wringing or praise for ultimately tepid sexuality, when the plot of Ogawa’s book is about a young girl’s relationship with a stranger who draws her into an intimate world of increasingly dangerous BDSM. Yet it’s done so elegantly, even lightly in its most violent moments. It gives her this wonderfully realistic self-awareness, appetite and empathy even as it strips her of an element of agency and nearly destroys her in the end. Fifty Shades it is not, nor is it a morality tale which warns women from pursuing what draws them in.
A lot falls between the cracks in terms of broader literary attention, like the Ogawa novel — it’s there all right but you have to be willing to search, and people aren’t. But you know, when you get right down to it, there are so many people who are embarrassed to talk about desire or sex outside of those normal frameworks. I’m not very surprised we haven’t progressed. Sometimes I think about the openness and prevalence of something like shunga as both art form and expression of desire and contrast it with now, and think, really, where are we? The female body still terrifies and shocks while being supposedly worshipped. The problem is that capitalism only finds it acceptable when it can be monetised, not even for the possessor of the body but in terms of greatest possible profit maximisation and exploitation.
De Robertis says something interesting in a 2016 interview with the New York Times: “Traditionally the body of the model is objectified to serve the message of the artist. My work suggests the opposite — the viewer is subjugated by the gaze of the model. The performance points a finger at a flaw that may seem trivial but I read as a sign that we’ve become conditioned to gazing at the naked female body.” This is why I was drawn to Olympia even as a child, despite not being able to articulate the reason. Her gaze suggests she isn’t intimidated by who looks at her, or even cares. I think about this in writing as I think the same applies — there is definitely an objectification of the (female) writer and/or the writing. Look at the autofiction furore of not long ago. But I think something to address is that it’s becoming less of a strictly gendered issue and more one of visibility. People care — or pretend to — when it’s put in front of them by the media/social media. There is uproar, then everyone moves on to the next person. It’s not something that comes up nearly as much outside of that framework but when it does, it tends to be a genuine concentration on the work itself. Which suggests it is more a matter of attention and the need for outrage than the work/person. So at what point do we break a cycle we are fully aware we are perpetuating? It’s certainly in the power of the readers/viewers, publishers, editors, agents, creators (the ones who exploit precisely for visibility). Sometimes the answer feels just to create but never explain, at least in the sense that you respond to nothing that you know feeds the endless need for reaction. It’s difficult. I certainly don’t want to say to anyone, “I see your intent and don’t disagree, but it won’t have the effect you think it will”. I admire anyone with the energy to expend fighting against this, but I know it would destroy me. I think I can only be one of those people who might never be heard — but I am fine with it. I get to write about joy and connectivity in desire and sex in everything from literature to perfume.
Regarding what De Robertis says about conditioning and the gaze, I don’t necessarily find a problem in the gaze itself, it’s more the questions that the gaze prompts. And that’s also not to say that as humans, the gaze can sometimes be no more or no better than that of an animal, sexual one, and pleasurable at that. But it should simply be a moment amongst many others. The body should ask questions of the one who looks upon it. If you can’t respond with anything intelligent or beyond fantasy, that’s where the problem lies. This is why I make references to women’s bodies in work via everyone from J-K Huysmans to Francis Bacon to Louise Bourgeois.
3:AM: Do you see yourself, or the book, as feminist, per se? Or is this a term that’s too vague or loaded?
TH: I’ll admit I really struggle with this at times. Feminism to me is simply supporting and uplifting women of all identities in order to place them in a position where they can flourish on equal terms. Ultimately, yes, I am a feminist according to that definition. But here we are, still in a society where feminism has its hierarchies. At the same time, it’s seen as problematic to recognise that, within a concept like feminism, some humans are essentially creatures who act out of self-interest, gender or culture or some other motive. I’m not much of a utopian, but nor am I a totally hopeless cynic. I’ve learned that some people are an abject waste of my time to deal with, so I don’t. Aligning myself with any phrase in a performative way or out of fear of being seen as not in line with the right people is hypocrisy. I’d rather be invisible and doing the right things than visible and meaningless. The people, the women, who have extended their hands to me in terms of writing have almost exclusively been the ones quietly doing the work, not grandstanding or centering it around themselves. I learn from them and follow their lead.
It dawned on me as I got into writing the book that I was doing so from a place that might be called feminist. I’m fine with that; it came naturally, so I think it speaks honestly about my perspectives regarding women, as well as my hopes and issues. Mostly, I would like people, regardless of gender, to be able to read it and just see something they recognise in it: if not themselves, then someone they know. I’m writing about men as much as women and the lines that blur in identifying ourselves, because the lines have always been blurred in me.
3:AM: There are many threads — or ribbons! — in the book but one of them is desire, something you have written about quite extensively, often with a focus on your personal experiences. How do you overcome any personal shyness or inhibitions in order to make your desires public in that way? Is there a confessional or transgressive thrill involved? An anger at the way female narratives are so often controlled or managed?
TH: Well, you know I’m shy to an extent. Comedically so at times. But for whatever reason, it never is an issue when it comes to desire — writing (or otherwise, if the connection feels right, sexual or otherwise). I think it was always so separate for me, in that people used to be so preoccupied with my face and name and the general strangeness growing up, that they forgot I would be a sexual person at some point. And so I escaped into desire because it was my own. Hence there is a complete lack of shame or shyness there, even in writing. That’s not to say I write everything, because I’m also quite private and some things are off-limits. But anything I do write about, I’m absolutely fine with — in the writing and being asked about it. Likewise, if I am attracted to someone, I have no problems being direct. Desire is best when it’s shared, open. Openness leads to a place where you create your own terms and boundaries and explore within them. It’s an amazing freedom.
In writing, I don’t feel anything is confessional… it simply exists as what it is, so I reject any idea that what I write is brave or other adjectives that tend to be used in describing this sort of writing. As a matter of fact, I think the well-meaning glossing of these descriptions tends to take away from the legitimacy of attempting to describe desire in a way that emphasises its essential humanity. Nor is it deliberately transgressive. The lovely writer Douglas Glover, of the former Numéro Cinq, and one of my earliest supporters, once commented about a perfume piece he published, something about me writing about my vast perfume collection and tastes nodded towards a kind of sexual transgression. I think that’s right — it was certainly unconscious, at any rate, until he said it, then it made sense. And I think, keeping it vague, you and I have had conversations about transgression and the realities of certain fantasies. It’s fascinating, as a thought experiment, and I like it when I can just have these conversations. Even that requires an openness, though. At the end of the day, if I want something, and I have that openness with someone, I just say so. We all do things in play… play is fantasy, ideally you start from a position of equality and then any inequality in play comes from a place of mutual understanding. But strictly speaking, I like having sexual agency; that it allows me to be myself without shame or the need to disguise it, and at times, within particular circumstances, to even relinquish it.
If I’m direct about talking or acting on desire, it’s only because of control: not only over female narratives but our behaviour generally and in a very specific literary sense is still monitored, controlled, commented on. We can’t do anything about commentary except not to rise to it — it’s not worth our breath most of the time — but I think we do have to push back against the idea that despite most literature being a business and in service to shareholders and profit, it does not mean that we are commodities. You can only do that by refusal. You can choose to be sold or not. You can choose to take a route that retains your dignity and humanity, your agency over someone telling you to bait publishers on Twitter and present yourself as the ideal woman in exchange for an audience. I’m pretty lucky in that I have time and space to write. But I’ve had a glimpse of what I would have to trade on to potentially be big. I don’t want it. I’ll only take up offers that I don’t have to compromise for and write for people who instinctively understand what I do. It probably would have been a lot easier if I just accepted whatever people told me to do to get ahead, but I always was extremely stubborn.
3:AM: You also talk in the book about the act and process of writing, about “paper as flesh,” and that when women write they are “always wearing that ribbon”. How does this connection work for you? Do you find it impossible to separate yourself from your writing? And aside from Bataille, which other writers ‘on desire’ do you admire or use/return to as inspiration?
TH: I don’t think I make any attempt to separate myself from the writing, though I think it’s important to note that that is different to being private about what I disclose and how I do it. Also that lack of separation doesn’t mean a lack of practical scrutiny in terms of editing. If you write like this, it’s necessary to be able to exercise restraint and/or constraint; just spilling and thinking it requires nothing else is laziness. If you can’t do it or see that it has to be like that, I’m not sure you should be writing this sort of thing. But going back, absolutely, the other side of that line is honesty to yourself, and honesty is as much about self-scrutiny as it is disclosure. I think I said in an interview elsewhere that getting older is about feeling that ribbon more: the awareness, the discomfort of it, is something to reckon with. And yes, maybe a little fetishistically, perhaps. Which is why as cliché as it may be, people like Bataille, Mishima, Quignard, Sapienza, Ogawa, Millet, Tanizaki or Leduc are ones I gravitate towards, because there’s an extremity there — sexual, aesthetic, cultural. It’s not that I’m necessarily extreme but I think I grasp the everyday realities of desire by understanding them through that. I think contrast, and to an extent conflict, is required to come to terms with it and move into a place where it becomes yours completely. I’ve tried to make sense of it my entire life and it’s always changing, because I am. That’s as it should be. Desire isn’t static, neither is flesh, but in everything from sexual norms to physical appearance, we tend to treat it like it is.
There’s an interesting thought that occurred to me (and this probably applies to the question below as well): that I’ve had to contrast myself sexually and culturally via objects, and perhaps that is a reason why Olympia and Leiris have made themselves felt so strongly. Like when I describe my mother’s teacups, the translucency of skin that repeats in things like washi paper, ribbons, the artificial cherries on the doll gifted to me, etc. Aside from paintings and nature, here I am surrounded by objects representative of who I am and will be. To recognise, even unconsciously, a kinship through sensory observation is to recognise we are in many ways no different to the inanimate in being bound and/or categorised. But in doing so we see our lives in these things; all objects are mirrors.
3:AM: I found the evocations of your past and your family, especially the elegant insights into Japanese culture, poignant and fascinating. But this hybrid upbringing (being half Japanese and half American) has clearly been a source of pain for you at times. Does the writing help heal some of those scars? And is the book also meant as a kind of tribute to your family or parents?
TH: I’m definitely of the camp that doesn’t believe in writing as therapy. I think it can be part of a process, yes, but not a solution in itself. My experiences will always be with me, it’s just that I’ve adapted or been able to see myself from other perspectives and assess them in new ways that allow me to learn from them. Some aspects still sting — but that sting is like the ribbon. It’s not a bad thing to have that awareness.
My parents were very supportive (my father died years ago) and we were loved. All families have issues and we weren’t any different, but I wasn’t ring-fenced in terms of identity. We were encouraged to be whoever we were, which was a source of conflict at times but we were never repressed. In a way the onus was more on my father, as my mother didn’t have the broad understanding of American culture in a lot of ways: how girls develop in/navigate it. She got a crash course with my sister and I, who were minor nightmares in our own ways. My father had the unenviable position of understanding from the opposite side of the gender divide, and had to make the decision: was he going to be the kind of man who took a very alpha dominant way of raising us, or a less interfering one, where he functioned as a kind of guide where needed. Aside from a general parental strictness he chose the latter, and I think I became fully who I am as a result. My mother entered into a new culture very much with an idea that she should be a certain person. She received a few shocks along the way, which ultimately changed the dynamic of the family, but more importantly let her become a person outside of a certain role or stereotype. We were witness to those things, and it was a lesson and an influence.
I know what you mean when you say “source of pain”. But that pain is not from being in any way, it’s only that you never know you’re different until someone else points it out. You’re normal until you’re not someone else’s normal. Under the heading of pain is confusion, anger, frustration, annoyance. What a waste of time a lot of it is. But at the same time, it is a formative experience. I watched my parents treat it when it came up with an admirable dismissal, and I don’t think that was because they weren’t affected; it was simply that they didn’t want us to think other people’s issues (in that sense) were our responsibility. At the same time, I was consistently told that I should always stand up for myself. So I was an interesting mix of slightly distant and, occasionally, a ball of rage. Sometimes my father would see me in the latter state and offhandedly say, “well, you are descended from samurai and Vikings”. Admittedly it’s probably easier dealing with these things via a keyboard or pen rather than a sword or axe nowadays.
3:AM: You write poetically in the book (and elsewhere) about scents, flowers, colours. It reminds me of Huysmans in Against Nature. You’ve written deeply and specifically about perfumes in other pieces. Clearly sensuality is important to you as a form of communication-about-the-world beyond words. When did you get interested in scents, perfumes and the like?
TH: Watching my father sitting at the kitchen table making his own cologne from sandalwood scraps, dried lavender, and alcohol. He loved scent, and when he couldn’t afford to buy branded colognes, he just made his own. He was a creatively-leaning polymath who would do things like make a working harp or recreate medieval manuscript pages complete with illuminations just to see if he could. So it went beyond perfumes. He took me to a lot of places as a child, from museums to shops, and everywhere was a learning experience. I remember going with him to a spice shop, these barrels larger than me: the mixture of scents was intoxicating. But his favourite flower was also lily-of-the-valley, and it was always surprising to me that this man who had been in military academy and the army — quiet, well read, well-travelled, usually smelling of leather and pipe tobacco — loved this delicate, crystalline, tiny blossom.
In junior high and high school, perfume advertising became fascinating to me. Ads used to be much more creative and message/fantasy-driven, rather than the celeb-led, rather basic (on the whole) ads of now. The things we’d get in Seventeen magazine, like Inès de la Fressange for Chanel Coco, half-naked wrapped in ropes of fake pearls and jewels, or Bonne Bell’s Skin Musk ad, where the face of the sort-of teen model was pure sexual ecstasy were eye-opening. By turns elegant, carnal, or inscrutable, it was a surprisingly diverse array and had a huge influence on me as I developed into a woman.
I was quite conflicted in terms of a societal narrative when it came to perfume. My mother didn’t wear any, so my cues were from my father. I leaned towards fougères (fern/green) and spicy-woody orientals for a long time. Chanel Coco was my first properly feminine powerhouse perfume, which my father bought for me one Christmas. But to this day I still wear as many men’s scents as women’s. Before he died I could afford to buy him niche and luxury scents, so I got him into brands like Serge Lutens and Creed and we would have long conversations about things like the scent of rubbed amber and why he came to like certain notes like heliotrope. But his favourite was Guerlain Eau Impériale, which he was buried with.
Into adulthood it became important that friends and lovers appreciated scent. Not that the latter should necessarily wear it; as a matter of fact I often prefer my men with their own scent, not out of a bottle, that’s the most arousing thing. But I like to teach them (or see that they’re open to it)… it’s a seduction of sorts, seeing who is open to knowing about it. Putting your wrist to someone’s nose and watching their expression change, trying to figure out what it is, is a form of intimacy, another way of communicating. Understanding that they can connect to the world in that way means they are open to other connections. A favourite memory is someone who was smelling my wrist when I was wearing Ostens Patchouli Heart I, a resonant, woody scent with a faint incense-treacle note. He had his nose and lips to my skin and his eyes looked like he’d experienced the divine, but it was more than sexual. It was a genuine realisation of another world, and he was trying to find the words to describe it. Seeing that is a turn-on like no other.
The first time I read Huysmans on scent, it was like, ah, a fellow obsessive. The way the words collide with each other when he writes about it… you can see all these thoughts and sensations in a rush to escape him. There’s a wonderful sensuality there, and it’s not a one-off; it comes up again and again in his work, both fiction and non-fiction. He very much observed the world through his senses and his prose follows that lead.
There are several points in the book where I talk about perfume, which were all very organic. For instance, I had been reading Huysmans’ Parisian Sketches, where there is a little ode to the armpit, of all things, and dedicated to Maupassant, which seemed even more connected for me as I love Bel-Ami, both the book and the Hermès scent. The way he describes the Parisienne’s armpit is glorious: carnal and curious, absolute olfactory exploration and worship. Of course this reminded me of the glimpse of armpit Olympia gives us. I started thinking of her body odour. But it matched perfectly to the perfume L’Être Aimé (femme) by Divine, which is a sunny, sandy scent due to the use of immortelle flower, which can smell a bit like very herbal maple syrup or honey, even curry. It smells like the body, but in a realistic way. That curryish aspect is akin to cumin, which in perfumery can repulse some people as it mimics, well, armpits. I wouldn’t describe it as a pretty scent, but it is an intriguing one. I think that reflects part of what attracts us to people. It isn’t always glossy perfection but something different, an interesting thing which communicates to you only, turning your head and drawing you in.
In another place in the book I imagine different perfumes that would be the painting, the body and landscape divided and made abstract, essences as a result of an olfactory dissemination. So I’m recreating everything from the scent of Olympia’s bed linens to her own flesh, her jewels, her gaze and imagining the individual notes. I appreciate this is more than a bit niche and thoroughly obsessive, but hopefully some people will read it and be able to imagine those scents.
3:AM: Serge Lutens is a particular inspiration — and a fascinating one since he was not only a perfume maker but a photographer and filmmaker. How did you discover him and what draws you to him specifically?
TH: He’s a perfect example of how connections have come together in my life: when I was younger, I think 12 or 13, just in high school, I have two separate memories that turned out to be linked to him. The first was that we (my family) would sometimes go to this large Japanese shopping centre in Chicago. It was like a big department store, so groceries, kiosks with cigarettes, whisky, ceramics, etc. My mother would stock up on things we couldn’t buy at that time in Racine, and part of the fascination for me was this large skincare/cosmetics counter: Shiseido. There was one thing in particular I was obsessed with, a tall rectangular bottle, a clear dark red, almost black at the edges. It had a round stopper top and characters running vertically down the label. I had no idea what it was, but I wanted it. It looked ancient and futuristic but otherworldly, a very specific aesthetic I’d never encountered. It was also very expensive (for us), so as much as I begged each time, I couldn’t have it. I even used to dream about it!
The other memory is also from around that time. I was at the age where I was starting to be a more social creature, doing the things girls do in groups — reading fashion magazines, experimenting with make-up etc. I was looking at a copy of Vogue, I think it was, in class and stopped at an ad for Dior Poison perfume, the original 80s first release. The tagline was “poison is my potion” and instead of a very French or all-American blonde, the model could barely be recognised as a woman. She was covered … I’m sure you can read Orientalism into this but I always interpreted it as more of a fantastic abstraction … wrapped in a bluish-purple-black head covering and outfit up to her neck, with black lace arm-length gloves. She wasn’t looking at the camera, but down, and her expression wasn’t demure or coy; it was internalised. A complete rejection of the viewer. Her make-up was anti-feminine, you could say, for the time. A powdered-white face. Purple lipstick. I saw that and I wanted to be her. It … transcended being a woman and went straight to this idea of fantasy for the self and not a man. It appealed to me, especially since I looked so different to anyone at school, growing up in a place where it was mainly kids of Scandinavian or German descent. There were a few Korean and Chinese families, but I was the only half-Japanese girl besides my sister (who “passed” in a way I didn’t), and so I was neither here nor there and totally invisible in terms of appearing beautiful… which I didn’t consider myself at all, nor do now.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I got to know Serge Lutens by name by discovering his perfumes, and then realised he was partly responsible for both the design of the red bottle (Eudermine essence) and if not the direction of the Poison ad, then the make-up. He’d also published a few books of his photography, and his women were and are still images which absolutely bewitch me. He has a way of styling and transforming them into essences: these powerful, beautiful, otherworldly creatures who are somehow pure abstraction, but you look and think, “yes, this makes sense”. Certainly one could critique his styling (as extremes of white and thin), but I also look at it no differently than I would say, someone like Giacometti. I just think Lutens sees women as beings of power and styles them to reflect that. There’s an anecdote in the book Model by Michael Gross, where he speaks to one of Lutens’ models, Louise Despointes, and she talks about how they’d go crazy in the studio: they decide they’re going to recreate Nero and Rome burning and end up torching the place. An image I refer to in the book is “Cracheuse de flammes”, another very stylised photo from the 1970s with the model Isabel Weingarten, where she’s breathing fire. He also used that name quite recently for a perfume, so I like the idea that he’s inspired by and connected to his past work, because I like to draw from my own past writing for present work. It’s all just a vast web to me.
He represents possibility and metamorphosis, something I distantly recognised back then while questioning the aesthetic-cultural aspects of myself in the context of a world I didn’t feel part of. That those (at the time) unconnected memories were in fact connected through him (the spice shop memory above came back when I first smelled his perfume, Arabie), is something I’m still a bit in awe of: part of me understood what I was looking at and kept it close; allowed me to follow it until it revealed itself.
Strictly speaking, he’s not a “nose” (the actual creator) — someone else executes his scents and he works with them. But what’s interesting to me is that someone has such a specific olfactory vision and sees it through, as opposed to the “maximum demographics” approach of mainstream brands. I think that must be extraordinarily difficult, following what’s in your head and nose as an idea and then have someone else make it happen. I’m trying to remember the first one I smelled, and I think it was Douce Amère, this incredible strange absinthe-inspired smell: green, sweet, herbal, bitter, floral. It was like smelling the obelisk in Kubrick’s 2001. You don’t know what it is, but you’re in awe of it.
I know you probably understand what I mean, as I introduced you to his La fille de Berlin (dark green-metallic rose) scent and I remember you were immediately taken with it. I could see you recognised this complexity and depth whereas previously I’d made you smell Marie Jeanne’s Brume d’Hiver perfume (naturalistic green-bonfire) and you loved it, but La fille was like another world completely.
3:AM: The first time I read anything by you, it was a story about having an orgasm on the Paris metro. Olympia is infused with references to French thinkers and writers — Maupassant, Duras, Bachelard, Barthes, Derrida, de Beauvoir, Zola, Baudrillard. Is it perhaps time to confess to being a passionate Francophile? And what kickstarted that?
TH: I get the feeling this is the one that I get remembered for… because it was true! I’m always a little wary of saying -phile as it suggests I can’t see the realities and struggles of any culture, but yes. Simply put, I am. It really did start with Olympia and her kin, the Orsay and Louvre books I spent so much time looking at as a child. Funny thing is, I’m not entirely sure I can name you anyone else except Sade, whom I read as a teen, until becoming an adult and having Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola really kickstart my (literary) passion in a completely new way. I remember putting Justine down on the counter at the library and no one blinking, despite me being 15 or something. Which, honestly, is as it should be. When I started getting into the thinkers, it was pretty much my all-French phase, fiction and non. I was a late starter in many ways (or not, if you consider what I said about being an organic reader) but I made up for it. I was on my own after a big relationship split and doing nothing but work and then going home and reading and writing into the early hours — I had only started to get to know lit-type people in a very small way. At the time I was a bit isolated in this small but idyllic annexe in Kent, near Leeds Castle, which was floor to ceiling with books, a slightly mad amount of hellebores and not a lot else. I devoured all this writing and I didn’t have the context of academia or even Twitter, so I was probably lucky in that I came to all of it sort of wide-eyed and accepting or arguing with it without anything preconceived.
Bachelard, Leiris and Quignard are probably my big three, though I find some of Blanchot so beautiful it can bring me near to tears: from my first readings to now, they feel like… sometimes you hold thoughts you never share because you think they’re just too strange to be understood. Then you read people like this and realise, no. There’s a world of people that do, this is just another connection. It’s a relief, intellectually and emotionally. That’s maybe a little naive, but I don’t really care. There’s so much intellectual grandstanding and cynicism, and I want to be able to read these thinkers and bask in the wonder of it. A focus on a thought or an observation that appreciates, opens and lets in the world. I’ve said Quignard is my favourite living writer, and that’s because there’s such a beautiful weaving of desire and thought, writing and death — it comes across as so lyrical that it could be a piece of music or watching a flower bloom. I’m reading The Five Senses by Michel Serres for the first time and I’m getting that feeling again, the great ache that comes with the realisation you are witnessing making sense of the world through its myriad connections, from literature and art to bodies and wine.
The piece you refer to (“Pilgrimage”, written for the wonderful Andrew Gallix for his anthology We’ll Never Have Paris), actually prompted my first reading and launch. Talking about your cunt in front of a room full of strangers is quite the experience! I was trying to tie this idea of a Paris that can’t be to desire and thoughts that can and can’t be read. An orgasm is sort of an ultimate expression of a certain interiority, if you think about it. We want to be read and understood but at the same time, we only open, or bloom, for certain people; the ones who want thorns as much as petals. With that orgasm, I wanted people to see something in me, read me. To be touched through it. Songs for Olympia is an extension, writing about a reading of an observation, but I think almost everything I write serves the purpose, and perhaps unconsciously at times, of creating a universe of connections.
3:AM: The book serves, in the best way, as a portal to a host of other writers, artists and texts on a broad variety of subjects. You name-check or quote Henri Bergson, Galen Strawson, ETA Hoffmann, Byung-Chul Han, Leonard Cohen, Martin Herbert, Robert Mapplethorpe, Francis Bacon, William H Gass… You obviously read voraciously and widely: where does this passion come from?
TH: You know, I still think about the Gass story “Order of Insects” a lot. The sublime beauty and sadness of an ordinary (by her own terms) woman realising something almost divine and soaring upon that knowledge before coming back to her reality. That’s another one that brings me close to tears. The first time I read it, I just ached. Sounds a bit ridiculous, I know. I couldn’t tell you why that happens… it strikes some truth, I suspect, that I can’t quite articulate. That’s the beauty of art. Not unrelated, when we were reading In the Heart of the Heart of the Country at the same time and talking about it, part of passion of this sort is the pleasure of reading something with someone and exchanging your thoughts about it. I get an absolute thrill from that.
All these writers and thinkers and artists mentioned, again, I liken it to touching. Touching and being touched. Even if for a moment, that moment sets off a train of thought, connection to connection. I get an exceptional amount of joy from those moments. It’s an electricity similar to the one you feel when you connect with someone in person, emotionally, mentally, sexually. It lights up the world and suddenly everything falls into place. I had a children’s book, Coppelia, based on the Hoffmann story “The Sandman” (Coppelia is Olympia in his story). I didn’t know it was him then, but there was something fascinating about the idea of a woman who wasn’t this ideal, who was only a mechanical creation, a reflection of desire. She can only say “Ah” and that “Ah” is the world to the young man in love with her.
Passions are curious things: they are curiosity in extremis, obsessions that take you to the point of no return. They can be brief or eternal. I like people who can fix on something and recognise that point, even if they don’t necessarily go there themselves. I’ve always escaped: I think this is the natural outcome of my childhood. I’m always looking for something, inside and outside of me. I leap from person to person, thought to thought, sometimes place to place. I’ve tried to deny it, but I finally came to accept it. As a child, bed meant reading, and reading meant the only escape that was possible at the time. But there were worlds there, in the words and art. As no one ever told me I couldn’t read this or that, I devoured everything and as one thing led to another, I never held back if I was interested in something. That, thankfully, remains an indulgence to this day. Something I look for in people which draws me to them, is the ability to look at/move through the world in a different way. All the people referenced in my book have that, and regardless of what medium they work in, discovering them was like doing a double-take, being introduced to their way of seeing.
There is an amazing double volume, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, which is one book of artwork and another of her psychoanalytic writing. It’s actually a really great contrast to read and take in her particular interiority alongside Leiris’s. She wrote something on September 29, 1955: “…all I wanted was to look but I cannot be left in peace doing my looking”. This is not something you really get the impression of with the men. It is a given that they have their space and peace. Later on, in a 1958 entry, she wrote: “how much violence is there in you to day (sic) – how should I know, how can I possibly find out? There are ways.” Those two things fascinate me, because it was a constant underlying feeling to what I was writing. There’s definitely an element of observation and writing that comes about through a sort of violence; the particular rage prompted by assumptions about your exteriority, and even more so, interiority. These are (often) not free spaces. As much as I love the men I reference, with someone like Bourgeois, you really understand what is at stake in women observing and being passionate about the world. And that it can be violent (in both ecstasy and anger), because it has often had to be internal and expressed in creative ways, even when all you want is to throw back your head and howl.
3:AM: Were there any consistent guiding spirits, aside from Leiris himself, for this book, or for your writing in general.
TH: I wish I could give you a romantic answer, like I read my cards every day or some nonsense. But honestly, I’m a little too pragmatic when it comes to writing. The best thing, the one thing that was right there in my head every day was Jacob at Sagging Meniscus, who responded to my little pitch and said, “I trust you implicitly as a writer. You have carte blanche”. Someone telling you to just go out there and be yourself, what else could you ask for? It’s the ultimate mark of faith in a writer, to have no strings attached to your creativity and thinking.
Something I have learned is to just trust the voice. I’m not the kind of writer who has a set list of all the things they want to write about. Ideas come out of the ether in my mind: so with the book, it was a conversation in my head; sometimes with essays or even reviews it can be a single sentence, a fragment. That starts everything. I follow what appears and shape the work around those things. There’s a lot to be said about how your mind processes ideas without you, so to speak: I mean when you might not be writing every day or consciously thinking about your work. I think it’s quite important to have those periods of conscious inactivity, because that’s when your mind takes everything and really starts to consider it. Writing is thinking as much as anything else. You can loosen your grip on the physical act of writing but you’re still doing it. Have the trust that it will come back to you.
3:AM: How do you imagine Leiris might respond to your book if he were alive today?
TH: I’d love to have one of those old-school, endless, chain-smoking (I don’t even smoke anymore) intellectual arguments/discussions. It’s a rather satisfying thing that I didn’t read him and feel a sort of all-encompassing love or place him on some intellectual pedestal. He absolutely drives me mad sometimes, but I think it’s rather apparent he feels like that about himself in his writings, so I suspect we’d really go at it. I’d say we might even actually go at it, but I get the feeling he was too frigid (by his own admission) for someone like me. Still, it’s an amusing thought. That said, if we played Fuck, Marry, Kill with all the French thinkers, there’d probably be a lot of weight on the first one. And quite a bit of the latter.
3:AM: Looking back on the book, how was the experience of writing it for you, given it’s quite different to what you had published before? Do you feel that you somehow grew or learned from it?
TH: I can genuinely say I loved every minute of writing it. Yes, I had all the usual issues of sometimes puzzling over what to say or how to say it, but it was all a pleasure. I debated having it be longer, but in the end I wanted it brief to keep an essence intact. That it started with an imaginary conversation in my head, a fragment, and then… total freedom There was nothing weighing on me, no expectations. So I just wrote what I felt: shaped this world around a man, a book, a painting, a woman. That was everything I lived and breathed and dreamed for a while. It was an obsession, and I think what I took from it was just to be true to those feelings. Not sure it’s worth doing anything else, if you can.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Tomoé Hill is a US-born, London-based editor and writer whose work has appeared or will be forthcoming in The Spectator, New England Review, Vestoj, minor literature[s], Exacting Clam, MAP Magazine, Socrates on the Beach, 3:AM Magazine, The Quietus, The London Magazine, Music & Literature, and Numéro Cinq, as well as various anthologies. She co-wrote a monthly feature as part of the duo XX and XY, reviewing erotic classic literature for Rowan Pelling’s The Amorist during its time as a print magazine.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Paul Sullivan (above) is a British freelance writer, editor and author living in Berlin, where he runs Slow Travel Berlin.
