MarysLibrary

The Thoughtful Dresser

Linda Grant, she who made the Booker short list with her novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, has a new, nonfiction book, The Thoughtful Dresser: The Act of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter. This isn't a guide to how to dress or a humor piece on the shallowness of the fashion industry. It's a serious essay on the role of clothes in the building and sustaining of personality, especially for women. Here's an anecdote from WW II:

The Comtesse de Mauduit, an American who had hidden Allied airmen in her Brittany chateau, was denounced by her maid and deported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Returning to Paris after the liberation, she arrived still in her striped uniform but looking oddly elegant, for she had come across another inmate in the camp, a forewoman from the prewar house of Schiaparelli, who had remodeled the striped suit for her.

This is amusing but it tells us how vital looking good and wearing attractive clothes is to the self-image of women. Even in a situation as desperate as that of a concentration camp women will take time for adornment in the midst of the struggle just to stay alive.

Grant addresses what makes clothes sexy, the problem of invisibility facing women in their 50s and older, the reason modern shoes have 5-inch heels that make them excruciatingly painful and almost impossible to walk in. She illustrates her points about the importance of clothes with the story of a Canadian woman, Catherine Hill, whose dress shop was at one time the only place to buy high-end clothes in Toronto.

Grant's book is delightful but thought-provoking and I recommend it to any woman (or man) who cares in the least about fashion and the meaning it gives to the lives of most women, whether they recognize it or not.

Hellhound on his Trail

I had just bought my first new-from-the-dealer car on April 4th of 1968 and I was driving my Renault back from the dealer in Greensboro, North Carolina, to Durham in the pouring rain that evening, listening to the radio when they broke in to announce that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. I remember the search for his murderer, which seemed to go on for too long and at times seemed unlikely to be successful

Now in Hampton Sides' new book, Hellhound on his Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr and the International Hunt for his Assassin, I'm learning what James Earl Ray was doing in the months before the murder in Memphis, what he did afterwords, and how the FBI, with the assistance of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Scotland Yard, captured him.

The story of what Ray was doing when is thin. The author has to rely on threads of physical evidence, testimony by not very reliable witnesses, and the narrative of Ray himself, a man who was said by one law enforcement official to lie "only when his mouth was moving." But the story of how the FBI gathered and analyzed the physical evidence, how the RCMP went through many thousands of passport applications until it found Ray's (under another name), and how Scotland Yard notified ports and airports to be on the watch for him and caught him trying to leave England - that part of the story is extraordinarily interesting and well told.

In fact, the book reads like fiction. Without ever over-reaching the author has presented a story of what went wrong and what went right in the search for Ray. And, something that is very important to me, the author does no editorializing about what was happening in the civil rights movement, what restrictions were or were not placed on gun purchase and ownership at the time, what the president (Lyndon Johnson) was or was not doing, or how much or little the political climate contributed to the assassination. He is scrupulous in his footnoting and is straightforward in his reporting about the FBI, which under J Edgar Hoover was on a campaign to discredit Dr King.

This is a superb example of what non-fiction should be - NON-fiction, non-opinionated, unbiased, carefully ascribing everything to reliable if sometimes by necessity secondary sources, but so well written that it is in no way dull or dry. I gave it a 5 on my scale of 1 to 5.

 

I Am Madame X

We all recognize this John Singer Sargent painting of Virginie Gautreau. Like its subject it became world famous. First thought a shocking travesty it is now recognized as a masterpiece. Sargent called it his greatest work. Unfortunately, the decidedly negative reception when it was shown at the Paris Salon in 1884 ruined Sargent's reputation in France and he was forced to decamp to England in order to find anyone to buy his portraits. It's called Madame X because Sargent asked the Met, to whom he sold the painting in 1916, not to use her name.

Remarkable as the painting is in photographs the real thing is startling. I've seen it more than once and each time I've found it difficult to walk away from. And now I've discovered a novel based on the life of Mme Gautreau, written by Gioia Diliberto and published in 2003, that is almost as hard to walk away from. By staying up until nearly midnight I read more than half of I Am Madame X's 250 pages in one gulp the day I got my copy from the library and I polished it off first thing in the morning.

Here's what Library Journal had to say about the book:

John Singer Sargent's provocative portrait of aloof and alluring Virginie Gautreau scandalized the Paris Salon in 1884. In it, the artist offset his subject's luminous white skin with a revealing black evening gown. Captivated by the enigmatic Virginie, biographer Diliberto (A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams) decided to research her. While she didn't collect enough information to write a biography, she teased and tantalized the scant findings into a compelling novel. From New Orleans, where she was born and raised on her grandmother's Creole plantation, Virginie moved to France to escape the Civil War. In Paris, she married a banker and became a "professional beauty" known for her ostentatiousness. Diliberto's writing brings Virginie to life in a way that Sargent's portrait does not, creating a complex woman who recognizes that her beauty is her most precious commodity. The author uses evocative images and sharp descriptions of both people and places to create a word-picture of Parisian society at the turn of the century. Her characters are well imagined, revealing strengths and weakness that explain both who they are and what they have become. Highly recommended.