Yesterday's Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles [Hardcover]

Cherie Nutting (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 21, 2000

Fifteen years ago, Cherie Nutting returned to Morocco. She had first visited it as a child with her mother, and the images of mystery and the desert had stayed with her, fueled over the years by accounts of expatriate life and by the literature created there. In Tangier again, she met the most famous of the expatriates and author of the classic The Sheltering Sky. Cherie became a friend of Paul Bowles and part of his circle. Over the years, the friendship deepened and widened.

Yesterday's Perfume is a memoir of that friendship and of Cherie's love of Morocco. She had unparalleled access to Paul, and recorded, journal-like, their conversations and the events of everyday life. Interwoven among Cherie's narrative are bits and pieces of Paul's previously unpublished writings -- diarylike fragments, retellings of dreams, little stories -- a sharp counterpoint in his inimitable voice.

Unlike most memoirs, Yesterday's Perfume is blessed with a wealth of extraordinary images. Cherie has created a visual record of their friendship, capturing intimate moments, making formal portraits, recording the comings and goings of celebrities and friends. And here, too, the dialogue with Bowles continues, for Paul has jotted down his reactions in the borders and on the prints.

Several other friends have contributed to these pages, Peter Beard, Ned Rorem, and Bruce Weber among them. But key is the collaboration of Cherie and Paul. Together they have created a touching portrait of friendship and a road map to the mind of an artist.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The formidable charm of Paul Bowles radiates from every page of this unconventional memoir, which recalls Cherie Nutting's friendship with the expatriate American writer-composer during the last 13 years of his life. Nutting layers together text (her narrative, his journal extracts and unpublished writings) and photographs (of Bowles, his friends, and various significant objects) in a collage-like format. This impressionistic approach is highly appropriate to Bowles (1910-99), whose first published work appeared in a surrealist magazine, and who remained an avant-garde innovator in music and literature for half a century. Although 40 years his junior, Nutting has similar interests: she fell in love at age 10 with Morocco, his adopted homeland; and, when she read his best-known novel, The Sheltering Sky, in the 1970s, "the book meant everything" to her. Inspired by recurring dreams, she wrote to Bowles in 1985 and explained that "it was in my destiny that we should meet"; he responded with an invitation to visit him in Tangier. Her photos show a radiantly handsome old man, while her reminiscences of kif smoking, rambles through the Moroccan landscape, and pronouncements like "the illicit bouquet that smelled of yesterday's perfume" create a dreamy atmosphere. Readers who are disinclined to this sort of stargazing will find comic relief in a running subplot that involves the house that's being built for Nutting by Bowles's friend Mohammed Mrabet, who extracts substantial sums of money from both of them, gets angry whenever his plans are questioned, and takes a long time to complete the structure. Readers who are attuned to the special sensibility that's expressed in Bowles's life and work will find it evocatively captured here. --Wendy Smith

From Booklist

The scrapbook format lends a publication a whimsical flavor and its creator the opportunity to experiment with material other than words to legitimize impressions or to dress up information. Executed well, the technique is referred to as collage. From the appearance of this book, one could characterize Nutting as an exceptional collage artist. It's utterly enjoyable to page through this book, delighting at the interplay between Nutting's impressionistic photographs and the various written messages--the letters, captions, first-person narrative, passages from Bowles' journals. The experience can be likened to viewing an old scrapbook that reeks with the scent of a flower or two pressed between its pages. On the contrary, Nutting's intriguing collages display an obsession with a country (Morocco), a book (The Sheltering Sky), and a man (Paul Bowles) that fueled a great friendship and a long-lasting adventure. She met him in 1986 and they were friends (although at times Nutting seems to imagine they were lovers, and on more than one occasion records her jealousy of Jane Bowles) until his death in 1999. The portrait of Bowles she offers is that of a sensual, vital, and mysterious man, interesting to the very end. Bonnie Smothers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1st edition (November 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609605739
• ISBN-13: 978-0609605738
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,192,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A really poor book...., December 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Yesterday's Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles (Hardcover)

I was loooking forward to this book, hoping it would be about Paul, whom I knew fairly well and whose work I much admire. But it's not primarily about Paul; it's about Ms. Nutting and her silly fantasies. This book is sheer narcissism, an ego-trip par excellence. And Ms. Nutting's photos aren't all that good either. Why anyone would pay $75 ($60 on Amazon) for this nonsense is beyond me. Here are the same old stories (about Cherifa and Jane, etc.) told better elsewhere (i.e. in the biographies.) There's unattractive cattiness here as well -- for example the mean reference to the number of letters Paul may or may not have written to Debra Winger. Finally there's little perception into Paul's behavior -- the passive-aggressive way he manipulated everyone (especially the marginal people) around him. Paul Bowles was a superb writer and a fascinating man...but he was also a complex human being with plenty of faults and flaws. Unfortunately there's nothing here but empty idolatry.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Who is this woman?, August 5, 2001

By 

Paul Mallamo (Denver, Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Yesterday's Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles (Hardcover)

Cherie Nutting somehow attached herself to Paul Bowles and took lots of photographs. Many of these are of herself in various gauzy poses. We also get the inside story in the form of her dreamlife. "Memoir" indeed, but who cares? What does all this have to do with Paul Bowles, especially the version that created the books and music? Toward the end of this volume we realize how lonely and confused Mr. Bowles was, and how ripe for an opportunistic Ms. Nutting. I don't know exactly what to call this thing, but the Bowles name would more correctly appear in it as a footnote.

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Today's Banquet, December 9, 2000

By 

Philip Steele Krone "[e-mail]" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Yesterday's Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles (Hardcover)

Yesterday's Perfume is a veritable banquet of tastes and sensations as well as an honest and intimate tribute to the late Paul Bowles.

Cherie Nutting truly loved "Pablo" as she refers to him, and her photos reflect her affection and reverence. In his last year of life Bowles spent considerable time preparing observations and comments for this book to both make it more marketable and to demonstrate his affection for Cherie Nutting.

This is a very handsome book. Its photographs are rich in symbolism as well as substance. For those who are interested in Bowles, this book will be most satisfying indeed.