I have repeatedly addressed the topic of sexual liberties between Gertrude and Alice (and certain friends) in these columns: see the très naughty Christmas poem Alice wrote to Gertrude in my post 16; or reflections about Alice's roles in Gertrude's life in post 17. In post 15, I introduced my late friend Samuel M. Steward with the stunning roses he tattooed on the back one of his clients and lovers. Now everybody can be introduced to Sam thanks to a biography — a remarkable book about a remarkable man.

Secret Historian: The life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade, by Justin Spring, is a subtle, brilliant, playful, elegant and compassionate portrait that does full justice to its subject. Spring has saved a huge archive of erotic writings, drawings, photographs and collected materials from the oblivion of an attic and turned his research into a page-turner. There are the ambitions that made the young writer dear to Gertrude Stein (see Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas); the life-long sex obsession that made him dear to Alfred C. Kinsey (for whom Sam became a prime gay informer and sexual performer); his tattoo shops in Chicago and Oakland (with Hells Angels as clients); Steward’s “Stud File” with notes and details on his nearly 1000 lovers; and finally the pornographic stories and novels written under numerous pen names that made him dear to innumerable gay readers because of his undying belief in the joy of sex and his high-risk rebellions against pre-Stonewall American pruderies.

When Sam became my friend and informant for my photobiography of Stein, he was already old, sick and weak, but delighted by any chance to still serve his beloved Gertude and Alice. He was proud of holding out for the 5-hour-marathon of interviews by film maker Greta Schiller for Paris Was A Woman, in 1993, shortly before his death. It slyly amused him that he who had befriended Stein in the thirties and was still alive, was framed by a bouquet of a dozen roses looking over his shoulder at the camera.

P.S. An exhibition from the Samuel Steward Archive will be arranged by Justin Spring this coming March, at the New York Museum of Sex.

If you missed Paris the Luminous Years on PBS and (and missed the snow falling on Gertrude’s Montparnasse in my last Stein post), there is a there there to console you: Paris Was A Woman, the charming (if not always accurate) documentary by Greta Schiller. It is now available on Netflix.

There is no better way to get a good look at Stein through the movies. Yes, the icon of modernism in front of a home movie camera! She and Alice walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. She gets her poodle excited. She even attacks the tomato patch in the garden of the country house — just to disprove herself: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” “Work is something I cannot do.” You hear her voice, the marvelous melody of her rapping on Picasso, and you can decide for yourself if Alice was out of her mind when she met Gertrude for the first time and was blown away by the “contralto” voice that seemed to emanate from the brooch Stein was wearing… “It was unlike anyone else’s voice — deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s.” Contralto voice coming out of a brooch? Is this an early case of Alice having been involved with a hash brownie? Or simply the violent effect of falling in love?

Live testimony in the film comes from the great Janet Flanner who wrote her regular Paris reports for the New Yorker, and from photographer Gisèle Freund who portrayed all the soon-to-be famous artists who frequented either Stein’s salon in the Rue de Fleurus or Nathalie Barney’s in the Rue Jacob, or both. Nathalie Barney’s housekeeper of 40 years dishes up stories about the “Amazon” of Paris and her guests. Sylvia Beach reminisces at length about the mythic bookstores, her own English-language Shakespeare & Company, and her lover Adrienne Monnier’s French-language La Maison des Amis de Livres. Stein was the first client in Beach’s lending-library-bookstore, faithful until she couldn’t forgive Beach’s obsession with James Joyce. Years later, in an interview, Silvia Beach appears undefeated by the publishing dramas of the past. It’s her friends who disclose the heart-wrenching story: the betrayal by Joyce, who allowed her to ruin herself with the publication of his Ulysses, in 1922, and then jumped ship, not giving her a penny of the $45,000 Random House offered him…

Publishing as we have come to know it. No matter, Paris Was A Woman makes it abundantly clear why creative women at the beginning of the twentieth century chose to be in Paris and no place else.

Entering fall in high fashion? Dressed in Gertrude Stein from head to toe? Coat, dress, petticoat, handbag and dessous:

http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/why-do-something-if-it-can-be-60

Our sleuthing began 75 km east of Lyon on an empty country road, between rabbit cages and sad bistros. Whereas nowadays a plaque guides the pilgrims in the village of Bilignin, back then, when I translated Stein’s mystery story, you had to be a good detective to find the house behind its forbidding walls. We found ourselves “at the edge of radical uncertainty,” having to knock at the gate. It so happened that the same family who had owned and rented the house to Gertrude Stein from 1929 to 1943, was still living there. The doors magically opened to us.
There was the southern façade with its high French windows and painted shutters; the low taxus hedges cut like a labyrinth; the three battered and slightly leaning towers on the famous low garden wall – the wall on which Stein would sit and sing, next to her Alice with her back turned to the view.
“And here was Alice Toklas’s kitchen and herb garden,” the family led us to the left side. “There in the back are the barn and (we exchanged a quick glance) the servant lodgings.”
The children of the owners were too young to remember the two lady inhabitants, but they still remembered the amazing mountains of oyster shells and finest wine bottles left behind the house, when Stein and Toklas moved to Culoz, a little town nearby.
We were allowed a glimpse at the salon, already closed off for winter, with its 18th century frescos. “Here hung the Picasso portrait and the Cézanne portrait which Mme Stein had brought down from Paris on the roof of her car,” we learned, “and in this spot there always was Mme Toklas’s flower arrangement.” We contemplated the corner of the room with the writing desk. Here the first traces of unnatural acts were detected in the summer of 1933: “The next morning on coming to the desk to write a letter it was noticed that hair and dust had been scattered all over. This was not an accident and it was mentioned.”
The sunny façade outside and the autumn chill inside the old house made the paradox oddly palpable: the liberal artistic life of foreigners, outsiders, and the tightly bound comme il faut of small-town life and gossip – fascinating and depressing – and exactly what Stein evoked in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.
Stay tuned.

After the marker of 5O Stein blogs — talking about Stein’s one and only writing block –- did I contract one myself? No, for me, too, writing went on, on another page. Finishing a novel, writing about opera. Stein was writing her detective story during that ominous summer in 1933, when success caught up with her. She was troubled by questions of identity (“I am I because my little dog knows me.”) Some part of her seemed unreachable, dead. It must have been soothing to mirror her inner troubles outside, in the provincial life around her. Lots of shady things right then are happening in her village and the nearby little town Belley with its proud hotel – adultery, betrayal, feuds over money. There are even deaths that could be murders or suicides or accidents… The wife of the hotelier has fallen to her death from a window of the Hotel Pernollet. Bizarre incidents happen at her own house. Stein becomes the Miss Marple of the village Bilignin, listening to gossip, bringing up suspicions, doubts, theories. She does exactly what Stein scholars today are doing with her texts: contextualizing. Finding a context to understand what is happening within a sentence, a paragraph, a book.
Stein does it with ironic playfulness. She almost leads us on to think we already know who has done it: if not the butler, then the gardener, of course. But as the setting is not a castle but a country house (“A house in the country is not the same as a country house,” the author instructs us on page one) there is no butler, just suspicious servants, and the suspicious gardener is a “hortoculturist.”
Make no mistake, however, Stein’s play with the detective story slyly refuses to obey the conventions of the genre. She remains experimental in her writing. (Some would say, highly experimental, but on the sly.) There is no plot. Nobody figures anything out or finds solutions to the riddles or possible crimes. The author repeatedly, however, evokes a woman who “tries and cries,” “cries and tries.”
Some of the events reported in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor also appear in other texts by Stein, in “A Waterfall and a Piano,” “Is Dead,” and in Everybody’s Autobiography. But there they are not much elucidated either. Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, with its broken narrative, sometimes unfinished sentences, time-shifts and frequent contradictions is about paradoxes – the muddles of writing and reality – and is itself an intriguing and amusing muddle. In more elevated terms, Ulla Dydo called it “unexpected writing at the edge of radical uncertainties.” Joan Retallic talked about its “intricate incoherence.” Stein’s friend, writer and photographer Carl van Vechten thought the story was “hair-raising.” Stein scholar Bruce Kellner said, “It isn’t.
In my approach to the book, I met the “radical edge of uncertainty”in two ways: by translating it into German, and by setting out on a pilgrimage to the places where it all happened, to see for myself.
Stay tuned.