Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by justin spring

an active interest in his writing.
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    Stein, aged sixty-six, was just then settling back into life in France after the tour of the United States that had followed the great popular success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). During the course of the tour she had been not only widely recognized as a central figure of the Paris-based Modernist avant-garde, but also embraced as a lovable female American genius-eccentric. She had lived in Paris since 1902, supported by a trust fund, and with her brother, Leo, she had collected works by Matisse, Derain, Gris, Braque, and Picasso. Starting in 1909, Alice Toklas, a fellow Californian expatriate, had lived and worked with her as her secretary and business manager. During that time their salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus had become a gathering place for many of the most brilliant creative minds of the 1920s, including Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, and Guillaume Apollinaire.
    By 1937, however, Stein’s life was relatively quiet. While she still entertained a steady stream of guests at Rue de Fleurus and at Bilignin, she devoted most of her days to her writing and correspondence. Steward later wrote of his first visit, “I was not old enough then—nor indeed was anyone wise enough at that time—to evaluate accurately her place in literature, and certainly it was hard to be conscious of it while one was near her…[for she was] a great and very human woman, an intricate yet simple and earthy personality, tremendously alive.”
    With his slight frame, delicate constitution, and multiple food allergies (which included wheat flour), Steward immediately appealed to Stein and Toklas as an adorably childlike young man over whom they might fuss as much as they liked. They called him “Sammy” from their very first meeting, and would alternately pamper, scold, and praise him for years to come. * The small, robust, and motherly Stein took an immediate liking to him, and he in turn found himself surprisingly at ease with her, for she bore an uncanny resemblance to his favorite stepaunt, Elizabeth Rose.
    From his very first day, Steward kept painstakingly detailed records of his visits to Bilignin, writing up a full account of the day’s activities and conversations with Stein each evening after they had retired. He also photographed the ladies and their home with his little Argus camera, and took Stein’s palmprint with a special kit designed for palmists.
    Steward was delighted with the grand seventeenth-century château and its formal garden, which overlooked a small valley planted with corn, beyond which rose the wooded hills of Ain. He quickly adapted himself to a daily routine of dog walks, outings to local restaurants, and expeditions by car to view nearby alpine scenery. During the visit, Steward found himself welcomed as a fellow writer, and discussed with Stein the difficulty of writing good fiction while teaching, for he had an enormous workload at Loyola and little time in which to do anything truly creative. Hoping to help him, Stein introduced him to a cadaverous-looking neighbor, Henri Daniel-Rops, who would eventually make a small fortune writing popular books on Catholic subjects, and become known as “the Dr. Goebbels of the Christian World by his jealous atheist enemies because of his strong resemblance to that german minister.” * (The name Daniel-Rops was, in fact, a pseudonym; born Henri Petiot, the author had taken the name in admiration of the artist Felicien Rops.) For the next two years, Stein and Daniel-Rops would try repeatedly to secure Steward a teaching position in France.
    At the end of a week, Stein wrote a note to Thornton Wilder, who was just then hidden away in Zurich, working on a play: “We have been having a young fellow here Sam Steward, he is the one who wrote Angels on the Bough and is a college professor we like him and he goes to Zurich [soon]…he will not interrupt your solitude much because he