Parisian Lives by Samuel M. Steward

After having read Steward’s Phil Andros novels and stories, and enjoying his writing, (while getting a little tired of the sameness of the plots – there’s only so much you can do within the confines of the pornography genre), I thought I’d read some of Steward’s more serious fiction. The local library had three of his novels, this one and two mystery stories featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas: Murder is Murder is Murder and The Caravaggio Shawl. After checking the publication dates I decided to start with this one because it’s the earliest.

Actually, I was surprised to see that this was published in 1984, so it comes after all of the Phil Andros stories (although it is possible that he wrote it earlier and couldn’t find a publisher). The setting is the late 1930s, with a postscript that takes place after the war, so he might have written it as early as then. If so, it would not have been publishable at the time due to the homosexual content and graphic sex.

I was surprised, also, at how much sex there is in the book. Sexy, isn’t the right word. Rather sex-obsessive. Nor is the novel pornographic, in the way the Phil Andros stories are. But from the title, I had imagined that the book was a portrait of the general population of Paris. Given that Samuel Steward was friends with Gertrude and Alice and pretty much every writer and artist of the time (especially the gay ones) I was hoping for a memoir on the order of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Instead, the novel focuses on stories of one man only, the (as far as I know) fictional, Arthur Lyly. Lyly is British, wealthy, a Baron, having spent a rebellious youth, attracted to the sordid and seamy side of life, enlisted in the navy, fathered a child off a woman in Spain then abandoned them both, lives the low life in Paris and has become, now, a talented painter. After they meet in the opening scene, Lyly becomes a friend of the first person narrator, clearly based on Steward himself using the name John McAndrews, the same stand-in name Steward used for the story titled “The Cuba Caper” from 1965 and included in the short story collection Different Strokes. That date gives evidence that perhaps this novel’s at least initial writing dates from the same time. In “The Cuba Caper” McAndrews is called “Jock”. Here, Arthur calls him “Mac.”

Mac in the novel, like Steward in real life, was a graduate student in literature in Chicago in the 1930s. Like Steward, Mac is given an introduction to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by a professor, and when Mac visits France for a summer break he visits the couple at their country home outside Paris. Later, he visits them also at their home in the city. Gertrude and Alice, though, are minor characters in the book. Instead, Mac’s friendship with Lyly, and Lyly’s exploits with, and exploitation of, men he picks up is the spine of the novel. There are four such encounters.

The first is with a man named Wally Herrick. Each chapter is given a date as a title, so this is July 18, 1935, but presented in the first sentence as “once upon a time, all those years ago.” This is Mac’s first visit to Paris. Gertrude knows Lyly because Lyly is a painter, and she tells Mac his history. Lyly arrives at Gertrude and Alice’s home accompanied by Wally whom Lyly picked up while traveling in the States, and who Mac immediately recognizes as a man who works as a masseur in a Chicago bath house and also works for the mob collecting “protection” money. Mac further knows that Wally uses his position at the baths to meet and blackmail closeted gay men. Mac warns Lyly, but Lyly ignores the threat and is excited by the danger. The rest of the story is Wally’s eventually successful scheme to steal from Lyly even going so far as to take ownership of Lyly’s vacation house and then sell it, after which he disappears back to the United States. Lyly doesn’t appear to mind too much. The loss of the house is never mentioned again.

The next story begins two years later. The chapter is dated April 16, 1937 (p. 77). This one involves a British sailor named Peter Quint. (Neither Mac nor Lyly remark that this is the name of the dead valet in James’ The Turn of the Screw). Although Mac meets Peter first, Peter pairs off with Lyly over their shared naval history. The sex is good. But Lyly seems to be mentally impaired. The story ends with Peter making a sudden suicide attempt by jumping off a bridge into the Seine as the three men are walking together. He survives, but is confined to a hospital as his mental state deteriorates further. Mac notices that Lyly’s creativity seems to feed on danger, drama, and excitement. He does his best work with that heightened energy. In fact, Mac begins to suspect that Lyly may have deliberately prompted Peter’s mental crisis so Lyly could feed off his energy.

Story three begins with a chapter dated June 6, 1939 (p. 124). This one concerns a violent hustler named Andre. Again, Mac and Lyly meet him together but he pairs off with Lyly. The fact that Andre is a convicted murderer only excites Lyly further. Andre and Lyly have violent sex. Mac learns that not only does Andre know Jean Genet but, “Yeah, I know him. I used to be one of his boys. He’s a good guy. I used to beat the hell outa him. He liked it” (p. 145). Andre has never read any of Genet’s books, but he’s in one that Mac recognizes. “I knew what Genet had said about him. The episode made the story of Adrien Baillon.” The novel is Our Lady of the Flowers, which wasn’t actually published until 1943. Andre says Genet used to call him Dede. And Steward, as Mac, reflecting with thoughts that sound like his own method of writing, says, “And Genet had used that name, too, in the novel I had translated as a labor of love. An author picks from here and there, sews, patches, selects, quilts a thousand fragments together. Everything is adjusted–nothing in fiction is ever wholly true or untrue” (p. 145). Eventually Lyly’s affair with Andre goes too far. Lyly arranges for a gendarme he knows (they met when Peter Quint needed to be rescued from the Seine) to surprise Lyly and Andre having brutal sex and threaten Andre with arrest for assault, thus ending their affair. Mac then takes Andre on a short vacation trip himself.

The fourth story begins only a month later. The chapter is dated, July 16, 1939 (p. 165). This time the man is actually a boy, 17 years old. He catches Mac’s eye at the opera. Then Lyly and Mac find him again at a bar. The boy is new in Paris, from Spain, on his own, and beautiful. Lyly takes him in. Lyly is smitten with him and imagines hiring him as his valet. Slowly the story comes out. Juan is not Spanish, but a Gypsy. His mother had an affair with a man she never saw again, and his father is, you guessed it (I guessed it) Arthur Lyly. This is too much, even for Lyly. He breaks down and tells Mac that he has decided to disappear.

The two postscript chapters are dated 1948. Although the World War intrudes there is no mention of it. And although the episodes with Andre and Juan occur only a few months before the war begins there is no sense of rising dread or impact on the characters, the way there is in Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. In the first postscript chapter, Mac meets with Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude had died in 1946. Lyly had sent them each a postcard during the intervening nine years, but he had stayed “disappeared” and then wound up dead, floating in the Chicago river. Alice and Mac chat about “that new American writer, James somebody or other” (p. 206) who has sent Alice a copy of his book. She didn’t like it, and later makes a pun “It’s not even purty good” making it clear which author they are talking about. Elsewhere in the novel Steward name drops George Platt Lynes (p. 99). In the final chapter, Mac meets Juan, in his room in Paris. Juan has become a prostitute, his beauty and innocence are gone.

The novel is a glimpse of a kind of twentieth century gay life before Stonewall. Mac and Lyly are able to live somewhat more openly in Paris than they could in either America or Britain, but they’re still concerned about what other people think about them. They seem satisfied enough, but their lives are constricted in ways that feel sad from the post-gay liberation perspective. Neither believes in love or fidelity between men, only transient sex. The sex is only based on physical attraction, not romance. As intelligent, cultured, upper-class men, they seek uneducated, lower class sex partners: laborers, sailors, criminals, youth, never a partnership of equals. They fetishize the strength of male bodies but can only imagine strength being expressed as violence. They idolize beauty and youth, and bemoan getting older.

Steward writes a self-revealing paragraph later in the novel in the voice of Mac. “I had a fleeting vision of myself grown old, darkening the gray hair along the temples, clipping the long hairs from nostrils and ears, rubbing eye cream into the pockets beneath my eyes, wearing a male girdle of some sort–doing all the things that are presumed to delay the dreadful slackening of the flesh, to postpone the death of youth–but never do. I hoped to be spared such panic activity. When I was seventeen I knew I was going to be seventy, and busily–sometimes hysterically–I had been storing up memories, tangible objects and souvenirs to sustain me after I ‘retired’. When the day of renunciation came, I would stop as a good man should, and live among the memories. Yet I wonder if my resolve to renounce it all would be firm when the time came” (p. 175).

There’s a picture of the older Samuel Steward on the book jacket flap. He looks perfectly fine. And I hope, in the 1980s and later (he lived until 1993) that he was able to enjoy some of the post-Stonewall gay life that his earlier life and work contributed to making possible.