Gertrude Stein

(1874—1946)

In 1904 the American-born writer and poet Gertrude Stein moved to Paris with her brother Leo and they collected art works. Stein met the writer Alice B. Toklas in Paris in 1907 and they lived together throughout the post-World War I period, entertaining major literary and artistic figures in their famous art-filled salon at 27, rue de Fleurus (a short walk from Les Jardins et Palais du Luxembourg on the Left Bank). Alice Toklas also was Stein's secretary and the cook. Among their circle of friends were the artists Pablo Picasso (and his wife Olga), Pavel Tchelitchev, Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, the composer Virgil Thomson, the photographers Cecil Beaton, Man Ray and George Platt Lynes, the writers Jean Cocteau, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Bernard Faÿ and Thornton Wilder, her couturier Pierre Balmain, and many others. In 1938 Gertrude and Alice moved to another apartment in Paris at 5, rue Christine.

The twenty-year-old Paul Bowles met Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1931, after corresponding with her. They became friends and she invited Bowles to her summer home in Belignin, in southern France. Stein nicknamed Bowles "Freddy", and she suggested that he was not really a poet. It was Gertrude Stein who advised Bowles to visit Tangier, Morocco—an exotic port city on the Mediterranean which had a mild climate. She and Alice had vacationed in Tangier on several occasions. Bowles took Miss Stein's advise, and he made his first visit to Tangier in August 1931 with his friend and music teacher Aaron Copland, composing music in a house they rented and furnished up on the Old Mountain.

A few of Gertrude Stein's works are Tender Buttons, Three Lives, A Novel of Thank You, The World Is Round, Portraits and Prayers and Four Saints in Three Acts, which Virgil Thomson made into an opera. Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania and died in Paris on July 27, 1946; Alice B. Toklas' works include What Is Remembered, Staying On Alone and The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Toklas was born in San Francisco, California on April 30, 1877 and died In Paris on March 7, 1967. They are buried next to each other in Paris at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Desultory Correspondence: An Interview with Paul Bowles on Gertrude Stein by Florian Vetsch

Charles Henri Ford

(1908-2002)

Poet, editor and artist Charles Henri Ford, lived in Paris from 1930 to 1934, one of the inner circle of Gertrude Stein's salon. Ford, persuaded by Bowles to visit Tangier, arrived in the spring of 1933, and shortly after his friend Djuna Barnes arrived. Ford and Barnes shared Bowles' work studio on the Marshan. There, Paul Bowles worked on his Sonatina for Piano, while Barnes typed her novel Nightwood. Charles Henri Ford was the editor of blues and View magazines, which published some of Paul Bowles' early writings.

(This 1934 photograph above is by Peter Rose-Pulham and copyright © by the Estate of Charles Henri Ford; reproduction without written permission is prohibited.)

Gavin Lambert

(Born in Sussex, England on July 23, 1924; died in Los Angeles, California on July 17, 2005)

Gavin Lambert and Paul Bowles

Gavin Lambert and Kenneth Lisenbee

Virginia Spencer Carr during two of her many visits to Tangier while writing her biography.