Hear historian Harlan Greene share “The Greatest Love Stories Never Told,” about forgotten LGBTQ couples on February 8
When art collector and author Gertrude Stein (center) visited Charleston in February 1935, she and her partner, Alice Toklas, stayed at Villa Margherita on the Battery and toured the city with DuBose Heyward and his wife, Dorothy.
In February 1935, 90 years ago this month, the avant-garde’s advance guard came to Charleston. “Gertrude Stein has arrived,” lights decreed in New York’s Times Square some months earlier when she had returned to her homeland after living in France for about 30 years. It was something of a victory lap for this exponent of Modernism and cryptic author who knew all the geniuses of the day from Picasso to Hemingway. Her book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein’s story told through the voice of her domestic partner and companion), was a best seller, and Stein was touring 37 cities across the country.
On February 3, (Stein’s 61st birthday), the local press reported that “hard-to-get Gertie” was going to address the South Carolina Poetry Society at SC Society Hall on February 13, noting that Stein had been called “everything from a super-genius to a floor-flushing publicity seeker.” After an awkward non-introduction by favorite son and Society founder, DuBose Heyward (Stein wanted to walk up to the podium unannounced as was the Paris custom), she launched into her lecture about punctuation. Poetry, she explained, is about vocabulary, while prose is of nouns. “Interjections have nothing to
do with anything, not even themselves,” she said, puzzling many. Yet a Citadel cadet in the audience saw her “as a source of genuine aesthetic delight” and was taken in by her wardrobe: a dress cut like a monk’s cassock, a yellow scarf, and “spats, not petite, sissy drug-store cowboy spats, but big brown, hairy, masculine spats.”
(Left to right) Stein's partner, Alice Toklas; Stein's book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas & Stein in her Paris salon.
After the lecture, Stein and Toklas spent two nights, including Valentine’s Day, at the romantic Villa Margherita on the Battery, where Stein was interviewed as Toklas watched from a corner of the room. The women toured local sites, including Cypress Gardens, with Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, before departing, leaving many residents trying to decipher the meaning of her lecture. “We liked you in Charleston, tremendously,” Heyward wrote to her, “even if we did not understand you.” A poet and novelist himself, he avoided most nouns and chose his vocabulary carefully.
Love Stories: Hear historian Harlan Greene share “The Greatest Love Stories Never Told,” highlighting forgotten LGBTQ couples on February 8 at 2 p.m. at the Baxter-Patrick James Island Library. For more information, visit https://ccplsc.libcal.com/event/13489220.
