Parisian Lives

I find Samuel Steward endlessly fascinating. He was a professor of English at Northwestern University, a friend of Gertrude & Alice, a tattoo artist and a pornographer. Parisian Lives is a novel loosely based on people Steward knew in France in the late '30's, including a character, Johnny McAndrews, who in this and other of his works is a stand-in for Steward. The plot revolves around Sir Arthur Lyly, another protégé of Gertrude & Alice, a rising painter with a taste for rough trade. But this is really just a frame on which to hang the story of bohemian life in France in the run-up to the Second World War.