Despite what Ernest Hemingway would have his readers believe in A Moveable Feast, the subject of sex for Gertrude Stein was always kept quiet or cleverly coded. It was fallout from Oscar Wilde's imprudence regarding his sexual relationships with men. In 1895, Wilde, who was married and the father of two children, filed a libel suit against the father of Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas was a young lover of Wilde's. The father, Marquis of Queensberry, had been publicly harassing Wilde regarding his sexual proclivities. The libel suit backfired and Wilde ended up serving two years of hard labor in the British penal system that broke his health and struck fear among the gay community of Stein's time. Conversely, Paris was a safe place to hide in plain sight and so Stein made her home there with her lifelong partner Alice B. Toklas.

Because life and art blend for an artist, the small details of every day existence tend to enter the work. This was especially true for Stein who made ordinary objects in her groundbreaking extended poem Tender Buttons be seen in an entirely fresh way. Here the Steiny Road Poet pauses to gloss her choice of the word fresh, which not only means new as in recently produced but also veers in slang vernacular to impudent as in saucy or immodest. What artists do is push the limits, but the trick is not to go over the edge. Things that suggest sex, especially sexual darkness, are infinitely more artful than those techniques that "let it all hang out."

HOW THE STEIN OPERA OPENED AS A FIGHT OVER SHOES

In the third workshop of Gertrude Stein Invents A Jump Early On, the Steiny Road Poet's collaboration with composer William Banfield, Nancy Rhodes, the developing director, and Dominick Amendum, one of the developing music directors, suggested that the conflict between Gertrude and her brother Leo needed to be further developed.

So the Poet dug deep reading letters written by Leo Stein, his book Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose, Brenda Wineapple's biographical work Sister Brother: Gertrude & Leo Stein as well as original texts by Gertrude Stein such as "Two," a piece in which Gertrude explores her conflict with her brother Leo. Looking for some vibrations of the sister and brother, the Poet also ambushed two of her poet friends Hilary Tham and Miles Moore and persuaded them to accompany her on a visit to the hard-to-find Villa I Tatti on the outskirts of Florence, Italy, the former home of the philosopher Bernard Berenson. Berenson was a friend of Leo Stein and on several occasions, he hosted both Leo and Gertrude, although Berenson's wife Mary did not know what to make of Gertrude describing her as "A fat, unwieldy person, the color of mahogany, but with a grand monumental head, plenty of brains and immense geniality — a really splendid woman."

What the Steiny Road Poet wrote based on her studies are the following lines:

Leo

Poetry realizes, Gertrude,
it doesn't describe.

[Leo looks around and moves to Marie who is sitting
with her shoe dangling off her foot.]

Leo

Take Marie's shoe,

[Leo takes it from Marie's foot and holds it up.]

Leo

Tell me what you see.

Gertrude

A shallow hole
rose on red,
a shallow hole
in and in
this makes ale less.
It shows shine.

Leo

Gertrude, the point is
to see the shoe in relation
to Picasso's studio.

[Gertrude smiles, nods yes, and waves to MoL to come
join her.]

Leo

What are you
talking about?

Master of the Libretto (MoL): [to Gertrude]

Is Leo a genius?

Leo

Do we drink
out of shoes? Look, I like
to get to the bottom
of things.

[He pauses. Gertrude frowns, tilts her head considering
the question.]

Master of the Libretto: [to Gertrude]

You could be a genius.

Leo

I could be a poet—
I'd write about
tiny feet and shoes
with silver buckles
perched on a closet shelf
behind a red curtain.
Can't you see them?
 

METAPHYSICS AND FOOT FETISHISM

Since the conflict between Gertrude and Leo centered on her writing, the Poet looked for the heart of the conflict there. Clearly in the title of Leo's book Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose, one would suspect that Leo had deep feelings about what poetry ought to be and how to write a poem. Poetry realizes, it doesn't describe are Leo's words. A shallow hole/ rose on red, a shallow hole/ in and in/ this makes ale less./ It shows shine./ are Gertrude's words from Tender Buttons and these words describe a shoe. Gertrude, like lots of women, had a particular love of shoes.

Leo had no idea about his sister's metaphysical approach to poetry that was influenced by their teacher William James. Yes, both Gertrude and Leo learned about the nature of reality from the same Harvard professor. Leo, being a year or so older than Gertrude and a cultural product of his time where men's voices and opinions meant more than women's, apparently did not bother to find out what Gertrude was thinking and experimenting with.

Somewhere in the Poet's studies, she understood that Leo had a foot fetish and that fetishes associated with the foot may be related to sexual imprinting to a child's own mother's feet. Here the Poet invented the situation about Amelia Stein's closet and shoes, but because Gertrude and Leo's mother Amelia took to her bed gravely ill with a female cancer when they were adolescents, it seems possible that Leo, who had trouble with his love life and was overly sensitive as a boy, would have had a fixation on his mother.

PLUMBING THE FAMILIAL WELL

And besides what siblings argue about and have irreparable fights over usually spring from a psychological well of hurts that radiate beyond the siblings and often involve the parents. Dead parents seem to make these kind of fights worse because the living sibling then becomes a whipping-boy for the angry offspring. Possibly Gertrude was abused sexually by a male relative, maybe by her father Daniel during the time of her mother's illness. The relationship with Leo was unusually close. Gertrude had clung to Leo since childhood. They were best friends who wrote off the failings of their parents, were educated by some of the same teachers at Harvard, shared an apartment in Paris as young adults and invested together in modern art. So when Leo decided to leave 27 rue de Fleurus to pursue the woman who eventually he married, the fight over Gertrude's writing took on a larger meaning and allowed Gertrude to transfer her dependence and love to Alice Toklas.

Now that the stress of the world premiere production by Encompass New Opera Theatre is behind the creators of Gertrude Stein Invents A Jump Early On, the Poet, in listening to a recording from one of those five performances mounted in June 2005, gravitates first to this part of the opera that deals with the fight over shoes. She continues to marvel at the sensitivity Bill Banfield infused into the music of this passage. Over the five years of developing this work, Bill indicated that he really did not relish writing new music once the musical work was initially drafted. Possibly he believed he could not get back into the mood of the Stein opera and that he would understandably move on to other projects where new monetary support existed.

Another dimension to this passage that surfaces each time the Poet hears it is the conversations she had with Justin Vickers who played Leo not only in the premiere but also in a Stein opera workshop with singers who were not selected for the premiere. Early on before Nancy and Dominick made their comments, Justin suggested that Leo needed to be more developed. Thus at the urging of the artistic director, music director and the singer playing Leo, the Poet explored Leo's arrested sexual development where a shoe slipped off the foot of the drunken painter Marie Laurencin became a trigger point between the brother and sister as well as smoldering test of reality. What did Gertrude see? What vision gave Leo the right to lecture his sister? Who was the genius — Leo or Gertrude?

According to Oscar Wilde, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace." In the art of sex in the arts, where that line is drawn marks the difference between elegance and vulgarity.