But one day, as she sits in Gertrude Stein’s apartment reading some of Stein’s word portraits, she has an epiphany. She describes the writing as “vivisectional, as if emotions were revealing themselves in their original state of being.” She relates experiencing another similarly intense emotion while later viewing some of Matisse’s vivid work. That feeling she called “a sense of life in the living.”

In addition to enlightening anecdotes about the painters Picasso, Matisse, and Rousseau (“the darling of the Montmartre group of painters”), Levy records her impressions of some of the less-renowned personalities then living in Paris: the temperamental Swedish-American sculptor, Peter David Edstrom; the greedy Russian art collector, Stronkine; the soft-spoken French poet, André Salmon; and the energetic American journalist who sought out and translated French plays into English, Mildred Aldrich. These first-hand accounts are valuable because they round out what we know about the circle of writers and artists working in Paris at the time, shining a spotlight on some of the less famous men and women who were part of the Steins’ world.

With Paris Portraits, Levy gives us her sense of life in the living during the early years of the twentieth century and the avant-garde movement in Paris, as well as the difficult and competing personalities of Gertrude and Sarah Stein.

Levy also recounts the development of the relationship between Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, as well as the influence Christian Science has on many of the members of this erudite circle. When Sarah Stein grows interested in the Christian Science movement, she channels the ardor she previously reserved for Matisse’s work into the healing practice and abandons her preoccupation with art. The sculptor Edstrom actually marries Cora Downer, the practitioner who introduced Christian Science to Europe. And in the chapter, “Fiesole: Sarah Heals Me,” Levy relates how she herself, after eight years of unspecified mobility problems, regains her ability to walk “without distress” when Gertrude orders Sarah to heal her. Levy offers no rational explanation for the healing, but confides that she did not believe that God was responsible. “Everyone who has known me intimately has remarked on my capacity for ingratitude,” she writes. She seems to simply accept her improvement as a matter of course, rather than as any sort of divine intervention.

With Paris Portraits, Levy gives us her sense of life in the living during the early years of the twentieth century and the avant-garde movement in Paris, as well as the difficult and competing personalities of Gertrude and Sarah Stein. A foreword by Deborah Kirshman, the former Fine Arts Editor and Assistant Director of the University of California Press, illumines Levy’s verbal portraits, as do the several historic photographs in the book. Kirshman notes the significance of the substantial influence a group of intellectual Jews from San Francisco had on the avant-garde movement in Paris.

A shortcoming of the book is that at times it seems to relate mere gossip. Levy’s writing moves from anecdote to anecdote, without making many overarching conclusions. Neither Levy nor Kirshman reports when the journal was written, and, therefore, how much hindsight was involved in Levy’s observations.

At the outset of World War I, Harriet Levy moved back to the safety of California. She was to visit Paris one more time fifteen years later, eager to show Gertrude the manuscript of a story she had written. But Gertrude, she relates, was too busy talking about her personal affairs and self-avowed greatness to listen—and there Paris Portraits ends. According to a brief biographical note in the back of the book, Levy returned to San Francisco once more and “led a life of eccentricity and independence” until her death in 1950.