Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (12 page)
Authors: justin spring
Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Social Science, #College teachers - Illinois - Chicago, #Gay authors, #Literary, #Human Sexuality, #Novelists; American - 20th century, #General, #Sexology - Research - United States - History - 20th century, #Psychology, #Artists; Architects; Photographers, #Body Art & Tattooing, #Authors; American, #College teachers, #Gay authors - United States, #Steward; Samuel M, #Tattoo artists, #Pornography - United States - History - 20th century, #Novelists; American, #Gay Studies, #Authors; American - 20th century, #Education, #Art, #Educators, #Pornography, #20th century, #Tattoo artists - New York (State) - New York, #Sexology, #Poets; American, #Literary Criticism, #Poets; American - 20th century, #Biography & Autobiography, #Teaching Methods & Materials, #Biography
After Steward got back to Chicago, he offered to help Stein arrange a second lecture tour in the United States, for he worried about her safety in Europe. But upon finding he could do little for her, he came up instead with a project for her amusement. “Six weeks ago I started to work on this Mixmaster which I am going to send you,” he wrote. Of this strange undertaking he later recalled,
I remembered the village fair [we had attended together] at Virieu-le-Grand,
*
and how Gertrude had said she liked things that went around—gramophone records, whirling grouse, egg-beaters and the world. [So] the Mixmaster seemed like the perfect gift, and useful to Alice as well…[Though Stein wrote me not to send it] I thought of all the trouble [I had already taken]—the special wiring, the wire-strapped shipping box—and sent it anyway, by parcel post [in late November 1939].
Since Europe was now engulfed in a world war, Steward doubted the Mixmaster would ever arrive. In late spring 1940, however, he had a note:
My Dearest Sammy,
The Mix master came Easter Sunday, and we have not had time to more than read the literature put it together and gloat, oh so beautiful is the Mix master, so beautiful…we are very happy to have it here, bless you Sammy, Madame Roux said oui il est si gentil,
et en effet
he is dear little Sammy, Easter morning, what a spring, lovely as I have never seen anything lovely…Alice all smiles and murmurs in her dreams, Mix master
Gertrude
Steward continued to entertain Stein during the bleak months that followed by filling her in on his various projects:
I’m writing…but the Eleven isn’t ripe yet, I guess. Beginning in that vein, however, and using the details of a little story Sir Francis Rose told me (and changing the details to a situation I knew about myself) I am writing a novel in the light tone and being veddy veddy gay about it all, and have 120 pages done…If you come I hope you’ll like it. (And everyone hopes you will come, and wonders when it would be.)
…This one is going to leave Loyola, next September at the latest…For 3 reasons: one, an e$pecially obviou$ and nece$$ary con$ideration; two, security of tenure; three, a pension for the twilight years…I am so tired of Catholics. For a long while I hated the idea of losing the “prestige” of teaching in a university; but…you can’t put prestige in the bank. All the machinery for making a change is in motion now.
Steward contacted the film director William Dieterle with the idea of doing a movie about Stein’s life, and in a subsequent note to Stein about it, he described his progress on his novel—“There is a lot of
Tristam Shandy
in it, and Ronald Firbank and Norman Douglas, and Richard Hughes’ understatement, but more in it of Gertrude Stein and her influence than anything else.” He then confessed obliquely that he had been beaten by a street pickup:
I have been in the hospital for five days, there are three stories to it all, the official, the semi-official, and the true…the official is that I was in an auto accident and had some stitches in my chin, and a subcorneal hemorrhage, and a cracked rib, etc. But I am definitely on the mend now and it was not bad so you mustn’t worry, and the Wilcoxes say it is all right because my ethereal beauty is not changed, except I look very distinguished with the goatee the stitches forced me to grow for a little while.
The “true story,” as Steward later wrote in his unpublished memoir, was that “when prowling the dark alleys of the Chicago Loop, I was set upon by someone who disapproved of my tastes and inclinations, hit on the chin with a brass-knuckled fist (ten stitches) and laid to rest in a hospital for several days. My cover story that I had been mugged was accepted easily enough, Chicago’s reputation being what it was.” In fact, Steward’s craving for rough and dangerous encounters had intensified in the past few months and would continue to do so during the war years; one such encounter, a bar pickup on the South Side of Chicago, resulted in a seven-hour ordeal as a sexual captive.
*
On May 21, Steward (who had remained at Loyola despite his earlier plan to leave) wrote Stein that with Europe now impossible to reach, he hoped to summer among French-speaking people in Quebec, and added, “I have finished my little book at last—or think I have—it’s only about 45,000 words long, but that’s as long as any of Thornton’s.”
By midsummer, though, he wrote her that his plans had changed once again:
I’m leaving tomorrow to spend August on an island off the coast of Maine—Cora Gould that old lady with eight millions wrote and said, would you like to spend it here at my expense, and so naturally I said yes…the address will be The Moors, Vinalhaven, Maine…I guess I will not be drafted since my 31st birthday was the 23rd, I thought of Basket II’s birthday
*
on July 22d, and of how last year I was with you…I was real unhappy thinking of all that…
I may see Thornton sometime in August or September, I suppose you know he is at Bass Rocks Theater in Gloucester playing in his play
*
just at the moment. He seems to be just about the same. I am going to write the 11 or make a good beginning while I am at Maine; I re-read it the other day and decided what was there was really good and I’m going on with it. I finished the other little thing, Houghton-Mifflin had been pestering me despite the fact I kept saying, no, how could anyone who published Keats and Hawthorne, how could they publish such a frivolous Firbankian thing, but they insisted on seeing it and of course didn’t want it, so I am taking it to Bennett Cerf when I go to New York and then to Simon and Schuster after that if he doesn’t want it.
*
Steward’s visit to Maine was not particularly exciting; he recalled it many years later as “Vinalhaven, that island off Rockland [where I had] more shore dinners than you c[oul]d count…And not much sex. The ‘host’ (whom one paid) was the ole broken-down 2-rate poet Harold Vinal; the island named for his ancestors, I guess.” Even in that remote place, however, he managed to scare up some fun: one Dr. Ralph Bowen performed oral sex on him five times. Of it Steward later noted, “Mouth of emptiness, excellent.”
Steward had hoped to see Wilder while vacationing in New England, but a brisk postcard from Wilder put an end to that plan: “Forgive the hurried card: working like a n[ig]g[e]r: acting, directing, & writing. I wish I could see Maine this summer and have some good long talks with you but when these present distractions are over I must nail myself down to my desk…Have a good rest, and once rested put pen to paper again. All my best as ever, Thornton.”
By the end of summer 1940, Steward could barely reach Stein by mail; as a result “letters [from Stein and Toklas became] sporadic. Sometimes my letters stayed in occupied Paris a year before reaching them, and theirs to me were similarly delayed.” Nonetheless, in October, he wrote Stein,
Well, Thornton was here and…he is the same old Thornton only he is talking a little more than usual about getting old and I think he is, I think maybe he needs a psychiatrist to work on him a little. He is more nervous and fussy and fidgety than he ever was before and he works very hard going places real fast and being athletic, I think to convince himself he is still young…
Everyone is becoming awfully patriotic…and quite naturally some of us even though we are patriotic are inclined
a vomir
*
at all the fuss…You can’t walk a block without seeing someone in uniform…
[The military] would probably use me in the intelligence service whatever that may be…it is all very exciting, and with things outside you that exciting it matters less about your own importance to yourself inside yourself, or maybe not, maybe it is just that the excitement gets inside you as well and you temporarily are dulled and so don’t notice the lack…
Wilder, in passing through Chicago, enjoyed a night with Steward at the Stevens Hotel, and wrote him a long letter afterward from Albany, New York, which concluded:
…So many things come back to me that we didn’t have time to talk about.
But it was very fine seeing you and thanks…
Do sit down some rainy afternoon and write me—anything, moods, anything.
Ever y’r’ old
Thornton
Although Steward kept no journals during the 1940s, letters from Wendell Wilcox to Stein indicate that Steward was significantly depressed in the fall of 1940: “Sam…is very unhappy and we are trying to soothe him. He is having a very trying time and Esther
*
thinks it is partly not wanting to be in a church any more.” He also added that “Thornton’s
Our Town
was in town…Sam saw it and cried.”
In spring of 1941, Steward wrote Wilder in anticipation of Wilder’s return to Chicago to teach the summer session at the University of Chicago. Though Wilder discarded the letter, Steward saved Wilder’s response, written from Medellín, Colombia, which suggested a lover’s quarrel: “So you do write letters after all! So you aren’t mad at me! My God—after all that silence I thought you’d decided to efface me, so that I shrugged my shoulders with assured pique and said: all right, so I’ll efface Sam.”
•
Steward spent more time with Wilder that summer, but then traveled alone to Quebec for his August vacation, there writing Stein,
It is Quebec now, out of my love for France, and I have a room with a little balcony looking out over an infinite expanse of the St. Lawrence and next door the
très elegant
Chateau Frontenac, and just a little below me the board-walk where all Quebec in the evenings parades endlessly, looking pathetically for sex and sin or excitement or something. The people are very strange…The first person [I have spoken to in five days] is a real French sailor, of a
sous-marin
crew that had been at Dakar, and it was strange and thrilling to hear good French again…Mostly I just sit on the promenade of afternoons and read a mystery, I read one a day now and the passion has more than got me…
I think Thornton is a little sillier than he ever was [and] more hysterical than ever…
It has been a sort of easy year for me, I am teaching entirely downtown now, and that is better, the people are much more mature. I suppose I shall stay on though I have been trying to get in the Naval Intelligence Service doing something, I would much rather be using my brains than my body when war comes, and of course it will in September sometime. I got deferred in the draft because of my aunts “partial dependence” but in case of actualities I’d be right in the middle of the senseless thing. And the navy has always had an attraction for me.
Steward’s interest in joining the navy was based in no small part on his long-standing fascination with sailors—and indeed, Chicago was just then awash with them, for hordes of men in training for the United States Navy were doing so just forty miles north of Chicago. Of the four million American men who saw active duty in the U.S. Navy during World War II, one million would be trained at Great Lakes Training Station, the nation’s largest naval training facility. By September 1942, well over one hundred thousand sailors were enlisted there, and all of them were taking their liberty breaks in downtown Chicago.
Young, vital, socially unencumbered, and forced into celibacy during long months at sea, the sailor on shore leave has long been considered an archetype of sexual availability, and Steward, like many homosexuals of his generation, had an abiding interest in picking them up, for they were well known as easy “trade.”
*
By World War II, the openness of sailors to any sort of sexual experience largely went without saying, and cultural references to it abounded—from the sly song lyrics of Cole Porter (“what’s Central Park / without a sailor?”), to the scandalous homoerotic paintings of Paul Cadmus, to the intimate homoerotic watercolors of Charles Demuth. Plays, musicals, and ballets based on World War II experience would continue to establish the sailor as a figure of romantic and sexual longing in years to come, as evidenced by the tight-pantsed sailor in Tennessee Williams’s drama
The Rose Tattoo
, as well as similarly attired young sailors in Jerome Robbins’s ballet
Fancy Free
, and Comden and Green’s musical
On the Town
.
*
Of the sailor’s uniform, Steward later wrote,
Most uniforms make the bodies beneath them more exciting—some in greater degree than others. For me, and perhaps for a majority of others like me, the sailor’s uniform top[s] the list.
…The sailor’s uniform, I decided…represents a way of life that most of us can never know…He fights for us who are left at home in the dull round of living…beneath the rough wool there beats a heart more brave and gallant than any we have ever known…The uniform surrounds him with the shimmering glitter of an illusion, and we are frozen into our positions of adoration and desire. The uniform is the psychic link—the gazing-glass through which we look into another world.
Although at thirty-one Steward was too old to be drafted (the average American sailor in 1945 was approximately twenty-five, and only one in two had completed high school), he had a good ability with languages and had studied codebreaking through an army-sponsored course. As a result he began teaching cryptography at Loyola in anticipation of entering army intelligence. But when school let out in June of 1943, he impetuously enlisted instead as a seaman: