Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (4 page)

Though pressed by his interviewer, Steward declined to give any further details of the sexual encounter.
^*
But young Steward emerged from the hotel room not only with the autograph, but also with a swatch of Valentino’s pubic hair,
^*
which he subsequently kept in a monstrance at his bedside until the end of his life.
^*
The experience was all the more trenchant for Steward because within a month Valentino suddenly ruptured his appendix and died, aged thirty-one.

Though unable to discuss his encounter with high school friends, Steward memorialized this and other sexual experiences by keeping records and collecting memorabilia. Steward’s first sexual experience had taken place only two years before, but he already had a secret list of all his encounters that he had transcribed in coded notations, occasionally supplementing these notes with physical souvenirs that carried their own erotic charge. Through these collections of facts, figures, and objects, Steward was able to put the experiences into order, to consider their relative importance (or unimportance), and, essentially, to daydream about his own risk-taking sexual activities with a sense of both detachment and control. Through them he would enter a state of erotic reverie—one in which he saw himself not only as safe, secure, and very much at the center of his sexuality, but also as a daredevil, a risk taker, and a sexual hero—a young man both larger than life and impervious to its cruelties.

•

By the time he finished high school in 1927, Steward was eager to begin a new phase of exploring his sexuality, this time through writing:

Paying his way through school as a part-time librarian, Steward took a BA with honors in 1931. As an undergraduate he helped organize student protests against the racial segregation of the fraternity system (despite having grown up in a segregated town, Steward maintained friendships with blacks throughout his life) and also against the presence of the ROTC on campus. He also participated in amateur theatricals, wrote poetry and prose for the school literary magazine and newspaper, and played in a jazz combo at school dances and mixers.

Steward found significant inspiration at OSU in a sympathetic mentor—a professor upon whom he would later model himself as both a teacher and a literary dandy. Clarence “Clare” Andrews, an elegant man of letters, had published several books, including the novel
The Innocents of Paris
(1928), which had been turned into a 1929 film starring Maurice Chevalier. He regularly summered in Europe and was a friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas; on one occasion he had even helped eject Hemingway (who was drunk) from their home. “Always elegantly groomed, tie carefully knotted…[he was] the very model of a professor,” Steward later wrote. “I
inhaled
him, I worshipped his intellect and understanding, and I patterned my teaching career around him.”

While Andrews was homosexual, he was discreet about it, and partnered, and he wisely kept Steward at a careful arm’s length. “[When] I wrote a short novel (imitative of
Death in Venice
, I fear)…Andrews read it, and scolded me for my preoccupation with sex.” Nonetheless Steward met a number of established literary figures through him, including William Butler Yeats.

Even while an undergraduate, Steward dabbled in various forms of literary bohemianism, for he had read all about bohemian life in Ben Hecht’s
Count Bruga
,
^*
and he had joined a group of young people crafting similarly “artistic” lives for themselves in a tenement building at 31 East Long Street in downtown Columbus. Though far from Greenwich Village, these young artists and writers listened to
Le Sacre du Printemps
on the Victrola at their cocktail parties, and read all the latest art and literary magazines. The group included Steward’s best friend and classmate Marie Anderson, a stylish lesbian who ultimately left Columbus to become a Communist, and Bobbie Creighton, a worldly young prostitute with a substantial collection of literary erotica and pornography. According to Steward, Creighton gladly lent him copies of “early poetry by Pound, the work of Joyce and Stein and e.e. cummings, the suppressed drawings of Felicien Robs,
^*
[and] the work of J. K. Huysmans.” Creighton’s collection of erotic books, poems, and pictures was profoundly important to Steward, for it described many varieties of sexual awareness—including homosexual ones—at a time when, according to the novelist Carl van Vechten, there was not “a single English or American novel of the first rank that deal[t] with [homosexuality] save in a perfunctory or passing way.” (In fact, her pornography collection fascinated him to the point of complete distraction, in a way he would later describe in his first novel,
Angels on the Bough
.) But by far the most important works that he found in her collection were the “decadent” early novels of Huysmans, for they were works upon which Steward would fashion his life.

As a slight but handsome young man now sporting a mildly outrageous pompadour and a racy pencil mustache, Steward had an easy enough time convincing young male undergraduates to have sex with him. He noted in his memoirs, “I went to Columbus with the major purpose of bringing pleasure to others, mainly straight young men.” He also observed that “none of us was coy in those days…We all liked to experiment [and] we found the direct approach daring.” In one instance, while fooling around in a frat house with an old friend from Woodsfield,
^*
the two were discovered by another frat member. In order to help his friend save face, Steward then pleasured a number of other frat members—for among these young men, only those who performed oral sex were considered homosexual.
^*

Steward had been exploring his sexual attraction to boys in his own writings beginning at age fourteen,
^*
and he continued to address the topic of homosexuality in his academic writings throughout his college and graduate school career. The question of how to discuss homosexuality would, in fact, be the central question of his writing life; not only would it preoccupy Steward during his early literary and academic career, but it would also be central to his later work as a diarist, sex researcher, and erotic author.

None of Steward’s academic writings on homosexuality ever achieved mainstream publication,
^*
but his poems and short stories from the same period have survived, and in both the stories and the poems, sexuality is often the subject. He began publishing his romantic verses in the
Columbus Dispatch
starting at age eighteen, and by March 1930, his junior year, he had published a poem in the magazine
Contemporary Verse
. Benjamin Musser, the editor of that magazine, took a special interest in Steward, and eventually obtained a small yearly college stipend for him from the philanthropist Cora Smith Gould.

Musser (1889–1951) was a very minor poet, and he would eventually leave literary publishing for a religious vocation,
^*
but at the time Steward met him in 1928, he was best known as the publisher of two small magazines,
Contemporary Verse
and
JAPM: The Poetry Weekly
.
^*
Though closeted, Musser had written and privately published the anonymous homoerotic novel
The Strange Confession of Monsieur Montcairn
. Through marriage, meanwhile, he had become wealthy enough to set himself up as a publisher of new and emerging (young male) poets.

Steward met Musser at a poetry reading at Columbus’s Chittenden Hotel and later noted, “From that chance meeting (as Huysmans wrote in
A Rebours
^*
) sprang a mistrustful friendship that endured for several years.” Musser, then in his forties, promptly became infatuated with Steward, and forthwith introduced him to a wider circle of poets and literary figures, including Harold Vinal, secretary of the Poetry Society of America.

Steward was himself an able poet. His Italian sonnet “Virginia to Harlotta,” written at age nineteen, presciently describes a consciousness divided between virtuous chastity and thankless promiscuity:

In a sense, the poem serves as an emblem of Steward’s sexuality during his early years in academe, as he pined for fine young men who would never love him, while at the same time he had any number of vigorous, semianonymous encounters with others about whom he had few illusions, and who in return had few illusions about him. The form of the poem, meanwhile, shows Steward’s interest in the sonnets of Petrarch, on whom he would later publish an essay in the
Sewanee Review
.

Musser invited Steward to visit him in New York, and subsequently to a number of romantic getaways at his beach house in Margate, near Atlantic City. In his
Bozart
gossip column of March 1930, Musser gleefully noted, “Sam Steward made his very first visit to New York [this past month] and the greater thrill was mine in showing him around…we made New Year whoopee at Parker Tyler’s
^*
apartment; Idella Purnell lunched with us one day and Harold Vinal the next.”

Apart from meeting these two poet-publishers
^*
(the latter best remembered in E. E. Cummings’s verse indictment of bad poetry, “poem, or beauty hurts mr. vinal”), Steward had a number of other New York adventures, only one of which has survived in print: he traveled up to Harlem with an unnamed lesbian friend to visit the postal clerk Alexander Gumby in his large studio apartment on Fifth Avenue between 131st and 132nd streets. Gumby’s gay literary salon drew many of Harlem’s theatrical and artistic luminaries; Steward, who enjoyed the sexual company of black men throughout his life, later recalled it as an evening of “reefer, bathtub gin, a game of truth, and assorted homosexual carryings-on.” But he was otherwise nonplussed by New York. “NYC is fun,” he observed to a friend at the end of his life, “but it drains you quickly (or it always did me) and the entanglements and cross-purposes and switchings and turnarounds make it seem like an emotional railroad yard, with everything working well but not much actually getting done.”