Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (5 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
•
Through Musser’s financial assistance, Steward published his first book with the vanity press Henry Harrison in 1930, a short-story collection entitled
Pan and the fire-bird
. These early stories featured a sexually allusive prose style strongly influenced by James Branch Cabell, whose 1920 novel
Jurgen
(a fantasy tale about a medieval pawnbroker, rife with naughty double entendres and barely concealed allusions to phalluses and sexual activity) had first been suppressed on charges of lascivious obscenity, then subsequently published to scandal-driven success. The collection included, most notably, Steward’s tribute to Valentino, a poem entitled “Libation to a Dead God.”
“With an interweaving of classicism and modernism, a soupcon of delicate decadence and sophisticated naievety [
sic
], the young Ohio poet and word-artist in this first book has linked the later Hellenic spirit with today’s art in storytelling,” Benjamin Musser noted of the book. “In these tales and poem-sketches, Mr. Steward strikes an exquisite note.” But Steward’s collection received few favorable reviews. One noted their frequent use of phallic imagery (the “fire-bird” of the title was in fact a phallus; the bird’s name, “cirpk,” was a none-too-subtle anagram). “That much is subtly suggestive, with an apparent flavor of homosexuality, will make [these stories] popular in certain circles,” the
Dallas News
reported, nonetheless genially adding that “Mr. Steward is worth watching.” A columnist in
The Brooklyn Citizen
, however, took violent exception to the book’s homosexual innuendo: “
Pan and the fire-bird
caught my eye as it lay supinely in our literary editor’s waste basket. I picked it up, read into its mystic and ineffably beautiful (to the initiate) tales of sex life among the Greeks, and tossed it forthwith into my own.”
While Steward might have moved to New York after graduation, he felt no need to “escape” to Greenwich Village. He was managing very well to have all the sex he wanted in Columbus, and moreover he was intent upon an academic career. The “screaming” effeminacy of Greenwich Village homosexuals like Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford was simply not for him; since he preferred encounters with masculine men, and since he was himself masculine in affect, the Village had little allure.
In mid-1930, while traveling out to the Jersey shore to see Musser, Steward had a spontaneous sexual encounter with a Pullman porter that resulted in a lesion upon his glans which his doctor shortly thereafter diagnosed as syphilis, then still a life-threatening disease.
*
“Given my loathing of uncleanliness and my early conditioning,” Steward later recalled, “the shock [of it] nearly unravelled me.” The best treatment then available was “a three year ordeal—[including] weekly shots of Neosalvarsan from a doctor…who had been a classmate of my father’s. And my father had [needed] to know too…” Steward’s father’s only comment on learning of his son’s condition was to repeat what his own father, a country doctor, used to say: “It’s like backing into a buzz saw, ain’t it? You can’t tell which tooth bit you.”
The painful weekly shots gave Steward both purpura and a skin ulcer. After the course of neosalvarsan came a mercury ointment that he had to rub into his armpits and groin, and then a course of saturated solution of potassium iodide “which caused the skin to erupt all over [my] back in what looked like Job’s boils.” The illness made Steward feel polluted, and the trauma brought on by the disease seriously curtailed his sexual activities for the next thirty-six months.
Having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, Steward received a BA with Honors in 1931 and was awarded the title of University Scholar in 1932–33 and University Fellow in English from 1933 to 1934. During this time he worked on a novel (provisionally entitled “Eros in Intaglio”), short stories, and plays. By August 1932 the Columbus
Sunday Star
would note, “The most sought after man on the Ohio State Campus is not a football player, but he’s more elusive than Garbo and has a more successful mustache than Menjou. Listen, gals, he’s Sam Steward, author of
Pan and the fire-bird
[and his] telephone number [is] WA1592.”
The Ohio Stater
of April 1933 likewise nominated Steward for the Ohio State Hall of Fame. During this time, he wrote his master’s thesis, “Mutability in Spenser,” and his dissertation, “Provocatives of the Oxford Movement and Its Nexus with English Literary Romanticism.”
Steward’s intense focus on his studies during the early thirties may have been based primarily on his love of literature; but it was also driven by his fear of both unemployment and poverty, for these were the darkest days of the Great Depression, and neither Steward nor his aunts had any money. During the summer of 1933, he taught creative writing without pay at a provisional summer school for the unemployed. As soon as he was granted his PhD in 1934, he seized the first teaching post he could find, a summer appointment at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia.
•
Steward began a period of spiritual questioning as a graduate student that resulted in his conversion to Catholicism. His journey to faith was not one he ever cared to chronicle in depth, though he did describe a similar journey for a character very much like himself in his 1936 novel
Angels on the Bough
. He did, however, note in his unpublished memoirs that his attraction to Roman Catholicism had been largely sensual, and that he had come to that sensual response primarily through reading the novels of Huysmans:
I went into the church by the back door, as a kind of spiritual experiment…learn[ing] from Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
about a book, in which “in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him,”
*
a book filled with “metaphors as monstrous as orchids,” a “poisonous” book about strange purple sins.
This book was
Against the Grain
[
A Rebours
] by [Joris-Karl] Huysmans. Its sensuality and erudition fascinated me, enchanted me, for it described the life of the senses in terms of mystical philosophy; and the exploits of its hero, Des Esseintes, seemed to range from the ecstasies of a Medieval saint to the confessions of a modern sinner.
Against the Grain
was (and remains) the standard defining example of French decadent fiction, the story of a man who withdraws from society to live in elegant depravity; but it was also the story of homosexual awakening that had inspired Oscar Wilde in both thought and deed. Huysmans’s subsequent work,
Down There
(
Là-Bas
), had combined fiction and autobiography in its study of the black mass and Satanism. “Having developed a passionate admiration for Huysmans,” Steward noted, “I went with him on his climb back from atheism to the Church in
En Route
,
The Cathedral
, and finally
The Oblate
.”
*
While Steward credited Huysmans with his conversion to sensual Catholicism, he was surely also rebelling against his own very chilly Methodist upbringing. The anti-Catholic teachings of an Ohio State history professor had also roused his curiosity: he later wrote that this professor’s “innuendoes and crafty indictments of the Catholic Church [in his course on the Protestant Reformation] made me stubbornly determined to find out more about Catholicism.”
But there was another aspect of Catholicism that appealed most strongly to Steward: namely, the concept that through confession one could seek (and obtain) absolution. For Steward, who felt so strongly rejected, condemned, and shamed by his own church, the idea of sexual absolution through confession was entirely appealing. Steward’s PhD dissertation on the Oxford Movement reflected his new embrace of Catholicism, for in it he discussed a movement that had sought (specifically through the work of John Henry Newman) to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots—but had ultimately resulted in a number of its participants, including Newman (whom Steward sensed was homosexual), instead converting to Catholicism.
Steward would not, however, remain a Catholic long, for in confessing the sin of his homosexual activities, he found that he was routinely asked by his confessor to promise he would cease to engage in them. Though Steward did so, as time passed he realized he could not make such promises in good faith, and his own rigorous truthfulness suddenly came into complete conflict with what he was doing:
My allegiance to Catholicism lasted a year and a half, and then the boyhood indoctrination against the Whore of Babylon
*
won out. I had been attracted to the Catholic liturgy, and by Huysmans…I thought I had found a creed elastic enough to allow for my pagan love of life—but the basic honesty infused into me by my early training [as a Methodist] made me realize that I could never again make a perfect act of contrition…And celibacy was not for me…[My ultimate feeling was that] no one with honesty can be both a Catholic and a homosexual.
Steward’s explorations of both Catholicism and homosexuality found their way into his dissertation. By detailing the probable homosexuality of the Oxford Movement’s leader, the philosopher, writer, and (later) Catholic convert John Henry (later, Cardinal) Newman, Steward noted that he had created “almost as much of a bombshell [in the English Department] as [had] my early essay on Whitman.” Nonetheless, the dissertation passed. He had earned his PhD.
Steward completed the dissertation at twenty-four, ten years after his first sexual experience, and just before beginning his first lonely winter of teaching English at a small Catholic college in Helena, Montana. He seems to have written an essay around this time, never published, in which he described the challenge of adjusting to his sexual nature. He signed it using an alias, and altered enough of the specifics of his own life story in it that he could not be concretely identified as its author. Entitled “The Homosexual’s Adjustment,” it features none of the humorous detachment of Steward’s later writing; in fact, it is deadly earnest, and so remarkable a document of his state of mind during these early years that it merits reproduction in its entirety:
*
]
I am twenty-two years old. I was graduated from college last June and am at present an instructor in English at a western college. I have reason to believe that with hard work on my part, I shall be able to go a little further in my profession than does the average instructor. But for the past three years I have known that I am a homosexual [and] it is something that I must take into account in any plans I make for the future. I will not say that it is the fact of first importance in my life…But it is a fact that I can certainly not ignore—or only at a price that I should not care to pay. The acceptance of the fact does not come at such a cheap price either.
This knowledge of my homosexuality did not, of course, come as a sudden burst of intelligence. If at the age of sixteen I had known that there was such a thing as homosexuality, I might have understood myself better. As it was, I was finding sexual expression with boys of my own age who were perfectly normal boys [who] chose [me as] the next best means of expression. As I grew older and my friends’ sexual interests became entirely taken up by the opposite sex, I began to wonder at the tardiness with which, in my case, these feelings put in their appearance. I did not at the time doubt that they would develop; I was concerned chiefly at the unconscionably long time it was taking them to do so.
In college they had not yet appeared, and in comparing my sexual reactions to those of my acquaintances, I began to worry about myself…I set about reading such books on psychiatry and psychopathology as I could get my hands on in an effort to understand myself better; then suddenly I felt that I had found out much more than I cared about knowing…
I was nineteen years old, a junior in college, when I made this discovery about myself…[But] if the price of…“belonging” was that I deceive myself and stifle some of my feelings, I was willing to pay the price…When I graduated three of my college friends—my roommate, another friend, and one of my professors—knew that I was a homosexual. To these three I had volunteered the information; I feel sure that neither of the three had previously suspected any such thing.
I do not know just when it was that I began to question the wisdom of my adjustment, to suspect, indeed, that it was no adjustment at all but merely a silly and futile effort to deceive myself into thinking that there was nothing the matter with me…But…I was not fooling myself. In the first place…I was also in less guarded moments building romantic notions about a future love affair of my own with another person like myself. Every new and attractive boy I met appeared as the possible fulfillment of this dream. In the second place, there was the conviction that my friendship with these normal boys was pretty one-sided. I understood them, even their love affairs, but they did not even begin to understand me. In the third place, I came to realize that I was living in a perpetual state of tension; at any moment something might snap and I would give myself away. Psychologists can perhaps explain the feeling of actual physical tension that seemed to accompany this mental state. I felt constantly on guard, and it seemed that I held my body rigid, so that I could not even relax in sleep.
Since my graduation last June, I have been trying to make a more mature adjustment to my condition. I realize that different inverts have made different adjustments and that there are perhaps as many types among homosexuals as there are among normal men…
The adjustment of one invert, whose book I have read, has largely been determined by his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. Religion, especially the Catholic religion, expects a definite adjustment from its sexually abnormal believers…There is much to be said for such an attitude. In the first place, it is definite. It does not ignore homosexuality nor make light of it; it accepts its existence and has a definite program for dealing with it. To those inverts who do believe or can honestly come to a belief in revealed religion, it offers a program of action. But to suggest that one accept the Catholic religion, or any other religion in order that he may gain thereby a program for dealing with his homosexuality, is, it seems to me, to suggest a perversion of religion. For those inverts who cannot accept the tenets of revealed religion even though through such an acceptance might come a solution of their problems, there must be some other form of adjustment.
In my own case…I have taken what I think are two definite steps toward a more mature adjustment to my nature. In the first place, I have stopped pretending that I am normal. I do not say that I have cut out normal activities or cut myself off from normal people…But I know that the enjoyment I get from such activities is not the enjoyment that my heterosexual friends get. I know this and sometimes it makes me afraid. I am afraid that sometime a girl is going to take me too seriously, that some girl may even begin to fall in love with me. I shall hate to fail her then. For I know that whatever latent capacity for love I may have, it will never be awakened by a woman.
Secondly, I have learned not to look upon every good looking boy I meet as a possible lover. I pride myself that my attitude is realistic…This new attitude has saved me from a lot of futile day-dreaming; unfortunately it has not rendered me impervious to the attraction.
At the present time, that is about as far as my adjustment has got. When I think of the future I find that there are some other things that I must take into account.
I have said that I do not consider my homosexuality the most important fact in my life. I am an invert but I am also ambitious. Normal men have other interests than sex; so does the invert. But normal men do not often have to choose between love and a career…But the homosexual, it seems to me, often finds himself in a place where the choice between a career and love seems inevitable.
I want to teach. For the next four or five years I shall be so busy getting degrees that, even were I normal, I should probably not give marriage much consideration. But with a doctorate and an instructorship in some college, I would, were I normal, probably fall in love and marry. No one would bat an eyelash. But suppose that within the next four or five years, with my doctorate and an instructorship, I should fall in love with another instructor like myself or with one of my students. There would at first be gossip. It would develop into opinion. Whether I were teaching at a small denominational college or at a state university it would probably mean my dismissal. One might of course escape detection by being furtive and secretive. Undoubtedly there are many men, married and single, on the faculties of denominational colleges and of large universities who carry on clandestine love affairs and get away with them. I might put my love on such a compromise basis and be fairly happy. But people would wonder why I did not marry, why I did not fall in love with “some nice girl.” It would be hard to escape detection…Of course, there is something to be said for announcing to the world what one is, for sending out wedding announcements as it were. And it is romantic and defiant. It is one way of solving the original difficulty—by creating thirty subsequent ones. And it would be one way of ensuring your dismissal from the faculty.
If one does not want to suppress his nature and yet is afraid of expressing it, what is he to do? I do not know. Not now. The homosexual, probably more than the normal man, learns the futility of mapping out a path for his emotions. I do not know what I shall be feeling or believing five years from now. I do not even want to know.
But this I do know. My friends are going to fall in love. They are going to get married. Try as we may, we shall never be able to regain the old intimacy of college days. My brothers and sisters will marry and raise families. My parents will not always be here. If I discover that I cannot have both love and a career and choose in favor of the career, I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that according to the standards of my age I have chosen the path of virtue and righteousness [and] perhaps in time I shall become a Grand Old Man.
That is one picture I see when I try to look into my own future. [But] there is [also] a blacker picture which I sometimes force myself to consider. That is the picture of arrest and imprisonment; in this country as in most of the countries of Europe, homosexual love is a crime, punished by fines and imprisonment.
There is, of course, a somewhat brighter picture. I may find a satisfying companion; I may fall in love, and because of love give up my career and find another career with which love would not be so likely to interfere. Up to the present time, although I have had infatuations for normal men, I have never been in love with another invert. Obviously I cannot predict what I might do should I fall in love. For love, my normal friends tell me, makes one do strange things.