Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (6 page)

In considering his future as dispassionately as possible, Steward admitted (as he would rarely do again) the many sorrows of his very solitary existence. What is most chilling about the essay, however (apart from its extraordinary focus and clarity), is its prescience. The bleak vision he offers of his future as a homosexual educator was entirely accurate, and does a good deal to explain his descent into alcoholism shortly after he wrote it. It also suggests that his conclusive departure from the world of academe (albeit nearly twenty years later) would be no mere accident of circumstance.

While Steward’s job as an English instructor at Carroll College, a small Catholic institution in Helena, Montana, paid a much-needed hundred dollars a month with room and board, he soon realized that teaching in the wild west would hardly be the romantic idyll he had envisioned from his Columbus bedroom. “Trying to teach cowboys and the sons of cowboys about semicolons is not a rewarding pastime,” he wrote years later, “[and] there was nothing to do in Helena…Almost every evening I would be tanked on sherry, for my life as an alcoholic was by now well under way.” One night after too many whiskey sours with Monsignor Emmet Riley, president of the college, the two ended up in bed together and, in Steward’s words, “enough happened to weaken my faith considerably…[for apparently] a cardinal sin in Ohio was [but] a peccadillo in Montana.” In the course of the fall term, two other priests attempted to bed Steward, and a third “pop[ped] out of the confessional to see who had confessed such lurid sins.” These and other acts of clerical hypocrisy quickly convinced Steward that Carroll was not for him, and also helped hasten his abandonment of Catholicism.

Apart from a clandestine sexual arrangement with a redheaded cowboy named Doug McCann, Steward found few diversions during the winter months. “We had a two-week period of minus 35 degree weather, warming up in the afternoons to minus thirty. Sometimes we amused ourselves by opening a third floor window and spitting out; the spittle would freeze…and a glass of water, if poured slowly in a thin stream, hit the earth with a tinkle of broken icicles.” To combat boredom, Steward held an oratory contest, drove 115 miles to Missoula to speak on “Trends in Modern Literature,” and took a bus full of students 250 miles to Billings to see a performance by the Ballets Russes. But for the most part he spent his evenings alone, working on the novel he had begun in Columbus, or else writing letters to anyone who interested him. The most successful of these correspondences was with Gertrude Stein.

Steward had first written to Stein from Columbus in 1932 to inform her of the death of Clare Andrews. By way of introduction, he had noted in a Stein-like pastiche that “one day in class he read your
As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story
and he read it so well we were all thenceforth readers of Gertrude Stein.” Stein’s immediate openness to Steward and his ideas seems to have encouraged him to abandon his initial disingenuousness toward her, or rather to engage in it more playfully in the knowledge that she readily saw through it. In any event, he genuinely liked her writing and she genuinely liked his praise of it, and on that basis they began an increasingly intimate epistolary friendship. Though his own prose style had gone in other directions since
Pan and the fire-bird
, Steward genuinely loved Stein’s continuing exploration of the abstract potential of language. He also loved her daring experiments with same-sex eroticism in works like “As a Wife Has a Cow” and “Lifting Belly.” And yet while Steward’s initial excitement about Stein had been a poet’s excitement about innovative use of language, he found that Stein began almost immediately to reach out to him personally: to nurture him, encourage him, and share her life with him in a way he had never dreamt possible with anyone—much less a literary celebrity.

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Steward’s first letter to Stein from Helena noted his sadness at missing her when she visited Ohio State University on her speaking tour of the United States, for
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
had just then established her as a national sensation. He quickly set up a speaking engagement for her in Helena, tempting her there with promised visits to a ghost town, a gold mine, and a hangman’s tree—but in the end the trip fell through. “When the [cancellation] telegram came from Alice [Toklas]…I broke down and wept,” he later wrote. “My regret and unhappiness were only slightly tempered by receiving one day a very large matted portrait of Gertrude [by] Carl Van Vechten” bearing an autographed personal inscription from her. Still, she was no pushover: In September 1935, Stein responded to his gift of
Pan and the fire-bird
by telling him that while “there are spots in it that I like very much…it is a mess.”

By then Steward had left Carroll College; after writing a bitter account of his (nonsexual) experiences there as a much-exploited lay faculty member (and subsequently publishing it in the Catholic magazine
The Commonweal
^*
), he had accepted a yearlong posting at the State College of Washington at Pullman, near the Idaho border. After spending the summer working as an information clerk in Glacier Park, he arrived in Pullman in late summer. “The whole scene around Pullman especially from my study window has the air of one of Grant Wood’s Iowa interiors,” he wrote Stein, “and with a little snow the other morning it was so clear and calm I felt a Wordsworthian tear very near.” But he soon discovered that Pullman, too, was far from ideal, for it was an extremely conservative school with a faculty that was “dull, inbred, and disastrously gossipy.” As a result Steward again found himself socially isolated, and again spending his free time mooning over the “fine upstanding young [male] heterosexual students, the western ideal that I had seen suggestions of in Montana…in the Housman manner I [then] wrote scores of melancholy poems about handsome young men I couldn’t have.”

A typical poem from this Housman-inspired series, dated November 16, 1936, reads:

Steward had few illusions about these verses, later noting they consisted of not much more than “a simple dingdong rhythm containing the record of a ‘pain.’” The only subtle note in the poem is in its final word, “bruise”—for Steward was now beginning to acknowledge not only emotional bruises, but also physical ones, as the young men he attempted to seduce sometimes responded to his overtures with a fist.

Housman’s erotic longings for idealized young men at least held out the possibility of creative sublimation for Steward as he struggled with his own intense loneliness as an unattached and closeted academic.
^*
As for the poems’ overtly homoerotic content, Steward felt simply, “If a don of Cambridge could get away with it, so could I.”

The suite of Housman-inspired poems also demonstrates a significant change in Steward’s writing style. While
Pan and the fire-bird
had abounded in florid word experiments, such things had now all but disappeared from Steward’s writing, replaced instead by plainspoken expressions of grim and awkward truths. Steward never wrote directly about the influence of Housman on his writing, but on his first trip to Europe a year later, he would make a special journey to Cambridge specifically to pay homage to the recently deceased scholar-poet.

By the time Steward received Stein’s letter about
Pan and the fire-bird
being “a mess,” he readily agreed with her:

Stein’s friendliness toward him was such that in his next letter he ventured, “I have thought that in the summer of 1937 it would be nice to come to Europe, [and] surely get to meet you at last.” He then described for her his growing popularity in Pullman as an English instructor: “I had two hundred students for my first semester here and next year…I will have a special course in creative writing all my own.” He accepted a verbal offer of reappointment to Pullman in April 1936.

A month later, in May,
Angels on the Bough
was published to uniformly positive reviews. Rather than submitting the novel to the top literary publishing houses in New York, Steward had simply placed the manuscript with Caxton Publishers, a small commercial printer just three hundred miles south of Pullman, in Caldwell, Idaho, which was developing a book-publishing venture as a sideline. Nonetheless, the novel received national attention, for it was a very fine first effort.

A collection of deftly juxtaposed character sketches of Columbus bohemians,
Angels on the Bough
is a beautifully crafted narrative exploring their intersecting lives during the toughest days of the Great Depression. In its look at love, faith, and the erotic drives of young men and women in a small Midwestern city, it is a comedy unique in its sexual candor. The novel received a long, praise-filled review by Stanley Young in
The New York Times
that noted that the novel’s six characters were “illumined by a very distinct gift above the usual. The inner motives of personality are so skillfully turned outward that we see straight through to the[ir] heart[s] and head[s].” Young went on to praise the novel’s

Each of the characters in
Angels on the Bough
represents some aspect of Steward’s own personality: Richard Dominay, a young man crushed by the endless duties and obligations of academe; Tom Cave, a spiritual seeker drawn toward Catholicism by Huysmans (and simultaneously drawn away from it by pornography); Jan Halladay, an artist incapacitated by his mother’s suicide; Mary Nowell, a good-natured floozy; and Dora Milton, a young woman who feels immense relief in finally running away from the man who loves her, despite her own great love and need for him. Marie Anderson appears as Jean Anders, who marries a Communist and sets sail for the Soviet Union; Steward’s aunts appear as the endlessly bickering Purfle sisters, who run a boardinghouse.

While deeply felt, the novel is also quite funny, particularly in its characterization of Mary Nowell, the homely young secretary whose private life revolves around the pickups she makes on the street. Steward delights in her rationalizations about her wanton ways, and his oddly empathetic portrayal of her makes the novel’s denouement—when she discovers she has been infected with deadly syphilis by a young man she had hoped would marry her—all the more shocking. While favorable reviews of the book appeared nationwide in more than twenty newspapers, the critical success of the novel gave Steward only trouble—for as a result of his extremely sympathetic portrayal of that girl of easy virtue, the morally righteous president of the university fired him on the spot.

Steward was dumbfounded. As he told the
Columbus Dispatch
a month later, “Four hours after the president delivered his commencement address extolling the virtues of liberty and a free people, [E. O. Holland, the university president] summarily dismissed me for exercising a little academic freedom and told me my going was but the forerunner of six or eight more to go.” When challenged, Holland stated that Steward had not only published an obscene novel, but also encouraged his students to engage in a strike against the administration. But an official investigation into the incident by the American Association of University Professors later found nothing to substantiate the latter charge and censured the university president.

At the moment of his dismissal, however, Steward had no legal recourse. He was without a job, and contesting his dismissal through the university system would have taken months. With little in savings, he could only pack his bags and leave town to find work elsewhere. But before returning to Columbus, he wrote Gertrude Stein: