Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (68 page)

^*
The poet Idella Purnell Stone (1901–?) published the verse magazine
Palms
from 1923 to May 1930; the poet Harold Vinal (1891–1965) was involved in many publishing ventures. Steward maintained a friendship with Vinal for over a decade; Vinal’s self-published
Nor Youth, Nor Age: Poems 1924–25
was jointly dedicated to Sam Steward and Cora Smith Gould.

^*
Sulfa drugs would come into general use only a decade later, approximately in 1939.

^*
Steward is quoting from the passage in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
in which Gray experiences a sexual awakening as a result of reading
Against the Grain
(as indeed Wilde himself had). The passage concludes, “Things that [Dorian] had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.”

^*
In his enthusiasm for Huysmans, Steward wrote a study of his influence upon the Paris-based Irish writer, poet, and art critic George Moore, publishing it in
The Romantic Review
in 1934.

^*
By “Whore of Babylon,” Steward means the Catholic church as it has been referred to by various fundamentalist denominations. The expression comes from a vision offered in the book of Revelation (17:18).

^*
The essay is signed “Michael Walters,” an alias Steward never used again. It appears to have been composed in 1934, the year in which he took his teaching position at Carroll College. Since so much of this biography depends on Steward’s credibility in his own writing, and since so much of what he did would seem almost beyond believing had not Steward himself been so good at documenting and recording his activities, it is worth noting that while Steward was utterly truthful always in his private records of his sexual activities (at first because he kept these records only for himself, and later because he kept them for Kinsey), he was, like all writers, capable of significant omissions or minor alterations of fact in writings about himself that he intended for anonymous or semi-anonymous publication.

^*
The article (describing the routine exploitation of lay faculty by clergymen at the college) was published as “The Lay Faculty,”
The Commonweal
21:24 (April 12, 1935): 667–68. See also Jeremiah K. Durick, “The Lay Faculty: A Reply,”
The Commonweal
21:25 (April 19, 1935): 699–701.

^*
Despite these longings for young men he could not have, Steward managed nonetheless “a considerable number of sexual releases [while at Pullman] with handsome young animals who were not gods but men.” “I was drunk each time,” he later noted, “…[and] somehow I didn’t care for my reputation, having usually managed…to get them to jack me off—which compromised them as much as myself, so they wouldn’t talk.” (Steward, unpublished memoir.)

^*
Stein later wrote in
Everybody’s Autobiography
that “
Angels on the Bough
…is a very interesting book. It has something in it that makes it literature. I do not know quite what but there it is.”

^*
Parcae
is the Latin word for the Fates of Roman mythology, the three goddesses of destiny.

^*
Steward’s courses (apart from introductory English courses and introductory French language courses) included: The American Novel; Dryden and Restoration Verse; English Literature from 450 to 1660; Contemporary British Literature; English Romanticism; Early Victorian Literature; Composition and Rhetoric; Literary Criticism; Tennyson and Browning; Elizabethan Drama; Contemporary French Literature; Shakespeare; The Age of Johnson; The English Renaissance; Wordsworth and Coleridge;
Beowulf
; and English Poetry and Prose of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

^*
This second “secret” diary was unfortunately lost in a fire in 1970 (see pages 356–57).

^*
The 1937 travel (as opposed to “secret”) diary has no description of Steward’s visit to Douglas in Hove, and while Douglas does appear in the Stud File, the date of the encounter is erroneously placed as “July 1937,” which was impossible since Steward arrived in England only on August 10 and departed on August 19. Steward’s Stud File notations for encounters previous to 1947 are often hazy, however, since through the late 1940s he kept the Stud File only for his own amusement (it became much more specific in its dates after Kinsey asked him to consider donating it to the Kinsey Archive in approximately 1950). Although Steward’s “secret” diary was lost in a 1970 fire, Steward’s various other written, published accounts of the visit to Douglas (which he published starting in the mid-1960s) are entirely consistent with the facts (only published much later) of Douglas’s life in Hove. In 1937, Douglas did indeed have a flat at St. Annes Court, Hove, which had been rented for him by his nephew, the Marquess of Queensberry. Douglas was able to entertain Steward with assured privacy since he lived alone—for his wife, Olive, had by then abandoned him though she continued to live nearby (Douglas Murray,
Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas
[New York: Hyperion, 2000]). In autumn 2009, the copy of Douglas’s
True History of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
inscribed to Steward by Douglas surfaced at public auction; it is currently in the collection of the author.

^*
Steward is quoting from Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798).

^*
At the time Steward visited him, Steward was unaware of Lord Alfred’s character, for indeed very few people knew the truly awful behavior Douglas had shown toward Wilde before, during, and after Wilde’s imprisonment—by 1937, Wilde’s
De Profundis
had been published only in Robbie Ross’s highly expurgated 1905 version, a version that had left out all of the many damning statements about Douglas by Wilde that might have been considered actionable. (The full text of Wilde’s indictment of Douglas would be published in its entirety only in 1949, more than a decade after Steward’s visit to Hove.)

^*
Steward’s borrowed phrase about the “red rose-leaf lips” comes from the “madness of kisses” letter from Wilde to Douglas, a letter that was stolen from Douglas by a blackmailer and subsequently used against Wilde in court as damning evidence of his “sodomitical nature.”

^*
It had appeared in a limited edition in 1920–21 (and was later published commercially in 1926).

^*
Steward was hardly alone in receiving such treatment; Thornton Wilder would later refer to “all of [Stein’s] children,” a group of friends including the so-called Kiddies (William G. Rogers and his wife, Mildred Weston Rogers); Robert Haas; and even Wilder himself. This game of parent-child make-believe had many permutations, however; with Carl van Vechten, Stein was the baby—“Baby Woojums”—with Toklas and Van Vechten taking the role of the parents.

^*
So observed by Sir Francis Rose (
Saying Life
, p. 396), who met Daniel-Rops in 1939 and subsequently designed a book jacket for him.

^*
Steward’s entry for Wilder in the Stud File notes that he and Wilder engaged in frottage a total of twenty-six times during the course of their friendship starting in 1937, and that these meetings took place in Zurich, Paris, and Chicago.

^*
The inscribed, dated photograph (noting in German that they had met previously) remains in Steward’s papers.

^*
“The Prisoner of Chillon,” a key work of English Romanticism, was a poem Steward taught regularly at Loyola.

^*
The little village in the Upper Engadine where Nietzsche had lived and worked.

^*
The hotel room Wilder considered his Chicago home, and in which he would repeatedly host Steward in years to come.

^*
Morton Zabel.

^*
Today known as the Lyric Opera House.

^*
Steward’s mention of “Ballet Theater” and “the American Ballet Theater” is slightly confusing since they are one and the same. “American” was added by Sol Hurok when the company made its first foreign tour. The “New York Ballet,” meanwhile, is the New York City Ballet. Steward cites Ballet Theater under both its names since he supered for both.

^*
He would have additional encounters at the baths from 1947 through 1952, but bathhouses became far less appealing to him after he achieved lasting sobriety in 1947.

^*
Even as late as the 2000 U.S. census, Woodsfield, Ohio, has remained 99 percent white.

^*
Steward’s Stud File uses the code letter “n” to denote each negro contact, “j” each Jewish one.

^*
Steward remained friendly with Sebree for many years, buying ten of his paintings in total, and in 1954 attending a musical Sebree had written (entitled
Mrs. Osborne
, and starring Eartha Kitt). (Steward,
Journal
, Oct. 30, 1954.)

^*
Identified as “Jimmy Taylick” in Steward’s memoirs, he was as close a friend as Steward ever had. The two men had sex regularly for eight years, through 1946.

^*
Collins was sexually active with Steward from 1938 until 1945, but because he spent much of that time away from Chicago (in the army), the two had sex only twenty-three times.

^*
The poet Hart Crane had killed himself in 1932 by jumping off the S.S.
Orizaba
into the Gulf of Mexico. He had reportedly done so after being publicly beaten by a sailor toward whom he had made drunken sexual advances.

^*
Stein wrote Steward a simple Guggenheim recommendation, saying that he was a scholar of distinction with an unusual gift for narrative writing, and commenting favorably on
Angels on the Bough
. She thought that his achievements would eventually be a credit to the Guggenheim Foundation. (Ulla Dydo to author, 2005.)

^*
The Guggenheim Fellowship.

^*
Entitled “To Sammy on His Birthday.”

^*
This note seems to suggest that Stein had written Steward a note about the Chicago novel, but no note has survived.

^*
No letter from Kahane survives.

^*
The manuscript, too, has been lost; though Steward donated a copy to the Kinsey Archive, the Archive cannot locate it.

^*
Mohammed Zenouhin never made it to Chicago; he died young, poisoned by his father for refusing to marry. (Extensive details on Zenouhin’s gruesome death, sent to him by Witold Pick, can be found in Steward, “Early Chapters” [unpublished], p. 224.)

^*
This note, like the one about Steward’s novel, has not survived; Steward re-created it from memory in his Stein-Toklas memoir (p. 75).