Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (8 page)

The conversation took a turn for the better, however, when Steward suggested they adjourn to a pub for a drink, and Douglas responded by opening a bottle of gin:

“I got to Brighton for the ten o’clock train that night,” Steward concluded. “Lord Alfred never wrote to me again, nor I to him. He died in 1945.”

•

On August 19, Steward left London, taking the boat train to Paris. His visit took place during the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne 1937, where, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Boris Iofan’s Soviet Pavilion confronted Albert Speer’s German Pavilion, and Picasso’s
Guernica
hung in protest against the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War.

Along with trips to the Exposition and to Paris’s various monuments and museums, Steward met up daily with some fellow homosexuals he had met on his crossing on the
Aquitania
. One night he stayed out until 2 a.m. at a seedy dive on Rue de Lappe, where, as he noted in his diary, “
les hommes dansent ensembles
.” He picked up several Frenchmen and sneaked each of them up to his hotel room, only to be horrified by their low standard of hygiene. Of one he noted, “Desire to give the whole French nation a collective bath.” Of another, “The French get dirtier and dirtier, and I more odor conscious.”

On August 23, he made his way to André Gide’s apartment on Rue Vaneau, where a handsome eighteen-year-old Arab in a burnoose led him in to meet “a tall, slightly stooped man in his late sixties, wearing a shabby old unbuttoned brown cardigan that sagged from somewhat narrow shoulders. The face was sensitive and thin-lipped, and he was nearly bald…his cheekbones were high and hollowed underneath.” Steward later felt that “Gide’s troublesome puritan-Protestantism” was reflected in these gaunt features; roughly the same age as Lord Alfred Douglas, he seemed equally unappetizing to Steward as a potential sex partner.

While Steward had always found Gide’s writing rather dry, he nonetheless thought Gide a heroic figure whose “brave and brilliant stand for homosexuality was like a lighthouse in those dark and stormy days of the 1930s…To me in my twenties, he was one of the first knights of Camelot.” After all, Gide’s
Si le grain ne meurt
had been the first book in which a respected public intellectual had openly described his homosexual history.
^*
Steward admired both that book and
Corydon
, Gide’s dialogue on homosexuality; but he loved
The Immoralist
best, thinking it the greatest novel of homosexual experience yet written. At the same time, he found Gide’s metaphysical dualism—which distinguished sharply between body and spirit, and confined homosexuality to a purely physical realm from which all emotion (most notably love) was forever banished—much too rigid and confining for his own tastes. As a result, he respected Gide’s work, but felt no immediate connection to it or to him. Gide himself seemed only an ancient, dried-up intellectual—one whose puritan upbringing had clearly left him unable to reconcile “base” homosexual desire with the realm of higher emotion. Steward (who at that moment in his life wanted strongly to reconcile emotion with desire) later observed in an interview, “[While] I think that
The Immoralist
[is a perfect homosexual novel], Gide has failed and fallen because of that thin-lipped fingernail-biting puritan Protestantism of his, which goes all through everything he has written; it doesn’t essentially damage his creative work, but you always sense it behind his writing, so that he seems to be a
closed
spirit rather than a flowering one.”

Steward was nonetheless delighted to be in the presence of a writer who had successfully presented his own homosexuality to the public without shame, fear, or embarrassment—and had moreover done so first, and to acclaim. Steward had come to France in search of the legendary Gallic sophistication about all things sexual, and in Gide he found it personified. The experience of meeting him was all the more fascinating since their interview took place in Gide’s own bedroom, which to Steward’s amazement “had a huge circular bed draped with a pink satin coverlet, and a frilly canopy at one end.” After discussing the Paris Exposition with Gide, and then moving on to discuss various authors, Steward revealed he had just visited Lord Alfred Douglas in Hove. Gide was appalled, for he had met Douglas in Oscar Wilde’s company many years earlier in Algeria, and he still considered him “a dreadful man…a shocking man.” Their interview concluded, Gide invited Steward to return in ten days’ time for a signed copy of
Les Caves du Vatican
.

When Steward did so, he was led once again to the room with the circular bed—but not to visit with Gide. The handsome Arab houseboy had mentioned to Gide that he had taken a fancy to Steward during his first visit; as a result, and with Gide’s blessing, the two were given the use of Gide’s bedroom for the afternoon.

In the days that followed, Steward visited Sylvia Beach’s bookshop on Rue de l’Odeon, toured Notre Dame de Paris, and took a day trip to Versailles. Finally, after visiting the grave of Oscar Wilde at Père Lachaise, he boarded the train for the small town of Culoz in the Rhône-Alpes, not far from where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas had the annual rental of an eighteenth-century château. There he was finally to meet the world-famous author who had taken such an active interest in his writing.

•

Stein, aged sixty-six, was just then settling back into life in France after the tour of the United States that had followed the great popular success of
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(1933). During the course of the tour she had been not only widely recognized as a central figure of the Paris-based Modernist avant-garde, but also embraced as a lovable female American genius-eccentric. She had lived in Paris since 1902, supported by a trust fund, and with her brother, Leo, she had collected works by Matisse, Derain, Gris, Braque, and Picasso. Starting in 1909, Alice Toklas, a fellow Californian expatriate, had lived and worked with her as her secretary and business manager. During that time their salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus had become a gathering place for many of the most brilliant creative minds of the 1920s, including Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, and Guillaume Apollinaire.

By 1937, however, Stein’s life was relatively quiet. While she still entertained a steady stream of guests at Rue de Fleurus and at Bilignin, she devoted most of her days to her writing and correspondence. Steward later wrote of his first visit, “I was not old enough then—nor indeed was anyone wise enough at that time—to evaluate accurately her place in literature, and certainly it was hard to be conscious of it while one was near her…[for she was] a great and very human woman, an intricate yet simple and earthy personality, tremendously alive.”

With his slight frame, delicate constitution, and multiple food allergies (which included wheat flour), Steward immediately appealed to Stein and Toklas as an adorably childlike young man over whom they might fuss as much as they liked. They called him “Sammy” from their very first meeting, and would alternately pamper, scold, and praise him for years to come.
^*
The small, robust, and motherly Stein took an immediate liking to him, and he in turn found himself surprisingly at ease with her, for she bore an uncanny resemblance to his favorite stepaunt, Elizabeth Rose.

From his very first day, Steward kept painstakingly detailed records of his visits to Bilignin, writing up a full account of the day’s activities and conversations with Stein each evening after they had retired. He also photographed the ladies and their home with his little Argus camera, and took Stein’s palmprint with a special kit designed for palmists.

Steward was delighted with the grand seventeenth-century château and its formal garden, which overlooked a small valley planted with corn, beyond which rose the wooded hills of Ain. He quickly adapted himself to a daily routine of dog walks, outings to local restaurants, and expeditions by car to view nearby alpine scenery. During the visit, Steward found himself welcomed as a fellow writer, and discussed with Stein the difficulty of writing good fiction while teaching, for he had an enormous workload at Loyola and little time in which to do anything truly creative. Hoping to help him, Stein introduced him to a cadaverous-looking neighbor, Henri Daniel-Rops, who would eventually make a small fortune writing popular books on Catholic subjects, and become known as “the Dr. Goebbels of the Christian World by his jealous atheist enemies because of his strong resemblance to that german minister.”
^*
(The name Daniel-Rops was, in fact, a pseudonym; born Henri Petiot, the author had taken the name in admiration of the artist Felicien Rops.) For the next two years, Stein and Daniel-Rops would try repeatedly to secure Steward a teaching position in France.

At the end of a week, Stein wrote a note to Thornton Wilder, who was just then hidden away in Zurich, working on a play: “We have been having a young fellow here Sam Steward, he is the one who wrote
Angels on the Bough
and is a college professor we like him and he goes to Zurich [soon]…he will not interrupt your solitude much because he has to be in Cherbourg on the 15[th].”

Because Wilder had left a vest with Stein, Stein entrusted it to Steward, and thereby guaranteed the two would meet. Accordingly, on Thursday the ninth, Wilder wrote to Steward, who had just arrived in Zurich after a very warm good-bye from Stein and Toklas. “I am at the Carleton-Elite hotel,” the note said, “and [I] would be delighted to see you at any time. I scarcely know anyone in town and will be free anytime so do not hesitate to call.”

Wilder had not yet achieved acclaim as a playwright, but his novel
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
was a worldwide bestseller. The financial success of this novel had enabled him to live and work abroad, where his life was largely solitary. While as a younger man he had taught high school at Lawrenceville—and so he shared Steward’s experience as an educator—it was really their shared love of Gertrude Stein and her work that first drew Wilder and Steward together.

Wilder never chose to acknowledge his homosexuality publicly, and was careful during his lifetime to suppress any information about it; perhaps as a result he destroyed his letters from Steward even as he praised them to Gertrude Stein. In this sense Wilder was not much different from many other celebrated men of his generation for whom such discretion was a necessity; but to Steward, Wilder’s deeply closeted ways later seemed to indicate a “basic dishonesty [that he] lived with all his life.” Remembering their first meeting in Zurich in 1937, Steward wrote in his memoirs,

Much to his own surprise, Steward soon found himself entirely captivated by Wilder—who, having spent a great deal of time alone to work on the play that would eventually become
Our Town
, was just then eager for literate and well-informed company. Though Steward initially thought Wilder rather schoolmarmish (fully twelve years older, Wilder had the affect of a much older man, and was visibly wide in the hips), he also quickly realized that Wilder was one of the most civilized and conversationally brilliant men he had ever met: