Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (9 page)

Wilder was pleased to mentor Steward during this brief overseas meeting—particularly about ways in which he might best reconcile himself to his homosexuality. Yet even as he did so, Steward later recalled, Wilder was maneuvering him into bed:

Steward next traveled to the suburb of Kuesnacht, where Thomas Mann was then residing, having fled Munich and the Nazis. Steward had lunch with Mann and his family, then spent the afternoon in private conversation with him, mostly discussing
The Magic Mountain
. “With what nervous heart and dryness of mouth I followed him upstairs to his study, to spend the hours alone in talking!” Steward later wrote. “Had I but known for sure that my instincts about [his sexuality] were true, who can say that I might not have laid a hand on his knee, or put my arm around his waist?” Mann’s feeling for Steward remained warm enough that, on passing through Chicago two years later, he met Steward again, this time presenting him with a personally inscribed photograph of himself.
^*

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Steward subsequently traveled to Montreux for a rendezvous with the French author and mystic Romain Rolland—but here, for the first time, he struck out. At Rolland’s door he was abruptly informed by Rolland’s sister that no matter what he may have told Steward by letter, the writer was currently incapable of receiving guests. And so, with nothing better to do, Steward visited the nearby castle of Chillon (which he knew through Byron’s poem
^*
) and, suitably moved by this connection to literary history, made off with the key to the castle’s men’s room. “Montreux was frightfully dull,” he wrote Stein, “…Lac Léman had colors not of this earth, and my soul reveled in them and in the Alps, on which fresh cold snow had fallen the day before I arrived. But the ‘season’ was over, and no one was there save old men with pipes, and tuberculosis babies. And I looked at the snow and the lake and the swans and decided not to stay too long.”

Wilder and Stein meanwhile discussed Steward by mail. “Steward [is] a fine fella and it was a pleasure,” he wrote her. “And one of the finest things about it was to learn that at your house he had written down twenty-five closely-written pages of Gertrude’s talk.” Stein responded, “I’m glad you liked Sam Steward…he is drowned at Loyola but perhaps Rops will get him a job in a lycée here and then he will have time to write. I think he will do something really good sometime.” Wilder agreed with this opinion, praising Steward’s abilities as a letter writer to Stein and calling him “the last of the elegants.”

Wilder was just then in the midst of preparing three plays simultaneously—a translation of Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
,
Our Town
, and
The Merchant of Yonkers
(which, though initially a failure, would eventually become
The Matchmaker
, and later
Hello, Dolly!
). Nonetheless he found time to send Steward a bon voyage telegram on the
Queen Mary
, and two weeks later a substantial note of farewell:

A month later, excited by the reception his agent had given
Our Town
, Wilder changed his plans; he would not immediately come to Chicago, so no meeting between him and Steward would be possible. But he had read
Angels on the Bough
, and in the brisk tone of a man who has much to do, he wrote Steward,

Wilder was right;
Angels on the Bough
was good, but it was only a first effort, and with that novel behind him, Steward needed to move on to bigger and better things. The talented young professor from Chicago had made a very good start; now it was time for him to write something truly exceptional.

But as he settled back into his teaching routine at Loyola in the fall of 1937, Steward neglected his writing, and instead began to volunteer as a stage extra at the Civic Opera House,
^*
appearing primarily in ballets. He had been fascinated by ballet as an art form since seeing the Ballets Russes perform in Washington, D.C., in 1935. After that, he wrote,

Like many of his generation, Steward found in the ballet not only an admirable art form in itself, but also an opportunity to admire male physical beauty in a public setting, and at the same time to mix with others who shared his taste for art, music, theater, and dance. To some extent, though, his enthusiasm was directly based on the sexual opportunities afforded by the performance: at a time when the public gathering of homosexuals in bars and nightclubs was essentially forbidden by law, the lobby of the Civic Opera House was one of the better places in Chicago to meet a friend or find a date. By working backstage, Steward was also able to befriend (and eventually bed) a number of dancers, whose names he later entered in the Stud File.

While the ballet was a leading form of artistic innovation during the first half of the twentieth century, it was also a highly physical art form that frequently asserted the validity (and delight) of sexual transgression and sexual release in a variety of ways, including through plotting, scoring, and choreography. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had attracted both popular and critical attention under the direction of a publicly homosexual impresario with his known bisexual lover, Nijinsky, as its greatest star—so its vision was arguably an assertion of homosexual identity as well as of a modernist aesthetic. The two were in fact inseparable, for the modernist rebellion of this ballet troupe was based, in large part, upon various portrayals of romantic and sexual transgression. The overt sexuality articulated by the Ballets Russes accounts, in large part, for its sensational popularity in Paris (and, later, around the world). Erotically conceived ballets such as
L’Après-Midi d’un Faune
consciously fueled that popularity through the controversy they generated, thereby attracting scandal-driven public attention. In the coming decades, Steward’s involvement with the ballet was such that he would befriend three significant homosexual men whose work and lives were intimately connected with the ballet: Paul Cadmus, Glenway Wescott, and George Platt Lynes. Compared to the ballet, Steward’s own chosen art forms—poetry and fiction—were all just words on a page; but ballet was a living art in which bodies interacted directly with bodies, and where creative homosexuals existed not just in the pages of a book, but radiantly at the center of live performance, often working in celebrated collaboration. No wonder, then, that Steward yearned to be a part of it.

Apart from the Lyric Opera, Steward spent a lot of his early years in Chicago drinking and making pickups, and in that way life in the big city distracted him even more from the hard work of being a novelist. He had understood Chicago to be a place of both danger and sexual opportunity since first reading Ben Hecht’s raffish Jazz Age story collection
1001 Afternoons in Chicago
in high school; since then, the city had become even more infamous for violent crime. All through the 1930s it was a rough, lawless city, and moreover one that became increasingly difficult for homosexuals to live in—particularly since, with the repeal of Prohibition, crooked police were once again able to monitor activities taking place in saloons, and thereby to shake down homosexuals by using threats of arrest and public exposure.

Despite the abundance of sexual opportunity, Steward nonetheless found city life an isolating existence. As he later told a sex researcher, “The only communal feeling that ever arose [among Chicago homosexuals in the 1930s] was at the Halloween drag balls…that was the only time of year that everyone came out. The rest of the time it was still an individual matter. We all went our separate, very lonesome, very lonely ways to our neighborhood bars, seeing whom we could make.”

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Steward’s Stud File records a number of pickups in Chicago during the late 1930s that took place in bars or on the street—at least one of which, described simply as “Clark Street Roll,” resulted in his being beaten and robbed (the card notes, “lost $$, shirt, etc.”). Not all violent encounters were attacks, however; he also records a 1937 whipping administered by a man named John Thayer that he enjoyed well enough to repeat nine years later.

He also had sex at Chicago’s Turkish baths. During the period 1936 through 1947, Steward had sex at “the tubs” on a total of fifty separate occasions, or roughly five times a year.
^*
Chicago also gave him his first opportunity to have sex with black men on a regular basis, for while he had known several in Columbus, he had not met any in Helena or Pullman. As he later told an interviewer, “There were two or three [clandestine gay bars] in Chicago—one [of them was] on the South Side, a black-and-tan joint—where blacks and whites mixed…That was unusual in the 20’s 30s and 40s because racism was terrific.” Although he had grown up in a small town that was totally segregated,
^*
Steward had loved having sex with black men since his Columbus years,
^*
and his first black male sexual contacts in Chicago began with the painter, musician, and writer Charles Sebree in 1938.
^*
Most of his pickups, both black and white, were from working-class backgrounds; some were clearly thugs.

Asked about the danger of approaching and propositioning such men on the street, Steward later noted,

Steward’s fascination with rough trade was in fact part of a well-established tendency among middle-and upper-class homosexuals for taking their sexual adventures with men of working or criminal class, whose masculinity may have seemed greater due to their more violent, less predictable natures. Their potential criminality added to the excitement of the pursuit; to Steward, accosting rough trade seemed a fascinating high-stakes adventure, and moreover one that incidentally linked him again to his great hero Oscar Wilde—who despite his idealized love for Lord Alfred Douglas had preferred erotic encounters with rough street boys, hustlers, and blackmailers. Wilde had in fact likened such activity to “feasting with panthers,” later explaining “the danger was half the excitement.”

Even if Steward hadn’t been openly propositioning men in the street, his late-night drunken wanderings would still have left him vulnerable to robbery and murder. But, in the way of a drunk, he took such things in stride: “From an alley on La Salle Street,” Steward wrote of his first holdup, “a guy emerged with a gun. He took my watch and told me not to move…After that I considered myself a True Native Chicagoan.”

In fact, Steward was quickly coming to love Sandburg’s “Stormy, husky, brawling / City” despite all its filth, poverty, corruption, and crime, and he took a certain pride in being a resident. He noted in the late 1940s that “there is a quality to the City of the Big Shoulders that grows on a person, like the taste of a martini, like learning to like pineapple and cottage cheese.” It was, to his mind, “a man-city, healthy, sweaty and sensual. It is Gargantua with his head in Evanston, his feet in Gary, and he lies relaxed and smoldering along the lake front…the whole anatomy of the city his outstretched body.”

Even as he became habituated to anonymous encounters and street pickups, Steward was seeing three sex partners regularly that he also considered good friends: a doctor named Jacob Cohen, a worker named Jimmy Taylor,
^*
and a serviceman named Bill Collins.
^*
Collins was not just a bed-mate but a lover and intellectual equal whom Steward would eventually introduce to many of his literary friends, including Gertrude Stein.

Upon his return to the United States in the fall of 1937, Steward bought about twenty kitchen gadgets and sent them off to Stein and Toklas by way of a thank-you. Stein wrote back,

Like many of the literary and artistic men who flocked to Stein in her later life, Steward both admired her genius and craved her motherly warmth and support. Deeply alcoholic and massively overworked, he seemed to many on the verge of a breakdown. In a letter to her of late fall 1937 he wrote:

Stein responded calmly from her new home on Rue Christine, “We were all at dinner at the Rops and…they said if you were sad all you needed was Paris…I have meditated a lot about your letter perhaps it is better but you see the trouble it certainly was with Hart Crane, the question of being important inside in one…”

Steward would treasure this phrase (“the question of being important inside in one”) for years to come, for the question—that is, the question of self-esteem—was, he felt, the key to his alcoholism, and also to his inability to develop as a novelist and writer. He responded: “You are right, the question of being important inside oneself can either cause or cure a lot of trouble…when I find the solution I think…I will be whole again and can write and do the things I want.”

Steward was continuing his sexual acquaintance with Thornton Wilder during this time, but theirs was hardly a romance; although Wilder wrote to Steward with some regularity, he kept the contents of his letters breezily informal, and constantly misspelled Steward’s name as “Stewart,” as if to suggest the two men were barely acquainted. Even so, Steward noted in his memoirs,