Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (7 page)

Stein wrote back:

By the end of the summer Steward had found a job at Loyola University, a Jesuit school on Chicago’s North Side. “I hardly wanted to go back into religious teaching,” Steward later recalled (for he had long since abandoned Catholicism), “but I sent a copy of my novel to the dean there, explaining all. He found it innocuous, and I was hired to teach…under the direction of Morton Dauwen Zabel, one of the most feared and respected scholars in the field.” Two months after arriving in Chicago, Steward wrote Stein describing his new situation:

Steward’s first year at Loyola was exhausting, for Zabel, a brilliant Henry James scholar, leaned on him heavily from the start. A confirmed bachelor who lived with his mother, Zabel had little tolerance for fellow academics who could not keep up with his own exceptionally high level of productivity. “Zabel worked us unmercifully,” Steward later noted. “His razor mind under his youthfully bald pate made him the archetypal egghead, with a soft voice that could cut like a blade of Toledo steel if necessary.”

Though Steward was now regularly drinking alone at night to blackout state, he nonetheless came into his own as a scholar at Loyola, for in Zabel he had finally met a boss he genuinely respected and wanted to please. In his first year Steward would teach “Contemporary English and American Literature,” “Pope and His Contemporaries,” and “Middle English Poetry and Prose” to undergraduates, and “Modern Drama,” “The Seventeenth Century,” “The Modern Novel,” and “Shakespeare Studies” to graduates. Over the coming years he would teach an extraordinary variety of other courses,
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including undergraduate French. “If I accomplished nothing else [during my time at Loyola],” he later wrote, “it was to become
teres atque rotundus
—complete and well-rounded—in the field of English literature and its allied topics.”

Despite the academic freedom granted by Zabel to his department, Steward remained closeted at Loyola, for the academic climate of the mid-1930s was, if not openly hostile to homosexuality, at least incapable of sympathy for it. Newton Arvin, a leading (and deeply closeted) critic of the time, wrote apologetically on Whitman in 1938 that “Whitman was no mere invert, no mere ‘case’: he remained to the end, in almost every real and visible sense, a sweet and sane human being.” Participating in such maddening hypocrisy galled Steward, who after all had begun his academic career with a forthright reading of Whitman’s “Calamus” poems by way of Havelock Ellis.

Even so, he profited from Zabel’s example as a scholar, and for a while he was happy with his career:

Then again, Steward could hardly have objected to Zabel’s closeted ways, for as he saw it, “If you were hypocrite enough to accept a job in a religious institution after having lost your religion—why should you expect perfection in anyone else? I tucked the whole problem away, drank a few more martinis, and did not bring it up again.”

And drink Steward did. “By the time I reached Chicago,” Steward later wrote, “I was fairly established as a secret drunk. Things grew steadily worse for the next ten years [until] I was consuming—at home in my apartment—a quart a day, to which must be added the shots I had
en route
to and from class. It was a period filled with dreadful scenes, the gradual loss of friend after friend, the deterioration of my health and sleep patterns, the inexorably growing loss of memory, and the slow ruin of my potency and my body.” In another instance he observed,

Steward had always been popular with his students, and at Loyola he became wildly so. “My classes are always full,” he wrote Gertrude Stein, “but maybe that means I [just] put a lot of sex in my lectures. [Still] I try to liberate the students, or increase their backgrounds, or train them to teach themselves. They say I have a sharp tongue and am a disciplinarian. Once I overheard one say, when he got back a paper with a low mark, ‘Oh, that Doctor Steward—I never know whether to kiss him or kill him.’”

Steward also quickly developed a number of friends away from Loyola, most of them living near the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. They included the surrealist painter Gertrude Abercrombie, a young black painter named Charles Sebree, and the pioneering black dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham and her husband, the stage designer John Pratt. Thornton Wilder, who then held a part-time teaching position at the University of Chicago, would eventually become another acquaintance; so, too, would a struggling young novelist and short-story writer named Wendell Wilcox, who like Steward was being mentored by Stein. Last to join this loose-knit group in 1938 would be the young avant-garde writer James Purdy, with whom Steward had a brief fling, even though Purdy was still in his late teens.

Steward also befriended Emmy Curtis, a French teacher at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Albany Park, who was eighteen years his senior. “When I first knew her, [she] looked like the stereotype of the old-maid school teacher,” Steward noted, “greying brown hair parted in the middle…into a small bun low on the neck; thin-lipped, and seeming to be easily shocked. [But with]in a few years [of knowing me], both her appearance and attitudes were greatly changed.” A war widow, Curtis lived with “her very German mother, Augusta ‘Mutter’ Dax,” who disapproved of Steward entirely. Nonetheless “[Emmy] fell in love with me,” Steward later wrote, “and in my peculiar way, I loved her. About 1943 we began to go to bed together, and continued this for about six years (211 times) until Kinsey said after our interview, ‘why don’t you stop?’ And I, of course, was not heterosexual. I bought her a wedding ring as a common-law wife, both of [us] having fulfilled the legal aspects by announcing it to three people. We did not want to get married; it was as much her reluctance as mine, for she would have lost her husband’s pension as a war-widow.” Though it ceased to be sexual, their remarkably warm friendship would last until Curtis’s death twenty years later, and during that time she would see Steward through many a crisis.

•

Having decided to visit Stein in Europe, Steward made no secret of his summer travel plans; the Loyola University newspaper noted that his ambitious program would include study at the British Museum in London, a tour of the Paris Exposition, and a journey to Bilignin in southern France to stay at Gertrude Stein’s summer home. If the newspaper article was to be believed, Steward then planned to “sojourn the latter part of his six weeks abroad as the guest of Thomas Mann, famed German writer in exile.”

As an ambitious young literary man patterning himself on his mentor Clare Andrews, Steward had long wanted to travel to Europe to immerse himself in the avant-garde milieu so amiably described by Andrews’s friend Gertrude Stein in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(1933). Moreover, by the mid-1930s a number of significant studies of contemporary literature, most notably Malcolm Cowley’s
Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s
(1934), had pinpointed Paris as a crucible for innovative American writing of the Jazz Age. So Steward’s decision to travel to Paris seemed, on the face of it, entirely in keeping with his academic vocation. The large number of tête-à-têtes he had arranged with leading European literary figures impressed Morton Zaubel, who of course knew nothing of the won’t-take-no-for-an-answer fan-mail letters Steward had been so assiduously writing these various literary figures for nearly a year on Loyola University stationery.

But Steward had more in mind than simply visiting these great writers as a scholar and student of literature. Since adolescence he had modeled himself on suave Continental sophisticates such as Adolphe Menjou. Now, having read all about French sexual sophistication, he hoped to establish himself in Paris as a writer and intellectual. Far from Woodsfield and its stodgy Methodists, Steward knew that in Europe (and particularly in Paris) he would finally fit in.

•

Steward memorialized his first trip to Europe in two diaries. The first was a simple travel diary noting random encounters with other tourists; the second was a secret diary describing his various literary and sexual adventures.
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In advance of the trip he had arranged by letter to meet not only with Thomas Mann, but also with Lord Alfred Douglas, André Gide, and Romain Rolland. Of all the literary figures he had written, only James Joyce had declined a meeting with him outright.

After arriving in London, Steward traveled up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where, as he later wrote in his memoirs, he walked “to Whewell’s Court and Great Court B2 where A.E. Housman had lived for twenty-five years,” there “to stand silently weeping” in tribute to the poet and scholar. Upon his return to London, he telephoned the aged Lord Alfred Douglas. Steward had been corresponding with Douglas regularly since 1934, for Douglas had been hoping Steward might help him find a good American publisher for his
True History of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
. While making his various plans for Europe, Steward had come up with the idea that through physical contact with Douglas he might establish physical contact, by extension, with his great literary hero Oscar Wilde.

Douglas’s voice was “high-pitched and tinny over the phone,” Steward later recalled, but “he seemed cordial enough, and invited me down to tea on an afternoon two days hence.” Steward accordingly took the train to Brighton, “which was next door to Hove where he lived, connected in those days (and perhaps still) by a kind of boardwalk along the seafront…[Douglas’s home, St. Annes Court, Nizells Avenue] was a fifteen minute walk from Brighton past flimsy pavilions dingy from the sea air.”
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The place in which Lord Alfred Douglas lived, as Steward later wrote, was “hardly…Wordsworth’s ‘pastoral farms green to the very door,’
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but it was pleasant and British and the sort of dwelling I was used to seeing in British movies.”

As Steward later confessed:

Steward then recalled the particulars of the visit: