Authors: justin spring
Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Social Science, #College teachers - Illinois - Chicago, #Gay authors, #Literary, #Human Sexuality, #Novelists; American - 20th century, #General, #Sexology - Research - United States - History - 20th century, #Psychology, #Artists; Architects; Photographers, #Body Art & Tattooing, #Authors; American, #College teachers, #Gay authors - United States, #Steward; Samuel M, #Tattoo artists, #Pornography - United States - History - 20th century, #Novelists; American, #Gay Studies, #Authors; American - 20th century, #Education, #Art, #Educators, #Pornography, #20th century, #Tattoo artists - New York (State) - New York, #Sexology, #Poets; American, #Literary Criticism, #Poets; American - 20th century, #Biography & Autobiography, #Teaching Methods & Materials, #Biography
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:
During those several days he lectured me about my homosexuality—which he had got me to confess early on—telling me how to handle it in a kind of four-way treatment (which was, perhaps, Thornton’s own advice to himself): Think how to run your classes most easily without draining yourself; write some essays (why, in heaven’s name?); consider your childhood and youth thoroughly, seeking out and examining all the disgusting things regarding sex until they are no longer repulsive; and study the lives and careers of the great homosexuals from the beginning down to the present day—Leonardo and Michelangelo to Whitman and beyond…
After this worldly intellectual preparation, sort of like tenderizing a tough cube steak, we climbed into bed together, myself half-drunk as I had to be in those days to have an encounter.
Thornton went about sex almost as if he were looking the other way, doing something else, and nothing happened that could be prosecuted anywhere, unless frottage can be called a crime. There was never even any kissing. On top of me, and after ninety seconds and a dozen strokes against my belly he ejaculated. At this he sprang from our bed of roses and exclaimed in his rapid way: “Didntyoucome? Didntyoucome?”
No, I didn’t.
Thus began the casual acquaintance with Thornton Wilder that lasted through the war years and beyond, ending sometime in 1948.
*
I became his Chicago piece, possibly his only physical contact in the city. If there were others, I knew nothing of them, for there was a double lock on the door of the closet in which he lived…[Besides] he could never forthrightly discuss anything sexual; for him the act itself was quite literally unspeakable. His Puritan reluctance was inhibiting to me as well…
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.
*
•
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:
Dear Samuel,
Lord’s sakes: you arrived in Zurich three weeks ago tonight. You arrived in my solitude and we had some very happy times and you left me to my solitude and I’ve missed you. The next week I went up among the peaks (it’s now settled; there
are
mountains in Switzerland) to Nietzsche’s beloved Sils Maria.
*
It’s rained a lot, but it was fine just the same and the great ghost walked for me, and the play benefitted from it. Then I came back and moved out to a hotel about five miles from the city and worked some more, and walked some more (with a great black dog named Morro, half saint bernard).
I’m kinda pining for home…[After my travels to Paris and London I’ll] go home. And then some time in the new year I’ll come to the Hotel Stevens and sleep in Room 1000 for a while.
*
I think of you often and wonder how it’s all going. I lectured you so much over here that I’m not going to put a single didactic word in this letter, but you know that’s between the lines…
Give your boss
*
my regards.
I can see your letters have elegance—in that wonderful Roman sense. You can’t help it, so this won’t make you self-conscious. I look for more. And thanks a thousand times for your dropping-from-heaven, unexpected and felicitous.
Yr friend
Thornton
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,
In the
Angels on the Bough
all I liked was the [spinster aunts]. Them I liked tremendously. We’ll talk about it when I get to Chi[cago].
It’s fine to have got it out of your system. Now the decks are clear. Everything’s all ready—you have style, and observation, and everything. One can begin.
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,
I read books on the ballet—histories of its past, intimate memoirs of its internal life, snooty discussions of its aims, and naughty anecdotes about its personnel. I learned all the technical terms from
entrechat
to
glissade
. I worshipped Nijinsky and flung the names of Diaghilev and Fokine into all my talk…I thought and dreamed about the Ballets Russes…
[Three years later in Chicago I began appearing as a supernumerary for the Ballets Russes, in their production of
Scheherazade
.] The “supering” went on for many years, until I had become a well-known regular, with several small roles distinctly my own when the Ballet Theater, the New York Ballet, or the American Ballet Theater came to Chicago.
*
I was the gondolier who poled the little princess across the stage in the last act of
The Nutcracker
, a eunuch in
Scheherazade
, a fiddler in the phony on-stage orchestra in
Gaieté Parisienne
; and [I had] a half dozen other roles [too]…
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.”
•
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,
I was not really “afraid.” Liquor in those days had a lot to do with [that lack of fear, for at that point I needed to be drunk to attempt a pickup]…Once I got steel-knuckled in a Chicago alley and was in hospital for a few days; I had a good cover story for the dean who came to see me about getting mugged…I had several narrow escapes; once, being tied foursquare to the bed and whipped by a black, I lay there several hours unable to work loose because he had passed out [from drink]. Other times were equally dangerous. Next day I’d shake off my hangover and not be visibly deterred from trying the whole thing again in a few days.
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,
Alice is delighted with the gadgets she keeps them on a shelf on the best Italian furniture in the atelier with the best treasures, and she shows them with so much pride, they are so useful and so beautiful and so pale blue and we are so pleased with our Sammy and [have] so much to tell you…we saw the Rops and we talked endlessly about you and I am writing a life in French of Picasso.
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:
To tell the truth, I am in a horrible state—one, I suppose, that has been growing for a long time. Something brought it to a climax and I can think of no other thing than that biography of Hart Crane which I have just finished. How horrible, how terrifying [his death was]—and particularly because I [sense] I am unconsciously following many of the same patterns he followed.
*
I think my personality has split—that sounds funny, but it has…In desperation I sat down last night and read some Whitman and for a little while forced myself into thinking he was right, and then I read one—oh, a very little one—in which he admitted he was wrong. It was “O Me! O Life!”…Do you remember it? “What good amidst these people, these faithless, these mean objects?” he asks. And his only answer: “that you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” But
may
I? Have I anything to begin with?
…Alas, I’m not drunk—I’ve found I can control that. And I feel I owe you an apology. I’ve just read this over, and I am strongly impelled to tear it up. But after an argument—no.
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,
Every time Thornton came to Chicago I would receive in advance a phone call or one of his chatty postcards, containing about two hundred words in his minuscule handwriting; and I would go down to the Stevens Hotel (now the Conrad Hilton) to spend the appointed night in Room 1000. On such nights he might show me his elaborately annotated copy of
Finnegans Wake
, the margins so black with his innumerable notes that there was hardly any white to be seen; or he would draw a score of Palestrina out of his suitcase and tell me how he spent hours alone in his hotel room “reading” the music to himself, and enjoying it as much as he was hearing it…Occasionally he would come out to my northside apartment. Once he left his wristwatch on the night table beside the bed, and sent me a telegram the next day asking me to forward the watch to him in Arizona or else bring it to the hotel. The telegram was possibly one of the few bits of evidence he might have left that would have exposed his dread secret.