Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (10 page)

Wilder sent a follow-up note from Tucson after that March 1938 visit, thanking Steward for returning the watch but alluding to nothing more. In another letter, after briefly apologizing for two months of silence, he simply gave Steward more (unsolicited) writing advice: “Now do compose yourself to some critical articles 1/2 of them for the learned journals, and 1/2 of them for the better magazines. There lies (1) advancement (2) employment of your gifts. Then return to the novel.” Steward was, however, far from heartbroken, having by now had enough experience, both sexual and romantic, to recognize Wilder’s emotional limitations. With that recognition came a certain disillusionment, for this author who had written so brilliantly of love in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
was apparently not capable of articulating such emotions in real life—or at least would not be doing so with Steward.

During early 1938, Steward applied to the International Institute of Education for an overseas scholarship, but nothing came of it. Loyola pressured him to teach over the 1938 summer vacation, and he needed the money, so he did. He also told Stein his latest scheme for financing a trip back to France: a Guggenheim Fellowship. He then asked her for a recommendation. “I am yours to command now and always,” Stein responded, “but if you can get somebody with a pull do do so, because I do think that’s the way it is done.”
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Steward responded that he was sure Stein would be the right person, then added some disturbing news:

He gave the same (nonspecific) story about his injuries to Thornton Wilder, just then in Hollywood, when asking Wilder, too, for a Guggenheim recommendation. Wilder assented, concluding: “All my sympathy on your motor accident…try and write anyway. The WILL, the will is all we have. Don’t postpone.”

During this period, Steward struggled again with the question of faith. After an agonized reconsideration of Catholicism, however, he rejected it once and for all. Instead, “I think I am coming more and more to exist in what Keats called a negative capability,” he wrote Stein, “that is, no irritable reaching out after fact or reason, and a refusal to accept a universe reducible to simple rules and terms.” This willingness to abide by his own constant uncertainty and spiritual discomfort would characterize not only Steward’s spiritual state from now on, but also his writing. In the years to come he would return to Keats over and over again, finding consolation in the example of Keats’s own tortured, rejection-filled life and his ultimate transcendence of that misery through creative brilliance.

By fall Thornton Wilder, Henri Daniel-Rops, André Maurois, and Paul Morand had all agreed to recommend Steward for a Guggenheim, and Steward began to think he had a chance of winning it. He wrote to Stein that he was developing a new novel, one based on the myth of Hero and Leander.

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In his 1938 Christmas letter, Steward gave Stein some surprising news: “I have finished a novel about Chicago but I do not know whether it is good, it will need a lot of revision.” He also noted, “I have completely stopped drinking for awhile…I will need all my wits about me for [teaching]
Beowulf
and anyway I want to start doing some more writing right away.” In February, when Steward learned that his application for the Guggenheim had survived a first round of cuts, Wilder congratulated him on getting that far, then asked to know more about Steward’s new “hard-boiled” novel: “What do you mean—hardboiled novel? Did you write a novel or did you pu[bli]sh a novel?”

The “hardboiled” novel was not the respectable Hero and Leander project Steward had proposed in his Guggenheim application, but rather a violent sexual tale set in the Chicago underworld, using “all the dirty words there were and then some.” He intended to offer this dark, homoerotic novel of murder and sexual dismemberment to Jack Kahane, publisher of Obelisk Press in Paris, before traveling on to Stein at Bilignin.

He wrote to Stein,

But as winter turned to spring, he wrote her again with bad news: “The Ides of March in sooth was a blighted day…For we did not get the Goog,
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no, neither Wendell nor myself…It was funny, I sat and looked at the letter for ten minutes, and then everything was over. But to thee much gratitude for helping.”

Though disappointed, Steward continued to revise his Chicago novel and to make plans for his trip to France, booking passage on the
Normandie
even while writing Stein, “I have a strange feeling…there may be a war before [I arrive].” Wilder meanwhile responded to Steward’s Guggenheim news (again misspelling his name “Stewart”) with “Forgive a hasty [post]card…All 3 of my protégés lost out in the Guggenheim this year. Hmm, that’s what I get for having a play
fail
on Broadway. Last year 2 of my protégés won.”

•

“I met [William] Saroyan on the way over,” Steward wrote to Stein in Bilignin immediately upon his arrival in Paris that June. “He was all you said of him, he was very annoying but it makes an amusing story.” Steward had loved his passage over on the ultra-French
Normandie
, for its appointments had seemed lavish to him, even from his berth in third class. After settling in at the Hotel de Nice on Rue des Beaux Arts, he rented a typewriter “to do two or three solid weeks of writing,” he wrote Stein, “because Paris brings it out in me.” In fact, encouraged by the success of his 1937 visit, Steward had returned to Paris with the idea of establishing himself there as a writer—even as questions of income, academic career, and, above all, the looming world war seemed destined to thwart his plans. He had high hopes that Obelisk Press would welcome his shocking new manuscript; after all, Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford had published
The Young and Evil
with Kahane, even though it had been appallingly bad. Steward had met both young men through Benjamin Musser, hated their work, and felt sure his novel would do better, if only Jack Kahane would give him his chance. In the meanwhile, Steward continued forging various contacts in France—mostly through Stein and her French friends—that would help him, he hoped, either to emigrate to France to work there as a teacher, or else simply to spend extended periods of time in France, writing.

After a visit from Wilder a week later, Steward wrote to Stein again: “Dearest ones—well, Thornton came and it was huge fun for two or three days, but he read pages one and forty of the Chicago novel I am re-writing and while he didn’t hit the ceiling he was so disturbed that I think I will take it over and throw it in the Seine.”

Despite Wilder’s dislike of Steward’s novel (Wilder wrote to Stein, “Yes, you know me, I thought that Sammy Stewart’s [
sic
] novel was a big mistake”), his visit to Steward was not without tenderness. Steward had been attacked in his hotel room earlier that week by a thug he had picked up on Rue de Lappe; after sex, the man had robbed him and “slugged [him] on the chin,” causing Steward to bite his own tongue, which had then bled profusely. Wilder had comforted him about the injury while the two stood on a bridge looking down into the waters of the Seine. The two of course had sex; they also spent an afternoon at Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookshop Sylvia Beach had opened with the assistance of her lover, Adrienne Monnier. At Steward’s suggestion, they had gone on to visit the room at the Hotel d’Alsace where Oscar Wilde had died (after legendarily observing, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go”); there, in the melancholy half-light, Steward snapped a photo of Wilder sitting on the sill of the half-opened window. Wilder, however, apparently declined to snap one of him.

Knowing that Stein and Toklas would be receiving a number of guests over the summer, Steward visited them briefly at Bilignin, at the château they had rented each summer since 1929. His plan was to continue on from there to Algeria while they entertained others, and then return to them later in the summer for another, longer visit. On Steward’s thirtieth birthday, Stein greeted him at breakfast with a kiss and a poem written in his honor.
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More important to him, however, was her continuing belief in his talent, for she had begun encouraging him to undertake a comic novel based on the idea of the eleven women desperately seeking his hand in marriage. “You’re a motherable person,” Steward later recalled Stein as having said. “I think you really ought to do a book about the Eleven. You can begin it in [Algeria]…I do think you ought to be a writer Sammy, honest to God I do.”

During the first part of the visit, they made assorted outings by car took daily dog walks in the countryside, and enjoyed good meals painstakingly prepared by the reclusive, chain-smoking Toklas. The three drove to Geneva to see “Les Chefs d’Oeuvre du Musée du Prado” at the Musées d’Art et d’Histoire; on Steward’s last day, he took photographs when André Breton came over from Chamonix for a party, bringing with him an entourage of other artists including Yves Tanguy and Roberto Matta Echaurren.

Although he was intent upon being a “good Sammy” during his visit to Stein and Toklas, Steward drank heavily in his room at Bilignin after Stein and Toklas had retired for the evening. He also managed, against all odds, to have sex there—with Stein’s Vietnamese houseboy, Chen:

Before leaving Paris, Steward had asked Jack Kahane to forward his “Chicago” manuscript to Stein, and Stein promised to read it while Steward was in Algeria. She also provided him with a letter of introduction to Picasso and quickly introduced him at the train station to her newly arriving houseguests, the painter Sir Francis Rose and the photographer Cecil Beaton.

Upon his arrival at the seaport Steward took an immediate liking to Marseilles, for its streets were full of sailors and thugs—just the type of men he found most attractive. Through an introduction from Stein, he also met J. Lambreghts Coulbaut, the Belgian consul-general in the city, a man of advanced years with whom he nonetheless enjoyed a brief sexual interlude. As he wrote to Stein and Toklas on July 25,

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Steward’s decision to visit Algeria had been inspired by his reading of Gide’s
The Immoralist
, which had described it as a place of romance, intrigue, and young men eager for sex for pay; and also by his knowledge that Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas had engaged in a number of sexual adventures there. Steward’s travel to the casbah was, in that sense, like travel to Marseilles: an opportunity to mix in the same rough, sexually available masculine company he most preferred, and at the same time to immerse himself in various literary associations and an utterly foreign culture. He quickly picked up a handsome young Arab named Mohammed Zenouhin to be his guide and escort.

A week into his visit, Steward wrote to Stein:

In later life, Steward recalled more specifically what Stein had told him about the novel: