Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by justin spring Page A
Authors: justin spring
Tags: Literary, General, Gay Studies, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Psychology, Literary Criticism, Gay & Lesbian, 20th Century, Biography, Education, Authors; American, Art, Artists; Architects; Photographers, Pornography, Teaching Methods & Materials, Human Sexuality, Educators, College teachers, College teachers - Illinois - Chicago, Gay authors, Novelists; American - 20th century, Sexology - Research - United States - History - 20th century, Body Art & Tattooing, Gay authors - United States, Steward; Samuel M, Tattoo artists, Pornography - United States - History - 20th century, Novelists; American, Authors; American - 20th century, Tattoo artists - New York (State) - New York, Sexology, Poets; American, Poets; American - 20th century
Ads: Link
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.
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.” * Steward responded that he was sure Stein would be the right person, then added some disturbing news:
I got whapped by an automobile while I was crossing the street in Chicago, and [have a] sub-conjunctival haemorrhage in my eyeball [and] stitches in my lip…aside from all those varied lacerations and contusions on my face and knee etc there were no bones broken…but I am glad you two cannot see me…I will soon be well and hope you are too.
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
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.” * Steward responded that he was sure Stein would be the right person, then added some disturbing news:
I got whapped by an automobile while I was crossing the street in Chicago, and [have a] sub-conjunctival haemorrhage in my eyeball [and] stitches in my lip…aside from all those varied lacerations and contusions on my face and knee etc there were no bones broken…but I am glad you two cannot see me…I will soon be well and hope you are too.
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
Similar Books
