Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (14 page)

Though still a binge drinker, Steward was now working steadily toward sobriety, and with it a return to serious writing. In an April 1945 letter, he wrote Stein and Toklas:

Steward’s fascination with hard-boiled detective fiction and the American vernacular would ultimately contribute to the wisecracking tone of his erotic narratives, and it would also permeate his correspondence, his journals, and his Stud File.

Wilcox, meanwhile, gave Stein and Toklas a glimpse of Steward in relapse:

In this particular instance, Steward’s emotional crisis may have been triggered by a war fatality. His sister had married Lieutenant Arthur Ury in 1935, and Steward, who liked Ury very much, had recently sent him to Stein and Toklas bearing a gift for them and a letter of introduction. In April 1945, however, Steward wrote to them,

In any event, by the end of the 1945 spring semester, Steward had reached an emotional crisis greater than anything he had experienced previously. Despite now teaching exclusively at the graduate center on Franklin Street in downtown Chicago (“to effect my escape from the nauseating adolescent brats on [the main] campus”), he was nonetheless having a job-related breakdown. After a weekend at the home of the sculptor John Rood in Athens, Ohio, Wilcox wrote Stein and Toklas,

Steward’s crisis worsened that summer, when a psychologically unstable older woman in one of his classes became psychotically obsessed with him. She was, as he later wrote, “mad, utterly mad. Every day [I would arrive in class to find] one full square of blackboard filled with her [obscene] writing—most of it rambling and incoherent.” When Steward demanded immediate action from the administration, however, the dean made no move to expel her from the class. Steward, enraged and powerless, did the only thing he could: he took an immediate leave of absence.
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As he wrote Stein and Toklas:

As he began his new job of rewriting
The World Book Encyclopedia
, Steward suggested to his sister, who was still grieving for her husband, that she join the project. Virginia Ury eventually did so, working with a staff of fellow scholars in what became an increasingly frantic two-year full-time endeavor. The challenge of rewriting the encyclopedia brought about a noteworthy change in Steward’s spirits. As he wrote to Collins,

Unfortunately, the encyclopedia job remained on-and-off freelance work for the first year. Steward filled the empty hours at the opera house; Wilcox noted to Toklas, “Sam’s been very busy being a super in the ballets and operas. It has got to almost a profession by now.”
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Feeling the need to reconnect with Stein at the end of the war, Steward decided to splurge on a fantastically expensive overseas telephone call to her home on Rue Christine. Scheduling it took from October 1945 to January 13, 1946, but finally, on January 20, the call went through, and, as he later wrote, “I heard her wonderful voice, straight from Olympus, neo-Valkyrean, thrilling and delightful. Space and time were no more…For three full minutes we shouted at each other, neither of us knowing what the other said. But it was joyous.”

Steward’s telephone call was prescient, for six months later, during the course of an exploratory operation for cancer, Stein died. Steward was devastated. Unemployed, low on funds, and deeply depressed, he could not bring himself to write Toklas anything more than a telegraph of condolence. But she nonetheless wrote back, “Your wire did me good because at once there came back to me the really good time you had given Gertrude—so many times…Gertrude was the happiest person that ever was but you found a way to give her a new pleasure—and so I will always love you. Basket and I stay on here alone—so if you come over we’ll try to welcome you prettily in Gertrude’s home.” Several months later, she sent Steward one of Stein’s silk scarves as a remembrance, and in response to his note of thanks, she wrote: “Are you being a good boy. Or are you like Basket—perfect with an occasional lapse. Have you seen Thornton. He wrote me that he expected to see you—he thinks you should teach—he’s a firm believer in teaching. He is of course the best example of the benefits it is possible to achieve from learning and teaching.”

Deeply disillusioned with teaching and strongly aware that he was very far from “perfect with an occasional lapse,” Steward again could not bring himself to respond. For a long time he sent no more letters to Toklas.

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The encyclopedia job soon proved more difficult than expected. The editorial team struggled mightily to keep to its deadlines, and Steward, finding the pace exhausting, began to long for “those dear departed halcyon academic days when I never had to get up before noon, and when the week’s work consisted simply of lecturing with a certain ironic and aloof dignity for only sixteen hours a week.” He later thought it “incredible that I voluntarily committed myself to [that] madhouse for two full years.”

He nonetheless performed well as department editor for
The World Book
, a job that consisted not only of revising and updating seven million words of text, but also of simplifying that text to meet various levels of reading difficulty. His clarity and precision as a prose stylist were indeed extraordinary; so much so that the managing editor for the project noted at its conclusion, “Dr. Steward [was] one of our ablest and most brilliant editorial workers…[in] charge of some of the ‘touchiest’ and most difficult fields of knowledge within the province of a general encyclopedia.” The articles on religion had particularly challenged Steward, for each of his efforts had needed to pass muster with a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jewish theologian before being sent to press. In promotional photographs of the editorial team taken during 1946–1947, he is nattily dressed, with carefully pomaded hair and a pencil-thin mustache, but he is also pallid and bleary-eyed. On one recent drunken night out in search of sex he had witnessed a murder; as Wilcox wrote wonderingly to Toklas, “It seems as if all the murders and sex crimes take place in his block…There was actually [one] in his building.”

Money, too, remained a problem—so much so that, during the last months of 1946, Steward took a job as holiday help at the bookstore in Marshall Field’s department store. Steward had naively thought that his lifelong love of books would make working in a bookshop at Christmastime enjoyable. It was not. In a
Dental Journal
essay about the horrors of holiday employment at Marshall Field’s, he observed, “It was a howling madhouse, a lunatic Sabbath, a frenzied nightmare of females and squalling brats.” The retail environment was nonetheless not without diversions, for Field’s had long been well-known in Chicago as a homosexual cruising ground, and many of its employees (including Steward’s boss) were homosexual. One afternoon Steward’s sexual interest was piqued by an extraordinarily handsome young man working in the gift-wrap department: tall and dark-haired, he had trained at Great Lakes, taken a first posting at the Naval Air Training Station in Glenview, and then done a brief tour of duty in the Philippines. Once again a civilian, Roy Fitzgerald was now spending the holidays wrapping presents. Steward learned that he was a “club-member” from his boss; after a brief conversation, Steward and Fitzgerald boarded a freight elevator and stopped it between floors for oral sex. The incident was a onetime thing; Fitzgerald would take a job after the holidays as a postman in Winnetka, and by September he would have moved to Los Angeles, there to begin a highly successful film career as Rock Hudson.
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In early 1947, at the end of the holidays, Steward fell into an incapacitating depression. Physically worn-out from years of heavy drinking, on leave from a teaching job that had exhausted him, unable to progress with his literary writing, emotionally disconnected from everyone he knew, Steward was also feeling less desirable than ever before on account of his advancing age, amputated testicle, and debilitating alcoholism. In despair, he decided on suicide.

Though loath ever to discuss it, Steward had repeatedly contemplated suicide since adolescence; while still a young man he had stolen twenty-four quarter-grain tablets of morphine from his grandfather’s medicine chest, expecting he might one day use them to end his life. More recently he had acquired a hypodermic syringe in order to inject massive doses of vita min B
₁₂
into his arm, “so that my ragged nerves could face each new day’s old pain.” He decided to crush the twenty-four morphine pills, dissolve them in water, and inject the lethal solution into a vein.

In a sense, Steward had been primed for suicide by culture-wide perceptions of the homosexual as an individual intent upon self-destruction. In the words of Edward Sagarin/Donald Webster Cory, a pioneering homophile writer of the period, American society saw “the homosexual as a depressed, dejected person, frequently on the brink of suicide, or actually ending his hopeless life after many years of despondent struggle…[The] wide acceptance [of this myth] may be attributed to the novelists who have ended so many books on [the] subject [of homosexuality] in a mood of despair, violence, and even suicide. [Nearly all contemporary novels on homosexuality of the 1930s and ’40s] end with hopelessness for the invert. Several of these books bring the invert to self-destruction; the others leave him no other path to follow.”

And yet as he prepared to inject the morphine, Steward hesitated. Through sheer force of habit he had found himself sterilizing the hypodermic needle, and when he realized what he was doing—sterilizing a needle in order to kill himself—he had a revelation: “From my deep despair I leaped suddenly to a peak of laughter…Well, not quite, and not immediately, but within a week I had gone to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and though it took me some time before I stopped ‘slipping,’ I had my last drink in 1947.” The fact that the twenty-five-year-old morphine tablets were most probably inert added further merriment to Steward’s after-the-fact recollection of his suicide attempt, which he later published as a short, life-affirming confessional article entitled “Death Averted.”

Though it began in 1935, the Alcoholics Anonymous organization was then relatively new to the Chicago area. Steward had never been a “joiner” and hated the idea of swapping misery stories with a group of fellow drinkers, but he also now knew he needed help by whatever means he could find. As he began attending meetings, he found he had a very particular problem: Alcoholics Anonymous insisted upon his appealing to “God” as part of his recovery process: