Free Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by justin spring

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.
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    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. * 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.” * The place in which Lord Alfred Douglas lived, as Steward later wrote, was “hardly…Wordsworth’s ‘pastoral farms green to the very door,’ * but it was pleasant and British and the sort of dwelling I was used to seeing in British movies.”
    As Steward later confessed:
    I must honestly admit that I had no interest whatsoever in Lord Alfred Douglas as a person or as a writer, but only in the fact that he and Oscar Wilde had been lovers, * and back in those shrouded days the name of Wilde had a magic all its own for those of us who had to live without the benefits of liberation or exposure of our wicked lives. Besides, I was in my twenties and Lord Alfred was by then sixty-seven, and in anyone’s book that’s old . To go to bed with him was hardly the most attractive prospect in the world—it was terrifying, even repulsive. But if I wanted to link myself to Oscar Wilde more directly than I was