Devastated by Kinsey’s death, Steward ceased his journal. It was not until over a year later, on November 14, 1957, that he uncertainly began writing in it again, and in doing so he noted the many significant changes that had taken place in his life since he had stopped:
I am now at the end of my first year in the new [tattoo shop I constructed in] the old bar across the street from the [Sportland] arcade…[and] the place has earned the deserved reputation among the young punks and juvenile delinquents and sailors of the area as being the nicest tattoo shop in town. It is really quite elegant, with more lights in the window than in a barbershop, neon signs all over the place, [and] a window display that gets a tremendous play from the passing public. The gross here is higher than [in] the old arcade…I won’t give up this little gold mine until the civic betterment association forces me out.
Steward had had many sexual contacts during the past year, and he cataloged them all in his very long first journal entry, which concluded, “Most of all at present…I enjoy [the black bodybuilder] Bill Payson…It is his attitude of semi-cruelty, you might say, that I like; not cruelty exactly, but more a feeling of ‘This is what you deserve, white boy; you scorn me because I’m a nigger, and here I am, shoving this big black tool right down in you, fucking you in the ass; that’ll show you what I think of you.’…and man—does he.”
Before Kinsey’s death, Steward had felt he was doing something greater in his journal than simply gloating over his various sexual escapades, something that would serve humanity in general by serving Kinsey in particular. But now, a year after Kinsey’s death, Steward was struggling with a sense of futility, for apparently he was once again back where he had started—keeping a diary of assorted sexual exploits for not much more than his own satisfaction and amusement. As a result, he struggled daily with an overwhelming sense of abandonment, hopelessness, and loss. Alice Toklas, knowing all too well what it was like to lose someone larger and more important than oneself (for she had been trying since 1946 to redefine her place in the world after the loss of Gertrude Stein), had been gently encouraging him for some time to think once again of writing for publication, asking him, “Isn’t there any newspaper that pays little but more than nothing for the things you can do so very well—so naturally like the Sparrow of the dental review—less local with subjects of a wider field.” Perhaps hoping to supply Steward with a little bit of “humor and diversion” of her own, she then shared with him her latest story about Sir Francis Rose, which she described, only half ironically, as “Francis and his international scandal.”
Rose’s “scandal” began while spending a boozy weekend in Portsmouth, England, with his old friend Lionel Kenneth Philip “Buster” Crabb.* Crabb was a retired Royal Navy commander who had been a pioneering undersea diver of the 1930s; beginning in the war years, he had been one of Rose’s favorite ne’er-do-well drinking buddies, and in fact they had briefly roomed together.* Though by 1956 Crabb was forty-seven, out of shape, and deeply alcoholic, he had nonetheless managed to conduct a surreptitious underwater inspection of the Russian cruiser Sverdlov while the ship was docked in England. The success of this mission (Crabb had seen and described the ship’s innovative steering propeller) had subsequently led MI6 to ask him to spy on the hull of the Russian cruiser Ordzhonikidze, which had just brought General-Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and Premier Nikolai Bulganin to Britain on a state visit. The day of the ship’s arrival in Portsmouth was the last day Crabb was seen alive; ten days later, British newspapers reported his death in a diving accident, giving no specific details.
Upon Crabb’s mysterious death,* Rose had left England and attempted to hide out at his little chambre de bonne apartment on Ile St. Louis—but not before telling a reporter that he had received a mysteriously phrased note from Crabb the day he died. As a result, Rose suddenly found himself being stalked by British intelligence, Russian intelligence, French police, and legions of tabloid reporters. His Paris apartment was broken into soon after he arrived and the mysterious note from Crabb was reportedly stolen; subsequently Rose’s “son” Luis was arrested and detained without charges in the French prison at Saint-Quentin. Hounded relentlessly by newspapermen, French plainclothes police, and the KGB, Rose had a mental breakdown. His estranged wife, Lady Frederica, arrived shortly thereafter from her home on Corsica, packed up his things and brought him back to England, and there deposited him at the former Holloway Sanatorium at Virginia Water for psychiatric observation. So began a cycle of breakdown, institutionalization, and release that would continue, on and off, for the rest of Rose’s life.
Steward’s existence, by comparison, had been relatively uneventful over the past year. There had been one great upset in the fall of 1956, when police had raided and shut down the Sportland Arcade for showing illegal (and highly profitable) pornographic films on its antiquated peepshow machines. As a result of the closure, Steward had lost his kiosk workspace. He had needed to find himself another space very quickly, before his business began to suffer, and so he had settled almost immediately on a shop front across the street, a former barroom and speakeasy “that Al Capone had frequented, having [once] been enamored of a bar-maid [who worked] there.” Steward was able to rent the place on a month-by-month lease since the building, surrounded by vacant lots, was slated for eventual demolition as part of an urban renewal scheme.
The name Steward gave his new shop—“Phil Sparrow’s Tattoo Joynt”—was slyly playful. In choosing the Middle English spelling of joint, “joynt,” Steward quietly drew attention to the word and its various meanings—for while joint primarily describes a place where two bodies come together or join (which is itself sexually suggestive), it also described, in slang usage, a disreputable place of entertainment, a prison, a marijuana cigarette, or (most significantly for Steward) a phallus. And indeed the Joynt contained elements of all those things. Immediately after moving in, Steward walled off the rear section of the overly large space, thereby creating a private backroom area at the Joynt devoted entirely to sex, and featuring a cot, an easy chair, a waist-high workbench for “rough fucking,” and a toilet area rigged not only with a series of peepholes, but also a “glory hole” through which men could engage in anonymous oral sex.
While Steward’s own sex drive was waning, he remained entirely fascinated by the rough young men he now encountered daily. As he wrote in his journal,
my periodicity* is extending itself—from 48 hours, it has now jumped to 80 or 90—and of course my body is slowing down, for I am now 48, going on 49.
One of the best of the new finds is Bill Tregoz, a boy [who] up and left a graduate fellowship in ancient languages at the University of Michigan [to come] to Chicago, [buy] a motorcycle, [play the harp] and…work for an engineering firm. I put three large tattoos on him…he wears full [motorcyclist] regalia, even down to the black leather pants…I have found him extremely interesting—highly intelligent…and a wonderful sexual thrill.*
The beauties who pass through my hands [as I tattoo them], however, are the ones that torment me still a great deal…At any rate, I can touch them, hold their biceps, touch their knees—something I could never do with the students when I was teaching…So, all in all, it’s been a fairly good year sexually speaking.
In January of 1957 Chuck Liston, a particularly handsome young man who had once hung around the cage en route to a military school in South Carolina, returned to Chicago in uniform and came to visit Steward at his new shop. Liston was now a soldier, and in Steward’s opinion, “a more rugged American youth I’ve rarely seen.” Steward developed a powerful crush on him after seeing him in uniform, one he found extremely painful, for the young man was amiable and affectionate with him, but in no way interested in sex.
In the same entry in which he described his unrequited crush on Liston, Steward nonetheless noted starting a sex relationship with a highly intelligent former student of his at DePaul named Pete Rojas. He went on to observe that “making Pete was one of the most satisfying rewards I’ve had for quitting teaching, for I think I could not have let myself do it (nor would he have said yes) while that other relationship [of student to teacher] existed in the background.”
•
In his pursuit of sexual variety and adventure, Steward had become involved with some very troubled characters over the past year. Most notable among them was Roy Robinson, a six-foot-two, twenty-seven-year-old ex-con who had had all of his teeth removed in order to be fitted for dentures. While Steward thought Robinson an awful character, he was nonetheless fascinated by the extraordinary sensation of Robinson’s toothless mouth, which Robinson made available to him (in exchange for cash) on a regular basis. Years later, after paying Robinson to perform oral sex on him a total of 230 times in the back room of the tattoo parlor, Steward observed that Robinson was without a doubt
the most morally and ethically rotten person I had ever known, [one who] would have been easily recognized by any psychiatrist as a true sociopath…He had been arrested nearly eighty times and spent a good third of his life in prison…He was married three times…and was very fond of “the gurls” but that did not keep him from having a regular clientele of homosexuals whom he actively serviced for amounts ranging from two to ten dollars; he took the money thus used and spent it on his women…[Though he worked for me for years as a handyman] he stole from me just as easily and with no more compunction than he jackrolled a stranger.
Writing, however, remained just as much on Steward’s mind as sex. During the year following Kinsey’s death, Steward’s friend James Purdy had established himself as a literary novelist by privately publishing Don’t Call Me by My Right Name and 63: Dream Palace. The two novellas were subsequently published commercially in Britain, and then brought out in the United States (together) under the title Color of Darkness. With these publications, Purdy’s reputation would continue to grow, and he would receive both a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant and a Guggenheim fellowship to support him in his work a short time later. While Steward did not much care for Purdy’s writing and was consequently perplexed by its success, he was heartened by the thought that the dark, violent, and sexually charged urban scenes that Purdy described, so very close to the world in which Steward actually lived, described a world about which he, too, might eventually publish. Alice Toklas, who shared Steward’s basic indifference to Purdy’s writing, noted as well to Steward that Purdy had tried to manipulate her into writing positively on his behalf (she had met him several years earlier through both Steward and the Wilcoxes). “James Purdy bores me,” she now wrote Steward. “He asked me to write something about his latest effort…but I ignored his request and his book. He—his subject matter and his treatment of it lack taste.”
As he returned to his journal, Steward became ever more lyrical and introspective in his entries, in a way that suggested he was once again trying to find a way of turning his day-to-day experiences into some sort of publishable work. The experiences he had been chronicling in his journals were, after all, far more interesting than anything he had found in Purdy’s fiction. Even as he did so, however, he seems to have been using the journal for private reflection:
[Tattooing] has so many more compensations than anything I had ever done before in my life, that I find the utmost gratification in it. Many things are answered for me. I sit reading by the window; three sailors, heavy bowed under their enormous sea bags, pass; two wave to me and grin. They don’t stop; they go on—but they are mine, and part of me is going with them…There is something almost terrifyingly personal and intimate about this work…Sailors come back just to gossip, or to ask my advice, or [ask] questions about what to do in town or where to go; I let them sew buttons on, I brush them off, I sit and watch them help each other dress and undress; I tie their ties, for the boot [sailors] often yet don’t know how…And there is also the satisfaction of doing a good tattoo and knowing the boy will carry it for many years, again a part of me.
Apart from his journal writing, Steward was now actively mentoring several of these young men, including the heavily tattooed former classicist Bill Tregoz. On December 6, Steward noted, “Tregoz [was told by his boss that] he’d either have to sell [his] motorcycle or stop working there…[He and I] fell into a discussion that turned unwarrantedly serious, about the ‘suicidal urge’ in us that frequently goads us to destroy ourselves right when we seem to have the world by the tail.” Though Steward was wary of yet again involving himself with a charismatic young man who would ultimately abandon him, he saw enough of himself in Tregoz’s sufferings—for Tregoz was decidedly homosexual in orientation—to want to help him achieve greater self-understanding. A similar desire to help and advise would later inform Steward’s erotic fiction.
Business slowed as winter came on. By mid-December Steward noted being “lonesome down here at times, mainly because I have no continuing project…I just snooze and putter.” His sex life was less dynamic as well; in September of 1957, he hosted his twenty-ninth and final daisy chain. Since on some winter days Steward earned as little as three dollars at the tattoo parlor (tattooing was, it turned out, a seasonal business), he decided to close down over the Christmas holidays to visit Alice Toklas in Paris. She seemed to him in need of company, for she was elderly and, despite being surrounded by Gertrude Stein’s vast art collection, she was also very low on money. Moreover, when her new landlords bought the building at 5 Rue Christine in 1958, they had made no secret of wanting her out of her apartment. Of her late-life loneliness and recurring financial difficulties, Steward later wrote,
Some money [to cover her expenses] came from a group of her old friends who could afford it—Virgil Thomson, Carl Van Vechten, Doda Conrad, Thornton Wilder, Donald Sutherland, and Janet Flanner. Once in a while one of the pictures in the collection disappeared; the royalties from her books were certainly not enough to keep her in the grand style to which she had long been accustomed…To protect and preserve this deep friendship…I did everything I could for her, and she reciprocated by loving me in the gentle fashion that a woman in her eighties can bestow on a person three decades younger.
Not wanting to visit Paris alone, Steward invited a handsome young Chicago ballet student named Allan Mayle* along as his companion. The two were astonished upon their arrival by the extreme dark, damp, and cold of Paris in December, and in their desire to heat their garret room at the Hotel Recamier nearly poisoned themselves with a hastily purchased butane gas heater.
Steward was sorry to see how Toklas had aged in the five years since their last meeting, for her mind as well as her body seemed to have slowed down considerably, and as a result her conversations with Steward were nowhere near as interesting as they had once been. In fact, she sometimes seemed to Steward almost a caricature of her previous self:
Alice is much feebler, walks very slowly, and with a cane. I am always a little shocked to see how much she diminishes between the times that I see her; she…is terribly humpbacked now, and weeny—to use a word that she herself used so much this time—and her mustache is heavier. She wears a kind of down over-the-ears cloche of fur, and with the glasses, the astrakhan coat (weighs pounds! I don’t see how she supports it!) and the cane, she looks exactly like a black troll.
The sensual pleasures Steward had known in Paris during the summer of 1952 were not easily recaptured with Allan Mayle in the winter of 1957, particularly since the young dancer, however talented he may have been in bed, was largely oblivious to the beauty of the city and had a tendency to engage in endless, mindless chatter. “I must confess I had looked forward to seeing Paris somewhat through Allan’s eyes,” Steward wrote in his journal, “but the empty-headed little idiot might as well be living in Pumpkin Center, Ohio, for all he reacts to Paris…Where are the old magics that I used to feel? Gone? Or moved to Rome?”
Steward’s next day consisted mainly of a four-and-a-half-hour visit for tea and gossip with Toklas, which included the news that “she is no longer seeing Francis [Rose] at all, having said to him that she appealed to him twice in the name of Gertrude, and wouldn’t again…She also said that Jean Cocteau, who…always makes a fetish of laisser-vivre, went so far as to send a note to Bernard Faÿ and say ‘you must NEVER see Francis Rose!’ which is going pretty far, for Monsieur Cocteau.” More important, however, Toklas gave Steward some advice:
Amongst the things [Alice] told me was to write the tattoo [book], and be real about it; that reality would carry it, even without plot and love interest. She also counseled me to go to Italy with tattooing, and said, “they laugh a lot there, that’s where all the gaiety has gone, not in France any more, people are too grim.” And she’s largely right about that. She was of the opinion that I could develop a “smart” clientele in Italy, in addition to the “bad boys” one—me, I’m not so sure.
A couple of days later, Steward ditched Mayle (who was suffering aftereffects of carbon monoxide poisoning from the butane heater, and confined to bed) to spend Christmas Day alone with his old flame Jacques Delaunay, now a well-established lawyer in Paris. The two dined together at Brasserie Lipp. There, eating Christmas dinner in a restaurant, Steward was amused to discover that the specialty of the legendary brasserie was nothing more than “sauerkraut and wieners, just like Ohio.”
In the days that followed, Steward had a long visit with Julien Green, during which “we talked a lot about Prok, and tattooing—[Green] thinks maybe I could make dialogues of the [journal] material.” He also visited Rudolph de Rohan again, to have photographs taken of his new rose garland tattoo. Through Pick, Steward was given an introduction to Cocteau’s lover and supporter, the film star Jean Marais. Steward, who had idolized the handsome French actor for years, came away from the meeting starstruck.
On Sunday Jacques Delaunay came by again. This time, as a favor to Allan Mayle, Steward pushed the two men into each other’s arms and simply retired to another room to read. Upon emerging from the bedroom, Delaunay then attempted to initiate something with Steward, but “evidently the continued excitement had been too much for Jacques and worn him down…we finally gave it up as a bad job [and] went and had a pizza.”
At lunch with Julien Green the next day, Steward shared a realization with the author. As Steward wrote in his journal, “Julien [was] as polite and impeccable as always, and speaking so low that sometimes one could barely understand him. He…told me of the sad discovery he had made when he was 40, namely, that ‘pleasure doesn’t really make one happy,’ a discovery (alas!) that I had made even before I was forty.” Steward had a similarly melancholy epiphany while lunching several days later at La Mediterranée with Toklas. A simple workman, recognizing her and knowing of her long association with Gertrude Stein, briefly expressed his reverence and admiration for both women, then bent and kissed her hand. Steward was suddenly overwhelmed, for “all the past, and the perspective of a half century moved into the place, and I realized just who and what this old lady was…and I started to weep…every time I would begin to get myself in hand, the damned workman would pass through the room again, and off I’d go. Alice was quiet for a long time following his charming speech, and I imagine she too was thinking of the old days.”
Steward’s awareness of his advancing age was confirmed by the finished set of photographs taken by Rudolph de Rohan of Steward standing bare-chested, showing off his rose-garland tattoo. In them, Steward seemed smaller and less fit than in previous years, and his face looked older, paler, and more tired. “As I suspected, they were not so good as they were five years ago, and whose fault is that?” Steward wrote in his diary. “Ah, well, we age indeed. Still, they [are] ‘documentary’ as far as my tattoo [is] concerned, and fair enough.”
•
Steward caught a cold during his last days in Paris that grew much worse on the flight home, “bloom[ing] into a gaudy monstrous thing, with fever and all the rest, and myself sick as a dog by the time we got to New York.” The chest infection subsequently turned into a pneumonia so debilitating that only by February 6 was Steward able to get out of bed without extended coughing fits. Even during the worst of the siege, however, Steward continued to see his “regulars” for sexual encounters—for despite the real danger to his health, he worried that in turning down any of these men even once, he might lose contact with them—a loss that, considering his advancing years and ever-diminishing sex appeal, he simply could not afford.
Having received so much encouragement from Toklas and Green, Steward returned to his tattoo journal with renewed enthusiasm, describing not only his customers and daily activities, but also his various new sexual partners, including a “negro with the unbelievable name [of] Ruffian Bellows Jr.” whom he had recently hired as a five-dollar hustler. But his recent illness made him ever more cautious about disease: “Soon as he left, I got to worrying about why (he said) they wouldn’t take his blood [at the blood bank], and wondering if he had syphilis. [My old friend] Doc Anthony used to tell me: ‘either stop fucking or stop worrying,’ and I guess I should.” Though Steward was strongly attracted to Bellows (“Lovely, satiny dark-brown skin. Quite a line of chatter, mostly beat”), he could not stop worrying about the possibility that he was a carrier of venereal disease, and his feelings about Bellows changed considerably when he learned several days later that Bellows had recently been treated for gonorrhea. Steward’s fear was not only of another infection, but also of becoming too visible to police and city health authorities, for Roy Robinson (who had recently discovered he had tertiary syphilis) had been compelled to report Steward as a sex contact at the local venereal disease clinic just a month earlier. Since Chicago health officials were now seeking to shut down tattoo shops under any pretext, Steward wanted his name and address kept out of their records. Even so, during his last meeting with Bellows, Steward heard a story from him that made him laugh so hard he wrote it down afterward in his journal:
He told me one fine tale about a fag who “hired” him one night. The guy made [Ruffian] take the belt out of his trousers and beat him with it, and then go into the bathroom and pee all over him, and finally, kiss his wife who’d been watching this all along and signalling to Ruffian to beat her husband harder. Ruffian was about to leave when the guy said wait, here’s your money, and Ruffian said, “Whuffo you pays me for beatin’ you? Why dat?” and the man said of course, and come again, and Ruffian said, “Whuffo? What kind of mens are you?” and the mens said, “I don’t know.”
Steward’s laughter was the laughter of self-recognition, for he had been posing a similar question to himself—almost daily, and for years—on nearly every page of his journals.
•
More and more, Steward wanted to turn his endless ruminations about his sexual activities into some sort of publishable work, perhaps by incorporating these real-life events into sexually themed fiction. But while a good deal of erotic fiction was being published commercially in Paris in 1956—primarily by the Olympia Press—none of it described male homosexual sex. Steward’s only means of publishing homoerotic fiction in the United States at that moment would have involved self-publishing privately (and illegally), and then distributing the work privately (which would have been even more dangerously illegal). His other alternative was to tone down the erotic content of his writing and publish it as erotically suggestive pulp fiction. But pulp fiction publishers routinely required authors to pathologize and denounce homosexuality in any fiction describing it—and Steward was opposed to doing anything of the sort.*
One of the few literary journals then interested in publishing prohomosexual short fiction was the trilingual Swiss homophile publication Der Kreis, to which Steward had been contributing illustrations since 1954. He had learned of the magazine through Kinsey in 1952, just as it began publishing contributions in English, and had met one of its editors, Daniel Decure, that very same year in Paris. The magazine would achieve a peak circulation, in 1959, of 2,000 copies, with only 700 of those shipped outside Switzerland, and unfortunately for Steward, its editor in chief, Karl Meier (also known as “Rolf”), was strongly disinclined toward any content (fictional or otherwise) that was openly sexual. But the editorial policy for fiction at Der Kreis began to change slightly after Rolf appointed a German-born English-language editor named Rudolf Burckhardt* in 1955.
An even greater problem for Steward in writing homosexual erotic fiction was his continuing ambivalence toward his fellow homosexuals—those for whom, presumably, he would be writing. Indeed, some of his journal entries about homosexuals are so deeply loathing as to seem almost irrational. On February 17 he noted, “[Today I tattooed] the 14th queer I’ve tattooed in three years—out of 8900 pieces put on. I am really glad that h[omosexuals]’s don’t get decorated; if they hung out in my shop, my business would be ruined. As it was, two punks eyed the fruit strangely, and laughed at him after he’d gone. I was, of course, heavily on their side as they did.” (Steward’s dislike of the “fruit” was not based on the man’s sexual preference, however, but rather on his overt effeminacy.) A week later, Steward once again made note of his ambivalence toward homosexuals in noting the return of a homosexual couple who had been to his tattoo parlor previously: Rich, a boxer who was in the merchant marine, and Jack, his older, Ivy League lover. Steward placed a pair of bluebirds on Rich’s chest and a tiger’s head on one of his shoulders while Jack looked on approvingly. Steward hated the experience, for he disliked proprietary relationships between affluent homosexuals and their “bought” boys, and moreover had come to think of male homosexual “couples” of any sort as being embarrassingly unnatural. As he later wrote in an editorial piece for Der Kreis, “the invert, it seem[s] to me, should live alone and learn to like it, and to be self-sufficing.”
Steward was now having sex regularly with a new partner, a former Nazi stormtrooper named Gerhard (soon to be “Gary”) Stroh. His fascination with Stroh’s Nazi past spoke to his long-standing desire to have sex with brutalizing authority figures, a desire that had increasingly colored his fantasies of the past year, as well as coming to dominate his actual sex life—for apart from Stroh, the partners he most preferred were men like Bill Payson who would physically abuse him and verbally degrade him during sex. At the same time, however, Steward continued to feel a desperate romantic longing for the relatively innocent younger men who frequented his tattoo shop, even (or particularly) those with whom no sexual relationship whatever would be possible. While the two kinds of longing may have seemed at first glance to be entirely opposite, they were, in fact, variations on the same masochistic theme of rejection and deprivation. Describing an afternoon spent with a handsome young heterosexual sailor who had a long-stemmed rose tattoo on his right hip bone, Steward noted that after applying a new tattoo, the two had sat and talked awhile, and
when he finally went to go he shook my hand in a grip that nigh squeezed it flat, and I said send me a postcard from a far place, and he started to say something (I’ll never know what), and at the door turned and said “goodbye” with a particularly intimate inflection that left me standing weak-kneed, so that I suddenly sat down and rested my chin in my hand, and thought about youth and beauty and the ache and hunger that it can cause in one, and has caused in me such an infinite number of times…The warm glow that he left in my mind and heart and eyes lasted for hours…I remember[ed] the epitaph that Santayana wanted carved on his tomb, with two youths kneeling; I thought of Keats, of Housman, of all the golden hopes of my own youth…
Oddly enough, I would not have had more. This contented me psychically as I have not been contented for years. It was at once an epitome and climax.
A few days after his meeting with this handsome but unattainable sailor, Steward received a letter from Rudolf Burckhardt of Der Kreis announcing that he would soon be coming to Chicago. “Since there was no way to get out of it gracefully, I wrote and asked him to stay the night with me if he hadn’t already made his arrangements,” Steward noted. And in fact, Steward was already working on some fiction. Recently while visiting his erotica collection (which was now in storage) to search for his 1954 sex calendar,* Steward had found a copy of his old motorcycle story, as well as the equally S/M-themed episode that had followed it, and he found himself thinking there was something in it that might yet be developed. “I read it over…it holds up well, as do the beginning pages of episode number three,” he observed. “I guess I can find it in my heart to finish them, now that the season is so slack.”
As he returned to writing erotic fiction, Steward noted repeatedly in his journal how the world around him was changing, for he kept meeting younger men who seemed much more open and demonstrative in their attraction to other males than any he had known in earlier times. Two young men had, in fact, recently come into the shop for matching love tattoos featuring each other’s name. “The whole episode left me rather shook up,” Steward wrote after applying them. “When we were all done (I dint let my hair down—much), [one] said, ‘Well, I may see you again.’ And [the other] said, ‘Not I!’ Whereupon I said slyly, ‘Not even to get it covered up?’ and embarrassed them both.” The experience marked the first time two outwardly masculine men had come to Steward to be thus tattooed, and Steward’s response—partly jealous and partly cynical (for he thought he recognized one of them as a hustler)—was basically one of amazement: he had never imagined such expressions of loving commitment to be possible between two masculine males.
Steward had a visit a week later from his sister that proved to be unexpectedly difficult. In getting married, she had converted to her husband’s religion, Catholicism, and she now pressed Steward hard to do the same. She remembered his earlier conversion, during the 1930s, and moreover she felt that, given the circumstances of his present life, he would greatly benefit from a return to the Church. “She kept after me to make a general confession; I kept telling her not to browbeat me, that I had no faith, that I couldn’t, etc.” Though Steward managed to give his sister the brush-off, he had an even greater surprise and shock when, a little more than a week later, Alice Toklas wrote to tell him that she, too, had been received back into the Catholic Church. The news left Steward more amazed and disturbed than he cared to admit, for, as he wrote in his journal, “She was the last person in the world except one (myself) whom I ever expected to go back to the Church—and indeed, I had always thought of her as Jewish.”* He went on to note that “on top of Jinny’s urging of me to return when she was here, comes now this—and I am both annoyed and pressured a great deal.” Steward nonetheless responded to Toklas’s news by cheerily writing that it had left him “flabber and ghasted,” and then adding, “I scarcely know what to say, for my own problem gets in the way.” Along with the joy he felt on her behalf, he admitted he was “wondering why I seem not able to believe any more, when once I could.”
Steward was nowhere close to returning to Catholicism, however. In fact his experience of Holy Week 1958 was entirely caught up in worldly concerns. In his journal for Good Friday, he noted, “The [new light] over the john now illuminates the cocks exceedingly well, as the boys stand there to take a leak, and whenever possible, I sneak back…to watch them through the fruit hole.” In the same entry he described how his friend Adam Norman had been entrapped by police that week at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, and how it was now going to cost Norman a thousand dollars to take care of the judge and the two cops. “More proof that you never ought to do it outside your apartment—or [your] shop, where doors can be locked.” Of his own life, he concluded, “Things seem to be going fairly well at present, but I live under dread, always expecting a calamity…this life is full of crises.”
Steward’s chief concern that spring was not so much about robbery or other threats to his business, but rather with Alice Toklas, for she seemed to him so feeble as to be nearing death. With that death, Steward knew he faced yet another serious loss, for he had few significant friends left in his life, and among them Toklas was the dearest and most important. She had not only seen him gently through his drinking, but had also followed his transition from academe to tattooing without judging or condemning him. More important, she was his last living connection to that higher, better, literary life to which he had once aspired—a life once so close that now seemed entirely lost to him.
A few days after Easter, Steward wrote a friend in New York that Toklas seemed “much enfeebled…[and with her conversion to Catholicism] I see her getting ready [for death], for when Gertrude’s last volume* appears, her work will be done.” Wanting to do something truly kind and generous on her behalf, Steward forced himself to pack up all the letters that Gertrude Stein had sent to him during the 1930s and ’40s, and to donate them, at long last, to the Beinecke Library at Yale. He then wrote Toklas to tell her he had done so. “The letters from Gertrude [to me] are finally now [donated to] the Yale collection,” he wrote. “While they were in my house, they were a radiant center; now the hearth seems cold.”
In sending the treasured letters off to Yale, Steward felt more lost than ever. Having already said goodbye to the two great mentors in his life—first Stein, then Kinsey—he was now apparently on the brink of losing Toklas, too. But the impending loss of this significant friend was just one aspect of the much greater crisis in which Steward now found himself—a crisis of self-esteem. What Stein had once termed “the question of being important inside in one” had continued to trouble Steward in the year after losing Kinsey. He was now no longer a working teacher, and could hardly even claim to be a scholar, poet, or novelist—for apart from his journals, he had written nothing of substance for nearly twenty years. Living alone without the daily support or encouragement of family or friends or even a casual lover, he was unattached to any institution or belief system that might otherwise have sustained him in his isolation. And much as Steward might have liked to think of himself as a man given over entirely to sensual debauchery, he was not entirely so. Even in dedicating his life to the exploration of his sexual nature, he was at heart too purposeful and creative a man, and moreover one with too active a mind, simply to sink into the mind-numbing repetition of sexual self-indulgence. But where was he going these days, and what was he doing with his life? Tattooing, sex, and writing were the three main activities that gave his days purpose and meaning; but how these activities might ultimately resolve Steward’s “question of being important inside in one” was something he had yet to work out.