![]() I picked up Dear Sammy and all of a sudden it was like, wow, this guy Steward actually knew Stein, and Alice, and he’s still alive! It was she who encouraged us to read Woolf, Jean Rhys, yes, even Gertrude Stein. One woman kept a critical resistance alive in me: Sallie Sears, whose teaching and critical eye seemed very akin to that of Susan Sontag’s. Except for Saul Bellow-several of whose castoffs were also tenured faculty. Yeats and Eliot were the great gods, nothing really had happened since World War II. In this atmosphere Stein’s name was never mentioned. Modernism might as well never have happened, for these people considered themselves modernists. There was also a prize-winning novelist from Ireland whose books were best sellers and lauded by The New York Times. Our “star” was a poet who had won the Pulitzer Prize in the 1950s and who bemoaned the way poetry had disintegrated since then. It was an English Department of the worst description, staffed by know-nothings and steadily, almost unendurably, drifting off into irrelevance and sexual adventuring. Grad school where, or so it seemed to me, I was the only one who had ever heard of Gertrude Stein. In graduate school I had read Dear Sammy-Steward’s annotated collection of his letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. ![]() I don’t know how he got them all there, but he was a natural enthusiast. Steve would invite everyone over to meet this one or that one. Around Steve’s big oaken round table next to his tiny kitchen you could meet all sorts of people in the 1980s. I remember meeting him at Steve Abbott’s house at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial as a simulacrum? Is there, between the thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition that holds up?” That’s Derrida, late Derrida, from The Spectres of Marx. “Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. so the branches seemed tangled somewhere before my time.) Allen had edited books by both Spicer and Steward. (With Lew Ellingham I wrote a life of the American poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965), and the late Donald M. Well, biography is my game, my middle name, my compulsion you might say. ![]() By an odd coincidence I had just finished his Fairfield Porter and I thought, I will put myself completely into Justin Spring’s hands. Then he said that he already had a contract with FSG and, my, I was impressed. ![]() So when Spring asked me what I remembered of the late Samuel Steward, I was, to begin with, astounded that someone was writing his life. I want one of each of these guys, Justin Spring and Michael Williams. And maybe this is Sam Steward’s time if so, it is thanks to an executor who just cleared his throat and got on with the task of preserving dozens of boxes’ worth of the most unseemly material I know of, then waited until the right biographer came into focus. Perhaps Steward is to culture what Kinsey was to science-someone who understood the concept but never bothered to play by the rules. And he was also a key informant for founder of Sexology Alfred Kinsey, whose star itself seems to wax and wane regularly as weather. In effect Spring’s colossal research and inspired prose seem almost to expand the field of what culture is, or what it amounts to, since Steward’s greatest achievements were his tattoo artistry, his work in gay porn, and his friendships, some of them erotic, with the great closeted names of his time. And though he was a decent enough writer, he was no Fairfield Porter his real talents lay in other directions, almost off the culture map entirely. Steward wasn’t tortured as much as he was obstinate, though Spring’s book lets us in on his myriad disappointments and frustrations. And yet once I thought about it with full attention, a life of Sam Steward made sense.įairfield Porter (1907-1975) was a realist painter who seemed in some odd way the other half of a figure like De Kooning, the yin to his yang or whatever, and he was a bisexual working in a heavily heterosexual time and milieu-and he was an excellent writer, largely on art subjects. Humph, thought I, my original dandelion idea has more merit. I could barely credit my senses when someone, I can’t recall who, told me that the biographer would next be turning his storytelling powers to Samuel Steward, whom I knew slightly back in the mid 1980s. I so admired Spring’s previous biography, Fairfield Porter, A Life in Art (1999), that if he had turned his attention next to the life of a dandelion I would have been interested. Justin Spring’s new biography of the late Sam Steward has only been out for a month or two and it has already received some rapturous reviews: last week it was nominated for the National Book Award.
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