“Read a Dirty Book”: James Joyce, Samuel Steward, and the Orientations of Literary Rebellion

In March of 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown, we—then-undergraduate Marissa Stinson and her Rider University professor Laurel Harris—visited the Special Collections at Princeton University’s Firestone Library to sift through boxes of Sylvia Beach’s papers. Rider is a fifteen-minute car ride down Route 206 from Beach’s hometown of Princeton. The accessibility of Beach’s and the Shakespeare and Company’s archives offered us a local connection to James Joyce’s iconic Irish modernist novel Ulysses (1922). Unsure of what we would find, we wound up spending the day particularly focused on Box 49, which includes a series of letters from around the world sent to Joyce in care of Beach in the 1920s and 1930s.

The box includes a 1921 letter from George Bernard Shaw, who backhandedly praises Joyce’s ability to capture the “foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity” of a Dublin he opted to leave at age 20.[1] It also contains a 1934 letter from horrified Californian socialist-feminist activist Kate Crane-Gartz who turned directly to Molly Bloom’s monologue at the novel’s end, having been told it was “the vilest chapter ever written,” to find “it was just that.”[2] One of our most compelling finds, however, came from an Ohio State University undergraduate writing to Joyce in 1928 to request a copy of Ulysses, then censored in the United States (fig. 1). The writer notes that “the University library has your Ulysses in the stacks, but refuses to let it out to students other than those who somehow have obtained permission to read it.”[3] The writer defines himself as “an unheard of student at an institution of ‘higher learning.’ At least, that’s what the proletariat calls it” (Steward to Joyce).

Who was this playfully self-deprecating undergrad? And what does his letter tell us about the circulation of Ulysses in the United States before the 1933 obscenity trial? We did some sleuthing and discovered that this “unheard of student”—the young Samuel Steward—had a compelling literary career ahead of him. He became an English professor—first at Ohio State University, then at Carroll College in Helena, Montana, State College of Washington in Pullman, Washington, and DePaul University in Chicago. He wrote the once well-regarded and now long out-of-print debut novel Angels on the Bough (1936). While he was living in Chicago, Steward became one of Alfred Kinsey’s collaborators. In addition, he became a tattoo artist who, after a move to Oakland, California, was the artist for the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. From the 1950s through to the 1980s, he wrote queer pornography under various pen names. He also cultivated significant modernist literary connections, maintaining a close relationship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas throughout his life, dining with Thomas Mann, and roaming the streets of Paris with Thornton Wilder. As he notes in his memoir, Steward as a young writer frequently reached out to the writers he admired as he did in this letter to Joyce (fig. 2).[4]

The two-page letter Marissa and Laurel uncovered in the archive offered us a delightful (missed) connection between Steward and Joyce. With twentieth-century Irish literature scholar Claire Bracken—our third coauthor on this piece—we traced a transatlantic story of the representation of illicit sexuality and modernist literary aesthetics. The (missed) connection between Joyce and Steward returns to one of the key questions Benjamin Kahan highlights in his introduction to the 2016 Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster “What is Sexual Modernity?”: How is the representation of queer modernity realized through the aesthetic affordances and generative obfuscations of literary modernist forms?[5] Steward’s career exemplifies across the twentieth century the recursive relationship between queer representation and literary modernism. Drawing from this unanswered correspondence, our article orients Steward’s fiction, and, indeed, his remarkable career, through cultural proscription and experimental aesthetics. Steward’s career unexpectedly connects multiple strands of modernism—bridging the urban centers of Paris and Chicago with the bohemian world of Depression-era Columbus, Ohio (reflective of Dublin in its marginality against the great modernist cities) and returning to the high-modernist 1920s throughout eccentric genre novels—pornography and mystery—written in the 1970s and 1980s. The long arc of Steward’s modernist career attests to how nonlinear our literary and political histories can be, an important reminder in a moment in which the censorship of the representation of sexuality, particularly LGBTQ+ sexuality, has become again a central political touchstone.

“A Terrible Stew”: Permission to Read Ulysses

We aren’t the first scholars whose attention has been drawn to this particular letter. In a reflection on his 1992 biography James Joyce: A Literary Life, Steward’s former Ohio State University professor Morris Beja regrets he was unable to include his passages on the young Steward’s letter. Recalling a corresponding phone call he had with Steward upon his discovery of the letter, he writes: “Without doing my homework, on an impulse I immediately picked up the phone and called him—and he answered on the first ring. . . . By the way, Joyce never did answer his letter. And I never did include Sam’s story in my book.”[6] We also learn from the notes in Steward’s autobiography that he narrowly missed meeting Joyce in person many years later when, in 1937, he frequented a bar at the Carlton Elite in Zurich, where Joyce had stayed just the previous week.[7]

As we explored the connection between Steward and Joyce, we discovered that the Ohio State University library did indeed have a copy of Ulysses when Steward wrote his letter in 1928 (fig. 3). Steward writes to Joyce that he is “in a terrible stew” because “the University library has your Ulysses in the stacks, but refuses to let it out to students other than those who somehow have obtained permission to read it” (Steward to Joyce). Given that Ulysses was at the time a banned book in the United States, it makes sense that the library would have such restrictions. A survey of academic and public librarians Random House publisher Bennett Cerf conducted in May of 1932 reveals that some libraries did possess copies of Ulysses in their collections despite its illegality. [8]  Twenty-four librarians—mostly academic—noted they had the book thanks to travel to London and Paris. These librarians also noted that the cost of such a difficult-to-find artifact was as prohibitive as legality (Brockman, “American Librarians,” 67–8).

In the completed Ohio State University questionnaire, librarian Earl N. Manchester states that the library does have a copy of Ulysses (“one”), which was obtained in 1924 through a “bookseller” (fig. 4). Additional information gleaned from the questionnaire is that there was “intermittent demand” for Ulysses from “both” authors and students for a book that, according to Manchester, is an “interesting example of a modern form of expression.”[9]

Whether or not the “smuggled” copy of Ulysses that Steward recounts reading during his college years was obtained through the library, we do know that Steward’s attempt to reach Joyce through this solicitation was never successful (Steward, Lost Autobiography, 63). However, most of his other youthful attempts to reach his modernist influences did pay off. As detailed in his book Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Steward sent Stein a letter in 1932, and a friendship blossomed.[10] The copy of Angels on the Bough that we read for this project from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library is Stein’s own copy, with an endearing written inscription from Steward on the opening page: “For Gertrude Stein, against the one day we will meet, with affectionate admiration for her and all her work has meant to me. Sam Steward.” Stein and Steward did indeed meet, with Steward visiting her and Toklas in France in 1937 and 1939, initiating a lifelong friendship (Dear Sammy, 5, 28) (fig. 5).

Steward’s growing friendship with one of the formidable figures of twentieth-century modernism is evident in the experimentation of his early work. However, Angels on the Bough has much more in common with Joyce’s fiction than with Stein’s work. And it is Joyce to whom Steward writes first, four years before his first letter to Stein. In the 1928 letter, Steward flatters Joyce, telling him how “I have just read and re-read your Portrait of the Artist, and your Dubliners, and I couldn’t rest until I told you how I enjoyed them.” While Steward failed to meet him or engage a correspondence, Joyce’s presence nevertheless permeates Angels on the Bough.

James Joyce in Columbus, Ohio: “Dirty Books” and Literary Exchange

Set in Columbus, Ohio in the early period of the twentieth century, Angels on the Bough paints a lively portrait of a group of characters who, in various ways, are stifled by their environs. The novel is more akin to Joyce’s Dubliners than to something more local, such as Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919). It’s structured episodically, with each chapter focusing (for the most part) on a different character and their perspective, as we move through a bohemian group of young people during a Great Depression summer. Paralysis, the Joycean word par excellence, is a condition similarly experienced by the characters of Angels on the Bough, with the term itself self-consciously engaged by Steward towards the end of the novel, as one character Mary describes her constraint moving through town on a tram:

Vainly Mary cast about for help, feeling that she was drowning, or choking, or dying. Beads of moisture filled the lines of her palms and appeared upon her upper lip. She wanted to get out, to run, to scream—it was impossible to sit there. And yet she could not move. A paralysis wound around her . . .[11]

Mary’s inability to move, her sense of being stuck in place, conjures up images of the character Eveline in Joyce’s Dubliners, fixed in place and unable to move at the story’s end. Ideas of escape pervade Angels on the Bough, with some characters experiencing the small city life of Columbus, Ohio as a release from their more rural and stifling backgrounds, while others feel stuck there, anxious to get away.

Each character in Angels on the Bough reflects, as Spring writes, “some aspect of Steward’s own personality” (Secret Historian, 37). One central character Richard Dominay conjures up the specter of Joyce’s own biographical character, Stephen Dedalus, as a bookish young man working on his doctorate at the University. His friendship with another central character, Tom Cave, recalls the Cranly and Stephen amity in Portrait of the Artist. The Tom Cave character straddles both Cranly and Stephen. While the novel initially sets him up as the acquaintance-friend of Richard, mirroring Cranly’s foil position in Joyce’s novel, Cave’s own conflicts are akin to Stephen’s. Like Stephen in Portrait of the Artist, Tom struggles between sexual desire and the religious demands of Catholicism. Also like Stephen, he ultimately chooses desire and the body. 

And it is a “dirty book” that, for Tom, engenders his rejection of the self-abnegating values of Catholicism. As he tries to avoid all sexual pleasures in preparation for the spiritual demands of his new religiosity, Mary throws some reading material his way: “‘I've got a swell new book you'll love to read.’ She hurried to the bookcase and pulled out a small volume in a red paper cover. ‘Here it is. It’s called The Town Bull, and is it hot! Boy!’ She handed it to him. ‘I know you still like to read a dirty book as much as ever’” (Steward, Angels on the Bough, 247). The chapter ends with him taking the book. Is this Steward’s nod to the most infamous “dirty book” of all in the 1920s–1930s: the banned Ulysses?[12]

While the U.S. trial against Ulysses propped the book up as an affront to young women’s purity and innocence, focusing especially on the “Nausicaa” episode and Gerty MacDowell’s sexual revelations, it is a young woman—Mary—who gives Tom the book that invokes his transformation. Steward was dismissed from his university position on the publication of Angels on the Bough because of his sympathetic representation of Mary, a character who has several sexual partners and is unapologetically open with her sexuality. As Spring writes, Mary, the “good-natured floozy,” reflects Steward’s own sexuality though it is represented as straight (Spring, Secret Historian, 37). She carries the traces not just of Gerty, but also Molly and her sexual frankness in Ulysses’ final episode. Oh, and yes, Molly likes those “dirty books” too.

While Molly spends much of June 16, 1904 (the day that Ulysses is set) at home, her husband Leopold Bloom is out and about on the Dublin streets. Like his fellow protagonist Stephen Dedalus, he is keyless, locked out of his house and unable to return home. Steward’s 1928 letter to Joyce asking for access to his famous novel rehearses this condition of exclusion: he doesn’t have the key to access the banned book; he is hoping Joyce himself might provide that key. Intriguingly, in Angels on the Bough, we learn that Richard has also had some key issues:

Yes, Mr. Dominay thought, he didn't forget to bring his key along this time. His hand touched it in his pocket to assure him. It had been embarrassing to leave the house without it, as he had done once or twice, and be compelled to ring the doorbell and have one of those poor old ladies come hobbling down the stairs at three in the morning to let him in. (Steward, Angels on the Bough, 49).

While Bloom forgets his key, Richard does not: he now has the access he needs, just as Steward himself eventually got his hands on Ulysses during his college years, before writing Angels on the Bough. The key motif is a nice little nod to Joyce and to a novel that gave Steward access to a whole range of experimental forms and a license to play.

LGBTQ+ Archives and Modernist Returns: Queer Literary Obscenity in Steward’s Later Work

Despite the positive reviews Angels on the Bough received from venues like The New York Times, it was never reprinted, and Steward did not embark on a more conventional career as a novelist.[13] Indeed, the novel exists today only in archives and used book repositories. Steward worked on his memoirs and wrote pornographic novels under the pen name Phil Andros through the 1960s and 1970s. The Tom of Finland designed 1984 cover of The Boys in Blue (1970) is shown here (fig. 6). In the 1980s, he returned to the modernist moment of which he had both been a part and of which had passed him by, another missed connection, in his also out-of-print—but utterly delightful—mystery novels featuring Stein and Toklas—Murder Is Murder Is Murder (1985) and The Caravaggio Shawl (1989)—as well as in the 1984 novel introducing his young alter-ego self, Parisian Lives (fig. 7). Scott Herring claims of this shift that Steward transformed in these later-in-life, later-than modernism, novels from “a fledgling groupie [of modernist writers] in his late twenties to a bona fide modernist author by his midseventies. . . . Steward emerged near the end of his biological existence as a master modernist après la lettre.”[14] Returning to the modernist scene—and inserting a younger version of himself into it, just as Joyce does with Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses—Steward’s novels reintroduce the profane zing of the moment, elucidating modernist queer sexuality in a way that wasn’t possible in Angels on the Bough.

Joyce’s sexual salaciousness in Ulysses is here in The Caravaggio Shawl as well. In the chapter “Kayaking up the Medulla Oblongata,” Stein has an unpunctuated, “dirty,” Molly Bloom-esque train of untrammeled thought while walking through the Luxembourg Gardens. This chapter is at once a parody of and homage to Joyce and Stein simultaneously, beginning with Stein’s reflection, “I am a lot smarter than Molly Bloom” (Steward, The Caravaggio Shawl, 145). Later in the passage, Stein reflects, “I am mighty glad I am like I am liking lifting bellies and caesars and seize hers and loads of cow coming out instead of little squalling bundles and glad too that I have Pussy instead of some great beast of a husband and that is amusing that I have two pussies instead of one . . .” (146). This parodic transmutation of Molly’s monologue through sexually provocative Steinian wordplay also reveals how unspeakable explicit queer sexuality was in the 1920s and 1930s even as Molly’s monologue gave explicit voice to one woman’s sexuality as imagined by another male writer.

Luckily for his own legacy, Steward was an obsessive archivist, from keeping detailed diaries to carefully maintaining a “Stud File” of his sexual experiences (fig. 8). Recalling the character Mary and her sexual exploits in Angels on the Bough, we can retroactively read her through Steward’s later works as a powerful stand-in for Steward’s own desires. Steward writes of his first meeting with the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey—with whom he collaborated for years—in 1949: “The thing that amazed him most of all . . . was that I was a record keeper . . . I had an accurate count on the number of persons I had been to bed with, the total number of times of ‘releases’ (as he termed them) with other persons, number of repeats . . . I had kept on three-by-five cards from my very first contact many years before in Ohio. My information like Kinsey’s was coded, but not so unbreakably or exhaustively” (Spring, Secret Historian, 116). Nevertheless, the fate of Steward’s copious archives—contributing to an LGBTQ+ history he himself was gathering—fell to the labors of his biographer and the flux of happenstance and luck.

Spring relates how he was also introduced to his subject through letters he found in another’s archive: “While writing a book on the artist Paul Cadmus, I found a group of letters from Steward in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale. The letters amazed and delighted me, for they were highly risqué and often very funny” (Spring, Secret Historian, xi). In the preface to his biography of Steward, Spring describes the archival journey that ensued. Finding a few archival traces of Steward through the archives of others—Kinsey, Stein—Spring eventually tracked down a manuscripts dealer in Berkeley who connected him to Michael Williams, a librarian and the executor of Steward’s estate. Williams introduced Spring to an attic full of Steward’s archival collections (xii). Beinecke Library acquired Steward’s archives from Williams in 2012.[15] As Martin Joseph Ponce and Debra A. Moddelmog note, interest in Steward’s paper was delayed by a “glut” of papers by queer writers seeking a home in the wake of the AIDS epidemic (“Introduction,” 9). Parts of Steward’s archives are now relatively open at least to the academic public, thanks to Spring’s biography, publication of works by Steward such as his memoirs and letters to Stein, and institutional archival accessibility through the Beinecke Library and Ohio State University. At the same time, none of Steward’s fiction remains in print and the story of Steward’s archives attests to the precarity of the archive itself. As Marissa pointed out in one of our discussions, the story of Steward’s archive was akin to that of Ulysses—or perhaps, more accurately, Bloom—fumbling his way home.

“Dirty Books,” Contemporary Culture Wars, and Archival Orientations

As the three coauthors of this piece, we read Steward’s contributions to modernism through different, but intersecting lenses. Claire and Laurel are academics with access to university libraries through which Phil Andros’s now quaintly literary pornographic novels can still be requested via Interlibrary Loan if they aren’t available in the stacks. Having received her Masters of Library Science after graduating from Rider, Marissa is currently a Young Adult Librarian at the Willingboro Public Library. She is thus at the forefront of our current culture wars over censorship. As Marissa is particularly well-aware in acquiring and maintaining her YA collection, what appears in public stacks and how it is categorized defines what is literary against what is obscene, what is age appropriate versus what is not age appropriate. Though they haven’t yet affected her acquisitions, our bad faith culture wars have particularly targeted texts that feature LGBTQ+ sexuality in public libraries and schools.

Moreover, these culture wars have morphed since January 2025, with the current administration’s increasingly fascist regime targeting sites of academic and public learning, which includes both institutions of higher education and public libraries. As we enter this new regime of repressive censorship, stories like Steward’s are all the more instructive and necessary. This missed—or not-so-missed—connection we trace here between Steward and Joyce through an archival discovery shows the limitations as well as the affordances that modernist literary experimentation offered for the representation of (queer) sexuality throughout the twentieth century. We have incorporated this insight into our pedagogies and practices, filling in the (missed) connections that contextualize the wreckage of our own twenty-first-century culture wars.