The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward by Jeremy Mulderig & Samuel Steward

Author:Jeremy Mulderig & Samuel Steward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Chapter Eight

Anomalies and Curiosities

1945–48

Richie Tucker, my bed companion of many years in Chicago, introduced me to an elderly friend of his, an old Greek doctor by the name of Stephen Anthony, who turned out to be my best drinking companion for the bitter years. It was not strange that those of us who knew him always thought of him as Ulysses, a wanderer over the earth, a wise man, a part of all that he had met, counsellor and friend. He had been born in Athens on a little hill opposite the Acropolis, where as a schoolboy on moonlit nights he used to climb up to the Parthenon and there, amid the crumbling fluted columns of the great temple, declaim his favorite passages from the Iliad or the Odyssey, imagining himself to be in turn Achilles or Agamemnon or Hector or Paris, the great and lordly ghosts whose shadows still were there.

Then there was a period of military conscription, when Greece was trying to annex the island of Crete, and after that, studying chemistry at Heidelberg in Germany. At twenty-two, he arrived in New York wearing a tag to take him to Minneapolis. He spoke French, German, Latin, Italian, and Greek—but no English. But when he eventually learned it, he worked for the government during World War I as a chemist developing synthetic dyes for American use. Then suddenly he quit all that and went to the University of Chicago to study medicine, “because I wanted to be my own boss.”

And so he became a doctor. We felt the same urge for freedom. When I first met him, his star had somewhat descended, his ambition dulled. He lived in quarters in the rear of his office, and to his home trooped an unending stream of male friends for advice or counsel, to borrow money or have a drink, to talk, to be prodded into ambitious activity or warned against folly. Or occasionally—to bring pleasure to the old man.

The habit of him grew on me, and since in those days I did not teach until late afternoons and evenings, I found myself in his place almost daily, listening to his fascinating words. He would sit rocking in his easy chair with a glass in hand, occasionally bellowing with a hearty Rabelaisian laugh at something said or done. In the mornings, he generally read, and it was curious to find in him as keen an up-to-the-minute mind on current medical progress as could be found anywhere. He predicted penicillin before Fleming and said that when a cancer cure was found, it would turn out to be a dye of some sort (are you listening, Sloane-Kettering and Battelle?).

What did each of us get from that charming old lush? That is hard to answer—for each one got what he needed. When I first met him, I was a twittering jumpy collection of wild neuroses filled with more than my share of darkness, growl, and venom. And although I did not realize it until later,

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