Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (12 page)

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Authors: Roger Austen

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Literary Criticism, #Gay & Lesbian, #test

BOOK: Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard
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Page 12
than he was: good boys were so milk-and-watery, he really couldn't endure them"(360).
Thus hurdles had to be surmounted before an adored idol could become Charles's chum; but from time to time, miraculously enough, he seemed somehow able to leap these hurdles. Although he was crushed when Fred decided to leave the academy, Charles soon attached himself to another boy. "We showed one another a kind of devotion worthy of young knighthood," Stoddard recalled, and they could hardly wait for the Christmas vacation to begin. "I had been formally invited to spend the holidays with my bosom-friend . . . at their elegant home in the city. All the delights of the gay season in the metropolis had been promised us, and the vision of Christmastide was ever before our half-dazzled eyes. It seemed to us that the joyful day of our departure would never, never come"
(TH 31, 33).
It never did; Grandpa Freeman had other ideas for Charles.
In Rochester the year before, the famous evangelist Charles G. Finney had preached a revival that, in addition to bringing the city to its knees, had produced a number of edifying side effects. Throughout Monroe County renewed zeal was shown for Bible societies, the temperance movement, and religious education; indeed, Rochester began preening itself as a "banner city for Sunday schools."
21
Recalling the crusade in his autobiography, Finney noted that the "blessed work of grace extended and increased until it seemed as if the whole city would be converted."
22
By late 1857, the waves from this revival had washed across western New York, engulfing Little Valley. Inspired by "conviction," Grandpa Freeman was concerned not only for his own salvation but also his grandson's: a strange lad, Charles, who always smelled suspiciously of wintergreen and who had shown a heathenish devotion to those graven images from China. The boy's mother had evidently allowed him to fall prey to godless influences in San Francisco; it was high time for him to be "saved."
Without at first knowing why, Charles was abruptly recalled from school. Heavy-hearted at the loss of his chum, he was further depressed by what was in store. Every night Grandpa Freeman drove him to the Little Valley church, where the revival was ablaze with the holy fire of an illiterate disciple of Finney. Long after he had become a Catholic, Stoddard recalled the scene:
 
Page 13
There was a bench under the pulpit which was known as the "anxious seat"! All those who were willing to acknowledge themselves sinnersI remember that the large majority considered themselves not such;all those who desired the prayers of the prayerful for their salvation; all those
who
were seeking, or desiring, or even willing to accept that "change of heart," which was pronounced the one thing needful, were requested to step forward in the face of the multitude and boldly station themselves on this ''anxious seat"or kneel by it if they preferred to do so,and there undergo the ordeal of prayer. The spectacle was humiliating beyond expression. Nervous excitement and the loss of all self-control drove the timid and shamefaced forward upon this rack of torture. Some of them, embarrassed and bewildered, wrung their hands and cried aloud. Once there, they were not permitted to retreat, but, surrounded by half-frantic men and women, whose flushed faces and flashing eyes were fearful to behold, they were held forcibly upon the bench, where they suffered the torments of the damned, until the close of the session. (TH 37-38)
Rather than advancing to the anxious seat, as his grandfather had hoped, Charles retreated to a rear pew, "stupefied with fear"
(TH 38).
He was prodded toward the pulpit nonetheless and coerced into confessing his sinfulness, but "salvation" never materialized in any form that Charles could recognize. At first he was troubled. After the services, as he lay abed in the farmhouse attic looking at the frosty stars, he began to wonder when this mysterious "corporeal phenomenon" (
TH
42)the change of heartwould begin to manifest itself. It was some years later before Stoddard was able to convince himself that the heart he had been born with was perfectly all right.
During this dreary holiday Charles was delivered from his Slough of Despond by an invitation to visit Dr. Stoddard, his worldly grandfather in Pembroke. On the northbound train he felt much relieved: "Oh, the clouds that passed from before my half-blinded eyes; the millstones that fell from my neck; the shadow that was lifted from off my soul!"
(TH
44). Unlike the hapless Grandpa Freeman, Dr. Stoddard had been a successful physician since 1810. Moreover, the doctor was richalthough he had lost a considerable sum in his son's Rochester firm. Most important, at least in his grandson's eyes, Dr. Stoddard was a gentleman, something that Charles yearned to be when he grew up; in fact, it was what he was trying to be even as a child.
In Pembroke no one was forced to go to church on Sunday but Charles rather enjoyed the "light, bustling air" of the Unitarian services, which reminded him of declamation hour at school
(TH 47).
If
 
Page 14
he preferred, Charles could stay home on Sunday and play marbles or read anything he wished. Instead of grace at table, there was wine, with which Charles was occasionally toasted by Dr. Stoddard's dinner guests. Best of all, his grandfather took him to his first circus, where Charles, dazzled by the grace of the near-naked acrobats, concluded that they were "but little lower than the angels"
(TH 46).
Circus performers, male acrobats particularly, were to remain a lifelong fascination for Stoddard, who thirty years later in Honolulu frequented the tent where the young men changed their costumes.
According to the Unitarians, "man's chief end was to be sociable and satisfied"
(TH
48), but during the last year of his "exile" in New York, Charles's efforts to be sociable and satisfied met with only occasional success. In the fall of 1858, after Grandpa Freeman had moved to another farm near Attica. Charles attended the Genesee and Wyoming Seminary in neighboring Alexander, a town that Stoddard remembered for its pleasant gardens. Here his chums were Edgar Montgomery, who, like Fred, reminded Charles of the olive-tinted Mexicans he had known in California, and Richard Waite, in whose father's barn the boys would often play. Charles also established a close friendship with a girl named Lizzie, with whose family he boarded. He and Lizzie read the
Waverly Magazine
with keen interest, especially after they had submitted their prospective contributions. Charles's romantically juvenile poem, "Helena,'' was accepted but never publishedwhich is perhaps just as well.
Oddly enough for a bookish boy who was addicted to serialized novelsthose of Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth being his favorites at this timeCharles did not care much for school. Recitation frightened him; spelling bees mortified him; and, small for his age, he stood target for the school bullies, one of whom pelted him with pebbles when he was not heralding his approach with sneering epithets. Charles took some satisfaction in editing the school paper, for which he worked up "personal items" in an "impertinent" style. He also looked forward to performing in the class play. Once again, however, Grandpa Freeman intervened: Charles was summoned home the week before final exercises, with "scarcely time to say farewell even to my bosom-friends"
(TH
53). Joyfully, the boy learned that he was bound to rejoin his family in San Francisco.
First, however, there was something in Attica that Grandpa Freeman wanted his grandson to see: the corpse of a boy about Charles's age.
 
Page 15
Apparently doubting the sincerity of Charles's religious "conversion," Grandpa Freeman believed that attending this boy's funeral would be a salutary experience. Thirty years later, Stoddard shivered to recall the "gloss of the rosewood coffin," the "sickly pallor of the memorial wreaths," the "mingled odor of fresh varnish and tuber roses,'' and the church choir's singing, "I would not live always, I ask not to stay / Where storm after storm rises dark o'er the way." But the funeral failed in its desired effect. Rather than being impressed with the "solemn fact that death is always with us, and that it is our first duty to be prepared for it," Charles felt only fiercer resentment toward his grandfather and the inexplicable and capricious God to whom he was always praying
(TH
54).
The first stirring of Charles's rebellion came a few days later in New York, where he was to meet the boat for San Francisco. Despite his having been warned against the wiles of the city, Charles was determined to indulge his whims just as soon as Grandpa Freeman returned home. For two days the boysmelling of wintergreen, no doubtbecame a Broadway boulevardier, devouring the sounds and smells and sights with the voracity of a younger Walt Whitman. He dared to go to as many plays as he could afford, thrilled by the performances of both Laura Keene and James Wallack. "For the first time in my life," Stoddard remembered, "I felt a sense of absolute freedom and relished it heartily."
23
On the way to San Francisco, via Panama, the fifteen-year-old boy had time to ponder his young life, and he came to at least two conclusions. First, he wanted nothing more to do with the religion of the Freemans; religious frenzy, he decided, simply weakened his faith in the frenzied. Second, he was finished with school. What would he do, then? He hardly knew, except to imagine staying home and becoming the Boy Poet of San Francisco!
 
Page 16
2
San Francisco had flourished during the two years Charles had been away. Tents had been replaced by brick buildings that rose as high as three or four stories. The Stoddard residence, now on Powell near Clay, was in the center of the city, which was growing westward toward the Presidio and southward toward the Mission Dolores. San Francisco claimed to have a population of about sixty thousand, mostly men between the ages of twenty and forty, who were reputed to be "easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather than immoral in . . . personal habits, and easy to meet and to know."
1
The city had eight hundred liquor dealers, ninety-five hairdressers, eighty-four restaurants, seventeen banks, and twelve daily newspapers.
The following items might well have attracted Charles's notice: Bayard Taylor was due to lecture on "The Arabs"; Norton I, the self-appointed Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, was issuing outrageous and unheeded royal proclamations; a dramatic version of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
was opening, and the original Siamese Twins were scheduled for exhibit; among the new books at the Mercantile Library was Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass,
which "while full of rich. nutty thoughts . . . are about as fit for general reading as Rabelais": and
 
Page 17
in Sacramento the legislature had approved the Bachelor's Homestead Bill, to the dismay of one editorialist who agreed that while homesteading "may be tolerated when confined to married persons, it becomes an intolerable public grievance when extended to those coreless knots on the trunk of societyconfirmed and deliberate bachelors."
2
I
The literary life of the city, which was formative of Stoddard's career in the decade ahead, may be described, in a somewhat oversimplified way, as an unstable mixture of Eastern elevation and frontier earthiness. The two traditions clashed, of course: first in northern California and later throughout the country. Philip Rahv's classic essay, "Paleface and Redskin," offers some usefully succinct generalizations about these two "schools" in American literature:
The paleface is a "high-brow," though his mentalityas in the case of Hawthorne and Jamesis often of the kind that excludes and repels general ideas; he is at the same time both something more and something less than an intellectual in the European sense. And the redskin deserves the epithet "low-brow," not because he is badly educatedwhich he might or might not bebut because his reactions are primarily emotional, spontaneous, and lacking in personal culture. The paleface continually hankers after religious norms, tending toward a refined estrangement from reality. The redskin, on the other hand, accepts his environment, at times to the degree of fusion with it, even when rebelling against one or another of its manifestations. At his highest level the paleface moves in an exquisite moral atmosphere; at his lowest he is genteel, snobbish, and pedantic. In giving expression to the vitality and to the aspirations of the people, the redskin is at his best; but at his worst he is a vulgar anti-intellectual, combining aggression with conformity and reverting to the crudest forms of frontier psychology.
3
Literary men who succeeded in San Francisco in the 1860s were generally those with more than a little of the "redskin" in their makeup. But as Charles Warren Stoddard grew to manhood in this decade, it was painfully clear to everyone that, at least in literary terms, he was a congenital "paleface."
When he got home, Stoddard was not so immediately concerned with the literary atmosphere of San Francisco as with his own future. He made it clear that he did not wish to attend the San Francisco High School, and he fancied that he might like a literary sort of job. This

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