Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (13 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 18
turned out to be not writing books, but selling them as a clerk in Chileon Beach's shop on Montgomery Street, a position he was to hold for two-and-a-half years. As the West Coast headquarters for the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society, the store ran heavily to religious stock, but miscellaneous literature was also at handalthough it was almost hidden on a back shelf. Charles favored poetry, and he began to keep a scrapbook of lines that impressed him and, ultimately, to submit his own poems to a new monthly magazine called the
Golden Era.
In the "Poet's Corner," where "the favorite Western themes of homesickness, praise of mountain and sea scapes, and tributes to nature's flowersbotanical or humanwere treated over and over again by aspiring lyricists," verses by "Pip Pepperpod'' (Stoddard's pseudonym) began to appear.
4
Charles, of course, was immensely pleased, sure that he had found his calling at last.
It was through his connection with the
Golden Era
that Charles began to meet people who would significantly affect him. Stoddard became a lifelong friend of Charles Henry Webb, a former regular at Pfaff's (the Bohemian beer cellar in New York), who had written for the
New York Times
and
who
was gaining popularity for his witty column called "Things." One of the most flamboyant members of the
Golden Era
circle was the sensitive and high-strung Fitz Hugh Ludlow, author of
The Hasheesh Eater,
who loved to talk about Charles Darwin, astrology, necromancy, and almost everything else. Another writer whom Stoddard grew to like was Ralph Keeler, a dashing young man who had run away from home, performed in a minstrel troupe, attended a German university, tramped barefoot throughout Europe, and who was currently teaching languages at a private school on Rincon Hill. Prentice Mulford, known throughout the state as the "Diogenes of the Tuolumne," had also taught school in addition to working in the mines, going to sea, and running for the state assembly.
Stoddard also met two unusual women who occasionally wrote for the
Golden Era.
The oft-married Adah Menken, a friend of Walt Whitman and a champion of free verse and free love, was soon to become notorious for her performance in
Mazeppa,
in which she impersonated a naked man strapped to the back of a horse. Accompanied by her illegitimate son, Ada Clare had come to San Francisco to appear in
Camille,
and Stoddard became one of her most devoted fans. There were other colorful characters passing through the
Golden Era
offices as
 
Page 19
well, but the three most important to Stoddard's life were Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain.
Charles was about the same age as Ina, and they soon became like brother and sister. He loved the chats in which "Miss" Coolbrith confided a few mysteries about her past. No one was to know, she said as they sat in her cozy parlor, that she was the niece of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and that she had come to San Francisco to escape a disastrous marriage in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, believing at this time and for many years to come that her friend was "normal," Ina told Charles that he would find true happiness only if he got ''married and settled in life."
5
They probably talked a good deal about their poetryhers was almost as delicate and wistful as hiswhich was appearing not only in the
Golden Era
but in the
Californian
and in
Outcroppings
as well. No doubt, they also compared notes on Bret Harte, who, when the
Overland Monthly
got under way, was to join them as a member of the "Golden Gate trinity."
6
Stoddard's relationship with Harte was equally congenial, if never quite so intimate, as that with Ina. After all, Harte, who was six years older, would soon settle down as a married man and father, and he kept a certain reserve that held everyone at a distance. What the two men had in common on the surface was that they were both gentlemen: in fact, by California standards, Harte was regarded as something of a dandy. Beneath the surface Harte seemed to possess a compassion for the underdog that made him sympathize with Stoddard. One of his biographers has noted that Harte, being partly Jewish, was unusually sensitive to the plight of his fictional "breeds" and indeed to the plight of all the "weak creatures of the earthanimals, children, and oppressed races."
7
Having been driven out of the mining town of Arcata for his editorial stand against the slaughter of Indians, Harte had some personal basis for siding with outcasts, in and out of his stories. It would have been easy for him to make fun of dreamy Charles Stoddard: instead he took pains to encourage and to guide the younger man.
Although Stoddard and Mark Twain were eventually to become friends, it is unlikely that either made a favorable first impression on the other. Mark Twain might well have reminded Stoddard of the school bullies who once had tormented him. Around town the story was circulating that Mark Twain had a mean sense of humor: he and his roommate (who could "whip anybody that walked on two legs" in the
 
Page 20
Nevada Territory) threw empty beer bottles upon the roofs of houses where Chinese lived, just to see the families swarm out and shake their fists.
8
As for literary talent, Charles was not likely impressed by Mark Twain's theater reviews for the
Morning Call;
and a tale about jumping frogs in Calaveras County was hardly Charles's idea of worthwhile literature. From Mark Twain's point of view, the youth who called himself "Pip Pepperpod" must have seemed too "milk-and-watery" to be a regular fellow. Years later he was to write publicly that Stoddard was ''the purest male I have known," meaning, as he wrote privately, that Stoddard was "such a nice girl."
9
In short, Stoddard was a "sissy."
II
At the book shop San Francisco's rising young poet "did not take much interest in dusting," and when he had to wash the windows from the inside, he felt like a "freak on exhibition" (CRP). But what else was he to do? Toward the end of 1862, Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian minister and eloquent Unionist, suggested an answer: go back to school. King, who came into the book shop one day singing praises for the Pepperpod poems, urged that the discipline of the classroom would foster even greater mastery. "In my youth I was a hero worshipper," Stoddard recalled, "and Thomas Starr King seemed to me the most heroic of them all" (CRP). When his heroes spoke, Charles always tried to obey, and he enrolled in City College for the spring semester of 1863. Stoddard took the Reverend Mr. George Burrows's course in literature, which was a "gentle inspiration for us all." He also contributed poems to the
City College Journal,
still using the "secret" pseudonym of "Pip Pepperpod." But a single semester was enough to convince Stoddard that "city life in combination with City College was not calculated to especially benefit one of my temperament" (CRP).
That is, there were too many enticing diversions in San Francisco. At the theater, for instance, this was the era of Menken in
Mazeppa,
Edwin Booth in
Hamlet,
and Joseph Jefferson in
Rip Van Winkle;
of Miss Lotta Crabtree, "The People's Pet," singing such crowd-pleasers as "Willie, We Have Missed You" and "Dear Mother, I'll Come Home Again." Impresario Tom Maguire was bringing stars like Edwin Forrest, Charles Kean, and Madame Ristori to town, and in his newly opened Academy of Music he was presenting everything from grand opera to prizefights. Charles was also meeting more and more writers, artists, and "Bohe-
 
Page 21
mians," all of whom were more exciting than his assignments for the Reverend Mr. Burrows. There was "Orpheus C. Kerr," the satirist whom Menken married after she had been deserted by John "Benicia Boy" Heenan, the famous prize-fighter. Even more interesting was W. A. "Comet Quirls'' Kendall, who wrote scandalous poems in praise of passion. Through Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Stoddard met Albert Bierstadt, who was to become well known for his sketches of the Yosemite country.
Over in drowsy Oakland, no doubt, there would be fewer distractions. After a family conference it was suggested that if Charles really desired to prepare for college, he might cross the Bay to attend Brayton Academy. "There were classic groves and the townit was little more than a village thenwas almost as quiet as a cloister," Stoddard recalled. "I could return to the bosom of my family and revel in the pageant of the streets that were so picturesque and peculiar in those days" (CRP). It was decided he would enroll for the fall term of 1863, and, for once, Charles actually seemed eager to go. Not only would the academy be an escape from the workaday world, but also the idea of being "cloistered" with other young men appealed to him mightily. Having "sighed" over the pages of
Tom Brown's Schooldays,
Thomas Hughes's novel about "the sweet influence of Arthur over the stalwart and impetuous Tom," Charles wondered if he might discover
his
Tom at Brayton Academy.
As it turned out, it appears, he did. But another discovery he made during the 1863-64 school year was that he was never going to succeed as a student. Virgil and the
Anabasis
were both his "delight" and his "despair," and he was simply unable to "gather knowledge in the conventional way." Once more Charles felt the embarrassment he had known as a schoolboy in New York. "I conned my text-book by the hour and honestly endeavored to make its contents all my own forever, yet in the end I seemed to have accomplished little and that little left me when the class was called" (CRP).
Outside the classroom, his emotional attachments continued to follow the pattern that had been established in early adolescence. As usual, Charles was an outsider. Rather than living with the other boys in the school dormitory on 12th Street, he lived apart in a vine-covered cottage down by the water. But, of course, he wanted very much to belong. At night he would stroll past the dormitory and "look up at the long rows of lighted windows and wish myself a happy habitantthey always seemed happyfor I began to feel that I was more like a parlor boarder than a member of the fraternity." As an outsider, it was all the
 
Page 22
easier for Charles to fantasize about the glamorous, self-assured young men who, as insiders, were the school's leaders and heroes. Stoddard recalled that boarding school had always seemed like an "enchanted realm," where "the manlier boys were natural rulers and all the others their willing votaries. I know that it is the nurserynot to say the hotbedof the emotions" (CRP).
In this particular "hot-bed," Charles apparently found the image of "Tom" in a classmate so spellbinding that Stoddard was to remember him for years and to confide about him in a long letter to W. D. Howells in 1892. Howells, with whom Stoddard had developed a warm friendship, had written playfully: "Whenever we feel gay or sad, we say, we wish Stoddard were here. Does everybody like you, and does it make you feel badly? Are you sure that you are worthy of our affection? If you have some secret sins or demerits, don't you think you ought to let us know them, so that we could love you less?"
10
In reply, Stoddard offered a sketch titled "The Spell-binder" as ''one of the reasons why I should be despised and rejected." Although written in a tone of condescension and exaggeration meant to suggest that he was now greatly amused at his schoolboy silliness, the vignette has at its core an anguish that must at one time have been all too real. For what it reveals of Stoddard's inner life, it deserves to be quoted at length:
Once there was a fellow at school who caught my eye and held it. He seemed to me little less than Godlike. I had never before seen such eyes, such curly hair, such a haughty mien in a youth of eighteen or nineteen. He had scorn of everybody and everythingsave only himself.
Me he ignored utterly even while I worshiped silently in his presence and secretly wished that I might die for his sake; for his briefest pleasure I felt that I would joyfully return to dust. Such is the heart of youth when it has been touched by the spirit of romance!
At the close of his first term at school he, one day, wanted a match: we were all in the campus in Holiday attire; all in high spirits and most of the fellows were at his feet. I worship silently and apartas was my wont.
O, Blessed Day! It chanced that there wasn't a match in the crowd. But I was not in the crowd; I was never in the crowd; I had a match. Having become desperate in his fruitless search for a match he, at the last moment, discovered me. I thought I heard a voice from heaven crying for a match. Kismet! My hour had come! He asked me in the doubtfullest way if I had a match and I produced one. It was the proudest moment of my life. The dews of joy were damp upon my brow; my heart turned over with delight. I wished I were a match that he might strike my head against something and consume me at the tip of his cigarette.

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