Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (19 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 43
watching me with earnest, patient looks, his arm over my breast and around me. In the morning he hates to have me go. I hate as much to leave him. Over and over I think of him as I travel: he doubtless recalls me sometimes, perhaps wishes me back with him. We were known to one another perhaps twelve hours. Yet I cannot forget him. Everything that pertains to him now interests me.
You will easily imagine, my dear sir, how delightful I find this life. I read your Poems with a new spirit, to understand them as few may be able to. And I wish more than ever that I might possess a few lines from your pen. I want your personal magnetism to quicken mine.
1
Stoddard closed this letter with a request for a photograph, and in June, Whitman complied, adding a short note: "I cordially accept your appreciation, & reciprocate your friendship. . . . Those tender & primitive personal relations away off there in the Pacific Islands, as described by you, touched me deeply."
2
One of the unforgettable young men was Kána-aná, whom Stoddard met while riding through the Halawa valley near the eastern coast of Molokai. With "ripe lips," eyes that were "perfectly glorious," and "not a bad nose," Kána-aná was perhaps a "young scion of a race of chiefs" ("Chumming with a Savage,''
CSS 33
). According to the tale that was to appear in the
Overland Monthly
in September 1869,
3
Stoddard stayed with Kána-aná for a couple of weeks, during which they gave themselves up to nearly every sensual delight. When they were not splashing in the ocean, they were lying naked on the beach, laughing, talking, and watching wild poppies nod in the breeze. They slept together in a huge bed, its posts charmingly festooned with wreaths of sweet-smelling herbs, quite as if it were their honeymoon. Stoddard could not help admiring the sleek, supple physique of his companion, who wished to hug him all night long. "I didn't sleep much," Stoddard confessed. "I think I must have been excited" (
CSS 3
6). Again and again, Kána-aná "would come with a delicious banana to the bed where I was lying, and insist upon my gorging myself, when I had but barely recovered from a late orgie of fruit, flesh, or fowl. He would mesmerize me into a most refreshing sleep with a prolonged and pleasing manipulation"
(CSS
41). Stoddard was so "beguiled" that he grew to like Kána-aná "altogether too well"
(CSS 39).
It is likely that on this same trip Stoddard met "Joe of Lahaina," whom he also sketched for the
Overland Monthly.
4
"I saw a figure so fresh and joyous that I began to realize how the old Greeks could worship mere physical beauty and forget its higher forms" (
CSS
47). Joe
 
Page 44
possessed not only a well-formed physique but also a handsome face, something, to his considerable disappointment, that Stoddard did not always find in the native youths. Best of all, Joe seemed "inclined" to enjoy homosexual lovemaking.
5
Stoddard "borrowed" Joe from his uncle, and for a time they kept house in a hut near Lahaina. On a typical eveningso Stoddard's story goeshe and Joe would sit on their lanai, watching the waving banana leaves, listening to the sea and smelling the intoxicating odor of grape. Charles would look over and say, ''Joe, housekeeping
is
good fun, isn't it?" Joe would agree. Then they would finish their cocoa-milk and bananas and go to bed because, as Stoddard put it, "we had nothing else to do"
(CSS 47).
By July 1869, Stoddard had seen enough of the Islands for a while. Tanned, fit, and feeling well loved, he was ready now to write, and possibly to lecture, about these picturesque people. When, after returning to San Francisco, he submitted the story of Kána-aná to the
Overland Monthly;
he was delighted to hear Bret Harte say, "Now you have struck it. Keep on in this vein and presently you will have enough to fill a volume and you can call it
South Sea Bubbles!"
6
Harte was correct in this assessment. Now that Stoddard was taking sides with the savages, he could almost be called an honorary "redskin." True, his South-Sea fiction did not fit the Wild-West formula, but it showed an anticivilized wildness in Stoddard; and Hawaii was even farther west and more barbarous than the mining camps in Calaveras County. He was appealing to the irreverent spirit of the frontier in a way that "Pip Pepperpod" never could.
In addition to contributing sketches to the
Overland Monthly;
Stoddard began writing a weekly column for the
Golden Era
in September 1869. In composing his "San Francisco Feuilleton," Stoddard adopted the persona of a debonair man-about-town, affecting a world-weariness quite remarkable in one so young.
7
Addressing "my dear
Era"
as if he were the Eustace Tilly of the West Coast, Stoddard wrote languidly of trips to the country, Saturday afternoons at the Cliff House, and clambakes at Sausalito. In the Christmas issue he hinted that gifts might be left for him at the
Golden Era
office, his preference being for "elegant dressing gowns." His pet topic was show businesshe evidently attended every opening night in townand occasionally he chided his readers for breaches of etiquette in the theater. He praised Adah Menken as one "who dared to live up to her nature," compared the cancan with the hula, and sentimentally marked the passing of a trouper. Circuses and carnivals continued to have a special fascination, and he
 
Page 45
closed one column with this confession: "I wish I were a circus-boy in shapely tights, to throw my double-summersault under the dome of the theatre in a blaze of flashing spangles!"
In another column, titled "The Pet of the Circus," he revealed that in Rochester, when he was about six years old, an older child (an "Ethiop!") had forced him to play "circus" for several hours, with the youth assuming the role of whip-wielding master and Stoddard being submissive as the "horsey." Stoddard seemed to have loved it, although he pretended otherwise in this column. The youth's whip had been ''well applied," and soon the "irresistible web of his magnetism was spun about me and I was wholly in his power." Stoddard claimed that he would never forget his persecutor: "I feel that he will yet plunge upon me from some obscure corner and claim me as his own."
8
Whereas Stoddard was rapidly advancing as a writer, his plans for lecturing on the Sandwich Islands led him nowhere. In late July, he tried to exploit his extensive literary acquaintance by asking correspondents throughout the country to advise him about lecturing in their areasin the company of "a couple of little
Native boys
who should at the close of the evening, sing, dance and entertain the people with some of their picturesque and grotesque mannerisms."
9
The replies were not encouraging. Although George Henry Boker, for one, thought that Stoddard and his "Sandwich Island niggers" would be "heartily received," Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted the extra expense of traveling with "native boys." Joaquin Miller cautioned that only circuses could draw a crowd in Oregon. Ralph Keeler, who had lectured in the East about his show-business days, warned against the venture: "You never had, and I will never again have, the 'brass' and impudence to go through what I did to challenge public attention. Stay where you are if you can Charley, and grow up with the country."
10
Stoddard concluded that if he could not make a lecture tour, at least he could write about one. In "My South-Sea Show," published in
The Overland Monthly,
the show is a fiascoZebra, the Wonder Boy, dies after swilling too much colognemuch as it may have been if Stoddard had actually gone on the road.
11
II
By spring 1870, he was making other plans: to escape to the South Seas again, this time to Tahiti. As he wrote to Walt Whitman, "in the name of
 
Page 46
Calamus": "I know there is but one hope for me. I must get in amongst people who are not afraid of instincts and who scorn hypocrisy. I am numbed with the frigid manners of the Christians; barbarism has given me the fullest joy of my life and I long to return to it and be satisfied." Sending Whitman his Kána-aná story on 2 April, Stoddard begged for a reply "within the month": ''I could then go into the South Seas feeling sure of your friendship and I should try to live the real life there for your sake as well as for my own."
12
Whitman did respond within a month, but not in a way that left Stoddard altogether sure of his friendship, even though he ended with a declaration of love and the hope to meet his young admirer some day. After praising the "sweet story," Whitman added: "As to you, I do not of course object to your emotional & adhesive nature, & the outlet thereof, but warmly approve thembut do you know (perhaps you do,) how the hard, pungent, gritty, worldly experiences & qualities in American practical life, also serve? how they prevent extravagant sentimentalism? & how they are not without their own great value & even joy?"
13
In broad literary terms, Whitman was suggesting that Stoddard stop flitting about like a butterfly to exotic locales and come down to earth. Earthiness, as Whitman had experienced it, meant loafing on the grass, walking along Broadway, resting on the beach, drinking in a tavern, and loving men like Peter Doyle. But if he had to deflect suspicion from his poetry, by interposing male "comrades" with female ones, Whitman would do so. In more specifically sexual terms, the fifty-one-year-old poet was writing from the vantage point of his wider experience. H
e
had not needed to go to Hawaii to find the "real life" that could be enjoyed any night of the week, wherever he was. Whitman could recall evening strolls up Fifth Avenue that would end with his sleeping with farmers, policemen, deck hands, soldiers, and black-smiths.
14
What stranger miracles, he might have asked,
are
there? For the twenty-seven-year-old Stoddard, however, the "hard, pungent, gritty" experiences of everyday American life had brought little satisfaction of any kind. They were more to be lamented and escaped than celebrated. At this stage in his life, at least, Stoddard lacked Whitman's sexual
savoir faire.
In order to love other males freely, he felt he had to go to "barbaric" countries.
Whatever Stoddard's reaction to Whitman's letter may have been, it did not divert him from going to Tahiti and writing up his adventures in the style that suited him. While he was waiting for the
Chevert,
a French

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