Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (21 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 52
Grass,
a number of signed photographs of young men. Noticing Stoddard's possessions, the consul "grew more friendly" by the hour. They discovered they "had hosts of friends in common," and together they "unmasked the mystery" of Stoddard's "nature," which must not have been much of a mystery to either of them. As Stoddard blossomed like the ''night-blooming cereus," the consul began lavishing gifts upon him. "Accept, dear boy," said he, "these pearls, a trifling souvenir of our friendship." Toilet soaps and "prettily plaited" native cloths were pressed on him, as well as a standing invitation to return to Papeete and stay at the consul's plantation
(ITD 3
4-35). As in his "Spell-binder" narrative, Stoddard decided to punish the master-turned-supplicant for his earlier indifference. The consul had "struck fire" too late, when his hour was past. Nevertheless Stoddard tucked the pearls safely into his trunk. If the captain was looking down on this scene from the quarter deck, he was likely smiling, as usual.
 
Page 53
5
Early in November 1870, Stoddard returned to San Francisco and to the several Bohemian circles in which he moved. One of these, composed chiefly of contributors to the
Overland Monthly,
was on the verge of breaking up. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, San Francisco was no longer an outpost, and its "Golden Era" of frontier literature was on the wane. By the end of the year, many of Stoddard's literary friends either had moved to the East or to England or were planning trips there. Bret Harte was headed for Boston, where the
Atlantic Monthly
had lured him with a ten-thousand-dollar contract. Joaquin Miller was in London bearding the Pre-Raphaelites, who were less taken by his poetry than by his Wild-West antics. Mark Twain had married and settled in Buffalo, where he was editing a newspaper and making a name for himself as a humorist and lecturer. Ralph Keeler was still in the East, where Prentice Mulford and Ambrose Bierce were shortly to go, en route to England. Even Ina Coolbrith was thinking of jumping an eastbound train. But Stoddard was still gazing westward toward Hawaii, Tahiti, and Samoa as he continued to plan his "South Sea Bubbles."
 
Page 54
I
In addition to his Tahitian sketches, Stoddard was writing his autobiographical novella, "Hearts of Oak," which ran serially in the
Overland Monthly
from April to July 1871. Stoddard also resumed his career as a newspaper columnist, thanks to the kindly intervention of Bierce, in the
Alta California.
Titled "Swallow Flights" and bylined the "Swallow," the column was similar to Stoddard's earlier one in the
Golden Era.
The persona he adopted of a lavender dandy was so congenial that for the rest of his life, regardless of circumstances, Stoddard was to think of himself and to impress others in these terms.
Even literary historians have tended to color Stoddard in pastel tones. Albert Parry, for instance, casts him as a Bohemian aesthete: "He was then as yet pale and slender. People imagined thrilling things about his sojourn in the Hawaiian Islands in company with the Queen of Bohemia [Ada Clare]. When he played the piano, they took him for a young god. The more cynical remarked that his music was quite suitable to tea and twilight."
1
More recently, Kevin Starr has divided the California Bohemians into two types: one, personified by Jules Tavernier, was "assertive," living a wine-filled "risqué life" in the traditional garret or studio; the other, represented by Stoddard, practiced a ''genteel" Bohemianism of "Chopin at twilight, Oriental bric-a-brac, incense, lounging robes, and fragrant cigarettes."
2
Stoddard himself was as responsible as anyone else for the idea of his being ever so
spirituel
and sinless in San Francisco. Given the naïveté and complacent heterosexuality of most of his otherwise "Bohemian" friends, he was obliged to revert to this role when he came home, to hide behind a mask as much as possible. For instance, in a "Swallow Flights" column about a bay cruise, he feigned disinterest when several of the all-male crew, resembling Greek gods, strip to go swimming. In another essay, he minimized the homoeroticism in the Turkish baths, and he felt obliged to give "Hearts of Oak" a vaguely heterosexual ending. All this camouflage was effective. Ina Coolbrith continued to believe in his heterosexuality, as did most of his friends in the Bay Area. In a testimonial poem written some years later, Richard Savage epitomized this view of Stoddard in calling him a man "of gentle ways" that had "never led to wrong."
3
Stoddard behaved one way in the South Seas and in quite another way in California. Yet since Stoddard's writings made no secret of his
 
Page 55
falling in love and sleeping with the natives, one has to wonder how his friends could persist in misapprehending him. True, Bierce once crudely asked if Stoddard had fallen "in love with another nigger boy" in the Islands, but this was an idea that could only be expressedin a jeering allusion at thatin private communication.
4
For nearly everyone else, the only imaginable reason for Stoddard's inordinate interest in savages was that he cared for their beautiful, childlike spirits. Thus George Wharton James's explanation of why a "man of such culture" would "so demean himself'' as to sleep with Hawaiians: "He became one of them . . . . He saw the inner and beautiful things of the soul,the purest affection, the devotion, the simplicity, the tenderness, the gentleness, the innate poetry and instinctive religious feeling of the child of Nature."
5
But what of all the fondling that Stoddard had described? Most nineteenth-century Americans regarded members of the brown races as more or less noble savages who, if they engaged in sexual demonstrativeness, did so simply because they did not know any better. It was assumed that Stoddard, being not only a civilized man but a rather prominent Roman Catholic,
did
know better. His San Francisco friends were happy to believe that he had behaved as chastely in the Islands as he seemed to live at home, and that when he wrote of spending the night with a young native, he was merely indulging a harmless fancy.
Behind his protective coloration, Stoddard longed to return to the South Pacific. By the winter of 1871-72, he was eager to dispense once more with clothes and pretenses. "Friends become common," he complained in his farewell "Swallow Flights" column, "and a common thing is not the cure for a malady so deep seated as mine." "I'm pining for new faces and new people," he continued, "voices that have an unfamiliar ring to them; footsteps that are not recognized the very moment they strike the front door steps. . . . I mean to embrace every fresh opportunity that presents itself."
6
Stoddard boarded the
Witch Queen,
bound for Samoa, on Februarys 10. Capricious and sometimes beastly midwinter weather, ranging from eerie calms to stupendous squalls, made this voyage one of the worst experiences of Stoddard's life. The passengers were not reassured when a "crusty old sea-dog" began spinning yarns of "wrecks and marine disasters of every conceivable nature" ("In the Cradle of the Deep,"
SSI
10). To distract himself, Stoddard wrote a play, which Harry Edwards was later to pronounce not stageworthy. By the time the schooner
 
Page 56
reached Honolulu harborafter thirty-one daysStoddard was in no mood to sail on to Samoa; and for the last few stories to finish his book, he would rely once more on Hawaiian inspiration.
After a few days at Waikiki, where he was a guest of Hawaiian royalty. Stoddard crossed over to Lahaina to visit his younger brother, Sam. Within a year Sam would die of tuberculosis; within a few months Stoddard's older brother, Ned, would finally die of the ailment that had plagued him since boyhood. Intimations of his brothers' mortality contributed, perhaps, to the uncharacteristically subdued tone of "The House of the Sun," "The Chapel of the Palms," and "Kahéle," the three sketches derived from this trip. For whatever reason, Stoddard was unusually pensive during his stay on Maui.
One of his most poignant experiences was meeting two French Catholic priests who served the villages on the eastern coast of the island. After inspecting Haleakala, the huge crater in the center of Maui, Stoddard and his guide Kahéle encountered Père Fidelis, a self-sacrificing "martyr" whose devotion to his "dusky worshippers" was deeply touching. This priest in turn introduced them to Père Amabilis, who, despite his own spartan habits, provided Stoddard with the best of everything. After a delicious luau, strong French coffee, and a smoke under the stars, the priests insisted that Stoddard sleep in the only bed while they slept on the bare floor. Such kindnesses touched him to the quick: "I wonder why the twin fathers were so very careful of me that morning? They could not do enough to satisfy themselves, and that made me miserable; they stabbed me with tender words, and tried to be cheerful with such evident effort that I couldn't eat half my breakfast, though, as it was, I ate more than they didGod forgive me!and altogether it was a solemn and memorable meal" ("The Chapel of the Palms,"
SSI
256).
In Stoddard's eyes there were two kinds of missionaries in Hawaii and throughout the world: the self-important and prudish Protestants, who were harassing the natives to adopt clothes and abjure the hula; and the Catholics, such as these priests on Maui and, later, Father Damien, who were well-educated, tolerant, and selfless, and who impressed Stoddard as being uncanonized saints. Their example made him wonder if serving the church might not be the answer for him after all. If only he could put off his worldly cares, resign ambition, forget the past, and dwell joyfully under the palms with the good priests for the rest of his life!
 
Page 57
Stoddard soon overcame such sentimental revery as he and Kahéle traveled on to the Meha valley, where the natives greeted them with a warmth that was amusing as well as a little embarrassing. In his companion's changeable ways, Stoddard recognized not a little of himself: "Kahéle, the chameleon, whose character and disposition partook of the color of his surroundings; who was pious to the tune of the church-bell, yet agile as any dancer of the lascivious
hula
at the thump of the tom-tom. . . . He was, moreover, worthy of much praise for his skill in playing each part so perfectly that to this hour I am not sure which of his dispositions he excelled in, nor in which he was most at home" ("Kahéle,"
SSI
281-82).
II
When Stoddard returned from Hawaii during the summer of 1872, he was feeling some urgency about defining his own place in the literary world. True success seemed to depend on his collection of South-Sea tales, and he began searching for a publisher. Through Harte and also Howells, Stoddard attempted to interest James R. Osgood in Boston. Meanwhile, Bierce promised to use his influence with Tom Hood in England. What Stoddard desired was not only a reputable publisher but one who would promote the book and, more important, pay him an advance.
In San Francisco, Stoddard joined a convivial group of writers, artists, and actors that had been formed while he was in Hawaii. Adopting the motto, "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here," the Bohemian Club gleefully blackballed the president of the Bank of California. Years later, Stoddard recalled that "we scorned the mighty dollar and it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Bohemia."
7
To support himself during this period, Stoddard resumed writing "Swallow Flights," this time for the
Golden Era.
Topics included "High-Jinks" at the Bohemian Club, boating on the bay, a balloon trip over Woodward's Gardens and, as always, the local theater. But the Swallow was growing flight-weary, and it showed in the columns. Stoddard's restlessness increased when Bierce and Joaquin Miller began to urge him to come over to England. "If you will only wake up, use some
snap
and
nerve,"
Miller exhorted him. "Sell your autographs if you can get anything from them and come over here. No magazine article will bring
 
Page 58
less than $25. And there are 20 a man can write for. You can get here cheap"
8
Stoddard was drawn to England not entirely for literary opportunity. Writing articles would be, just as they had been in Hawaii, merely the means to the end. As Carl Stroven has observed, Stoddard "desired companionship above all else, even a literary career."
9
By 1873, Stoddard was eager to experience the companionship, sexual and otherwise, that Europe might offer. There he could love and be loved in comfort, as opposed to "roughing it" in Hawaii. He had always loathed roughing it, in truth. Two events clinched the trip to Europe. First, Stoddard's old Powell Street School friend and owner of the
San Francisco Chronicle,
Charles De Young, agreed to hire him for a year as the paper's roving reporter in England and on the continent. Then James R. Osgood and Company agreed to publish his book, which would appear in the fall of
1873,
under the title that Osgood proposed:
South-Sea Idyls.
By 1873, American readers had come to expect ripe romanticism in books about travel to foreign lands and perhaps even overripeness when these books described life in the tropics. Some readers still relished the charming sensuousness of
Typee
and
Omoo,
which were, according to popular opinion, better than anything Melville had written since. When it came to sketching the natives, authors often reflected the ambivalence Americans felt toward the darker races. On the one hand, white men mildly condescended to the "quaint" life of the barbarians. Everyone knew that the natives talked funnily and acted funnily, and readers wanted to smile at their outlandishness. On the other hand, Americans embraced the sentimental notion that the savages, communing daily with nature, were somehow more "noble" than people who had been shaped by civilization. Readers liked to entertain the idea that somewhere on earth there still existed a prelapsarian Eden.
On the surface at least,
South-Sea Idyls
seemed to adhere to these social and literary conventionsexcept that Stoddard's narrator is less consistently "civilized" than usual in this genre. Whereas at one moment he seems to be as aloof and bemused as Irving's Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., at another he more closely resembles Walt Whitman, taking off his clothes and lounging about slothfully, as if his sense of propriety were no more cultivated than that of the native youths with whom he always seems to be chumming. Indeed, unlike other literary tourists to the South Seas, Stoddard's narrator does not merely flirt with the joys of

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