Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (29 page)

Read Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard Online

Authors: Roger Austen

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

BOOK: Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard
5.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 91
outside Stoddard's "Eyrie" on Rincon Hill. Stevenson had walked from his Bush Street lodgings to make some sketches of the bay:
The first day I saw I was observed, out of the ground-floor window, by a youngish, good-looking fellow, prematurely bald, and with an expression both lively and engaging. The second, as we were still the only figures in the landscape, it was no more than natural that we should nod. The third, he came fairly out from his entrenchments, praised my sketch, and with the impromptu cordiality of artists carried me into his apartment; where I sat presently in the midst of a museum of strange objects,paddles and battle-clubs and baskets, rough-hewn stone images, ornaments of threaded shell, cocoanut bowls, snowy cocoanut plumesevidences and examples of another earth, another climate, another race, and another (if ruder) culture.
Stevenson recalled that it was in conversation with Stoddard that he "first fell under the spell" of the Islands.
12
At this time in his life, Stevenson was in even worse straits than Stoddard: more or less penniless, friendless, suffering from what seemed to be galloping consumption. Stoddard found him to be "unfleshly to the verge of emaciation," and while he was sympathetic, there was little he could do to help
(EE
17).
The person in the Bay Area who did help Stevenson, however, was Mrs. Fanny Osbourne of Oakland. Through Joe Strong, Stoddard already knew Mrs. Osbourne, and he was fated to know her headstrong artistic daughter, Isobel, much better than he ever really wanted. Both Osbourne women ended up marrying their lovers at about this time. Isobel eloped with Joe Strong in the fall of 1879, and Fanny and Stevenson were wedded in the spring of 1880. As a general rule, Stoddard did not approve of marriage, particularly for his creative friends, and most particularly if they were foolish enough to marry each other. Nonetheless he gave his blessing to the Stevenson-Osbourne match, if only because everyone else in San Francisco believed that a motherly, resourceful woman was exactly what Stevenson needed if he were ever to regain his health. In the case of "Belle" and Joe, however, most everyone, including Fanny, felt it was an unwise match. Belle liked to drink and flirt as much as Joe did, and neither was especially prudent when it came to money. Stoddard may have sensed the trouble ahead for these two. As long as he did not have to see Belle too often, there were no problems, and they seemed to enjoy each other at first.
In 1880, the Strongs were living in a large studio on New Montgom-
 
Page 92
ery, near Market, in San Francisco; and, as Belle recalled, Stoddard frequently visited them, sitting for hours at the piano, singing "many strange airs and haunting melodies" or regaling them with "odd adventures in Tunis; or the night he lost his way in Constantinople; or the swimming party he joined at a pool in Tahiti." When Stoddard met her, "he held out both hands and said in that foolish but very genuine way of his, 'Belle, love Charley!' And I did from that moment to the end of his life.''
13
In fact, however, Belle and Stoddard were later to become rivals in Hawaii, where they came to detest each other. Stoddard's relationship with Belle's mother, of whom he saw far less, was a happier one, and he wrote regularly to Stevenson until the latter's death in Samoa in 1894.
II
During his first two years back in San Francisco, Stoddard seemed to be relatively content. He enjoyed a brief moment in the limelight when he delivered a series of benefit lectures at Platt's Hall. Illustrated with "Stereoptic Views" flashed on the screen behind him, his talks about Europe and the Near East succeeded in "enchaining the interest of hearers to the very end."
14
Then there was the surprise visit to San Francisco of Kahéle, the lovable scamp who had guided Stoddard around Maui in 1871. The reunion was not quite what Stoddard hoped for, however; Kahéle had become a thoroughly heterosexual Romeo, and in a few days he deserted Stoddard to go to "Los Angel" with his new Mexican wife.
During the next two years, however, Stoddard grew increasingly depressed, frightened and helpless. He was subject to paranoia and "neurasthenia," complaining in his letters to Father Hudson that "the times are out of joint" and that "I am out of my element and shall ever be so."
15
Work dried up. By the end of 1879, the
Chronicle
editors decided they had no further use for Stoddard's warmed-over reminiscences of Europe, and during 1880 and 1881, he had no regular source of income. He began to pawn his precious souvenirs; finally he had to move out of the "Eyrie," cheap as it was. His sixty-seven-year-old father lost his job at the custom house, and his parents left for Hawaii, hoping to start a new life there with the assistance of their daughter, Sarah Makee. With no one to love and nothing to live for, Stoddard tried to commit suicide in February 1880. "I have been ill," he confessed to
 
Page 93
Father Hudson. "I wanted to die and tried to, but failed. I have no wish to live and struggle on as it seems must ever be my fate."
16
Whenever Stoddard found himself in desperate circumstances, his first impulse was always to escape. He would neither accept any responsibility for his plight nor try to extricate himself. It pleased him, rather, to cast the blame on the dreadful weather or unappreciative people or the poor job market or whatever and, having done that, to flee to a more congenial setting. However fond he was of New England, he did not wish to go back East. "I'm afraid of the East," he wrote John Hay in 1881, "where you are all such fighters."
17
Since the rest of his family was in Hawaii, he considered Honolulunot so much with the idea of chumming with a savage (although he knew that he would probably fall in love with someone in the Islands, as he always did everywhere), but with the hope of finding a writing job and a vine-covered cottage.
While waiting, with characteristic passivity, for some turn of fortune, Stoddard received two pieces of heartening news in 1881. One was from D. Appleton and Company, which was planning to publish his
Chronicle
letters from Egypt as
Mashallah! A Flight into Egypt
in its new "Handy-Volume Series." There was no money in it, perhaps, but at least
Mashallah!
would keep him before the reading public. The other boost came when the good fathers of Santa Clara College invited him to deliver a poem at the Grand Annual Literary Entertainment, to be given in April by the Philhistorian Debating Society. In a "masterly manner," Stoddard read his poem, ''Pedro de Alvarado, An Episode in the Early History of California," which ended on this obligatorily reflective note:
How oft, methinks, does thoughtless youth set forth
With argosies, to sweep enchanted seas;
How oft the student leaves the mother-house,
Armed to achieve the conquest of a world!
Yet for a causewhat cause oh! who shall say?
Fast by the store, they wreck their hopes, and leave
Their freighted fleets to rot upon the wave.
According to an eyewitness from the
San Jose Herald,
Stoddard "received a perfect ovation at its finish, and bowed his acknowledgment amid a shower of bouquets."
18
Then, finally, Stoddard's prayers were answered by an unexpected offer: to come to Hawaii to write editorials for the Honolulu
Saturday
 
Page 94
Press. "I
hope to do some good work there and to do far more of it than I can do here or in your East," he wrote to Howells. "Perhaps it is all a dream but what of it so long as it pays me."
19
When the
Australia
sailed into Honolulu harbor, all the bells in the town were ringing, a cannonade was set off, and the people ashore began cheering as the ship came into its berth. Colored lamps were hanging from the towers of the fire department and the Catholic cathedral, and amid the canopies and flags, some Chinese had erected a little kiosk that proclaimed, "Welcomed by the Children of the Flowery Land." However much Stoddard reveled in this elaborate show, it had not been planned for him. The town was giving a royal welcome to King Kalakaua, who was completing a goodwill tour of the world and whose presence on board must have occasioned an awkward moment or two for Stoddard; for, in a sense, he was being brought to Hawaii to join the enemy camp. He had been hired to write editorials that would indirectly attack the King by directly attacking Walter Murray Gibson, an unscrupulous ex-Mormon missionary, who was regarded by the
Saturday Press
as a wicked influence on Kalakaua. "This many-faceted Sandwich Island Rasputin," according to one source, had formed a "triumvirate with Kalakaua Rex and Claus Spreckels, 'the foreign interloper,' Gibson being considered kingpin in this so-called 'Unholy Three.'"
20
Stoddard's editorials did nothing to deter King Kalakaua from appointing Gibson as Prime Minister the following May. The ineffectiveness of Stoddard's pieces is not surprising. First, Stoddard was not a political animal; and if he had any feelings at all about this conflict, they were sentimentally royalist. In reference to Kalakaua, Stoddard wrote some years later: "O what a King was he! Such a King as one reads of in nursery tales. He was all things to all men, a most companionable person."
21
Second, Stoddard's style was far from forceful enough to persuade readers to change their opinions, a point which has been well analyzed by Carl Stroven.
22
It appears that
Saturday Press
editor George W. Stewart soon sensed that Stoddard's talents lay elsewhere, and before long he was allowed to write on themes closer to his heart.
23
In "Birds of Passage," for instance, Stoddard deplored the fact that two famous opera singers stopping over in Honolulu had not been induced to give a series of concerts. In "Physical Culture," he exhorted the young men of Honolulu to use the town's gymnasium. citing the improvements to be expected if they would only follow Dr. Sargent's exercise program.

Other books

Blood on the Water by Connor, Alex
The Sweet Dead Life by Joy Preble
The Missing by Chris Mooney
The Cowboy SEAL by Laura Marie Altom
To Wear His Ring by Diana Palmer
Midnight Remedy by Gaddy, Eve
Keeper of the Wolves by Cheree Alsop
Paws and Effect by Sofie Kelly