Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (5 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 xx
I was able to determine that Roger had played out a variation on the Puerto Vallarta scenario. On 19 July 1984, he checked into a Seattle hotel; a few hours later he drowned in nearby Lake Sammamish. He was forty-eight. His ashes were scattered at sea. If he had written any farewell letters this time, I did not receive one. Indeed, it was never confirmed to me, by the lawyer or anyone else, that Roger's death was a suicide.
The distribution of his few assets was contested by Roger's family, and I felt no more desire to resist them than I did to be his "residuary beneficiary." From the start, my primary interest had been to foster Roger Austen's work, and so I waived claim to anything except the literary rights to
Playing the Game
(in case of a new edition some day) and to Roger's unpublished manuscripts, of which I already possessed
Genteel Pagan
and his seminar papers from USC.
12
The cartons of Stoddard research material failed to surface; all of Roger's papers had evidently been destroyed. As for
Boomerang,
which I never read, I ceded all rights, as Roger had once requested, to his friend in Rhode Island, to whom the original typescript had been sent before the first suicide attempt. Who knows if that book will ever appear.
I have no doubt, however, that Roger was sincere when he suggested that none of my "inheritance" need be dedicated to publishing
Genteel Pagan.
But I know he hoped I would do everything in my power to see it into printand not through a vanity press. Soon after his death, I tried to place the book with a few university presses. None considered the unedited typescript to be publishable: the tone was unduly flippant, the narrative prolix; and a certain intellectual sophistication was lacking, in part because the book had been written before the scholarly explosion in gender studies. At the very least, heavy editing was needed, as well as an introduction that would place Austen's work in a current frame of reference.
What follows is a version of
Genteel Pagan
revised by me to such specifications. The typescript has been reduced to about two-thirds of its original length through the omission or compression of long block quotations, the pruning of digressions, and an overall tightening of the narrative. Roger's style has also been "refined" in two senses: both polished and also tonally altered in places to sound less flippant. I am an inveterate reviser of my own prose, and I have not hesitated to revise Roger's when it seemed advantageous for economy or clarity. Thus, at least in some passages, I have acted as a ghostwriter, if not exactly as a coauthor.
 
Page xxi
Those "personal" passages that once seemed so integral to Roger's purposes now strike me as being awkward and unnecessary; some of them have been revised or deleted. The chapter divisions are mine because Roger never decided on any, although he knew they were necessary. In chapter 5, I have replaced the original discussion of
South-Sea Idyls
with Roger's later revisions.
13
Errors in fact and/or quotation have been corrected where they have been detected, and the documentation has been painstakingly reconstructed from Roger's handwritten (and incomplete) notes, to which I have added here and there.
14
In general, I have edited this book with the same care and rigor I would bring to one of my own, but without forgetting that it is not mine. As I have made changes, that is, I have also tried to honor the basic integrity of the text. Whether Roger would have approved of my editing I do not know. I hope so. I also do not know if or how it mattered to Roger that I am not gay, although my editing of his book must inevitablyand in ways of which I am unawarereflect that fact. In any case,
Genteel Pagan
remains Roger's book in substance.
As I review what I have said here about my relationship to Roger, so tightly centered on our correspondence, I realize how much about him remains unsaid because it is (still) unknown to me: mainly the expanse of his life and mind beyond his letters to me. His successful career in San Francisco during the 1970s, for instance, is a conspicuous blank in my account. Roger rarely mentioned his past, and I asked no questions. There are others, I think, who must have known him far better than I ever did. But maybe not. He was an intensely private man, and he had a way of alienating his friendsso some of them have testified. He may not, finally, have trusted anyone very far. I also recognize that I have portrayed Roger at his most self-destructive. But he was far from being a feckless "victim," and I hope I have managed to capture some of his feisty spirit.
During the time he was writing ad copy in Spokane, Roger once related his strategy for avoiding office politics: "Am taking off, since tizzies have erupted at work and I choose not to get caught up in them, as my hero Bartleby would not have" (15 February 1982). In my role as editor, I have sometimes fancied that I was playing Maxwell Perkins to Roger's Thomas Wolfe. As his friend, however, I have often wondered if I were doubling the nameless narrator of Melville's tale in his dealings with the ruthlessly recalcitrant scrivener. This thought does not give me comfort, for I know how this narrator is usually read, how I read him
 
Page xxii
myself when I am teaching the story: as the target of Melville's fiercest irony, a self-serving hypocrite for all of his cautiously delimited "charity" toward Bartleby.
Ah, Roger! Ah, humanity? No, in thunder! Unlike Bartleby, Roger Austen was a scrivener who preferred to write: unlike Stoddard, he deserves to be remembered for his writings.
The more formal and scholarly introduction that follows is meant to adjust for what may now seem dated in Roger's approach. In recent years, under the aegis of poststructuralisin, it has become a commonplace to say that language is constitutive of "reality" (and to dislodge the ordinary meaning of words by fencing them in "scare quotes"). Within the booming field of gender studies, a historicizing trend has yielded several important accounts of the formation of modern notions of sexuality, elements of which were circulating in the nineteenth-century culture that Stoddard inhabited. This historical context is largely missing in
Genteel Pagan,
produced nearly fifteen years ago in the spirit of Stonewall rather than of Foucault.
Unlike recent scholars steeped in poststructuralism, Austen understood homosexuality as a congenital and transhistorical reality. Although he granted that the perceptions, if not the practices, of same-sexuality have shifted over time, taking a recognizably modern form at the turn of the twentieth century, Austen was concerned not with the discursive representation of "homosexuality," but with the detection of homosexuality in the lives and works of premodern literary figures. The impetus to his research was "Gay Pride": a desire to unstop the (closet) door, in a Whitmanian spirit, in order to release those men, such as Charles Warren Stoddard, whose homosexuality had necessarily been concealed, at least in their writing.
Austen's argument with Gore Vidal was that the latter allegedly refused to accept "certain facts": that "(1) there is such a thing as a totally undeviating and justifiably unapologetic homosexual, and that (2) there are such things as worthwhile stories and novels written by and about gay males that can be termed, for the sake of convenience and parallelism with other minority literature, homosexual fiction."
15
The notion here of parallelism marks the affinity of Austen's aims with those of contemporaneous feminist and black critics: the definition of an "aesthetic" inherent to the writings and life experience of a distinctive "minority" group.
 
Page xxiii
"As the black aesthetic of the 1970s celebrated a black consciousness in literature," Elaine Showalter remarks, "so too the female aesthetic celebrated a uniquely female literary consciousness."
16
A counterpart to Ellen Moers's innovative feminist study,
Literary Women (1976),
Playing the Game
also resembles Jonathan Katz's encyclopedic
Gay American History
(1976), of which Austen later made use. All three books belong to a documentary or archival mode of gender studies; they are works of recovery and recanonization, of a kind now (all too readily) discredited by adherents of poststructuralist theory for their reliance on an essentialized idea of gender in their advocacy of a female or gay aesthetic.
Genteel Pagan,
like
Playing the Game,
is not theoretically "sophisticated." Roger Austen was not a scholar of an academic stripe, despite his years of graduate study. By temperament and background, he was a "man of letters," and he always wrote for a general audience. I suspect he would have had neither patience nor use for much recent gender theory, even had he lived to read it. Nevertheless Austen's life of Charles Warren Stoddard, which is among the fullest and frankest biographies of nineteenth-century American homosexuals to appear so far, will undoubtedly provide grist for a variety of theoretical mills.
In bringing
Genteel Pagan
into the light, I owe a debt to those who offered me advice for revision of Austen's unedited typescript (but who are not responsible for my editorial decisions): George Arms, Robert Emmet Long, Robert K. Martin, Douglas Mitchell, and Michael Paller. Carl G. Stroven, who had been so helpful to Roger Austen, kindly provided me with photographs of Stoddard. For general encouragement I am grateful to Hayden Carruth, Richard Hall, Susan Wolstenholme, and Thomas Yingling. The production of this book would have been impossible without the able assistance, at different stages, of Margie May and Eve Crandall.
The following archives have granted me permission to quote unpublished letters in their collections: the American Antiquarian Society; the George Arents Research Library for Special Collections at Syracuse University (Charles Warren Stoddard Collection); the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Charles Warren Stoddard Papers, C-H 53); the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia (Charles Warren Stoddard Collection, #8533); the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Collection of American Literature); Brown University Library; The Catholic University of America
 
Page xxiv
Library; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Lilly Library, Indiana University: the Massachusetts Historical Society; Robert Louis Stevenson House, State of California, Department of Parks and Recreation, Monterey District; the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio; Department of Special Collections, the Stanford University Libraries; the University of Hawaii at Manoa Library; The Archives of the University of Notre Dame (Charles Warren Stoddard Collection; Reverend Daniel Hudson Collection); the University of San Francisco Library.
In a revised form, a brief section of chapter 5 is derived from Roger Austen's article, "Stoddard's Little Tricks in
South Sea Idyls," Journal of Homosexuality
8 (Spring/Summer 1983). Permission to reuse this material has been granted by The Haworth Press. A brief section of chapter 10 appeared originally as the Introduction to
For the Pleasure of His Company
(San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987).
Finally, I wish to thank Clark Dougan and Bruce G. Wilcox of the University of Massachusetts Press for supporting a project that other publishers were so reluctant to consider. In these days of rampant homophobia, within government and without, to publish
Genteel Pagan
is not only a vindication of Roger Austen; it is also a welcome demonstration of good principles.
 
Page xxv
Editor's Introduction
John W. Crowley
Known in his day primarily as a "California humorist," literarily akin to Bret Harte and Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard (18431909) would now seem to have less significance for his work than for his life. Author of genteel poetry and exotic travel sketches that had largely been forgotten by the time of his death, Stoddard was also a lover of men at the historical moment when "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" were being constructed by the scientific and other discourses that have organized modern common sense about human sexuality.
1
In reviewing two of Stoddard's books that have recently been reprinted, Thomas Yingling observes that "the difference between reading
For the Pleasure of His Company
[1903] and reading the Balzac that inspired Barthes's
S/Z
is that in the Stoddard novel, the codes of homosexuality are self-consciously employed as codes." The effect is "artificial but not artful," Yingling claims, because "it was perhaps impossible in 1903 to produce a well-formed text on a discursively de-formed topic." He goes on to suggest that the very artlessness of Stoddard's only novel, whose plot is so conspicuously incoherent, makes it a "representation of sexual displacement and of the inability of the homosexual to gain a socially-defined and -sanctioned identity." Likewise the psychological va-

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