Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (7 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 xxxi
Essential to this enchantment is not only Kána-aná's assiduous attention to Stoddard's physical pleasure but also his linguistic otherness, which precludes the possibility of nontrivial conversation and his articulation of anything more than a desire to please. Innocent of civilization and its call, the native is bewildered when Stoddard suddenly abandons him. Rushing in the nude after the departing canoe, he "ran after us like one gone daft, and plunged into the cold sea, calling my name over and over as he fought the breakers." Stoddard knows that "if he overtook us I should never be able to escape again"
(CSS 44).
In the account of this poignant parting, the emphasis falls primarily on the narrator's, not the native's, loss. The narrative silence about Kána-aná's thoughts and feelingshe has no fictive inner lifematches the "persuasive silence" of the enchanting Islands. Too primitive for complex human emotions, it is implied, Kána-aná is also too docile to feel anger at being exploited; he is a Good Man Friday to the last. Back home, now playing the prodigal son rather than Robinson Crusoe, Stoddard has no appetite for the fatted calf:" 'I don't deserve it; for I'd give more this minute to see that dear little velvet-skinned, coffee-colored Kána-aná than anything else in the wide worldbecause he hates business, and so do I'"
(CSS
44-45). As the prodigal who identifies himself with the natives, Stoddard can distance himself from the America of commercial enterprise without recognizing his own importation of ''business" to the Islands in his assumption of Crusoe-like mastery over Kána-aná/Friday.
"I'd rather be a south sea islander sitting naked in the sun before my grass hut than be the Pope of Rome," Stoddard once quipped, defining the antipodes of fantasy between which he alternated for much of his life.
26
When he was not dreaming of a return to the South Seas, he was imagining himself in monastic habita fantasy captured in the portrait of Stoddard painted by Joseph Strong during the 1870s.
27
As Jackson Lears has shown, "the aesthetic legacy of medieval Catholicism charmed increasing numbers of nineteenth-century American Protestants." As it developed beside a "more general interest in premodern art and ritual," this movement toward the church "merged, at its periphery, with
fin-de-siècle
aestheticism."
28
The draw of Catholicism was certainly aesthetic for Stoddard, who even as a boy found the mass, the music, and the colorful ecclesiastical trappings all the more attractive by contrast to the starkly evangelical
 
Page xxxii
religion of his family. "The beauty of its ritual, the mysticism of its creed, the consolation of its confessional, all appealed to him intensely."
29
But the church, which he formally joined in 1867, also afforded Stoddard another way, alternative to "barbarism," of allying himself with antimodern resistance to the business ethos of the Gilded Age. And insofar as Catholicism was more "feminized" even than high-church Protestantism, Stoddard's aestheticism (his artistic vocation) became congruous with the asceticism (the religious life) of those under stricter orders than he could ever have abided himself.
Meditating over the ruins of the Acropolis on his first trip to Greece, Stoddard wrote: "It is not unlikely that in the flight of the gods mankind lost his reverence for the purely beautiful; they took with them that finer facultythe sentiment is called feminine to-day, it may be considered infantile tomorrowfor the want of which the world is now suffering sorely."
30
This linkage of religion, beauty, and the "feminine" and/or "infantile" was commonplace in Stoddard's time. The gendering of aestheticism, which accompanied the refashioning of Victorian gender codes during the later nineteenth century, effected the redefinition, as Lears remarks, of "the 'feminine' ideal of dependence'':
In the
fin-de-siècle
imagination, many of the "childlike" qualities associated with premodern character, and with the unconscious, were also linked with femininity: fantasy, spontaneity, aesthetic creativity. The premodern unconscious generated androgynous alternatives to bourgeois masculinity. Those options especially appealed to the men and women who were most restive under bourgeois definitions of gender identity, and who suffered most acutely from the fragmenting of selfhood.
31
For a man like Stoddard, who had never fit the Wild-West mold of masculinity, the androgynous elements of Catholicism could be embraced without the ambivalence felt by men like Henry Adams, whose "vestigial commitments to male ego-ideals, to individual autonomy and conscious control" made him fear the power of the Virgin he simultaneously worshiped from a safe distance.
32
What was "feminine" about the church tallied with Stoddard's need for a model of "masculinity" that was nurturing rather than aggressive, domestic rather than entrepreneurial, genteel rather than strenuous; one, in short, that affirmed his ideal of spiritual beauty in brotherly love. It was in the name of Mother Church, for instance, that Father Damien became a missionary martyr among the lepers at Molokai. In Stoddard's eyes, Father Damien was a saint. But even the ordinary Catholic priests whom he befriended
 
Page xxxiii
seemed to represent a sure and universal refuge for pilgrims, like Stoddard, constantly in need of spiritual care and manly affection. No wonder, as he wrote from Europe in 1874, he was tempted to "bury myself out of this world in the seclusion of one of these monasteries. I never pass one here but I keel a little over to that side."
33
For those capable of vowing celibacy, Catholicism provided one solution to the problem of gender identity. But the side of Stoddard that needed sexual expression kept him from ever keeling over into the clerical brotherhood. (He never aspired, even in fantasy, to priestly status.) Believing his desire for men was natural, and thus within the divine scheme, Stoddard also believed that the church, in its sacrament of penance, made allowances that the Protestants did not for human frailty. There is little indication, however, that Stoddard felt guilty about what he called his temperament. As he explained his religious conversion to James Whitcomb Riley: "I couldn't help it, you see; it was born in me and was the only thing that appealed to my temperament. I believe a man's religion is nessessarily
[sic]
a matter of temperamentI couldn't be anything else than a Catholicexcept
except
a downright
savage,
and I wish to God I were that!"
34
Catholicism, then, was as deeply "congenital" for Stoddard as his same-sexuality.
Stoddard's coming out as a Catholic in his conversion narrative,
A Troubled Heart
(1885), was symbolically equivalent, as Austen sees, to his revealing his sexual "temperament."
35
This equivalence remained inchoate for Stoddard because the idea of "coming out" would not crystallize in sexual, rather than religious, discourse until the category of "homosexual'' had been fully established and enforced. However adrift in his sexual life, Stoddard remained firmly anchored to his religious faith, even when church officials (as at Notre Dame and Catholic universities) seemed to conspire against him.
An interesting contrast in this regard is Fr. Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo, for whom "homosexuality" and Catholicism came more violently into collision than they ever did for Stoddard. Whereas Stoddard would have preferred being a "savage" to being the Pope of Rome. Rolfe transformed the latter fantasy into
Hadrian the Seventh (1904
), the embittered novel in which (as imaginary Pope) he avenged himself upon the church that had denied him ordination. ("Fr." stood, in fact, for "Frederick," not "Father.") In Rolfe's Manichean mindhe too was a convert to Catholicism from evangelical Protestantismthe flesh raged against the spirit. A seeker of spiritual friendships with fellow
 
Page xxxiv
Englishmen, he was also late in life a pander of Italian boys in Venice.
36
There was, as A. O. J. Cockshut says, "an absolute gulf" between Rolfe's conduct in Italy and his ideal of friendship:
When Rolfe writes of homosexuality, he invariably does so in the coarsest, most brutal way. He can only write of it when all his higher aspirations, whether toward God or the imaginary friend, are laid asleep. His higher and lower nature can never be on stage together. There is absolutely nothing corresponding to the wistful talk about the love that dare not speak its name. And the imagined, long-desired, impossible perfect friendship is utterly chaste.
37
Love, in Rolfe's view, had nothing to do with the flesh. As he wrote to Temple Scott about "heterosexuality":
Carnal pleasure I thoroughly appreciate, but I like a change sometimes. Even partridges get tiresome after many days. Only besotted ignorance or hypocrisy demurs to carnal lust, but I meet people who call that holy which is purely natural, and I am stupefied. I suppose we all deceive ourselves. To blow one's nose (I never learned to do it) is a natural relief. So is coition. Yet the last is called holy, and the first passes without epithets. Why should one attach more importance to one than to the other? I don't think that I want to know.
Some talk of wickedness, and vulgarly confound the general with the particular. Of course you re wicked, every instant that you spend uncontemplative of, uncorresponding to, the Grace and Glory of your Maker. That may be forgiven, for that Real Love forgives.
38
Such logic, in Cockshut's opinion, plunged Rolfe into a self-destructive state of mind during his final years of penury and paranoia. He yielded to "an amalgam of two separate and partly opposite impulses: theological despair, and a desire, by piling sin on sin, to punish God for not taking him at his own valuation and making him a priest."
39
In Stoddard's far sunnier Catholicism, which Rolfe would have considered self-deceiving, the spiritual and the carnal were happily wedded, without any sense that he was heaping sin upon sin. Publicly, of course, Stoddard seemed to conform to "the ideology of nonsexual Christian brotherhood," which "legitimized (nonphysical) intimacy between men by precluding the possibility that such intimacy could be defined as sexual."
40
As George Chauncey, Jr., has shown in regard to the Newport scandal of 1919 and 1920, in which Episcopal and other Protestant leaders leapt to the defense of a fellow clergyman accused by the United States Navy of "lewdness" in his ministry to sailors, the churchmen's stigmatizing of same-sexual
acts,
rather than individual disposi-

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