Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (9 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 xxxix
"cocoanuts from the Fijis, fans and feathers from Hawaii, savage weapons and dancing skirts from Tahiti, and other bright pagan relics."
55
Because it expressed a domestic ideal, "The Bungalow" was different from the more insistently "manly" environments to which Stoddard had gravitated: the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, where alcoholic high jinks were meant to set obstreperous young writers above the sober business class; Charlotte Street in London, where illustrator Wallis Mackay played genial host to an endless stream of male visitors; "Stag-Racket Bungalow" in Hawaii, where three young men-about-town took in ''Charley" Stoddard as a boarder and good fellow; "Tuckanuck," the exquisitely appointed house of William Sturgis Bigelow on an island off Nantucket, where men took their ease, often naked, in an untamed natural setting; Carmel, where the California literati tried to combine art with physical culture. What Stoddard desired was a homosocial site in which his "feminine" tastes could be more fully expressed, one that literally brought home the worlds of art, religion, and tropical languor. He was most himself in a parlor that could double as a stage from which he retailed his adventures, for attentive visitors, from the comfort of an easy chair, surrounded by the curios that were his props.
Stoddard also possessed an extraordinary social grace in the homes of others. Wherever he went, either in male homosocial spheres or the domains of women, Stoddard was always welcomed merely for the pleasure of his company. As Howells said, Stoddard's "utter lovableness" endeared him to everyone who knew, "which is to say, loved. him": "He was so greatly and constantly beloved of hospitality that, as he complained once, he was being perpetually passed round on a plate, and there were none of his hosts who did not wish to add some special garniture to the dish."
56
As the metaphor implies, Stoddard readily adapted himself to a variety of social situations, masking his "temperament" when necessary. What remained constant, however, was his aestheticism "of Chopin at twilight, Oriental bric-a-brac, incense, lounging robes, and fragrant cigarettes."
57
During Oscar Wilde's sensational American tour in 1882, in the course of which he arrived in California "wearing a Spanish sombrero, velvet suit, puce cravat, yellow gloves, and buckled shoes" and proceeded to drink members of the Bohemian Club under the table,
58
Isobel Strong wrote to Stoddard about her meeting the resplendent visitor in San Francisco:
 
Page xl
He was delightfully entertaining, and said that the only thing he regretted about California was that he had not seen the Yosemite Valley and Charley Stoddard. But you, Charley, are the real aesthetehe affects what to you is natural and he has not your languour, grace, or beautiful voice and so the general verdict is that we have a better aesthete at home than this fellow who came all these miles to "show off."
59
What was "natural" to Stoddard was soon, largely through the agency of Oscar Wilde, to seem all too "unnatural." Long before the scandalous trials of 1895, Stoddard had recognized in Wilde what "decent" people were later shocked to discover.
60
As he wrote to a friend from Hawaii in 1882: ''Oscar Wilde! Shall I ever find him in this vague world? If you see him before I do, and of course you will. please say the unutterable things that stick in my throatbecause here there is no one to spoon with, or to gush over, or to care a fig for and I am out of practice."
61
"Spooning" and "gushing" were specialized words in Stoddard's vocabulary, used only in reference to his love for men and, outside of his diary, only in letters to fellow lovers of men. All such "homosexuals," whatever the variations in their gender identities, were subsumed during the 1890s, Sedgwick argues, under the aristocratic Wildean stereotype: "For the first time in England, homosexual styleand homophobic styleinstead of being stratified and specified and kept secret along lines of class, became . . . a household wordthe word 'Oscar Wilde.'" One consequence was that Symonds and Edward Carpenter, disciples of Whitman and proselytizers for a "middle-class-oriented but ideologically 'democratic,' virilizing, classicizing, idealistic, self-styled political version of male homosexuality," lost their consensus.
62
The impact of "Oscar Wilde" on American "homosexuals" was perhaps neither so immediate nor so profound as it was in England. For Stoddard, in any case, Whitman, not Wilde, was the enduring idol. But Stoddard had never been political, and he was indifferent to the democratic Whitman. In retrospect, then, Stoddard may be seen, as literary historians
have
seen him, less as Whitman's heir than as a prototype of the Wildean aesthete.
At the end of his life, Stoddard was heartened by those breaking silence about their same-sexuality, curious about the terms being circulated to describe "the unutterable things" that had stuck in his throat and had remained unarticulated in his work. He became bolder in the homoeroticism of his later tales, and he projected, but never wrote, an
 
Page xli
autobiographical piece to be called "The Confessions of an Unnaturalist." But Stoddard, born to another time, was not a modern "homosexual," and he was not to feel the full brunt of modern "homophobia." What his life offers is an invaluable clue to the formation of these categories during the crisis of gender and culture at the American fin
de siècle.
 
Page xliii
Foreword
Roger Austen
After they have been in their graves for a decade or two, it is a grand old American custom for homosexual writers to undergo curious transformations. Literary historians and critics and biographers set to work heterosexualizing or at least neutering these writers for posterity, Conveniently forgotten are all those nicknames that hinted vaguely at some form of hermaphroditism (James was called a "Miss Nancy," Whitman a "counter jumper," i.e., an "effeminate" creature of "weak depravities''). Passionate attachments to other males become innocuous, as Martin Duberman noted several years ago in the
New York Times Book Review:
The standard works on even celebrated literary figures (Gay Wilson Allen's biography of Walt Whitman, for example, or Leon Edel's Henry
James)
demurely bypass the question of sexual preference, presuming no
Written early in 1979, when Roger Austen was still attempting to place his book with a trade publisher, this "Foreword" was intended for the general reader. Austen believed that it would require revision should
Genteel Pagan
be accepted instead by a university press: "The tone of flippancy, so screeching in the last paragraph, would obviously have to be toned down." Because these pages reflect both Austen's intentions and their historical moment, I have chosen to include them as written.-ED.
 
Page xliv
more than an occasional elevated "infatuation." But the presumption of sex?Never! No one in our history, it seems, has ever been to bed with anybody of the same gender.
In place of boyfriends, girlfriends are discovered, frustrated heterosexual love affairs are hinted at, and irrelevant theories are offered to explain why these writers never chose to marry. And thus,
voilà!
These authors' lives and works may be safely examined by the school children of America.
Some gay critics have charged that this process is nothing less than an intellectually dishonest conspiracy, and they are right to the extent that literary historians have wittingly misrepresented the facts. In other cases, especially in the studies that were done a generation or so ago, it is possible that heterosexual scholars were simply too imperceptive to recognize a homoerotic clue when they saw one. But whatever the cause, the effect of all this whitewashing is the same: we are supposed to believe, as Martin Duberman says, that none of our writers ever went to bed with someone of the same sex.
This, of course, is nonsense, and it is time the truth was told.
But why tell the truth, the reader may well ask, about Charles Warren Stoddard? Since he was merely a minor author, does he warrant a full-length critical biography? No, not on the basis of his writing. Many of his books are admittedly second-rate, and some hardly merit rereading, let alone extensive literary analysis.
South-Sea Idyls
and
For the Pleasure of His Company;
however, do seem to warrant some degree of reevaluation in light of what is now known about Stoddard's life. In the past, these two books have been used as evidence to show that Stoddard was a somewhat "precious" stylist who could write charmingly but who didn't have very much to say. In fact, he had a good deal to say about a subject very close to his heart: men loving other men. And in
South-Sea Idyls
and
For the Pleasure of His Company
he said it, although at the time everyone had to pretend that he hadn't. In general, however, most of Stoddard's books deserve to remain in the background as their chief value is usually more biographical than literary.
It was how he lived, rather than what he wrote, that makes Stoddard of some interest to us today. All through his life he wore "his heart on his sleeve," as he used to say, falling in love with one good-looking young man after another. Since he felt it was his God-given right to love and be loved in return, he was seldom secretive about these affairs. On the

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