Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (10 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 xlv
contrary, when he had found a new "Kid," as he called these young men, he couldn't wait to share this good news with anyone who was willing to listen. By the time Stoddard was in his sixties, a British lady with whom he had corresponded for thirty years wrote to exclaim: "What a long line of Kids you have! . . . They 'stretch out to the crack of doom'!" In speaking out so freely about the love that otherwise "Dared Not Speak Its Name," Stoddard may be regarded as a homosexual touchstone among the writers in nineteenth-century America. Whenever he thought he detected a certain telltale quality in the lives or works of his fellow authors, he didn't hesitate to tell them so in letters or in person. Of course, he wrote to Whitman
Leaves of Grass
was, after all, so
obvious
for one in the know. And with the same sort of sniffing intuition, he felt he detected something behind the facades of Rudyard Kipling, Bliss Carman, Yone Noguchi, Frank Millet, Jack London, and, yes, even of the Hoosier Poet himself, James Whitcomb Riley! An examination of Stoddard's life will be illuminating, then, simply on the basis of how he reacted to all of the famous and near-famous men he got to knowheterosexuals as well as homosexualsand how they, in turn, reacted to him.
Let the misconceptions of the past be brushed aside. Those who still want to believe that Stoddard was in love with Ina Coolbrith (or was it Ada Clare or Lotta Crabtree?) should read no further. Those who will be affronted at finding Stoddard in bed with someone of the same sex should return this book to the public library. However, those curious to know what it was like to be a homosexual in nineteenth-century America maywith both pleasure and profit, it is hopedread on.
 
Page 3
1
With what he must have later regarded as remarkable prescience, Charles Warren Stoddard struggled against coming into the world in Rochester, New York, during the early morning hours of 7 August 1843. "I was born," he wrote sixty years afterward, "much against my will."
1
The infant had no way of knowing, of course, that his proud old family was in decline. He was to be told about the seventeenth-century Stoddards who had gone through Harvard to become doctors and ministers. Even in 1843, his paternal grandfather was a wealthy physician practicing in nearby Pembroke, New York. But Charles's father, Samuel Burr Stoddard, was in comparison an uneducated ne'er-do-well. In 1837, he had married a Pembroke girl, Sarah Freeman; he had fathered children in 1838 and 1841; and at the time of Charles's birth he was struggling to succeed in the paper-manufacturing business he owned with his father-in-law. For a while the firm of Stoddard and Freeman seemed on the verge of prosperity. In the late 1840s, the partners boasted in an advertisement that they offered "the largest assortment of Paper to be found in any house west of New York or Boston."
2
But in 1851 the firm failed, and after filing for bankruptcy, Charles's father left Rochester in search of a new job for himself and a new home for his family.
 
Page 4
I
During his first seven years of childhood, Charles seemed to have every reason to feel secure in the family home. Along with Grandpa and Grandma Freeman, the Stoddards were living in a commodious, broad-fronted white house at 24 Frank Street. In addition to the older children, Ned and Sarah, he was to have younger brothers to play with: Sam, born in 1846, and Fred, born in 1850. A childhood friend recalled that it was always grand fun at the Stoddards'. In the large side yard there was a tent with flags, a cannon, a whirling contraption called "flying horses," and, on the lawn in a shady corner to keep it cool, a bucket of lemonade.
3
For Charles, as he recalled, childhood had been difficult. Never a rough-and-tumble boy, he was "very timid and sensitive": "I hated most games, I liked better to lounge about, dream-building."
4
While the more rambunctious children played, Charles preferred to "steal apart . . .  and, throwing myself upon the lawn, look upon them in their sports as from a dim distance. Their joy was to me like a song, to which I listened with a kind of rapture, but in which I seldom or never joined." For reasons that he could not then begin to understand, he just did not fit in. In spite of a doting family, he was a "lonely child. . .  often loneliest when least alone," and his chief consolation was ''intense and absorbing love, and love alone."
5
The prevailing religious tone in the household was set by his mother and her parents, much to the boy's dismay. While Grandpa Stoddard over in Pembroke had become a comparatively liberal Unitarian, the Freemans and their daughters were God-fearing Presbyterians. Everyone was forced to attend Sunday services in a dreary unadorned church that Charles recalled with loathing for having offered nothing "for the eye to fall on with a sense of rest; nothing to soothe or comfort the heart"
(TH
20). As it turned out, there
was
something. One day, while enduring the two-hour service in "dumb misery," Charles chanced to notice at the rear of the church a picture of an angel "floating through the air with a lute poised lightly upon his breast." Finding solace in this bit of beauty, he turned his back on the minister and gazed until "the man in the pew behind me seized me abruptly by the shoulders and turned me face about"
(TH
22-23).
By contrast, the aura of the mysterious Catholic cathedral across from his home filled the boy with wonder. The music that wafted out of the
 
Page 5
stained-glass windows was strangely beautiful; and while standing across the street on Sunday nights, Charles sometimes caught "glimpses of clustering tapers, twinkling like dim stars through clouds of vapor"
(TH 15
). He longed to go inside, but he knew better than to ask his parents, who had no use for unsanctified religious practices. Without his parents' knowledge, Charles prevailed upon the maid to take him into the cathedral, where he was much impressed with the tapering columns, painted arches, rose windows, pictures, statues, and frescoes. "I saw an altar that inspired me with curious awe; a throng of worshipers, who knelt humbly and prayed incessantly, so that the quiet of the chapel was broken by the soft murmur of lisping lips"
(TH
15-16). True, he was somewhat frightened by the dark-robed priests, who reminded him of the illustrations in a book at home picturing the most harrowing excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. But this surreptitious visit planted a seed that was to take root twenty years later. When it came to aesthetic beauty, Charles was convinced that the Presbyterians could notand, of course, would nothold a candle to the Catholics.
After 1850, the comforts of gracious living gradually gave way to the frightening reality that this branch of the Stoddard family was headed for the poorhouse. From his eighth to eleventh years, Charles moved with his family into increasingly narrow quarters: in 1850 to Fitzhugh Street in Rochester; then to a former wayside inn outside of town; then to Pennsylvania and back to Spencerport, New York; then, in 1854, back to Rochester to live near the railroad tracks. In and out of country schools at irregular intervals, Charles became a shy, self-conscious pupil, easily intimidated by his teachers. In the Presbyterian church every Sunday, Charles found his heart growing more and more troubled by a God indefatigably bent on visiting His wrath upon the sinful.
There were occasional moments of joy. Once in a while at school Charles would become attached to another boy, who would become his "chum"; and his family attended the marvelous traveling shows along the barge canal at Spencerport. But the steady decline of the Stoddards's fortunes and the incessant moving about had the effect of making Charles ever more sensitive, introspective, and insecure. In later life he jotted down some notes for his "Autobiography, Book First" that give a clue to his boyhood personality:
A victim of emotional worries. The instant defender of the abused. A horror of the Insaneand of those who are under the influence of stimulants of any kind. Passionate attachments. Flights of Fancy. Dreamsby
 
Page 6
day and nightmore especially day-dreams. Shyness. Worldly detachmentlife viewed as if from a distance, and not really entered into. School horrorstyranny; anxiety over tasks; embarrassment in class. Superstitious. Testament under my pillowperpetual prayerIf I get to the top of the stairs before anyone speaks
it
will happen!
6
II
Finally, late in 1854, Samuel Stoddard found a job in San Francisco with an importing and shipping firm, and the family prepared to join him on the West Coast. As the Stoddards awaited their boat in New York City, Grandpa Freeman, relaxing his usual rigor, took his daughter and the children to the "Lecture Room" at Barnum's Museum. As it turned out, the current attraction was not a lecture but a dramatic performance, the first one Charles was to see. Significantly enough, the play was
Damon and Pythias,
starring the great J. R. Scott, and little Charles was so enchanted that for some years to come he would act out scenes from this play with his brothers in their new San Francisco home.
In mid-December 185
4
, the Stoddard family boarded the
Star of the West,
the "ill-smelling, overcrowded, side-wheeled tub" that was to take them as far as Nicaragua.
7
Charles had brought along Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe,
a volume he would always treasure because it was a gift from a chum. The drama of Crusoe was brought to life one day when Charles saw, somewhere between the Florida Keys and the Caribbean, a lush green tropical island. Its peak was "sky-kissed," its valleys were "overshadowed by festoons of vapor," and along its beach the "creaming breakers wreathed themselves, flashed like snow-drifts, vanished and flashed again''
(IFP
8). Charles was as entranced as he had been at the performance of
Damon and Pythias.
He recalled that he had been filled with "a great longing" as he looked at the island and had wanted "to sing with the Beloved Bard: 'Oh, had we some bright little isle of our own, / In the blue summer ocean, far off and alone!'"
(IFP 10
).
Traveling across Nicaragua gave Charles his first taste of the exotic. As the flat-bottomed river boat headed west, the eleven-year-old boy was dazzled by "splashes of splendid color" against the vivid greens of the jungle. Macaws, with "scarlet plumage flickering like flame," flew nearby
(IFP
16). The river banks were decked with "gigantic blossoms that might shame a rainbow"
(IFP 22).
There were oranges ("great globes of delicious dew"), mangoes, guavas, bananas, sugarcane, and other good things to eat that Charles had never seen before
(IFP 19
).

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