Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (15 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
8.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Until the day he died, Stoddard was almost constantly in love; and if there were no agreeable homosexual males nearby, which was often the case, Stoddard would, with a sigh, tumble for an attractive heterosexual male. With this point in mind, the streak of "masochism" that runs through "The Spell-binder" can be better understood. Time after time, falling in love had so conditioned Stoddard to expect rejection and suffering that he eventually accepted the proposition that, at least in his own case, a correlation existed between the two. The extent of his suffering seemed a measure and indeed a proof of his love. At least subconsciously, Stoddard felt he did not deserve to be loved by the
 
Page 24
godlike idols he worshiped; had they stepped down from their pedestals and loved him in return, his reaction would have been more consternation than joy. Renunciation became almost a way of life. He could, like Emily Dickinson, "wade GriefWhole Pools of it," but "the least push of Joy" had a tendency to startle and unnerve him as he watched his accustomed universe turn upside down.
12
III
How did Stoddard and others of his time define this kind of love that often brought with it such exquisite pain and so little pleasure? We have a clue in Stoddard's use of "should" in the phrase, "one of the reasons why I should be despised and rejected." As we have seen and will continue to see, many people of prominence and of various religious beliefs accepted rather than rejected Stoddard in spite of what must have been a general awareness that he was sexually "eccentric." To some extent, this acceptance is explained by the fact that Stoddard was a ''Bohemian" at a time when people indulged the "sins" and eccentricities of Bohemians with the understanding that they were more affectations than signs of depravity.
More to the point, however, Americans in the nineteenth century simply lacked the terms with which to define people like Stoddard. True, various slang terms implying sissiness (e.g., "Miss Nancy," "Charlotte-Ann," "Aunt Fancy") were in use, but none was necessarily synonymous with "pederast" or "sodomite," words that were unsavable and almost unthinkable in the polite society in which Stoddard generally moved. If heterosexuals had a hard time defining the homosexual (a term coined in 1869 by a Hungarian doctor), it can be imagined how baffling it must have been for homosexuals to try to define themselves. In the mid-nineteenth century there was almost no published literature on this subject for the layman to read, especially in America. As a result. young homosexuals often felt they were the only ones in the universe so afflicted, and, quite understandably, a great number of their self-definitions were idiosyncratic.
In Stoddard's case, we find some relevant jottings in the "Thought-Book" he kept from 1865 to 1867. In one entry, he thinks of sketching a "romance of how my soul got into [Ada] Clare's body and was at rest." with the idea that the "physique" would thus be "made whole."
13
Coincidentally, this concept of a woman's soul trapped inside a man's
 
Page 25
body was the basis of Carl Ulrichs's theories in Germany at this time. By the end of the century in England, Ulrichs's
Urning
had been translated into Edward Carpenter's "Uranian," a member of an "intermediate" sex that, high on the evolutionary ladder, combined in one body the most noble aspects of the female and the male.
14
Thinking of himself as some kind of biological sport, Stoddard, at least at this time, seemed to experience very little shame or guilt about falling in love with other young men. In a few years he was to have Paul Rookh argue in ''Hearts of Oak" that God-given instincts of whatever kind must be right: and in a "Thought-Book" entry for 27 May 1866, he expressed his belief in a God who is perpetually compassionate and forgiving. Later we will find that, in moments of depression, Stoddard tended to despise and reject himself. But in his young manhood he seemed to view the arrival of love as a tender and enchanting experience. Even when the love object was someone as indifferent as the "Spell-binder," Stoddard always tried to relish and enjoy the experience the best he knew how.
 
Page 26
3
By the end of the 1863-64 school year at Brayton Academy, Stoddard was a nervous wreck. What led to this condition we do not know for sure; but, aside from Stoddard's aversion to his studies, his case of nerves might have had to do with an especially devastating emotional entanglement. Whatever the cause, the family doctor prescribed that nineteenth-century panacea for any sort of mental or physical indisposition: a lengthy sea voyage. So in August 1864, in order to recover his equilibrium, Stoddard left San Francisco for a six-months' stay in Hawaii.
Just twenty-one, Stoddard was still malleable, unformed, and uncertain from nearly every point of view. As a writer, he was a published poet, but he had not yet discovered the type of writing that would bring him more than local celebrity. As a searcher after religious truth, he was wavering somewhere between the Unitarians and the Episcopalians, occasionally visiting Catholic churches in order to hear the beautiful music. As one drawn to his own sex, he was still no doubt very much of a virgin, puzzled and saddened that most of those he loved so rapturously seemed not to care too much for him in return. In several ways, this trip
 
Page 27
to Hawaii was a turning point, destined, as Stoddard put it, "to influence the whole current of my life" (CRP).
I
Charles was enchanted with the tropical kingdom of Hawaii. In the balminess of its climate, the sweep of its seashore, and the beauty of its flowers and people, it was to San Francisco as, some years before, San Francisco had been to New York State. A visitor to Honolulu about this time described the city as almost overwhelming in its lush and exotic foliage: "over-arching trees, through whose dense leafage the noon sunshine only trickled in dancing, broken lights; umbrella trees, caoutchouc, bamboo, mango, orange, breadfruit, candlenut. monkey pod, date and coco palms, alligator pears, 'prides' of Barbary, India, and Peru, and huge-leaved, wide-spreading trees, exotics from the South Seas, many of them rich in parasitic ferns, and others blazing with bright, fantastic blossoms." The people of Honolulu were just as colorful and picturesque:
Such rich brown men and women they were, with wavy, shining black hair, large, brown, lustrous eyes, and rows of perfect teeth like ivory. Everyone was smiling. . . . Without an exception, the men and women wore wreaths and garlands of flowers, carmine, orange, or pure white, twined round their hats, and thrown carelessly round their necks. . . . Chinamen . . . "foreigners," half-whites, a few negroes, and a very few dark-skinned Polynesians from the far-off South Seas, made up the rest of the rainbow-tinted crowd.
1
At first Charles was content to soak up such atmosphere in hopes of regaining the serenity he had lost at Brayton Academy. He spent days lounging in a hammock at the home of family friends who lived two miles from Honolulu in the Nuuannu Valley. Ada Clare's coming to town provided a pleasant distraction, but Charles was lonely enough to recall his life at Brayton Hall "with a touch of tenderness that verged dangerously upon the romantic." There had been an "emotional parting with certain of my school fellows," and during the next months he wrote them "a bag full of sentimental letters" (CRP). One, apparently written to a spellbinding friend, if not
the
''Spell-binder," asked plaintively: "Have you entirely forgotten a fellow? Are there no reminiscences of bygones wherein I figure?" For Charles there were memories:
 
Page 28
of "the little chat" in the dusk of his friend's quiet parlor, of the "ramble through the beautiful garden" and his gift of flowers. "Perhaps you don't know that I kept those flowers in a little white vase, till the leaves fell apart and then I knew it was time to walk again toward you and your garden'' (IH 17, Sept. 1864).
Charles snapped out of his nostalgia one day when, in Whitney's bookstore, he was introduced to a "slender but well proportioned gentleman, clad in white duck." This "godsend" turned out to be Charles Derby, the thirty-eight-year-old manager of the Royal Hawaiian Theater. The two became "fast friends at once, and it was my custom to lounge under the window in the green-room hour after hour, while he talked of the vicissitudes in his extraordinary career." Derby had been "delicate and effeminate" as a youth, but, "possessed of much physical grace," he became a circus acrobat and later a versatile actor. He excelled in light comedy and eccentric character parts, and he loved to perform in drag ("the prima donna in burlesque opera was a favorite assumption"). On the side he raised botanical specimens and instructed young men in music, dancing, fencing, boxing, and gymnastics. Known for being charitably disposed toward the young, Derby invited many homeless youths to take temporary shelter under his roof. Over glasses of lemonade, he enthralled Stoddard with tidbits of backstage gossip. Years later in "The Drama in Dreamland" Stoddard was to capture Derby in a description that was in some ways a self portrait: "a man of the most eccentric description; greatly loved by a few, intensely disliked by many, and perhaps fully understood by no one. He had learned to hate the world, and at times to irritate himself very much over it; doubtless he had cause"
(CSS
53, 56, 62-64).
An even greater godsend was the chance to accompany Enoch Wood Perry, an American painter in his early thirties, on a tour of the island of Hawaii, the highlight of which was a week spent in Hilo, which was even more luxuriantly green than Honolulu. Stoddard and Perry stayed at the Protestant Mission House (since there was no hotel in Hilo), and every afternoon Stoddard went to a nearby pool to watch the young natives swim. The setting was breathtaking: "The stream that flows down from the mountain over a bed of lava as smooth as glass, there leaps from the brink of a cliff and buries itself in foam at the top of a deep pool half a hundred feet below. It was like pouring cream from the lip of a mug the way that stream slid off into the air, and 'twas whipped cream for sure when it struck the rim of the pool" ("Kane-Aloha,"
CSS
 
Page 29
69). The swimmers of Hilo, who have been likened in physique and comeliness to "the bronzes of the Naples Museum,"
2
were breathtaking, too. "And the greatest of these," Stoddard decided, perched on a rock above the pool and eyeing each young man in turn, "was Kane-Aloha''
(CSS 71).
In a sketch written about Kane-Aloha ("well named the Loving Man"
[CSS
81]), Stoddard says that before long he and the young native were "inseparable," explaining that "friendship ripens quickly in the tropical sunshine"
(CSS
71). But the Protestant missionary's wife was suspicious, making it her business to interrogate young Stoddard about his doings. In the sketch, however, it is not the woman but, rather surprisingly, Enoch Perry who tries to come between the two young men. Perry suggests leaving Hilo; Stoddard counters with the idea that Kane-Aloha be hired as their guide for a horseback trip to the other side of the island. Finally acquiescing, Perry assumes the role of watchful chaperon and insists that everyone stay together during their journey. Stoddard outwits Perry by straggling behind with Kane-Aloha, conveniently getting "lost," and the two are separated from Perry for several delightful days and nights.
The noonday heat induced Kane-Aloha to shed his garments one by one, and it was "evident that presently there would not be a solitary stitch left for propriety's sake. Nobody seemed to care in the least." Especially Stoddard, who, after all, was the only one around
to
care: "Is there anything more soothing, more cleansing, more ennobling and refining than the caress of the pure, cool air when it comes in immediate contact with the human body as God created it? O, Ye Tailors! Ye Men-Milliners! Ye Out-fitters of the Unfit! Ye Padders, and Upholsterers, and Repairers and Remodelers of the human form divine, out upon Ye!"
(CSS
76).
If the days spent riding with Kane-Aloha through the jungle greenery were enchanting, the nights were literally indescribable. Stoddard became an "easy convert to the untrammelled delights of barbarianism." He and his "loving man" not only engaged in "riotous living," they reveled in it
(CSS
76). Although they "transgressed the unwritten law," they were "not in the least sorry for it"
(CSS
78). At twilight they slept together in little thatch huts along the roadside; and as the "indolent zephyr breathed upon us freighted with the narcotic aroma of cocoanut-oil," they "yielded to the seductions of the hour"
(CSS
76). Stoddard may well have lain awake for a long time, glancing at the beautifully

Other books

One Knight's Bargain by O'Hurley, Alexandra
The Undead Kama Sutra by Mario Acevedo
The Sword of the Lady by Stirling, S. M.
Until You by Sandra Marton
Cometh the Hour: A Novel by Jeffrey Archer
One Night of Scandal by Elle Kennedy
EscapeWithMe by Ruby Duvall
Runaway Cowgirl by Cheryl Dragon