Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (2 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 viii
of "The Genteel Tradition" at its stupefying worst. I remained curious about Stoddard himself, however, and so I wrote to Austen about the papers in Boston.
We quickly moved to a first-name basis in an increasingly prolific and lively correspondence in which, among other things, Roger informed me about gay life in the nineteenth century and since, and I offered him advice and encouragement. His project was important, I believed (and still do), for its bearing on Victorian sexuality, a matter to which feminist scholars had first drawn my attention. Our letters crisscrossed the continentbetween Syracuse and San Francisco, Spokane, and Los Angelesuntil the end of 1983. Seven months later Roger consummated a desire for death with which I had, by then, become all too familiar.
Austen was nothing if not enthusiastic about the Stoddard book, confident he would surpass the modest success of his first one.
2
"Playing the Game
now seems to me to be an embarrassmenttoo flip and glib, especially as I work on Stoddard in some depth," he wrote from San Francisco on 29 August 1978. Roger had immersed himself so deeply into Stoddard, in fact, that he felt like a medium of his subject's sensibility. "The nice thing about it," he said, "is that my moods so often coincide with Stoddard's that the bio will at least be a fairly perceptive recreation of how he felt at any given time" (10 September 1978). Such intense identification, however, sometimes threatened Roger with emotional contagion. He later warned me not to make the same mistake with W. D. Howells in a biographical book I started in 1980.
3
''Don't get so far inside Howells that you can't get out again. Actually, I do think that this sort of happened to me in San Francisco, damn it all. After getting 'into' Stoddard and his letters and diaries and then, sort of under that general spell, putting everything down day after day from his fraidycat and warped and spoiled crybaby point of view, this perspective became somewhat engrained" (6 July 1980). What aroused Roger's disdain, but subtly appealed to him as well, was Stoddard's using "infantilism as a sort of armor," boasting of "his babyishness, as if it were an immediate explanation and defense of his inability to cope" (16 April 1979).
Neither a fraidycat nor a crybaby, Roger was nonetheless given to depression, against which his sardonic wit served as a tensile armor. Over the course of our friendship, I came to notice the oscillation of his moods between elation and despair. Circumstances often seemed to conspire in favor of the latter.
Soon after he finished it, Roger concluded that
Genteel Pagan: The
 
Page ix
Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard
would not only fail to outsell
Playing the Game,
but would also likely fail to be published at all. He had devoted two full years (1977-1978) to the biography, living in abstemious isolation while he did the extensive research and drafted nearly four hundred pages. Rejected by Harper & Row (on the basis of sample chapters) and by the Stanford University Press (after merely two days!), the book was gathering dust, early in 1979, on an agent's desk in New York. It was subsequently declined by Avon Books, by the University of Chicago Press, and (after unconscionable delay) by McGraw-Hill. Roger had predicted that the "problem" with
Genteel Pagan
would be "similar to that of
Playing the Game:
commercial presses will think it too esoteric, university presses will think it too popular in style if not in content" (16 April 1979). He was alternating between disappointment and exasperation at the time he deadpanned about "posthumous publication" for
Genteel Pagan
(30 May 1979), adding in a later letter: "At this point, I just want to get the fucking thing published, and expect to make zero money on it, so anything short of a vanity press would do" (6 July 1980).
I read the draft myself during the summer of 1979, which I spent in Seattle at the University of Washington. In order to shrink his expenses in accord with his dwindling savings, Roger had moved from California to live with his mother in Sunnyside, Washington, and I arranged to meet him face-to-face. At lunch on campus one day, he handed me the Stoddard typescript, which I eagerly read overnight and returned with my reactions. I could see a few problems in the bookit was diffuse and overwritten in spotsbut the narrative was mainly clear and potentially compelling, and the new light cast on Stoddard and his times was unquestionably valuable. To Roger I stressed the book's virtues and assured him earnestly that publication was only a matter of time.
I was never to see him againa tall and slender black-haired man in his forties (a year younger then than I am now), whose broad features were dominated by thick eyeglasses. Roger's hearing aid was attached to the black plastic frames. Despite a stapedectomy in 1971, he suffered from chronic tinnitus (ringing and buzzing in the ears); and I found it far more difficult to conduct our conversations in person than I had by mail. So did he, of course. I began to understand that his near deafness was a major reason for his loneliness. "More and more I feel like Emily Dickinson in Amherst," he had written from Sunnyside, "with only the bees and the bobolinks for company" (30 May 1979).
 
Page x
Much laterafter his death, in factI gleaned a few basic facts about Roger Austen. A native of' Washington, he was born (under another name, apparently)
4
on 25 September 1935thus sharing his birthday, as I once pointed out to him, with William Faulkner. He grew up, like Charles Warren Stoddard, in a fundamentalist Christian household against which he rebelled. (Austen never mentioned his father to me, and he seldom alluded to his mother and sister, with whom his relationship was evidently strained.) After graduating from the University of Washington, he earned an M.A. from Seattle University, a Jesuit school, with a thesis on Tennessee Williams; and he subsequently taught English at the junior high and high school levels. After a year at the University of California, Irvine, Austen moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s in order to establish himself as a free-lance writer. His articles and reviews appeared in such places as the
Bay Guardian, San Francisco Theatre, California Living, San Francisco Review of Books,
and the
Advocate;
for a while he was even the host of a television talk show. Then, after serving as managing editor of the
Sentinel,
a gay paper, he wrote ad copy for Capwell's department store in Oakland. The income from this job supported his work on
Genteel Pagan
throughout 1977 and the following year, during which he wrote full-time, having quit Capwell's.
In the fall of 1980, when other options had been exhausted, I persuaded Roger to submit
Genteel Pagan
to the Syracuse University Press, where I could at least put in a partisan word, for what it might be worth. Along with a tepid reader's report, the typescript was returned late in November with detailed suggestions for revision. The door to later acceptance was left ajar, but Roger could never bring himself to do what lie did not think was necessary.
The anonymous reader had been annoyed by what he (unlikely she) regarded as "excessively personal reflection on incidents and the character"a personal note that arose from Roger's imaginative fusion with Stoddard, but also from his sense of himself as a self-appointed gay gadfly and provocateur. He was especially fond of those passages in which he had attemptedat the risk of transgressing the generic boundary between biography and fiction by his use of novelistic interior monologuesto bring his subject to life: "through a little bit of extrapolation, to paint the view in Stoddard's eyes." He worried that if such "personal reflection" were to be cut from
Genteel Pagan,
its vitality would be "snuffed out" (2 December 1980).
 
Page xi
"I took it for granted, in reading the MS.," I replied, "that part of the point of the book was to suggest that there may be a distinctive gay aesthetic in American literature and elsewhere and that you were trying to liberate CWS from the distorting context of genteel American letters, in part by writing about him in a deliberately ungenteel and unacademic way." The reader, I speculated, had been resisting the self-conscious "feyness" (as I called it, for lack of a better word) of
Genteel Pagan,
"its very voice and manner." This was, I thought, "a political issue and nothing less'' (9 December 1980).
Roger conveyed his relief that I at least had grasped "exactly what I am about" and had perceived "correctly, I think, the pointlessness of redoing it in a dry, academic style from every point of view" (16 January 1981). Thus there were to be no revisions by Roger himself, although he acknowledged a need "to improve and streamline the Stoddard" (2 December 1980). A few months earlier, when he was reworking one chapter into an article for the
Journal of Homosexuality
(the editorial board of which he had been invited to join), he had become aware "of how awful it was and how sloppy much of that Stoddard ms. now seems to me to be" (20 August 1980). The next year he had a brainstorm, in the bathtub, about how to enliven the opening: by skipping over Stoddard's early years to his first trip to Hawaii in the late 1860s; that is, to focus immediately on the moment of his sexual initiation. "But rather than getting excited and bubbling up and racing on ahead in my mind. I just stopped there, too languid to bother thinking beyond that." The book now resembled "a huge baby elephant who will
not
fly, for 400 pages, try as I will" (16 January 1981). The following July, although he was gratified by Carl Stroven's praise for the draft,
5
Roger was still feeling languid: "At present, though, the status of future drafts remains, like so much else, unclarified."
"Like so much else" was a wry allusion to recent events in Roger's life. In May 1981, when he had sent Stroven a copy of
Genteel Pagan.
he had also mailed the original typescript to me for safekeeping. "Since I may well not continue to serve as babysitter of this project," he had explained ominously, "it has occurred to me that I should do something to see that all the research does not go down the drain." Roger had been pondering
The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima,
and he added: "Like Mishima, I do not much believe in old age anyway, and my objections, like his, are aesthetic" (15 May 1981). This was, as I dreadfully perceived, a suicide note.
 
Page xii
The downward gyre in Roger's mood had been gradual. Despite the disheartening response to
Genteel Pagan,
he had launched yet another book in the summer of 1980. This was
Boomerang,
an account of the 1919 and
1920
scandal over homosexual activities at the United States Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island, in which incident the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and several other prominent figures had been caught up.
6
Roger had soon lost himself in researchhe was ploughing through forty-seven hundred pages of documents he had obtained from the National Archivesand he was thrilled by the sheer drama of the affair. "Nothing has given me more pleasure than putting this thing together: it is like a melodramatic mystery story that writes itself, with cliffhanging endings for each chapter bubbling up from the material of their own accord" (24 July 1980). Here was promise for trade publication, which would reroute his career from the dead-end detour of
Genteel Pagan.
When Roger learned that another scholar was also exploring the Newport story, he was alarmed at first, lest he be scooped, and finished the book at breakneck speed.
7
At the end of the year, as he pitched
Boomerang
to Scott Meredith and several other agents in New York, Roger was soaring again. He could envision a movie spin-off from his best-seller.
No sale. Another dead end.
An even harder blow fell in February 1981, when Roger discovered that Gore Vidal, a writer he admired even as he rejected his line on homosexuality, had made a mockery of him. In Views from a Window, a collection of old interviews, snippets of Vidal's correspondence with Judy Halfpenny (Roger, for some reason, could not believe this name was real) were quoted. "At one point Ms. Halfpenny, in one of her alleged letters to Vidal, asks what he thinks of my 'depressing' book" (10 February 1981).
Roger explained that he had sent Vidal a copy of
Playing the Game
in 1977, with the hope he might review it. Vidal had responded privately instead, committing himself only to the equivocal exclamation, "What a Job!" and promising to take account of Roger in a piece he was writing for the
New York Review of Books.
But when the essay, "Sex Is Politics," finally appeared in
Playboy
(January 1979), it contained no mention of
Playing the Game.
"Well, in his next alleged letter to Ms. Halfpenny," Roger continued, with a mock-legalistic punctiliousness that did not mask his dismay, "Vidal allegedly wrote that I was 'dull,' that I hadn't had 'much of a life,'

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