Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (25 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
11.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 72
sending home sketches of Naples and then, in the fall, columns about the cities he passed through on his way to Venice: Ravenna, Bologna, and, perhaps most interesting of all, Loreto.
Stoddard's chief reason for stopping at Loreto was to visit the "Holy House," which Catholics believed to have been the home of the Virgin Mary at the time of the Annunciation. (The shrine was miraculous in that the house had supposedly been carried to Loreto by angels in the thirteenth century, when Mohammedans were overrunning the Holy Land.) At the local church his confessor turned out to be a progressive young Franciscan from Terre Haute, Indiana, who had been banished abroad for disciplinary reasons. With his "coalblack eyes that sparkled like jet," Father John was "quite unnecessarily good looking," and as a devotee of boxing and fencing, he had "more shape than he knew what to do with."
24
Delighted to see another American, the priest played host to Stoddard for the next few days. The muscular priest let Stoddard feel his ''knotted biceps," and Stoddard let the priest drive him around to the many shrines in the area. Like the selfless French missionaries on Maui, Father John struck Stoddard as the personification of everything that was beautiful and admirable about the Catholic church. With reluctance Stoddard left this winsome priest and continued his train ride northward, more hopeful than ever that someday he too would become a monkif only the church would have him.
III
Enervated by the heat, Stoddard had been unable to write well in Rome. where he would "lie in bed till two or three in the afternoon, smoking, reading and dreaming over the work I hope to do before long."
25
He promised himself that he would get to work in Venice, where the weather would be more bracing. Venice also held an answer to the vexing questions of' whom to live with and whom to love. One night, during intermission at the opera, a young man quietly joined Stoddard in his box. "We looked at each other," he recalled, "and were acquainted in a minute. Some people understand one another at sight, and don't have to try, either."
26
This young man, whom Stoddard had met once before (in Rome), was twenty-eight-year-old Francis Davis Millet. Like everyone else, Stoddard called him "Frank"; his nicknames for Stoddard were "chummeke" and, later, "you butterfly."
Born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, in 1846, Millet had been a Civil
 
Page 73
War drummer boy, serving beside his surgeon father. After the war he earned a master's degree in modern languages and literatures at Harvard, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Millet had come to Europe to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he had also done well. Now in Venice, he was painting, writing travel sketches for the papers back home, and looking for someone to love. That night at the opera, when he invited Stoddard to come and live with him, there was never any doubt as to the answer. Looking back on this experience, Stoddard mused, "Isn't it a delightful 'Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will'?"
27
During the winter of 1874-75, Stoddard lived with Millet in an eight-room house that featured a
loggia
and windows opening on the Grand Canal, the Guidecca, the Lagoon, and the Public Garden. The other occupants were Giovanni, the servant-cook-gondolier, and another American artist or two interested in keeping "bachelor's hall" for a while. Millet had taught Giovanni to fix baked beans and codfish balls, and during the frosty winter days, Stoddard loved dining on this New England fare in the cozy kitchen. An added attraction was the view from the kitchen windows of half-nude artisans at work in an adjoining shipyard. During the days Millet painted on the
loggia,
and Stoddard dozed and smoked and wrote his
Chronicle
columns. They dined early and usually took a sunset spin in their gondola, and at night they slept together in Millet's bed in the attic chamber with a commanding view of this enchanting city.
Local color was everywhere in Venice, of course, and Stoddard wrote column after column on every aspect of Venetian life: the afternoon band concerts on the Piazza San Marco; Florian's Cafe, where people gathered to gossip over chocolate and ices; the colorful peddlers who kept plying him with matches, flowers, and chestnuts. Most rapturously of all, he wrote about Venice after dark: "the divinely beautiful evening of that almost divinely beautiful city;tranquil, moonlit, with a shimmer of waters, and a shadow-haunted labyrinth of canals walled in by white, silent palaces, half in deep shade and half pallid in the moonlight."
28
Chronicle
readers were perhaps learning more than they wanted to know about the city. There were accounts of "Beautiful Venice," "Afloat in Venice," "Lingering in Venice,'' "Venetian Vignettes," "The Mother of Venice," "The Venetian Islands," "The Gayeties of Venice," "The Venetian Fetes," and "Farewell to Venice."
29
In order to gather fresh material for his columns, Stoddard took a
 
Page 74
three-week tour of Northern Italy in February. Frank went along as guide and "companion-in-arms." In Padua they were struck by the sight of "lovely churches and the tombs of saints and hosts of college boys." On the way to Florence Stoddard sympathized with a display of passionate male friendship often seen in Italy. A gigantic young fellow had just parted with his friend at the station.
As soon as they had kissed each other on both cheeksa custom of the country,the traveler was hoisted into our compartment, and the door locked behind him; but no sooner did the train move off, than he was overcome, and, giving way to his emotions, he lifted up his voice like a trumpeter, and the echoes of the Apennines multiplied his lamentations. For full half an hour he bellowed lustily, but no one seemed in the least disconcerted at this monstrous show of feeling; doubtless each in his turn had been similarly affected.
30
In Florence, Millet explained the art to Stoddard, who was much taken by the "Venus de Medici" and "The Wrestlers." Outside the city they visited La Certosa, the monastery where chartreuse was made. They were so amused by the strange, indirect ritual by which the monks were served their meals that they later played at being monks, handing "invisible provisions in to each other through the little hole in the wall" of the monastery garden. In Siena the two men slept in a "great double bed . . . so white and plump it looked quite like a gigantic frosted cakeand we were happy."
31
When they got to Pisa, Millet wanted Stoddard to see the leaning tower from just the right angle, so that he would be duly impressed. He was. Highlights of Genoa included sampling the
capo magro
and the Turkish punch, and taking a sunset stroll on a terrace overlooking the harbor. Stoddard regarded Milan as the "Paris of Italy''; he reveled in the glass-roofed Galleria, and enjoyed going with Millet to the opera.
Back in Venice, the two men were often invited to dinner by American friends eager to hear of their recent adventures. In those days the social life of the American colony seemed to revolve around the consulate, where one had to suffer Dr. Harris, a "perambulating corpse," and "Mother" Harris, who was, fortunately for her husband, an ex-army nurse. This woman was kind enough to have "the boys" over for Thanksgiving dinner but squeamish enough to regard
Summer Cruising in the South Seas
as distasteful. When Frank offered her his copy of the book to read, she glanced slyly at the illustrations of "several naked
 
Page 75
figures dancing" and handed it back with a "maiden blush." "From what they say," she added, "I don't think I should care to read it."
32
That spring Stoddard's heart was set aflutter by the appearance of A. A. Anderson, an exquisite American artist whose beauty and wealth were noteworthy, even in Venice. Anderson called on Millet one lazy Sunday in a long black cloak "of Byronic mold" (one corner of which was "carelessly thrown back over his arm, displaying a lining of cardinal satin"), a damask scarf of a gold-threaded fabric, and a slouch hat with tassels. But Anderson was most striking to Stoddard for his "comely face of the oriental-oval and almond-eyed type." He dubbed him "Monte Cristo." By contrast, Frank Millet now seemed less interesting.
Millet's "butterfly" had taken flight; Stoddard was fascinated by the dashing young Anderson. "Before we parted I had learned to pass half the day with him in his gondola, reading, chatting, writing, dreaming, or merely drifting with him while the tide swung lazily between the meandering canals and the Lido. The rest of the day we were ashore, but usually in each other's company." One night Anderson gave a dinner at the Danielli Hotel, where Stoddard felt he "must have had the suite of the royal princess, it was so ample and so richly furnished." The menu was "the realization of a sybarite's dream," with "wondrous wines'' and "viands from the four quarters of the globe." Anderson gave Stoddard a fez as a souvenir of this dinner and a sketch of a Venetian canal as a memento of their warm friendship. Then he left Venice as abruptly as he had arrived.
33
IV
With Anderson gone, Stoddard began to grow restless with Millet, and he decided to leave for Paris, telling Frank he would rejoin him in Brussels in July. "I feel there will come a time when I shall find it quite impossible to recall anything unpleasant in my whole Italian experience," Stoddard wrote en route.
34
He was looking forward now to a tour of the British Isles, in part to see Bob Jones. During his stopover in Paris, Stoddard encountered an old family friend from Oakland, Mrs. Preston Moore, who attached herself to him despite his protestations that he preferred to travel alone, for reasons that he would rather not explain. In London, Stoddard was "busy day and night showing her about," and he could not manage to leave her behind when, failing to keep his
 
Page 76
rendezvous with Millet, he went on to Chesterand to Bob Jones, who for over a year had been sending letters that were quite as impassioned as those Stoddard was now beginning to receive from Frank.
"Miss you? Bet your life," Millet had written after Stoddard's departure from Venice. "Put yourself in my place. It isn't the one who goes away who misses it is he who stays. Empty chair empty bed, empty house."
35
But Millet reluctantly resigned himself to Stoddard's ways. "You know that I only feel whole when you are with me. Is it magnetism? I'm sure it is the magnetism of the soul that can not be explained and had better not be analyzed,'' he later wrote. Then he added: "Go ahead! You know I'm not jealous, if I were I should be of 'Bob.' Anyone who can cut me out is welcome to. Proximity is something but you know I'm middling faithful."
36
Since their parting, Bob had bought a puppy that he called "Charles Warren Stoddard"; the namesake was anxious to see them both. In Stoddard's account of his reunion with Bob, Mrs. Moore was kept out of sight and out of mind, as she may well have been; for Stoddard moved in with the young man for the rest of his stay in Chester. "Ah!" Stoddard was to recall fondly, "What days of lazy leisure, what moonlight on the Dee; what strolls down the Liverpool road after vespers; what high-jinks and what not!"
37
After the "high-jinks and what not," Stoddard and Mrs. Moore went over to Ireland for a few days and then to Scotland. There they were joined by an Oxonian who assumed they were married. When Mrs. Moore asked him why he thought Stoddard was her husband, the Oxonian replied, "Because he pays so little attention to you, madame!"
38
In London again around the first of Augustand finally rid of Mrs. MooreStoddard spent his days visiting Bierce and others while awaiting the arrival of his
Chronicle
check, which allowed him to spend the next five months touring Western Europe. (Egypt was in the back of his mind; for he had heard glorious things about it from Eugene Benson and, particularly, A. A. Anderson.) From the male-only nude beach at Ostend, aptly known as "Paradise," Stoddard wrote to Bierce that he was as "red as a herring and as jolly as a clam."
39
He especially enjoyed watching two Italians ("lovers possibly, and organ grinders probably"), who were such "guileless, olive-brown, sloe-eyed, raven-haired, handsome animals."
40
Stoddard continued by train to Brussels and Cologne, sailed down the Rhine to Frankfurt, then went up to Leipzig and Berlin, and finally down through Dresden and Vienna on his way to Munich.

Other books

Walkers by Gary Brandner
Tragedy's Gift: Surviving Cancer by Sharp, Kevin, Jeanne Gere
Crybaby Ranch by Tina Welling
Butterfly Swords by Jeannie Lin
Starstruck - Book Three by Gemma Brooks
The Chosen Ones by Brighton, Lori
Zlata's Diary by Zlata Filipovic