Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (26 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 77
With guidebook in hand, Stoddard inspected all of the tourist attractions at each stop, writing up his impressions for the
Chronicle
in a style that was sometimes world-weary and other times strangely disarming. A typical column described works of art in the museums, music in the squares, food in the restaurants, and accommodations in the hotels (usually unsuitable). Stoddard also dropped the names of any San Franciscans he happened to see.
When he got into scrapes or simply wanted the comfort of human companionship, Stoddard depended on attracting new friends by virtue of his "animal magnetism": "I believe I am peculiarly unaccountably fortunate; someone is sure to come to my relief at the right moment; I have only to hang out signals of distress and I awaken a response in a bosom whose horizon has, perchance, never before lapped over mine."
41
Here he seemed to be echoing his accounts of his providential experiences in Tahiti, where he had enjoyed such good luck with the native men; for when he spoke of a "response" in a stranger's bosom, he hinted at more than the ordinary kindness of strangers. With his sad blue eyes transmitting a gaze full of helplessness and longing, Stoddard's signals must have been instantly recognized by those who knew what they meant.
By the middle of October 1875, Stoddard was in Munich, where he spent several weeks living with two American students he apparently met through Toby Rosenthal, who had lived in Munich for about ten years and who seemed to know everyone in the art world there. The two young men, Joseph Strong and Reginald Birch, were to play important roles in Stoddard's later years. Stoddard took immediately to Joe Strong, who also had lived in the East, in San Francisco, and in Hawaii. They joked, in regard to their comparably shaky finances, that perhaps they would both end by having to "take the veil" and join a monastery. The cream of the jest was Stoddard's posing in clerical robes for a remarkable oil portrait by Strong.
While Joe had a personal charm that was quite irresistible to Stoddard, Reggie Birch was downright lovable. Born in London, young Birch had more recently lived in San Francisco, where he became well known as a designer of theatrical posters. Stoddard found himself falling in love again. Reggie became his "Kid," and their friendship was sustained for the next twenty years. Meanwhile Stoddard stopped writing to Frank Millet, who had returned to America and was now languishing in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. "My dear old Chum-
 
Page 78
meke," Frank protested, "Two weeks in Munich spooning! spooning! SPOONING! and couldn't find time to write me. Che diavalo!. . .  I haven't spooned a bit since I got back, you know I haven't, but you [butterfly pressed on the page] you have had one solid spoon. . . . Now then you butterfly if you don't write more I'll cut your off so you won't flutter about anymore."
42
Undeterred by Millet's transatlantic threats, Stoddard left Munich for Paris, where he continued to spoon as often as he could. He moved into a Latin Quarter hotel that catered to American art students; it seemed like a "great boys' boarding-school"
(M
1
9). To some degree accepted as one of the boysone of the older boys, to be sureStoddard adjusted his daily routine to that of the Left Bank artists:
Breakfast is quite like a noon dinner, with soups and dessert, if we prefer them. It begins shortly after twelve o'clock and lasts an hour or two. . . . The affairs of the day are duly canvassed; we plot a thousand pleasant things and live up to about half of them; we discuss art, literature, the
prime donne,
music, and the masque. We burn the fragrant weed over tall glasses of black coffee, and grow boisterous, perchance, in argument or repartee.
(M
14-15)
Some nights, when he was feeling particularly bold, Stoddard went to the Boullier dance hall to watch the gyrations or to the "Valentino," where he was surrounded by people who were either depraved or at least pretending to be. Here the "wickedest" dances were performed; in the satanic glow of red, blue, and green lights, "Frou Frou" did the cancan in the center of the floor. The special appeal of the "Valentino'' was that everyone came in costume and, even more intriguing, some of the dancers cross-dressed. In describing those in drag for the
Chronicle,
however, Stoddard affected moral detachment:
We boys of the Quarter, who come only to look on and to renew our feeble but I trust virtuous indignation at such sights, turn at last from the girls in boys' clothes, and the boys in girls' clothes; from the jaunty sailor girl-boy who has just ridden around the room on the shoulders of her captain; from the queen of darkness who swept past us in diamonds and sables, and never so much as suffered her languishing eyes to rest for a moment on any one of us; from the misery of the jealous one in the corner who has been robbed of his prize, and the melancholy of the two who are advising one another to go home.
43
Stoddard's indignation was "feeble" indeed, belied as it was by the perspicacity and sympathy of his description. It seems likely that many of these dancers were homosexuals and that Stoddard knew it.
 
Page 79
When Stoddard wasn't socializing with the other "boys of the Quarter," he was sometimes in the company of Americans he had known in California. But the American he was most desirous of seeing was A. A. Anderson, who had just returned to Paris after a visit to New York. Beckoned by a pale pink invitation, "faintly perfumed as if it had been stored in a casket of sandalwood," Stoddard arrived at Anderson's opulent home on the other side of the Seine. He felt ''transported to the realms of the Arabian Nights" when a corner of "a tapestry heavy with gold embroidery was lifted" and he found himself "at once in the embrace of Monte Cristo." After a lantern-lit "feast that might have been served in a kiosk of the Khedive," the two men sipped their coffee, smoked their water pipes, and talked about going together to the "fabulous East," where Anderson would illustrate the exotic sketches Stoddard would write. In the clear light of the next morning, no longer "intoxicated with the incense of smoking pastilles," Stoddard realized that such Arabian pipedreams were nothing more than that.
44
Anderson was not serious about accompanying him to Egypt, and Frank Millet could not afford to join him. But Stoddard set out nonethelessoff to Marseilles, where a ship was waiting to take him to Alexandria.
V
From January to July 1876, Stoddard made a semicircular tour of the countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean. If what he expected to find was a grand panorama that lived up to what he had read in travel books, he was often disappointed; for what he generally found were appalling poverty and decay: beggars with outstretched hands, and crumbling shrines at every turn. But Stoddard was a seasoned traveler by now, and he bore delays and mishaps with equanimity. He could usually find something amusing or beautiful enough to fill his
Chronicle
columns.
In Egypt, Stoddard tried to enter into the spirit of a culture he scarcely understood. One day in Alexandria he joined a funeral procession that was making its noisy way through the streets. "It is thought well of a man," he explained knowingly, "if he helps to swell a funeral pageant." But, as it turned out, the mourners did not think too well of Stoddard, for they made him march in the rear with "the children of the Prophet" and denied him admission to the cemetery (M 62). In an adventurous mood one night in Cairo, Stoddard began strolling alone through the dark
 
Page 80
streets and ended up lost in a remote quarter. He noticed with some satisfaction that "many an eye was turned on me in surprise." Then, suddenly, he was surrounded by a "mob" of rock-throwing youths, forcing him to make "as speedy a retreat as possible"
(M
80). While in Cairo, he tried the baths, which abounded in sensual delights, although he felt obliged to write of them as if they were a bewildering ordeal.
After visiting the pyramids, Stoddard embarked on a leisurely cruise up the Nile on a flat-bottomed barge named the
Nitetus.
Sailing southward always seemed to produce the same effect on Stoddard; as on his trips to Hawaii and Tahiti, the closer he came to the equator, the more he was tempted to turn into a languorous voluptuary. "The delicious days," he noted, "drift by unreckoned. Hour by hour we cast off the customs of our time, one after another, and grow luxurious and sensuous, taking in the landscape as if it were something that was provided for our physical enjoyment"
(M
151). It would not be difficult, he fancied, "to turn heathen in this heathenish land"
(M
139
).
One "heathenish" aspect of Egypt that left Stoddard unmoved, however, was the seductive dancing of the "ghawazee" in the "fleshpots." Before a performance in Luxor, the audience gradually lost consciousness of "the absurdity of our situation" and began ''to look about us as if we had some business here." Stoddard and his fellow thrill-seekers sat "in solemn rows on each side of the hall . . . apparently waiting for some one to lead us in prayer" (M 189). When the women began to undulate, Stoddard observed with disdain that their light garments were "excessively ugly" and that their dancing was little more than an "awkward shuffle over the floor from one end of the hall to the other"
(M 190
-91). While the ghawazee "very much bored" Stoddard
(M
191
), his soul was "satisfied" in Egypt by the sight of "handsome men and lovely boys"
(M 159).
Back in Cairo early in April, Stoddard almost dissolved in the heat. "Under its enervating influence I subsided into a hasheesh frame of mind, and passed my time between the bath and the nargileh, the victim of brief and fitful moods"
(M
217). After a few days he was headed north to tour the Holy Land with a couple of American friends.
Stoddard, playing the penitent and reverent pilgrim, visited the most sacred shrines during Easter week. But he found in Jerusalem "a lack of color, a want of vitality, a drowsiness of spirit noticeable everywhere"as if an "eternal Sabbath," the "awful hush of the deep-blue New England Sabbath," brooded over the city "like a curse."
45
Always crit-

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