Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (28 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
9.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
On the beach at Monterey, November 1905
.
 Left to right: Joaquin Miller, George 
Sterling, Charles Warren Stoddard.
 
Page 85
7
Europe is like a picture bookgood to look at and think about," Stoddard had written to a friend from Italy, "but how lacking in the genuine life we know at home, especially in the West."
1
Now that he was back in the midst of "genuine life," however, Stoddard had no idea how he would fit, even in San Francisco. He could always write more "Swallow Flights," but that would be a retrogression in his literary career: precisely what he did not want to do for the rest of his life. Stoddard decided to stay in the East for a while; and for three months during the fall of 1877, he was the houseguest of Mrs. Jenny Johns, who had been so fond of him and Eben Plympton years before. Following the suicide of her latest husband, Jenny had moved to her parents' estate, "Eagleswood Park,'' near Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Jenny regarded Stoddard as a harmless "Babe in Christ," someone who was almost silly-simple. Stoddard regarded her as good material for the San Francisco novel that was still in the back of his mind.
While staying at "Eagleswood Park," Stoddard sent a brief note to Father Daniel Hudson at Notre Dame, mentioning their mutual friend, Dan Paul, and suggesting that if Father Hudson would send him the
Ave Maria,
he would be happy to contribute to the paper. With Father
 
Page 86
Hudson's encouraging reply began a steady correspondence and a friendship that would last for over thirty years.
Stoddard was also in contact with Joaquin Miller, whose
Danites in the Sierras,
a revenge drama about a Mormon massacre, was becoming a hit on Broadway. Stoddard wanted to see the play, and he decided to leave "Eagleswood Park" and spend the winter with Miller in Manhattan. In Miller's hotel room they led a "kind of camp life," cooking over "a bed of live coals in the parlour grate"
(EE
230ff.). It is likely that Miller told Stoddard of his meeting Walt Whitman in Boston, where neither of them had hit it off with the local poets as well as they had with each other. With Miller as a literary connection, it would not have been surprising had Stoddard wished to make a pilgrimage to Camden. For some reason, however, it appears that Stoddard never made an effort to visit Whitman, although in the years to come he often found himself passing through the Philadelphia area.
During his stay in New York, Stoddard saw old friends, such as the Prentice Mulfords, and made some new ones among Manhattan's literati. William H. Rideing recalled the impression Stoddard had made on the set that did their drinking at Oscar's on Fourth Avenue, a group consisting of Maurice Barrymore, H. C. Bunner, Edgar Fawcett, Frank Watson, Richard Watson Gilder, George Parsons Lathrop, and others. Stoddard was "one of the gentlest and most plaintive of little men," with a "beseeching, wistful, propitiating manner, shot with gleams of humor that played as the sun plays through clouds. When he smiled at you, it was with a mute entreaty for sympathy." Rideing added that "'Charley' would take from us anything he wanted and we could spare as he took the air, or as a child takes things, as a natural right, without constraint or the awkward protestations of gratitude of the ordinary received: a night's, a week's lodging, the freedom of one's table, one's pipes, one's gloves, one's money, but when his ships came homethey were always belated and unluckyrestitution never failed and what was his at once became ours."
2
Stoddard made a similar impression on the poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, who was by this time no longer a Bohemian but an established member of both the literary establishment and the stock exchange. After Stoddard had dined with the Stedmans one March evening, his host made this notation in his diary: "Lonesome and hard up. Is a Catholic and talked of taking orders. Cheered him up, and must get him some money."
3
Joaquín Miller had also been trying to help Stod-
 
Page 87
dard by asking railroad officials to give him a pass to the West Coast. But Stedman finally obtained an advance of two hundred dollars from Scribner's, and by the end of March 1878, Stoddard was on his way back to San Francisco.
I
He was welcomed home by a writer for the
Alta California,
who exclaimed that his visit to the editorial rooms was "like a streak of sunshine after a long season of cloudy weather." Five years of absence and travel had "changed the pale, slight boy, in appearance to an enlarged man, with a healthy and ruddy countenance."
4
At last Stoddard was beginning to resemble the self-possessed man of the world that he had tried so hard to be; but when he went "home" to 42 Hawthorne Street, much of his confidence deserted him. In this dreary house, located in a working-class neighborhood "South of the Slot,'' he found his parents and his brother Fred struggling against destitution. His father had a menial job in the custom house, and his brotherunmarried, unskilled, and often unsoberwas thinking of becoming a photographer. "Trust that the day is coming," Stoddard had grandly written to his mother from Rome, "when the ancient glory of the house of Stoddard will shine again."
5
In 1878, that day seemed not very close at hand.
While a "restless wandering youth is appropriate and agreeable to witness," Stedman wrote to Stoddard from New York, "a Bohemian after thirty has a frame badly suited to his picture."
6
That year Stoddard would turn thirty-five, and some of his married Californian friends expected him to find a wife, get a regular job, buy a house, and start a family. If he was unhappy as a rootless bachelorand he often conceded he wasthen surely the solution was to settle down like everyone else.
For Stoddard, of course, the ordinary heterosexual rules did not apply. Women were all right in their place, as he had told Joe Strong, but he certainly would never want to marry one. As for children, he once wrote in his diary: "I thank God that I have no children of my own to worry me . . . butO! how long for those of others."
7
The young man for whom Stoddard soon began to long was William Woodworth, whom he called the "Kid."
Born in San Francisco during the Civil War, Woodworth came from a wealthy family. His grandfather had written "The Old Oaken Bucket,"
 
Page 88
and his late father had been an officer in the United States Navy. "Willie," who had been privately educated in Europe, exuded a great "personal fascination," according to a friend, who added, however, that Woodworth was also "perverse, exasperating, high tempered and overwhelmingly generous. . . . He offended his dearest friends whenever he pleased, safe in his infinite resource in winning them back, for there was no resisting his fascination when he chose to exert it."
8
Mrs. Woodworth must have sensed that her fatherless boy would benefit from older male companionship and guidance. As a budding naturalist who planned to study this field at Harvard, Woodworth was especially eager to take outings into the countryside.
During the summer of 1878, Stoddard was more than happy to oblige by accompanying Willie, then fourteen, on camping trips up into the Redwoods and down the coast to Monterey. Stoddard recalled one such trip to Sonoma County: "The Kid was the very thinga youngster with happiness in heart, luster in his eye, and nothing more serious than peach-down on his lip; yet there was gravity enough in his composition to carry him beneath the mere surface of men and things." The days that followed were idyllic. While Stoddard wrote, Willie went swimming and hunting and chasing dragonflies. "One night, the Kid set out for the stubble-field and lay in wait for wild rabbits; when he came in with his hands full of ears, the glow of moonlight was in his eye, the flush of sunset on his cheek, the riotous blood's best scarlet in his lips, and his laugh was triumphant; with a discarded hat recalled for camp-duty, a blue shirt open at the throat, hair very much tumbled, and no thoughts of self to detract from the absolute grace of his pose"
(IFPr
214-15, 217).
Back in San Francisco in the fall, Stoddard was in fairly good spirits even though he had no income beyond the sixty dollars a month from the
Chronicle
for his weekly column of European anecdotes, plus whatever he was paid for an occasional piece in the
Atlantic, Scribner's,
or the
Ave Maria.
It was enough for Stoddard to begin looking for an inexpensive room of his own, where he could write and entertain with the privacy he lacked with his family on Hawthorne Street. He found his atmospheric "Eyrie" at 3 Vernon Place, on the once fashionable Rincon Hill. His rooms in the slowly decaying Gothic house seemed "suspended in midair" because of the huge, deep cuts that had been made on nearby Second Street, and there was a touch of faded glory about the
 
Page 89
house and the neighborhood. But Stoddard found this ambience entirely appealing, and the rent was only ten dollars a month.
The place was to be lovingly recalled at the start of
For the Pleasure of His Company.
In the sitting room with a bay window were several easy chairs, a faded carpet, books everywhere, water colors and oil paintings above the bookcases, statuettes, busts, medallions, a Florentine lamp, an idol from Easter Island, signed photographs of famous people, spears, war clubs, pots of ferns and creepers, Japanese lanterns, oriental fans, and a skull with faded boutonnieres stuck in the eye sockets. In the bedroom (the former conservatory that was now "half doll's house and half bower"), the "ivy had crept over the top of the casement and covered his ceiling with a web of leaves." Above the bed's headboard was a "holy-water fonta large crimson heart of crystal with flames of burnished gold set upon a tablet of white marble." The whole effect, Stoddard felt, was one of ''harmonious incongruity"
(FPHC 19
).
After he moved into the "Eyrie," Stoddard's daily routine no doubt resembled that of Paul Clitheroe in
For the Pleasure of His Company:
Mornings were usually serene, devoted as they were to reassuring rituals. After slipping into sandals and an angel sleeve robe (which made him resemble something between a "Monk and a Marchioness"), he opened the bay window shutters, watered the ferns, patted a few favorite books on their spines, and went out for the mail
(FPHC 23).
Then breakfast; then reading letters from all over the world; then working on his next
Chronicle
column or answering letters.
Afternoons and evenings were often less predictable. Like Clitheroe. Stoddard would wander down to the Bohemian Club on Pine Street "for a bit of refreshment which was sure to be forthcoming, for his friends there were ever ready to dine him, or more frequently to wine him, merely for the pleasure of his company"
(FPHC
23). He was often someone's supper guest as well; and then, after musical entertainment in his host's home or a visit to a theater, Stoddard would sometimes have a beer at a picturesque rathskeller and arrive home by midnight. He was not, however, always alone. Once in a while an attractive art student named Rudolph Muller came for the night, as did, perhaps, the actor Will Stuart, when he was performing in San Francisco.
Stoddard's merrymaking was usually under the auspices of the Bohemian Club, which was always up to high jinks or low jinks or some kind of tomfoolery that amounted to lots of wine, speeches, pranks, laughter,
 
Page 90
and alcoholic fellowship. That June, Stoddard had gone to Camp Taylor on the B. C. ("Bully Crowd") train for the first Midsummer "High-Jinks," which included swimming in the "buff" and general silliness during the day, and music and drinking around the campfire at night. For a later Jinks, with "The Devil" as a theme, Stoddard wrote and recited an eight-stanza poem that hardly anyone took seriously. "To Lucifer, Star of the Morning'' was a plea for the inversion of conventional morality, and beneath the surface facetiousness there ran a vein of heartfelt sentimentas in the last six lines:
Teach us, all Powerful One, that Wrong is Right,
And Virtue chief of Vices.
Lead us astray, and tempt us as thou wilt;
But when at last thou hast used us to thy ends,
Let us arise and leave thee all the guilt
Parting, the best of friends.
9
One Bohemian Club member who did perceive what Stoddard meant in this poemand who did not like it at allwas Ambrose Bierce. By the late 1870s, the two men had become "estranged," to use Bierce's term, and Stoddard hardly mentioned "Biercy" for the rest of his life. According to a staff member of the weekly
Argonaut,
to which both had begun contributing around this time, Stoddard "loathed Bierce, and Bierce detested him."
10
To a certain extent, the rift might be explained by their incompatible approaches to writing. "Bitter" Bierce was becoming increasingly scornful of the "Miss Nancys" of American literature (such as Henry James and W. D. Howells), who struck him as unbearably sunny, nice, and namby-pamby. To Bierce, Stoddard no doubt seemed another "Miss Nancy." But literary differences cannot completely explain their estrangement because the same differences, after all, had existed when the two men were friends. The real reason, as Bierce told Sterling after Stoddard's death, was that he could no longer abide Stoddard's homosexuality. "I did not care for him," Bierce wrote. "My objection to him was the same as yourshe was not content with the way that God had sexed him."
11
While losing a friend in Bierce, Stoddard was gaining one in a writer who was soon to become more famous than either man. Although there is some confusion about when and where they met, it was during the winter of 1879-80 and, according to Robert Louis Stevenson, it was

Other books

The Mosts by Melissa Senate
God of the Abyss by Oxford, Rain
Souls Aflame by Patricia Hagan