Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (3 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
3.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page xiii
living in the ghetto as I was forced to do, that he couldn't stomach fag-novels, that he had never heard of most of them I had mentioned, etc."
8
For Roger, this was "devastating," although he claimed to have "developed a protective scab over the wound which allows me to view everything with some detachment." Self-defensively, he attributed Vidal's remarks to his own wounded vanity at having been lumped with so many earlier writers of "fag-novels" in
Playing the Game
and thus robbed of his pride of place as a homosexual novelistone who steadfastly denied, however, that there was any such thing. "Rather than appearing on page 1 of my book, he comes in at about page 200 . . .  and this may have been eye-opening in a rather unpleasant way for him, although I should think that he might have been more amused than distressed'' (10 February 1981).
Badly wounded as he was, Roger also had to wonder if Vidal was right in some respects. Certainly, his present life was "dull." He was feeling gloomy and restive in Sunnyside, a name that seemed grotesquely inapt, marooned there as he was, washed up, it seemed, by his writing disasters. Early in 1981, he was talking vaguely about getting a teaching job at a prep school in Florida or reapplying to the doctoral program in English at the University of California, Irvine, from which he had discontentedly dropped out some ten years before.
Then out of the blue came that uncannily lucid letter announcing some other, fatal, plans. Roger had reached what seemed to him a logical impasse. Increasing deafness and age had deranged his "former savoir faire in the bedroom" and effectively ended his sex life, so he explained, and his literary career, meant to afford him compensatory mental pleasure, had brought only more frustration:
I am left with a rather bleak prospect: no one wants to go to bed with me or publish me, and I find this state of affairs "unacceptable," as outraged politicians use that word to convey haughty disdain. "The heart asks pleasure first," Emily Dickinson says in that poem of gradually decreasing demands, and I have been finding myself being pushed further and further down the ladder of the options in her poem.
9
Living in Sunnyside as a prodigal son was unbearable"I have felt as if I were growing into a permanent town misfit"and life anywhere else was no longer appealing. So Roger had joined the Neptune Society, a death-with-dignity organization, in order to prearrange his cremation and the scattering of his ashes at sea. (Roger had a strong wish not to be buried.) First, however, he intended to enjoy a last holiday; and
 
Page xiv
he promised he would be writing once more from some unspecified "balmy climes" (15 May 1981).
From one of "Sheraton's two magnificent hotels on the beach at Waikiki" (as the printed caption put it), a picture postcard arrived a few days later. Its message was probably intended as a macabre parody of tourist breeziness: "If I told you that I came here to trace CWS's footsteps, you would not believe me. Nor should you. I came here with a friend [a male prostitute hired in Los Angeles] to have an unabashed fling and, I say, let 19th Century Literature be forgotten" (30 May 1981). But the trip to Hawaii was a pointedly ironic reference to Stoddard, whose situation Roger had ruefully contrasted to his own at the end of the earlier suicide letter:
Finally, without wanting to wallow in self pity, I might mention that in doing the Stoddard notes [the documentation he had finished before mailing me the book] I couldn't help compare myself with the great amount of loving kindness and support that was showered on this poor man by the rich and the famous throughout so many years of his life. If only there were a [William Sturgis] Bigelow to invite ME to a Tuckernuck right now, for instance, or a Bay Lodge to smile at
me
across the dinner table. To some extent Vidal was correct in assessing that I had not had "much of a life" (though his objection was not pertinent in the context he was discussing) in comparison with grand gaudy gay characters who have lived, for a time, at least, in splendor. Dying well may be the Best Revenge, if one has little choice in the matter. (15 May 1981)
Receiving this letter and then the postcard
Genteel Pagan,
sent fourth-class, was long delayed in transit!gave me a jolt, to say the least. Roger had carefully orchestrated his movements and mailings so as to prevent anyone's stopping him. However distressed I might be, I was also helpless by his design. The paper trail was cold, and it did not lead to the fatal siteSanta Monica, as it turned out.
Except that the overdose did not work. Two nights in a row Roger vomited the pills and then desisted from a third attempt. "Surprise/ groannn: Yes, I am still here, in spite of it all," he wrote laconically. "I had thought these letters were at an end, but they seemed destined to go on forever" (18 June 1981). I hoped sincerely that this was true, but my relief was alloyed by wariness. After suffering through the days when I had only to suppose that Roger was deadthere had been no telling if I would ever know for certainI felt somewhat abused. But our epistolary friendship survived along with Roger himself despite the psychic lesions in him and me.
 
Page xv
I offered, with some private misgivings, to shelter him for a while, if he wished; but he preferred to stay with a friend in Rhode Island, closer to the scene of
Boomerang,
until he could recover his bearings. He promised to come for a weekend visit in August but never did. He read a lot that summer, taking perverse delight in John Kennedy Toole's posthumously published
A Confederacy of Dunces.
That Toole had killed himself in despair of his literary career made it all the easier for Roger to enter into the darkly comic madness of
Dunces:
"The thing that made reading the novel especially poignant for me, as you can guess, was what I saw going on in the author's mind as he wrote this thing out in an attempt to preserve his mental balance" (31 July 1981). Having regained his own balance for now, Roger reviewed his options for living and settled on graduate school, but only after an interim year of recuperation and money-making.
Living in Spokane with his sister, Roger found another ad-writing position with a local department store, The Crescent. The work was easy, he said, and relatively lucrative. "In writing copy I have to hold back, of course, since I cannot possibly indulge in the sort of sentence structure which is characteristic of my style. It is similar, I guess, to speaking a foreign languageyou just shift into COPYWRITING and the garbage flows out effortlessly" (1 November 1981). Keeping closely to himself on the job, he enjoyed what he imagined to be the puzzlement of his coworkers about him.
As always, Roger read voraciously; he was developing an interest in D. H. Lawrence, who, he believed, was an unacknowledged homosexual whose evasions had been abetted by his heterosexual biographers. Although he was already, in effect, planning his dissertation, Roger was extremely anxious about graduate school. As an older student (now forty-six)and a nearly deaf onewould he really fit in? He fretted about retaking the Graduate Record Exams and seesawed about the relative merits of Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and Irvine. At my suggestion, he added the University of Southern California to his list. I knew someone there who might, on my recommendation, go out of the way to help Roger gain admission and financial aid.
Meanwhile Roger was trying to settle the score with Gore Vidal, whose polemical piece on "Neo-Con Homophobia" had appeared in
The Nation.
10
Mentioned in passingin support of Vidal's contention that serious work on homosexuality is ignored in the United States whereas "all-out attacks on faggots are perennially fashionable in our
 
Page xvi
better periodicals"was
Playing the Game,
"(a remarkably detailed account of American writing on homosexuality)," no review of which Vidal had ever seen.
11
That the man who had himself not reviewed
Playing the Game
and who had attacked Roger personally was now citing his book in an ostensibly friendly mannerthis was too much. In a long letter to the editor, Roger vented his hostility, accusing Vidal of obscurantism in his views on homosexuality and hypocrisy in his treatment of books like
Playing the Game:
"Which are we to believe? The Vidal who suggests in
Views from a Window
that 'fag novels' and books about 'fag novels' are a tedious business and should not be encouraged? Or the Vidal who appears to be regretting in
The Nation
that these interesting books have remained unreviewed? Both? Neither?"
Vidal took Roger's questions seriously enough to reply to them at length, and he also apologized for his remark about Roger's "dullness": "He has quite enough to contend with in his lonely vocation without a stab, as it were, in the back by me." But Roger was not mollified. He claimed, in fact, that he had ''chosen not to read Vidal's rebuttal" (15 February 1982). Emboldened by his appearance in
The Nation,
"which is pretty much enemy territory for me" (15 February 1982), Roger thought about writing (but never did) a letter to
The New Republic
denouncing FDR, whom he considered a liberal sacred cow in need of debunking, for his role in the Newport scandal.
As the day for admissions notification approached, Roger was favoring USC more and more over Stanford (which ultimately rejected him anyway). He saw graduate school not as a move toward an academic careerhe cared nothing about thatbut as a commitment to the intellectual life, which would fill the void left by his attenuated sexual life:
I have more or less come to the conclusion that my days as a sexpot are over. I was not gracious in acquiescence, as you will remember from my pilltaking last year, and I am not altogether a good sport about it now, since I still loathe anti-climax of any sort, most particularly in terms of my life. But USC seems to give me some sort of viable alternative, something that will lend a little logic and dignity to my days. (16 March 1982)
Unfortunately, Roger's attending USC did not work out that way. A prophetic sign of trouble was the bureaucratic snarl that cast his acceptance temporarily into doubt. Then he failed to receive a fellowship. Although he was willing enough to be a teaching assistant instead,

Other books

The Forerunner Factor by Andre Norton
Bloodeye by Craig Saunders
The Chronicles of Robin Hood by Rosemary Sutcliff
Dark Harbor by Stuart Woods
Unraveling the Earl by Lynne Barron
Ambition by Yoshiki Tanaka
The Ice Storm by Rick Moody