Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (31 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 101
their retreat; all are obliged to renounce their sweethearts and wives. For a while everything goes well enough. Everyone abides by the rules and engages in the prescribed activities, which include lawn tennis, bowls, baseball, lacrosse, gymnastics, and boating. Rather than trying to play tennis in their cumbersome robes, the young men, at Brother Festus's suggestion, wear nothing more than "simple bathing-suits"an idea defended at length:
How is it any more indelicate in a man to parade his natural outline upon the sod than upon the sand? Why may he not with equal propriety, so long as a spectator is as clear visioned in the one spot as in the other, pose in a drawing-room, with his figure, if he have one, set off to advantage in a seamless male jersey, such a garment as is affected by well-proportioned youths at watering places. The popular gymnasts and the chorus of the opera comique have accustomed the eye to lines of beauty: Brother Festus was right; the bathing suit is the proper suit for lawn tennis; I applaud his innovation.
33
The tale ends on a strongly misogynic note, with females cast in the role of descending furies. (At the time of composition, Stoddard had begun to think of Belle Strong as an abductress, whose very presence in the Bungalow was a desecration and whose flirtation with Deering was unforgivable.) Sweethearts and wives rush through the gates, taking the Brothers "by storm" and leading them "away captive," thus perpetrating ''the rape of St. Aidenn."
Although his writing gave Stoddard a diversion, it could not provide him with what he felt he needed mostlove. Although Stoddard kept trying out different strategies to win back Deering's affection, their friendship was more or less moribund by the end of 1883. In December, Stoddard took to his bed with a case of "boohoo fever," a malady with no known cause or cure, characterized by depression and weeping.
34
Stoddard prayed that this "illness" would finally melt the Kid's chilling indifference, but everyone in the household became solicitous except the Kid. Whiting and a local priest prescribed a change of scene, and they obtained for Stoddard a pass from the steamship company that allowed him to spend three restorative months in San Francisco.
When he arrived back in Honolulu in March 1884, Stoddard found that Deering was still "distant" and "indifferent." Stoddard plied him with giftsa Japanese lantern, a kimono, two Japanese fans, a painting, a pipe bowl, and a Japanese friezeall to no avail. Deering gave the kimono to Belle, explaining, "She will appreciate it more than I do" (D
 
Page 102
17 Mar. 1884).
35
Stoddard then reversed his tactics, pretending that he did not care if the Kid spoke to him or not. But, of course, he did care, and every precious utterance was duly recorded and evaluated in his diary. (Deering's "Well, good bye," for example, seemed somehow more significant than merely his "Good bye.") Stoddard concluded that it was Deering who was behaving in a peculiar fashion. In his diary he would ask, "What is the matter with him?" or comment, "What a strange Kid he is!" (D 10 Mar. 1884). Only rarely would he wonder if he himself might be out of step. "How strange this world is and how hateful,'' he wrote at the end of April, "or is it only I that am so?"
Maybe the Bible had some answers. Stoddard would close his eyes, open the Bible at random, and place his finger on what he hoped would be an instructive passage. "Thy place is not in this city," a verse told him one day that spring, and he wondered if he should spend a few months at Waihee again, however dull it would be. But then Stoddard had an inspiration: what if he were to slip out of Honolulu without "so much as a good bye to a living soul"? (D 27 Apr. 1884). His absence might become a cause for gratifying wonderment and concern. Surely, even the Kid would be obliged to feel some "compunctions of conscience." Stoddard sailed for Waihee early in May, leaving behind a note for Whiting that was carefully designed to set his scheme into motion: "I have abscondedwith heavy heart as I can carry; will write particulars by return mail. Say 'Good Bye' to the Bungalow Boys for meI have not the courage to say it" (D 5 May 1884).
In visiting his family at Waihee, Stoddard was simply exchanging one baleful and depressing atmosphere for another. In recent years the Stoddards had turned into a "sorry lot of worn out, impoverished disheartened folks." His father was making hardly any money at the store; his mother's health was declining; Fred had failed in business again and was back "home" with nothing to do; and Sarah, while not impoverished, seemed to be chronically ill and out of sorts. Never very close to his father, Stoddard felt a much greater affinity to his "poor" mother, whom he sometimes assisted in the garden. From time to time he escaped to Sarah's house, where he could play the piano, drink some claret, borrow a few books, and chat with "Sister" if she were well enough to sit up. It was with his younger brother Fred, however, that Stoddard seemed to have the most in commontoo much, in fact, for his own peace of mind. During the ten weeks at Waihee, he and Fred had many a long talk at twilight on the veranda; after one of these,
 
Page 103
Stoddard wrote in his diary: "What luck this poor fellow has had and what a range of
unpleasant
experiencesa photographer, a baker, a butcher, a house painter, a theatrical 'super,' a tramp, a house servant, a nurse, a hotel boy, a drudgeand I know not what else" (D 30 Jun. 1884). In addition to being a ne'er-do-well, Fred gave every appearance of being both alcoholic and homosexual as well. In Stoddard's eyes, Fred served as a living cautionary tale that told what he himself might become.
During the torrid and lackluster days at Waihee, Stoddard's spirits sank. The future was as "blank as a drab wall," and he would often "sit and mope and wonder if life is worth living." He even lost interest in the amorous game he thought he was playing with Charles Deering, who, in any case, had grown no fonder of Stoddard in his absence. He did try to do a little writing while he was on Maui, producing a series of eight local-color sketches of island villages for the Honolulu
Daily Hawaiian.
Other than that, almost nothing. He returned to the Bungalow in mid-July, his heart "marble."
IV
The only person who was giving Stoddard the comfort and encouragement he so desperately needed at this time was Father Hudson of Notre Dame. In addition to mailing him books, pictures, the
Ave Maria,
and a steady supply of religious objects, Father Hudson was also taking an interest in Stoddard's writing career. For some time the priest had been urging Stoddard to write the story of his conversion, with the idea that it could run in the
Ave Maria
and then be published as a book. Stoddard was now in the mood to start on this project, which proved to be a healthy distraction from the silly affairs of the Kid and Belle and Joe and everyone else. His confessions are especially interesting in the context of the woebegone life he was leading at the time of their composition.
What Stoddard wrote that summer appeared serially in the
Ave Maria
during the fall of 1884;
A Troubled Heart and How It was Comforted at Last,
the book version, was issued by a Notre Dame publisher the next year. Stoddard insisted on anonymity because the subject matter was "controversial" and because he felt he was "baring his soul." In this regard, his preface is of some interest:
Let it amaze no one that I have at last chosen to unveil my heart to the possibly unsympathetic eye of the general reader.
 
Page 104
Again and again, and yet again. I have been curiously questioned by those who could not follow in the path which led me away from my kinsmen . . . and to whom the mysterious influences which I found irresistible were unknown. . . . What my lips dared scarcely utter . . .  my pen in the serene solitude of my chamber has related unreservedly.
(TH 7)
From this preface, which did not appear in the
Ave Maria
serial, the twentieth-century reader might easily suppose that Stoddard is on the verge of confessing not that he is a Catholic, but that he is a homosexual.
A Troubled Heart
should be read in the context of the virulently anti-Catholic literature of the nineteenth century: anti-Popish novels
(The Female Jesuit; or, The Spy in the Family);
plays
(The Jesuit: A National Melodrama in Three Acts);
tracts
(Thoughts on Popery):
scurrilous "exposés"
(Open Convents; or, Nunneries and Popish Seminaries Dangerous to the Morals and Degrading to the Character of a Republican Community).
There were even anti-Catholic almanacs and gift books. According to George Shuster, the Catholic author was often placed in the position of having to refute the "astonishing charges that his priests have cloven feet and that his churches are stocked with ammunition."
36
"Coming out" as a Catholic
was
a bit risky; and Stoddard, neither a daring man nor a fiery controversialist at heart, had no desire to become a champion of the church. He did have some anti-Protestant points to make, however, and anonymous publication enabled him to make them while remaining safe from counterattack.
Much of
A
Troubled Heart
is soft-spoken and deliberately vague. Stoddard is especially hazy in the first two-thirds of the book, in which he describes his childhood and conversion. New York, for instance, is never named as such; California is "a far country" (
TH
25); and nearly all of the persons in the tale remain shadowy and disembodied, including the narrator-hero. Stoddard sketches his Protestant home life, his harrowing experience at the revival, his growing interest in Catholicism in San Francisco, and finally his first communion, during which invisible choirs chanted "Holy, holy, holy!" and he was filled "to overflowing with unspeakable peace" (
TH
131). Taking an occasional swipe at Unitarians, Episcopalians and (especially) evangelical Methodists, Stoddard sometimes halts his narrative to attack the "childish and stupid'' arguments of Protestant partisans: the "empty, vulgar and worthless" tirades of "infidels and fanatical writers"
(TH
111). "Protestants may fortify themselves with the bulk of their best known treatises, and

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