Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (36 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 126
Compared to these women writers, Mrs. Bellamy Storer and Mrs. "Laddie" Mitchell were a bit more conventional. He had known Mrs. Storer (nee Maria Longworth) for several years, having met her during his Covington-Cincinnati years. This artistic, wealthy, and generous woman, then in the process of converting to Catholicism, was in Washington because her husband was serving as a congressman. Although not quite so socially prominent as Mrs. Storer, Mrs. Mitchell was almost as rich. When Stoddard stayed with the Mitchells, he slept in a fabulous bed that once had belonged to the Empress Eugénie. These women were especially kind to Stoddard, always asking him to join their family circle on holidays.
As much as Stoddard enjoyed escaping from Caldwell Hall into the salons, parlors, and breakfast nooks of these friends, he took greater joy in escaping Washington altogether on trips to New York and Massachusetts during the summers and the university recesses. In Manhattan, he was usually the guest of old California friends, but his favorite host was his seemingly evergreen "Kid," Reginald Birch, whose heart he found unchanged after fourteen years. In Massachusetts, Stoddard visited Eben Plympton's country estate, "The Grange," on the shores of Silver Lake in Plymouth County. Eben's temperament, as well as his male houseguests, continued to be unpredictable. In Cambridge and Maine, Stoddard's host was "that darling Willie-Boy" Woodworth, who was still an instructor in the zoology department at Harvard. During these years, however, Stoddard seemed to rely most of all on the devoted friendship of that singularly entertaining adventurer, Theodore Dwight.
Not long after introducing Stoddard to Washington society in 1889. Dwight moved to Boston, where he continued his work for the Adams family. He had a marvelous zest for living: he was trying to get Mrs. Charles Francis Adams and her daughters to share his enthusiasm for the Boston baseball team; he was often seen in the company of Mrs. Jack Gardner, the indefatigable art collector; he was much in demand as a dinner companion to William Woodworth, George Santayana, and other men from Harvard; he loved dressing up in costume for the Tavern Club carnival nights. Dwight had become a good friend of the maverick Brahmin-turned-Buddhist, William Sturgis Bigelow, whose island retreat off Nantucket Stoddard would one day come to cherish. With the help of his connections, Dwight was chosen as the head of the Boston Public Library in March 1892.
Dwight's private library was well stocked with pictures of naked
 
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young men, both those he had taken himself and those he was smuggling through customs. In 1890, he told Stoddard of his adventures in claiming some Neapolitan photographs he had ordered from Pluschow, the notorious purveyor of erotica.
The contest is over and I have won! The 83 photos are safe in my bureau upstairssafe, tho somewhat the worse for much handling and crumpling. It would almost seem they had passed through the hands of every official in both Post Office & Custom House. . . .
I was shown the pictures and to my surprise and pain they were too, too properonly 35 had been impeachedamong them some of yours but there are others truly exquisite. After much babble the Deputy took me with great kindness to the Collector & acted as my advocate. The Collector's Secretary had formerly been Secretary Folger's & knew meall was civility & kindness. The Collector like a Solomon said he would submit the question to two men in the roomtwo lawyers, who withdrew, examined the package & reported that if nudity was obscenity, some of these prints were obscene. Then we were taken to a mild, elderly deputy collector on whose opinion the Collector depended as a finality, & he quietly glanced at them & as quietly remarkedthese are artists models! . . . I had nothing to do but look unconcerned. I paid $2.08 duties, pocketed my photos, took an affectionate leave of the amiable officials and came home at 1:30 to lunch.
9
While touring Europe with Mrs. Gardner during the summer of 1892, Dwight purchased some additional material that he planned to share with Stoddard. In Munich he bought 121 photographs from the Pluschow and von Gloeden collections, buying 216 more in London. (The Sicilians, he wrote Stoddard, "are dreams.") Even more suavity was required when he went through customs this time. "The photos were never discovered or their place of concealment examined," he wrote Stoddard, thus allowing Dwight to escape "confiscation and imprisonment." He added, "When you see my spoils you will comprehend my dangers."
10
Dwight was also taking pictures of naked young men in Bostonand, if possible, going to bed with them. Sometimes his models were Irish, but more often they were Italians who had been procured for him by his barber. After he began earning five thousand dollars a year from the library, he usually had one of these models living with him as his "valet.''
Thus when Stoddard went to stay with Dwight, as he did every summer, he found himself in the midst of a homosexual milieu well beyond anything he knew in Washington. According to a turn-of-the-century report, "Boston, this good old Puritan city, has them [homosex-
 
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uals] by the hundreds . . .  throughout all classes, from the slums of the North End to the highly fashionable Back Bay. Reliable homosexuals have told me names that reach into the highest circles of Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., names which have left me speechless with astonishment."
11
Several members of Dwight's circle were fairly well-known writers, and it was during this time that Stoddard got to know Thomas Russell Sullivan and Meredith Nicholson.
Sullivan was a bachelor in his forties who wrote plays and novels and who went through anguished affairs of the heart. In December of 1891, for instance, Sullivan was having "a time" with a "would-be protégé" named Belknap, while Dwight was going through similar difficulties with Rudolph von Holcomb, an untrustworthy young man who lived in New York and who was also involved somehow with a young Indiana writer named Meredith Nicholson. A bachelor in his late twenties, Nicholson was writing for the Indianapolis
News. H
e had also published a volume of poems, and he was a "dear" friend of James Whitcomb Riley. In getting acquainted with Nicholson, Stoddard became increasingly interested in the famous Hoosier Poet, whose "dialect" verses were enormously popular. Stoddard decided not only to begin writing to Riley but also to bare his soul to this man with whom he seemed to have so much in common.
What had led Stoddard to believe that Riley might be sympathetic? We do not know what Nicholson may have told him because Nicholson's many letters to Stoddard have not survived.
12
It is possible, however, that Nicholson knew of Riley's stormy relationship with Charles Phillips, a young Kokomo newspaperman. In 1879, Riley had written a note to Phillips apologizing for an "insane burst of affection," but then holding his ground. "I am what I am," he argued, "God made me so."
13
Or perhaps Stoddard had merely read several of Riley's poems that glorify the "youthful friendship" of young men. Nicholson may also have told Stoddard about Riley's periods of "dejection, loneliness and self-suspicion,'' and about his drinking.
14
In any case, Stoddard liked to presume that others had undergone calvaries that were very much like his own; on 17 December 1890, he wrote to Riley, hoping to establish some common bond.
In this first letter, Stoddard declared that the other poet he had gotten "close to" was Walt Whitman and that he could not be "natural" at Caldwell Hall: "I am in a 'Holy House' where every heart wears a coat
 
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of mail. I cannot get near these fellows and it is out of the question for me to blossom in such an atmosphere."
15
In replying, Riley expressed no interest in Stoddard's plight and made no response to the mention of Whitman, a poet he regarded as a humbug. Stoddard tried again, quoting one of Riley's poems ("He Is My Friend") that sentimentalizes male friendship, professing that it meant a great deal to him, and expressing the wish that he "were a savage."
16
This time Riley replied in a Sunday-school vein, exhorting Stoddard to bear his burden like a good Christian: "'Every back is fitted for its burden' and every burden is the best thing that ever happened to the back of mortal man! Them's my views, doggies!"
17
Still Stoddard persisted, saying in another letter that he regarded himself as ''despised and rejected of men," and insisting in yet another that "I love my friends dearly and nobody shall stop me!"
18
Finally, on 9 March 1891, Riley ventured to touch on the subject that was obviously so vital to his new correspondent. "Indeed, I like a good man," Riley confessed, "if he's temperate about it." Even more pointedly, Riley added, "And don't think God has much affection for the other brand."
19
Stoddard might logically have concluded that he and "Whitcomb" were never going to establish rapport after all. But then on 2 April 1892, the two men apparently met in Washington. Perhaps Stoddard was in one of his lachrymose moods; Riley quoted in his autograph album, "There! little girl, don't cry."
20
After 1893 however, their correspondence dwindled, and Stoddard was disappointed. "I started out by saying that silence doesn't matter," he wrote. "It does matter when a man writes such letters as you do: I can feel the life-blood pulsing in them. I wonder if you write many? Some day they will show to the world a side of your nature which even your exquisite poems do not betray. May
that
day be long distant."
21
III
During these years Stoddard earned about fifty dollars a month for his stream of contributions to the
Ave Maria,
some of which were travel sketches recycled from the
Chronicle
series of the 1870s. During the summer of 1892, he finally completed the autobiographical novel he had begun in Hawaii. It took him only seven weeks to write most of its seventy thousand words; but as the writing flowed, he lacked the cour-

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