Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (39 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 143
"District Volunteers," he was given a "rousing sendoff" at the train station in mid-May. Too rousing, in fact. The Kid was "kissed by scores of women and girls," Stoddard complained with fierce resentment, ''most of whom were unknown of him."
30
Stoddard sank into "a state verging on madness" after Kenneth left him. "I am almost in despair," he told DeWitt Miller.
31
The "splendid little war" was over by August, and in September Kenneth returned to Stoddard, who spent a few weeks with him in Atlantic City at the Hotel Ruscombe. The war had made "wrecks" of them both, he told Father Hudson, but in the healthy sunshine and salt air they were "picking up together." Back in the "Bungalow," however, they were soon falling apart. Kenneth beganor, more accurately, continuedto drink, carouse, and squander "Dad"'s money. Soon, all of Kenneth's "short-comings of character," as Carl Stroven has noted, were blamed on "the boy's experiences in the army."
32
But Stoddard himself really knew better. In 1901, when the Kid turned twenty-one, Stoddard confessed to DeWitt Miller that "Kenneth has outgrown me and is running with a set that I have nothing to do with . . . . I need a great deal of cuddling and I don't get it nowadays."
33
It was this "outgrowing" process that must have hurt Stoddard more than anything else, but there was nothing he could do about it. Just as painful was Kenneth's turning for sex to a type of person that Stoddard would have nothing to do with.
While little is known of Kenneth's "fast" group of friends, some contextual facts suggest what the Kid may have been doing when he thought no one was looking. First, Lafayette Square provided a popular cruising ground that was not too far from the "Bungalow." According to one report, both black and white "moral hermaphrodites" had been arrested
in flagrante delicto
under "the very shadow of the White House"
34
not to mention the very shadow of Henry Adams's house. Second, whether Kenneth found his partners in the park or on the street, he sometimes brought them home to the "Bungalow." One December dawn in 1901, Kenneth slept "with someone whom he brought in from the streets . . . at four or five o'clock." Stoddard was in Providence Hospital at the time, but Yone Noguchi, then a houseguest, told him all. Stoddard showed no astonishment, a fact suggesting that Kenneth did this sort of thing from time to time. But Stoddard hoped, as he wrote in his diary, that the Kid's stranger "took only his possessions with him." Stoddard was not so old that he could not remember what it was
 
Page 144
like to be young, impulsive, and sexually adventurous. "Heaven knows what he did last night," he wrote of Kenneth a week later. "Perhaps I used to do it myself."
35
During the years after his return to Washington, Kenneth also continued to have relationships with younger "Kids" of his own. From about 1900 through 1903, Will Combs, who lived with his mother on G Street, was especially devoted to Kenneth. In fact, Will worshiped Kenneth, and he sometimes would accompany his idol to work just to spend the day in his company. (After being discharged from the army, Kenneth did manual labor for a railroad and later worked in Senator Lodge's office.) Stoddard had not objected to Tony, Kenneth's previous "Kid," and he actually became fond of Will, who was ''handsomest when least clothed," as Stoddard confided to DeWitt Miller, adding that the youth "strips like a Roman gladiator and is an artist in the sexual line."
36
Sometimes the matter of who belonged to whom became ambiguous at the "Bungalow," and in later years Stoddard spoke of Will as one of
his
"Kids."
How much the officials of Catholic University knew about Stoddard's life at the "Bungalow" cannot be known for sure. Certainly, everyone on campus must have been aware of Stoddard's continuing love for Kenneth. After the Kid had joined the army, for instance, Stoddard found the empty house so unbearable that he moved into the college dormitory for several weeks. As far as official records go, there is little evidence to show that Rector Conaty was distressed by Stoddard's sexual "irregularity."
Other aspects of Stoddard's last years at the university, however, are a matter of public, or at least private, record. In Stoddard's opinionand, perhaps, in factMaurice Egan continued to conspire against him. While professing to be his friend, Egan may well have maneuvered to have Stoddard's classes declared elective after 1897, while his own remained compulsory. The enrollment in Stoddard's course dwindled in any case, sometimes leaving him with only two or three students to lecture. Furthermore, Stoddard was often unable to meet his classes because of illness. During these years he was in and out of Providence Hospital, suffering from symptoms of malaria or the grippe.
Finally the university, troubled by declining enrollments and shaky finances, decided to fire Stoddard. His diary entry for Wednesday, 13 November 1901, records the event:
 
Page 145
Today having lectured on Hazlitt to a class of oneRector Conaty met me in the Corridor of McMahan Hall and asked me to his room. He did not invite me to be seated. He said bluntly:"Are you aware that the Faculty of Philosophy and the Senate have decided that your services are no longer required in this University?" A strange little flutter of joy quickened my sad heart. I said without change of countenance, I was not. He continued that "such was the case. You have been ill and absent so often. Have not attended the faculty meetings regularly, etc. No one has spoken unkindly of you; all spoke warmly and even affectionately, etc."
Well, I went home and was glad. My day of deliverance is at hand! Thank God!!
37
Stoddard's sense of deliverance was soon followed, however, by acute apprehension about the future. On New Year's Day of 1902, he wrote to Father Hudson: "Now we begin to dismantle the Bungalow. It is heartbreaking. Perhaps when I am settled in my new quarters I shall feel more at ease. Now, at intervals, as I think of the future, I am positively sick with fear."
38
The new quarters turned out to be the upper-story rooms in Mrs. O'Connor's house on 9th Street. It is to Kenneth's credit that, although his relationship with Stoddard had changed, he remained willing to help his "Dad" at his moment of crisis. The move was made in February, and Stoddard never felt at home during the year he stayed with the O'Connors, which became "one of hellish torture.''
39
Overwhelmed by a sense of "Paradise Lost," he grew increasingly wistful about the "dear old Bungalow" days.
In truth, the "paradise" had been lost for some time, a fact he had to face every day in his dealings with Kenneth. It was not just that their quarters were cramped in contrast to the spaciousness they had enjoyed in the "Bungalow." What was really "hellish" was that the Kid was now under no obligation to obey him. Not that he had been especially compliant during the last few years at the "Bungalow," but there at least Stoddard had been in a position to lay down the law. Now if the Kid wanted to drink and carouse all night, Stoddard was powerless to object. As soon as the school year was overStoddard was allowed to work until thenhe left town in a hurry.
He wanted to be with people who appreciated him and still loved him. The first part of the summer of 1902 he spent with a former student, Ned Crowley, in North Adams, Massachusetts. Crowley, who lived in a "cozy little nest" with his widowed mother, was studying for the priesthood in Montreal. Avoiding Nahant because the hyperactive Theodore
 
Page 146
Roosevelt was there, Stoddard went next to Nantucket, where he was a guest of Charles Webb. From there he left for "Tuckanuck" to spend some glorious Indian summer days in the delightful company of Sturgis Bigelow and Bay Lodge. "I dread the thought," he wrote Father Hudson, "of returning to Washington at all.''
40
Nevertheless he went back to his rooms at the O'Connor house in October and tried to pick up his life as best he could.
V
Stoddard had little to cheer him. Even though a San Francisco publisher had agreed to publish
For the Pleasure of His Company,
he continued to have mixed feelings about the novel. "I am glad it will appear out yonder," he said, "where no one will see it." From an artistic point of view,
For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City: Thrice Told
warrants little attention. Robert Gale judges accurately that this book "must rank as one of the strangest novels ever written."
41
For the Pleasure of His Company
is so strange, in fact, that it seems as if Stoddard set out to write an "antinovel" or a "metafiction" long before anyone had ever heard of these genres. Nor is the book especially useful from a biographical point of view. Stoddard so thoroughly jumbled up people and events from the late 1860s, 1870s, and early 1880s that the novel gives only a refracted and confusing picture of Stoddard's life. Whatever its other deficiencies, however,
For the Pleasure of His Company
does not lack "love interest," as Gale charges. While there is no heterosexual romance, there is a thread of homoerotic "love interest," and it is on this basis that the book merits at least brief examination.
Even as a rudimentary "homosexual novel," it must be said,
For the Pleasure of His Company
is a failure, mainly because of its obliquity. But Stoddard had little choice but to write as he did. At the turn of the century, any American writer who chose to touch on homoerotic themes was obliged to be vague in order to be published. Realism, after all, had its limits. When Stephen Crane started reading a tale of homosexual low-life to Hamlin Garland, this champion of realism was "horrified and begged him to stop."
42
Novels that dealt directly with homosexuality, such as
Teleny
or
Imre,
usually had to be privately printed abroad and circulated underground. Even had Stoddard felt free to do so, the fact remains that he was incapable of writing a novel in the realistic or

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