Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (40 page)

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Authors: Roger Austen

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BOOK: Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard
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Page 147
naturalistic mode.
For the Pleasure of His Company
was cast in the genteel style Stoddard had been refining since the 1860s, a style modeled in turn on the example of early nineteenth-century authors. To be sure, it was the very obliqueness of this style that had always allowed him to tell the truth, but tell it slant. In the novel, however, the evasive fancy prose leaves readers so bewildered that they can hardly recognize the truth, even when it has been told.
In the first of the three "books" into which the novel is divided, Paul Clitheroe is introduced as a hapless "heathenized-christian" newspaper columnist, who loves living in his (Rincon Hill) "Eyrie"
(FPHC
20). By the third chapter, some of his Arcadia (Oakland) friends introduce him to the mysterious, fascinating Foxlair (Wylde Hardinge). Foxlair is so magnetic that when he asks Paul to spend the night with him, the youth agrees to do so ''without a moment's hesitation"
(FPHC
23). For the next week they are inseparable. It is possible that Hardinge was bisexual; in the novel, at least, Stoddard suggests that Foxlair loves Paul as much as the "lad" loves him. Indeed, in the fourth chapter, it might be said that Foxlair proposes to Clitheroe:
"Look here, Paul Clitheroe," cried Foxlair, turning suddenly upon the youth who was seated in his deep, sleepy-hollow chair. "I love you better than any fellow I ever met. You understand me; these brutes about us are incapable of it." He came and sat on the arm of Paul's chair, facing him, his two hands resting on Paul's shoulders, and resumed: "Let's leave this cursed land. Let us sail into the South Seas. You love them and so do I. . . . If we can't get money in advance to pay our way in the cabin, I'll go before the mast. I can do ithave done it before. Once on the other side of the sea we are all right, no one can touch us there!" (
FPHC
40-41)
Paul is tempted to yield to Foxlair's "subtle charm," but he hesitates about leaving the Misty City (San Francisco). Shortly after this scene, Foxlair is exposed as the "Prince of Frauds," and he vanishes, taking with him Paul's ring, scarf pin, vest, trousers, cane, and mackintosh. Nevertheless, Paul is never able to think of Foxlair "without the tenderest regret"
(FPHC
42-43). At the end of each of the three sections, Paul rushes off in search of some form of refuge. In "Balm of Hurt Wounds," the chapter that concludes this first book, Paul has gone on retreat with some local priests.
In the second book, a major character is Miss Juno or Jack, a young woman modeled on Julia ("Dudee") Fletcher, whom Stoddard had
 
Page 148
known in Italy. Her function in the novel is to talk with Paul about such matters as androgyny, love, and the purpose of fiction. Since Jack is at the very least a tomboy, she is ideally suited to discuss girls who want to be boys and boys who want to be girls. Paul mentions what is apparently one of his pet peeves: that sissies are ridiculed in America, while tomboys are indulged and even admired. "But why is it," he asks, "that girl-boys are so unpleasant while tom-boys are delightful?"
(FPHC
98). Jack hardly knows. With his new pal, Paul also discusses love and its ideal role in fiction. "What is true love? It is bosom-friendship,'' he asserts
(FPHC 10
6). The purpose of the novelist is to prettify, not revolutionize. Revolutionary approaches, Paul insists, "only soil the water": "I'd beautify the banks of the stream, and round the sharp turns in it, and weed it out, and sow water-lilies"
(FPHC 10
5).
At the end of this section, Jack has taken Paul's advice and written a novel, one based on her theories, not his. She has thus become a success. From Italy she writes to a friend that during a recent visit to San Francisco del Deserto, she remarked that one of the friars was "none other than Paul Clitheroe!"
(FPHC
114). Thus Paul has supposedly found refuge in the bosom of a monastery, a lifelong fantasy for Stoddard that was not without its homoerotic appeal.
The last section, "Little Mama," focuses on another female characterwhich should not lead the reader to expect that
For the Pleasure of His Company
becomes any more heterosexual. Somehow back in the Misty City after all, Paul is no more romantically interested in Little Mama than he was in Miss Juno. Indeed, Little Mama (based on Jenny MacKaye Johns Peet) is there mainly to introduce likely young men to each other. This apparently naive and dimwitted panderess introduces Paul to the actor Grattan Field (Eben Plympton) with the following speech: "There, you are to be brothers, and love one another with brotherly love! . . . I arranged this meeting; I chose to bring you two together; my boys must always meet; and they must always let me plot for them"
(FPHC 133
-34). They are quite able, however, to plot for themselves as they start to sense a "bond of intimacy that knit them closer and closer every hour"
(FPHC 143
). Paul spends the night with Field, and for a while everyone is happyincluding Little Mama, who exclaims, "These are my Jewels!"
(FPHC 143).
Later she asks Paul if he would like to join her Order of Young Knighthood, which very much resembles the all-male utopia of Stoddard's story about Saint Aidenn-down-dale. Paul thinks not. His interest in life has ebbed to a low point.
 
Page 149
He has become weary of Grattan, of "Bohemianizing," and, in fact, of Little Mama.
At the end of the novel Paul has escaped the Misty City by going on a summer cruise with some hedonistic friendsa rather long cruise, apparently, because one night Paul sees three naked islanders approaching the yacht in their canoe. Lonely, unloved, and bored with his traveling companions, Paul motions for the islanders to approach. Since the three young chiefs turn out to be friends from his past, he jumps into their canoe and greets them passionately. With this scene, the novel ends, having touched on most of the themes so dear to Stoddard: his love for other males; his blasted hopes of finding a lasting refuge in the church; his dream of escaping into some kind of secular, all-male utopia; and the fantasy of returning to the South Seas, where he might be "natural" in a way that was proscribed in America.
As might be expected, most reviewers in 1903 seemed no more aware of the homoeroticism in
For the Pleasure of His Company
than they had been thirty years before in
South-Sea Idyls.
Kipling's prediction that Stoddard would be "misunderstood" if this novel were published did not come true.
43
What the reviewers did notice was the novel's lack of structure and its airy unreality. Kinder critics gave Stoddard the benefit of the doubt: "The book, for all its rambling and inconsequent manner, is a piece of charming literature, the expression of a spirit unfettered by the conventions, freely disporting itself in its own native element of imagination and fantasy."
44
Others saw an unfortunate lack of purpose: "There is no ease of diction nor is there a convincing excuse for telling the tale at all. The action is tedious, lagging, it does not give the impression of inevitableness, nor of sincerity.''
45
The reaction of friends who recognized themselves in the novel was in some cases extremely negative. Ina Coolbrith did not much care for Elaine, the sad, drooping minor poetess whom Stoddard dubs "Our Lady of Pain." "As his dear friend for many years," her biographers have written, "she must have resented Paul Clitheroe's obvious preference for two other females in the book."
46
The model for "Little Mama" was furious at Stoddard's portrayal of her as an unwed mother who needed to claim "a father for her children." Mrs. Jenny Johns Peet charged that since Stoddard's novel had exposed her reputation to "utter ruin," he must never reveal the characters' identities.
47
Stoddard liked to pretend that such reactions did not hurt. It was a "jolly experience," he told Howells, "to be called every bad name in the
 
Page 150
dictionary."
48
He had published the novel, he explained to others, only to get it off his mind. Yet he continued to feel embarrassed that the tale had ever appeared in print. Rather than insincere, as the
Overland Monthly
charged, he felt he had been all too painfully honest. In the final analysis, the real cause for shame was not that he had written a
roman à clef,
but that he had written it so badly.
 
Professor Charles Warren Stoddard during the 1890s
 
Stoddard's grave, Monterey, California
 
Page 151
11
For much of the winter of 1902-03, Stoddard was stricken with inflammatory rheumatism, and he had to enter the Georgetown University Hospital for treatment. After his release, he decided to put everything in storage and to leave Washington forever. He was planning to throw himself upon the hospitality of friends in the North. In early April 1903, the Kid and Will Combs saw him off at Penn Station, where they kissed him good-bye and "left with much suppressed emotion." Stoddard later wrote in his diary:
I caught a glimpse of them as they stood on the platform under the car windowmy heart flew into my throat, my eyes grew mistyI felt myself breaking downwith a gesture I waved them away and they vanished on the instant!
So ends the experience of my life, when for fourteen years I have been the champion, protector, lover of one who needed me and all I could do for him. (D 6 Apr. 1903)
1
If there was to be another "Kid" for Stoddard, he would have a different role in his life. Stoddard recognized that he was regressing into a helpless second childhood; he was becoming "more of a lad than ever," as he told a friend. What he needed now was a "Kid" who would

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