Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (41 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 152
provide for him, rather than the other way around. On his sixtieth birthday in 1903, he wrote: "How I need a guide, philosopher, and friendin fact a Kidto care for me in these sad times" (D 7 Aug. 1903).
I
For a few weeks after leaving Washington, Stoddard was the guest of Ned McGeorge, the art student and potential "Kid" he had met in Philadelphia. He felt "more normal" during his stay with McGeorge's family in Atlantic City, and he began to long for Ned when he was not in sight. They took the train to New York, where the young man was studying at the Art League. In his diary Stoddard noted that Ned was "beginning to depend somewhat" on him, but he must have concluded that he could not, finally, depend on Ned (D 17 Apr. 1903). In a few days Stoddard moved out of McGeorge's apartment up to 8
7
th Street, where Mrs. Burnett had a lovely room waiting for him.
During the following month, Stoddard toyed with the idea of establishing himself as a professional writer in New York. Both "Fluffy" and Vivian Burnett urged him to get started on his next novel,
Taboo,
which was to be a "naked romance of the South Seas." In this never-to-be-written sequel to
For the Pleasure of His Company,
Stoddard was to tell what happens to Paul Clitheroe after he meets the three young chiefs in their canoe. But there were too many distractions at the Burnett's. The "enchanting" Kitty Hall was a guest. Belle Strong and her son came to call, and visits back and forth with Fanny Stevenson were in order. Special dinners were planned, including a memorable one at a rooftop restaurant at which Richard LeGallienne and Gelett Burgess were among the guests. Invitations to the theater came from Bliss Carman, Yone Noguchi, and Percy MacKaye.
Determined to settle down to work, Stoddard moved into a "quaint" flat, furnished it with Belle Strong's bric-a-brac, and faced the blank page. But he was unnerved by the "appalling noise, rush, and vulgarity" of Manhattan, and he was afraid to stay in his apartment by himself. In June, Stoddard finally collapsed into "nervous prostration," and Willie Woodworth came to the rescue, taking him home to Cambridge.
2
By this time, Dr. William McMichael Woodworth had become something of a minor legend at Harvard. His home on Brattle Street, the historic Riedesel House, was famous for its splendid array of exotic
 
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furnishings. As the keeper of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Woodworth had accompanied Louis Agassiz on collecting trips to Samoa, Australia, Africa, and South America, bringing back curios for his house as well as for the museum. Woodworth also collected a wide variety of seemingly disparate people. In his library on Sunday afternoons, one might find the colonel of marines from the Charleston Navy Yard and an English army captain rubbing elbows with Charles Macomb Flandrau, author of
Harvard Episodes,
and Pierre LaRose, author of
Harvard Celebrities.
3
It was into this house and this circle that Stoddard was welcomed, and it is not surprising that he immediately felt at home. Woodworth, who oversaw Stoddard's convalescence with the help of two servants, was exactly the sort of "Kid" he needed.
But Stoddard still was not content at 149 Brattle Street. A great believer in the spirit world, he had concluded that the house was haunted, perhaps by the ghost of Lafayette. There was also some friction with his host, who resembled him in so many ways that personality clashes and petty jealousies were perhaps inevitable. By the fall of 1903, Stoddard had moved into separate lodgings at nearby Prescott Hall.
Here disaster struck. One winter morning he was found unconscious and rushed to Cambridge Hospital, where his condition was diagnosed as "brain congestion." Stoddard remained gravely ill for several weeks, and it was generally assumed that he was dying. Relatives were alerted; friends came to pay last respects; a priest administered the last rites; newspapers and magazines prepared and even began to publish eulogies.
4
The
Overland Monthly,
for instance, reported that "Chas. Warren Stoddard, the author of many of the sweetest poems in the language, is dying. It is said that, though he should recover, his mind will remain a blank." He was remembered as being "delicate and sensitive as a girl. in his nature almost feminine-never effeminate-worshipped by his friends, a rare, sweet soul."
5
By February 1904, however, Stoddard was rallying. "I know how awkward it is," he wrote in a later issue of the
Overland Monthly,
"for one to re-appear upon the stage when one's friends have said their last adieus," and he went on to insist that his mind was no more of a blank than it had ever been.
6
Back in Woodworth's house to convalesce, Stoddard soon came to take a fresh and vital interest in the future. The
National Magazine
in Boston invited him to write monthly personality sketches-fifty dollars each for only five pages-and he embarked on this project with relish. From the West Coast came word that the
Sunset
 
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was willing to commission a six-months' series of feature articles on the old missions of California, and Mrs. Storer wrote to say that he was to be the beneficiary of a fifty dollar per month stipend for the rest of his life. Stoddard wrote to Father Hudson, "I really feel as if I had at last succeeded in tacking around a bend in the stream of life where I have been struggling against the current for so many years."
7
In the fall of 1904,
The Island of Tranquil Delights,
a collection of South-Sea tales, was published. In the older material, which he had written years before, Stoddard's hints of homoeroticism were characteristically veiled. But in several recently written sketches, Stoddard was comparatively outspoken. The last paragraph of "Kane-Aloha" provides a good example. After recounting his experiences with this youth, who was "well named the Loving Man," Stoddard concludes by explaining why he had to write this story: "I cannot forget it nor refrain from recounting it since it once touched me to the quick." Warming to his theme and coming as close as he ever would to declaring himself an apologist for "Unnatural Love," he concludes: "It does not matter if in my calmer moments reason cautions me to bewaremy head and my heart don't hitchthey never didand so I have written as I have written; and I shall not have written in vain if I, for a few moments only, have afforded interest or pleasure to the careful student of the Unnatural History of Civilization''
(ITD
276).
One impetus to Stoddard's candor was probably the reading he had been doing on homosexual themes for the last few years. In 1901, DeWitt Miller had sent him John Addington Symonds's
A
Problem in Modern Ethics,
and Miller was to continue sending him similarly provocative books for the rest of his life. Perhaps he had also been having conversations with Woodworth and others about what was "natural" and "unnatural" among various species. From an entry in his notebook, it is clear that he was thinking about a piece to be called "The Confessions of an Unnaturalist." With the publication of
The Island of Tranquil Delights,
the careful reader could see that Stoddard no longer cared very much what people might think of his unorthodox emotional life.
It was in this comparatively assertive mood that Stoddard began making travel plans for California in order to visit the old missions and to write them up for the
Sunset. H
e would make his headquarters in Santa Barbara, perhaps, or Monterey. He would bask in the warm California sunshine and then, when he was rejuvenated, would return
 
Page 155
to New England where he "belonged." With Woodworth for a traveling companion, he left Boston in late March, arriving in San Francisco on 3 April 1905.
II
The city had changed, of course, and not for the better in Stoddard's view. Like the unbearable Teddy Roosevelt, San Francisco had become noisy and strenuous: "I had suddenly dropped into a whirl of excitement that seemed to me breathless after the comparative repose of my later years. Many of the old companions had gone forever. I was constantly meeting new faces, and hearing voices pitched in an unfamiliar key. It was beginning to tell upon me: the restless, strenuous life."
8
For a few weeks Stoddard stayed with his sister Sarah on Baker Street, not far from Golden Gate Park. There was a quiet family reunion. Stoddard's father and brother Fred were both ailing; for that matter, He was not feeling so well himself. Stoddard was bothered by the fog. and he wanted to flee the city for some warmer clime to the south. But first he meant to enjoy the "Welcome Home" dinner in his honor that the old-timers at the Bohemian Club were planning for April 13
.
Woodworth would still be there to escort him, and other notable visitors, including Enrico Caruso and Henry James, would be attending as well.
James was rounding out his tour of America after an absence of twenty-one years. He was, in fact, seeing the Far West for the first time, and the sights were not altogether pleasant. In San Francisco, as he later wrote, he detected "a poverty of aspect and quality."
9
It is possible that James attended the dinner under the misapprehension that
he
was to be the guest of honor. In
Henry James, The Master,
Leon Edel remarks that James "enjoyed being feted by the Bohemian Club, where he talked with Charles Warren Stoddard, author of books and sketches about Hawaii and Tahiti."
10
But the
Annals of the Bohemian Club
record merely that James was one of the speakers that night.
11
Perhaps he rose to thank the club for giving him a painting; perhaps he said nothing in praise of Stoddard, whom he had never met, after all. But "Charley" Stoddard was affectionately well known by the others.
"We have killed the fatted calf," intoned the poet Lucius Harwood Foote, a former ambassador to Korea, "and are glad to welcome back the prodigal son to the haunts of his youth." In his tribute, one of many "efforts at oratorical pyrotechnics" to be heard throughout the evening,
 
Page 156
Foote recalled the Golden Age of California literature, placing Stoddard in the pantheon beside Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller. "While Hua Manu no longer stands watching for his friend where the long Pacific surges break on the strand of his island home," Foote concluded, "the printed page will continue to tell the tale, and the art of the master is eternal."
12
That Foote should have called Stoddard "the master" in the presence of James may seem ironic now, when Stoddard seems not to have been "the master" of anything, especially of his literary generation. James himself, as he watched the honored guest that night, is unlikely to have perceived any distinction to rival his own. On the surface the two men did, in fact, resemble each other in several striking ways. Exactly the same age, they were equally short and stout and balding, and both had remarkable blue eyesJames's were hard, piercing, and omniscient, while Stoddard's were soft, liquid, and beseeching. Above all, each man had the dignity and the stage presence of a personage; each projected the aura of an urbane, courtly, slightly fastidious grand old man of letters. But there, James may well have told himself as the toasts and the tributes dragged on, the resemblance ended.
Yet in one important way, perhaps, Stoddard was more of a master than James. "Live all you can," the latter had recently written, "it's a mistake not to."
13
To be sure, James had formed several emotional attachments to good-looking young men. There was a Norwegian-American sculptor, Hendrik Andersen, a few years back, and home in England there was now a lovely Irishman, Dudley Jocelyn Persse, with whom he was having such an "exquisite relation."
14
But Stoddard could claim that he had always lived as if Lambert Strether's famous advice in
The Ambassadors
had been his life's motto.
By mid-May Stoddard had decided to go down the peninsula to Atherton to spend some weeks at the magnificent home of his former "sweetheart," Fred Henshaw. A forty-eight-year-old state Supreme Court justice who had married a millionaire's daughter, Henshaw was able to provide Stoddard with every comfort at "El Nido." Of course, the relationship between the two men was hardly the same as it had been during the blissful summer of 1873, just before Stoddard left for Europe. But Fred was extremely kind to Stoddard, whom he kept supplied with notebooks, fountain pens, purple ink, books, and even some dashing new clothes.
Such things fell short, however, of meeting Stoddard's deepest needs.
 
Page 157
Most of all he wanted to find a cozy bungalow by the sea and a "Kid" with whom to share it. During the next couple of years, he would be on the lookout for both. Few seaside cottages escaped his notice if there was something picturesque about them, and few young men escaped his inviting looks as he embarked on a search for a West Coast "Kid." He might make a fool of himself, he realized. "I know that with all my experience I have gained no practical knowledge," he told himself, ''nothing that shall save me from other follies." It would be worth it all if he could have "friendship, fellowship, intimacy" (D 6 Jun. 1905, 7 Sept. 1905).
15
Stoddard saw such promise in a twenty-three-year-old day laborer at "El Nido." Edwin McKenzie had a "shapely figure," "kindly blue eyes," and "brown hair clustering in curls." Guests should not mingle with the servants, Stoddard knew, but he could not resist a pleasant chat with McKenzie, who blurted out the story of his life. He had run away from home, had been a stowaway and a tramp; he loved the books of Jack London, and he had a brother at Santa Clara who was working his way through college by teaching swimming. Falling in love on the spot, Stoddard soon began to plan out the life that he and McKenzie would share in some storybook cottage. There would be a "big bedroom," a "bathroom where he can help me to bathe," and "our little breakfasts together"; it was to be understood that Edwin would "spend his evenings at home" (D 13-17 Jun. 1905). After a few days, however, the youth's work was finished, and with great reluctance Stoddard said good-bye.
After a short visit to San Francisco in the middle of June, Stoddard decided to admit himself to a sanitarium run by the Sisters of Charity in San Jose. He was not feeling well, at least not well enough to write all of the articles he had promised to the
Sunset
and the
National.
The sanitarium had been recommended by Father Harry Stark, a young priest who had been Stoddard's student at the Catholic University of America. Now assigned to a San Francisco parish, Father Stark had become remarkably and irresistibly solicitous toward his former professor. As with Edwin McKenzie, Stoddard began to fantasy a "Dad/Kid" relationship with Harry, one he imagined as "the most perfect I have known in a life of sixty-two yearsand a very loving and liberal life at that" (D 28 Jun. 1905). But, in fact, Stoddard was not deterred from moving on to Monterey after his cure at Saint Joseph's Sanitarium.
It had been twenty-seven years since he had been there, and much

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