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Authors: Roger Austen

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Page xxvi
pidity of its protagonist Paul Clitheroe, the ''vacuum at the center of his character." is "the textual equivalent to the vacuum homosexuality was for the West at the turn of the century."
2
Men like Stoddard, however, had little choice but to fill this vacuum for themselves as best they could, borrowing from the codes available to say who and what they were.
Soon after the turn of the century, Stoddard, then in his late fifties and in poor health, was planning to return from Washington, D.C., where he had been fired from his professorship at the Catholic University of America, to California, where he had first made his reputation in the 1860s as "The Boy Poet of San Francisco" and had later gained recognition for his travel writings from Europe and the South Seas. For a while he attached himself to the artists' colony at Carmel, where the poet George Sterling caught his eye and inspired some typically (for Stoddard) effusive letters. Deeply devoted to "darling Wolf," as he called Jack London. Sterling was nevertheless nonplussed and repelled by Stoddard's ardor. His is a "case of inversion of sex," he confided to his mentor Ambrose Bierce, who reassured Sterling after Stoddard's death that "my objection to him was the same as yourshe was not content with the way that God had sexed him."
3
Stoddard himself told London that "I am what I was when I was born."
4
To define what he was when he was born, he would not have used the pathologizing label of "inversio,"
as
applied to him by Sterling out of apparent "homosexual panic."
5
Moreover, he had usually been quite content with the way God had sexed him. (He did believe in God; a convert to Roman Catholicism, he remained devout to the end.) When, late in life, Stoddard encountered "Xavier Mayne" 's Im
re,
the first explicitly "homosexual" novel published by an American (albeit privately and pseudonymously), he copied a sentence into his notebook: "The silences of intimacy stand for the most perfect mutuality."
6
Stoddard had come of age before the proliferation of terms"invert," "Uranian," "intermediate type," and so onmeant to distinguish, usually invidiously, between men seeking the mutuality of other men and those preferring "heterosexual" intimacy. His representations of his own desire were part and parcel of the discourses (and silences) that preceded the medical paradigm of "homosexuality." In the late nineteenth century, as Peter Gay remarks, homosexuals derived certain advantages from the reticence, bordering on obliviousness, of bourgeois culture: "Homosexual lovers . . . were safer in the earlier days of tight-lipped equivocations than in the later days of clinical inquisitiveness."
7
 
Page xxvii
Consider, for instance, the reception of
South-Sea Idyls (1875),
in which Stoddard made fiction of his travels in Hawaii and Tahiti during the late 1860s. The Island adventures most significant to him were undoubtedly his sexual initiation and subsequent affairs with native youths. Several tales based on these experiences have been reprinted by the Gay Sunshine Press precisely by virtue of what the publisher calls their "veiled homoeroticism," which the modern reader, it is presumed, will have no difficulty in unveiling.
8
South-Sea Idyls
abounds in hints that Stoddard's intercourse with the natives had been more than meets the eye in the letter of the text. Like the word "intercourse" itself, the sexual connotations of which were as latent in nineteenth-century usage as they are dominant now, Stoddard's prose barely conceals its erotic implicationsby means, as Roger Austen suggests, of an obfuscatory narrative technique.
9
Exactly how much of Stoddard's "veiled homoeroticism" was visible to nineteenth-century readers is not easily determinable. But neither in 1873 nor in 1892, when it was republished, was
South-Sea Idyls
seen (in reviews, at least) to contain anything untoward. Except in the
Nation,
which urbanely observed that the book could not be recommended for "an invigorating and purifying tone" because the South Seas "as it used to be said of Parisare not a good place for deacons,"
10
the critical consensus was that
South-Sea Idyls
was a delightful example of "California humor." W. D. Howells in the
Atlantic Monthly
welcomed it ''as a real addition to the stock of refined pleasures, and a contribution to our literature without which it would be sensibly poorer."
11
"Sensibly" might now be read as possibly referring to a homoerotic subtext in
South-Sea Idyls,
but that subtext had yet to be written with modern explicitness for either Howells or Stoddard. Howells understood Stoddard's narrative pose of "prodigality" as a comic convention: "It all strikes us as the drollery of a small number of good fellows who know each other familiarly, and feel that nothing they say will be lost or misunderstood in their circle."
12
That is, what Stoddard might have meant in such homoerotic tales as "Chumming with a Savage," which Howells later called a "harmless story,"
13
went without saying among good fellows, whose appreciation of "refined pleasures" did not preclude their liminal awareness of unrefined ones. "Drollery" covered and contained a multitude of implications, including sexual ones, which remained "harmless"
because
they were not and needed not be expressed, and thus did not invite misunderstanding. Whatever may have
 
Page xxviii
happened between Stoddard and his native chums was not lost within the small circle of male familiarity, but neither was it found. Indeed it was not sought.
As I have argued elsewhere,
14
this discursive system, in which silence played a crucial part, allowed such literary friends as Howells and Mark Twain to take Stoddard as a fellow good fellow even as Stoddard's same-sex preferences were not lost upon them. They "knew" about Stoddard but in a way that does not correspond to modern knowing through medicalized categories; and although they tolerated Stoddard's "homosexuality" insofar as it remained discursively marginal, they also did not hesitate to depreciate him, usually by treating him as a hapless child. From such men Stoddard could not expect complete acceptance and understanding. For that he turned at first, like many others, to Walt Whitman.
As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, Whitman became a major site for the "self-formation of many members of that new Victorian class, the bourgeois homosexual." Photographs of the bard, gifts of his books, scraps of his handwriting, gossip about him, admiring references in printall "seem to have functioned as badges of homosexual recognition, were the currency of a new community that saw itself as created in Whitman's image."
15
As Stoddard once wrote to Horace Traubel, "Do you know what life means to me? It means everything that Walt Whitman has ever said or sung . . . He breathed the breath of life into me."
16
After young Stoddard discovered the "Calamus" poems during the 1860s, he pressed his own first book of verse on Whitman. When the poet did not respond, Stoddard persisted, writing to profess that he was the "stranger" whom Whitman had enjoined to "speak" to him. He claimed kinship by recounting his experiences with the Pacific Islanders: ''I have done wonders in my intercourse with these natives. For the first time I act as my nature prompts me. It would not answer in America, as a general principle,not even in California, where men are tolerably bold." Stoddard went on to describe a typical night of love with one or another young native: awakening with "his arm over my breast and around me." "You will easily imagine," he asserted, "how delightful I find this life. I read your Poems with a new spirit, to understand them as few may be able to." Stoddard closed with a request for a photograph.
17
Whitman obliged, adding in a note: "I cordially accept your appreciation, & reciprocate your friendship. . . . Those tender & primitive personal relations away off there in the Pacific islands, as described by you, touched me deeply."
18
 
Page xxix
In 1870, when he was preparing to return to the Islands, Stoddard explained to Whitman that he needed to "get in amongst people who are not afraid of instincts and who scorn hypocrisy." Only "barbarism" had given him "the fullest joy of my life," and he begged the poet's blessing: "I could then go into the South Seas feeling sure of your friendship and I should try to live the real life there for your sake as well as my own.''
19
"As to you," Whitman replied, "I do not of course object to your emotional & adhesive nature, & the outlet thereof, but warmly approve them." But then he gently reproved Stoddard for looking unnecessarily far afield for that outlet: "But do you know (perhaps you do,) how the hard, pungent, gritty, worldly experiences & qualities in American practical life, also serve? how they prevent extravagant sentimentalism? & how they are not without their own great value & even joy?"
20
From Michael Lynch's excellent study, we know that Whitman had adapted the word "adhesiveness" from phrenology to his own purposesto have "an exclusive reference to same-sex love."
21
Whether or not Stoddard grasped this special usage in Whitman's letter, he never adopted the term himself. He seems also to have missed the point of Whitman's contrast between "South-Sea Bubbles" (the title Bret Harte had encouraged Stoddard to use for
South-Sea Idyls)
and the hard, pungent, gritty, and worldly realities at home. In effect, Whitman was challenging Stoddard's understanding of the spirit of his poems. What Stoddard considered to be the "real life" of the Islands Whitman saw as exoticism that amounted to "extravagant sentimentalism."
Stoddard's notion of "barbarism" was not only sentimental; it was also thoroughly in keeping with the prevailing racialism and imperialism of the American Gilded Age.
22
When Bierce once twitted Stoddard for going to the Islands to have love affairs with "nigger" boys,
23
he was exposing in his own contempt the underside of Stoddard's "tender and primitive relations." The very imprecision of Bierce's racialism, in which Polynesians are assimilated into the undifferentiated category of "nigger," is indicative of an undiscriminating discrimination against all nonwhitesor, more exactly, against non-Anglo-Saxons.
Although reviewers often compared him to Melville, Stoddard lacked the radically subversive vision of his predecessor's South-Sea romances. If he deplored, as Melville did, the influence of Christian missionaries over the Islanders, still he exempted the Catholic ones from blame. Despite his prodigal pose, Stoddard never forgot that he was civilized at heart; his chumming with the savages, whom he tended to reduce to
 
Page xxx
comic stereotypes, was a form of slumming with those beyond the normal (and normalizing) bourgeois ken. In seeking to escape sexual "hypocrisy," Stoddard did not question the cultural presuppositions that shaped his attraction to "barbarism"such as the idea that nonwhite races were less afraid of "instincts'' and thus naturally more promiscuous than Anglo-Saxons.
From his youth, Stoddard felt a special (but not exclusive) attraction to those darker than he, whether the Mexicans he encountered as a child in San Francisco, or the "mezzo-tinted" boy that became his school chum in upstate New York, or the olive-skinned Italian youths whose nude photographs were smuggled through customs by his friend Theodore Dwight for Stoddard's delectation. Dwight, who was working at the time as librarian to the State Department, offered a special enticement for Stoddard to visit him in Washington: "Coffee in thin porcelain shall be served to you at your bedside by the African Sphinx, James the black and speechless, called by some the 'Mind Reader.'"
24
The combination here of racial darkness with devoted service and knowing silence was the ideal for Stoddard in his Island lovers.
The preferred color was "not black . . . not even brown" but "olive-tinted"and not just any "olive," but the "tenderest olive . . . that has a shade of gold in it."
25
Such was Kána-aná, Stoddard's companion in "Chumming with a Savage," with whom he played out a "Crusoe life":
We had fitful spells of conversation upon some trivial theme, after long intervals of intense silence. We began to develop symptoms of imbecility. There was laughter at the least occurrence, though quite barren of humor; also, eating and drinking to pass the time; bathing to make one's self cool, after the heat and drowsiness of the day. . . . Again and again he would come with a delicious banana to the bed where I was lying, and insist upon my gorging myself, when I had but barely recovered from a late orgie of fruit, flesh, or fowl. He would mesmerize me into a most refreshing sleep with a prolonged and pleasing manipulation. It was a reminiscence of the baths of Stamboul not to be withstood. From this sleep I would presently be awakened by Kána-aná's performance upon a rude sort of harp, that gave out a weird and eccentric music. The mouth being applied to the instrument, words were pronounced in a guttural voice, while the fingers twanged the strings in measure. It was a flow of monotones, shaped into legends and lyrics. I liked it amazingly; all the better, perhaps, that it was as good as Greek to me, for I understood it as little as I understood the strange and persuasive silence of that beloved place, which seemed slowly but surely weaving a spell of enchantment about me.
(CSS 41-42)
BOOK: Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard
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