Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (8 page)

Read Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard Online

Authors: Roger Austen

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Literary Criticism, #Gay & Lesbian, #test

BOOK: Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard
3.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page xxxv
tions, as "perverse" served to protect from suspicion those engaged in Christian devotion to youth. The navy's "inquiry had questioned the ideology of nonsexual Christian brotherhood that had heretofore explained their devotion to other men." The confrontation between the navy and the churches "represented fundamentally a dispute over the norms for masculine gender behavior and over the boundaries between homosociality and homosexuality in the relations of men."
41
For Stoddard's generation, the battle lines in this dispute had yet to be drawn so sharply, if at all. No clear boundary existed between "homosociality" and "homosexuality" except within the ideology of Christian brotherhood, which Stoddard radically revised to suit his temperament. When he agreed to take a position at Notre Dame, in fact, he cited his devotion to young men as one of his strongest credentials. To his mind, there was nothing hypocritical in extending the lay ministry of his pedagogical office to include physical love itself. Indeed, Stoddard imputed no wrong to himself but only to those, such as the clergy at Notre Dame, who objected to his same-sex relationships. "How foul these brothers are," he wrote in his diary, "how prone to think evil and poison the minds of the lads.''
42
The "palpable embodiment" of love, after all, was his "meat and drink" (D 19 Jan. 1885)no less sacred to him than the spiritual sustenance of Holy Communion. With native boys and college lads alike, Stoddard felt that human love brought him only closer to the love of God. As the clerical defendant was to be described by his character witnesses during his 1920 Newport trial, so Stoddard could sincerely have characterized himself as "'an earnest Christian man [who] was much interested in young men.'"
43
Although some of Stoddard's sexual relationships
were
with young men, such as Frank Millet and Reginald Birch during the 1870s, his deepest and most sustained love affairs were pedophilic. As he once wrote in his notebook, "I thank God that I have no children of my own to worry me . . .  butO! how I long for those of others" (D 6 Oct. 1905).
44
In 1878, for example, Stoddard was employed as a male companion to young William Woodworth, fatherless scion of a wealthy San Francisco family, whom he took sailing off Monterey and botanizing in the Redwoods. (Woodworth was to become a distinguished naturalist and a professor at Harvard.) Stoddard later recalled his idyllic days with Willie, only the first of many youths to be dubbed his "Kid": "The Kid was the very thinga youngster with happiness in heart, luster in his eye, and nothing more serious than peach-down on his lip; yet there was
 
Page xxxvi
gravity enough in his composition to carry him beneath the mere surface of men and things." In his way, Willie recalled the frontispiece etching of Whitman in the 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass.
Stoddard wrote of a day when "The Kid" had returned from hunting rabbits with a glow of moonlight in his eyes, a sunset flush on his cheek, and "the riotous blood's best scarlet in his lips." The boy stood there, laughing triumphantly, "a blue shirt open at the throat, hair very much tumbled, and no thoughts of self to detract from the absolute grace of his pose.''
45
Both mentorial and erotic, Stoddard's relationship to Woodworth bears some resemblance to "Greek love," as it was (re)understood by John Addington Symonds in his privately printed
A Problem in Greek Ethics
(1883). Sedgwick points out, in regard to Symonds's friendship with the Italian gondolier Angelo Fusato, that the appropriation of Whitman by upper-middle-class homosexuals in England could lead to a "distinctive sexual-political narrative" in which the "potential political effects of 'Calamus' love" were described in "terms drawn from chivalry, but appealing at the same time to the virilizing authority of the Greeks." This narrative tended in Symonds to mystify his sexual exploitation of proletarian men. His idea of Whitmanian "democracy," based "on noblesse oblige and individual pastoralism and condescension, served to keep class barriers in place.
46
As an American, however, Stoddard's class position was less fixed than Symonds's, and he never invoked the idea of "Greek love" to describe his desire for youths whose backgrounds ranged from the upper class (in the case of Woodworth), to the middle class (in the case of Tom Cleary, Stoddard's "Kid" during his brief tenure at Notre Dame), to the immigrant working class (in the case of Kenneth O'Connor, the boy he "adopted" during his Washington years). In no sense did Stoddard think of himself as an exploiter of Cleary, whose family sheltered him for two years after he resigned his professorship. With Kenneth O'Connor, who at the age of fifteen moved into Stoddard's Washington "Bungalow" in 1895, the narrative of their relationship derived less from the Greeks than from American domesticity.
Like Woodworth, O'Connor was a fatherless boy for whom Stoddard saw himself to be filling a paternal need. A dropout from school and something of a street-corner tough (Stoddard preferred the term "waif"), Kenneth drank and smoked and had his own desire for "Kids." In the spirit of Horatio Alger, Stoddard wanted to "save" the youth from a supposedly hellish family life and give him uplifting opportunities.
47
 
Page xxxvii
Stoddard arranged for Kenneth to attend Georgetown Prep, and he lavished upon him the material bounty of bourgeois respectability. When Stoddard and O'Connor (along with Jules, the French cook and factotum, and Mexique, Stoddard's dog) took possession of their new home, Kenneth's mother helped to choose the kitchen equipment, Henry Adams sent over three Persian pillows, and even Bishop Keane, who had hired Stoddard for Catholic University, seemed to approve. Given to gushing about his "Kid" to whoever would listen, Stoddard described their life to Father Daniel Hudson, his enduring friend from Notre Dame, as "almost ideal," a domestic romance come true: "This is a rare housea house of love."
48
Although Stoddard had no biological son, his friends had no difficulty in recognizing him as Kenneth's "Dad" (which the boy was encouraged to call him).
49
Such a paternal role, as Lynch suggests, was to be proscribed for men like Stoddard under the paradigm of "homosexuality": "Pre-homosexuality 'homosexuals' entered the family structure by having children, but in the newly emerging role, the 'homosexual' would not be defined as a parent. Indeed, 'homosexual father' and 'lesbian mother' would come to be seen as self-contradictions." Here again Stoddard may be seen to mark a transition between Victorian and modern discourses on same-sexuality. Like Whitman, in his notorious claim to Symonds that he had fathered six children, Stoddard could avail himself of the idea of paternity. But whereas Whitman, as Lynch says, "assumed genetic fathering to be incommensurable with the new same-sex role he had done so much to articulate,"
50
Stoddard was closer to Symonds in finding no necessary contradiction between paternity and "homosexuality.''
In one newspaper article, in the popular vein of the Author at Home, Stoddard's relationship to Kenneth was placed beside his fondness for native boys and found to be equally unexceptionable:
"The kid" is the object of Mr. Stoddard's warmest affection; he is a fine-looking boy 7 years oldhis other name is Kennethand he was adopted by Mr. Stoddard when quite a little fellow. The author of "South Sea Idylis,"
[sic]
has all his life had a way of adopting boys, and he has watched over them with more than a father's love and care until they passed from him either by death or marriage. Some he has immoralized
[sic!]:
Kehele
[sic],
the young hero of Hawaii; Kana-Ana of Tahita
[sic]:
Hua-Manu of Pomotoe Islands, and others he has come across have deeply appealed to him.
Mr. Stoddard's nature is an unique one; he has many souls in one and
 
Page xxxviii
through them all are strains of tenderness and melancholy. Boys of ardent enthusiasm and fervor of feeling are completely won over by him. Indeed. he wears his heart upon his sleeve at the disposal of whoever will take it.
51
The untruths herethat Stoddard adopted Kenneth at a young age. that he habitually watched over his "Kids" until either marriage or death did them partserve to trim the facts more closely to the narrative pattern of a male domestic idyll. The reporter is strikingly (to the modern reader) sanguine about what is called "more than a father's love": a term that seems less obscure if it is heard to resonate with "passing the love of women," the biblical phrase often applied to male romantic friendships in the nineteenth century.
52
Stoddard's "tenderness and melancholy," the traits common to his ''many souls," qualify him, in fact, as an ideal guide for boys of like disposition, who require a "feminine" father.
53
With such a father, what boy would need a mother? This is the unspoken question behind the reporter's jocular treatment of the misogynic spirit that pervaded "The Bungalow." "'No woman can stand our whimsmine and the kid's.'" Stoddard told the interviewer, who adds that Jules, too, "has not much liking for 'these girls d'Amerique' who stop on their bicycles by the front gate to talk to 'the kid.' The fair lassies never dream of Jules' contempt for them nor of Mr. Stoddard's hearty laughter as he peeps out through the closed shutters."
54
Inaudible here is any nervous overtone to Stoddard's "hearty" laughter as he peeps voyeuristically at the "lassies" playing up to the "Kid." Of course. the joke is entirely on them, foolish enough not to recognize their superfluity to this decidedly male ménage: a house to which no angel need apply.
Enclosed by the shutters at "The Bungalow" were the rooms stuffed with souvenirs that Stoddard had accumulated through decades of travel. Part library, part shrine, part grass hut, the house was decorated to be emblematic of the major triad of its owner's life. Literature: photographs of celebrated authors; a collection of over three-thousand volumes, including deluxe editions and many inscribed books. Catholicism: a glass case containing relics of Father Damien (the veil and maniple he wore when saying mass for the lepers); a portrait of a Capucin monk vowed to silence: a crown of thorns; the rosary of a Franciscan friar; a picture in every room of a statue of Saint Anthony ("The Bungalow" was also called "Saint Anthony's Best"). The South Seas:

Other books

A Choice of Treasons by J. L. Doty
Gimbels Has It! by Lisicky, Michael J.
Finding Faith by Tabatha Vargo
Broken by Erin M. Leaf
Levijatan by Boris Akunin
La última batalla by C.S. Lewis
Tinker and Blue by Frank Macdonald
Nympho by Andrea Blackstone