Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (20 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 47
training vessel, to sail, he shared the society of a few friends who were, no doubt covertly, trying to pursue the "real life" in San Francisco. Two such men he was getting to know at this time were Eben Plympton and Theodore Dwight.
Plympton was a professional actor who had been hired to play juvenile roles at the California Theater. He and Stoddard may have been introduced by Mrs. Jenny Spring MacKaye Johns, an extraordinary woman attracted to all things theatrical, including self-dramatization. In
For the Pleasure of His Company,
"Little Mama," who was modeled on Jenny, plays cupid for the Stoddard and Plympton characters: "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
1
34
) In real life, the two men had an intense relationship"too intense to last"
15
after which they kept in touch for the rest of their lives. In later years the actor lived on a country estate in Massachusetts to which interesting men of various types, including Stoddard, would be invited.
Dwight was gradually becoming a member of the Harte-Coolbrith-Stoddard circle as a result of his contributions to the
Overland Monthly,
Although the native of Auburn, New York was merely a bank clerk at the time, he had literary ambitions and, more important, good connections with some of the "better" families on the East Coast. During the early years of their friendship, Dwight and Stoddard had two passions in common: autograph collecting and theatergoing. After Dwight had moved back East and begun to dabble in photography, they came to share a more illicit hobbycollecting pictures of naked young men.
Another person who may have been tempted to pursue the "real life" while visiting San Francisco was Bayard Taylor, with whom Stoddard had some good times that June. The forty-five-year-old Taylor was a poet and travel writer, and he had also tried his hand at fiction. Some of his books were colored by a homoeroticism that Stoddard must surely have noticed, especially in the novel that came out that year,
Joseph and His Friend.
16
In this book, dedicated to those "who believe in the truth and tenderness of man's love for man, as of man's love for woman," Taylor's young heroes share a twilight kiss and the dream of living together in California amid the orange and olive groves. Although Taylor had enjoyed tender relationships with young men while visiting Europe in the 1840s, he gave Stoddard the impression that he was no longer allowing himself to love as freely as he was tempted to. Years later Stoddard wrote of Taylor: "I fear his life, not withstanding the
 
Page 48
honors that fell to his lot, was a disappointment to him and left his heart unsatisfied" (CRP).
Just before Stoddard sailed for Tahiti, Joaquin Miller finally came to town, hoping to take Stoddard and San Francisco by storm. The self-styled "Byron of the Rockies" deposited himself on Stoddard's doorstep one morning, dressed in sombrero, linen duster, blue denims, and beaded moccasins. He was full of liquor, ingratiating compliments, and, most of all, myths about himself. Claiming to be Stoddard's age (he was actually older), he insisted that he had established a utopian Indian republic on Mount Shasta and had served with General William Walker in Nicaragua. He pressed upon Stoddard the poem, titled "To the Bards of San Francisco Bay," that he had written expressly for the occasion. After lunch, Miller wanted to "go and talk with the poets," all of whom, he assumed, were eager to meet him. As it turned out, they were not. Ina Coolbrith found him striking, but Bret Harte detected a talentless poseur. Others thought his resemblance to Byron was limited merely to his impulsiveness and recklessness. Stoddard nevertheless stood by this colorful masquerader, as he would for the rest of his life. Here was someone, he may have thought, who was even more outlandish than himself. For posterity Stoddard wrote: "Never had a breezier bit of human nature dawned upon me this side of the South Seas than the Poet of the Sierra
[sic]
when he came to San Francisco in 1870."
17
III
Stoddard finally boarded the
Chevert
on 7 July 1870. His official reason for making this trip to Tahiti was the notion that he might once more play the role of traveling correspondent; but, in fact, no one had commissioned him to write articles. Unofficially, he had two reasons for going. First, he needed material for a few more tales that could, after appearing in the
Overland Monthly,
fill out "South Sea Bubbles," the book he and Harte had discussed. Second, his mind was, as he admitted, "saturated with romance"
(ITD 1 ).
Having read about the incomparably beautiful and amorous young men in Melville's
Omoo,
Stoddard was determined to have his share of barbarian satisfaction.
The atmosphere aboard the
Chevert
was so thickly homoerotic that Stoddard must have wondered if Tahiti was going to be anticlimactic. According to his account of this voyage, punningly titled "In a Transport," his fellow passengers consisted of forty "bold" young French
 
Page 49
sailors on a training mission, a soft-eyed first officer and his clinging black aide-de-camp, and
Monsieur le Capitaine,
whose "hard, proud" face "unmanned" everyone when he paced the quarter deck with "the shadow of a smile"
(CSS
146-47). It is little wonder that the captain smiled. When the members of his crew were not busy hugging each other, they skipped about like a "ballet scene in
L'Africaine" (CSS 144).
His shameless first officer was the "happy possessor'' of Nero, a handsome "tight little African," whom he kissed in front of everyone with a defiance "calculated to put all conventionalities to the blush"
(CSS
151-52). (With marvelous delicacy, Robert Gale has described this "manifestly homosexual pair" as being guilty of "miscegenating.")
18
There was also that dreamy-eyed American passenger who spent so much of his time pressed to the bosom of Thanaron, a French sailor whose "handsome little body" everyone on board loved to squeeze
(CSS
149). Stoddard hints that his intimacies with Thanaron went so far that "by the time we sighted the green summits of Tahiti, my range of experience was so great that nothing could touch me further"
(CSS
147). When they docked at Papeete on August 9, the "fruity flavor in the air" was so narcotic that the disembarkment was nearly orgiastic: Thanaron was hugging Stoddard; the first officer was hugging Thanaron; and Nero, the first officer's lover, was somewhere in the vicinity of "his master's knees"
(CSS
156-57).
Stoddard's courtesy interview with the American consul in Papeete was not a success. Although he introduced himself with the "ingenuous air" that "had won me troops of friends and invited not a few adventurers to capture and lay me waste," the consul, cool and correct in his white flannels, was not impressed
(ITD
15-16). Stoddard "showered" him with letters of introduction
(ITD
16). Still suspicious, the consul warned Stoddard that as long as he was in Tahiti, he would be expected to keep his distance from the natives.
Not surprisingly, Stoddard did just the opposite. He knew quite well what he was risking, of course. It was one thing for white men to sleep with the native women; it was quite another for a white man to sleep with young Tahitian men. Hiding behind the euphemistic phrase, "of the climate," Stoddard asks: "What if the gentleman in white flannel should discover me yielding for a moment to the seductions of the climate?" Answering this question, he imagines himself overhearing the reactions of civilized Christians: "Disgusting! Who ever heard the like? Positively beastly!"
(ITD
18-19). But in the soft, limpid air there
 
Page 50
seemed to be the indulgent atmosphere of "aita peopea," which has been translated as "a kind of happy 'Who cares?'" Stoddard was quick to sense this attitude, and he decided that the risks were well worth taking. After all, he had come four thousand miles for the chance.
Allowing for a certain amount of wish-fulfilling fantasy, which makes his stay in Tahiti seem altogether
too
sexually successful, we can still infer from Stoddard's Tahitian pieces that he must have enjoyed more than purely imaginary intercourse with the natives. His partners were found mainly in the villages outside of Papeete, away from the watchful eyes of the American consul. Setting out on a walking tour that would take him along the eastern and southern coasts of the island, Stoddard seemed to meet gallant natives at every turn. As he describes it, there was a sort of "Bali Hai" magic and mystery to these providential encounters. If there was a stream he could not ford, he had only to wait, and he "was invariably picked up by some bare-backed Hercules, who volunteered to take me over the water on his brawny brown shoulders" ("A Prodigal in Tahiti,"
SSI 33
8).
19
His luck at finding companions for the night seemed almost a matter of preordination: "As I walked I knew something would cause me to turn at the right time and find a new friend ready to receive me, for it always does. So I walked slowly and without hesitation or impatience until I turned and met him coming out of his cage, crossing the rill by his log and holding out his hand to me in welcome. Back we went together, and I ate and slept there as though it had been arranged a thousand years ago; perhaps it was!"
(SSI 3
41
).
What special appeal did the young men of Tahiti have for Stoddard? First, they possessed an almost Mediterranean beauty: they were "not black . . . not even brown" but "olive-tinted and this tint was of the tenderest olive; of the olive that has a shade of gold in it"
(ITD 27).
Second, like the Italians in John Horne Burns's
Gallery,
the Tahitians "had the gift and the voice and the eyes of love"
(ITD 31
).
20
They were
simpatico: "I
was a stranger in their midst; even the blind might have seen that; they pitied me for the sorrows I had known, the effects of which I could not laugh away; they pitied me again for the sufferings I had endured among the enlightened of the earth and for the indelible scars I bore in form and feature, these unmistakable evidences of civilization"
(ITD
26). Third, at least in some cases, they were sexually dashing and daring, as we can gather from this series of rhetorical questions: ''Was I not seized bodily one night, one glorious night and borne out of a mountain fastness whither I had fled to escape the sight of
 
Page 51
my own race? Was I not borne down the ravine by a young giant, sleek and supple as a bronzed Greek god, who held me captive in his Indian lodge till I surfeited on bread-fruits and plaintain and cocoanut milk? And then did we not part with a pangone of those pangs that always leave a memory and a scar?" Furthermore, as he goes on to claim, "this happened not once, but often"
(ITD
20)which, if true, suggests that as he wandered from village to village, his reputation may well have preceded him.
How long did Stoddard luxuriate in these "mysteries undreamed of?" His answer is: "Well: Really, I cannot tell you. No one kept tally . . .  and, as for pinning me down to so fine a point, I'd as soon think of someone who had been in Paradise for a while suddenly sitting up and asking: 'What time is it?'"
(ITD 3
3). In fact, Stoddard stayed in Tahiti less than three months, and his stay, moreover, was not one long honeymoon.
There are other aspects to this story that range, in Stoddard's fictional rendering, from the darkly humorous to the pathetic. Stoddard's only friend during the first week in Papeete was an imbecilic, misshapen cripple he called "Taboo." With this fellow outcast he took in the sights of the
Fête Napoléon
on August 15; but after a while Taboo, who could only grunt, became a rather depressing sort of companion ("TabooA Fete-Day in Tahiti,"
SSI).
When his money began to run out, Stoddard appealed to the local Catholic church, to which he was always to turn in times of extremity. The bishop, however, gave only "a blessing, an autograph, and a 'God speed'"
(SSI348).
In desperation Stoddard took a menial job with a French merchant, in whose chicken coop he was allowed to sleep. Not feeling up to the task of hauling sacks of potatoes, he soon quit. Eventually his clothes were in rags, and he was so downcast that he was tempted to throw himself into the oceanexcept that he was afraid of the water ("A Prodigal in Tahiti,"
SSI).
21
One day the American consul stopped Stoddard on the street and suggested that he think about going home. The
Chevert
was about to sail, and if Stoddard could promise that his fare would be paid when he reached San Francisco, he could sail with it. Stoddard made this promise, much to the pleasure of the consul, who said he was going to be making the trip as well. Once on board, Stoddard sensed that the tables had been turned: now it was the consul who was trying to be charming. It all began when Stoddard was airing the contents of his trunk on the deck: there were his dainty souvenirs, his beloved copy of
Leaves of

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