Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (22 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 59
barbarism and then retreat into civilized decency. In Stoddard's tales, there is a deep undercurrent of feeling that life in the Islands is, in fact. infinitely preferable to life in the United States. Stoddard's narrator is genuinely fond of eating and sleeping with the natives: he is sincere in his devotion to paganism; and he fiercely resents having to put his clothes on and return to the restrictions of Christian civilization.
Of course, these restrictions included a taboo on the very homoerotic experience that, as we have seen, lay behind many of Stoddard's tales. Granted, Stoddard's homoeroticism does not dominate every one of the sixteen sketches included in the book. In "The Chapel of the Palms." for example, he devotes himself to another of his themes: the beautiful. self-sacrificing lives of the Roman Catholic priests who have found an enviable serenity in their service to the church. Nor is there anything very sexual in "The Last of the Great Navigator," which recalls the final days of Captain Cook in Hawaii. But in most of the pieces, either in the background or the foreground, there is at least one handsome young pagan who captures Stoddard's eyes or heart or both. For instance, in "Taboo," the narrator is not interested so much in his misshapen companion as in the perfectly shaped, "naked and superbly built fellows" who shinny up a greased pole, and in the sight of the hundred young men in their war canoes, all "stripped to the skin and bareheaded: their brawny bodies glistening in the sun as though they had been oiled''
(SSI
97, 99). In "Joe of Lahaina" the young man's significance can hardly be overlooked. But of all the tales in this book, perhaps the greatest degree of homoeroticism may be found in "Chumming with a Savage" (based on Stoddard's 1869 visit to Molokai), "Pearl-Hunting in the Pomotous." and "In a Transport" (both based on his 1870 trip to Tahiti).
While the significance of Stoddard's unabashed delight in seeing and touching and being touched by handsome, naked males seems rather obvious now, it is understandable why
South-Sea Idyls
caused few eyebrows to be raised over a hundred years ago. The combined innocence and ignorance of nineteenth-century readers was a key factor, of course, but another was Stoddard's half-shrewd, half-bumbling technique of constructing sentences and paragraphs so as to cover his tracks with confusion. The governing pattern in the following examples of this technique can be compared with a squirrel's venturing out, farther and farther, to the leafy end of a branch. When swaying signals danger to the squirrel's brain, it stops short and leaps back to safety as nimbly as it
 
Page 60
can. Likewise, instead of crossing out and revising passages of telltale homoeroticism, Stoddard merely retreated, hoping he could scurry back to safety under the cover of misleading explanations.
The first example is taken from the paragraph in "Chumming with a Savage" that describes Stoddard getting into bed with Kána-aná for the first time: "Over the sand we went, and through the river to his hut, where I was taken in, fed, and petted in every possible way, and finally put to bed, where Kána-aná monopolized me, growling in true savage fashion if any one came near me. I didn't sleep much, after all. I think I must have been excited." Rather than deleting that last sentence, Stoddard gropes for some suitable reason for the excitement. The paragraph continues: "I thought how strangely I was situated: alone in the wilderness, among barbarians; my bosom friend, who was hugging me like a young bear, not able to speak one syllable of English, and I very shaky on a few bad phrases of his tongue"
(SSI 31-32).
The idea that he is distressed at the thought of sleeping among barbarians is belied, elsewhere in the text, by his depiction of the hospitable Hawaiians, who pose no threat to him at all. Nor under normal circumstances would a sudden awareness of impending language difficulties likely induce much emotion. Most revealing of all, however, is Stoddard's dropping his mask in midflight. The concealment of an explanation that is no explanation is itself undone by the suggestive, but comically turned, detail about hugging, which points again to a sexual cause for the excitement.
In another example from this tale, Stoddard is still in bed, now peering at the sleeping body of Kána-aná: He lay close by me. His sleek figure, supple and graceful in repose, was the embodiment of free, untrammelled youth. You who are brought up under cover know nothing of its luxuriousness. How I longed to take him . . ." What Stoddard goes on to say is surely the last thing he must have had in mind at the time. After having described, in euphemistic terms, the joys of being naked, he contradictorily suggests that they go to America and put on some clothes: ". . . over the sea with me, and show him something of life as we find it. Thinking upon it, I dropped off into one of those delicious morning naps"
(SSI 33).
In midparagraph in "Pearl-Hunting in the Pomotous," Stoddard again realizes he has tipped his hand. During the "balcony scene," Hua Manu begins "making vows of eternal friendship," vows that are "by no means disagreeable'' to the narrator, now playing Juliet. But why are
 
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these vows not disagreeable, or, rather, why are they so agreeable? Is it the beauty of the native's Herculean physique that compels the narrator to reciprocate? No, Stoddard wants us to believe, it is Hua Manu's intimidating size: "He was big enough to whip any two of his fellows, and one likes to be on the best side of the stronger party in a strange land. . . . I leaned over the stern-rail . . .  assuring that egg-boy that my heart was his if he was willing to take it at second-hand"
(SSI
1
53).
A final example may be cited from "In a Transport," which is surely one of the most lavender pieces of prose published in the nineteenth century. In the following paragraph, Stoddard wants to show both the cause and the effect of the ship's crew and passengers being "unmanned" as they catch sight of Tahiti: "There was something in the delicious atmosphere, growing warmer every day, and something in the delicious sea, that was beginning to rock her floating gardens of blooming weed under our bows, and something in the aspect of
Monsieur le Capitaine. . . 
that unmanned us; so we rushed to our own little cabin and hugged one another . . ." Stoddard seems to realize that the conjunction "so'' is not strong enough to stand alone in explaining why he and Thanaron are hugging each other. How to finish this sentence in order to satisfy, or at least to confound, the reader? ". . . lest we should forget how when we were restored to our sisters and our sweethearts, and everything was forgiven and forgotten in one intense moment of French remorse"
(SSI 3
09). This conclusion is, of course, nonsense. Nonetheless, the spray of words following "lest" may have convinced most nineteenth-century readers that the narrator and Thanaron are embracing for reasons that, if not perfectly clear or convincing, are at least quaintly amusing.
Reviewers were generally pleased with
South-Sea Idyls,
often comparing Stoddard with Melville as to subject matter, and with other Western writers as to style. In the
Overland Monthly,
an anonymous reviewer (who likely knew the author) evaluated the book in light of Stoddard's personality, with which readers were presumed to be well acquainted:
Being young and poetical, ardent in his love of the beautiful, and really bored with civilizationby spellsStoddard was "enthused" over the lovely islands of the Pacificover their coral shores, their palm-groves, their water-falls, their deliciously tinted peaks, their remoteness, and their amiable, sensuous people, who treated him like a brother, because he fraternized with them in the mood of a poet and a humanitarian. Hence his
 
Page 62
ecstasy was not an affected one. H
e
wrote from the inspiration of a dreamy nature, keenly sensitive to every charm of form, and color, and perfume, yet melancholy, and not so much of the Puritan that he could not play the prodigal.
About Stoddard's style, this reviewer concluded with an optimistic (but, unfortunately, inaccurate) prediction: "If it is thought sometimes too exuberantly descriptive, or too florid and sensuous, these are qualities that will be corrected or tempered by experience."
10
In the
Atlantic Monthly,
W. D. Howells found some of Stoddard's sketches to be written in such a "dreamy" and "vague" manner that he could not tell whether they were supposed to be fiction or nonfiction. However, Stoddard was given the benefit of the doubt: "You must rest satisfied with your inference that at several times Mr. Stoddard visited Tahiti and the islands of the Hawaiian group; for there is no historical
resumé
of the facts of his goings or comings." Howells wished for "a little more structure in the book, something more of bone as well as marrow, of muscle as well as nerve''; but he conceded that "the tone for writing about the equatorial, lotus-eating lands has been set, and we are not sure but Mr. Stoddard gains a charm by holding to the traditional vagueness."
11
The reviewer in
The Nation
was also troubled by Stoddard's style. There was, he found, "something disagreeably jarring" in the uncertain tone of this writer. At the same time he was able to tolerate Stoddard's unfathomable peculiarity by placing it within the tradition of the "California humorist," whose business is "to make us laugh by humorous distortions of the common tongue of Shakespeare and Milton." The review concluded by warning readers that the tone of the book was not entirely wholesome: "We ought to say, however, that life in the Southern Seas is such a peculiarly non-moral life, that we cannot recommend 'South-Sea Idyls' as a book of invigorating and purifying tone. The Southern Seasas it used to be said of Parisare not a good place for deacons."
12
If the urbane tone of the last sentence is any clue,
The Nation's
reviewer was not truly shocked by anything in
South-Sea Idyls.
Neither was Howells, who took the pose of "unrepentant" prodigality merely as a convention of Western humorists who wrote chiefly to amuse each other: "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." Howells, then, thought that Stod-

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