Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (33 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 111
could see that he was pleading with them to like him. Many of them did, and Stoddard began to forget all about rubbing out and beginning again. But in giving way to his nature, he did try not to hurt any living soul.
By the time the lilacs and apple trees were in bloomhe often had overflowing bouquets of these flowers in his roomStoddard had fallen gloriously in love with Charles Porter, who often came into his room to give him an affectionate "good night" (D 7-9 Apr. 1885). Somewhat embarrassed by his own fickleness, Stoddard discovered in April that he was falling out of love with Porter and into love with Tom Cleary, the charming junior from Kentucky whom he had noticed that night in the infirmary. Cleary came from Covington, Kentucky: his father was a judge, his brother an actor in New York, and his mother an occasional visitor to campus. Stoddard began calling Cleary "the Cub" and looking forward to his visits, which soon became too frequent to be overlooked.
Notre Dame had a Prefect of Discipline, Father Began, and ten Holy Cross Brothers who served as Assistant Prefects. Perhaps Brother Lawrence, who was assigned to Cleary's class, said something to Father Began, who then took Father Hudson aside. At any rate, Father Hudson cautioned Stoddard on May 3 about Cleary's visits. "Our intimacy is being noticed," Stoddard wrote in his diary that night, "and there will shortly be talk about it." At first he took this development sanguinely, but after a few weeks he began to feel aggrieved. By the middle of May, his diary entries show the prefects metamorphosing into adversaries. Perhaps Professor Edwards (thought Stoddard), consumed as he was with "jealousy," was goading them on. Stoddard was convinced that the prefects were saying things ''to poison the minds of the lads" and that they had conspired to deny Cleary the first-class honors he had expected to receive.
Whenever Stoddard fell in love, his emotions overshadowed the rest of his life, but his first term at Notre Dame was not devoted entirely to courting students and criticizing prefects. There was writing to be done: sketches for the
Ave Maria
about his trip to Molokai. ("The Martyrs of Molokai" ran serially in the summer of 1885, and it appeared in book form that fall.)
3
There was also proof to read on
A Troubled Heart;
and when the book was published that spring, Father Hudson sent copies to dozens of his and Stoddard's friends all over the world.
Their reactions varied. Oddly enough, Stoddard's Presbyterian father
 
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seemed to like it, while a staunchly Protestant lady in San Francisco, not recognizing him as the author, wrote to say that she did not appreciate receiving Catholic propaganda. Mark Twain's response was especially interesting:
You must not make the mistake of supposing that absolute peace of mind is obtainable only through some form of religious belief: no, on the contrary I have found that as perfect a peace is to be found in absolute unbelief. I look back with the same shuddering horror upon the days when I believed I believed, as you do upon the days when you were afraid you did not believe. Both of us are certain, now; and in certainty there is rest. Let us be content. . . .
You have told your story eloquently, beautifully,how well a gifted man
can
argue from false premises, false history, false everything!
4
Stoddard was also keeping up his voluminous correspondence. There were increasingly perfunctory letters to the Bungalow Boys and also letters of advice to Arthur MacKaye, who was about to marry, despite Stoddard's discouragement, the daughter of Joaquin and Minnie Myrtle Miller. Stoddard told Theodore Dwight that he had at last found a haven, and Dwight told of his life in Washington as an assistant to Henry Adams. Other correspondents included a convict in Sing Sing, a homosexual poet in Indianapolis, and his "poor" mother, to whom he tried to send a little money from time to time.
During the 1885 summer vacation, Stoddard was given a railroad pass to take a trip to Alaska in the company of Father John Zahm, the physical science instructor who doubled as the curator of the school's museum. Father Zahm wanted to collect Alaskan curios for his museumn, and Stoddard hoped to make some money by writing up his adventures for the
San Francisco Chronicle.
5
The two men toured Denver, Portland, Juneau, and Sitka; all the while Stoddard brooded over the situation at Notre Dame, especially the denial of first-class honors to Tom Cleary. As he wrote to Father Hudson on August 1, "I've been thinking much of Notre Dame . . . wondering if ever again I shall
love
it
as I have loved it!
Can one
love
without
trust,
is the question? Tom's treatment shook my faith in the justice of the powers that be to the foundations thereof . . .  I no longer hope anything in particular, nor expect anything in particular and I have lost faith in the impartial justice that should be there, and more than all and worse than allI have lost faith in the Beads!"
6
As the 1885-86 school year began, Stoddard was feeling depressed
 
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and secretive, telling himself in his diary, "I must brace up, or I am lost indeed!" He was cheered considerably, however, when Tom Cleary spent two hours with him every Sunday afternoon. These visits were variously described in the diary as droll, rollicking, cozy, charmed, affectionate, tropical, jolly, satisfactory, merry, and delicious. As Christmas approached, Mrs. Cleary invited Stoddard to Covington for the holidays, and he accepted at once. The twenty days he spent with the Clearys turned out to be blissfully indolent: "Generally Tom and I are not out of bed until toward noon."
7
Back on campus in January, Stoddard grew increasingly uncomfortable. He was plagued by malarial fever and chills; he could not depend on the steam heat and electricity in his room; he felt that both he and his classes were disintegrating. Two deaths at school during that spring, one a suicide, convinced Stoddard that the Brothers were doing a disgraceful job of running the institution. Disposed to believe the worst, Stoddard swallowed the tales told him by Brother Polycarp, another unhappy soul, about witchcraft and demon possession among the clergy. "All this is uncanny," noted the gullible Stoddard, "and I like it not" (D 19 Apr. 1886). By the end of the term his only friend on the faculty was Colonel Hoynes. Father Hudson's nightly visits had ended, and Stoddard had long since stopped speaking to Professor Edwards and Father Regan.
Stoddard decided to quit. In submitting his official resignation to Father Walshwho was, he suspected, also against himhe explained that the school physician had ordered his "immediate removal from the state" because of his malaria. To others, he added that he was leaving Notre Dame "full of disgust and malaria."
8
By the end of June 1886, both Stoddard and Cleary had removed themselves from the "unwholesome atmosphere'' of Notre Dame to Covington.
The Indiana climate was "anything but kind," Father Hope writes in
Notre Dame: One Hundred Years,
noting also that Stoddard's "sensitive nature recoiled from the warning administered by Father Regan . . . that he must not give 'sigarettes' to the boys."
9
Carl Stroven attributes Stoddard's resignation to his dispute with the prefects over their denying honors to Cleary.
10
But neither malaria nor the honors imbroglio was the main reason. Stoddard blamed the Holy Cross Brothers for something he hesitated to articulate, for fear that any charges against the clergy would redound to himself.
The real issue for Stoddard at Notre Dame was the orthodox Catholic
 
Page 114
position on homosexuality. On the one hand, Stoddard was operating under these premises: (1) that God-given instincts must by their very nature be right; (2) that the expression of his affectionate feelings for other males, since they were the only ones he had, was therefore not wrong; and (3) that the Catholic church made allowances for those of his temperament in a way that the Protestant denominations did not. On the other hand, the Brothers of the Holy Cross viewed the physical expression of homosexual love as a sin, and they did not hesitate to say so. "There can be no intimate [male-male] friendships," one of the Brothers had warned Tom Cleary the year before, "without sin." Tom had retorted, "Then I will live in sin" (D 30 May 1885).
When Cleary had told him this news, Stoddard was enraged to the point of launching a counterattack in his diary. "How foul these brothers are," he wrote, "how prone to think evil and poison the minds of the lads." On this point he was adamant. He would give up almost anything else for the churchsmoking, for instance, or drinking. But love? Never! The "palpable embodiment of . . . love," he had written during
his
first days at Notre Dame, was his ''meat and drink," and he later vowed that nothing could persuade him "to foreswear these experiences" he had been having with Tom Cleary (D 15 Feb. 1885, 19 Jan. 1885).
11
Either the Brothers were wrong or he was wrong. Stoddard would not allow this difference of opinion to drive him out of the church, but it certainly was reason enough to leave Notre Dame.
II
That September Stoddard wrote to Father Damien that he was "once more a wanderer," asking the priest to pray that he might "find rest at lastsomewhere."
12
For the next two years, somewhere was the Cleary home, where he was accepted merely as Tom's good friend, a charming conversationalist, a noted Catholic writer, and a disarming if slightly eccentric houseguest. For a while Stoddard was content to explore Covington, a bucolic suburb of Cincinnati. Eventually, he became part of a group of Bohemian artists in Cincinnati that revolved around Harry Farny, whom he had met in Munich during his stay with Joe Strong and Reggie Birch. By 1887, Stoddard had settled into a comfortable routine in his "Old Kentucky Home," dividing his time between writing letters and articles, reading books, collecting autographed pictures, taking

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