Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (34 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 115
rides in the countryside, and occasionally going into the city to chat with Farny or to see a play. One of the most heartening developments was the repair of his relationship with Father Hudson, who continued to solicit articles for the
Ave Maria.
Their correspondence was full of news about writers and books, both sacred and profane, and gossip about the beloved "boys" of Notre Dame. The priest also condoled with Stoddard after his mother's death in February 1887.
One of the books that Father Hudson forwarded to Stoddard that year was
A Look Round Literature
by the prolific Scottish writer Robert Buchanan. It was inscribed "To Charles Warren Stoddard. A token of sympathy & admiration from Robert Buchanan"to which was added this bit of verse:
"I never bowed, but to superior work,
Nor ever failed in my allegiance
there."
Young
13
Buchanan had achieved notoriety in England by attacking D. G. Rossetti and "The Fleshly School of Poetry," but it was his views on American literature that endeared him to Stoddard. Buchanan held that Whitman was one of the greatest poets of the century. (By contrast, Howells and James were effeminate "man-milliners.") Buchanan also decried the American neglect of Melville and of Stoddard himself.
A more famous Scottish writer that Stoddard and Father Hudson discussed in their letters was Robert Louis Stevenson, who was soon to arrive in America en route to the South Pacific. "He is the fashion, the rage just now," Stoddard opined. "Fashions change and rages exhaust themselves. Presently there will be a reaction and he will be underrated in the same proportion that he is over rated now."
14
No doubt Stoddard kept such opinions to himself when he met Fanny Stevenson during her visit to Covington and Cincinnati in October 1887. Fanny told Stoddard about her plans to spend the winteralong with her husband, son, and mother-in-lawin the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York, where the bracing air of Saranac Lake was thought to be ideal for consumptives. Stoddard was invited to join them.
15
When malaria struck him again during the winter of 1887-88, however, Stoddard was too seriously ill to think of traveling all the way to New York. As usual, the Clearys were extremely solicitous, providing around-the-clock care while he was bedfast. By the first week of Febru-
 
Page 116
ary 1888, Stoddard was looking and feeling much better, and he decided to go East after allnot to the Adirondacks, which the Stevensons were in the process of leaving, but to New England.
Although born in New York, Stoddard liked to think of himself as a child of New England; and when he received an invitation from his friend Theodore Vail to come to Boston Highlands for the summer, he accepted at once. Vail was the president of the Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph Company of New York, a wealthy Presbyterian with a wife and a son recently graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy. Vail also enjoyed collecting books, paintings, and interesting people, and he promised Stoddard that there would be plenty of yachting that summer up and down the New England coast. For the next several months. Stoddard accompanied the Vails and their wealthy friends aboard the
Norma
as it sailed up Long Island Sound and over to Provincetown and along the Maine coast as far as Bar Harbor. Mrs. Vail and young Davis were planning a trip to Europe, and Stoddard was asked to be their traveling companionall expenses paid. H
e
could hardly refuse so generous an offer, even though he had come to regard Davis as "bloated, overgrown, ungainly, uninteresting and spoiled utterly."
16
Before the mid-August sailing date, Stoddard was able to visit a great number of people in Boston, and he was especially delighted to meet someone to whom he had been writing for years. W. D. Howells was spending the summer with his family at Little Nahant in hopes that the salt air might restore the health of his daughter, Winifred, who was to die the next year. Wearing a new pair of his host's "Wigwam" slippers, which he was urged to keep as a souvenir,
17
Stoddard basked contentedly as Howells urged him to work on the San Francisco novel he had laid aside in Hawaii. This book should not be quite so airy as
South-Sea Idyls,
Howells advised. Stoddard should depict characters and settings drawn from ordinary life. But that was a problem for Stoddard. How acceptable, after all, would be the truth about a young man whose emotional life consisted of falling in love, time after time, with other young men? Nevertheless, Stoddard decided to sit down to work, and for a few days in August he wrote several pages every morning. But there was no completed manuscript for Howells to read until 1896, and the novel itself did not appear until 1993.
18
The other person Stoddard wanted to see in Boston that summer was his old San Francisco friend, Theodore Dwight, who was now cataloguing papers for the Adams family in Quincy. Both men had been
 
Page 117
dropping hints in their letters for some time. Most recently, Stoddard had written of his great fondness for Tom Cleary, and Dwight had replied that he wished some similar relationship might brighten his own life. Stoddard and Dwight met several times, mainly in restaurants, where they dined on lobster, drank claret, and gossiped for hours. It is likely that Stoddard brought Dwight up-to-date on all of his "Kids," one of whom, Willie Woodworth, was soon to become a good friend of Dwight. (Woodworth was graduating that summer from Harvard, where he would stay on to do graduate work in zoology under the direction of the famed Louis Agassiz.) Dwight perhaps told Stoddard about his circle of homosexual friends in Boston, each of whom was cultivating the friendship of some promising and discreet young man. Dwight himself had a special interest in photographing good-looking bathers at the seashore, and he had gained some expertise at developing his own prints.
III
After spending a "glorious day" in New York, Stoddard joined Mrs. Vail and Davis aboard a German steamship bound for Bremen. Once in Germany, Stoddard began to think he had made a mistake. The Vails were all too proper and conventional, and he began to chafe at the "tediously polite bondage" to which he had submitted himself. He complained to Howells that "respectability bores me horribly" and to Father Hudson that he was not going to be allowed to enjoy Europe in the "good old Bohemian fashion."
19
But he did his best to adjust and to behave, having little choice in the matter. He let Mrs. Vail take his good arm when they went into first-class hotel restaurants, and he tried to establish some rapport with Davis, whose chief aspiration, once he got to Harvard, was to row on the varsity crew. In Munich, where they settled for the winter, all three signed up for daily German lessonssomething that was not Stoddard's idea. He would much rather have spent his time visiting the old haunts, carousing with the Munich artists he had met in the 1870s and, through them, meeting the new crop of art students from America.
Obliged to behave circumspectly, Stoddard decided to write up his mild "adventures" for the
Ave Maria.
In contrast to his
Chronicle
pieces of the 1870s, the tone of these "Letters from Over the Sea" is relentlessly pious; a reader might get the impression that Stoddard did
 
Page 118
little else in Europe but visit cathedrals. Of course he
was
visiting cathedrals, and he knew that
Ave
Maria
readers wanted a Catholic slant on Europe. But there was, perhaps, a more subtle motivation for his scrupulously devout manner. In the back of his mind Stoddard kept rehearsing his battles with Father Walsh and Father Regan, never convinced that he had succeeded in discrediting them while exonerating himself.
20
Thus the "Letters from Over the Sea" might help to counteract any anti-Stoddard rumors that were still being circulated by his various "enemies" at Notre Dame.
The highlight of Stoddard's stay in Europe came in March 1889, when he and the Vails went to Italy. Its sensuous beauty was especially welcome after the cold, dull winter in Germany, and Stoddard was apparently able to break free from the Vails much of the time during his trip. A few precious days were spent in Venice, where Stoddard lolled about in gondolas. In Florence, he was granted an audience with "Ouida" (Marie Louise de La Ramée), whose popular novels he had treasured for years. In Rome he visited the Vatican, spending many hours at the American College in search of old and new friends. He was also received at the Palace Barbarini by William Wetmore Story, an elderly American poet and sculptor who had been living in Rome since 1856. Story knew many of the "better" people on both sides of the Atlantic, and he may have said something to Stoddard about his friend, Henry James, who by that time had been living in London for some years. At any rate, James became one of the people that Stoddard decided he must meet before he sailed home to America.
The most important thing that happened to Stoddard in Rome was his meeting an Irish-American priest named John J. Keane, the former Bishop of Richmond who had resigned his see in 1887 to become rector of the new Catholic University of America. Keane had come to Rome to obtain papal sanction for the school, which was scheduled to open in the fall in Washington, D.C. He was also interviewing potential faculty members, all of whom were to be "professors with proven ability and outstanding reputations for scholarship": such men as Henri Hyvernat, the eminent Egyptologist, for Old Testament; Joseph Pohle, then teaching at the seminary at Fulda, for Thomistic philosophy; Joseph Schroeder, the brilliant linguist and writer, for dogma.
21
There was also to be a chair of English literature, and, surprisingly, Keane offered it to Stoddard, who promptly accepted.
Stoddard certainly had no reputation for scholarship, and it is debat-
 
Page 119
able whether he had demonstrated any teaching ability at Notre Dame. Furthermore, he had no regular college training and no advanced degree. But Keane was under pressure to secure several Americans for his faculty, and he apparently believed that his literature professor need not have a degree if he had some reputation as a man of letters. If not Stoddard, who else was available in the field of Catholic American literature? Orestes Brownson was dead by this time, and neither Father John Bannister Tabb nor Maurice Francis Egan was apparently available. Stoddard was becoming well known in the
Ave MariaA Troubled Heart
and
The Lepers of Molokai
had been praised by Catholics across the countryand he had a distinguished air that would lend a certain dignity to the chair of English literature.
In view of his unhappy experience at Notre Dame, it may seem unaccountable that Stoddard should have accepted this position. But the rector convinced him that his teaching in Washington would be much easier than it had been in South Bend. In a letter to Father Hudson, Stoddard explained that he would give only several lectures a week: "There will be no text book; no essays to correct; the students will listen to my talk, take what notes they can, and thenat suitable intervalsI can call upon one or another to relate what he may remember."
22
More important, the school's head was going to be on his side. In showing Stoddard a sketch of Caldwell Hall, which was to contain both private quarters and classrooms during the first few years, Bishop Keane offered him free choice of his rooms. The nation's capital would be a more stimulating atmosphere than the dreary midwestern countryside. There would be a generous salary, and money was important just then for a variety of family reasons. Finally, what alternatives lay before Stoddard as he thought of returning to America? Although Howells had suggested that he settle in Manhattan and try to write salable fiction, Stoddard was not at all confident he could do so. Catholic University offered a far more secure situation.
With an exciting and definite future to plan, Stoddard was more discontented than ever as he tagged along after the Vails on sightseeing trips during the next few months. As spring turned to summer, he grew increasingly impatient to return to Covington, where he would prepare for the fall. A departure date in early August was agreed upon, much to Stoddard's relief; he and the Vails would be spending their last two weeks in England before sailing from Liverpool.
The person Stoddard most wanted to see in England was Frank

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