Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard Read Online Free PDF Page A

Pagan, like Playing the Game, is not theoretically "sophisticated." Roger Austen was not a scholar of an academic stripe, despite his years of graduate study. By temperament and background, he was a "man of letters," and he always wrote for a general audience. I suspect he would have had neither patience nor use for much recent gender theory, even had he lived to read it. Nevertheless Austen's life of Charles Warren Stoddard, which is among the fullest and frankest biographies of nineteenth-century American homosexuals to appear so far, will undoubtedly provide grist for a variety of theoretical mills.
In bringing Genteel Pagan into the light, I owe a debt to those who offered me advice for revision of Austen's unedited typescript (but who are not responsible for my editorial decisions): George Arms, Robert Emmet Long, Robert K. Martin, Douglas Mitchell, and Michael Paller. Carl G. Stroven, who had been so helpful to Roger Austen, kindly provided me with photographs of Stoddard. For general encouragement I am grateful to Hayden Carruth, Richard Hall, Susan Wolstenholme, and Thomas Yingling. The production of this book would have been impossible without the able assistance, at different stages, of Margie May and Eve Crandall.
The following archives have granted me permission to quote unpublished letters in their collections: the American Antiquarian Society; the George Arents Research Library for Special Collections at Syracuse University (Charles Warren Stoddard Collection); the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Charles Warren Stoddard Papers, C-H 53); the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia (Charles Warren Stoddard Collection, #8533); the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Collection of American Literature); Brown University Library; The Catholic University of America

 

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Library; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Lilly Library, Indiana University: the Massachusetts Historical Society; Robert Louis Stevenson House, State of California, Department of Parks and Recreation, Monterey District; the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio; Department of Special Collections, the Stanford University Libraries; the University of Hawaii at Manoa Library; The Archives of the University of Notre Dame (Charles Warren Stoddard Collection; Reverend Daniel Hudson Collection); the University of San Francisco Library.
In a revised form, a brief section of chapter 5 is derived from Roger Austen's article, "Stoddard's Little Tricks in South Sea Idyls," Journal of Homosexuality 8 (Spring/Summer 1983). Permission to reuse this material has been granted by The Haworth Press. A brief section of chapter 10 appeared originally as the Introduction to For the Pleasure of His Company (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987).
Finally, I wish to thank Clark Dougan and Bruce G. Wilcox of the University of Massachusetts Press for supporting a project that other publishers were so reluctant to consider. In these days of rampant homophobia, within government and without, to publish Genteel Pagan is not only a vindication of Roger Austen; it is also a welcome demonstration of good principles.

 

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Editor's Introduction
John W. Crowley
Known in his day primarily as a "California humorist," literarily akin to Bret Harte and Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard (18431909) would now seem to have less significance for his work than for his life. Author of genteel poetry and exotic travel sketches that had largely been forgotten by the time of his death, Stoddard was also a lover of men at the historical moment when "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" were being constructed by the scientific and other discourses that have organized modern common sense about human sexuality. 1
In reviewing two of Stoddard's books that have recently been reprinted, Thomas Yingling observes that "the difference between reading