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

For the Pleasure of His Company [1903] and reading the Balzac that inspired Barthes's S/Z is that in the Stoddard novel, the codes of homosexuality are self-consciously employed as codes." The effect is "artificial but not artful," Yingling claims, because "it was perhaps impossible in 1903 to produce a well-formed text on a discursively de-formed topic." He goes on to suggest that the very artlessness of Stoddard's only novel, whose plot is so conspicuously incoherent, makes it a "representation of sexual displacement and of the inability of the homosexual to gain a socially-defined and -sanctioned identity." Likewise the psychological va-

 

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pidity of its protagonist Paul Clitheroe, the ''vacuum at the center of his character." is "the textual equivalent to the vacuum homosexuality was for the West at the turn of the century." 2 Men like Stoddard, however, had little choice but to fill this vacuum for themselves as best they could, borrowing from the codes available to say who and what they were.
Soon after the turn of the century, Stoddard, then in his late fifties and in poor health, was planning to return from Washington, D.C., where he had been fired from his professorship at the Catholic University of America, to California, where he had first made his reputation in the 1860s as "The Boy Poet of San Francisco" and had later gained recognition for his travel writings from Europe and the South Seas. For a while he attached himself to the artists' colony at Carmel, where the poet George Sterling caught his eye and inspired some typically (for Stoddard) effusive letters. Deeply devoted to "darling Wolf," as he called Jack London. Sterling was nevertheless nonplussed and repelled by Stoddard's ardor. His is a "case of inversion of sex," he confided to his mentor Ambrose Bierce, who reassured Sterling after Stoddard's death that "my objection to him was the same as yourshe was not content with the way that God had sexed him." 3
Stoddard himself told London that "I am what I was when I was born." 4 To define what he was when he was born, he would not have used the pathologizing label of "inversio," as applied to him by Sterling out of apparent "homosexual panic." 5 Moreover, he had usually been quite content with the way God had sexed him. (He did believe in God; a convert to Roman Catholicism, he remained devout to the end.) When, late in life, Stoddard encountered "Xavier Mayne" 's Im re, the first explicitly "homosexual" novel published by an American (albeit privately and pseudonymously), he copied a sentence into his notebook: "The silences of intimacy stand for the most perfect mutuality." 6 Stoddard had come of age before the proliferation of terms"invert," "Uranian," "intermediate type," and so onmeant to distinguish, usually invidiously, between men seeking the mutuality of other men and those preferring "heterosexual" intimacy. His representations of his own desire were part and parcel of the discourses (and silences) that preceded the medical paradigm of "homosexuality." In the late nineteenth century, as Peter Gay remarks, homosexuals derived certain advantages from the reticence, bordering on obliviousness, of bourgeois culture: "Homosexual lovers . . . were safer in the earlier days of tight-lipped equivocations than in the later days of clinical inquisitiveness." 7

 

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Consider, for instance, the reception of South-Sea Idyls (1875), in which Stoddard made fiction of his travels in Hawaii and Tahiti during the late 1860s. The Island adventures most significant to him were undoubtedly his sexual initiation and subsequent affairs with native youths. Several tales based on these experiences have been reprinted by the Gay Sunshine Press precisely by virtue of what the publisher calls their "veiled homoeroticism," which the modern reader, it is presumed, will have no difficulty in unveiling. 8 South-Sea Idyls abounds in hints that Stoddard's intercourse with the natives had been more than