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

meets the eye in the letter of the text. Like the word "intercourse" itself, the sexual connotations of which were as latent in nineteenth-century usage as they are dominant now, Stoddard's prose barely conceals its erotic implicationsby means, as Roger Austen suggests, of an obfuscatory narrative technique. 9
Exactly how much of Stoddard's "veiled homoeroticism" was visible to nineteenth-century readers is not easily determinable. But neither in 1873 nor in 1892, when it was republished, was South-Sea Idyls seen (in reviews, at least) to contain anything untoward. Except in the Nation, which urbanely observed that the book could not be recommended for "an invigorating and purifying tone" because the South Seas "as it used to be said of Parisare not a good place for deacons," 10 the critical consensus was that South-Sea Idyls was a delightful example of "California humor." W. D. Howells in the Atlantic Monthly welcomed it ''as a real addition to the stock of refined pleasures, and a contribution to our literature without which it would be sensibly poorer." 11
"Sensibly" might now be read as possibly referring to a homoerotic subtext in South-Sea Idyls, but that subtext had yet to be written with modern explicitness for either Howells or Stoddard. Howells understood Stoddard's narrative pose of "prodigality" as a comic convention: "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." 12 That is, what Stoddard might have meant in such homoerotic tales as "Chumming with a Savage," which Howells later called a "harmless story," 13 went without saying among good fellows, whose appreciation of "refined pleasures" did not preclude their liminal awareness of unrefined ones. "Drollery" covered and contained a multitude of implications, including sexual ones, which remained "harmless" because they were not and needed not be expressed, and thus did not invite misunderstanding. Whatever may have

 

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happened between Stoddard and his native chums was not lost within the small circle of male familiarity, but neither was it found. Indeed it was not sought.
As I have argued elsewhere, 14 this discursive system, in which silence played a crucial part, allowed such literary friends as Howells and Mark Twain to take Stoddard as a fellow good fellow even as Stoddard's same-sex preferences were not lost upon them. They "knew" about Stoddard but in a way that does not correspond to modern knowing through medicalized categories; and although they tolerated Stoddard's "homosexuality" insofar as it remained discursively marginal, they also did not hesitate to depreciate him, usually by treating him as a hapless child. From such men Stoddard could not expect complete acceptance and understanding. For that he turned at first, like many others, to Walt Whitman.
As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, Whitman became a major site for the "self-formation of many members of that new Victorian class, the bourgeois homosexual." Photographs of the bard, gifts of his books, scraps of his handwriting, gossip about him, admiring references in printall "seem to have functioned as badges of homosexual recognition, were the currency of a new community that saw itself as created in Whitman's image." 15 As Stoddard once wrote to Horace Traubel, "Do you know what life means to me? It means everything that Walt Whitman has ever said or sung . . . He breathed the breath of life into me." 16
After young Stoddard discovered the "Calamus" poems during the 1860s, he pressed his own first book of verse on Whitman. When the poet did not respond, Stoddard persisted, writing to profess that he was the "stranger" whom Whitman had enjoined to "speak" to him. He claimed kinship by recounting his experiences with the Pacific Islanders: ''I have done wonders in my intercourse with these natives. For the first time I act as my nature prompts me. It would