Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard by Roger Austen

and "homosexuality.''
In one newspaper article, in the popular vein of the Author at Home, Stoddard's relationship to Kenneth was placed beside his fondness for native boys and found to be equally unexceptionable:
"The kid" is the object of Mr. Stoddard's warmest affection; he is a fine-looking boy 7 years oldhis other name is Kennethand he was adopted by Mr. Stoddard when quite a little fellow. The author of "South Sea Idylis," [sic] has all his life had a way of adopting boys, and he has watched over them with more than a father's love and care until they passed from him either by death or marriage. Some he has immoralized [sic!]: Kehele [sic], the young hero of Hawaii; Kana-Ana of Tahita [sic]: Hua-Manu of Pomotoe Islands, and others he has come across have deeply appealed to him.
Mr. Stoddard's nature is an unique one; he has many souls in one and

 

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through them all are strains of tenderness and melancholy. Boys of ardent enthusiasm and fervor of feeling are completely won over by him. Indeed. he wears his heart upon his sleeve at the disposal of whoever will take it. 51
The untruths herethat Stoddard adopted Kenneth at a young age. that he habitually watched over his "Kids" until either marriage or death did them partserve to trim the facts more closely to the narrative pattern of a male domestic idyll. The reporter is strikingly (to the modern reader) sanguine about what is called "more than a father's love": a term that seems less obscure if it is heard to resonate with "passing the love of women," the biblical phrase often applied to male romantic friendships in the nineteenth century. 52 Stoddard's "tenderness and melancholy," the traits common to his ''many souls," qualify him, in fact, as an ideal guide for boys of like disposition, who require a "feminine" father. 53
With such a father, what boy would need a mother? This is the unspoken question behind the reporter's jocular treatment of the misogynic spirit that pervaded "The Bungalow." "'No woman can stand our whimsmine and the kid's.'" Stoddard told the interviewer, who adds that Jules, too, "has not much liking for 'these girls d'Amerique' who stop on their bicycles by the front gate to talk to 'the kid.' The fair lassies never dream of Jules' contempt for them nor of Mr. Stoddard's hearty laughter as he peeps out through the closed shutters." 54 Inaudible here is any nervous overtone to Stoddard's "hearty" laughter as he peeps voyeuristically at the "lassies" playing up to the "Kid." Of course. the joke is entirely on them, foolish enough not to recognize their superfluity to this decidedly male ménage: a house to which no angel need apply.
Enclosed by the shutters at "The Bungalow" were the rooms stuffed with souvenirs that Stoddard had accumulated through decades of travel. Part library, part shrine, part grass hut, the house was decorated to be emblematic of the major triad of its owner's life. Literature: photographs of celebrated authors; a collection of over three-thousand volumes, including deluxe editions and many inscribed books. Catholicism: a glass case containing relics of Father Damien (the veil and maniple he wore when saying mass for the lepers); a portrait of a Capucin monk vowed to silence: a crown of thorns; the rosary of a Franciscan friar; a picture in every room of a statue of Saint Anthony ("The Bungalow" was also called "Saint Anthony's Best"). The South Seas:

 

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"cocoanuts from the Fijis, fans and feathers from Hawaii, savage weapons and dancing skirts from Tahiti, and other bright pagan relics." 55
Because it expressed a domestic ideal, "The Bungalow" was different from the more insistently "manly" environments to which Stoddard had gravitated: the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, where alcoholic high jinks were meant to set obstreperous young writers above the sober business class; Charlotte Street in London, where illustrator Wallis Mackay played genial host to an endless stream of male visitors;