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

"Stag-Racket Bungalow" in Hawaii, where three young men-about-town took in ''Charley" Stoddard as a boarder and good fellow; "Tuckanuck," the exquisitely appointed house of William Sturgis Bigelow on an island off Nantucket, where men took their ease, often naked, in an untamed natural setting; Carmel, where the California literati tried to combine art with physical culture. What Stoddard desired was a homosocial site in which his "feminine" tastes could be more fully expressed, one that literally brought home the worlds of art, religion, and tropical languor. He was most himself in a parlor that could double as a stage from which he retailed his adventures, for attentive visitors, from the comfort of an easy chair, surrounded by the curios that were his props.
Stoddard also possessed an extraordinary social grace in the homes of others. Wherever he went, either in male homosocial spheres or the domains of women, Stoddard was always welcomed merely for the pleasure of his company. As Howells said, Stoddard's "utter lovableness" endeared him to everyone who knew, "which is to say, loved. him": "He was so greatly and constantly beloved of hospitality that, as he complained once, he was being perpetually passed round on a plate, and there were none of his hosts who did not wish to add some special garniture to the dish." 56 As the metaphor implies, Stoddard readily adapted himself to a variety of social situations, masking his "temperament" when necessary. What remained constant, however, was his aestheticism "of Chopin at twilight, Oriental bric-a-brac, incense, lounging robes, and fragrant cigarettes." 57
During Oscar Wilde's sensational American tour in 1882, in the course of which he arrived in California "wearing a Spanish sombrero, velvet suit, puce cravat, yellow gloves, and buckled shoes" and proceeded to drink members of the Bohemian Club under the table, 58 Isobel Strong wrote to Stoddard about her meeting the resplendent visitor in San Francisco:

 

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He was delightfully entertaining, and said that the only thing he regretted about California was that he had not seen the Yosemite Valley and Charley Stoddard. But you, Charley, are the real aesthetehe affects what to you is natural and he has not your languour, grace, or beautiful voice and so the general verdict is that we have a better aesthete at home than this fellow who came all these miles to "show off." 59
What was "natural" to Stoddard was soon, largely through the agency of Oscar Wilde, to seem all too "unnatural." Long before the scandalous trials of 1895, Stoddard had recognized in Wilde what "decent" people were later shocked to discover. 60 As he wrote to a friend from Hawaii in 1882: ''Oscar Wilde! Shall I ever find him in this vague world? If you see him before I do, and of course you will. please say the unutterable things that stick in my throatbecause here there is no one to spoon with, or to gush over, or to care a fig for and I am out of practice." 61
"Spooning" and "gushing" were specialized words in Stoddard's vocabulary, used only in reference to his love for men and, outside of his diary, only in letters to fellow lovers of men. All such "homosexuals," whatever the variations in their gender identities, were subsumed during the 1890s, Sedgwick argues, under the aristocratic Wildean stereotype: "For the first time in England, homosexual styleand homophobic styleinstead of being stratified and specified and kept secret along lines of class, became . . . a household wordthe word 'Oscar Wilde.'" One consequence was that Symonds and Edward Carpenter, disciples of Whitman and proselytizers for a "middle-class-oriented but ideologically 'democratic,' virilizing, classicizing, idealistic, self-styled political version of male homosexuality," lost their consensus. 62
The impact of "Oscar Wilde" on American "homosexuals" was perhaps neither so immediate nor so profound as it was in England. For Stoddard, in any case, Whitman, not Wilde, was the