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

not answer in America, as a general principle,not even in California, where men are tolerably bold." Stoddard went on to describe a typical night of love with one or another young native: awakening with "his arm over my breast and around me." "You will easily imagine," he asserted, "how delightful I find this life. I read your Poems with a new spirit, to understand them as few may be able to." Stoddard closed with a request for a photograph. 17 Whitman obliged, adding in a note: "I cordially accept your appreciation, & reciprocate your friendship. . . . Those tender & primitive personal relations away off there in the Pacific islands, as described by you, touched me deeply." 18

 

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In 1870, when he was preparing to return to the Islands, Stoddard explained to Whitman that he needed to "get in amongst people who are not afraid of instincts and who scorn hypocrisy." Only "barbarism" had given him "the fullest joy of my life," and he begged the poet's blessing: "I could then go into the South Seas feeling sure of your friendship and I should try to live the real life there for your sake as well as my own.'' 19 "As to you," Whitman replied, "I do not of course object to your emotional & adhesive nature, & the outlet thereof, but warmly approve them." But then he gently reproved Stoddard for looking unnecessarily far afield for that outlet: "But do you know (perhaps you do,) how the hard, pungent, gritty, worldly experiences & qualities in American practical life, also serve? how they prevent extravagant sentimentalism? & how they are not without their own great value & even joy?" 20
From Michael Lynch's excellent study, we know that Whitman had adapted the word "adhesiveness" from phrenology to his own purposesto have "an exclusive reference to same-sex love." 21 Whether or not Stoddard grasped this special usage in Whitman's letter, he never adopted the term himself. He seems also to have missed the point of Whitman's contrast between "South-Sea Bubbles" (the title Bret Harte had encouraged Stoddard to use for South-Sea Idyls) and the hard, pungent, gritty, and worldly realities at home. In effect, Whitman was challenging Stoddard's understanding of the spirit of his poems. What Stoddard considered to be the "real life" of the Islands Whitman saw as exoticism that amounted to "extravagant sentimentalism."
Stoddard's notion of "barbarism" was not only sentimental; it was also thoroughly in keeping with the prevailing racialism and imperialism of the American Gilded Age. 22 When Bierce once twitted Stoddard for going to the Islands to have love affairs with "nigger" boys, 23 he was exposing in his own contempt the underside of Stoddard's "tender and primitive relations." The very imprecision of Bierce's racialism, in which Polynesians are assimilated into the undifferentiated category of "nigger," is indicative of an undiscriminating discrimination against all nonwhitesor, more exactly, against non-Anglo-Saxons.
Although reviewers often compared him to Melville, Stoddard lacked the radically subversive vision of his predecessor's South-Sea romances. If he deplored, as Melville did, the influence of Christian missionaries over the Islanders, still he exempted the Catholic ones from blame. Despite his prodigal pose, Stoddard never forgot that he was civilized at heart; his chumming with the savages, whom he tended to reduce to

 

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comic stereotypes, was a form of slumming with those beyond the normal (and normalizing) bourgeois ken. In seeking to escape sexual "hypocrisy," Stoddard did not question the cultural presuppositions that shaped his attraction to "barbarism"such as the idea that nonwhite races were less afraid of "instincts'' and thus naturally more promiscuous than Anglo-Saxons.
From his youth, Stoddard felt a special (but not exclusive) attraction to those darker than he, whether the Mexicans he encountered as a child in San Francisco, or the "mezzo-tinted" boy that became his school chum in