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

jottings in the "Thought-Book" he kept from 1865 to 1867. In one entry, he thinks of sketching a "romance of how my soul got into [Ada] Clare's body and was at rest." with the idea that the "physique" would thus be "made whole." 13 Coincidentally, this concept of a woman's soul trapped inside a man's

 

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body was the basis of Carl Ulrichs's theories in Germany at this time. By the end of the century in England, Ulrichs's Urning had been translated into Edward Carpenter's "Uranian," a member of an "intermediate" sex that, high on the evolutionary ladder, combined in one body the most noble aspects of the female and the male. 14 Thinking of himself as some kind of biological sport, Stoddard, at least at this time, seemed to experience very little shame or guilt about falling in love with other young men. In a few years he was to have Paul Rookh argue in ''Hearts of Oak" that God-given instincts of whatever kind must be right: and in a "Thought-Book" entry for 27 May 1866, he expressed his belief in a God who is perpetually compassionate and forgiving. Later we will find that, in moments of depression, Stoddard tended to despise and reject himself. But in his young manhood he seemed to view the arrival of love as a tender and enchanting experience. Even when the love object was someone as indifferent as the "Spell-binder," Stoddard always tried to relish and enjoy the experience the best he knew how.

 

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By the end of the 1863-64 school year at Brayton Academy, Stoddard was a nervous wreck. What led to this condition we do not know for sure; but, aside from Stoddard's aversion to his studies, his case of nerves might have had to do with an especially devastating emotional entanglement. Whatever the cause, the family doctor prescribed that nineteenth-century panacea for any sort of mental or physical indisposition: a lengthy sea voyage. So in August 1864, in order to recover his equilibrium, Stoddard left San Francisco for a six-months' stay in Hawaii.
Just twenty-one, Stoddard was still malleable, unformed, and uncertain from nearly every point of view. As a writer, he was a published poet, but he had not yet discovered the type of writing that would bring him more than local celebrity. As a searcher after religious truth, he was wavering somewhere between the Unitarians and the Episcopalians, occasionally visiting Catholic churches in order to hear the beautiful music. As one drawn to his own sex, he was still no doubt very much of a virgin, puzzled and saddened that most of those he loved so rapturously seemed not to care too much for him in return. In several ways, this trip

 

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to Hawaii was a turning point, destined, as Stoddard put it, "to influence the whole current of my life" (CRP).
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Charles was enchanted with the tropical kingdom of Hawaii. In the balminess of its climate, the sweep of its seashore, and the beauty of its flowers and people, it was to San Francisco as, some years before, San Francisco had been to New York State. A visitor to Honolulu about this time described the city as almost overwhelming in its lush and exotic foliage: "over-arching trees, through whose dense leafage the noon sunshine only trickled in dancing, broken lights; umbrella trees, caoutchouc, bamboo, mango, orange, breadfruit, candlenut. monkey pod, date and coco palms, alligator pears, 'prides' of Barbary, India, and Peru, and huge-leaved, wide-spreading trees, exotics from the South Seas, many of them rich in parasitic ferns, and others blazing with bright, fantastic blossoms." The people of Honolulu were just as colorful and picturesque:
Such rich brown men and women they were, with wavy, shining black hair, large, brown, lustrous eyes, and rows of perfect teeth like ivory. Everyone was smiling. . . . Without an exception, the men and women wore wreaths and garlands of flowers, carmine, orange, or pure white, twined round their hats, and thrown carelessly round their necks. . . . Chinamen