A unique gathering of bohemians and Catholics packed Monterey’s San Carlos Church on this date 115 years ago for the solemn funeral of Charles Warren Stoddard, one of the most enigmatic literary characters of the era.
Stoddard had died four days earlier at a friend’s house on Larkin Street following a lengthy battle with heart disease. He was 65.
Delivering the eulogy in the crowded church on April 27, 1909, was Rev. Henry Stark, a Paulist priest who had been one of Stoddard’s pupils when Stoddard taught at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C.
Stark spoke eloquently of the conflict that apparently gripped the poet, author and world traveler. “Within the year he told me in person, ‘I have never written anything that could make scandal or of a character that any school girl could not read,’” Stark said. “Yet, with tears flowing from his eyes, Charley said, ‘I have been accused of writing otherwise.’ This purity of life and heart was the expression of the life within.”
Pure. That’s one of the words Mark Twain used to describe Stoddard, who was once employed by Twain to manage the great author’s European tour.
Among the things other people said out loud about Stoddard: He was a poet of note, he was an author of authority and an accomplished journalist, he was a friend and confidante of consequential writers like Twain, Joaquin Miller and Bret Harte. He was a world traveler, a member in good standing at the legendary Bohemian Club of San Francisco, and a converted Catholic who wrote passionately about missionary work and the California missions.
Here’s what his friends and admirers did not say out loud: Charles Warren Stoddard wrote the first gay novel ever published in America, an obviously autobiographical publication titled “For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City.” Also, he preferred the company of younger men and boys.
He is buried in the Catholic cemetery.
Stoddard was born in Rochester, N.Y., in 1843, and moved to San Francisco with his family while he was still a child. He wrote verse for local newspapers, got some of them published in a book, and shoved off to see the world. Stoddard was especially fond of the South Seas, and he first became noticed in the literary world with the publication of “Idyls,” a collection of letters he wrote during his first voyage to tropical islands. He wrote several other nonfiction accounts of his travels, most of them tales which — let’s be clear — tended toward the homoerotic.
During one of those trips, to Molokai, he met Father Damien, the so-called “Apostle to the Lepers,” and published another book called “The Lepers of Molokai.” Soon after, in 1867, he became a Catholic, and wrote “A Troubled Heart and How it Was Comforted,” in which he described his religious conversion. With “Troubled Heart,” he declared, “you have my inner life all laid bare.”
Stoddard also distinguished himself by writing a series of travelogue-type dispatches published in The San Francisco Chronicle while traveling with Twain in Europe in 1874-75.
Through it all, he befriended cultural and literary luminaries of the day. “Beloved for his wit and amiability, Stoddard had a genius for friendship,” according to one of Stoddard’s biographers, John Crowley.
For a time, Stoddard plunged into academia, becoming English department chair at the University of Notre Dame. That didn’t last long, as he left under questionable circumstances. The New Advent, an encyclopedia devoted to all things Catholic, said Stoddard departed due to “ill health.” But Crowley reported that Stoddard was forced out of Notre Dame after three semesters after clashing with colleagues “over his attentions to the students.” Stoddard then taught at the Catholic University of America, where he met Stark, but lasted there only a couple of years.
Stoddard fell in love with the painter Frank Millet during the 1870s and lived with him during a romantic winter in Venice. But he usually favored more youthful companions. Of his several "kids," as he called them, the most significant was Kenneth O'Connor, who was 15 years old in 1895 when Stoddard unofficially adopted him and took him home to his bungalow in Washington. That relationship ended messily, and Stoddard retreated back to California, to concentrate on his writing, his Catholic faith and what the locals euphemistically referred to as his “bohemian” lifestyle.
It wasn’t until later in his life that he wrote “For the Pleasure of His Company,” published by A.M. Robertson of San Francisco. Stoddard made no bones about the autobiographical nature of his protagonist. “Here you have my full confession,” he reportedly said of the book.
“Pleasure” was Stoddard’s first foray into fiction. While it is regarded as a ground-breaking work in gay fiction, it was mostly ignored by readers and critics of the time. The New York Times dismissed the novel in several short paragraphs under a headline that read “A Raving Egotist.” A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times referred to the book as a “literary oddity.” Crowley, the biographer, called the book “an (unsuccessfully) experimental work of gay fiction.”
A frequent visitor to the bohemian community in Carmel, Stoddard came to Monterey to stay in 1905. His final years were a struggle. His health went bad and he spent the last several months of his life in bed, unable to repair a failing heart. He died around 10 o’clock the night of April 23, 1909. The Monterey Daily Cypress ended its front-page obituary the next day by noting that Stoddard “loved this place and its traditions, and he did not care to leave it.”
And while the obituary writers of the time skirted the issue of his double life, the six men selected to serve as pallbearers at his funeral seemed to have been selected to straddle Stoddard’s bohemian and catholic interests. They included poet George Sterling and actor Jay Dwiggins — and Michael Noon, former city marshal, and Harry Ashland Green, the noted Monterey developer and preservationist.
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Postscripts:
Frank Millet, Stoddard’s lover in Venice, was among the passengers who died in the sinking of the Titanic. At the time the ship hit the iceberg, Millet was sharing a room with Major Archibald Butt, an advisor to both presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Butt was also among the Titanic’s victims.
A 256-page book about Stoddard, entitled “Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard,” was published in 1995. Written by Roger Austen, the biography was edited by Crowley.
Sources:
The Los Angeles Times
“Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Warren Stoddard.” Roger Austen, University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
“For the Pleasure of His Company.” Charles Warren Stoddard. 1903.
The Monterey Daily Cypress
The New York Times
The San Francisco Chronicle
“Charles Warren Stoddard: The Pleasure of His Company.” Brian McGinty, California Historical Quarterly, (Summer 1973)
“Cannibal Cruising, or, ‘to the careful student of the Unnatural History of Civilization.’” Ralph J. Poole, Amerikastudien / American Studies, Queering America (2001)
The San Francisco Examiner