Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard by Roger Austen Read Free Book Online

needed sexual expression kept him from ever keeling over into the clerical brotherhood. (He never aspired, even in fantasy, to priestly status.) Believing his desire for men was natural, and thus within the divine scheme, Stoddard also believed that the church, in its sacrament of penance, made allowances that the Protestants did not for human frailty. There is little indication, however, that Stoddard felt guilty about what he called his temperament. As he explained his religious conversion to James Whitcomb Riley: "I couldn't help it, you see; it was born in me and was the only thing that appealed to my temperament. I believe a man's religion is nessessarily [sic] a matter of temperamentI couldn't be anything else than a Catholicexcept except a downright savage, and I wish to God I were that!" 34 Catholicism, then, was as deeply "congenital" for Stoddard as his same-sexuality.
Stoddard's coming out as a Catholic in his conversion narrative, A Troubled Heart (1885), was symbolically equivalent, as Austen sees, to his revealing his sexual "temperament." 35 This equivalence remained inchoate for Stoddard because the idea of "coming out" would not crystallize in sexual, rather than religious, discourse until the category of "homosexual'' had been fully established and enforced. However adrift in his sexual life, Stoddard remained firmly anchored to his religious faith, even when church officials (as at Notre Dame and Catholic universities) seemed to conspire against him.
An interesting contrast in this regard is Fr. Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo, for whom "homosexuality" and Catholicism came more violently into collision than they ever did for Stoddard. Whereas Stoddard would have preferred being a "savage" to being the Pope of Rome. Rolfe transformed the latter fantasy into Hadrian the Seventh (1904 ), the embittered novel in which (as imaginary Pope) he avenged himself upon the church that had denied him ordination. ("Fr." stood, in fact, for "Frederick," not "Father.") In Rolfe's Manichean mindhe too was a convert to Catholicism from evangelical Protestantismthe flesh raged against the spirit. A seeker of spiritual friendships with fellow

 

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Englishmen, he was also late in life a pander of Italian boys in Venice. 36 There was, as A. O. J. Cockshut says, "an absolute gulf" between Rolfe's conduct in Italy and his ideal of friendship:
When Rolfe writes of homosexuality, he invariably does so in the coarsest, most brutal way. He can only write of it when all his higher aspirations, whether toward God or the imaginary friend, are laid asleep. His higher and lower nature can never be on stage together. There is absolutely nothing corresponding to the wistful talk about the love that dare not speak its name. And the imagined, long-desired, impossible perfect friendship is utterly chaste. 37
Love, in Rolfe's view, had nothing to do with the flesh. As he wrote to Temple Scott about "heterosexuality":
Carnal pleasure I thoroughly appreciate, but I like a change sometimes. Even partridges get tiresome after many days. Only besotted ignorance or hypocrisy demurs to carnal lust, but I meet people who call that holy which is purely natural, and I am stupefied. I suppose we all deceive ourselves. To blow one's nose (I never learned to do it) is a natural relief. So is coition. Yet the last is called holy, and the first passes without epithets. Why should one attach more importance to one than to the other? I don't think that I want to know.
Some talk of wickedness, and vulgarly confound the general with the particular. Of course you re wicked, every instant that you spend uncontemplative of, uncorresponding to, the Grace and Glory of your Maker. That may be forgiven, for that Real Love forgives. 38
Such logic, in Cockshut's opinion, plunged Rolfe into a self-destructive state of mind during his final years of penury and paranoia. He yielded to "an amalgam of two separate and partly opposite impulses: theological despair,