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

there, laughing triumphantly, "a blue shirt open at the throat, hair very much tumbled, and no thoughts of self to detract from the absolute grace of his pose.'' 45
Both mentorial and erotic, Stoddard's relationship to Woodworth bears some resemblance to "Greek love," as it was (re)understood by John Addington Symonds in his privately printed A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883). Sedgwick points out, in regard to Symonds's friendship with the Italian gondolier Angelo Fusato, that the appropriation of Whitman by upper-middle-class homosexuals in England could lead to a "distinctive sexual-political narrative" in which the "potential political effects of 'Calamus' love" were described in "terms drawn from chivalry, but appealing at the same time to the virilizing authority of the Greeks." This narrative tended in Symonds to mystify his sexual exploitation of proletarian men. His idea of Whitmanian "democracy," based "on noblesse oblige and individual pastoralism and condescension, served to keep class barriers in place. 46
As an American, however, Stoddard's class position was less fixed than Symonds's, and he never invoked the idea of "Greek love" to describe his desire for youths whose backgrounds ranged from the upper class (in the case of Woodworth), to the middle class (in the case of Tom Cleary, Stoddard's "Kid" during his brief tenure at Notre Dame), to the immigrant working class (in the case of Kenneth O'Connor, the boy he "adopted" during his Washington years). In no sense did Stoddard think of himself as an exploiter of Cleary, whose family sheltered him for two years after he resigned his professorship. With Kenneth O'Connor, who at the age of fifteen moved into Stoddard's Washington "Bungalow" in 1895, the narrative of their relationship derived less from the Greeks than from American domesticity.
Like Woodworth, O'Connor was a fatherless boy for whom Stoddard saw himself to be filling a paternal need. A dropout from school and something of a street-corner tough (Stoddard preferred the term "waif"), Kenneth drank and smoked and had his own desire for "Kids." In the spirit of Horatio Alger, Stoddard wanted to "save" the youth from a supposedly hellish family life and give him uplifting opportunities. 47

 

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Stoddard arranged for Kenneth to attend Georgetown Prep, and he lavished upon him the material bounty of bourgeois respectability. When Stoddard and O'Connor (along with Jules, the French cook and factotum, and Mexique, Stoddard's dog) took possession of their new home, Kenneth's mother helped to choose the kitchen equipment, Henry Adams sent over three Persian pillows, and even Bishop Keane, who had hired Stoddard for Catholic University, seemed to approve. Given to gushing about his "Kid" to whoever would listen, Stoddard described their life to Father Daniel Hudson, his enduring friend from Notre Dame, as "almost ideal," a domestic romance come true: "This is a rare housea house of love." 48
Although Stoddard had no biological son, his friends had no difficulty in recognizing him as Kenneth's "Dad" (which the boy was encouraged to call him). 49 Such a paternal role, as Lynch suggests, was to be proscribed for men like Stoddard under the paradigm of "homosexuality": "Pre-homosexuality 'homosexuals' entered the family structure by having children, but in the newly emerging role, the 'homosexual' would not be defined as a parent. Indeed, 'homosexual father' and 'lesbian mother' would come to be seen as self-contradictions." Here again Stoddard may be seen to mark a transition between Victorian and modern discourses on same-sexuality. Like Whitman, in his notorious claim to Symonds that he had fathered six children, Stoddard could avail himself of the idea of paternity. But whereas Whitman, as Lynch says, "assumed genetic fathering to be incommensurable with the new same-sex role he had done so much to articulate," 50 Stoddard was closer to Symonds in finding no necessary contradiction between paternity