STODDARD, Charles Warren 1843-1909 (Pip Pepperpod)

PERSONAL: Born August 7, 1843, in Rochester, NY; died April 23, 1909, in Monterey, CA. Religion: Roman Catholic.

CAREER: Travel writer, poet, and journalist. Golden Era, weekly columnist, 1867; secretary-companion of Mark Twain in England, 1873; Honolulu newspaper, editorial writer, 1880s; University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, professor in English and American literature, 1885-86; Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., chairman of English literature, 1889-1902.

MEMBER: Bohemian Club, 1870s.

WRITINGS:

Poems, Anton Roman (San Francisco, CA), 1867.

South-Sea Idyls, James R. Osgood (Boston, MA), 1873, published as Summer Cruising in the South Seas, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1874, second revised edition, Scribners (New York, NY), 1892.

Mashallah! A Flight into Egypt, Appleton (New York, NY), 1881.

A Trip to Hawaii, Oceanic Steamship Co. (San Francisco, CA), 1885.

A Troubled Heart and How It Was Comforted at Last, J. A. Lyons (Notre Dame, IN), 1885.

The Lepers of Molokai, Ave Maria Press (Notre Dame, IN), 1886.

Hawaiian Life: Being Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes, F. T. Neely (Chicago, IL), 1894.

The Wonder-Worker of Padua, Ave Maria Press (Notre Dame, IN), 1896.

A Cruise Under the Crescent: From Suez to San Marco, Rand McNally (Chicago, IL), 1898.

Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska, B. Herder (St. Louis, MO), 1899.

Father Damien: The Martyr of Molokai, Catholic Truth Society (San Francisco, CA), 1901.

In the Footprints of the Padres, A. M. Robertson (San Francisco, CA), 1902, revised edition, 1911.

Exits and Entrances: A Book of Essays and Sketches, Lothrop (Boston, MA), 1903.

For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City, Thrice Told, A. M. Robertson (San Francisco, CA), 1903.

The Island of Tranquil Delights: A South Sea Idyl and Others, Herbert B. Turner (Boston, MA), 1904.

Apostrophe to the Skylark; The Bells of San Gabriel; Joe of Lahaina; Father Damien Among His Lepers; An Appreciation of Charles Warren Stoddard, by George Wharton James, Arroyo Guild Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1909.

Poems of Charles Warren Stoddard, compiled by Ina Coolbrith and Thomas Walsh, John Lane (New York, NY), 1917.

Charles Warren Stoddard's Diary of a Visit to Molokai in 1884, introduction by Oscar Lewis, Book Club of California (San Francisco, CA), 1933.

Cruising the South Seas: Stories by Charles Warren Stoddard, edited by Winston Leyland, Gay Sunshine Press (San Francisco, CA), 1987.

Contributor to periodical publications including American Literature and Huntington Library Quarterly. Published poems under pseudonym Pip Pepperpod.

SIDELIGHTS: Charles Warren Stoddard was an American poet, educator, and travel writer. His most influential travel book is South-Sea Idyls. His account of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, A Troubled Heart and How It Was Comforted at Last, is regarded as one of his most outstanding works. Poet and renowned literary figure Ina Coolbrith collected his poems in 1917. With Coolbrith, he coedited the Overland Monthly. Stoddard, often disorganized, did not finish his formal education and had a truncated acting career. However, as M. E. Grenander said in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "His talents as a good listener and fondness for the bottle contributed to his popularity with a variety of friends, including Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and, in 1870, Joaquin Miller." Grenander believed that with the increased scholarly focus on gay and lesbian studies, Stoddard will receive more critical attention. In addition to almost twenty books, he contributed more than nine hundred articles to periodicals.

Stoddard spent most of his childhood in Rochester, New York. His family tree includes former Vice President Aaron Burr, best known for his duel with Alexander Hamilton, and theologian Jonathan Edwards. In 1855, his family moved to San Francisco, where his father found a job in the shipping industry. Upon returning east, he settled with his maternal grandparents in western New York and continued his formal education. At age fifteen, he returned to San Francisco at his father's request. Stoddard, determined to become a poet, befriended various journalists, took on work as a handyman in a bookstore and studied in San Francisco and Oakland. He contributed poems to Bret Harte's Golden Era, under the pseudonym "Pip Pepperpod." He also struggled with his homosexuality, which society then did not understand well.

Stoddard's poor health led a doctor to advise him to go to Hawaii. He went in 1864 and, for six months, immersed himself in native Polynesian culture. He had an affair with a native boy named Kane-Aloha, a relationship Stoddard describes in The Island of Tranquil Delights: A South Sea Idyl and Others. This affair, Grenander said, "marked the inception of his interest in the brown-skinned youths he called 'barbarians,' to whose 'instinctual' life his own instincts could respond with delight."

In 1867, Harte edited Stoddard's Poems, his first book. Stoddard biographer Carl Stroven, according to Grenander, thought the edition, which was illustrated and stamped in gold, was "the first example of fine book making to be produced in California." That year Stoddard converted to Catholicism, while publishing verse in a new journal called the Californian.

Stoddard's sister invited him to visit her in Hawaii in 1868, and he returned for an eight-month stay. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin commissioned him to write travel sketches about his experiences there. Upon returning to California, he started writing a weekly column for the Golden Era. He helped form the Golden Gate Trinity (also known as the Overland Trinity), a trio of writers that included Harte and Coolbrith. They formed the editorial team of the Overland Monthly, a California literary journal Anton Roman founded in 1868. Stoddard and Coolbrith coedited the Overland under Harte's direction. For the Overland, Stoddard also wrote sketches of Hawaii, especially about youths he met there. In the 1870s, he joined San Francisco's Bohemian Club, over which Coolbrith presided.

Stoddard's fascination with Polynesian and South Pacific culture intensified and, in 1870, he set off to Tahiti on a French ship with a gay crew. Short on funds, he stayed only three months, but the voyage provided him with stories he told in The Island of Tranquil Delights. In 1872, he published an article titled "A Prodigal in Tahiti" in the Atlantic Monthly.

The following year he departed to Europe as a traveling correspondent, and met literary figures that included Ambrose Bierce, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and Joaquin Miller. Shortly after he arrived, he worked as a secretary-companion for Clemens, during his lecturing throughout England. Stoddard was comfortable with Europe's literary elite. "His lavender elegance was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Wild West stereotype Miller's roughneck persona was carrying to ridiculous extremes," Genander wrote. Bierce knew the British were less tolerant than Californians about homosexuality. Grenander quoted Bierce, in a warning letter to Stoddard: "You will, by the way, be under the microscope here; your lightest word and most careless action noted down, and commented on by men who cannot understand how a person of individuality in thought or conduct can be other than a very bad man. . . . Walk, therefore, circumspectly . . . avoid any appearance of eccentricity."

That same year, Stoddard's most important travel book, South-Sea Idyls, was published. Chatto & Windus in London republished it a year later as Summer Cruising in the South Seas. Many important writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, read the book, with Polynesia becoming a literary trend. Stevenson and Stoddard became friends. Stoddard was later the model for a character in Stevenson's novel The Wrecker, in which he was described as a "youngish, good-looking, fellow . . . lively and engaging."

Stoddard then visited the Middle East. He sailed there in 1876 and returned to the United States via Europe the following year. Back in the United States, he borrowed money and relied on friends' generosity, never really working regularly. His next three works reflected his experiences abroad: Mashallah! A Flight into Egypt, A Cruise Under the Crescent: From Suez to San Marco, and Exits and Entrances: A Book of Essays and Sketches.

In the early 1880s, financially strapped, he became an editorial writer for a newspaper in Honolulu. The Lepers of Molokai was based on his visit to the Molokai leper colony. He also had another affair with a young man. In 1885, he began to teach English and American literature at the University of Notre Dame, where he stayed for a year and a half. During that time, he traveled to Alaska with one of the professors, and described the trip in Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska.

After leaving Notre Dame, Stoddard settled in Kentucky, where he had his most important affair, with a youth named Tom Cleary. In 1888, he traveled to Europe with Mrs. Theodore Vail, a rich widow, and her son. The following year he became chairman of English literature at the new Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He remained there for thirteen years. Stoddard's health worsened and he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, returning after two years to San Francisco in 1905 and settling in Monterey in 1906, where he died three years later.

Stoddard, a well-traveled aesthete and great conversationalist, had many literary elite friends. Grenander called him "an acute observer of superficial details, and he was a master of tropes with a remarkable flair for words." Grenander added, however, "He lacked the powerful shaping imagination." Considered a minor writer today, he enjoyed considerable acclaim during his day. A New York Times reviewer said of Poems, "There is singularly little that is antiquated about these poems. . . . Stoddard was a supreme artist in verse as in prose, and was well in advance of his time in his entire sincerity and lack of literary pose."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 186: Nineteeth-Century American Western Writers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Gale, Robert L., editor, The Gay Nineties in America: A Cultural Dictionary of the 1890s, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1992.

Hart, James D., editor, The Oxford Companion to American Literature, Sixth edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Perkins, George, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger, editors, Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, HarperCollins Publishers (New York, NY), 1990.

periodicals

New York Times, November 4, 1917.*