Aloha Wela Wela, Charley Stoddard!

Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909)

Aloha Wela Wela translates as “the warmest greetings” or in colloquial Irish, “The top of the mornin’ to you!” Aimée wrote that along with a few other Hawaiian words of love and admiration to her “chum”–travel writer Charles Warren Stoddard in his autograph book. Their friendship centered around their lifelong shared love for that haven of bliss, the heart chakra of the world, The Kingdom of Hawai’i, then known as the “Sandwich Islands.” Other contributors of poems, illustrations and inscriptions in this priceless book included Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Edwin Booth & Teddy Roosevelt, and other lesser known but equally dynamic friends Ada Clare, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, Edgar Saltus and Edmund Russell.

Early in his career, Stoddard mailed copies of his poems to his favorite authors, fishing for compliments from the most famous writers in the English language. These included literary lords of New England—Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes—and British eminences like Alfred Tennyson and Charles Darwin. “I was hoping against hope the attention of the immortals.” Incredibly most replied. Emerson enjoyed his poems: “I am much touched with them, and I think so well of their superior skill and tone that I would hear with pain that you discontinued writing.” Tennyson said simply, “I have read your verses and I liked them.” Herman Melville was “quite struck” by a certain piece. Oliver Wendall Holmes warned him to use writing as “an apology for neglecting humbler and more steadily industrious pursuits.” Stoddard exchanged letters with his hero Walt Whitman for several years, was a companion of Mark Twain and inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to sail the South Seas. Jack London revered Stoddard referring to him as Dad in his letters. He had a pen pal love affair with Yone Noguchi (poet and father of sculptor Isamu Noguchi). “I, I am a hero worshipper no more, I have met all my heroes!” Stoddard would later tell a house guest.

Ada Clare, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson would have a profound impact on Charles Stoddard’s personal and professional life and all would shape Aimée Crocker’s irreverent world view directly and indirectly.

In 1855, Stoddard’s family migrated to San Francisco from New York City when he was eleven. Stoddard began writing verses at a young age amid the growing literary climate of California. His first piece was published at aged nineteen in The Golden Era, then the chief literary organ west of the Rocky Mountains, under the pseudonym “Pip Pepperpod.”

Ada Clare

“The Boy Poet of San Francisco”

In the spring of 1864, the “Boy Poet of San Francisco” needed to recover his equilibrium after an emotionally devastating year at Oakland’s Brayton Academy. The family doctor prescribed that nineteenth century panacea for any sort of mental or physical indisposition: a lengthy sea voyage… Stoddard’s family, hoping to improve his health, arranged a stay for him in Hawai’i, where his sister was married to a wealthy planter. On the eve of his twenty-first birthday, Stoddard left San Francisco for a six-month stay in Hawai’i.

Literary phenom, actress and “Queen of Bohemia” Ada Clare, who he met at The Golden Era offices, had gone to the islands a few weeks earlier. She had always been interested in fostering younger writers and especially those who looked up to her. Their casual relationship deepened on the islands. Clare became a thoughtful and supportive friend, encouraged the fragile Charley to continue writing poetry, and later helped him get published.

Stoddard was one day drawn aside by some missionaries, and assured, in a low voice, that the unwed mother and all too progressive Ada Clare was an unspeakable person; that he must avoid her as he would the shadow of sin; and that, “she was at that moment on the Island of Hawai’i consorting with the goddess Pele who dwelt in the sulphurous depths of the greatest living volcano in the world and that the two were no doubt in their natural element.” Stoddard ignored their warnings. Ada eventually charmed the right royals and government officials and silenced her troublesome critics.

Golden Gate Trinity

When the literary journal Overland Monthly was started in 1868, editor Bret Harte called on Ina Coolbrith and Charles Stoddard to contribute to the first issue. As writers and arbiters of literary taste, Harte, Stoddard and Coolbrith were known as the “Golden Gate Trinity” and with the help and support of Mark Twain and Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King, are credited with founding San Francisco’s literary culture. Later that year Charley sailed again to Hawai’i as a free-lancer for the San Francisco Evening-Bulletin. He roamed the countryside, visiting villages and meeting native boys.

While staying at a Hilo mission house, “whose lips pursed with the prunes and prisms of propriety,” he became entranced by a native Hawaiian boy he met at Rainbow Falls whom he called Kana-Aloha. The friendship ripened and in a few days the young native and Stoddard were inseparable. He traveled with him to the Big Island. Stoddard wrote of their dalliance:

There were no sign posts on that road pointing the way to Crater or Creature-comforts, no notices to “Keep off the Lava” or, “Beware of the Missionary.” No Town Criers ran after us filing the vales with the clang of their dreadful bell. We had nothing to do but to get as lost as possible and hug ourselves and chuckle in sheer delight at the thought of our delicious predicament. Sometimes upon the breezy hill-tops with the azure sea curled up at the horizon brim like a wine cup, we paused to laugh aloud, or shout, for the very joy of living, and our hearts were ready to burst with the love and lust of it all.

This would be Charley’s first “aikāne” homosexual relationship. The Hawaiian aikāne relationship is well known to have been a part of Hawaiian noble life, including that of Kamehameha. They were an accepted tradition for both men and women, and they are one of the best examples of a nominally heterosexual community also accepting homosexual and bisexual relationships. The Protestant missionaries, however, deeply deplored known aikāne relationships.

Male hula dances circa 1900 (Getty Images)

Stoddard met another boy, Kana-ana, on the island of Molokaʻi (known by the natives as Molokaʻi Ka Hula Piko), then respected by native Hawaiians as the spiritual center of the archipelago. In his article “Chumming with a Savage,” Stoddard describes getting into bed with Kana-ana for the first time:

Over the sand we went, and through the river to his hut, where I was taken in, fed, and petted in every possible way, and finally put to bed, where Kana-ana monopolized me, growling in true savage fashion if anyone came near me. I didn’t sleep much, after all. I think I must have been excited.

They gave themselves up to nearly every sensual delight imaginable. They slept together in a huge Elizabethan bed, its posts charmingly festooned with wreaths, as if for their honeymoon. Stoddard continued his decidedly homoerotic tale:

Again and again, he would come with a delicious banana to the bed where I was lying, and insist upon my gorging myself…He would mesmerize me into a most refreshing sleep with a prolonged and pleasing manipulating.

Stoddard admitted, “[we] reveled in riotous living. We had certainly transgressed the unwritten law, but we were not in the least sorry for it.” Kana-aloha, Kana-ana, the great Ada Clare and the Islands rocked his world. Stoddard claimed his first trip to Hawaii changed the whole current of his life.

Stoddard, like Aimée and her husband Harry Gillig were friends with King David Kalākaua

Stoddard made a total of five trips into Oceania between the years 1864 and 1882, four trips to the Kingdom of Hawai’i and one to Tahiti. On his last trip, Stoddard happened to be aboard the same steamship from San Francisco as King David Kalākaua. Honolulu gave a royal welcome to Kalākaua, who was returning from a successful goodwill tour of the world, a tour which included, incidentally, meeting a sweet sixteen-year-old Aimée Crocker in London. It was during his trips into the Pacific that Stoddard honed his skills as a travel writer of wide acclaim during the late nineteenth century.

Walt Whitman

“You will easily imagine, my dear sir, how delightful I find this life,” Charley wrote to  his pen pal Walt Whitman. The coded celebrations of gay love in verse in the 1860 edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass had inspired Stoddard to do something similar in prose. On March 2, 1869, Stoddard wrote Walt Whitman of his joys in spending nights with supple Polynesians: “I have done wonders in my intercourse with these natives. For the first time I act as my nature prompts me. It would not answer in America, as a general principle—not even in California, where men are tolerably bold.”

The article “A South-Sea Idyll” appeared in the September 1869 issue of the Overland Monthly. Those who knew Stoddard only for his poems would be surprised to see him transformed into the gloriously indolent sun worshiper who narrated this tropical tale. Stoddard managed to make the eroticism obvious without crossing the line into obscenity; the coyness of Stoddard’s tone kept him safely within the bounds of propriety. When he sent Whitman a copy, the poet , praised the piece as “beautiful and soothing” and wrote, “Those tender and primitive personal relations away off there in the Pacific Islands as described by you, touched me deeply.” The master poet recognized a kindred spirit. When Stoddard described being “petted in every possible way,” Whitman surely knew what he meant.

The colorful Walt Whitman in the 1860s

“Walt Whitman,” according to Stoddard, “breathed the breath of life into me.” Whitman gave his life meaning, direction and purpose. He praised the magnanimous, patriotic poet who’s vision for the country was that America should welcome all, “…Chinese, Irish, German, the pauper and the criminal, favoring everything that broke down fences and brought together East and West, creeds, classes, races, customs and tongues.” Stoddard and Whitman corresponded frequently from 69-71.

Polynesian Prose

Stoddard took another extended trip to Hawaii in 1872. He was a Robinson Crusoe in reverse. He didn’t go to conquer but to be converted. Charley loved the islands not just for their naked boys and their scented frescoes of foliage but because they let him inhabit more of himself. They let him be lazy and mischievous, sleazy and spiritual; above all, to speak in his own voice instead of perpetually imitating everyone else’s. “I know there is but one hope for me. I must get in amongst people who are not afraid of instincts and who scorn hypocrisy.”

South Sea Idyls by Charles Stoddard (1873)

In 1873, Stoddard’s collection of writings from Tahiti and Hawai’i were published under the title South-Sea Idylls and was well received and reprinted in 1892. His veiled homoeroticism wasn’t visible to the nineteenth-century readers. The general consensus was that South-Sea Idylls was a delightful example of “California humor.”

The Nation, however, panned the book, “…life in the Southern Seas is such a peculiarly non-moral life, that we cannot recommend South-Sea Idylls as a book of invigorating and purifying tone. The Southern Seas—as it used to be said of Paris—are not a good place for deacons.”

Literary friends knew about Stoddard but in a way that does not correspond to modern knowing through medicalized categories; and although they tolerated Stoddard’s “homosexuality” insofar as it remained discursively marginal, they also did not hesitate to depreciate him, usually by treating him as a hapless child.

Other Polynesian books by Stoddard include Summer Cruising in the South Seas (1874), The Lepers of Molokai (1885), A Trip to Hawaii (1885), Hawaiian Life: Being Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes (1894), Father Damien, a Sketch (1903), The Island of Tranquil Delights (1904).

Chicago Daily Tribune believed that the writings of Pacific Coast men, like Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller and Charles Warren Stoddard be kept out of the public schools. “No one wants the children to be reading about Poker Flat and Oyster-Can Gulch as described by Harte, nor about a dalliance with a gentle Sandwich-Island savage as described by Stoddard. Joaquin Miller has written some pretty good poetry, but it is not common-school poetry by a great deal.”

As a Chronicle correspondent Mr. Stoddard roamed the world for four years, living for a time in Rome, passing a longer period with artist friends in Munich, and rambling as far east as Palestine and Egypt. He spent two months on a flat-bottomed boat on the Nile. He had an audience with Pope Pius. Stoddard converted to Catholicism in 1867 drawn to the pageantry and the possibility for forgiveness through confession. Charley told the story of his conversion in a small book, A Troubled Heart and How it was Comforted, of which he said: “Here you have my inner life all laid bare.” He later struggled with the ideology of pious Christian Victorians who damned his “sins of the flesh.”

Mark Twain in London

A young Mark Twain

A very young Charley Stoddard met Mark Twain at The Golden Era offices in the 1860s. Twain and Stoddard shared an interest in the Sandwich Islands. Twain traveled there in 1866, two years after Ada Clare and Charley, as a special correspondent for the Sacramento Union. His letters to the Union written during Twain’s four-month visit, were popular and became the basis for his first lectures. A collection of 25 letters were published as Letters from Hawaii in 1947. Roughing It follows the travels of young Mark Twain through the Wild West and Hawaii during the years 1861–1867.

After getting his first book published, in the winter of 1873-74, Stoddard met with Mark Twain while he was lecturing in London. “He seized me at once and said how nervous and miserable he was—and I guess he was as lonesome as I—and that, if he was to continue to make a success of the lectures, I’d have to stay with him. ‘Let your letters go for a while; I’ll pay your salary and you just come and companion me.’ And that was all there was to it. I just had to go.” They breakfasted on chops and went for long walks in the afternoon.

Twain found the London fog indigestible and six lectures a week at the Queen’s Concert Room, Hanover Square, a burden. “I loved him and coveted his respect,” Stoddard wrote, “Every night we talked till cock-crow…I could have written his life just after our eight weeks together were over.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargent

Stoddard met yet another literary giant, Robert Louis Stevenson, in 1880 by chance and invited him into his “plover’s nest” on the side of Rincon Hill in San Francisco. Stevenson never saw such a chamber. It was a “museum of strange objects,–paddles and battle clubs and baskets, cocoanut bowls, snowy cocoanut plumes—evidences of another earth, another climate, another race, and another (if a ruder) culture.” Stoddard talked of his tramps in the islands. “You can imagine with what charm he would speak, and with what pleasure I would hear…It was in such talks, which we were both eager to repeat, that I first heard the names—first fell under the spell—of the islands,” wrote RLS. The poet lent him Melville’s Typee and Omoo.

Stoddard was adamant that Stevenson should go to the South Seas:

I said to myself apart from the inevitable animate attractions, the consummate splendor of vast palm plantations, the lisp of the reef-zoned, effeminate sea, the almost overwhelming fragrance of indolent gales, heavy with the perfume of citron and lime—these will surely paint [Stevenson’s] skies a richer color and inflame the blood of his heroes, if not that of his heroines.

RLS took Stoddard’s advise a few years later. He traveled extensively in the South Seas living in Hawai’i, the Gilbert Islands and Tahiti, and eventually settled in Upolu, an island in Samoa where he purchased 400 acres. While living in the Tropics, Stevenson wrote The Master of Ballantrae, The Bottle Imp, The Wrecker and In the South Seas among other great works. 

Bohemian Club

My dreams, ambitions fine. My youth, my joys divine. My fasts, my feasts, my wine, were thine, Bohemia!

–Charles Warren Stoddard

Stoddard became a member of the Bohemian Club within the first year of its formation in 1872. The young writers, artists and musicians of San Francisco who started the club aligned themselves against the business class. In an early meeting they blackballed the president of the Bank of California, declaring that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Bohemia. The Bohemian Club’s anti-materialism was a stance of have-nots, artists who lived in the Bay Area from Oakland to Carmel. Their headquarters on Pine Street was a place for drinking and tomfoolery.

Mr. Stoddard proposed that the Club, being a worthy Club, ought to have a patron Saint, and what better or more appropriate Saint could it have than the bravely reticent Saint John Nepomuck, a Czechoslovakian from geographic Bohemia, who died rather than tell a woman’s secret. Stoddard practice a “genteel” Bohemianism of Chopin at twilight, Oriental bric-a-brac, incense, lounging robes, and fragrant cigarettes. For some of its members, the club was a fraternity where “feminine” tastes could be enjoyed.

Stoddard was accepted as a “fellow tankard-man” by a wide variety of people, ranging from the ultra-feminine to the ultra-masculine of both sexes. Stoddard became friends with Bohemian Club founder, prolific and versatile writer and Civil War bad ass Ambrose Bierce.  He enjoyed Bierce’s sardonic sense of humor. Infernally handsome, Bierce stood nearly 6 feet tall with curly blonde hair and bright blue eyes. His animal magnetism earned him admirers wherever he went. Bierce was tolerantly aware of Charley’s penchant for falling in love with “nigger boys.” He cautioned Stoddard when he went to Europe knowing that homosexuals were sometimes sent to prison in England, “your lightest word and most careless action noted down, and commented on by men who cannot understand how a person of individuality in thought and conduct can be other than a very bad man…Walk, therefore, circumspectly…avoid any appearance of eccentricity.”

By the late 70s, the two men had become estranged. Bierce became increasingly scornful of the “Miss Nancys” of American literature, who struck him as unbearably sunny, nice, and namby-pamby. Bierce once remarked to a mutual friend, George Sterling, “my objection to him was the same as yours—he was not content with the way God had sexed him.”

Aimée and Charley

Stoddard spent the summer of 1891 with Aimée and her second husband Harry Gillig aboard his yacht, the Ramona. On board with Charley was a colorful cast of boisterous Bohemians — painters Theodore Wores and Julian Rix, publisher of the Argonaut Jerome Hart, composer and Bohemian Club president Joseph Redding, playwrights (and Lambs Club presidents) Clay Greene and Augustus Thomas, and the dashing actor Henry Mygatt Woodruff.

Atlantic city circa 1900. East coast beaches prohibited men going topless until as late as 1937 when a judge overturned New York state’s male shirtless ban.

Aimée Crocker, like Ada Clare before her, connected with Stoddard on many levels. They were all sexual outsiders. Clare was a single mom who had a child out of wedlock and was therefore considered a fallen woman. Stoddard and Crocker were 19th century “perverts” who had unnatural and unrestrained sexual desires. Aimée’s second husband Harry Gillig, like Stoddard, preferred the company of men. She admitted their marriage was strictly platonic. Harry was described in print in code as “ultra-bohemian.” Husband and wife were beards for one another. Each would never report on the other’s indiscretions. They appeared to be a happy, monogamous married couple. Stoddard, Aimée, Harry, and Frank Unger (Harry’s companion) went on four extended trips to Hawaii to enjoy the relaxed morals—and the nearly naked natives—at a time when men in America weren’t allowed to walk on the beach topless.

Like Charley, Aimée appalled the islands’ missionaries. Her antics sometimes made it into Hawaiian scandal sheets.  When Harry and Aimée were on their original wedding tour and were in Honolulu, the bride made a bet that she would run around the block in her nightgown. She not only took on the challenge but invited a Hawaiian string band in bathing suits to accompany her. The Cousins’ Society discussed the matter a whole afternoon. It was unanimously decided that Aimée could never hope to be saved. The missionaries were outraged when the Gilligs, Unger and King Kalākaua emerged from a hotel cottage clad only in their bathing suits and then drove to Waikiki beach.

Sexual morays in fin de siècle America

None but the most powerful and privileged, the educated, the literati, the artists had the courage to live out sexual fantasies, or openly live alternate lifestyles. Even among these elites, there was risk involved. That was the draw. If they were found out, if they were reputed to have committed certain impermissible sexual acts, they were demoted to a lower class. They were deviants. Their reputations were forever stained.

In the late 1800s many European “explorers” who sought forbidden sexual fulfillment found refuge in colonial outposts in Africa and southeast Asia as well as the Pacific and Caribbean Islands and among partners who were not peers in any way. They had love affairs (or hired sex workers) with people outside of their social and intellectual class, from other cultures, preferably third world cultures and oftentimes from another age group. This was certainly true for Aimée Crocker and Charles Stoddard. Aimée referred to her gigolo companions as her “secretaries.”

Charles Warren Stoddard, the Genteel Pagan

In the course of Stoddard’s life, attitudes toward “maleness” and “femaleness” and toward sexuality in general were changing. The “feminine” was linked with the religious impulse, the unconscious, spontaneity and creativity. Homosexuality was not yet as defined or feared as it later became. People of the same sex might hold hands, embrace or kiss without necessarily arousing notice. But whether the late 1800s was a “more innocent” time could be debated; any undeniable appearance of adult homosexual behavior was met with horror and possibly draconian legal treatment.

The year of Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment, 1895, might be viewed as a turning point. From then on, homosexuality was readily defined as not just a deviation, but a sin and a crime. Homosexual activities, secret to begin with, were forced to go even further underground. The once free wheeling Bohemian community of San Francisco returned in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to the Philistine world of prosperity, respectability and social structure.

Aimée Crocker would be branded an “adventuress,” which at the time was a code for a promiscuous man-eater. Even though Aimée spent most of her life rebelling against gender inscriptions and societal norms, she wanted to regain some control of the wild narratives that the popular media spun. There were those in high society, in the church and in the press who painted her as a sexual deviant. Crocker pushed back:

I have been accused of living adventurously. Let us admit the word. But I have never been an “adventuress.” I have never cared about your man-made conventions (and every modern school-girl would laugh at those of my day), I was not immoral, but un-moral. If I have often loved, I have at least loved well and fully. I have nothing to be ashamed of, in spite of the scandalous press reports that hopeful reporters managed to use to amuse a scandal-loving public. And if I have dared to stick my nose into trouble just because the game was fun, does it make me a brazen hussy?

Aimée couldn’t be a proponent for promiscuity or polygamy but would advocate for “seasonal marriage.” She did in fact have several short marriages and did most certainly cheat on four of her five husbands…

Charles Stoddard took a position as chair of the English literature department at the University of Notre Dame in the mid-1880s, but would be forced to resign because of the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality. That pronounced shunning put an end to his struggles over prominently held religion beliefs and his alternative lifestyle.  He made peace with his temperaments and his inclinations. “I’d rather be a sea islander sitting naked in the sun before my grass hut,” Stoddard wrote during his later years, “than be the Pope of Rome.”

Both Aimée and Charley, in spite of their indiscretions, were well liked in Bohemian circles and by the public at large. In April 1903, Stoddard returned to San Francisco and was the guest of honor at a welcome-home party at the Bohemian Club with Henry James and Enrico Caruso in attendance. He then settled in Monterrey, California, with a hope of recovering his failing health. He traveled within California on occasion and was in San Francisco during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Stoddard stayed on in Monterrey, where he was diagnosed with heart disease, until his death from a heart attack on April 23, 1909.