Free Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard by Roger Austen Page A

dealers were "beautiful women in bewildering attire," plying their trade with devil-may-care "greasers" and thrill-seeking sailors, their eyes glazed with lust and liquor. On the walls were hung lewd pictures that "young and innocent eyes ought never to have been laid on" (IFP 64). 11 But young Charles took in everything and everyone and, in doing so, became less and less innocent, although he was unable then to grasp the significance of it all.
Charles had his share of conventional and wholesome boyhood experiences as well. There were family outings to "The Willows," a popular oasis offering animals in cages and an open-air theater, and to "Russ's Gardens," another resort out in the Mission District, which featured a German beer garden and acrobatic acts on Sundays. (Charles was especially struck by a muscular, near-naked tightrope walker named Blondin, who was later to become a partner of his friend Adah Isaacs Menken.) There were also jaunts with his neighborhood friends to the "Cobweb Palace" on Meigg's wharf, picnics at Fort Point and the Cliff

 

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House on the ocean, and visits to the comparatively respectable "foreign quarters"Chinatown, which always fascinated Charles, and the Spanish Quarter, where everyone seemed dressed "as if they were about to appear in . . 'The Barber of Seville' "(IFP 59).
One thing was certain: compared to Rochester, San Francisco was colorfully cosmopolitan, even if it lacked as yet the patina of urbane sophistication. At school Charles could find himself sitting next to pupils who had been born in Europe, Australia, Russia, "Chili," or the Sandwich Islandsto say nothing of nearly every state and territory in the Union. In retrospect, Stoddard observed that there had been something "singularly bracing" about the climate of San Francisco: "the middle-aged renewed their youth, and youth was wild with an exuberance of health and hope and happiness that seemed to give promise of immortality" (IFP 101 ). In this regard, however, he was not speaking for himself. In his boyhood, as in later life, he had always been more of an observer than a participant in exuberance, and in spite of the general holiday spirit in San Francisco, still he was not happy. Beginning in January 1857, and for the next two years, Charles was to be even less happy.
III
On 4 January 1857, Charles and his seventeen-year-old brother Ned boarded the Flying Cloud, a clipper ship that would take them around Cape Horn to New York City. 12 At family prayers that morning, their father had read aloud from the Bible: "Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of their distresses . . .  Oh, that men would praise the Lord for His goodness and His wonderful works to the children of men." 13 Goodness? Wonderful works? Charles had some reason to doubt; for it was thought that Ned was dying of a chronic alimentary disease, and this sea voyage had been prescribed in the hope of prolonging his life.
On the voyage Charles read his Bible faithfully, as his mother had bidden him do, although every day this reading made him "more and more perplexed." During the ninety-two days at sea, he also read Uncle Tom's Cabin, kept a journal, spied some more "pretty" islands, and noticed that Ned was not getting very much better. Charles was especially taken with the worldly-wise cabin boy from Paris who, when they arrived in New York, was even more impressive as a "perfumed exquisite" seen dining across the room at the Hotel Astor. 14

 

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After a night in Manhattan, the Stoddard boys journeyed to Little Valley, a village in western New York, where their Grandpa Freeman had a farm. Ned and Charles shared a room in the farmhouse attic, and Charles soon found himself dreadfully bored after the excitements of San Francisco. "What was there," Stoddard asked years later, "beyond brook trout and maple sugar in their season for the refreshment of farmers' sons?" Alas, he added, even "the sons were scarce." 15
Charles