For the Pleasure of His Company

At the start of <i>For the Pleasure of His Company</i>, Paul Clitheroe sits alone in the moonlight of his San Francisco apartment, named “the Eyrie”, a Gothic building perched at the top of a cliff overlooking the bay. His studio is a lavish cabinet of curiosities, chaotically filled with exotic objects and antiquarian treasures, Nilotic masks, Florentine lamps, Kamchatkan toy canoes. The image encapsulates the fraught inner tragedy of the protagonist—Clitheroe is an angst-ridden young man, an aloof genius at the height of the world, who yearns for adventure and novelty and escape from the puritanical encumberances of American decorum. Throughout the novel, he applies himself to new vocations—poetry, theatre, journalism—but repeatedly becomes disenchanted with all these occupations. He hangs out with Bohemian radicals, novelists and entomologists, bantering in sardonic humor and relishing their romantic dramas and betrayals; he joins a secret society of libertine “knights” under the authority of a divorcee foundress; and he has covert love affairs with men and women. Clitheroe is above all drawn to outsiders and non-conformists. He loves a boy because of his "ungovernable nature" and he befriends a boyish woman, whom he calls Jack, because she is "not like any woman of his acquaintance". Upon entering the home of a mysterious woman who lures him off the street, his attention is drawn to an Indian mandolin and he is told that "the fetish appeals to your uncivilized nature". This is not a book about homosexuality per se: there are only coded references to same-sex intimacy and Clitheroe rarely expresses strong affections. As the introduction notes, the novel is devoid of contemporary sexology and its clinical terminology of uranism, similisexuality or inversion. Instead this novel is more expansively a radical repudiation of “civilization” and its manners. The "land of the free" does not offer Clitheroe the liberty he truly craves. He is a queer outsider, a dissolute artist, a bored orphan. It is a novel about wanderlust and transgression.

The introduction does a decent job unpacking the obvious colonial undertones of Stoddard’s works. In romanticizing Hawai’i and eroticizing the “barbarian” body (both in the novel and in the accompanying story titled “Chumming with a Savage”), Stoddard enacts the same colonial logic of conquest, acquisition and predation. The white man travels to remote lands in search of personal enrichment, sexual gratification and archaeological curiosities. <i>Chumming with a Savage</i> is a more disturbing tragedy. At first, the protagonist falls in love with a boy; the family does not disapprove and there is no stigma attached to the relationship, except by a prudish white doctor. However, it becomes clear that the protagonist is a possessive and manipulative lover. The boy is sixteen and does not know English, and the protagonist uses the pretense of evangelization to “trap” the boy in America and do his “missionary” work. As the story progresses, he slowly comes to regret his attempts to remodel the boy in his own fashion, dressing him in western clothes and trying to assimilate him to American norms; he understands the destructive effects of colonization and the violence of acculturation. While it is an unsettling story full of naive platitudes about the noble savage, Stoddard starts to critique his own colonial gaze and suggests that contact, even when well-intended, even when foppishly romantic, will always be corrosive.

<i>For the Pleasure of his Company</i> and the companion story “Chumming with a Cannibal” are both valuable entries in the history of queer literature. Like in Forster’s <i>Maurice</i> or Radclyffe Hall’s <i>The Well of Loneliness</i> or Baldwin’s <i>Giovanni’s Room</i>, to be queer is to be an émigré, an outsider, a traveller. In casting off the strictures of modern conventions, these early queer characters find refuge in foreign countries where they can be anonymous and unguarded.

Thanks to netgalley and the publishers for a chance to read!

For the Pleasure of His Company by Charles Warren Stoddard is a sort of frustrating novel. There are glimpses where the descriptions, the feelings, the wording, could touch your very soul and make you think "Yes! Exactly!", but then that quickly fades away and you're left with Paul Clitheroe, an artist who is as all artists are painted to be: transient with their moods. Quick to pick up both profession and friends, and equally quick to abandon them for the next thing that tickles his fancy, the book flies thither and yon, with him writing, and working in an office, and going on the stage, and rumoured to be in a convent, and then off at sea. He whines about money but then runs away from work in which he is earning said money. He finds companionship with women who don't fit the societal ideals, and his dealings with men are mostly brushed over and vague enough to hide in the text.

I guess what frustrated me most about the novel is that most of the characters seemed to have the same "I'll do this! No, never mind, I'll do this instead. Wait, no, I know, I'll do THIS!" and it's just something completely bonkers, like I'll head a little group of men and we'll live off in the forest together. Or, perhaps, it's that these people just decide that things will go great for them, and they do, like his friend Jack, who, once told she ought to write, does, and becomes enormously popular, moves to Italy, and lives very snugly and happily and implores Paul to come to her. Of course, he doesn't, as he's caught up in his latest unhappiness over his job, and his funds, and so forth.

One thing else that bothered me is that most of the characters all talk in the same overwrought way, where they make passionate declarations about themselves, or describe one another after having literally just met each other, or speak about the world as they see it, and none of it sounds realistic at all. Nearly everyone in this novel talks as though they are in a 19th century play and delivering their star monologues. It got pretty old pretty quickly.

As for the other story, it details a "superior white" coming to live amongst a people he automatically assumes are cannibals and takes up with a boy possibly sixteen years old whom he at first refers to as "it". He is not much different than Paul Clitheroe, soon growing bored of staying in a place that seems to be Paradise, abandoning the boy even as the youth chases after him, and when people back in "society" murmur Kána-Aná must have been a girl, he promptly sends for him and attempts to force him to shed his heritage and traits in order to fit "civilisation". The boy is spoken of as a "savage" and disparaged for not immediately grasping the language and customs and for also being more boring than was previously recalled. In a word, this sketch is even worse than the main novel, if possible. He sees the error in his ways of trying to convert Kána-Aná when the youth becomes absolutely miserable when away from his home, and sends him off to return to his land, but the read is an uncomfortable one up to that point.

As a piece of literature penned by a gay man in a time where to live so openly was a crime, it is important in that respect, but I suspect some who pick up this book may not put it down wholly finished.

I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The premise of the story is quite universal in its setup, the overall feeling of the story itself following a messy young person who is searching for themselves, a place to live, a group of people to call their own, facing their own artistic highs and lows. That is what drew me in and interested into this story, as well as my general interest in the historical queer literature.

However, I did find this slightly too much a product of its own time and on top of that, sadly, a bit too boring in its delivery. Now, you might ask what I had expected from a book written over a century ago, and while I will allow that a lot of older literature should be taken with a grain of salt, reading there is quite a bit of colonial undertones and especially in the accompanying story Chumming with a Savage was incredibly uncomfortable to read, even if it was meant to criticise the white savior/superiority complex, it fell a bit too short of that. The story followed a white man who comes to live with the people he deems savages and cannibals and gets into an inappropriate relationship with a very young (about 16 year old, if I am not mistaken) boy, who he proceeds to try and "civilise". It ends in the man realising he was wrong to do so, but the story is still what it is for its majority.

To go back to the main portion of the book, the main novel, as I said follows an artist, more precisely a writer, Paul Clitheroe as he navigates life. He is quite flighty, he often changes his mind, his friends, his occupation. He is a bit of an artistic mess, and quite self-absorbed. There are many moments his thoughts are what I referred to earlier as 'universal experience' of a person searching for themselves, but there is also a lot of just droll writing, of him (and other characters, annoyingly) having big, "profound" declarations about themselves (they are actually saying something slightly insane most of the time). It quickly loses the relatable aspects and just leaves the reader with many a monologue they probably could've lived without.

I recognize the importance of historical queer lit, especially written by a gay man who lived in a time it was illegal to do so, but asides that detail of it's general setup, the novel (and especially the additional story) left much to be desired. My opinion is that if you do decide to go into it, know it is flawed, and there are probably better stories to fill the craving of a historically queer novel.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with an ebook in exchange for an honest review!