noon, sunful-eyed,—the crazy, one-inch butterfly (dethroned angel?) roams about, her embodied shadow on the secret-chattering grass-tops in the sabre-light” left his readers baffled. Clearly he needed someone to help him channel his poetic thoughts into more comprehensible English, but in a way that would not erase the rich influence of Japanese haiku. One of the first writers to give Noguchi encouragement was Adeline Knapp, the journalist whose messy breakup with her lover Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman) provided grist for the gossip mills in 1893. He was taken under the wings of Gelett Burgess and Porter Garnett, the editors of TheLark, San Francisco’s most prestigious literary journal. Launched at first as a humor magazine, The Lark appeared only briefly (1895– 97), but, like England’s The Yellow Book, it has been acknowledged as an important publishing landmark because of the Zeitgeist it captured and the careers it launched. The editors were intrigued by Noguchi’s poems, which in Garnett’s estimation were “only slightly touched by incoherence.” They smoothed his English with skill and tact, but when the poems began to appear in the The Lark they garnered mixed reviews. In the San Francisco Examiner, the ever-irascible Ambrose Bierce used his regular column as an open letter to Noguchi: “I shall give myself the unhappiness to tell you that the estimable gentlemen and ladies having you in tow, O Brain-Boat-ofDown-the-River-Cascade-Going, are making an honorable fool of you. Your work is the most lamentable nonsense that ever kindled inextinguishable laughter on Olympus.” With Burgess and Garnett’s assistance, Noguchi published two volumes of poetry, Seen & Unseen and The Voice of the Valley, and he prepared single-sheet poems that he sent to the leading literary figures of America and England. His poetry drew sincere praise from both Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, who hailed him as a master of the emerging Imagist movement. Most writers (Willa Cather among them) responded with somewhat puzzled encouragement, but from one novelist came a florid shower of praise in a letter whose envelope was marked“Private and Confidential”: “Dear friend who has come to me out of the Orient! Do you know that I have sent you many unwritten letters; many warm messages of love and sympathy? Some of these have reached you; some of these you must have heard—perhaps in a dream. ... I was going to ask Joaquin to introduce us. I waited and called out to you listening for the echoing response. ... [T]he Muse has at last brought us face to face and heart to heart. Now we must abide together.” THIS GEYSER GUSH OF ADULATION came from Charles Warren Stoddard in 1898. The novelist, who was then 55 years old, had taught at Notre Dame but was fired because of an inappropriate relationship with a student, and while at the time of his letter to Noguchi he was teaching English literature at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., his job there was hanging by a thread. He had been following Noguchi’s career from afar and had built up a rich erotic fantasy about him. In his semi-autobiographical novel For the Pleasure of His Company (1903), Stoddard describes the life of a gay man trying to find his way in late 19th-century San Francisco. Since the days of the Gold Rush, San Francisco had been a place where people came to reinvent themselves, to try on different personas to see which one(s) felt right. But in a city that celebrated eccentrics, divas, and poseurs, Charley Stoddard felt depressingly average. It took trips to Hawaii and Tahiti in 1864 to allow him to spread his wings. There Stoddard became for the first time the exotic outsider himself, and with Polynesian culture’s more relaxed attitudes toward male-male sexual pleasure, he reveled in being the object of desire for many handsome young men. To Walt Whitman he wrote: “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 tolerablybold.” Stoddard fictionalized his adventures in a book he titled South Seas Idylls (1873). Herman Melville had charted the course with his novels Typee and Omoo, but where Melville veiled his encounters so skillfully that literary scholars even today argue about how much homosexual activity he actually experienced with Pacific Islanders, Stoddard employed barely a palm frond to conceal his intimacies: “Again and again he would come with a delicious banana to the bed where I was lying, and insist upon my gorging myself, when I had but barely recovered from a late orgie of fruit, flesh, or fowl. He would mesmerize me into a most refreshing sleep with a prolonged and pleasing manipulation.” Only someone completely clueless about what two men do in bed could miss the allusion. When he returned stateside, Stoddard attempted to replicate the life he had shared with the handsome men of the South Seas, but the closest he could come was a series of relationships with men who were much younger and working-class. He called each of these young men in turn “Kid” and insisted that they call him “Dad.” At the time that Noguchi’s exploratory letter reached him in Washington, D.C., Stoddard was distressed by the deterioration of his relationship with his latest Kid, a wastrel named Kenneth O’Connor. Stoddard had already known O’Connor slightly when the fifteen-year-old approached the famous novelist one day on the street and made it clear that he wanted to 16 TheG&LR Yone Noguchi in 1903. Smithsonian Institution.
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