Jonathan Ned Katz: Francis Davis Millet and Charles Warren Stoddard, 1874-1912
Empty Chair, Empty Bed, Empty House
By 1874, the American travel journalist Charles Warren Stoddard had given up on the South Seas, the site of earlier sensual adventures recorded coyly coded form in published articles. He was now pursuing his erotic destiny in Italy.[1]
There
in romantic, legendary Venice at the end of the year, "a young man quietly
joined me" in a box at the opera during intermission, Stoddard recalled.
"We looked at each other and were acquainted in a minute. Some
people understand one anotherer at sight, and don't have to try, either."
Stoddard's recollection of this meeting was published in Boston's National Magazine
in 1906.
Stoddard's new friend was the American artist Francis Davis Millet.
The two had heard of each other, but never met. Stoddard was thirty-one
in 1874, and Millet was twenty-eight.
During the Civil War, Millet's father,
a Massachusetts doctor, had served as a Union army surgeon, and in
1864, the eighteen-year-old Frank Millet had enlisted as a private, serving
first as a drummer boy and then as a surgeon's assistant. Young Millet
graduated from Harvard in 1869, with a master's degree in modern
languages and literature. While working as a journalist on Boston newspapers,
he learned lithography and earned money enough to enroll in
1871 in the Royal Academy, Antwerp. There, unlike anyone before him,
he won all the art prizes the school offered and was officially hailed by the
king of Belgium. As secretary of the Massachusetts commission to the Vienna
exposition in 1873, Millet formed a friendship with the American
Charles Francis Adams, and then traveled through Turkey, Romania,
Greece, Hungary, and Italy, finally settling in Venice to paint.
At the opera, as Stoddard recalled, Millet immediately asked, "Where
are you going to spend the Winter?" He then invited Stoddard to live in
his eight-room rented house. "Why not come and take one of those
rooms?" the painter offered, "I'll look after the domestic affairs" -- is this
a Stoddard double entendre?
Stoddard accepted Millet's invitation,
recalling that they became "almost immediately very much better
acquainted." Did Stoddard go home with Millet that night?
The two lived together during the winter of 1874-75, though Stoddard
did not take one of the extra rooms. Millet's romantic letters to Stoddard
indicate that the men shared a bed in an attic room overlooking the
Lagoon, Grand Canal, and Public Garden.
Lack of space did not explain
this bed sharing, and Stoddard's earlier and later sexual liaisons with men,
his written essays and memoirs, and Millet's letters to Stoddard, all
strongly suggest that their intimacy found active affectionate and erotic
expressIon.
Though Stoddard's erotic interests seem to have focused exclusively
on men, Millet's were more fluid. In the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, Millet's psychic configuration was probably the more common,
Stoddard's exclusive interest in men the less usual. In any case, the ranging
of Millet's erotic interest between men and women was not then understood
as "bisexual", a mix of "homo" and "hetero." The hetero-homo division has not yet been invented.
Another occupant of the house was Giovanni, whom Stoddard called
"our gondolier, cook, chambermaid and errand-boy." His use of "maid"
and "boy" hint at gender doubling, and, perhaps, at sexual nonconformity.
(Giovanni's last name, not mentioned, is lost to history, typical in
masters' accounts of servants.)
That winter, Millet taught Giovanni to
prepare two classic New England dishes, baked beans and fish balls, and
during the cold months, Stoddard recalled, he and Millet dined Massachusetts
style in their warm Italian kitchen.
From the window of this kitchen in warmer weather, Stoddard recalled,
they watched "the supple figures of half-nude artisans" working in
an adjoining shipyard. It was "no wonder that we lingered over our meals
there," said Stoddard, without explaining that lingering. Visual, alimentary, and erotic
pleasures are repeatedly linked in Stoddard's and Millet's writings, as we
will see.
During the daytime, Millet painted in their home's courtyard while
Stoddard dozed, smoked, and wrote columns about Venice and other
Italian cities for the San Francisco Chronicle. They dined early and took
gondola rides at sunset.
In a newspaper column that Stoddard published
early in his relationship with Millet, the journalist wrote of "spoons" with
"my fair" (an unnamed woman) in a gondola's covered "lovers' cabin," and
of "her memory of a certain memorable sunset-but that is between us
two!" Stoddard here changed the sex of his fair one when discussing
"spooning" (kissing) in his published writing. Walt Whitman also employed the literary subterfuge, changing the sex of the male who inspired a poem to a female in the final, published version.
In February 1875, Stoddard, seeking new cities to write about for the
Chronicle, made a three-week tour of northern Italy, revising these memoirs
twelve years later for the Catholic magazine Ave Maria, published at
Notre Dame University. Stoddard wrote that his unnamed painter friend
accompanied him as guide and "companion-in-arms," a punning name
for his bed mate--the companion in his arms. This definitely intended
pun allowed Stoddard to imply more about this companionship than he
could say directly. A variety of other, barely coded references lace Stoddard's
writing with allusions to eros betwee·n men.
In Padua, for example, Stoddard wrote that he and his companion were
struck by views of "lovely churches and the tombs of saints and hosts of
up to page 206
Notes
- ↑ Ada[ted and republished on OutHistory without the original backnote citations from Jonathan Ned Katz's "Empty Chair, Empty Bed, Empty House", Chapter 14, in Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pages 202-219.