Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909) was, during his life, an
acclaimed and prolific writer in multiple genres: poetry, travel
sketches, personal memoir, and conversion narrative. His most
popular works were dispatches primarily from the South Sea Islands
but also extended into Palestine, Egypt, and what would become
known as Hawai'i, most of which were published in the San Francisco
Chronicle and then collected into books. For the Pleasure of His
Company: An Affair of the Misty City, Thrice Told (1903) is
Stoddard's only novel. This new edition, as with other works in
Penn Press's series Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century,
returns and reframes an important queer literary text to print. Set
mostly in and around San Francisco in the late nineteenth century,
the novel features a protagonist, Paul Clitheroe, who is an
aspiring writer living among the Bohemian artistic circles of that
place and time-the same circles Stoddard himself inhabited. The
novel is both formally experimental and largely autobiographical.
Thus Paul comes into contact, as Stoddard did, with writers,
artists, actors, directors, priests, adventurers, and many others
as he attempts to begin his career. Bohemian artistic life and
erotic experimentation go hand in hand here: Paul has multiple
relationships with other men even as he writes a novel that
features similar liaisons. At the very end of the story, while on a
cruise in the Pacific, Paul impulsively leaves his ship and
disappears in a canoe with some young Hawaiian men. This parallels
Stoddard's life too: he spent many long periods of his life in
Hawai'i, where he found the local homoerotic customs to his liking.
This Q19 volume also includes three of Stoddard's Hawaiian travel
sketches, which chronicle his intimate personal relationship with a
Hawaiian youth he calls Kana-Ana. The volume contains a full
critical introduction as well as extensive annotations explaining
textual references of various kinds and identifying parallels with
Stoddard's own life.
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