1843-08-07

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD, American author, born (d: 1909); Only the stout of heart or hard of head can read Stoddard today without breaking out in spots. His lush South Sea Idylls (1873) depicts a land of brown-skinned gods, all young Jon Halls and Christopher Atkins’s and Brad Pitts untroubled in paradise by the likes of Dorothy Lamour or Brooke Shields, all named Kana Owana or some such vowel stuffed concoction, all with “lips ripe and expressive,” “lashes that sweep,” “eyes perfectly glorious—regular almonds,” and all dropping to their knees at a second’s notice. What is authentic about Stoddard is his joy in having discovered, like Paul Gaugin and Robert Louis Stevenson before him, an island respite from Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy. His writings, however, are not the documents of sociology would make them out, rather the product of perfervid imagination.