The Gay & Lesbian Review

The Splendid, Drunken van Vechten

T HE LAST TWO DECADES have seen a strong revival of in- terest in Carl van Vechten (1880- 1964), the Midwestern author, patron of and enthusiast for Harlem Ren- aissance writers, for “Jazz Age” Negro sub- culture and, more broadly, for 1920s Americanized dandyism and decadence. Yet, understandably, no single sense of why we should return to, or even reclaim, van Vechten, has emerged.

deed securing his only commercial success, either in the U.S. or in Britain. Van Vech- ten, meanwhile, was able to promote the book, but was also testing the water rela- tive to using the notorious slur in a title. Two years later, Nigger Heaven— an ironic reference, van Vechten insisted, to a nickname for the cheap seats at the top of any theater frequented by African-Ameri- cans—sought not so much to document

R ICHARD C ANNING

The Tastemaker: Carl van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America by EdwardWhite Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 384 pages, $30.

Negro lives, cultures, and mores , as to subject them to satire. Fir- bank’s novel had deployed humor in portraying the journey of the Mouth Family to “the Celestial city of Cuna-Cuna,” but the esprit was evidently warm-hearted. Van Vechten’s novel meant to celebrate Harlem, but in a “warts and all” style that many African-Americans resented. Artists and writers understandably did not relish the sense that among their greatest achievements were the speakeasies where louche white cats drank all night

NYRB Classics evidently thinks The Tiger in the House: A Cultural History of the Cat (1920, reprinted 2007) is his mas- terpiece—though one senses here the pull of the marketplace. Bruce Kellner has more adventurously overseen the first publi- cation of van Vechten’s journals as The Splendid Drunken Twen- ties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922–30 (2007). In 2012, Yale published Emily Bernard’s somewhat pedestrian “partial bi-

alongside their black peers, invariably being offered a range of extra divertissements for an additional fee. Some figures of the Harlem Renaissance—Countee Cullen and W. E. B. Du Bois among them—protested the novel’s title. Other of van Vechten’s friends, such as James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, stayed loyal, but even they defended the book with caution. Hughes noted the problem of “the n word” thus, even while promoting Nigger Heaven : The word nigger , you see, sums up for us who are colored all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America: the slave-beatings of yesterday, the lynchings of today, the Jim Crow cars, the only movie show in town with its sign up FOR WHITES ONLY , the restaurants where you may not eat, the jobs you may not have. The unions you cannot join. The word nigger in the mouths of little white boys at school, the word nigger in the mouths of foremen on the job, the word nigger across the whole face of America!

ography,” Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance , concentrating on the subject’s “black life.” Bernard had previously edited the 2002 volume Remember Me to Harlem , the collected correspondence of van Vechten and African-American poet Langston Hughes. In July 2013, Columbia University Press brought us the first paperback edition of The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946 , edited by Edward Burns, weighing in at a very Steinian 920 pages and perhaps also confirming that inter- est in van Vechten today primarily lay in whom he knew, not in what he achieved. Now, however, van Vechten receives the co- pious and discriminating biographical analy- sis he has long needed, in the form of The Tastemaker , an exceptional publication and Edward White’s first book. The elephant in the room throughout all this attention is captured in a single word— “the n word,” rarely seen today in publishing or in public discourse. But in 1999 Illinois republished van Vechten’s bestselling novel,

Carl van Vechten, Self-Portrait , 1932

The oddest thing to emerge from White’s extensive re- searches is the extent to which van Vechten, as an established author in mid-career, was continually waging a private battle with his Iowan family. His father, particularly, Carl simply wanted to shock. On the one hand, Charles van Vechten had been and remained a provincial conservative, epitomizing the small-town values of Cedar Rapids, van Vechten’s birthplace. Earlier novels, with their less-than-subtle homoerotic innuen- does—such as Peter Whiffle (1922), The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), and The Tattooed Countess (1924)—had scandalized his father accordingly. The middle title here, he told his son, was “a very

Nigger Heaven , which brought forth some concern—though White shows carefully that similar concerns had been every bit as pronounced when it was first published in 1926. Van Vechten had already dipped his toe in the water of this particular con- troversy, in a sense, by persuading the English novelist Ronald Firbank that his Caribbean-set novel Sorrow in Sunlight would enjoy renown and huge sales stateside if the title were changed to Prancing Nigger (1924). Firbank agreed to the switch, in-

Richard Canning’s most recent publication is an edition of Ronald Fir- bank’s Vainglory for Penguin Classics (2012).

March–April 2014

39