White Mischief - The passions of Carl Van Vechten
by Kelefa Sanneh
In the summer of 1925, Carl Van
Vechten, a New York hipster and literary gadabout, sent a letter to Gertrude
Stein, whose friendship he was cultivating. Stein had finally found a publisher
for "The Making of Americans," but Van Vechten was preoccupied with a
project of his own. He called it "my Negro novel," though he hadn't
started it yet. "I have passed practically my whole winter in company with
Negroes and have succeeded in getting into most of the important sets," he
wrote. "This will not be a novel about Negroes in the South or white
contacts or lynchings. It will be about NEGROES, as they live now in the new
city of Harlem (which is part of New York)." A few weeks later, Stein
replied, using a word that Van Vechten didn't. "I am looking forward
enormously to the nigger book," she wrote.
When Van Vechten first arrived in
New York, in 1906, there were few signs that he would ever attempt to appoint
himself bard of Harlem. He was a self-consciously sophisticated exile from the
Midwest, and he was quickly hired by the Times as a music and dance critic.
Celebrating provocateurs like Igor Stravinsky and Isadora Duncan, he trusted
that the chattiness of his prose would make up for the occasional severity of
the art he loved. (In an early collection of his criticism, he sought to
reassure unseasoned listeners: "Don't go to a concert and expect to hear
what you might have heard fifty years ago; don't expect anything and don't hate
yourself if you happen to like what you hear.") He also published a series
of mischievous novels that were notable mainly, one critic observed, for their
"annoying mannerisms," including a lack of quotation marks and a
fondness for "obsolete or unfamiliar words." This verdict appeared on
the front cover of one of those novels, which was a clue that the anonymous
critic was Van Vechten himself. The more time Van Vechten spent in New York,
though, the more interested he became in the sights and sounds of Harlem, where
raucous and inventive night clubs were thriving under Prohibition. His ‘Negro
novel’ was meant to be a celebration, but Van Vechten couldn't resist giving it
an incendiary title: "Nigger Heaven," after a slang
term for the segregated balcony of a theatre. His idea was that the term might
serve as a suitably ambivalent analogy for Harlem. In a soliloquy halfway
through the book, one character explains:
Nigger
Heaven! That's what Harlem is. We sit in our places in the gallery of this New
York theatre and watch the white world sitting clown below in the good seats in
the orchestra. Occasionally they turn their faces up towards us, their hard,
cruel faces, to laugh or sneer, but they never beckon.
Various people urged Van Vechten to
reconsider, including his father. "Whatever you may be compelled to say in
the book," he wrote, "your present title will not be understood &
I feel certain you should change it." Van Vechten felt equally certain
that he should not: he didn't mind drawing some extra attention to his novel,
and, besides, he had Negro friends who would defend him.
In the end, Van Vechten and his father were both right. A
number of Negro critics were annoyed by the title, and offended by the novel's
lurid depictions of cabaret life-even though its main protagonists were smart,
college educated young Negroes who talked incessantly about art and literature.
But many white critics were impressed, and the controversy helped make
"Nigger Heaven" a best-seller. The book's marketing campaign was
designed to exploit white readers' fascination with uptown night life. (An advertisement
in The New Yorker asked, 'Why go to Harlem cabarets when you can read 'Nigger
Heaven'?") And its success helped draw attention to a movement: the Negro
Renaissance, which came to be known, and celebrated, as the Harlem Renaissance,
a name that conjures up both novelists and night clubs. It is possible that
"Nigger Heaven" did more for the Harlem Renaissance than it did for
its author, whose reputation never quite recovered from the backlash he faced.
Decades later, Ralph Ellison remembered him as a bad influence, an unsavory
character who "introduced a note of decadence into Afro-American literary
matters which was not needed." And, in 1981, the historian David Levering
Lewis, the author of a classic study of the Harlem Renaissance, spoke for many
when he called "Nigger Heaven" a "colossal fraud," an
ostensibly uplifting book whose message was constantly upstaged by "the
throb of the tom-tom." He viewed Van Vechten as a hustler, driven by
"a mixture of commercialism and patronizing sympathy," and treated
the novel as a quaint artifact of a less enlightened literary era: the
scribblings of a former hipster who no longer seemed very hip.
This kind of criticism turned Van
Vechten into a rather troubling figure, which is to say, a fine candidate for
reexamination, and maybe rehabilitation. In 2001, Emily Bernard published
"Remember Me to Harlem," a compendium of letters documenting the
forty year friendship between Van Vechten and Langston Hughes, who publicly
defended "Nigger Heaven," and privately enjoyed Van Vechten's roguish
sense of humor. (In one letter, Van Vechten referred to himself as "this
ole cullud man.") Two years ago, Bernard published "Carl Van Vechten
and the Harlem Renaissance" (Yale), a thoughtful reconsideration of Van
Vechten's career as both a writer and an effective champion of Negro writers.
She found much to admire in Van Vechten, though she described him as
"ensnared" in the "riddle of race." She also acknowledged
that for years she avoided teaching "Nigger Heaven" in her college
classes, so as not to subject students to "the wound that is the title of
the book."
The newest Van Vechten biographer
is Edward White, a Brit and a less agonized enthusiast. In "The
Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America" (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux), White celebrates all the things that might once have
seemed shocking about Van Vechten: his conviction that Negro culture was the
essence of America; his simultaneous fascination with the avant-garde and title
broadly popular; and his string of sexual relationships with men, which were an
open secret during his life. Van Vechten's tastes were varied: his bibliography
includes an erudite cultural history of the house cat, and in his later decades
he became an accomplished portrait photographer. White calls him, plausibly
enough, the "prophet of a new cultural sensibility that promoted the
primacy of the individual, sexual freedom, and racial tolerance and dared put
the blues on a par with Beethoven." Even so, White can't help placing that
polarizing novel, and its title, at the center of his tale. Nearly a century
after he rose to fame, Van Vechten remains the white man who insisted on
publishing a pro-Negro book called "Nigger Heaven." And he will be a
tempting subject for biographers as long as there are readers who want to know
what, exactly, he was thinking.
No writer who tackles Van Vechten
can resist the urge to describe his once famous face, although none can match
the standard set by Bruce Kellner, who knew him, and who published an affectionate
biography in 1968, four years after Van Vechten's death. Kellner compares him
to a "domesticated werewolf," placid but intense, with a resting
expression that was an unnerving "blank stare," and "disfigured
by two very big and ve1y ugly protruding front teeth, like squares of broken
crockery." Van Vechten grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and, even as a boy,
he amplified these involuntary quirks with a number of voluntary ones: ascots,
slim trousers, one long fingernail. He escaped to the University of Chicago,
spending evenings at the opera and the symphony, and late nights playing piano
at the Everleigh Club, a legendary brothel or so he claimed. A good Van Vechten
biographer must also be a tireless debunker, and White, alert to his subject's
tendency toward embellishment, could find no evidence that Van Vechten had
spent time at the Everleigh's famous gold-leaf piano. "One must only be
accurate about such details in a work of fiction," Van Vechten wrote,
years later, by way of excusing his fabricated account of the historic premiere
of Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps." He hadn't been there,
either, although he had attended the second performance, which was not quite so
historic.
Van Vechten's determination always
to be in the right place - even when he wasn't - carried him to New York, to
Europe, and back to New York, a city that he found fewer and fewer reasons to
leave. After a brief marriage to a childhood friend, he wed an actress named
Fania Marinoff, who stayed with him for the rest of his life, more than half a
century, despite being given plenty of reasons to leave. Van Vechten and
Marinoff were known for their parties, which flouted the laws of Prohibition
and the norms of segregation. Starting in 1924, as Van Vechten became, in his
words, "violently interested in Negroes," the Van Vechten apartment,
on West Fifty-fifth Street, was one of the few truly integrated social spaces
in a city that wasn't as cosmopolitan as it thought it was.
Van Vechten's passion had begun as
curiosity about a novel called "The Fire in the Flint," which depicts
a Ku Klux Klan lynching in Georgia. Van Vechten arranged to meet its author, an
enterprising young N.A.A.C.P. activist named Walter White, who helped introduce
him to just about every prominent Negro singer and writer in town. In a series
of articles for Vanity Fair, Van Vechten argued that the blues deserved
"the same serious attention that has tardily been awarded to the
Spirituals," and he introduced readers to W. C. Handy, the songwriter who
popularized the blues, and to Hughes, whose poems drew inspiration from Negro
vernacular culture. Some nights, he went uptown, prowling Harlem's cabarets.
Other nights, the cabaret came to West Fifty-fifth Street, as when Bessie Smith
treated party goers to a thunderous performance. Afterward, when Marinoff
attempted to deliver a grand kiss good night, Smith threw her to the floor,
yelling, "Get the fuck away from me!" Apparently, Van Vechten was
unfazed - one attendee heard him praising Smith's performance, sotto voce, as
she was escorted out.
By the time he got to work on his
Negro novel, Van Vechten didn't feel merely like a supporter of the Harlem
Renaissance; he felt like part of it. In one telling, this feeling explains why
he thought that he could get away with his scandalous title. The novel contains
only two footnotes: one points readers to a glossary of "unusual Negro
words and phrases"; the other explains that the word "nigger" is
"freely used by Negroes among themselves," but that "its
employment by a white person is always fiercely resented." Bernard argues
that by using the word "nigger" Van Vechten sought to "establish
his privileged status" as a white man who was above the racial law. Edward
White, too, views the footnote as proof that Van Vechten saw himself as an
exceptional white man, with "special dispensation" to use language
that would otherwise be taboo. It seems just as likely, though, that Van
Vechten chose so definitive a formulation - "always fiercely
resented" - not because he thought he could escape censure but because he
knew he wouldn't. And he must have known: one of many people to whom he
revealed his title in advance was Countee Cullen, the urbane Negro poet. In his
journal, Van Vechten recorded Cullen's response: "He turns white with hurt
& I talk to him." They argued about it, and the next day they augured
some more; Cullen was never persuaded, which didn't stop Van Vechten from using
a quatrain of his as the book's epigraph. It's not hard to imagine that Van
Vechten was thinking of Cullen, and all the others who might never forgive him,
when he wrote that self-indicting footnote.
"Nigger Heaven" is a
short book, made shorter still by its standalone prologue, about a pimp known
as the Scarlet Creeper, and by its split structure, which pairs two slim
novellas, one for each protagonist. The first is given over to Mary Love, a perceptive
but anxious young librarian; the second belongs to Byron Kasson, a stubborn and
confused aspiring writer, whose brief love affair with Mary provides a hinge between
the two halves. Both characters wrestle with Negro identity: Mary is too
self-conscious to join the revelry she sees all around her in Harlem, while
Byron is paralyzed and enraged by the humiliations of a segregated city. After
a condescending white editor criticizes Byron's work, he leaves Mary and takes
up with a debauched socialite named Lasca Sartoris; when Lasca leaves him, he
descends into fury, and the novel ends with a complicated spasm of violence.
(It was Mr. Scarlet, in the night club, with the revolver though it's Byron who
faces punishment.) Van Vechten is fascinated by the diversity of Harlem, with
its "rainbow" of skin colors and its complicated hierarchy of class
and culture. When Mary rebuffs a powerful kingpin, Raymond Pettijohn, who has
cornered the market on a numbers game called bolito, the result is a bilingual
form of pulp fiction:
I'm sorry, Mr.
Pettijohn, she said, but it's no use. You see, I don't love you.
Dat doan mek no
difference, he whispered softly. Lemme mek you.
I'm afraid it's
impossible, Mary asserted more firmly.
The Bolito King
regarded her fixedly and with some wonder. You cain' mean no, he said. Ah's
willin' to wait, an' to wait some time, but Ah gotta git you. You jes' what Ah
desires.
It's impossible, Mary
repeated sternly, as she turned away.
That "throb of the
tom-tom" that David Levering Lewis detected is real enough: the sound is
described in a scene near the end, when Byron and Lasca, high on cocaine,
stumble into a demonic after-hours club. But, throughout the novel, the
character most obsessed with primal and exotic Negro identity is Mary, whose
hunger for racial authenticity becomes a cruel running joke. "She admired
all Negro characteristics and desired earnestly to possess them," we learn,
though she also suspects that this desire is self-defeating. "Unless I
acted naturally like the others, it would be no use," she thinks, and the
novel turns on the question of what it might mean for a college-educated Negro
to act "naturally"; this ongoing debate makes the novel much more
interesting than its characters or its plot.
During her brief romance with
Byron, Mary suddenly finds herself speaking the kingpin's English. "Ah'm
jes' nacherly lovin' you, mah honey," she says. To Byron, this
"nacherl" speech sounds artificial; he asks her, "Where did you
learn that delicious lingo?" And the white editor who so infuriates Byron
does it by urging him to write about Negro life in Harlem. The editor says,
"God, boy, let your characters live and breathe! Give 'em air. Let 'em
react to life and talk and act naturally." This is more or less what Van
Vechten had been telling young Negro writers in his own published essays, and
yet the character who delivers these words to Byron is more buffoon than sage:
a rude and presumptuous interloper, eager to share his dubious theories about
the happy life of the average "Negro servant-girl." Tellingly, in the
years after "Nigger Heaven" was published, Van Vechten largely
stopped offering unsolicited advice to young Negro writers. The reaction to
"Nigger Heaven" doubtless made him reticent, but so, perhaps, did the
experience of writing it.
In a brutal and influential review
published in The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois derided
"Nigger Heaven" as "an affront to the hospitality of black folk
and to the intelligence of white"; he found nothing in its pages besides
"cheap melodrama," enlivened by bursts of "noise and
brawling." Bernard, similarly, finds the novel "banal," but celebrates
it anyway, arguing that its real contribution to the Harlem Renaissance lay in
the reviews it generated. Annoyed by Du Bois and others, a coterie of young
Negro writers joined the fight, standing up not just for Van Vechten but for
the right to fill their own pages with as much "noise and brawling"
as they pleased. Claude McKay, a Jamaican immigrant, published "Home to
Harlem," a rich and sordid tale of love and violence uptown. (After
reading it, Hughes wrote a wry letter to Van Vechten: "If yours was
'Nigger Heaven,' this is 'Nigger Hell.'") And the witty and acerbic
novelist Wallace Thurman delivered a mixed verdict on the novel itself, even as
he lambasted its critics:
In
writing "Nigger Heaven" the author wavered between sentimentality and
sophistication. That the sentimentality won out is his funeral. That the
sophistication stung certain Negroes to the quick is their funeral.
It was true that Van Vechten was
one of the patrons of Fire!!, the
celebrated single-issue magazine in which Thurman's essay appeared. But Bernard
is right to observe that, for many writers associated with the Harlem
Renaissance, the defense of "Nigger Heaven" had become an
emancipatory project. "It enabled members of the younger generation to
distinguish themselves from their predecessors," she writes. "It had
become their cackling chuckle of contempt."
No Negro writer was more caught up
in the controversy than Hughes, who was widely perceived as Van Vechten's
protege. Van Vechten had prevailed upon his friend Alfred A. Knopf to publish
Hughes's first collection, "The Weary Blues," and wrote a preface to
it. Some critics thought they detected Van Vechten's vulgarizing influence in
Hughes's earthy poems. But Van Vechten insisted, with some justification, that
"the influence, if one exists, flows from the other side." The effort
to debunk these rumors only strengthened their friendship, which endured not
only the "Nigger Heaven" controversy but also Van Vechten's withering
assessment of Hughes's pro-Soviet poems, and Van Vechten's reputational decline.
(In the nineteen-fifties, Hughes asked Van Vechten to write an introduction to
a new volume of poems, then tactfully rescinded the request after his publisher
told him that it wouldn't be a good idea.) The letters they exchanged are
affectionate and conspiratorial-in one, Van Vechten teased Hughes by telling
him that people were referring to his debut as "The Weary Blacks."
Even as the debates of the nineteen-twenties faded, Van Vechten and Hughes
liked to think of themselves as mischievous upstarts, doing battle against the
forces of Negro propriety. When Van Vechten told Hughes that he had arranged
for his papers to be archived at Yale University, Hughes feigned concern:
I was just about to
tell you about a wonderful fight that took place in Togo's Pool Room in Monterey
the other day in which various were cut from here to yonder and the lady who
used to be the second wife of Noel's valet who came to New York with him that
time succeeded in slicing several herself - but you know the Race would come
out here and cut me if they knew I was relaying such news to posterity via the
Yale Library. So now how can I tell you?
If Van Vechten's attraction to men
was an open secret, Hughes's romantic life was a secret secret; his biographer
Arnold Rampersad is one of many historians who have looked for evidence and
come away with nothing conclusive. White, considering the close relationship
between Hughes and Van Vechten, concludes that they were not lovers; as proof,
he offers their correspondence, which he contrasts to the "flirtatious"
letters, rife with "homosexual coding and innuendo," that Van Vechten
sent to his male lovers. "His letters to Hughes feature none of
that," White argues, "and disclose nothing but warm, jovial
friendship and honest exchanges of opinions." It might be said, though,
that Van Vechten's version of "jovial friendship" wasn't entirely
free of sexual suggestion. One of Van Vechten's missives, from 1943, includes
an out-of context postscript: "I have just photographed an extremely
beautiful merchant seaman (cullud) age 21 who used to be an undertaker and is
devoted to the arts." The next year, he told Hughes about a "Best
Built Man" competition he had attended in Harlem. 'The Adonises (white and
cullud) are obliged to POSE to display their muscles and some of the attitudes
were honeys," Van Vechten wrote.
Despite his reputation for lurid
prose, Van Vechten could be surprisingly discreet, and, even with the benefit
of thousands of letters and journal entries, there are parts of his life that
are hard to reconstruct. Early notes make reference to a turbulent marriage.
(From 1925: "I get drunk & get rough with Marinoff.") Later,
there are passing, references to estrangements and vacations and
reconciliations, and also to men who turn out to have been Van Vechten's
lovers. Sometimes, in his letters to his wife, he writes as if he were
travelling or dining solo, when he wasn't; other times, the men are mentioned
casually, as mutual friends.
White, lacking details, has few
stories to tell, but he confidently diagnoses Marinoff's plight. "In New
York, where Van Vechten's coterie of young men was always buzzing around him,
she often felt as if she had to wait in line for an audience with her
husband," he writes. Occasionally, he allows himself to express some
frustration that his subject wasn't more forthright; when it came to the
"sexual freedom" that White wants to celebrate, Van Vechten declined
to preach what he practiced. One of Van Vechten's closest friends and lovers
was Mark Lutz, a journalist from Virginia, who died in 1967. Van Vechten sent
him thousands of letters in the course of more than three decades, but after
Lutz's death those letters were destroyed, in accordance with his wishes.
Above all, Van Vechten seems to
have been careful to keep his two lives separate. The Harlem Renaissance was,
in Henry Louis Gates's formulation, "surely as gay as it was black,"
and Bernard counts Van Vechten among the many "gay downtown whites who
went uptown in search of sexual recreation." But although "Nigger
Heaven" includes an entry in its glossary for 'jig-chaser' ("a white
person who seeks the company of Negroes") and its counterpart,
"pinkchaser," the book's acknowledgment of same-sex encounters
consists of a single reference to a bar known for its "bull-dikers."
Perhaps Van Vechten felt that his Negro literary project would be immeasurably
more difficult if he were widely perceived to have ulterior motives. Richard
Bruce Nugent, the first black writer to produce frank descriptions of same-sex
desire, remembered an odd exchange with Van Vechten, later in his life. At a
party, he touched Nugent's shoulder and said, "If you had just patted me
on the head and said, 'Carl, you're a nice boy,' you could have had anything
you wanted." But, to Nugent, this seemed less like a proposition and more
like an older man's plea for acknowledgment.
The most startling thing about
White's book is its breadth: "Nigger Heaven" was merely one episode
in a very long and very episodic life. Van Vechten remained a devoted friend
and champion of Stein, and after her death, in 1946, he became her literary
executor. (A collection of their letters was published last summer; it's nine
hundred and one pages long.) He was celebrated, in retrospect, as one of
America's first major dance critics, and one of the first music critics to
embrace the sounds of the twentieth century. When he took up photography, he
badgered and flattered a wide range of luminaries into sitting for him, from
Joe Louis to William Faulkner; he captured some of the best-known images we
have of Stein, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. He never quite broke into
Hollywood, but he tried. Despite these other interests, he played an outsized
role in the development of Negro music and literature, which is partly a
tribute to how isolated and powerless black artists were in those days. One
well-connected white man could alter the course of a movement, just by writing
some articles and making some introductions. This, of course, was precisely what
Du Bois found so dismaying.
Back in the nineteen-twenties, Van
Vechten sometimes portrayed himself as a dilettante, whose interest in Negro
culture was just a phase. In a letter to H. L. Mencken, in 1925, he wrote,
"Jazz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously for the
moment. Doubtless, I shall discard them too in time." Of course, he never
did-in this and other ways, he was far more loyal and earnest than he sometimes
pretended to be. Much as he loved photography, his true life's work was the
Yale Library archive, and he pestered his old friend Hughes with endless
requests for material to add to the historical record. In 1963, a year before
Van Vechten's death, a reporter from The
New Yorker went to visit him at his apartment; he had moved from West
Fifty-fifth Street to Central Park West, but his interests hadn't changed. He
showed off some recent photographs, held forth on his favorite foods, shared
his enthusiasm for foreign films, and bragged about the friends he still had in
Harlem. "I still get about twenty-five letters a day from Negroes,"
he said. He never had children, although White raises the possibility of one or
more secret births and quiet adoptions. His life was his obsessions, which is
why he held them so tight - he was, in the end, the opposite of a dilettante.
He said, "I don't think I've ever lost interest in anything."
New Yorker
magazine, Feb 17 & 24, 2014
