The Gay & Lesbian Review

39 / 52

THE 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.
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-
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,
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-
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
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
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!
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
The Splendid, Drunken van Vechten
RICHARD CANNING
The Tastemaker:
Carl van Vechten and
the Birth of Modern America
by EdwardWhite
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 384 pages, $30.
Richard Canning’s most recent publication is an edition of Ronald Fir-
bank’s Vainglory for Penguin Classics (2012).
March–April 2014 39
Carl van Vechten, Self-Portrait, 1932