The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  In the long run, being pulled back from Paris was highly fortunate. On his return to New York Van Vechten discovered the city at the start of an exciting cultural moment, the first of many to which he managed to tie himself. In recent months Alfred Stieglitz had displayed the paintings of Henri Matisse at 291, the first exhibition of modern art in America, while a group of New York painters known as the Eight put on a show of their work at the Macbeth Gallery, transferring to the canvas realistic depictions of the gritty panorama of urban American life of the sort that Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Upton Sinclair had already committed to the pages of their novels. Soon after, twenty-two-year-old Van Wyck Brooks published The Wine of the Puritans, an excoriating attack on an American culture that viewed all art, “ritual, pleasure, light-heartedness … as symbols of opposition to the stern economic need.” The desperate need for a revitalized national culture, unencumbered by the weight of foreign traditions, was a central seam of Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life too, the work of political philosophy that best embodied the vaulting ambition of the Progressive Era.

  When one looks back on this moment from the distance of more than a century, it appears to be an obvious turning point in American cultural history, the first shoots of a modern, urban artistic culture distinctive to the United States that would refute Henry James’s old accusation that Americans had “the elements of modern man with culture quite left out,” the sort of snobbish sentiment that Elinor Glyn had aimed at Van Vechten in Paris. Yet at the time few mainstream critics paid this moment of foment much attention. In fact, a recurring theme of Van Vechten’s own work across the six and a half years he spent at the Times was the United States’ supposed artistic retardation. He once quoted Chaliapin’s raging against the close-minded American critics who objected to the crude realities of life appearing onstage, and in his interview with Harold Bauer, Van Vechten noted the English pianist’s frustration that Americans apparently needed to pigeonhole art in order to appreciate it. In another of Van Vechten’s articles, Luisa Tetrazzini expressed her bemusement at the American obsession with the size and shape of opera singers.

  It was to Van Vechten’s immense credit, then, that when Isadora Duncan took to the New York stage in November 1909, he was one of the few who recognized that she represented something new and important, although at first he struggled to say exactly what. Duncan’s barefoot dances, inspired by the art of ancient Greece and informed by the techniques of ballet, had become a sensation across Europe, where she was hailed as the savior who had reinvented tired old European traditions with her American idiosyncrasies, in equal parts muscular, individualistic, naive, and exhilaratingly modern. Van Vechten was acutely aware of Duncan’s European reputation. In the artistic circles in which he mixed on the Left Bank, Duncan, one of the few Americans to be considered a great artist, was lionized. This may have been in Richard Aldrich’s mind when he decided that Van Vechten should take responsibility for reviewing Duncan’s performances at the Metropolitan in November 1909, though his main reason was that he thought the whole thing rather beneath him. Like the majority of established newspaper critics in the United States, Aldrich considered dance more akin to a vaudeville entertainment than a “proper” art form like the opera.

  Van Vechten was woefully underqualified for the job of reviewing the work of Isadora Duncan, who at that moment was the United States’ most important modern artist. “I was almost totally ignorant of the finer points of any kind of dancing,” he remembered of those assignments, although the deficiency was not his alone. Because dance was barely considered an art form, there was no critical tradition for Van Vechten to draw upon; in the process of writing his reviews late at night he had to invent a critical vocabulary to describe Duncan’s performances right there at his typewriter. He was undoubtedly glad of the opportunity, but given his bruising experience of Paris, he was also apprehensive about how to describe things that neither he nor his readership was used to being critiqued. His anxiety bled onto the page. Grasping futilely for the appropriate language and reference points, he decided not to attempt a dissection of Duncan’s technique but rather to convey the spirit of her work, its underlying artistic philosophy, which, visceral and unfettered as it was, seemed profoundly unusual to American audiences of the time, though, ironically, it was exactly this that made Europeans think of her choreography as quintessential of the United States. He may have been influenced in his approach by some of the writing about Duncan that had appeared in more obscure New York publications in recent months. Writing in Stieglitz’s Camera Work magazine, Charles Caffin had critiqued Duncan’s dances in highly impressionistic terms, likening them to the paintings of Matisse. Both, he said, were masters of invoking the rhythms of the natural world, “the corporeality of things,” as Caffin put it, submerged beneath a swamp of materialism, from the scent of flowers to the rush of running water. There are faint echoes of that in Van Vechten’s reviews, in which he exalted the “life and gaiety and motion” of Duncan’s dancing, describing how in one of the “wildest of her dances she closed with arms outstretched and head thrown back almost out of sight until she resembled the headless Nike of Samothrace.”

  Isadora Duncan dancing “La Marseillaise,” 1917

  Inexpert as these first efforts were, Van Vechten captured Duncan as an exuberant manifestation of a new type of art, though he struggled with some of her boldest experiments. With a tone of unconcealed astonishment he condemned as “a sacrilege” her use of music “never designed for dancing,” such as Beethoven’s A Major Symphony. It was evidence that modern art could befuddle him as much as many of the older, more conservative critics. As Paris correspondent he once filed a story in which he described the painting of Matisse as like that of “an inartistic child.” Rarely would he admit to ever having held a conservative opinion on matters of art, preferring to fuel the notion that he had emerged from the womb as a maven of the broadest tastes. However, he did concede that although he enjoyed Duncan’s approach, its precise meaning had him stumped at first. “Like any other new art,” he wrote in a paean to Duncan in 1914, “it is not to be understood at first and I confess in the beginning it said nothing to me.”

  Duncan was in fact the first of three American female dancers to perform homecoming shows in New York that winter, and Van Vechten was asked to review them all. The second was Loie Fuller, who appeared at the Metropolitan just two weeks later. There was a connection there with Van Vechten’s earliest memories of dance, for Fuller’s routines were theatrical embellishments of the skirt dancing he had seen as a child. On this occasion it was the lithe, sinuous dancers who darted around Fuller’s flowing skirts that caught his eye. Thamara de Swirksy, a Russian dancer, performed bare-legged in a modern American manner with “a more sensuous appeal than most dancers of the classic type,” while Rita Sacchetto thrilled with her “dance of madness in Chopin’s Tarantelle.” Flailing and writhing to the frenzied music, Sacchetto threw herself to the floor “completely exhausted, only to rise again to intensified emotion.”

  The sight of these barefoot young women expressing intense emotion through the angles of their bodies brought to mind the atmosphere of Salome. In the aftermath of that controversy the American dancer Maud Allan achieved great success in Europe with a routine she called a Vision of Salomé, which interpreted the themes of Salome through dances of her own. When Allan brought the routine to New York for the first time in January 1910, Van Vechten’s review noted that in the last two and a half years the antics of Salome had lost much of their ability to outrage: “there were no exclamations of shocked surprise,” he told his readers of Allan’s performance, “no one fainted, and at the end there was no very definite applause.” By this point Van Vechten’s confidence of expression was beginning to catch up with his critical instincts, and he treated the Times’s readers to perhaps the most evocative descriptions of dance yet to appear in an American newspaper. He wrote of Allan’s “grace, a picturesque personal quality” that
gave her movements an enchanting elegance. “Bare-limbed and scantily draped in filmy gauzes, diaphanous in texture and unvivid in colour, she floats from one pose to the next, emphasizing the plastic transitions with waving arms and raised legs and sundry poses of the head.”

  He had no critical grounding in dance, but he did have an intuitive feel for it. Memories of dance—the dance of the seven veils, the cancan from Paris, cakewalks from Chicago nightclubs, even Herbie Newell—underpinned his education in art and his experiences of cities on two continents. He was able to express what had so beguiled Europeans about these American women’s dancing, their energy and individualism, those elemental forces of American modernity. His name was still unknown to the public—the Times gave bylines only to senior critics—but among his peers his reputation was greatly enhanced, considered by many to be the city’s leading critic of dance. In those reviews he exhibited the kernel of the abilities that characterized his subsequent achievements: a gift for recognizing and expressing the ineffable brilliance of an artist and a moment of performance and, in so doing, binding himself to their greatness.

  * * *

  After the ignominy of his Paris experiences, the steps he made as a dance critic were a much needed fillip to a career that had stumbled. At home with his wife the future looked distinctly less promising. In the summer of 1911 Van Vechten’s marriage effectively shattered when Anna Snyder left him behind in New York to take an extended break in Europe. From Paris she wrote to him in an attempt to rekindle their dwindling relationship. “I not only love you,” she assured him, “I desire you.” No matter the strength of her feelings, the marriage had been doomed from the very start. Try as she might, Anna could not share her husband with Avery Hopwood or anyone else, and she felt neglected and marginalized by all of Van Vechten’s friends and the full, passionate life he lived outside their home. By the beginning of 1912 the gap between Snyder’s expectations of her husband and Van Vechten’s behavior had become a chasm. In January Van Vechten received a letter from Elsie Stern Caskey reassuring him that she had convinced Anna to “suppress the tale” of some transgression of his, the precise details of which she only elliptically referred to, though it was likely a homosexual liaison. Stern Caskey reassured Van Vechten that his reputation would survive this incident, but only if he learned to control himself. “Do everything you can to talk and act discreetly,” she implored, as “the people you are seen with etc. are going to be the deciding point. You can’t afford to antagonize anyone, nor to disregard public opinion.” Those were wise words: convictions for sodomy in New York at the time typically resulted in a jail sentence of between four and seven years.

  It is possible that Stern Caskey’s letter referred to a much darker episode that had taken place roughly four years earlier. In his memoirs Bruce Kellner, a protégé of Van Vechten’s, claims that many years after their wedding Anna Snyder confided to a friend that by the time she and Van Vechten married in England in 1907 she was pregnant with his child. With his phobia of responsibility there was nothing on earth that Van Vechten would have wanted less than to be a father, and Snyder’s letters about their “bohemian domesticity” do not sound as though she had motherhood on her mind. Consequently, if she was pregnant, it is likely that Snyder either had an illegal abortion or carried the baby to full term and had it adopted. Intriguingly, around roughly the same time a married couple who had once worked for Van Vechten’s father adopted a baby. Charles not only paid for the child’s college education but also offered him a job upon his graduation. There is no paper trail that can either prove or disprove the supposition that this child was Snyder and Van Vechten’s, but if true, it is easy to comprehend how the emotional strain of secretly putting their baby up for adoption could have contributed to the disintegration of their relationship.

  The marriage in tatters, Van Vechten apparently chose audacious means to secure a definitive split. At the time the only legitimate cause for divorce in New York was adultery, which had probably been one of the root problems in this case, but obviously, to testify to homosexual affairs in a court of law was out of the question. To get around the problem, he hatched a plan. One evening, having hired a room in a hotel, Van Vechten went out to procure a prostitute from Times Square. With the young lady back at the hotel, a friend, Paul Thompson, walked in on the couple accidentally on purpose, thereby being able to truthfully testify that he had witnessed Van Vechten committing adultery.

  After five years of marriage the divorce was finalized in August 1912. The split came as a shock to nobody. Uncle Charlie wrote Van Vechten a congratulatory letter when he heard the news. Charlie thought the unhappiness in their marriage had been plainly obvious, not because of anything that Van Vechten had said but because of “the things you have not said, which a young husband would naturally have spoken or written.” Many years later Van Vechten gave a remarkable verdict on Snyder and the value of their relationship: “she influenced me in many ways and was very good for my progress.” The solipsism of that statement reveals a fundamental truth about Van Vechten’s view of his relationships with others, whose value to him was frequently determined by their capacity to aid his interminable process of self-development. Once he had set his mind on erasing somebody from his life, the break—for him at least—was clean. “I can stop a relationship immediately” is how he assessed his ability for such coldly clinical behavior, striking a discernible note of pride. “I’m very hard.”

  Before the divorce was official, Van Vechten had a new lady in his sights, a twenty-five-year-old Broadway actress named Fania Marinoff. According to the accounts that Marinoff gave to others during her life, she was brought as a child with her Jewish family to America from Odessa, smuggled beneath the skirts of her stepmother on an overcrowded passenger ship only to live undernourished and uneducated in the slums of Boston. At the age of eight she was sent away to be cared for by an older brother, Michael, who, along with his wife, treated her abysmally, working her feverishly hard around the home and locking her up alone in the dark, rats scurrying around her feet, for hours at a time. At the age of twelve Marinoff was paying her own way in the world, working as an actress in the Camilla Martinson St. George Company, a touring theatrical group that bolstered its income during fallow periods by doubling as a sort of itinerant brothel, although Marinoff herself did not turn tricks. By the time she met Van Vechten she had established herself as a bright young thing of the legitimate theater, taking prominent roles in hit Broadway shows, and was tipped for stardom. The tale sounds Dickensian and may well have been exaggerated or embellished in parts; Marinoff shared Van Vechten’s flair for mythologizing, and like many actresses of the time, she spent most of her life claiming to be several years younger than she was.

  Marinoff was a striking young woman: high cheekbones framed cupid’s bow lips and large dark eyes, which looked out imploringly from milk-white skin. Van Vechten was immediately smitten by her looks and her personality. She was vivacious and assertive, the polar opposite of the languid and introspective Anna Snyder, with the added distinction of being an independent, self-made woman, who was urban to the core. “Artistic” might be the kindest way to describe her temperament; Van Vechten himself labeled her “a maid of many moods, and a few minutes after a violent discussion she is all smiles and charm.” To Marinoff the whole world was a stage. “If there was a door, she’d go through it,” one friend, paraphrasing a line from a Noël Coward play, fondly remembered her predilection for making a grand entrance. She had “prompt responses for everything,” remarked another, less fondly. “If one took her to a picture-show she screamed with delight; if some one gave her a new kind of cake she screamed with joy … one suspected her reactions of being rather studied, for surely no one could go on reacting so violently for so long without the process becoming automatic.” The gasps and shouts and trills of enthusiasm were an expression of shyness and insecurity rather than self-confidence. The hugs and kisses she liberally dispensed were a means of keeping others at
arm’s length, and very few friends ever saw the extent of the anxieties that plagued her, which ranged from a fear of abandonment to a fear of the dark. She was, in short, a born performer of tremendous emotional complexity, a perfect match for Van Vechten.

  Fania Marinoff

  The two first met through a mutual friend at Claridge’s on July 15; a second meeting occurred by chance on August 10. On August 15, they took a room at the Brevoort Hotel and spent the night together for the first time. It was the start of an intense affair, even more tempestuous than the relationship Van Vechten experienced with Snyder. In the normal course of their days together they would go from kissing and cuddling to screaming at each other in the street in a matter of minutes, with the arguments ending as suddenly as they had started. When Marinoff was out of town working in the theater, letters volleyed back and forth to New York, Van Vechten’s as giddy and garrulous as those of a lovesick teenager, displaying a tenderness unexpected of a cynical and worldly newspaperman who had just ended a disastrous marriage in unusual circumstances. “Darlingest Angel baby,” he began one letter in early 1913. “You are the only one—of that I am sure.” In mischievous moments, of which there were plenty, he sent his darling “Fan-Fan” warmest love from “Tom-Tom,” his pet name for his penis.