The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  Spotting an opportunity to use his position at the Times to glue himself to the burgeoning cult of Stein that was stirring among the members of Mabel’s salon, he worked to publish an article about her, this American “cubist of letters,” as he described her. After having had pieces rejected by various publications, he managed to persuade the Times to print a short profile of Stein, peculiarly, in its Monday morning financial section. In it, he described Stein as the creator of a new type of literature, comparing her writing with the paintings of Picasso. “This is post-impressionist, or cubist, or futurist literature,” he explained to New York’s presumably confused bankers and stockbrokers reading that morning; “it is impressionistic, emotional literature … a new attempt at feeling a thing.” He quoted an unnamed “friend” of Stein’s, Mabel Dodge, who attempted to explain the writer’s style and purpose. She is “tired of the limitations of literature,” Mabel declared, “and she wants to create a new field … the reading of this literature demands an entirely new point of view.” Just what that “entirely new point of view” was neither Mabel nor Van Vechten could quite articulate. But the significance of the article was not in its navigation of Stein’s style and philosophy, a task that keeps dozens of academics in heroic full-time employment to this day. Rather, Van Vechten had introduced the name and legend of Gertrude Stein to the pages of the nation’s most widely read newspaper. Without having ever met him, Gertrude Stein had an enthusiastic new cheerleader.

  Just a few days earlier, on February 17, 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, or the Armory Show, as it is more commonly known, opened in New York. The Armory Show that year displayed the best of American modern art, as well as Europe’s cubists, fauvists, and futurists. Cézanne, Kandinsky, Gauguin, and Picasso all were displayed, though the work that became synonymous with the event was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, an abstracted depiction of a body in sequential stages of motion that signaled a bold departure from the realist tradition that most Americans considered art. Van Vechten excitedly attended the exhibition with his friend Henry McBride, an art critic and a fellow Stein worshipper who had just begun a new job at the Sun newspaper. “Everybody went and everybody talked about it,” Van Vechten remembered with pleasure of the Armory Show. “Street-car conductors asked for your opinion of the Nude Descending the Staircase, as they asked you for your nickel.”

  The enthusiasm Van Vechten describes was not universally shared. With only rare exceptions, the prominent art critics in the United States ridiculed the Armory Show. It was all overly intellectual European nonsense, they raged, accessible only to metropolitan cliques. Van Vechten’s employers at the Times allowed the famous critic Kenyon Cox two pages to castigate the Armory artists and organizers as cynical charlatans who “seized upon the modern engine of publicity and are making insanity pay.” The Chicago Daily Tribune went in even harder with its headline ART SHOW OPEN TO FREAKS.

  As the historian Patricia Bradley points out, critics like Kenyon Cox were born before the United States’ dislocating industrial revolution took hold. Their cultural world was shaped not by the roar of motorcars and the flash of electric lights but by a memory of a savage civil war that had brought the American project to the precipice. Like the box holders at the Metropolitan Opera House who threw up their hands in disgust at Salome, these critics believed the point of art was to unify and soothe, to create order from chaos, and to play a purposeful role in national life. To them modern art’s violent abstractions, sexual overtones, and reordering of the physical universe were not only unpleasant but un-American and an affront to the traditional values that held the nation together. Van Vechten, however, had come of age in the first years of the twentieth century, when the function of art was very often not to create consensus but to question and explore the powerful forces that were propelling the United States into the next chapter of its astonishing journey. In his promiscuity and unconventional love affairs and his fascination with African-Americans and their culture, Van Vechten experienced those forces as the essence of modern life.

  His delight at discovering Mabel Dodge, Gertrude Stein, and the Armory Show within the space of a few months made it painfully obvious that his ideas about art and American life were increasingly out of step with the preoccupations of mainstream critics and especially of his employers at The New York Times. Six years into his career at the paper he was treading water, still playing second fiddle to Richard Aldrich and still writing without a byline credit. When in May 1913 he was offered the job of drama critic at a rival paper, the New York Press, he leaped at the opportunity, hoping to make a name for himself with the public. He was to begin the job as soon as he arrived back from a forthcoming trip to Europe, where he was planning to meet Gertrude Stein and stay with Mabel at the now legendary Villa Curonia. He wrote Marinoff, who was away working on a play in New Haven, that an exciting future lay ahead for them both.

  * * *

  Armed with letters of invitation from Mabel Dodge, Van Vechten arrived in Liverpool on May 27. By the twenty-ninth he was in Paris, spending the evening at the Folies Bérgère with his friend, and sometime lover, John Pitts Sanborn, an arts critic, with whom he had sailed from New York. Inside the club Van Vechten went backstage to see his old friend the actress Polaire, who, by a freak coincidence, happened to be entertaining Anna Snyder at that very moment. It was an awkward encounter for them both, and Van Vechten’s judgment on his ex-wife was far from kind. In his eyes she was haggard, overweight, and “altogether disgusting,” he told Marinoff. This was his first time in Paris since the divorce, and he had hoped to experience it afresh, free of the memories of his ill-fated marriage. It was an unfortunate start.

  Two evenings later he pushed Anna Snyder from his mind, put on his favorite shirt, a fancy white number decorated all over with tiny pleats, and walked across town to have dinner with Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice Toklas, at their home in the Sixth Arrondissement. As he crossed the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus to the front door, his heart began to beat a little faster beneath his breast pocket. It was not like Van Vechten to be nervous, but on this occasion he could not help it. Over the last year the figure of Gertrude Stein had acquired mythical status in his mind: an avant-garde prophet who existed on a plain high above the common or garden artists of Greenwich Village. Even her address was legend, thanks to the amazing collection of art that she and her brother Leo had accrued. Van Vechten was expecting no ordinary home but a museum of wild curiosities, the Armory Show crammed between writing desks and dining tables.

  When the front doors swung open and he was led inside, Van Vechten was astonished to discover that all he had heard was true: 27 rue de Fleurus was a veritable trove of modernist treasures. He told Marinoff about the remarkable Picasso paintings and sketches that met the eye at every turn, many of which featured “erect Tom-Tom’s [sic] much bigger than mine.” At the center of it all sat Gertrude Stein in a high-backed armchair. A portrait of her by Picasso, the jewel of her collection, hung close by on the wall. It showed her leaning forward into the viewer’s gaze, hands on thighs in a solid, masculine pose, her face shining out iridescently from the dark, shapeless form of her body. The message was clear: this was Gertrude Stein’s domain, and everyone who stepped inside was subject to her burning scrutiny.

  Over dinner Van Vechten’s nerves dissipated slightly, and the conversation began to flow. Intoxicated by her company, he believed there was no topic that Stein could not talk about at length: “a wonderful personality,” he swooned to Marinoff. He loved her deep belly laughs, her inquiring eyes, and her supreme self-confidence; she was happy to greet the world in baggy brown corduroy skirts and carpet slippers. Van Vechten would not be the first or last young man to feel the force of her unconventional powers of seduction, not explicitly sexual but certainly sensual. Like a pilgrim in the presence of a holy relic, he was so eager to confirm Stein’s otherworldly qualities that he allowed himself to ignore the machinating, manipulating part of her
character that displayed itself that evening, as Stein dropped several unsubtle references to his adulteries and divorce into the conversation. Van Vechten was bewildered and embarrassed but did not question where Stein had received her information or why she had chosen to behave so cruelly. Years later Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that Anna Snyder had been a dinner guest earlier that year and had spent much of the evening recounting intimate details of her marital difficulties. When Stein realized that Carl was the “villain of Mrs. Van Vechten’s tragic tale,” she could not help herself from having a little fun, she said. There was more to it than that. The teasing was a test of whether or not Van Vechten could be trusted as a friend and supporter. After all, he had been referred to her by Mabel Dodge, who Stein believed had exploited their friendship as a means of boosting her own profile. It was a favored tactic of Stein’s. The writer Bravig Imbs likened his first meeting with her to an audience with “a Roman emperor, taking a deep malicious pleasure in the all but mortal combat she encouraged among her guests.”

  Being teased was a new experience for Van Vechten. He was usually the one who poked fun and made others blush for his amusement, pursuing his targets to the point of cruelty. If anyone tried to reverse the roles, he would react angrily and cut him off. In Stein’s presence his usual self-assurance abandoned him, and he reverted to the impressionable youth spellbound by a compelling older woman that he had been with Mahala Dutton and Mrs. Sublett. Evidently his willingness to submit to the teasing earned Stein’s approval. It set the tone for their relationship for the next twenty years: he was to be a faithful and unquestioning supplicant at the majestic court of Empress Stein.

  * * *

  Two days later, by either design or pure coincidence, Van Vechten and Stein were reunited, when they shared a box at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées for the second performance of Le Sacre du Printemps by the Ballets Russes. Van Vechten had hoped to be in attendance for the premiere four nights earlier, but when he and Sanborn arrived at the theater a couple of hours before the curtain, they learned it had long ago sold out. That first performance hit Paris like a thunderbolt. With its subjects of paganism and ritual human sacrifice, this was a very different kind of ballet from any that had gone before, even for the progressive Ballets Russes. Almost as soon as the curtain came down, stories began to spread, mainly about the astonishing behavior of the audience. In one camp, it was said, jewel-laden defenders of the elegant traditions of classical culture hissed and booed and shrieked in horror from the opening bars. In the other, long-haired, shabbily dressed bohemians applauded the subversion while bellowing insults at the Philistine snobs. Punches were thrown, and duel challenges were issued by affronted gentlemen for the following morning.

  Van Vechten’s expectations for the second night were enormously high. He was not disappointed. In a letter to Marinoff he hailed it as the most remarkable theatrical event he had ever witnessed, even outstripping Salome. The dancing and the music he described as being of “an originality appalling,” and the whole event, including the unruly behavior of the audience, was “wildly beautiful.” Stravinsky’s score on its own, dissonant and wailing and hammered out in complex, brutal rhythms, would have been enough to cause a stir. Allied with Nijinsky’s impudent choreography, its every thrust and twist replete with a violent, primeval carnality, Le Sacre du Printemps was genuinely revolutionary. Van Vechten could have counted himself immensely lucky to have seen one of the first incendiary performances, but the fact that he had not made it to the premiere rankled him. Upon his return to the United States he decided to rewrite history by claiming he had been one of those privileged few who attended the infamous first night. The lie was a deliberate strategy to bolster his reputation as the United States’ leading dance critic. Yet May 29, 1913, was not simply the premiere of a modish new ballet; it was the point at which, to quote Modris Eksteins, art became “provocation and event.” Van Vechten grasped this immediately. He believed the opening night symbolized a crucial division between those who wanted to cling to the old values of the nineteenth century and those who wanted to embrace the new ones of the twentieth. In 1915 he published an account of what he claimed to be his experience of the debut performance, leaving nobody in any doubt where his sympathies lay:

  A certain part of the audience, thrilled by what it considered a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art, and swept away with wrath, began very soon after the rise of the curtain to whistle, to make cat-calls, and to offer audible suggestions as to how the performance should proceed. Others of us, who liked the music and felt that the principles of free speech were at stake, bellowed defiance. It was war over art for the rest of the evening.

  His account reached truly absurd proportions, worthy of his most lurid efforts for the American, when he claimed that a man who was seated behind him was so intoxicated by the music, the dancing, and the atmosphere that in keeping with the primitive theme of the ballet, he began “to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time … When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We had both been carried beyond ourselves.”

  Van Vechten never intended to write accurate eyewitness testimony, although for decades many writers took his recollections at face value. In playing so freely with fact and fiction he was employing a favorite modernist technique, eliding the distinction between art and reality and using the mythology of Le Sacre du Printemps to furnish his own. After Stein read the piece, she wrote Van Vechten to query a minor detail of his recollection—but surprisingly not the date. Amused that she had not picked up on the fabrication, Van Vechten reminded Stein that it was the second night of the ballet that they had attended but assured her that the precise facts were of little importance, and that “one must only be accurate about such details in a work of fiction.” Stein presumably felt similarly when she later claimed to have anonymously encountered Van Vechten at the ballet for the very first time and was so struck by his dandyish appearance that she went home and wrote the poem “One Carl Van Vechten” all about her brief encounter with this mysterious stranger. For both Stein and Van Vechten, the event of Le Sacre du Printemps was too perfect a moment to be sullied by the straightforward truth.

  * * *

  In June, with her new lover, the twenty-five-year-old socialist poet John Reed, a darling of the Greenwich Village radicals, Mabel Dodge arrived in France from New York, where she had just staged a remarkable pageant at Madison Square Garden in support of striking silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey. Along with Robert Edmond Jones, the future theatrical visionary, Van Vechten, Mabel, and Reed set off for Florence and the Villa Curonia. With Mabel and Reed’s attentions firmly devoted to each other, Van Vechten provided most of his own entertainment en route, flirting suggestively with Jones and scaring the shy young man half to death in the process. He baffled the inhabitants of a number of medieval French towns as they motored through, standing on the backseat, lifting his hat, bowing, and shouting, “Au revoir et merci.”

  The Villa Curonia was even more marvelous than Van Vechten had hoped. Suspended among the Apennine Mountains, the villa was surrounded by dense groupings of cypresses, gardenias, and bushes of sweet-smelling jasmine; peacocks strutted about the lawns as nightingales swooped and sang from the trees above. On the terrace where Van Vechten had his morning coffee, the soft contours of Florence clustered in the distance, the Duomo and Giotto’s famous tower stretching high above them. The rooms inside were beautiful too: modern comforts draped in a fluid patchwork of silks, antiques, and tapestries. This was Mabel’s Fifth Avenue apartment if decorated by the Medici. The cornerstone of the Italianate fantasy was Mabel’s own bedroom, in which she had a velvet ladder affixed to the ceiling above her four-poster bed and from which John Reed descended each night before they made love. Gertrude Stein had been invited that summer but declined. No matter, the other guests provided stimulating company. Paul and Muriel Draper, who ran a celebra
ted musical salon in London, were there along with the celebrated pianist Arthur Rubinstein, though Van Vechten thought his playing greatly overrated and was annoyed by the attention it drew from the others.

  As was customary at the Villa Curonia, the days and nights were taken up with arguments about art. Van Vechten took to the task well, spouting a stream of trenchant opinions in a manner that irritated Muriel Draper, who heard more bluster than considered opinion in his conversation. John Reed, however, found something striking about Van Vechten’s swagger, a quality that was absent from any of his journalism, and urged him to adapt his writing to allow more of his personality to shine through. If he did, Reed felt, Van Vechten might find an authentic voice, certainly one that would separate him from the herd of bland American arts critics. At the end of a blissful summer it was a thought that Van Vechten took back with him to New York, Marinoff, and his new position at the Press.

  * * *

  With editorial control for the first time in his career, Van Vechten stayed true to the concerns he had spent the summer immersed in, those of the new, the sensational, and the primitive. All three of those encapsulated his review of My Friend from Kentucky, an African-American musical written by J. Leubrie Hill and performed by the Darktown Follies at the Lafayette Theatre, a newly desegregated venue, the first of its type in New York. The show embodied all the things he believed to be authentically black, the thread that bound together the best of the African-American entertainment that he had seen in Cedar Rapids, Chicago, and New York. He praised its exuberant physicality and its “spontaneity” and noted the “semi-hysterical state of enjoyment” it produced in the audience, all of who, apart from Van Vechten, were black: “They rock back and forth with low croons; they scream with delight; they giggle intermittently; they wave their hands; they shriek.” The visceral responses of the audience at Le Sacre du Printemps had sounded the arrival of a modernist revolt against tradition. Van Vechten was keen to point out that such reactions in the black theater were just a regular part of the evening’s entertainment. It was a sign, he thought, that the primitive emotions with which Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Picasso, and many other modern artists were attempting to reconnect lay, like the epidermis, just beneath the surface of black skin. It was the first time Van Vechten had expressed in print the nub of an unwieldy idea that would slowly develop and consume his private and professional lives: in its essential primitivism, blackness contains the essence of modern art. In the United States the phenomenon of primitivism—the urge among artists to turn from the traditions of white Western culture and look to the supposedly more primitive traditions of nonwhite communities—is generally associated with the 1920s, after the devastating shock of the First World War had taken its toll and the Jazz Age was in full flow. Yet even before the war broke out in Europe, Van Vechten was promoting black culture in the popular white press. He urged audiences and producers to open their minds to the brilliance of New York’s nonestablishment arts. “One thing is certain,” he concluded his review. “There are few musical entertainments on Broadway that compare with this one.”