The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  Further notices about black theater followed, including a warm review of Bert Williams’s comeback show at the Palace Theatre and an effusive editorial about Granny Maumee, a play starring an African-American cast, which Van Vechten praised not just for its humanizing depiction of black people but because it “is not an imitation of a French play or an English play or a German play. It is an American tragedy which sprang from the soil.” He advocated that Granny Maumee should provide the template for a new phase in American theater, “using the negro or the Indian or something which really belongs to us,” an extraordinary notion in 1913. He went so far as to investigate the possibility of establishing a black theater company to perform serious dramatic work by and about African-Americans, a venture aborted only because he failed to find black playwrights who wrote of the “essentially Negro character” that he felt needed to be expressed—that is, stories about black people told from what he considered a purely black perspective.

  Away from the Press he continued to promote Gertrude Stein, one of dozens of artistic causes that he took it upon himself to champion over the next half century. His efforts for Stein were unpaid, but from the beginning it was clear that he saw his own public profile bound up with hers. One evening, in the Brevoort Hotel with Marinoff and Avery Hopwood, he decided to educate the entire dining room by reading aloud passages from Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. Nobody had asked him to, of course, and Marinoff was mortified at his showing off. Hopwood, however, approved; he was so intoxicated, Van Vechten said, that he even claimed to have deciphered its meaning. In a more sober moment, Van Vechten found Stein her first publisher, Donald Evans, who agreed to take Stein’s Tender Buttons for his publishing company, Claire Marie. Evans had befriended Van Vechten a couple of years earlier, when working as a copyreader at the Times. Although demure and conventional on the surface, Evans was a deeply unusual character, like Van Vechten a devotee of Wilde and the decadents, and committed to living his life in accordance with his artistic principles. Also like Van Vechten, Evans believed himself special, a member of a natural aristocracy of artists. When Tender Buttons was published in June 1914, Evans wrote that “there are in America seven hundred civilized people only” and that the book was for them alone. In her very first published work in the United States Stein was depicted by Evans and Van Vechten as a complex author comprehensible only to a sophisticated minority. It was the opposite strategy to that of the Armory Show, which publicized modern art as if it were a circus coming to town with posters and buttons and merchandising of all kinds. In the future Van Vechten’s work as a promoter would employ a little of that same brashness to spread the popularity of various underappreciated artistic figures. For now he was content to carve himself a niche at the very heart of Stein’s following, proving to himself and the fashionable crowd around him that he was one of a select band of radicals who would shake things up in the United States as others had done in Europe.

  The same attitude is evident in a lengthy piece he wrote for the arts magazine The Trend in August 1914, entitled “How to Read Gertrude Stein,” with which he established himself as Stein’s greatest American champion. Van Vechten’s essay was an attempt to demystify Stein as many recent articles, books, and public lectures had tried to do for other modernist causes. Frederick James Gregg, for example, published For and Against, which accessibly engaged with both sides of the debate surrounding the Armory Show, and Charles Caffin wrote How to Study the Modern Painters. What Van Vechten really did was reinforce the notion, still common today, that Gertrude Stein is a difficult author, explicable only when one has been guided through her work by an expert insider, and even then the mission may be fruitless; special writers require special readers, runs the notion.

  He name-drops his way through the essay, allowing the reader to know that they are reading the opinions of a man who has surmounted the disorientating climes of modern art and is on friendly terms with not only Stein but her brother Leo, Henri Matisse, John Reed, and Mabel Dodge. Van Vechten wanted the world to appreciate Stein’s genius but was equally eager that it should be through him that its appreciation would flow. When it comes to grappling with Stein’s work, Van Vechten lets on that it is all a matter of technique. Only by reading it aloud, he says, can its innate musicality be felt. “Miss Stein drops repeated words upon your brain with the effect of Chopin’s B Minor Prelude,” he says, reaching for his favored musical metaphors. For readers hoping that Van Vechten might decipher for them the meaning of Stein’s writing, he has bad news: he has no more clue than they do. Even his special, direct access to Stein has not helped him. “I have often questioned her,” he writes, exaggerating the depth of their relationship at this point, “but I have met with no satisfaction.” However, the truly sophisticated will cherish her inscrutability. “Her vagueness is innate and one of her most positive qualities,” he declares in a statement as frustratingly vague as anything Gertrude Stein herself could have composed. It might sound like an elegant way of covering up his ignorance, but really this sums up his fascination with Stein—her strangeness and her indefinability. “How to Read Gertrude Stein” has a double meaning, referring to the work of the writer as well as to the personality of the woman. Both are apparently laden with mystery. In Van Vechten’s sketch Stein is a literary magician with an elusive yet spellbinding charisma who has alchemically “turned language into music.” There is nobody who can compare with her. “She lives and dies alone,” he says, “a unique example of a strange art.” Van Vechten sent Stein a copy of the piece upon its publication. She gave a measured, imperious response to let him know he had passed another test: “I am very pleased with your article about me.”

  Gaining Stein’s approval was easier for Van Vechten than making a success of his new job at the Press. He had started with great energy and the best intentions, expanding the scope of the review section to include productions usually ignored by newspapers, and enlisted exciting new talent such as Djuna Barnes—his “favorite genius”—to write and illustrate reviews. Unfortunately for Van Vechten, the editors of the Press saw no signs of genius on his watch. The attention he lavished on black theater they could tolerate, but they became irritated by his refusal to tend to the paper’s commercial concerns, especially by repeatedly failing to give review space to those theaters that provided regular advertising revenue. Following several reprimands, he was eventually fired in May 1914. It was obvious that Van Vechten’s passions could no longer be accommodated within the narrow parameters of the daily press. He needed a new arena in which to work, but having spent the last decade on newspapers, he had little idea of where to turn next.

  * * *

  A few weeks later he was able to put the disappointment aside as he set off for Europe once more, the Villa Curonia being the ultimate destination, and before that, Paris with Marinoff. Among a crowded itinerary, the pair made a pilgrimage to Oscar Wilde’s tomb at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, the solemnity of the occasion undercut by the outbreak of one of their spontaneous livid rows, though the following day neither could remember what it had been about. Their evenings were split between the opera and ballet and the sweaty backstreet bars in which ordinary Parisians drank and danced frenetically on tiny dance floors to mazurkas played on accordions, men and women of various ethnicities pressed together in intimate proximity. In between Van Vechten took Marinoff to meet Gertrude Stein and was delighted to find Stein unchanged—the same “intellectual Jewess, the same brown corduroy skirt with a non-descript shirtwaist—and breasts dropping low over her belt—and carpet slippers.” It was obvious that Van Vechten was now firmly in Stein’s good books: she could not have been more engaging, talking for hours about Spanish dancers, Tender Buttons, Donald Evans, Abraham Lincoln’s Jewish ancestry, and Mabel’s chaotic love life. Most pleasingly of all, she and Marinoff got along famously.

  After visits to Venice and London, Marinoff returned to the United States for work at the end of July. Van Vechten soon wished he had left with he
r. Upon his arrival at the Villa Curonia on the morning of Friday, July 31, he discovered the place enveloped in a strange atmosphere. Neith Boyce had been haunted by the villa’s resident ghost and had moved to an even more remote spot, a mountain retreat in Vallombrosa. As a result, Mabel had fallen into a gloomy mood. She had grown weary of the villa and was going to transport the entire household to Vallombrosa on Monday. In the meantime, other guests arrived: the English painter and writer Mina Loy, a zealous convert to futurism and mistress of its figurehead, Filippo Marinetti; Leo Stein, Gertrude’s now estranged brother, and his current lover, the artists’ model Nina de Montparnasse, a Frenchwoman of great charisma and physical beauty. In the evening Van Vechten found himself alone with Nina—who is perhaps better known today by her real name, Eugénie Auzias—and the two fell into a graphic conversation about their sexual peccadilloes, Nina recommending the thrills of exhibitionism. She also revealed that she knew Hener Skene, a Hungarian musician who claimed to have had an affair with Anna Snyder in the summer of 1911, a revelation that appeared to intrigue the voyeur within Van Vechten rather than cause him upset.

  The following morning grave news came. Germany had declared war on Russia. The talk of war in Europe throughout the summer had not bothered Van Vechten much, and it took time for the seriousness of this new development to register in his mind. Greenwich Village and Mabel’s salon had been suffused in ideological argument and political activism for the last three years, but Van Vechten never showed the slightest interest in any of it. Even when Marinoff participated in benefit performances for striking workers, he could not rouse himself to take an interest in the substantive underlying issues. As an old man in the 1960s, having lived through two world wars, the Depression, and many stages of the civil rights struggle, he admitted he had neither the knowledge nor the vocabulary to join in conversations about politics. When it came to elections, he cast his vote only if a particularly charismatic candidate was standing. For that reason he supported Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, even though he thought the nation did best under “stupid republican [sic] presidents.”

  On the day that war broke out his diary entry mentions the conflict only in connection with what he regarded as a much more significant event: his decision to abandon journalism for a more artistic calling. He envisioned a swirling work of prose that would combine futurism and the war with Neith Boyce’s visitation from a ghost and the bewitching character of Nina de Montparnasse. The disparate elements of the story would be pulled together in the half-fact, half-fiction format of George Moore’s that he so admired. Rapidly, however, the gravity of the situation in Europe sank in, though Van Vechten claimed that only Mabel foresaw that this war would have further-reaching consequences than any before. “I’ve done it all,” he had Mabel say in an account he wrote of the episode, “sixteenth, and seventeenth, and eighteenth century art. I’ve made a perfect place of this and now I’m ready for whatever will come after the war. I am through with all property, as every one else will have to be.” Frantic with worry about the war and yearning for the absent John Reed, Mabel recalled in her memoirs how she descended into a foul mood. Van Vechten’s flippant humor and his liberal consumption of red wine enraged her; his very presence made her seethe, but she refused to explain the cause of her temper. She screamed at him inside her head while remaining silent and withdrawn on the outside, wearing “a mask of quiescent boredom” that confused and unsettled the others.

  For the next several days gloom and panic filled Vallombrosa. Communications with the United States were patchy at best, money was running worryingly low, Italy was descending into chaos, and opportunities to leave the country were few. Eventually Van Vechten and Neith Boyce decided to take their chances and bought themselves spots on a rickety ship back to New York. Mabel was incandescent. She had wanted to remain in Italy with her son long enough to meet John Reed before attempting to find a way home together. Boyce had children to look after, so her early return was understandable. But Mabel saw Van Vechten’s departure as an inexcusable act of cowardice, leaving a woman and her child vulnerable to invading troops and the pandemonium of war. As he sailed back to New York at the end of August, Mabel mentally cut him adrift. They would not see each other again for nearly a decade. In reconstructing those final fraught days in print, however, it was to Mabel that Van Vechten gave the gift of prophecy. “Just think,” he had her say as war commenced, “the world will never be the same again.”

  SIX

  In Defense of Bad Taste

  Almost as soon as Van Vechten arrived back from Europe, he was approached by John Pitts Sanborn to take over the editorship of The Trend, the magazine in which his article about Gertrude Stein had recently appeared. Despite having concerns about the magazine’s finances—the last editor had resigned in a fury about the nonpayment of money owed to him by the publishers—Van Vechten agreed to step into the fold. Without his having to worry about the pressures of appeasing advertisers or writing copy that reflected the views of his superiors on a daily newspaper, this was his chance to develop his writing in the way John Reed had urged him to do. More prosaically, he was mighty relieved to have regular work again—especially now that he was a married man for a second time. The trauma of his separation from Marinoff made the couple realize that they could not live without each other, and in early October they married in a small, unfussy ceremony in Connecticut.

  The experience of editing The Trend proved to be stressful yet satisfying. As editor he was able to shape the magazine in his own image, an image inspired by the milieu of Mabel Dodge’s salon and 27 rue de Fleurus, the Armory Show and Le Sacre du Printemps, the Villa Curonia and the European war. Van Vechten’s first editorial pledged to “exclude stupidity, banality, sentimentality, cant, clap-trap morality, Robert W. Chambersism, sensationalism for its own sake and ineffectuality of any kind.” The Trend was to be the intellectual space of his fantasies, “an arena in which fiction writers, politicians and poets may find themselves face to face with wild beasts.”

  Fania Marinoff and Carl Van Vechten, c. 1925

  In the three issues he edited at the end of 1914, Van Vechten devoted much space to emerging—mostly American—talents who had something vital and new to express. He published illustrations by Djuna Barnes, an essay by Mabel Dodge, polemic prose by Louis Sherwin, and poetry by Mina Loy, Donald Evans, and Wallace Stevens. Perhaps the most remarkable contribution came from the editor himself. Appearing in the November issue, “War Is Not Hell” was unlike anything Van Vechten had previously written, a solemn disquisition on the meaning of the European war for American civilization, a bold step on the road to becoming the new type of writer he had resolved to become at the Villa Curonia. In the vein of so many of the idealistic young artists of Europe, he explained that the true purpose of the war was to “destroy dilettantism and the spirit of imitation, to destroy smugness; to destroy the sense of ownership; property rights, and rights in general; to destroy laws, customs, traditions; to destroy religions; to destroy the domination of Things; to destroy system; to destroy formulae … to destroy the army; to destroy the bench; perhaps to destroy marriage.” Some of these opinions seem far too ideological to have been his own, borrowed instead from the Greenwich Village set or Mina Loy, who, under the spell of Marinetti, wrote excited letters from Italy about the cleansing properties of war and how her masculine spirit craved the heat of battle. However, the zeal for rebellion and the challenge issued to cultural orthodoxies were authentically Van Vechten’s. War was not hell, he stated, because hell meant the stasis of eternal pain and drudgery. War, on the other hand, entailed not just conflict but creativity, climactic ends in concert with exciting beginnings. The vicious reality of war, the deaths and the misery that inevitably attend any conflict, was of secondary importance to him. As Le Sacre du Printemps had dared suggest, through violence and death, beauty and youth emerge anew. “That is what the war is for, he declared, “to recapture the word ‘spontaneous,’ to make people realize the
meaning of life.” It was a callous, idiotic statement, one that expressed nothing about the brutality of war, which of course he had been desperate to escape, but plenty about how he felt the last few months had liberated him.

  Days after the article was published Van Vechten went to see a musical revue at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, the venue at which Al Jolson had soared to national stardom over the last three years. Jolson, it turned out, had read the latest issue of The Trend, presumably because it included another piece by Van Vechten, which described Jolson as “gifted with the most magnetic and compelling personality upon the American stage today.” Jolson sought Van Vechten out to tell him how much he had enjoyed reading the magazine and in particular “War Is Not Hell.” Usually, he said, he did not go in for high-minded stuff, preferring to leaf through popular magazines like Pearson’s Magazine instead. But “War Is Not Hell” had really grabbed him. Van Vechten was overjoyed; it confirmed his suspicion that a new path was beckoning. If such a mainstream Broadway star, a legend of vaudeville and blackface whose repertoire was studded with the songs of Jerome Kern and Stephen Foster, was intrigued by the stirrings of a new cultural moment, Van Vechten was sure that the United States was ready for a leap into modernity in its fullest sense, and if it was afraid to jump, then he would happily give it a push.