by Edward White
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The trail to the cliff edge, however, was by no means straight and smooth. Shortly after that encounter with Jolson, Van Vechten’s association with The Trend came to a sudden end. Having gone weeks without a paycheck, Van Vechten resigned his position after the December issue had been edited, unfortunately before he had been able to publish any new work by Gertrude Stein, as had been his intention. Without a regular income he was in real financial trouble. Marinoff’s career was going well, but her earnings could scarcely cover their living expenses; they were particularly cash strapped because for the first year of their marriage they kept separate apartments, a bohemian arrangement that suited their independent lifestyles but bemused Charles Van Vechten, who thought it the latest example of his son’s infuriatingly weak grip on the practical demands of the real world. Van Vechten even stopped making his alimony payments to Anna Snyder, who, on March 9, 1915, applied to the courts for back payments of $738. Furious, Van Vechten declared himself both unable and unwilling to pay.
When the alimony payments were first ordered back in 1912, Carl had written to both his brother and father, whining about the injustice of it all, even claiming he was prepared to martyr himself with a prison sentence for nonpayment. Because Snyder had a job of her own and the support of her family, Van Vechten thought it grossly unfair that he should have to contribute to her upkeep out of his modest income. Neither Charles nor Ralph was at all sympathetic. Ralph bluntly told his little brother it was about time he faced up to his responsibilities. “While the alimony seems like a great injustice,” he conceded, “the best thing for you to do is buck up and pay it like a man. Your talk of going to jail is all bosh. You simply make yourself ridiculous and would disgrace your family … There is nothing like being a man when you are under the dog.” Three years later, on Ralph’s discovering that Carl had amassed several hundred dollars of arrears, his stance was barely more charitable, though he did provide him with an attorney, albeit one Van Vechten considered incompetent. Charles, ever the dutiful father, tried to soothe and reassure, but he told Van Vechten that he must find a dignified solution. The family’s masculine honor was at stake. “Don’t fear anything,” he wrote Carl. “Do the best you can and stand up like a man,” the implication being that thus far his behavior had been anything but manly.
Van Vechten repeatedly stated that he could not afford to settle the debt, yet Snyder refused to reduce her demands. She told the courts that her ex-husband had plenty of money sloshing about, but that he chose to spend it on expensive dinners, drinking sessions, and a wardrobe of fancy clothes, including numerous pairs of silk underpants. On April 5 Van Vechten was sentenced to the Ludlow Street Jail until the issue was resolved. Given the likely trigger of their separation—Van Vechten’s roving eye and his homosexual dalliances—Snyder’s decision to pursue him so vigorously for the alimony payments may have resulted from the hurt and confusion she felt now that he had a glamorous new wife with whom he was apparently besotted. Of course, if the reports are true, she may still have been grieving over the child they put up for adoption and been dismayed that Van Vechten was capable of putting the past behind him so effortlessly.
The sexual dimensions of the split from Snyder lurking unspoken in the background were not lost on Van Vechten, who wrote a comic verse while behind bars titled “The Ballad of Ludlow Street Jail,” an allusion to Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” His period of incarceration was, however, infinitely happier than Wilde’s and far less injurious to his reputation. Ludlow Street was a relatively relaxed institution, housing many civil rather than criminal offenders, and numerous small luxuries could be acquired for a fee. Van Vechten boasted that he decorated his cell with a Matisse etching, courtesy of the art collector Walter Arensberg, and always maintained that he rather enjoyed his stay. Greenwich Village friends who visited him thought being locked up with an exotic array of ne’er-do-wells was just the sort of scandalous thing they had come to expect of “Carlo,” as they all called him. “It was fearfully exciting going to meet you today,” wrote Louise Bryant, the far-left journalist. “I terribly envy you … Do become well acquainted with the Blue Beard of the many wives and concubines. He is very like my first abortion doctor.” From Florence, Mina Loy expressed similar envy: “The only place for a writer is prison.” Back in Cedar Rapids the situation caused pain and humiliation. Van Vechten’s father was only thankful that the editor of the local paper pledged to hush up the story out of respect for the family. Eventually Van Vechten was released on April 28 on the agreement that Snyder would receive a one-off lump sum of $2250, paid out of Van Vechten family money.
Over the years, Van Vechten embellished the tale of his imprisonment into something more befitting his self-image. He reveled in the notoriety, and with repeated telling his stories grew increasingly elaborate. He claimed to have had a piano in his cell—as was not the case—and his three-week sentence eventually became an ordeal of four months, a fabrication that possibly ended up supplanting the truth in his own mind. Following his release, he continued to write freelance, managing to get provocative articles published in various fashionable organs, including a fictionalized account of a visit to a Parisian brothel that was based on a Mina Loy painting, Love Among the Ladies, and heavily inspired in its form and style by George Moore. Entitled “An Interrupted Conversation,” the piece appeared in Rogue, a new magazine founded and run by Louise and Allen Norton. The Nortons were committed to publishing anything that seemed likely to outrage conservative sensibilities, and their magazine’s slogan “The cigarette of literature” neatly described a publication intended to be an illicit but sophisticated indulgence. Alongside his own work, Van Vechten convinced the Nortons to place pieces by Loy and Stein, to both of whom he was acting as agent-cum-cheerleader. Though Stein had numerous advocates and possessed the uncommon assurance of a self-proclaimed genius, Loy was far from certain that she had any talent for writing at all. Not only did Van Vechten’s enthusiasm bolster her confidence, but his promotion turned her into one of the most talked-about literary figures in Manhattan; her visceral, erotic poetry both extolled and excoriated the New Woman’s sexual awakening.
As an essayist, controversialist, and publicist Van Vechten’s reputation was growing fast. But fomenting American modernism was not exactly a lucrative career choice. Rogue, for example, rarely paid contributors, so he received no remuneration for his own writing, let alone that of the third parties he helped publish in its pages. Not that Van Vechten ever promoted other artists in hope of financial reward. His primary goal was cultural capital. It excited him to feel as though he had an influence on developing tastes and fashions, and publicizing unusual and emerging talents was a means of promoting himself as a man of foresight and sophistication. To be admired in that way was something money could not buy.
By the fall of 1915 Van Vechten had been forced to attempt to live within his means, and his and Marinoff’s separate domiciles were traded in for a single marital home, a three-room apartment at 151 East Nineteenth Street. They might conceivably have afforded a larger place elsewhere, but this was an achingly fashionable address. Tucked between Irving Place and Third Avenue and a stone’s throw from Gramercy Park, this is what the journalist Harriet Gillespie, in an article in American Homes and Gardens in 1914, had famously christened the Block Beautiful, many of the buildings customized and decorated with eclectic designs that made it one of the most attractive neighborhoods in the city, inhabited by dozens of celebrated people. Residents of the Block Beautiful included the muckraker Ida Tarbell and Robert Winthrop Chanler, the aristocratic bad boy of American painting and one of New York’s best-loved party hosts. Chanler’s parties were held on the top floor of his characterful house, recognizable to many New Yorkers today by the intertwined giraffes bordering the front door, and Van Vechten claimed he was all but forced to attend his raucous parties, “for his unrestrained guests kept me awake if I didn’t,” though it is difficult to imagine he was any
thing but a willing and voluble guest. This was the Van Vechtens’ kind of neighborhood, a perfect base for them to cultivate their profile as one of Manhattan’s most stylish couples: Fania, a left-field star of Broadway and the movies; Carl, a prophet of the United States’ emancipation into a new age of speed and sensuality.
In September Van Vechten accompanied Marinoff to New Providence in the Bahamas, where she was to have a starring role in a new movie titled Nedra. Even though Van Vechten had a tiny cameo in the production, he passed up the chance to write about the experience of making a movie on location and instead directed his voyeurism toward the island’s native population. During the days he strolled the beaches of Hog Island, studying the local youths bathing naked in the sea, admiring their sleek dark skins as they swam and then let their bodies dry in the arid heat of the afternoon. “Wonderful in their lithe nudity, these Negroes,” he reminisced in one of the two articles the trip produced, “gleaming in their bronze perfection.” He was both erotically and intellectually stimulated. To his eyes, the Bahamians shared the same uninhibited character as many of the African-Americans he had encountered in Chicago and New York, the “essentially Negro character” that he found in Granny Maumee. In fact, the Bahamians’ innate blackness seemed even closer to the surface of their being, unobstructed by the presence of white Western civilization. One evening a group of young local men and women agreed to entertain Van Vechten with a dance—in exchange for a small sum of money. Van Vechten sat transfixed as the dancers threw out their limbs and swayed their hips, their bodies illuminated in the flickering firelight, all the while accompanied by drumming and singing, a “primitive jingle,” as he described it, which was “in its inception, symbolic of manifestations of sex.” The Ballets Russes sprang to mind. The primitive feeling of Le Sacre du Printemps seemed spontaneously abundant in the folk culture of the Bahamians, their “wild leaps, whirls, contortions of the body, girandoles, occasionally suggesting the barbaric Polovtsian dances in Prince Igor.”
Another encounter on the island, this time with a charismatic evangelical sect known as the Holy Jumpers, encouraged him to draw even firmer parallels between blackness and the raw, rebellious spirit that surged within the new breed of radical artists. It was at a local tour guide’s suggestion that Van Vechten ventured out of town to a rickety little building, a tiny church made of timber posts and palm leaves. Dozens of parishioners were tightly packed on the church floor, “strewn with dried palm branches,” with even more worshippers spilling outside. On a platform at one end of the church, a preacher began an unrestrained performance, which Van Vechten thought resembled “a Mozart overture; there were descents into adagio and pianissimo, rapid crescendos and fortissimos; slowly, slowly, slowly the assemblage was worked upon and with the progression of the exhortation the emotion increased; the preacher was frequently interrupted by shrill distorted cries.” As the sermon continued, Van Vechten described the congregation’s losing control. His report soon skipped to improbable heights of melodrama as he likened the worshipers’ communion with God to a moment of pulsating orgasm:
A young negress rose and whirled up the aisle, tossing her arms in the air. “Oh God, take me!” she screamed as she fell in a heap at the foot of the platform. There she lay, shrieking, her face hideous, her body contorted and writhing in convulsive shudders. […] Her eyes rolled with excitement; supreme pleasure was in her voice. The crisis approached. It seemed as if the girl lying prone was in a frenzy of delight. Every muscle twitched; her nerves were exposed; her fists clenched and unclenched. Uncontrollable and strange cries, unformed words struggled from her lips … and then a dull moaning, and she lay still.
Aside from the narrow and, inadvertently, patronizing idealizations of black people, the Bahamian articles exhibit Van Vechten’s cultural worldview. With an insouciance that failed to disguise a calculated provocation, he proposed that at root Americans and Europeans were in pursuit of the same visceral experience displayed in the “ecstasy of a Negro’s sanctity,” striving to access raw, truthful emotion buried beneath the patina of manners and social conditioning. “Americans are easily thrilled at a base-ball game; at best they seek a prize fight.” It was the guiding force of the age, he argued, the thread that connected the bloodshed of Ypres with Keystone Kops. “Everywhere there is evidence of the search for the thrill, by the masses, by individuals: revolution, fast motoring, war, feminism, Jew baiting, Alfred [sic] Casella, aeroplaning, the Russian Ballet,” as well as lynching and public executions.
In an article titled “In Defence of Bad Taste,” written in September 1915 around the time of his trip to the Bahamas, he urged his compatriots to honestly engage with their instincts when he playfully mocked wealthy Americans who relied on interior decorators to tell them how a home should be properly furnished, for fear of straying from the herd and exhibiting “bad taste.” The reticence of creating a home to reflect one’s own identity, he argued, pointed to a greater truth about Americans’ relationships with art and culture. “Americans have little aptitude for self-expression,” he claimed. “They prefer to huddle, like cattle, under unspeakable whips when matters of art are under discussion.” The Bahamians exhibited their willingness to abandon themselves to the power of their instincts, as did the Ballets Russes and its fans. Until Americans learned to do the same, he said, they would remain desperately unfulfilled. In what reads like a metaphor for his refusal to deny his sexual proclivities as well as his artistic ones, he avowed it pure folly to live by the rules of others and deny the irresistible force of one’s true identity: “it is preferable to be comfortable in red and green velvet upholstery than to be beautiful and unhappy in a household decorator’s gilded cage.” It was the first time that Van Vechten crystallized on the page what was essentially his guiding philosophy: the objective of existence was to sate one’s innate desires rather than to conquer them through the intellect; to thrill, excite, and challenge the senses rather than to explicate or dull them. His encounters with black people in Chicago, New York, and now the Bahamas convinced him that they had an instinctive understanding of this, and access to a fount of primitive feeling that was out of reach of the many white Americans tethered to a prudish and reactionary culture.
The leaden shackle of “good taste” was the ultimate target of Van Vechten’s main venture of 1915, Music After the Great War, a collection of essays about the current and future states of music. The project had floated around his mind ever since that transformative trip to Europe in 1913. He was keen on the subject, not only because of his passion for and knowledge of new music but also because it was relatively open territory. For years James Huneker had occupied the position of the United States’ most radical voice in music criticism, championing Wagner, Debussy, and Strauss with a devilish erudition. But as lively and novel as his criticism had always been, Huneker, now approaching sixty, had little feel for the sounds of ragtime that delighted the general populace and were influencing classical composers at home and abroad. In this respect, Huneker was regarded as a fusty Victorian, a very different figure from the jousting maverick he had been just a decade before. Van Vechten’s reputation could barely have been more dissimilar. In 1912, while still at the Times, he had written an article about why ragtime was fundamentally different from other recent popular music fads, such as the Viennese waltz. Having interviewed the composer of the hit ragtime tune “The Gaby Glide,” Louis A. Hirsch, about its unique qualities of syncopation, Van Vechten suggested that ragtime “is really distinctively American” and more sophisticated than the popular music of any other nation. It was a gentle burst of heterodoxy, but still an opinion that any critic of Huneker’s generation would have choked on.
Handled by one of Huneker’s old publishers, G. Schirmer Inc., Music After the Great War was an audacious first book. Over the course of seven essays it told the American public that music was on the precipice of revolution: the exalted canon of German romanticism “has had its day”; the tradition of Brahms, Bach, and Beetho
ven was to be incinerated in the flames of war, clearing the way for an uncompromising movement, led by the Russians. Ridiculing the banality of American and English classical composers, he declared the brutality of Stravinsky and the twisting ambiguity of Schoenberg to be the future of music. With a typically breezy flourish he prophesied “beyond doubt that music after the Great War will be ‘newer’ (I mean, of course, more primitive) than it was in the last days of July, 1914.” The war would produce a “splendidly barbaric” new order in which the syncopations of Negro music, vulgar to the ears of most established critics, would thrive. The genteel tradition, he told his readers, was as good as dead.
Many reviewers, even those who praised the “clever” author for the robustness of his arguments, found the book so crammed with dissenting opinions that they found it difficult to believe it was meant to be taken seriously. A reviewer for The Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, summed up the sense of incredulity by concluding that the book contained “considerable enjoyment but less sound sense.” To some the book’s very title was a loathsome impertinence. The war that was supposed to have been over by Christmas 1914 was entering a phase of bloody attrition that nobody had foreseen. To consider how marvelous its effects would be on something as frivolous as music was irreverent in the extreme.