The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  Naturally, the bombast was calculated. Van Vechten was sincere in his desire to shake the United States from its artistic conservatism, and he believed what he said about the arrival of new musical sensibilities. Even so, a film of self-aggrandizing superiority sticks to the profanations of Music After the Great War. It was here that Van Vechten first published his lie about attending the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps, clinging to the coattails of some of the greatest artistic innovators of his generation to gain notoriety by association and embroidering a personal mythology that he hoped might put the name Van Vechten in the same category as Duncan or Dodge or Stein. Modern music in America, after all, had no Armory Show moment as painting and sculpture had, so it was with this book that Van Vechten hoped to insinuate himself as a leader of the cultural rebellion. The preening did not go unnoticed. Not for the last time Van Vechten was dismissed by certain critics as a bohemian fraud. “His revolt,” one otherwise complimentary reviewer snorted, “goes so far in mad, mad daring that one hears in it the gurgle of the vin rouge of Greenwich Village.” Another said the book exhibited nothing more than that its author “has been in Paris, which seems to him to be a precious and exclusive privilege enjoyed by few, and that he has heard Russian music and seen Russian dancers, which are now about to bring glorification unto our poor souls.”

  * * *

  Music After the Great War was published at a pivotal moment for the arts in the United States. In 1915 the author Van Wyck Brooks called for Americans to create a vibrant new culture, a “genial middle ground” between the highbrow of “academic pedantry” and the lowbrow of “pavement slang.” Throughout the war years the shoots of this new culture burst through the soil. The plays of Eugene O’Neill debuted, thanks to the Provincetown Players. Mabel Dodge had moved away from Manhattan shortly after returning from Europe in 1914, but Van Vechten’s friends Ettie, Carrie, and Florine Stettheimer opened their Upper West Side home to artists including Charles Demuth and Marcel Duchamp. Radical magazines, including Others, The New Republic, and The Seven Arts, among them published Robert Frost, Khalil Gibran, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Sherwood Anderson.

  But more than any other person it was Carl Van Vechten who embodied Brooks’s notion of the “genial middle ground.” Embracing Stein and Stravinsky in one arm, ragtime and black musicals in the other, he elided the conventional distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow on and off the page. New York was the perfect—perhaps the only—place for such an existence. With Paris and London stymied by war with Germany, New York gained a prominent global standing. European avant-gardists such as Duchamp and Albert Gleizes thought the city more conducive to the creation of new art than anywhere in the Old World, not only because of the turmoil that war wrought in Europe but because New York was itself a work of art. Leon Trotsky, one of the many European radicals who sought asylum in the city, believed New York to be “the fullest expression of our modern age … a city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism.”

  Integral to New York’s character was the growth of industries to harness the city’s creative talents. Publishing, in particular, boomed in the war years with dozens of ambitious new firms being established to promote and sell American literature. In 1916 Van Vechten signed a deal for his next book with perhaps the most exciting of all these outfits, Alfred A. Knopf, run by a twenty-three-year-old sharp-eyed whiz of the same name and his equally brilliant twenty-two-year-old wife, Blanche. Van Vechten was only the third author to join Knopf’s stable, the other two being the novelist Joseph Hergesheimer and H. L. Mencken, the essayist and coeditor of The Smart Set, who had a compulsion for speaking his mind and tearing into hypocrisy and intellectual laziness wherever he encountered them. On the surface, Mencken and Van Vechten were conspicuously different animals: Mencken, an irascible ball of impatient machismo who saw softheaded idiocy at every turn; Van Vechten a glib, effeminate dilettante with no interest in philosophy, politics, or anything that did not have a direct bearing on the arts. Yet the two formed an instant bond, sharing a sharp, cynical wit and an aversion to abstemious Victorians, who they believed still tyrannized the United States, a type that Mencken characterized as “boobus americanus.” They saw themselves as part of an elite order of outstanding citizens whose calling in life was to offer inspiration and guidance to the rest of the nation on all matters of sophistication and substance.

  Van Vechten’s first book for Knopf, Music and Bad Manners, was an exhibition of this cultural leadership, another collection of heretical essays about the musical arts that added an extra coat of varnish to his self-portrait. He furthered his reputation as the United States’ lead combatant for contemporary music by taking the fight to its detractors, including his old boss Richard Aldrich, whom he described as “the enemy.” Even more than in Music After the Great War, this book positioned Van Vechten at the cutting edge, boasting that “even the extreme modern music evidently protrudes no great perplexity into my ears. They accept it all, a good deal of it with avidity, some with the real tribute of astonishment which goes only to genius.” He told his readers that they too could become up-to-the-minute connoisseurs, if only they discarded their irrational attachment to the past. Arguing about whether this newfangled music will catch on, he said, is as pointless as debating whether industrialization is here to stay. “Music has changed; of that there can be no doubt. Don’t go to a concert and expect to hear what you might have heard fifty years ago; don’t expect anything and don’t hate yourself if you happen to like what you hear.”

  The collection set the template for the next four books of Van Vechten’s music and arts criticism that Knopf was to publish by the end of 1920. It unveiled obscure artistic geniuses and elevated things traditionally regarded by the cultural establishment as lowbrow, vulgar, or indecent to the status of high art, using the churning metropolis of New York as its backdrop. In “Music for the Movies” Van Vechten wondered aloud how peculiar it was that as of that moment no serious composer had written a score for a motion picture, pointing out that because the movies represented the most pioneering and demotic form of storytelling, they offered thrilling new opportunities for music, which could in turn transform the art of moviemaking. In other chapters he dealt with Spanish and African-American folk music and Stravinsky’s love of ragtime and music hall. The collection ends with a profile of Leo Ornstein, the Russian-American pianist from the Lower East Side, whose body of experimental compositions, Van Vechten said, “vibrates with the unrest of the period which produced the great war.”

  Two years after he had fled Italy, Van Vechten was still writing about the war as if it were a beneficent force, a catalyst that had delivered the world from artistic sterility. In 1914 and 1915 it was a stance that could be easily maintained and was in fact in keeping with the fashionable attitudes of many radical artists across Europe. But after the United States entered the conflict in April 1917, all such opinions acquired a new piquancy. When conscription was introduced in June that year, a number of Van Vechten’s friends willingly filled out their cards. But not all did so in order to thrash the Boche. Donald Evans signed up straightaway and told Van Vechten he had done so “not to make the world safe for democracy, but for the aristocracy of thought. To make life comfortable once more for the decadent, the iconoclast, the pessimist.” Having escaped the war once, Van Vechten certainly had no intention of getting caught up in it a second time. A letter sent from John Pitts Sanborn to Van Vechten in Iowa confirmed that Sanborn had just signed himself up but that he had also inquired of the conscription official “narrowly about your case.” Eager to avoid any possibility of being called into service, Van Vechten appears to have temporarily removed himself from New York. “He says as the law stands if you left before the eleventh,” Sanborn continued, “and return only after registration is over you do not have to register.”

  Blanche and Alfred Knopf, c. 1932, photograph by Carl Van Vechten

  H. L. Mencken, c.
1913

  While an artistic generation, including John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E. E. Cummings, left America to discover Europe from behind the steering wheel of an ambulance, Van Vechten stayed home, where he found the charged atmosphere thoroughly stimulating. The day before the United States officially entered the War, he wrote to Gertrude Stein to tell her how Isadora Duncan was whipping the theatergoers of New York into paroxysms of patriotism during her latest performances, which she conducted draped in the American flag, to her audience’s roaring delight. “It is very exciting,” he assured Stein, “to see American patriotism thoroughly awakened—I tell you, she drives ’em mad; the recruiting stations are full of her converts.”

  That the energy of the times had grabbed even Isadora Duncan, a fairly unlikely flag waver, demonstrated New York’s excitation. Indeed, according to Van Vechten, Duncan was so overwhelmed by her sudden love for Uncle Sam that she seduced a sailor on the sidewalk one evening and spent a good while in the throes of passion with him in the gutter.

  The fever of cultural nationalism found its way into Van Vechten’s own work too, albeit in his inimitable style. In Interpreters and Interpretations, a book of highly subjective pieces about his favorite performers and the art of performance, Van Vechten argued, with extraordinary prescience, that ragtime was the foundation stone of future American music, and named “Lewis F. Muir, Irving Berlin, and Louis Hirsch, the true grandfathers of the Great American composer of the year 2001.” To be sure, the United States’ “serious” composers, such as Edward McDowell, wrote pleasing enough melodies and harmonies, he conceded, but it was only the syncopated rhythms of ragtime songwriters that managed to capture the “complicated vigor of American life.” Van Vechten explained that the nation’s inability to recognize the artistic worth of its own culture was an inevitable consequence of the distinction that had been drawn between art and entertainment, a distinction that seemed increasingly false to him. “Americans are inclined to look everywhere but under their noses for art,” he explained. “It never occurs to them that any object which has any relation to their everyday life has anything to do with beauty. Probably the Athenians were much the same.” To his mind, refusing to acknowledge the worth of ragtime was folly not only because it denied the validity of American culture but also because it ignored the fact that no great art was ever created through imitation. Producing facsimiles of European art was sheer futility. “It is no more use to imitate French or German music than it is to imitate French or German culture,” he wrote. “The sooner we realize this the better for all of us.”

  Mencken applauded his friend for recognizing that “a vast body of genuine American music has sprung up out of the depths of popular song, wholly national in idiom, as unmistakably of the soil as baseball.” More than any other writer, in his opinion, Van Vechten demonstrated that “a man may be an American and still give his thought to a civilized and noble art, and find an audience within America.” Others were less sure. Some critics accused Van Vechten of simply being Van Vechten, tossing out an outrageous idea for the delight of provoking an annoyed reaction rather than espousing a sincerely held belief. “He likes what is new,” sighed one writer, “because it is new or else because to say he likes a certain thing will shock a sufficient number of people to make him commanding in the solitude of his appreciation.” And in fairness, Van Vechten did nothing to discredit such a theory with the public image he projected. Still a relatively peripheral cultural figure writing esoteric books that sold to a small, discerning readership, Van Vechten was as well known for his exotic personality as for his writing. The character he had been developing for the last decade—that of the sophisticated dandy always ready with an acerbic put-down and a controversial bon mot—had now become a professional persona. When interviewed by The Morning Telegraph for a large feature on him in January 1918, he fed the interviewer a stream of quotable lines, some witty, some insightful, others pretentious, and others still just plain silly. “It would be much better for everybody,” ran one of his pronouncements, “if a law were passed consigning all creative work to the flames ten years after it saw the light. Then we would have novelty … it must have been thrilling to have lived in Alexandria at the time the library was burned.” When asked for his prescriptions for strengthening the health of the arts in New York, he said only constant invention would do, and of the sort that brought together the poles of American culture in the way that Van Wyck Brooks urged, splicing the salons of Greenwich Village with the Broadway stage. “I would ask Gertrude Stein and Irving Berlin to collaborate,” Van Vechten said, “or Avery Hopwood and Leo Ornstein.”

  Although his rhetorical gambits were clearly Wildean, Van Vechten had become nothing less than the archetypal American modernist. His experiences in Europe, combined with lessons he had learned about the arts of mythmaking and promotion from the Everleigh Sisters in Chicago, Oscar Hammerstein, Mabel Dodge, and Gertrude Stein, taught him that being a great artist was far from the only contribution to be made in the war on convention. It was more important to Van Vechten to be on the scene, connected to every new and exciting thing that was going on. He was a one-man publicity machine for American modernism; the Armory Show on two legs, a self-styled tastemaker who embraced taboo and sprayed camphor on moth-eaten ideas of good taste in everything he did.

  * * *

  Back in Iowa, the Van Vechten clan struggled to see the utility in Carl’s radical work. As the war hauled itself into 1918 and the Allies inched closer to decisive victory, Charles Van Vechten urged his son to take some constructive part in the wartime displays of virile patriotism. Van Vechten Shaffer, Carl’s nephew, became the pride of the family by fighting bravely in France, apparently relishing the opportunity to uphold American ideals against the barbarous Germans. Charles was pleased by Carl’s success as an author, but he could not banish the distaste he experienced that his son, at the age of thirty-eight, should still be drawing on his wife’s income for financial support and devoting his energies to something as niche and unprofitable as music criticism. In ways subtle and unsubtle, Charles never let him forget that artistic fulfillment was no match for financial success. Upon the publication of Music After the Great War, Charles said that Van Vechten might become the more illustrious of his sons—but only if he sold enough books to become rich and famous, a reminder of what was expected of the Van Vechten men. The days when Carl was afforded special treatment for being the baby of the family were gone. When his next book, Music and Bad Manners, was published, Charles similarly sent sincere congratulations on its quality but again stated the need for Van Vechten to earn money, to take care of his wife and perform his male duty. Another book “for musical people” will “have necessarily a very limited sale,” he griped, adding, “I should gladly like to have you write a book that would sell to a million people.” The war, he suggested, could be Carl’s making, an opportunity to become the steely, self-reliant man he wanted him to be. “Really it looks to us as though your time had come to enter the service of Uncle Sam,” he wrote Carl in August 1918. “If you have the spirit which I suppose you must have you will wish to be ‘over there’ with the others … I only wish I was young and strong enough.”

  Carl Van Vechten, c. 1925

  Charles’s hopes for his son were simply unrealistic: there was no chance that Van Vechten could be dragged away from New York, not for the rush and push of war or even the bright lights of another metropolis. More than ever New York was filled with contradictory forces to shorten the breath and quicken the blood. In recent months Van Vechten had acquired a familiarity with the city’s vibrant Yiddish theatrical and literary culture through Marinoff, and his enthusiasm for the entertainments of African-Americans grew all the time. In addition to the plays and musicals that he had raved about in The Trend and the New York Press, he was enjoying the current surge in cabaret clubs and hotel bars run by and primarily for black New Yorkers, mostly concentrated around the Tenderloin. Marshall’s Hotel on West Fifty-third Str
eet was the social hub for New York’s most prominent black citizens—chiefly musicians, performers, writers, and theater producers—and was to them what the Algonquin was to be to the celebrated whites of the 1920s: a place to eat, drink, swap stories, show off, make contacts, hatch plans, and be entertained. Marshall’s also attracted a coterie of liberal-minded whites, and Van Vechten was an eye-catching patron of its basement cabaret in the late teens, his presence there immortalized by Charles Demuth’s painting Cabaret Interior.

  Multiethnic, polyglot New York was the only place he wanted to be, but the old routine of orchestral concerts and operas was beginning to grate, and in both his personal and professional lives, his attention drifted toward more exotic territory. In four essays written between October 1918 and May 1919 and eventually published together in a diverse book of themes entitled In the Garret in 1920, Van Vechten painted a picture of New York as a place of infinite variety, excitement, and pleasure by introducing his readers to the treasures buried within unfashionable parts of town populated by black, Italian, and Jewish communities. In this other New York Van Vechten depicted himself as an urban explorer. “Come with me on a Saturday or a Sunday night” begins one description of a trip to an Italian theater, as if he were placing the reader’s hand in his. “We are in one of the delightful old Bowery theatres with its sweeping horseshoe balcony and its orchestra sloping gracefully up to the orchestra circle, a charming old theatre of a kind in which it was possible for the audience to be as brilliant as the play.” A million miles from the conventional theaters that his readership frequented, his penetrating gaze locked on to the scrum of humanity inside and absorbed every sensory detail: