The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  working men in their shirt sleeves … women with black hair parted over their oval olive faces suckling their babies, or with half nude infants lying over their knees. Boys in white coats, with baskets of multi-colored pop and other forms of soda … mothers and children, young girls with their young men, grey-haired grandmothers tightly bound in thick black shawls in spite of the heat, sipping the red and pink and yellow pop through long straws … In a box a corpulent gentleman fingers his watch chain stretched across his ample paunch. All this observed in the smoky half-light of the darkened theatre.

  At another Italian theater, this time uptown in Harlem, he found a similar scene at a performance of Wilde’s Salome. “No hysteria or shuddering repugnance informed this mob,” he said, in contrast with the outrage that had greeted the American premiere of Salome, the opera, at the Metropolitan in 1907. “Young mothers were there with their babes; they suckled them, if nature so demanded. Young girls were there, with lovely black hair and gold earrings; children were there and grandmothers. They had come to see a play … it was just a play.”

  Van Vechten was far from the first to write about the city’s ethnic diversity. A number of his friends, including Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Hutchins Hapgood, were among the writers and campaigners who had pulled back the curtains to reveal the lives of the millions of migrants and immigrants who constituted early-twentieth-century New York, but most had done so as part of a mission to expose squalor, inequality, and injustice. Van Vechten’s take was different. It was in its mixture of subterranean delights that he located the promise of New York, not its flaws. In February 1919 he wrote a panegyric to the city, rejoicing in its multifarious attractions. In his exhaustive lists of its different languages, communities, cuisines, and architectures, he intended to show that all humanity seemed to live within Manhattan’s borders, a place where any appetite could be sated and any sight experienced. By the end of the twentieth century this would have become a common perception of New York, one that New Yorkers would proudly use to define themselves. At the time, in the midst of widespread fears about the latest huge surge of immigrants into the city as Europe tore itself apart, Van Vechten’s unqualified celebration of difference was novel and bold. Soaring clear of the Progressive Era’s rancorous political debates about immigration, assimilation, and the American “melting pot,” he extolled New York’s extravagant variety as the secret of its creative genius. This was no mere city, but a fantasy made real. “New York,” he said, “is the only city over which airships may float without appearing to fly in the face of tradition. I might safely say, I think, that if a blue hippopotamus took to laying eggs on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Broadway every day at noon, after a week the rite would pass unobserved.”

  SEVEN

  What One Is Forced by Nature to Do

  When carnage on the Western Front gave way to a shell-shocked peace in November 1918, the Old World rocked on its haunches, its vaunted civilization dreadfully tarnished. Across the Atlantic, the United States entered a decade of unprecedented self-confidence. Mass-production industries from textiles to automobiles fueled a consumerist boom, banishing the unpleasant memories of wartime and providing a renewed sense of national mission. In the cities, New York in particular, there emerged a youthful culture of instant gratification in which American fashions, technologies, music, and movies were preferred to those of Europe. “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, summing up the sense of liberation that swept through his generation. “We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun?”

  Not that all young Americans were seduced. To some, this was no emancipation, merely enslavement to old conventions concealed beneath garish distractions. Considering themselves outcasts within their homeland, a small cohort of literary tyros—a “lost generation,” according to Gertrude Stein—headed to Europe in search of solemn purpose. “A young man had no future in this country of hypocrisy and repression” is how Malcolm Cowley recalled the sentiment that drove him and his clique to the Left Bank and beyond during the twenties. “He should take ship for Europe where people know how to live,” where art and intellectual freedom were prized. As a middle-aged man who had long ago experienced his European rites of passage, and for whom the war, in which he had not fought, had precipitated the most creatively satisfying years of his life to date, Van Vechten did not share the disaffection of many of the clever young men who had come of age against the backdrop of industrialized slaughter. Certainly, he despaired at the provincialism and puritanism he still detected at the heart of the nation’s culture, but as the 1920s began, he could not have agreed with Cowley’s idea that Americans simply did not know “how to live.” With every passing year New York’s cosmopolitan luster seemed to shine more radiantly; living had never been such fun for Carl.

  Into this life of gaiety and promise arrived a new companion who encapsulated the youthful giddiness of the moment. Blessed with soft, conventional good looks—full, plum lips and innocent doe eyes—Donald Angus arrived at the Block Beautiful one afternoon in 1919. The excitable nineteen-year-old fop of a boy was eager to meet the man whose writings on the opera and the ballet had charmed him with their arch wit. Van Vechten was keen to meet Angus too. Their introduction had been facilitated by Philip Bartholomae, a successful playwright, Broadway producer, and irrepressible gadabout with whom Angus had briefly been romantically involved. Such introductions were a key means by which Van Vechten met potential new lovers, safer than cruising and less irksome than going through the elaborate pickup rituals. When Van Vechten answered the door to Angus that afternoon, it was probably in his mind that this meeting would lead to more than a conversation about books.

  Many decades later Angus still clearly remembered his first time inside the Van Vechtens’ apartment. His eyes were drawn to the clutter of oriental trinkets and the rich scarlet paper studded with gold dots that covered the walls, most striking in such a small apartment. Following his own advice about eschewing interior decorators and their notions of good taste, Van Vechten had hung that wallpaper during one of Marinoff’s working absences. On numerous occasions throughout their marriage she returned from a trip away to find the furniture rearranged, sometimes new curtains in place and whole rooms redecorated. This time his impatience to transform the living room meant he had decided to paper around the furniture rather than go to the effort of moving tables and chairs. Slapdash though the decoration may have been, to Angus the interior of 151 East Nineteenth Street matched the bohemian elegance of its celebrated residents. For at least part of the afternoon Marinoff was also there, and even though Angus was hardly an innocent, the couple was wonderfully glamorous to him. Van Vechten found Angus instantly attractive, the kind of sunny, high-spirited, and effeminate boy that he liked best. As they talked and drank, Angus felt Van Vechten’s gaze crawling across him, sizing him up with a penetrating stare, at once both warmly playful and coldly scrutinizing. For women, and for some men he knew to be gay, Van Vechten had an intense greeting ritual. For several unsmiling seconds he looked steadily into their eyes, often gripping one of their hands between both of his, the way a charismatic preacher might with a member of his congregation. It made some people understandably uncomfortable. Angus was one of those who loved being the sole focus of Van Vechten’s attention, feeling as though nothing in the world mattered more in those few seconds than the connection between him and the remarkable man opposite.

  When Marinoff left the apartment for a theater engagement, Van Vechten took Angus to one of his favorite Village hangouts for dinner and drinks. Almost immediately after that first encounter a physically and emotionally intimate affair began; it lasted for one intense year before drifting into a more casual arrangement for the remainder of the twenties. It was an important relationship for them both. Approaching forty, “Carlo” was no longer able to play the neophyte in search of a knowing teacher, as he
had with Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge, and various others. Instead he would give to Angus what they had given him, an education in how to live, lending him books to read, playing him phonograph records, and even arranging jobs for him with publishers and theater producers. In return Angus offered youth, beauty, and an outlet for Van Vechten’s need to instruct, lead, and be admired.

  It is difficult to know precisely what Marinoff thought of her husband’s new relationship, which was his most involved with another man since they had met. Letters between Carl and Fania from this period betray the same affectionate mutual dependency they had always done, though the sexual passion of their early correspondence had evaporated, as it had in their domestic life. There were no more descriptions of the physical yearnings each experienced in the other’s absence, only their unwavering love and their need for companionship. Van Vechten still called Marinoff his baby, but he no longer told her how he wanted to cover her naked body in kisses, and Tom-Tom was never mentioned at all. Bruce Kellner, the same friend of Van Vechten’s who suggested in his memoirs that Anna Snyder may have given up a baby for adoption in 1907, speculates that the cause of this change in the Van Vechtens’ marriage may have been that Marinoff had also fallen pregnant and given the baby up for adoption during the last year or so. Central to Kellner’s speculation is one strange postscript in a letter Marinoff wrote Van Vechten in September 1918 that makes pointed reference to “Baby Van Vechten.”

  Donald Angus, aged nineteen, c. 1919

  Was Marinoff referring to a child or simply using “Baby” to address Van Vechten as she often did? In an echo of the circumstantial evidence that exists for the possible adoption of Anna Snyder’s baby, a person close to Van Vechten’s family—Ralph’s wife’s sister—adopted an infant in hazy circumstances at some point between 1918 and 1920. Perhaps, Kellner ventures, the child was Van Vechten and Marinoff’s. The evidence is intriguing but not remotely concrete. It is true that around this time letters indicate that Marinoff was out of town for lengthy periods, perhaps a sign that she was attempting to conceal the pregnancy. However, her extended absences from New York for professional and personal reasons were a constant feature of the Van Vechtens’ half-century relationship and should not necessarily be seen as evidence of something untoward. It is more likely that Van Vechten embarked on such an intimate affair with Donald Angus because after seven years with Marinoff the heat of their early passion had cooled, and he felt the need for involved homosexual relationships to be so great that he could no longer ignore it. What is certain is that Marinoff knew about Van Vechten’s relationship with Angus from the start. If she harbored any jealousies or objections, she did not express them. In fact, she and Angus quickly became close friends, testament to the unusual but resilient arrangement that was the Van Vechtens’ marriage.

  * * *

  Several months into his affair with Angus, in January 1920, Van Vechten received his first letter from Mabel Dodge in five years. In it, she made no reference to the events in Italy in 1914 but asked for news of Fania and details of his latest work and told him about the mystical properties of a Native American ring she was forwarding, “for the good of your soul.” True to her word, she had long ago abandoned the Medici and Florence, as well as the grunt and grind of New York, to live among the indigenous peoples of New Mexico, and, free from the suffocating embrace of Western civilization, reconnect with nature. Writing just days after the Volstead Act brought Prohibition into effect, she may have thought this the perfect time to offer salvation to the pleasure seekers of Manhattan she had left behind. The ring she sent Van Vechten “has very strong (molecular!) vibrations,” she assured him, “and if you wear it you will see the effects from it in your everyday life,” though quite what they might be she did not relate, and Van Vechten decided it easier not to ask.

  Within a month the two were corresponding as freely as if the recent years of silent hostility had never passed. Van Vechten was delighted to have her back in his life. Every time he received one of Mabel’s letters, he told her, his brain and muscles raced as they would had he snorted a line of cocaine. She confessed that he excited her every bit as much, though she was always wary of his caustic wit. “Your enhancing appreciation ought to be eagerly claimed and craved by all kinds of personalities of your time,” she said of his book Interpreters and Interpretations, a volume of essays on his favorite performers. “I would crave it for my own perpetuity did I not fear it more than I desire it! For there is a terror lurking in your pages though I don’t know exactly where in it lies. Maybe your wit is a little horrific at times—maybe your smile is full of little daggers.” Little did she know that at that very moment Van Vechten was securing her “perpetuity” as one of a cast of characters in his first novel.

  As he approached his fortieth birthday, Van Vechten had decided to attempt writing a novel because he feared he was a spent force as a critic. He “held the firm belief that after forty the cells hardened and that prejudices were formed which precluded the possibility of welcoming novelty.” Less quixotically, he was irritated that his brilliance had earned him eminence and prestige but not fame and fortune. Writing novels, he said, “not only brings one money, it also brings one readers.” Primarily, Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works is a fictional biography of a would-be writer who spends his life preparing to write a great work of literary genius but never commits a single word to paper because of what he describes as an “orphic wall of my indecision.” Van Vechten narrates the story as himself, the conceit being that Whiffle’s dying wish was for his friend to write the tale of his life, which Van Vechten agrees to do as “a free fantasia in the manner of a Liszt Rhapsody.” Whiffle, who is essentially a composite of Van Vechten and Avery Hopwood, flits from one crowd to another in constant search of new sensations through art, illicit love affairs, alcohol, drugs, and the occult. His experiences mirror many of Van Vechten’s memories of his own early adulthood: he plays piano in a Chicago brothel, quaffs champagne in Paris, luxuriates in the riches of the Uffizi. Yet each event is like a fairy-tale reimagining of the truth in which senses are overstimulated, logic dissipates, and people from the real world are bent into curious new forms as in a Coney Island hall of mirrors. Even though he fails spectacularly as a writer, Whiffle eventually realizes that he has turned living into an art form of the highest kind, the type of project that Van Vechten himself was engaged in. “I have done too much, and that is why, perhaps, I have done nothing,” Whiffle says to Van Vechten the final time they meet. “I wanted to write a new Comédie Humaine. Instead, I have lived it.” The novel’s moral is delivered in a maxim that is unmistakably Van Vechten’s own: “It is necessary to do only what one must, what one is forced by nature to do.”

  The novel was published in 1922, a literary year best remembered for two towering masterpieces of high modernism, Ulysses and The Waste Land, as well as early novels by a couple of future colossi of American letters, The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Enormous Room, by E. E. Cummings, both of which crackled with the rebellious energy of the young postwar generation. That same year Sinclair Lewis gave capitalist America a swift poke in the ribs with Babbitt. It was a remarkable crop for one year, and at first glance the brittle decadence of Peter Whiffle seems glaringly out of place in that milieu. Yet the novel was not quite the florid misfit it now appears. Van Vechten was one of a number of successful but now mostly obscure novelists from the twenties loosely bound together by an appreciation of frivolity and fantasy, whom the literary critic Alfred Kazin aptly dubbed the Exquisites. All were united by an obsession with aesthetics, imagining themselves to be Oscar Wilde or J-K Huysmans with an American accent in an ambitious age of automobiles, airplanes, and moving pictures. The notional figurehead of this group was James Branch Cabell, whose novel Jurgen caused a scandal upon its publication in 1919. Though set in some indeterminate past, the novel deals with a thoroughly twentieth-century concept—sexuality—and is full of Freudian imagery, phallic symbolism, and very
obvious double entendres. Van Vechten was a huge admirer of Jurgen, and its spirit of salacious adventure resounds throughout his own fiction.

  Peter Whiffle also makes more sense when placed into Van Vechten’s bespoke canon of American fiction, which he publicized in magazine articles in the late teens and early twenties, one populated by unusual and long-forgotten writers, most of whom discarded realism for fantasy and scabrous pleasures of the flesh. At the center was the great lost American genius Herman Melville. Van Vechten’s tart, mannered sketches of life among New York aesthetes could scarcely be more dissimilar to Melville’s sprawling tales of travel and adventure. Yet in Melville’s voracious appetite for life, his taste for subversion, and the threads of sexual ambiguity that run through his work, Van Vechten detected a kindred spirit, one he thought should be recognized as a giant of the nation’s artistic heritage. Since the publication of his last novel, The Confidence-Man in 1857, Melville’s reputation had dwindled rapidly. By the time of the First World War his name was unknown to all but a tiny literary elite. The Melville revival began in earnest in 1921, when Carl Van Doren devoted an entire chapter in his book The American Novel to Melville’s work. In a smaller way Van Vechten joined the fray later that year with a piece about the character of the American novel in a Yiddish newspaper edited by Jacob Marinoff, Fania’s brother, in which he suggested that Melville was one of the foundation stones of the nation’s literature. A month later the first biography of Melville was published: Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, by Raymond Weaver, which Van Vechten reviewed positively in the pages of The Evening Post on New Year’s Eve 1921. The following January he issued the most strident claim made by any agent of the Melville revival, comparing Moby-Dick to Hamlet and The Divine Comedy in both the majesty of its construction and its importance to a national literary tradition. It is, he said, “Melville’s greatest book, assuredly one of the great books of the world,” the sort of opinion that is entirely commonplace in the early twenty-first century but seemed conspicuously eccentric at the time, if not willfully perverse.