by Edward White
In Moby-Dick, Mardi, and Pierre, Van Vechten identified Melville as someone more than a writer: he was an intrepid adventurer whose epic imagination was matched only by his unflinching bravery. Here was a true “cosmopolitan, a sly humorist,” Van Vechten said, “[a] man who ballyhooed for a drunkard’s heaven, flaunted his dallyings with South Sea cuties, proclaimed that there was no such thing as truth, coupled ‘Russian serfs and Republican slaves’ and intimated that a thief in jail was as honourable as General George Washington.” It was the sort of description that could have been written of Peter Whiffle and surely one that Van Vechten hoped might one day be written of his creator.
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When Mabel Dodge received her copy of Peter Whiffle, she was delighted that Van Vechten had captured so perfectly the emancipated spirit of their society. “Why don’t you decide to be a kind of chronicler of your time & do dozens?” she suggested. “Times change—it would be an amusing record. Like Saint Simon & S. Pepys.” In her curiously shamanic way, she had unknowingly suggested a type of project that he had already begun. In February 1922 Van Vechten started a diary to capture the events and atmosphere of the times, beginning just weeks before Peter Whiffle was published and ending amid the Depression in 1930. Like the minute scrawls of his college diaries, this was not a confessional journal through which he mediated his demons, but rather what he called his daybooks: lists of the people, places, and objects that whirled in and out of his life, his instincts as a writer overruled by the compulsions of a collector. Perfunctory though many of the entries are, they amount to a striking document of 1920s’ Manhattan, full of the fights, flings, petty jealousies, and indiscretions of the canonical names of the decade—and, of course, a fast-flowing stream of revelations about his own life.
“The Twenties were famous for parties,” he wrote in a recollection of the decade in the 1950s; “everybody gave and went to them; there was always plenty to eat and drink, lots of talk and certainly a good deal of lewd behavior.” For once Van Vechten was guilty of understatement. In the unexpurgated, private pages of his daybooks the fevered excess of what he called “the splendid drunken twenties” fills every page, the entries themselves often scribbled through the fog of a hangover. His social calendar was crowded and wildly diverse. During a typical three-week period in late April and early May 1922, his engagements included a recital by the composer George Antheil, a tea party at the Stettheimer sisters’ with Marcel Duchamp, an after-show party with Eugene O’Neill at the Provincetown Playhouse, a performance of the vaudeville revue Make It Snappy, starring Eddie Cantor, and Geraldine Farrar’s farewell appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House, all dotted around the ubiquitous cocktail parties.
The reek of bootleg gin hung permanently in the air like background radiation. The Van Vechten family table in Iowa had always been dry, but neither Carl nor Ralph followed their father’s abstemiousness, and both were enthusiastic drinkers their whole adult lives. Prohibition did nothing to curb either’s habits, and in Carl’s case it only increased its attraction, turning what had previously been a largely benign indulgence into another marker of bohemian sophistication, another medium of rebellion. He had two regular bootleggers: Jack Harper, who with his wife, Lucile, also ran a trendy speakeasy, and Beach Cooke, one of New York’s most successful hooch merchants. He and Marinoff were never without a sizable stash of champagne, gin, and whiskey, and out-of-town friends knew that the Van Vechtens could always fix them up with good-quality liquor. Easy access to alcohol was as important to Van Vechten’s public image as a Manhattan trendsetter as was his acquaintance with Gertrude Stein. When Ralph came to visit New York in the summer of 1922, Carl took him for a night out at Leone’s, a highly fashionable speakeasy, where Ralph proceeded to embarrass his little brother by bungling Prohibition etiquette. Impressed by his surroundings, Ralph had inquired about getting a membership card, but to protect his reputation as a respected banker, he assumed an obviously false identity to do so. Ralph “makes a provincial ass of himself” was Van Vechten’s exasperated judgment in his daybook.
“Provincial” rather than “ass” was the insult here, about the worst thing Van Vechten could imagine being said about anyone. Florine Stettheimer completed a portrait of him around this time that perfectly captures his self-image as the embodiment of contemporary chic and so pleased him that he sent photographs of it to friends far and wide, including Gertrude Stein in France. In it he sits with his legs crossed in a black suit in the middle of his red and gold apartment, as sleek and slim as the cigarette balanced between his clawlike fingers, though in reality the onset of middle-aged spread was expanding his frame quite rapidly. Surrounding him are his cherished possessions: his erudite books and prowling cats, his objets d’art and piano. And in the corner is a fairground sign lit up by electric lights suspended above a miniature merry-go-round, a reference to the title of one of his volumes of essays, but also a metaphor for the life that he led, a brightly colored whirl of amusement.
The only thing missing from Stettheimer’s canvas was Van Vechten’s coterie of friends, of both sexes, young enough to be his children. They all were either beautiful or talented, or both. The hyperactive silent movie star Tallulah Bankhead became a particular favorite. She could often be found making an exhibition of herself at the Algonquin Hotel, where Van Vechten spent oceans of time either in the dining room or upstairs, taking illicit cocktails in the private quarters of Frank and Bertha Case, the couple who ran and later owned the hotel. Bankhead’s loud extroversion annoyed many of the Algonquin’s more serious-minded patrons, but Van Vechten found her antics hilarious. At one of his parties she provided a star turn when she “stood on her head, disrobed, gave imitations & was amusing generally.” For more sedate reasons, he also found the company of the not-yet-famous George Gershwin, an “egotist” of “considerable charm,” to be a welcome addition to any social occasion as he filled the room with the strains of his early compositions “Swanee,” and “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise.” Van Vechten himself had been playing the piano at a party in April 1922 when he met another dazzling young talent, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for the first time, the same night that the publisher Horace Liveright, in a drunken moment of horseplay threw Van Vechten off the piano stool and broke his shoulder.
Tallulah Bankhead, c. 1934, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
The youthful friends and lovers, the parties and the constant drinking: they all were ways of trying to repudiate the passing of his own youth. Van Vechten regarded himself as a late starter who had wasted the first sixteen years of adulthood and had only begun to fulfill his potential after the life-changing events of 1914. He was determined to make up for lost time and did so by turning the city into his playground. This frivolous, self-indulgent atmosphere formed the backdrop for his next book, The Blind Bow-Boy, a whip-smart, funny, and deceptively insightful novel about a group of New York sybarites. It is Van Vechten’s best piece of fiction and one of the great forgotten American novels of the 1920s. The story, which has a far more conventional structure than Peter Whiffle, is essentially an off-kilter retelling of A Rake’s Progress in which Harold Prewett, a timid, straightlaced college graduate, is sent to Manhattan by his wealthy father to be educated in the ways of the world by Paul Moody, a socialite and louche gentleman of leisure. On the surface, Moody is a younger Van Vechten; he got the job as Harold’s “guide to fast life” because he is “of good character but no moral sense” and had once been sentenced to the Ludlow Street Jail for refusing to pay his ex-wife alimony. However, it is Moody’s beguiling female friend Campaspe Lorillard who expresses Van Vechten’s interior world, his core personality and opinions on life. It is she who lives on the Block Beautiful, who rhapsodizes about Manhattan and reads widely and voraciously, casting her eye over her circles of friends while musing on the curiousness of “the manly American” and the hidden desires that lurk within us all.
Between them, Moody and Lorillard introduce poor innocent Prewett to avant-garde
composers, fairground snake charmers, speakeasies, casual sex, fine dining, and all the other sensual pleasures of 1920s Manhattan. It is a story of Harold Prewett’s loss of innocence and self-discovery that cleverly doubles as a coming-of-age tale for the United States. When Prewett, a representative of Van Vechten’s puritanical and conservative America, is taken on his first trip to Coney Island, he is assaulted by the spectacle of modern consumerism: “Ferris wheels, airplane swings, merry-go-rounds, tinsel and marabou, hula dolls, trap-drummers, giant coasters, gyroplanes, dodge ’ems.” Prewett is overwhelmed; Lorillard, ecstatic. “It’s superb,” she gushes. “It’s all of life and most of death: sordid splendour with a touch of immortality and middle-class ecstasy … It is both home and the house of prostitution. It is … complete experience. It is your education.”
The one marvel of modern New York that Van Vechten could not write about overtly was homosexuality, though the subject is woven right through the story, using the language of codes and symbols that were a vital part of gay life in the real world. The effeminate clothing, vocabulary, and mannerisms of certain characters mark them out as homosexual without any categorical identification. The most obvious example is an English aristocrat by the name of the Duke of Middlebottom, a double entendre that seems to have eluded most readers at the time, whose motto is “A thing of beauty is a boy forever.” Some of the codes were censored when the novel was published in Britain, but in the United States the book was left untouched. Either the references went unnoticed, or in the “anything goes” atmosphere of the Jazz Age, a little leeway was considered acceptable.
The Blind Bow-Boy is a masterpiece of camp, written decades before the term and concept came into existence, and it sealed Van Vechten’s hero status to a small but discerning group of gay, literary-minded cosmopolitan men. Van Vechten was one of the first cultural figures to draw New York’s gay subculture into mainstream visibility, leading ultimately to the so-called pansy craze of the early 1930s and the huge success of overtly homosexual cabaret performers such as Gene Malin. As the historian George Chauncey explains, the revolt against Prohibition that created the speakeasy culture fostered other types of cultural rebellion, including the increasing prominence of homosexuals in public life. A year after The Blind Bow-Boy was published the magazine Broadway Brevities complained about the “impudent sissies that clutter Times Square.” There had been other American writers to include veiled themes of homosexuality in their novels, but few had done it with such verve or indelicacy as Van Vechten. His novels spoke to a gay audience with an urgency that many heterosexual readers, even those who admired his work, did not experience. One reader wrote Van Vechten to thank him for portraying his sexually unconventional characters not as freaks but rather as people in search of happiness because “that is what any so-called pervert wants although he risks jail everytime he reaches for that happiness.” Another young fan who picked up on the subtexts and codes was Max Ewing, a midwestern boy studying at the University of Michigan. Ewing, homosexual and a talented writer, began corresponding with Van Vechten in 1922 for a profile in a student newspaper. Their correspondence made no explicit reference to anything sexual, but there can be no doubt that by the time that Ewing visited Van Vechten in New York for the first time in October 1923 both knew of their shared orientation. The evening Ewing arrived in town, Van Vechten took him to a party in honor of The Blind Bow-Boy, thrown by Lewis Baer, a member of what Van Vechten had begun to call the jeunes gens assortis, the group of young, handsome gay men whom he collected around him and who, like Donald Angus, received the benefits of his educating influence. The term had originally been coined by Jacques-Émile Blanche to describe Mabel Dodge’s coterie of young men, but when Van Vechten appropriated it—admittedly with tongue in cheek—it acquired an extra layer of significance.
Max Ewing, c. 1932
Seen from a distance of eighty or ninety years, the 1920s often seem a time of striking sexual liberation but usually of a distinctly heterosexual nature. Images of flappers in thick lipstick and high hemlines being pursued by girl-crazy men, as in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the love stories of glamour couples, such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbank, have created a popular notion of a time in which men were men and women were women. Many of the emblematic writers of the era who have been laid to rest in the mausoleum of Great American Novelists are also of a priapic and unambiguously heterosexual sort. Van Vechten wrote novels that offer a glimpse of the pansexual currents of the moment. In a pre-Stonewall world homosexuality was not openly expressed and embraced, but it was there all the same; you just had to know how to decipher its symbols. And with Van Vechten, those symbols were far from Delphic. Long after Van Vechten’s death—and some years after the Stonewall revolution—one of his young male admirers said it best: “He knew everyone knew, but he wasn’t going to carry a placard down Christopher Street on Gay Day.”
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The Blind Bow-Boy hurled its author to new heights of popularity. That summer of 1923 Carl Van Vechten was celebrated as a literary sensation. Sinclair Lewis wrote a letter of congratulation that delighted him because it got closest to identifying what he had attempted to express. “It is impertinent, subversive, resolutely and completely wicked,” Lewis raved. “You prove that New York is as sophisticated as any foreign capital.” The influential Chicago critic Fanny Butcher lauded him as one of the most essential novelists of the moment, and The Blind Bow-Boy was probably the sole Van Vechten novel that Scott Fitzgerald genuinely admired. A new friend, the Vanity Fair artist Ralph Barton, thought Van Vechten worthy of one of his caricatures, considered an unofficial sign that one was a star in the 1920s. Universal Pictures even entertained the idea of adapting The Blind Bow-Boy into a movie. After a lengthy period of consideration Van Vechten’s contact at the studio, Winnifred Reeve, eventually got in touch to say that it was going to pass up the opportunity to buy the rights to the picture but forwarded the reader’s report as way of explanation and for his amusement. The reader summarized the novel as a tremendously fun tale revolving around a “sissy hero” who is given “a liberal education in matters of sex.” The book would be of great interest to the “neurotic cognoscenti,” the report concluded, “but not for the radio or motion pictures.” Van Vechten noted each letter of congratulation and each word of praise in his daybooks. All the attention came as a relief, confirmation that he really was the special talent that he had believed himself to be for so many years.
Van Vechten’s new glitterati status was of no interest to the members of his family, who were shocked and embarrassed by the contents of his latest book. When Peter Whiffle was published, Charles Van Vechten had ordered copies for friends and relations and beamed with pride when people around town asked him questions about his boy, the novelist. While the book may have been a little racy at times, it all was handled in a civilized, intelligent manner. The Blind Bow-Boy, however, was smut from start to finish. “The new book is a very well written picture of depravity,” wrote an exasperated Charles after reading the offending volume. “Not a decent character in the book. It will shock and disgust many readers. While apparently written to amuse it isn’t amusing at all.” He still intended to order copies for various friends who were fans of Peter Whiffle, but “what they may think of it, I don’t know.” Just before Christmas Charles wrote again to say that though the book was a Cedar Rapids bestseller, nobody ever dared discuss it with him. Uncle Charlie offered praise of what he thought was a “very clever” novel, which was “here and there brilliant,” but teased Van Vechten that other members of the family took a dimmer view: “Aunt Mary says that it is a dirty book and that you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Van Vechten was anything but that. Success as a novelist brought notoriety, influence, and wealth. “Very suddenly, out of the clear sky,” he remembered of 1923, “I began to make a great deal of money.” When his brother, Ralph, came to New York on business in December, Van Vechten took him, Avery Hopwood, and their
friend Ernest Boyd for a slap-up meal at the Algonquin. The occasion was recorded in his daybook with the information that he, rather than Ralph, paid. At the age of forty-three Van Vechten could finally afford to pick up the check. It was a far more important milestone than he would like to have admitted. In the Van Vechten family making money was the mark of a successful man, and the need to make his writing pay had been a constant refrain from his father for the last twenty years. Ralph had been no less attentive on the matter in recent times. After one rebuke from his brother in February 1919 about the parlous state of his finances, Carl had replied with a lofty defense of his art. “The kind of writing I do requires time for reflection,” he said, as well as all manner of expenses. “It is one thing or the other for me, either to settle down for a career of a mediocre journalist or to strive for something better.” He had finally managed to achieve what had thus far been illusive: fulfillment of his creative ambitions combined with the financial success that his family valued.
Making a point to the folks in Cedar Rapids was at the heart of Van Vechten’s intentions for his next novel, The Tattooed Countess. Concerning the teenage rebellion of an ambitious and artistic boy named Gareth Johns against the dull rectitude of a midwestern town in the summer of 1897, the story is an obvious retelling of Van Vechten’s own adolescence. Van Vechten’s escape route from Cedar Rapids had been college life in Chicago. Johns finds his way out of Maple Valley in the embrace of Countess Ella Nattatorini, a woman who left town many years ago to seek a life of refined indulgence in Europe, marrying an Italian aristocrat along the way before his death left her a wealthy widow, free to travel, live, and love as she saw fit. Recently turned fifty and jilted by a caddish French lover, she returns to her hometown to visit her kindhearted but prudish sister and scandalizes the local gossips by smoking cigarettes, wearing makeup, and having a French phrase tattooed on her wrist, “Que sais-je?,” an apparent reference to the ironic skepticism of Michel de Montaigne. Bored rigid by the people of Maple Valley and their narrow universe, she eventually embarks on a passionate affair with the seventeen-year-old Johns, the one person in town in whom she detects a spark of life.