by Edward White
Nobody emerges from The Tattooed Countess particularly well. With few exceptions, Maple Valley’s residents are portrayed as benign but comically small-minded, while the countess, for all her sophistication, “alert intelligence,” and “abounding vitality,” is presented as the proverbial mutton dressed as lamb, “at that dangerous and fascinating age just before decay sets in.” Rarely was Van Vechten crueler in print than in ridiculing this creation of his, a middle-aged woman who still had the temerity to think herself attractive to younger men. For that sin, Van Vechten thought, she deserved to be pitied and scorned. To his friend Hugh Walpole, to whom the novel was dedicated, he derided the countess as “a worldly, sex-beset moron,” who was taken for a ride, in every sense of the term, by a “ruthless youth” of “imaginative sophistication.” To the poet Arthur Davison Ficke, with whom Van Vechten enjoyed swapping sexual gossip, he suggested The Tattooed Countess had a double meaning as “the Countess was certainly full of pricks.” The ironic similarities between her predicament and his own—a middle-aged man of expanding waistline and receding hairline, still yearning for the attentions of brilliant boys—does not appear to have struck him. Of all the characters, Gareth Johns, the “ruthless youth” in possession of “imaginative sophistication,” fairs best. Although his yearning for a life of excitement makes him cynical and calculating beyond his years, he takes control of his situation and ultimately gets what he wants when the countess whisks him off to Europe. There was never any ambiguity about who was the model for Johns, and Van Vechten’s sister, Emma, believed he had got his teenage self down to a T. There are even veiled hints that Johns, like the adolescent Van Vechten, struggles with his sexuality. Despite being slavishly adored by the Countess, his beguiling English teacher, and a pretty female schoolmate, Johns never feels a spark of passion for any of them. He simply exploits their affections and discards them when their purposes have been served.
Cynicism and irony abound in The Tattooed Countess, slyly subtitled “A Romantic Novel with a Happy Ending.” The joke there was that the “happy ending” was in fact the novel itself. As the real-life Gareth Johns, Van Vechten had come back to haunt and taunt the Midwest of the nineteenth century and in so doing created his bestselling work to date; the book sold in excess of twenty thousand copies in its first month on the shelves. Baiting provincial America was not in itself tremendously noteworthy; it was a favored sport of many writers and intellectuals in the 1920s. Since the end of the war, both Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson had written acclaimed fiction that lampooned the manners and mentalities of the Midwest, and various state-of-the-nation works such as Civilization in the United States expressed the fashionable opinion that the United States of eastern intellectuals was weighed down by the country’s old-fashioned, reactionary heartland. Van Vechten was faithfully following the trend, posing, as other writers had done before him, as the chic prodigal son returning home, holding in one hand a color-tipped cigarette and wielding a hatchet in the other, guffawing at the yokels as he hacked away.
The novel was published in August 1924. In October he visited Cedar Rapids and smirked at how accurate his derision of the place had been. William Shirer, later the acclaimed chronicler of the early years of Nazi Germany, was then a twenty-year-old college student who lived with his parents a few doors from the Van Vechtens. He recalled meeting Carl, whom he described as “a sort of invisible force, especially for the young and rebellious in our town” and talking to him about literature and life in New York. Van Vechten’s advice to him, “off the record,” was to “get the hell out of Cedar Rapids as quickly as possible.” Yet disdainful as he was of its charms, Van Vechten could never quite abandon his hometown. During his visit that fall, he wrote Marinoff that the whole place was talking about his book and described his glee at being reviled and feted all at once. He happily gave interviews for two local newspapers, smiling wryly as he protested that the novel was a work of pure imagination. Being liked by the townsfolk or gaining their approval was not important to him, but having their attention was. Tellingly, in the voluminous scrapbooks of press clippings through which he charted the progress of his public reputation over the decades, the judgments of reviewers from Cedar Rapids are always reserved a spot alongside Franklin Pierce Adams, Alexander Woollcott, and the other metropolitan writers. The Iowan critics were usually rather kind, even with The Tattooed Countess, proud that the son of a local family was among Manhattan’s brightest stars. Van Vechten never decided which he should cherish more, their praise or their opprobrium, but he kept tabs on both all the same.
* * *
The spread of Van Vechten’s fame from New York to the Midwest and beyond did not dull his efforts as a promoter of causes. Far from it; the boost to his celebrity only gave him more opportunity to put his stamp on the nation’s culture and extend his reputation as a tastemaker. It was almost a compulsion; there was nothing that made him feel more vital.
As Peter Whiffle, The Blind Bow-Boy, and The Tattooed Countess flew off the shelves, Van Vechten used his contacts and influence to further the careers of numerous American writers. He convinced Knopf to publish Harmonium by Wallace Stevens and came close to pulling off the same feat for Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Elinor Wylie felt so indebted to his public support of her novel Jennifer Lorn she gave him a copy inscribed, “Carl Van Vechten … But for whom this book would never have been read.” In cheering on American talent Van Vechten was following the postwar trend of boosting previously underappreciated American culture, from Herman Melville to Native American folk art. Indeed, it was a trend that he had been instrumental in starting with his advocacy of art as diverse as Leo Ornstein, African-American theater, and Gertrude Stein.
However, his advocacy was by no means restricted to Americans. In the early twenties one of Van Vechten’s great successes was an eccentric Englishman by the name of Ronald Firbank, whose hammy comic novels made Van Vechten’s look like sober tracts of social realism. His introduction to Firbank’s writing came in February 1922, when James Branch Cabell’s editor, Stuart Rose, recommended Firbank’s novel Valmouth, a frothy comedy of manners set in an English spa town, with a barely concealed subtext about interracial and homosexual sex carried out between characters with names such as Dick Thoroughfare and Jack Whorwood. Van Vechten saw Firbank as a fellow rebel against propriety and a man who, like him, found it impossible to dilute his true inner self. Sensing the opportunity to claim him as his latest cause, he immediately wrote Firbank to announce himself as his unofficial American publicist, revealing that he had already produced an article about him for the April issue of The Double Dealer—Firbank’s first notice in the United States—and more would follow. Firbank was bashful in his reply but also clearly excited by Van Vechten’s enthusiasm, and the two began a long-distance friendship through correspondence. Though they had never met—and indeed never did meet; Firbank died suddenly in 1926—they established a close bond, their shared homosexuality at its core, always bubbling beneath the surface of their warm and humorous letters but never overtly mentioned.
Over the summer of 1923 the two swapped gifts via airmail. Van Vechten sent Firbank a copy of the record that the United States was crazy about, “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” a song so wonderfully mindless and vulgar, Van Vechten said, it was the anthem of the national mood. In return, Firbank sent a photograph of himself that Van Vechten hung in his bathroom, in a space between a couple of his favorite divas, Mary Garden and Gaby Deslys. More important, he sent his latest novel, Sorrow in Sunlight. Set in the West Indies, the story is a fish-out-of-water tale about a black family from the country who go to the city to find their fortune and shin their way up the social ladder. Bouncing along with all the social comedy, frivolity, and innuendo that he so admired in Firbank’s writing, Sorrow in Sunlight delighted Van Vechten, who took it into his own hands to find the book an American publisher. On September 19 he wrote to Firbank to say that Brentano’s was keen on publishing it, as well as all his pre
vious novels, for the American market. With extreme presumptuousness, Van Vechten also mentioned that he would of course write the preface for Sorrow in Sunlight should this happen. On October 30, he contacted Firbank again to explain that he had been thinking the matter over and had decided that Sorrow in Sunlight was a dreary title. A particular phrase from the novel would be much better: Prancing Nigger. With this title, he assured Firbank, audiences would know immediately that the book was exotic, naughty, and fun, and sales would increase enormously. Brentano’s agreed: he had already told the editors, and they were set on it. The final decision was Firbank’s, but Van Vechten let him know that rejecting the new title would be foolhardy. “Beyond a doubt,” he said, “the new title would sell at least a thousand copies more.”
Firbank agreed to rename the book—the “title is delicious,” he told Van Vechten in November—and arrangements were made for publication in the spring of 1924. He was sincerely thankful for, and flattered by, Van Vechten’s interest in him but startled that Van Vechten had been discussing publication deals for his books without telling him first. Van Vechten had championed causes with great enthusiasm before, but this was something else. The Blind Bow-Boy had been published just months earlier, and his ego was surging. Never before had he been so sure of the correctness of his opinions. The notion that Firbank might have objected to his interference never entered his thinking. Over the coming years this proprietorial attitude became a recurring feature of his promoting, dispensing orders and grave words of advice in a voice strangely reminiscent of the one both his father and his brother used when lecturing him on financial matters. A close friend once remarked that Van Vechten had “an autocratic way of taking possession of things he wanted.” That was especially the case when the thing he wanted could bolster his reputation. When Prancing Nigger, complete with Van Vechten’s preface, was published later in 1924, the American public knew that Firbank was Van Vechten’s discovery. Firbank apologized if some of the outraged reviews the book received from conservative critics harmed Van Vechten by association. “My books are quite unconventional,” he wrote, “and shock a lot of people (even in England) and you were brave to champion them.” Van Vechten assured him that apologies were unnecessary; riling the critics and attracting controversy were all part of the fun.
The following year Van Vechten’s certainty in his tastes spilled over into hubris when he wrote the introduction to Red, a collection of essays that was his swansong to music criticism. “I seemed always to be about ten years ahead of most of the other critics,” he wrote, immodestly but accurately, in 1925, looking back over his career as a critic. In 1915 he had published his prediction that the primal rage of Stravinsky would conquer America; in 1924 Le Sacre du Printemps finally made its New York debut. And now, he assured his readers, he was about to be proved right about African-American music too.
He may have sounded insufferably arrogant, but there is no question that he was correct. Two years earlier, in November 1923, jazz reached an important crossover moment when, accompanied by George Gershwin, the mezzo-soprano Eva Gauthier dedicated the second half of her “Recital of Ancient and Modern Music for Voice” at Aeolian Hall to ragtime and jazz tunes, an unprecedented move that Van Vechten claimed was originally his idea. There is no definitive proof of that, but it does sound strongly plausible. Nowadays Gershwin and Gauthier do not seem like such a strange pairing. In 1923 it was the sort of perverse scheme that only someone like Van Vechten would have dreamed up, like his suggestion to The Morning Telegraph in 1918 that Irving Berlin should collaborate with Gertrude Stein. In the weeks following Gauthier’s recital, American newspapers and magazines earnestly debated the question of whether ragtime and its offshoots should be taken seriously as great American art—approximately eight years after Van Vechten had caused irritation and disbelief for suggesting they most definitely should and more than a decade after he had written an apologia for ragtime in The New York Times.
One evening the following January Van Vechten stopped in at the sumptuous West Fifty-fourth Street home of the arts patron Lucie Rosen, where he and a select group of other guests enjoyed a repeat performance of Gauthier’s and Gershwin’s unique double act. After they were through, Gershwin hung around at the piano and gave a sneak preview of a brand-new piece he had written for another upcoming concert at Aeolian Hall, “An Experiment in Modern Music,” curated by the orchestral director Paul Whiteman. It was Gershwin’s first long-form concert piece, and he had a title for it that encapsulated its fusion of African-American and classical traditions, Rhapsody in Blue. Though it was only a fragment, Van Vechten was rapt by what he heard. A week before the concert he spent an afternoon in the stalls at Aeolian Hall, listening to Gershwin play the whole of Rhapsody in Blue twice. The concert on February 12, which Van Vechten attended with his friend Rebecca West, proved crucial in establishing Gershwin’s credentials as a composer and the reputation of jazz as a “serious” musical form. It was also the moment that convinced Van Vechten that his predictions about the art form were coming true.
So ardent was Van Vechten’s belief in the potential of jazz he seriously considered an intriguing proposition from Gershwin a few months after the Whiteman concert, a collaboration on a jazz opera about black America, for which Van Vechten would write the libretto and Gershwin the score. “He [Gershwin] has an excellent idea,” Van Vechten told Hugh Walpole in October ’24, “a serious jazz opera, without spoken dialogue, all for Nègres!” Despite his excitement, the project never got off the ground, though Gershwin persevered with the idea and of course eventually wrote Porgy and Bess with his brother, Ira, and DuBose Heyward. Of the respected, established music critics of the day, Van Vechten was unusual in his zeal for jazz. Even Paul Rosenfeld, the man who took on Van Vechten’s mantle as America’s leading advocate of modern music, obstinately rejected the notion that jazz could be considered great art and cited its influence on Aaron Copland as that composer’s greatest flaw. By the time he came to make his valedictory comments in Red, published in 1925, Van Vechten’s mind was certain on the matter. “Jazz may not be the last hope of American music,” he conceded, “nor yet the best hope, but at present, I am convinced, it is its only hope.”
George Gershwin, c. March 1937, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
EIGHT
An Entirely New Kind of Negro
In May 1924 Van Vechten—out of debt and on the bestseller lists—moved with Marinoff into a new midtown address more befitting their means and celebrity. In Apartment 7D, 150 West Fifty-fifth Street, they found a large, elegant space complete with a dining room, a drawing room, and an entrance hall in which to entertain. Every square inch was adorned by some beautiful object, and visitors were overwhelmed by a bounty of artifacts the moment they stepped through the doorway: antique chairs, towering bookcases crammed with precious first editions, a gilded carriage clock, oriental rugs, oil paintings, and vases of lilies, carnations, and roses all competing for attention. Van Vechten decorated these rooms in the same way he filled his scrapbooks, every last blank space obliterated by color and curiosities. The luxury extended to separate living quarters, Van Vechten and Marinoff each having a bedroom and bathroom of their own. To their wider circle, this was an emphatic expression of the Van Vechtens’ unconventional companionate marriage. A small number of closer friends knew it was necessitated by creeping marital tensions. The sexual element of their relationship had fizzled out sometime ago, and Carl’s hard-drinking, hard-partying lifestyle was igniting the bickering that had always been one of their favored forms of communication into fearsome rows. Add to this Marinoff’s persistent insomnia, and it is clear that the separate rooms were places of refuge for both of them.
The new apartment’s mixture of material comforts and emotional volatility made it a fitting venue in which to compose Firecrackers, Van Vechten’s most abstruse novel to date. Firecrackers was another present-day tale featuring Campaspe Lorillard and Paul Moody as they continued their search for meaning and
fulfillment amid the carnival madness of Jazz Age New York. The action begins with Moody reading a novel about the Tattooed Countess’s relationship with Gareth Johns in Paris, though his attention is not held for long: “It was Paul felt, rather than thought, too much like life to be altogether agreeable.” That moment of self-referential humor sets the tone for the rest of the novel, which reads like one long inside joke about modish Manhattan circa 1924. Psychoanalysis, self-improvement philosophies, the cult of youth, pansexual desire, excessive drinking, and an obsession with athleticism and physical perfection all contribute to make Firecrackers as “of the moment” as The Great Gatsby, a book published that same year. Van Vechten had particular fun sending up the present craze among Manhattan socialites and intellectuals for the teachings of George Gurdjieff, the Armenian spiritualist who claimed that his repertoire of ancient dances held the key to complete spiritual enlightenment. Van Vechten’s skepticism inured him to Gurdjieff’s charms, and his methods are ridiculed in Firecrackers as specious opportunism.