by Edward White
At the end of the novel’s madcap, frolicking narrative one is unsure whether to laugh at the gaiety of the pageant or sneer at its shallowness. The author himself no longer knew. Both in his daybooks and in letters to friends Van Vechten admitted that he could not quite articulate what this latest opera buffa was really about. His low-boredom threshold was partly to blame; there were only so many tales of fashionable excess that could be written before the novelty wore off. Mabel Dodge pointed out something more pertinent: that Van Vechten’s life was wedged in a familiar groove, endlessly repeating the luxuriant lunacy of his fiction. After visiting New York for a few days during the summer, she wrote him a series of stern rebukes for clinging to a lifestyle that appeared to her to be faintly pathetic, like a prolonged adolescence. “You’re too evolved really to be amused by the facts of crude sex in any of its inter relations—rape or whoredom—or bed athletics of whatever kind,” she said, referring to the smutty conversations he’d had with Avery Hopwood in her presence. “You make me sorry for you when I hear you still trying to raise the wind over any of these old and overworked manifestations.” Following Van Vechten’s protestations against these derisive remarks, Mabel put her case as plainly as possible in a subsequent letter: “who sleeps with who isn’t funny anymore.” Clearly she felt he needed some new external stimulus to lift his mind to higher matters. When it arrived, it came from a source that surprised them both.
* * *
On June 19 Van Vechten finished redrafting the eighth chapter of Firecrackers and settled down to read a book passed to him by George Oppenheimer, an editor and publicist at Alfred A. Knopf. What he found between its pages dazzled him: “a great negro novel.” Fire in the Flint, was an impassioned protest against segregation, written by an African-American writer named Walter White. This was White’s first novel, inspired by his experiences of investigating racial violence on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization for which he was then the assistant secretary and was to go on to successfully lead between 1931 and 1955. Consequently, his novels had a fiercely polemical edge, the sort of thing Van Vechten usually dismissed as propaganda rather than literature. Not so Fire in the Flint; Van Vechten was enthralled by the ferocity of its rage against a cruel white society and given a new insight into a type of American life far removed from his own.
“I had no idea that you would be so interested in a novel such as mine,” wrote White on learning of Van Vechten’s appreciation, clearly astonished that the Wildean chronicler of Manhattan sophisticates should be concerning himself with the serious business of southern race relations. Intrigued by his new fan and acutely aware of the commercial implications of having a well-connected trendsetter behind his novel, White was only too happy to accept the invitation to pay him a visit. The two men met at the Van Vechtens’ apartment on August 26 and hit it off immediately. White told stories about how his light complexion allowed him to cheat segregation; Van Vechten enthused about Fire in the Flint and advised on how it might be adapted into a stage play. Even after several hours, when Avery Hopwood arrived with his boyfriend John Floyd, both steaming drunk and wanting to party, Van Vechten could not be tempted away from his latest discovery and shooed them off.
Walter White, c. March 1942
That August afternoon was a revelation for Van Vechten. For years he had sought out African-American culture in places most white people would never have dreamed of venturing. But until he read Fire in the Flint, his idea of blackness was a caricature centered largely on physical performance. Mrs. Sublett’s prayer rituals, the “Negro Evening” at Mabel’s salon, the display of the Holy Jumpers in the Bahamas, Bert Williams’s genius on the stage, even a growing interest in prizefighting: all suggested to Van Vechten that black people could captivate audiences with their voices, faces, hands, and feet, but not with the written word. In his 1920 essay “The Negro Theatre,” Van Vechten said that while “most Negroes have a talent for acting,” he had yet to encounter an accomplished black playwright who could capture the experience of being a Negro in the way that the best black actors could. J. Leubrie Hill’s 1913 show My Friend from Kentucky, which Van Vechten had reviewed in the New York Press, was still his benchmark of black creativity, sensual and unrestrained. “How the darkies danced, sang, and cavorted,” he exulted in “The Negro Theatre.” “Real nigger stuff, this, done with spontaneity and joy in the doing. A ballet in ebony and ivory and rose. Nine out of ten of those delightful niggers, those inexhaustible Ethiopians, those husky lanky blacks, those bronze bucks and yellow girls would have liked to have danced and sung like that every night of their lives.”
This was Van Vechten’s essential idea of the black artist. Walter White therefore was an unknown quantity: a high-minded black man who used his brain rather than his body for creative expression yet managed to maintain, as Van Vechten saw it, an authentic black identity in his writing. He wrote an excited letter to Mabel trumpeting his new discovery and urged her to tell everyone she knew about him. “He speaks French and talks about Debussy and Marcel Proust,” he told Edna Kenton. “An entirely new kind of Negro to me.” He could have been describing a precocious child rather than a thirty-one-year-old graduate of Atlanta University and the assistant secretary of the NAACP. Making an intellectual connection with a black novelist genuinely excited Van Vechten, but in the presence of white friends like Kenton he felt compelled to show off, talking of White as his latest novelty. He told Kenton that White was apparently not a one-off: there was an entire community of other literary Negroes. He told her that he hoped to learn more about these “cultured circles.”
And indeed he did. Van Vechten could not have picked a better guide to lead him into black Manhattan society had he advertised for one in The New York Times. As Van Vechten described him, Walter White “was a hustler.” He shared Van Vechten’s tendency to value people in terms of their usefulness to him, and though their friendship in these early days was warm, each eyed the other up as a potential asset, White recognizing the benefits Van Vechten’s influence could bring to his career and to the African-American cause; Van Vechten seeing White as a fast track to the “cultured circles” in black society. Van Vechten admitted that their relationship was opportunistic in 1960, around five years after White’s death. “I was never completely sold on Walter,” he said. Explaining how they had grown apart over the years, he said that as time passed, “I was no particular use to him and he was less use to me.” From that casual remark one would never guess that Van Vechten was talking about an old friend who had actually named his son Carl in his honor. The best he could muster in White’s memory was that “he served his purpose.”
White ushered Van Vechten into the center of Harlem, the uptown Manhattan neighborhood that absorbed the majority of the vast flow of black people into New York City in the early twentieth century, some as immigrants from the African and Caribbean colonies of declining European empires, others as migrants from the racially divided South. Harlem was the crucible for a self-confident black identity attuned to modern America, the New Negro, as it became known. Celebrated examples of this postwar urban blackness were as diverse as they were numerous. Madam C. J. Walker, whose parents had been born into slavery, became the United States’ first female self-made millionaire producing and selling beauty products specifically for black women. Her daughter, A’Lelia, dressed in silk robes, turbans, diamonds, and furs, was the queen of the Harlem social scene, hosting legendary parties at her properties on Edgecombe Avenue and 136th Street. W.E.B. DuBois, black America’s leading intellectual, edited The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, which dedicated itself to issuing “uplift” propaganda designed to galvanize “the talented tenth” of African-American writers and thinkers. Marcus Garvey led thousands in parades through Harlem’s streets under the flag of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. There was even a black Lindbergh, Hubert Julian, who attempted a transatlantic flight from New York to Liberia. These p
eople were just a few members of the varied groups of black artists, activists, and entrepreneurs responsible for what is now called the Harlem Renaissance, one of the most vibrant and important American cultural moments of the twentieth century, which helped push black culture into the national mainstream as never before. In the words of one of its most celebrated citizens, the writer and diplomat James Weldon Johnson, Harlem “was a miracle straight out of the skies.”
Van Vechten’s initial reaction to mixing in black company that encompassed showgirls, vaudevillians, polemicists, and poets was one of enchanted disbelief; it was the type of thing that only New York could offer, one that not even Campaspe Lorillard had experienced. In November, as keen as ever to show off to his idol, he told Gertrude Stein that his latest diversions were “Negro poets and Jazz pianists.” His lightness of tone made it sound as though he expected his Negrophilia to go as suddenly as it came. But unlike birds’ eggs, the music of Richard Strauss, Italian theater, and his many other fancies, this was to prove no passing whim.
Over the ensuing months Van Vechten became, in his words, “violently interested in Negroes. I would say violently, because it was almost an addiction.” With trademark speed he worked his way through the great texts of an American literary tradition hitherto unknown to him. He mined DuBois’s seminal The Souls of Black Folk and the novels of Charles Chesnutt. He also discovered a bold and ambitious younger generation of writers who constituted the creative heart of the Harlem Renaissance, expressing the reality of what life was like for young, urban blacks in the new century. He especially admired Jean Toomer’s radical modernist novel Cane; the poems of Countee Cullen, some of which H. L. Mencken published in The American Mercury; and the urgent short stories of Rudolph Fisher sent to him by Walter White. The work that affected him most was The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a pained but beautiful novel by James Weldon Johnson. The novel centered on the experiences of a black man passing as white, a subject that fascinated Van Vechten. Johnson was the national secretary of the NAACP, and after being introduced by Walter White, he and Van Vechten became firm friends. For the length of their friendship Van Vechten was astonished by the range of Johnson’s talents: he was a gifted musician, an accomplished writer, a skilled diplomat, a shrewd politician, and one of the few black lawyers to be admitted to the Florida bar. It seemed there was nothing he could not do. In awe of his talents, Van Vechten held Johnson up as one of the great living Americans, black or white, as flawless in his eyes as Gertrude Stein.
James Weldon Johnson, c. 1920
Schooling himself in African-American cultural history by day, by night Van Vechten developed an obsession with the physical experience of Harlem, “the great black walled city,” as he described it. Of course Van Vechten’s encounters with the Tenderloin and Chicago’s Black Belt meant he was no stranger to African-American neighborhoods after dark. Harlem itself was not entirely unknown to him. In recent years he had occasionally visited theaters in the area and browsed the numerous bookstores that peppered 125th Street. But under Walter White’s guidance Van Vechten became acquainted with black people from all backgrounds, from straitlaced social workers to brash artists with smart mouths, sharp minds, and a thirst for hard liquor to rival his own. Very quickly Harlem ceased to be simply another of New York’s many exotic diversions that kept Van Vechten amused; it became his all-consuming passion, the absolute center of his social universe.
In 1924, if white people had any familiarity with Harlem’s nightlife, it generally came in the racially segregated venues whose names are still known around the world today. The Cotton Club, on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, was a temple of primitivism: African drums, African sculpture, and a sprinkling of wild vegetation allowed white patrons to feel as though they had stumbled upon tribal rites in a jungle clearing. The only black people allowed in were the dancers and jazz musicians hired to entertain the white customers and a select band of celebrities to provide a veneer of exotic glamour. Similarly, the Plantation Club on 126th Street between Lenox and Fifth Avenue, catered to a farcical antebellum fairy tale. Log cabins and picket fences dotted the club’s interior while African-American women in the role of dutiful, chuckling mammies tossed waffles and flapjacks on demand for hungry white customers. When the club was smashed to pieces by a gang in the employ of a rival speakeasy owner in January 1930, The Afro American newspaper reported that “Harlem is laughing—long and loud. It refuses to be segregated in its own home.” These clubs were in Harlem but clearly not of it.
By and large Van Vechten avoided those places, dedicating himself to what he considered the real Harlem, where black people could be encountered as drinking pals and not merely as entertainers. Small’s Paradise, at 2294 Seventh Avenue, was one of his preferred haunts and arguably the pivotal social venue of the Harlem Renaissance: an upmarket—“dicty”—“black and tan” club, deliberately catering to whites but welcoming blacks. Small’s main attraction was its cadre of lithe waiters, who Charlestoned their way from table to table, spinning on the balls of their feet, knees darting inward, trays of drinks and plates of Chinese food held high above their heads. The tables on which they waited enveloped a tiny dance floor that was always packed. Patrons of all colors pressed up close against one another, the air between them thick with perspiration, as they ground their bodies to the gutbucket, the long, meandering jam sessions performed by the club’s resident jazz band.
Small’s was the hip joint, the place to be seen, a little like the uptown Algonquin. Van Vechten could not resist that, but what excited him most were the low-down venues that the Harlemite Claude McKay described as “bright, crowded with drinking men jammed tight around the bars, treating one another and telling the incidents of the day. Longshoremen in overalls with hooks, Pullman porters holding their bags, waiters, elevator boys. Liquor-rich laughter, banana-ripe laughter.” The Nest fitted the bill perfectly: a scruffy, smoke-filled, after-hours den in the basement of a brownstone house on 134th Street. Its clientele was almost exclusively black, including many performers from more salubrious spots who came there to unwind after long sets. Nora Holt was among them: an unconventional and gifted cabaret singer who captivated Van Vechten from their first meeting. Describing Holt to Gertrude Stein, he expressed her charms as exotic, outrageously funny, “adorable, rich, chic,” and plenty else besides. Born in Kansas City in 1885, Holt was christened Lena Douglas but changed her name after each of her five brief and turbulent marriages, the first of which she entered at the age of just fifteen. In 1918 she became the first black woman to receive a master’s degree from the Chicago Musical College, and she worked for many years as a teacher, composer, and music critic, during which time she founded the National Association of Negro Musicians. But like Van Vechten, she also claimed to have performed at the Everleigh Club brothel in Chicago, and she gained terrific notoriety for her extramarital affairs and her penchant for stripping off and dancing naked at parties.
Perhaps more than any other Harlemite he encountered, Holt expressed within one body what Van Vechten regarded as the ideal elements of black identity: the urbane and thoughtful “entirely new type of Negro” that Walter White had astounded him with as well as the physically expressive and sexually charismatic type that he had romanticized since childhood. Harlem had the curious effect of both dismantling and reinforcing his stereotypes of black people. Despite introducing him to a group of educated African-Americans whom he had previously never given any thought to, Harlem was also Van Vechten’s place of escapism, a land of freedom and abandon where fantasies came to life. The Committee of Fourteen and New York City’s other powerful moral guardians who had asserted themselves during the Progressive Era were not nearly as interested in monitoring vice and criminality in Harlem as they were in predominantly white areas of New York, just as they had steered a wide berth of the Tenderloin in years gone by.
Harlem’s permissiveness manifested itself in numerous ways. Nightclubs in the neighborhood had a rampant drug culture, eve
n at high-profile venues like Small’s Paradise, where Avery Hopwood, among others, went for an opium fix; Van Vechten, never a big drug user, likely contented himself with the odd joint and line of cocaine. To the annoyance and revulsion of the community’s churches and social conservatives, Harlem also offered greater sexual freedoms than most other New York locales, especially to white homosexuals. To echo Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s famous declaration, the Harlem Renaissance “was surely as gay as it was black.” The male writers Van Vechten socialized with in Harlem’s nightclubs included Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent, all pivotal figures of the renaissance, all gay, and, with the exception of Cullen, more open about their sexuality than the majority of homosexual men of the era.
Nora Holt, c. 1930
Richard Bruce Nugent was so frank about his homosexuality he made Van Vechten seem like a sheltered bumpkin from The Tattooed Countess. In his extraordinary short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” Nugent appears as Alex, a young man who picks up a stranger at four in the morning and brings him back to his apartment. As “they undressed by the blue dawn,” Nugent wrote, “Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being … his body was all symmetry and music … and Alex called him Beauty.” It is worth noting that Nugent once wrote Van Vechten to express his admiration of Peter Whiffle—unsurprising considering that Whiffle’s declaration to do “what one is forced by nature to do” mirrored Nugent’s own philosophy for living. “Harlem was very much like the Village,” Nugent recalled decades after the Harlem Renaissance had passed. “People did what they wanted to do with whom they wanted to do it. You didn’t get on the rooftops and shout, ‘I fucked my wife last night.’ So why would you get on the roof and say, ‘I loved prick’? You didn’t. You just did what you wanted to do. Nobody was in the closet. There was no closet.”