by Edward White
Langston Hughes working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, D.C.
The same was essentially true of Van Vechten’s relationship with Paul Robeson. As Robeson’s career entered the stratosphere in the months after those first concerts, Van Vechten was a constant and key adviser and played a pivotal part in convincing Otto Kahn to lend the Robesons five thousand dollars to clear off a mounting pile of debt. Early in their acquaintance, perhaps wary that he did not appear too proprietorial over Paul’s professional activities, he joked with Essie that he was “beginning to sound like a grandpa, always offering advice. Remember that it is the advice of a friend. Reject it when it does not meet your approval. The friendship will remain.” And so it did—at least until Robeson infuriated Van Vechten by not paying him sufficient attention during the late 1930s. Van Vechten could stomach having his advice rejected, but his ego would not tolerate being ignored altogether. Nearly three years after his performance at Van Vechten’s party Robeson wrote Van Vechten to thank him for what he had done for his career. No matter where in the world he was performing, Robeson said, he would always think of Van Vechten because “it was you who made me sing.”
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Van Vechten’s work as a publicist and dealmaker was one of the furnaces that fueled the Harlem Renaissance. His reputation as a white impresario of black art even allowed him to influence the success of African-American performers abroad. When the theater producer Caroline Dudley wanted to export to Paris the sort of black stage entertainment that was all the rage in New York, it was to Van Vechten she turned for advice. He acted as a creative consultant on La Revue Nègre, Dudley’s cabaret show at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées that launched the career of Josephine Baker in 1925. In the grand spectacle that Dudley arranged, Van Vechten’s flamboyant aesthetic sensibilities and his ideas about blackness were vibrantly evident. Twenty-five singers, the Charleston Steppers dancing troupe, and the seven-piece Charleston Jazz Band provided energetic backing to the show’s real stars, who included a nineteen-year-old Josephine Baker. Dudley’s intentions for the show echo Van Vechten’s beliefs in keeping black theater “authentically” black. La Revue Nègre would exhibit the core of blackness, she told a French magazine, “their independence and their savagery, and also that glorious sensual exuberance that certain critics call indecency.” That pronouncement could have fallen straight from Van Vechten’s lips. By neat coincidence, in the same month that La Revue Nègre opened in Paris, Van Vechten published his article “Prescription for the Negro Theatre” in Vanity Fair. The most important thing, he said on how to construct the perfect Negro revue, is to ensure that the chorus girls are nice and dark, and certainly no lighter than “strong coffee before the cream is poured in.” With his dark-skinned cast in place, he then speculated on the type of scenes they should act out, skipping off into the sort of primitivist fantasy that would mark passages of Nigger Heaven, published in 1926, and dictated the look and feel of La Revue Nègre. He daydreamed about “a wild pantomimic drama set in an African forest with the men and women nearly as nude as the law allows.” Against this backdrop he imagined a cast of spear-carrying warriors and “lithe-limbed, brown doxies, meagerly tricked out in multihued feathers” performing a “fantastic, choreographic comedy of passion.”
Despite his successes in raising the profile of black artists at home and abroad, some Harlemites were highly suspicious of his motives. To judge from his early novels, in which black people appear as only mute servants to a cabal of white decadents, Carl Van Vechten seemed the least likely man in New York to act as the downtown envoy to Lenox Avenue. The poet Countee Cullen, for one, did not buy it. From the time of their first meeting in late 1924, Cullen was more than happy to socialize with Van Vechten; he found him unwaveringly good company and even offered to teach him how to Charleston. But he never fully trusted him and suspected Van Vechten was interested in black people for sex and song—and a chance to bolster his own profile. When a Van Vechten article about African-American culture appeared in Vanity Fair, Cullen confided to one of their mutual friends that he had not bothered to read it because he simply thought Carl was “coining money out of niggers.”
That was an unfair judgment. Van Vechten’s interest in black people and their culture was complex, long-standing, and continually deepening, and his work on behalf of Hughes and Robeson brought him no financial gain. The article Cullen referred to was one of a series that Van Vechten published in Vanity Fair in 1925 and 1926 on different aspects of African-American arts. If Cullen really never read these pieces, he missed a landmark in American critical writing. It is not Van Vechten’s prose that makes these essays so remarkable—at times he strays into the melodramatic mode characterizing his earlier writings about black people that tends to fetishize rather than demystify his subject. Rather, it is his approach that is so arresting. In each essay he presented a mainstream white audience with a serious examination of subjects—black theater, spirituals, and the blues—most had never previously encountered and, if they had, would never have considered them art. Yet Van Vechten wrote about them in the same terms he had once written about the opera and ballet. On describing the blues singer Clara Smith, he wrote that her “voice, choking with moaning quarter tones, clutched the heart. Her expressive and economic gestures are full of meaning. What an artist!” He stressed how the inherent racial gifts of black people for improvising and harmonizing had allowed them to create a folk culture whose quality and beauty could not be matched by any the world over. “The music of the Blues,” he wrote, “has a peculiar language of its own, wreathed in melancholy ornament. It wails, this music, and limps languidly: the rhythm is angular, like the sporadic skidding of an automobile on a wet asphalt pavement”; the poetry that accompanies this music is “eloquent with rich idioms, metaphoric phrases, and striking word combinations.” Nobody, certainly no white man, had written about black folk culture quite like this before: not just as worthy and beguiling but as genuine, authentic American art of the highest quality.
However, some Harlemites saw in Van Vechten’s mania for blackness a ghostly shadow of the blackface tradition, a white man who thought African-American culture was a costume that could be slipped on and off for the entertainment of white audiences who sat gawping, astonished that a white man could perform the trick of imitation so thoroughly that he seemed to be inhabiting a Negro soul. Certain black observers publicly expressed their hostility to Van Vechten’s cheerleading for Harlem’s artists. In 1927, at the premiere of Africana, a Broadway revue starring his close friend Ethel Waters, Van Vechten’s exhibitionist display of whooping and cheering and shouting out requests between songs became a feature of the ensuing reviews. “Mr. Van Vechten did everything to prove that Miss Waters is his favorite colored girl and no fooling,” wrote the reviewer for the New York Amsterdam News, clearly of the belief that there was something sinister about Van Vechten’s motivations. “There was the passion of possession in Mr. Van Vechten’s claps and cheers.”
In a way the reviewer had it just right. Van Vechten adored Waters and wanted to flaunt their connection publicly. He even splashed out on a bust of her by Antonio Salemme, the African-American artist, just as he bought a bust of Paul Robeson by the British sculptor Jacob Epstein. After all these years he was as mesmerized by fame as ever and desperate to warm himself in its glow. At times the strength of his desire to connect himself to his favorite stars made him appear desperate, like a celebrity hanger-on forever pushing his way into the back of paparazzi photographs. He once wrote James Weldon Johnson praising his friend as one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language—a peer of Daniel Defoe’s, no less—and said it was an honor for him to be able to call such a man a personal friend. The only thing that irritated him, Van Vechten said, was that he could claim no part in having discovered Johnson for the world to enjoy. Van Vechten, intending this to be the highest compliment, was unaware that it risked making him sound patronizing, possessive, or self-obse
ssed. To black observers like Countee Cullen this behavior may have appeared unsettling, as if Van Vechten were attempting to own black performers in some way. Yet the crucial point is that Van Vechten behaved in a proprietorial, self-publicizing fashion with all the artists he supported; race had nothing to do with it.
If some blacks were irritated or angered by his self-appointed role as Harlem’s one-man publicity machine, many whites found it absurd and teased him for it. According to a report in Zit’s Weekly, a leading theatrical trade paper, he was reported to have been a victim of a hoax along these lines during a visit to Hollywood in 1928. Egged on by the movie director Dudley Murphy, apparently the actress Madeline Hurlock introduced herself to Van Vechten as Pansy Clemens—note the pseudonym: a gibe at Van Vechten’s sexuality—a light-skinned black woman who wanted to make it big on Broadway. The story runs that Van Vechten fixed her with his usual stare and promised her all sorts of introductions to big-shot producers. When the ruse was revealed a little while later, Van Vechten supposedly hid his embarrassment and insisted that the joke was on Hurlock: he, “an expert on things Ethiopian,” as the reporter described him, could tell that Hurlock really was of Negro heritage, even if she claimed otherwise. Enraged, Hurlock threatened to sue Van Vechten should he try to spread the rumor that she had even a drop of African blood. The story has the strong odor of gossip column embellishment about it, but even if apocryphal, it reflects how his association with black New York society had come to define his public image.
Van Vechten took no mind of the teasing. As he saw it, he was doing vital work, creating a bridge between the racially divided worlds of New York. With pride and seriousness he assumed the role of expert on the New Negro, the man to call upon to explain the mysteries of blackness to curious, or ignorant, whites. By 1927 his favorite party trick was sitting in the dining room of the Ritz, or some other fashionable downtown spot, and pointing out to incredulous friends the patrons who were passing as white. With the Chicago Defender he shared his eccentric pet theory that within a few decades passing would be obsolete; miscegenation would simply absorb all Negroes into the white population. At the end of the decade Andy Razaf, the composer of 1920s’ hits such as “Ain’t Misbehavin,’” dropped Van Vechten’s name into his song “Go Harlem.” “Like Van Vechten, start inspectin,’” ran the line, a clear sign of how closely he had been linked to the neighborhood in the public’s mind by that point.
Van Vechten’s presence in Harlem as a white patron and publicist for black artists was conspicuous—he was temperamentally incapable of being anything else—but it was not unique. The very institutions that provided the organizational thrust of black America’s reinvention, the NAACP and the National Urban League, had been founded by white philanthropists. In March 1925 the white-owned Survey Graphic produced what is still regarded as the Harlem Renaissance bible, entitled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” and soon after published as The New Negro anthology. The Spingarn Medal, given annually by the NAACP to the person who had done most to promote the cause of African-Americans that year, was the gift of the white Spingarn family and the most sought-after prize in Harlem. Without the patronage of these whites—the “Negrotarians,” as the writer Zora Neale Hurston referred to them—the Harlem Renaissance could not have happened.
Inevitably, though, the patronage of whites was wrought with complications. Charlotte Mason was a fabulously wealthy woman with a mansion on Fifth Avenue overflowing with African art, who created around her a circle of black writers dependent on her spectacular but sinister largess. Mason made three basic demands of her stable of black protégés: they call her Godmother, they keep her identity a secret, and they gain her approval for all their writing projects, thus ensuring they stayed true to her idea of their core racial identity. Langston Hughes was one of the godchildren for several years, though it was another of Van Vechten’s close friends, Zora Neale Hurston, who was Mason’s favorite. Hurston believed as fervently as Mason in the ideal of the unpolluted, primitive African soul. Van Vechten believed in that too, of course, but he was no Charlotte Mason, who patronized, hectored, and manipulated the black writers in her orbit to the most outrageous degree. Under the terms of their agreement, Mason paid Hurston two hundred dollars per month and obliged her to collect a great store of material about black folklore, none of which Hurston could use without Mason’s explicit permission. Hurston appeared to have no problem with this. Indeed she thought a cosmic link bound her and Mason together and wrote her letters that express the uncomfortable inequality that defined their relationship. “I have taken form from the breath of your mouth,” reads one. “From the vapor of your soul am I made to be.” In another she described Mason as “the guard-mother who sits in the twelfth heaven and shapes the destiny of the primitives” and signed off, “Your Pickaninny, Zora.”
She never sent letters like that to Van Vechten, who over the years helped many struggling black writers and artists get work and publicity and occasionally gifted them money too. Over two decades Hurston and Van Vechten maintained a friendship of intense warmth, as evinced by their lengthy correspondence, interrupted by silences only when Hurston disappeared on some adventure, through letters that could be flirty and boastful simultaneously but always funny and always passionate, as they swapped stories about Mae West, Lead Belly, or some surprising new discovery—a gospel choir, perhaps, or the Caribbean islands. Van Vechten adored Hurston for the same reason he adored anyone, black or white: he thought she was an extraordinary individual, a beautiful, charismatic talent whose entire being resonated with a life-affirming energy. Ultimately that may have been the crucial distinction between him and Godmother Mason. Both believed in the singularity of the black soul, but Van Vechten wanted to be a friend and peer of the black people who interested him rather than some omnipotent overlord always sitting in stern judgment.
A caricature of Carl Van Vechten as a black man by Miguel Covarrubias, entitled A Prediction
That positive distinction had a crucial effect on his relationships with Harlemites. Behind his back there were some teasing words and eyes lifted to heaven when he tried too hard to appear at home in the company of black people or display his knowledge of their culture, but it was that very same attitude of unself-conscious enthusiasm that endeared him to many. He thought the differences between blacks and whites were self-evident but no reason to keep the races apart. They were in fact an exhilarating life force, what the historian Emily Bernard has aptly termed his belief in “the importance—and insignificance—of racial difference.” Harold Jackman, a black teacher and writer who was a linchpin of Harlem society, circled Van Vechten with gawping curiosity when the two first met in February 1925. Jackman said he had never before felt comfortable in the company of white people, but in Van Vechten’s presence racial differences seemed to dissolve. “You are just like a colored man!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know if you will consider this a compliment or not.” To Van Vechten, who prided himself on his ability to effortlessly befriend exceptional people in almost any environment, it would have surely been the highest compliment possible. However, considering Van Vechten thought he had been able to pass as black in Chicago two decades earlier, Jackman’s praise would not have come as a surprise to him. When the artist Miguel Covarrubias drew a caricature of Van Vechten as a black man entitled A Prediction in 1926, Van Vechten had special copies printed to keep for posterity and send to friends. Being black, he was beginning to believe, was just another of his exquisite talents.
NINE
Exotic Material
By the midpoint of the 1920s there were few aspects of contemporary life in New York that had not been penetrated by the nation’s crop of exciting young literary talents. In particular, the city’s fashionable and flighty spirits—the sorts of characters that filled Van Vechten’s books—had been thoroughly documented, celebrated, ridiculed, and pitied as the epitome of the Jazz Age. Yet no writer, black or white, had published a novel about the New Negroes of Harlem, the
community that had set the Jazz Age in motion. The first one to successfully do so could secure canonical status. The idea of attempting a novel about Harlem occurred to Van Vechten as early as the fall of 1924, a few weeks into his friendship with Walter White. On October 23 he told Marinoff that should his proposed opera collaboration with Gershwin come to nothing he would try his hand at “a Negro novel.” As the Gershwin project drifted away, and his immersion into Harlem society deepened, the idea of writing a novel about its inhabitants gradually turned into an obsession.