The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  But Van Vechten was nervous about such an undertaking from the very start. His tremendous self-confidence usually allowed him to write with an air of absolute authority on any number of subjects regardless of how new to him they were, including many aspects of African-American culture. Since meeting Walter White, however, his relationship with black people had changed profoundly: he had come to know them as individuals rather than mere character types. Finding a black person he did not like had been his “emancipation” on a social level, allowing him to see the individual personality beneath the skin color. From the point of view of a novelist hoping to capture the entire experience of the three hundred thousand citizens of Harlem, the knowledge that black society was every bit as complicated as white society was vexing. He confided to Langston Hughes that prior to his immersion in Harlem it would have been “comparatively easy for me to write” a novel about the place, but his recent experiences had simply underlined how much more complex black society was than he had hitherto realized. In the same letter he expressed his enormous admiration for Hughes’s ability to crystallize what he saw as the essence of black experience within his poems. “You have caught the jazz spirit and the jazz rhythm amazingly,” he gushed; “some of them ought to be recited in stop-time!” Achieving similar deftness in a full-length exposition of black New York was not a task that even Van Vechten would take lightly. The following month he told Gertrude Stein of his planned novel, though he still had no plot in mind, only its setting. “It will be about NEGROES as they live now in the new city of Harlem,” he said, informing her that the neighborhood contained aspects of black American life never before explored in a novel, and which hardly any white people knew about. With unintended irony Stein breezily replied that she could not wait to read “the nigger book.”

  The breakthrough came in August 1925, on the day that Firecrackers was published. That evening Van Vechten went to The Crisis awards at the Renaissance Casino and on his return noted in his daybook: “Title of ‘Nigger Heaven’ comes to me today.” Although he was still not able to sit down and start writing the book for three months, stumbling upon the title was a catalyst. Two days later he told one friend that he had “found so good a title” for the new book that “it should be very easy to write.” To his mind, he had come upon not just an arresting title but a scheme for the novel. The term “nigger heaven” was a common colloquial expression for the balcony seating area in segregated theaters, high up in the gods, reserved for black audience members. Both shocking and tartly satirical, it suited Van Vechten’s desire to write an overtly serious novel—his first and only—without straying into polemical earnestness. Most important, framing Harlem as “Nigger Heaven” helped create a suitably epic atmosphere for a novel that would encompass the grand sweep of black experience.

  Van Vechten eventually managed to begin his novel on the morning of November 3. By lunch he had finished the first chapter. Before Christmas he had an entire first draft. What he produced was a strange and sensationalist exposition of his ideas about what it meant to be black, set against a backdrop of the different Harlems that had so absorbed him over the last year: the nocturnal scene of jazz, drink, and casual sex; A’Lelia Walker’s expensively debauched high society parties; and the literary cliques, or “cultured circles,” as he had once described them to Edna Kenton. The plot is carried by the doomed love affair of two well-educated young Harlemites, Byron Kasson and Mary Love. Both are presented as having allowed white cultural influence to dilute their essential blackness, their “primitive birthright,” as Van Vechten puts it, which enables all black people to “revel in colour and noise and rhythm and physical emotion.” Mary is a bookish librarian with an interest in European history who can—somewhat unfeasibly—recite gigantic passages from “Melanctha,” Gertrude Stein’s story about a black woman from the South but cannot experience the ferocity of emotions that Melanctha feels. Byron is a writer who struggles to write, but not, like Peter Whiffle, because of indecision; instead he eschews race literature and attempts to imitate the white authors he read at college. This was a perennial bugbear of Van Vechten’s. When he attempted to find black playwrights to promote in 1913, he was frustrated that none seemed prepared to tackle subjects that he felt were “essentially Negro.” In the novel a magazine editor, clearly based on H. L. Mencken, tells Byron straight out that black writers who do not write about black subjects are being artistically dishonest.

  Shut out of white New York because of his color and ridiculed by black society for having the fancy airs of a white man, Byron grows angry and despondent. Mary’s emotional and sexual frigidity renders her incapable of consoling her man, and Byron is soon seduced by the attentions of Lasca Sartoris, a cabaret star and professional man-eater modeled on Nora Holt, who draws him into her wild existence. This is Van Vechten’s other Harlem, his hell-raiser’s paradise of nightclubs, hustlers, pimps, and whores, where black people have no trouble acting on the primal instincts that supposedly flow through their veins. In this Harlem of the night, the threat of violence and the promise of casual sex are ever present. Van Vechten’s relish in describing it all is palpable, at points nauseatingly so. In one scene inside a nightclub he describes “men and women with weary faces tired of passion and pleasure” who resemble “dead prostitutes and murderers,” listening to “shrieking, tortured music from the depths of hell,” while a sixteen-year-old girl, “pure black, with savage African features, thick nose, thick lips, bushy hair,” and “eyes rolled back so far that only the whites were visible,” emerges naked in the center of the dance floor, brandishing a dagger, primed to perform “evil rites” as the scene ends. It brings to mind Van Vechten’s similarly overblown account of the Holy Jumpers’ religious ceremony in the Bahamas a decade earlier. His core idea of the black soul had barely changed in all that time.

  When Sartoris tires of Byron, she discards him for another man. Driven by bitterness and wounded pride, Byron grabs a gun and heads for the Black Venus nightclub, planning to kill Sartoris and her new lover. But inside the club his immersion in white civilization proves to be his undoing: his calculating mind prevents him from committing a crime of passion. At that moment Sartoris’s lover is shot dead by another aggrieved rival, who has arrived deus ex machina. The book ends with the white hands of a policeman apprehending Byron for a crime he did not and, more important, could not commit.

  Nigger Heaven is from start to finish a work of pure melodrama, peppered with Van Vechten’s usual adornments of lists, mentions of obscure artistic figures, and digressions into esoteric topics. There are also numerous set pieces that do nothing to propel the narrative and are included only to unveil aspects of African-American existence about which most white people were entirely ignorant. In one scene characters talk about passing as white; another explains the different types of parties to be found in Harlem. Van Vechten was demonstrating not only the breadth of Harlem society but also the depth of his expert knowledge.

  One of the many things he had learned over the past year or so in Harlem was the power of language. From 1925 onward the abrasive racial epithets that he had routinely used to describe black people entirely disappeared from his writing, even in his diaries and notebooks. His new friendships with black men and women had taught him the hurt that such words can cause. The only term he now used to refer to black people was “Negro”—the n always capitalized—the accepted, respectful designation of the day. When reviewing his old notebooks in the 1940s prior to committing them to academic archives, he even crossed out some uses of “nigger” and wrote “Negro” over the top, embarrassed that he had once used the word so indiscriminately. He knew therefore that he risked causing offense with his title, but its dark, lacerating irony seemed too perfect to abandon, as did the prospect of flirting with another taboo. Its dangerousness made it irresistible. Commercial reasons probably came into his thinking too. As recently as the fall of 1923 he had of course urged Ronald Firbank to introduce himself to American audiences by changing t
he title of his novel Sorrow in Sunlight to Prancing Nigger in order to boost sales of the book. A shrewd promoter and an ambitious author, Van Vechten was attached to his title partly because he knew that it would get people talking—and spending.

  Three weeks into writing, he revealed the title to his most trusted black friends. Grace Nail Johnson, James Weldon Johnson’s wife, warned him to expect a venomous response should he stick with it, though Walter White judged it a wonderful title and wished he had thought of it himself. Countee Cullen, on the other hand, was incensed that Van Vechten would even consider such a thing. As is often the way with those who are quick to offer it, Van Vechten had little capacity for taking criticism. It was not really Cullen’s opinion he sought but a rubber stamp. He wanted Harlem’s men and women of letters to sanction the title, thereby ridding him of any moral qualms about using it. Not gaining that from Cullen infuriated him. Van Vechten dismissed Cullen as oversensitive and incapable of understanding irony, failings he identified as common to most black people. Thirty-five years later his stance had not changed. When an interviewer asked him whether he had used “nigger” in the title of his book because the word had had fewer “unpleasant connotations” in 1925 than in 1960, Van Vechten was bullish: “It had more, I’d say … But emancipated people like [the African-American writer George] Schuyler and James Weldon Johnson understood the way it was used. It was used ironically, of course, and irony is not anything that most Negroes understand.”

  That one barb lays bare the tension within Van Vechten’s personality that made his involvement with African-American culture so contentious: the conflict between his fierce individualism and his firm belief in immanent racial identities. He prided himself on being able to value black people as individuals yet repeatedly spoke of “Negroes” as a monolithic bloc, bound together by a common blackness inside and out. When it came to others’ judging him, he balked at the idea that he should be seen as anything other than a unique individual whose racial identity as a white man was of no consequence. In the novel Byron is portrayed as foolish and inauthentic for writing about issues that are not explicitly linked to his race. Van Vechten never considered imposing such parameters on his own work, as the very existence of Nigger Heaven demonstrates. In his mind he was free of all the constraints that bound others. The first chapter of Nigger Heaven includes a footnote that says as much, explaining that while the word nigger “is freely used by Negroes among themselves, not only as a term of opprobrium, but also actually as a term of endearment, its employment by a white person is fiercely resented.” The implication is clear: in the mouths of ordinary whites, with their lack of understanding and experience of the Negro, the n-word is a lethal weapon, but for Van Vechten the rules did not apply. Consequently, when some black people reacted negatively to his use of an inflammatory word, he lashed out with petty insults.

  Perhaps the criticism that hurt the most came not from Harlem but from Cedar Rapids. When he wrote his father about his latest work, Van Vechten probably expected to receive words of congratulation for following the family tradition of challenging the rigidity of the color line. Instead Charles delivered his son a stern lecture. “Your ‘Nigger Heaven’ is a title I don’t like,” he said bluntly. “I have myself never spoken of a colored man as a ‘nigger.’ If you are trying to help the race as I am assured you are, I think every word you write should be a respectful one towards the blacks.” Insisting on using this horrid title was pure folly, he maintained, the behavior of an overindulged child who has never fully grown up. “You are accustomed to ‘get away’ with what you undertake to do,” he warned, “but you do not always succeed, and my belief is that this will be a failure if you persist in your ‘I shall use it nevertheless.’ Whatever you may be compelled to say in the book your present title will not be understood and I feel certain that you should change it.” Again Van Vechten dismissed the criticism. His father, after all, was an elderly midwestern businessman whose ideas about black-white relations had been shaped in the Civil War. What did he know of Harlem and the New Negro of the twentieth century? Although he recognized his father’s sensitivity was born of good intentions, he thought it as prissy and reactionary as Cullen’s. The matter was dropped, unresolved, over the Christmas of 1925. On January 4, Charles died of a sudden illness. It was a horrendous start to a long year of emotional strife, probably the most turbulent of Van Vechten’s life thus far.

  Charles was buried on January 7 in a service attended by the great and good of Cedar Rapids, many wearing the distinctive sashes of the Masonic order to which he had belonged. On the ninth, Van Vechten was on a train heading back to New York, where he sat alone, drank a bottle of bourbon, and slipped effortlessly back into the old routine of self-destructive indulgence. Throughout January and February the evenings he stayed sober were so noteworthy that he recorded them in his daybook alongside the names of guests at the parties he attended. Naturally, the heavy drinking combined with his sudden grief was having a deleterious impact on his health. His letters to distant friends, which usually avoided any suggestion that his life in New York was anything other than the glorious fizz of one of his Manhattan novels, showed signs of strain. He told Hugh Walpole that this book was ruining him, exaggerating hugely that he had been working twelve hours a day for six months. He vowed that when it was all over, he would never write again. Nigger Heaven actually went to the printers two weeks after that letter, on March 18, fractionally more than four months from his writing the opening sentence of the first draft. Those years of churning out copy in Hearst’s Madhouse and dashing off reviews late at night for the morning edition of the Times had paid off; even under the most unpleasant circumstances, he could summon the powers of concentration and self-discipline to write, and write quickly.

  If nothing else, the novel seemed to be well timed. In February Lulu Belle opened at the Belasco Theatre. The play was David Belasco’s take on Harlem street life, infused with all the striking realism for which the star producer had become renowned—save for the fact that the leading roles were taken by white actors in blackface. The play bore certain striking similarities to Nigger Heaven, especially in its melodramatic exposition of the characters’ inner blackness. Lulu Belle presented Harlem as the wild place of white American fantasies, in which the checks and balances of American civilization are no restraint on the inborn passions of its black population. The title character, a treacherous black prostitute played by the white actress Lenore Ulric, breaks hearts and marriages as she pursues a string of men before being murdered by one of her conquests. Audiences and reviewers alike were smitten. Among white New Yorkers it marked the moment when Harlem went from being the obsession of a small clique of artists and socialites to a bona fide mainstream craze. Even if black performers were not always as prominent as they should have been, Van Vechten was excited about the breakthrough of African-American entertainments on the mainstream stage. On March 4 he wrote Gertrude Stein that “the race is getting more popular every day.”

  Within Harlem not everyone was so thrilled at how the community was being presented to the white population. A number of prominent literary and intellectual figures, most notably W.E.B. DuBois, were expressing serious concerns that the younger generation of Harlem writers was encouraging a portrayal of black people as drinkers, gamblers, and fornicators. A matter of weeks before Nigger Heaven was published Van Vechten dipped his toe into the debate, knowing that the rest of him would be submerged before long. In a provocative piece for DuBois at The Crisis he encouraged African-Americans to write about the underbelly of black society, as Langston Hughes and Rudolph Fisher did. “The squalor of Negro life,” he believed, provided wonderful material for artists, and he posed what he felt was the vital question facing Harlem’s creative community: “Are Negro writers going to write about this exotic material while it is still fresh or will they continue to make a free gift of it to white authors who will exploit it until not a drop of vitality remains?” It could be argued that the phrasing of th
at question was intended more as a rhetorical flourish to nudge black writers into action than an admission that he had “exploited” Harlemites or African-American culture. After all, it had been his contention for many years that Americans should engage with taboos as a way of producing distinctive and stimulating art. However, Van Vechten knew that in writing Nigger Heaven, he was joining an already lengthy roll call of white artists who had attained great success by absorbing or purloining black culture. It had started of course with minstrelsy almost a century earlier and was to carry on throughout the twentieth century, touching everyone from Elvis to Eminem via Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, developing into a central but problematic motif of American identity. In Van Vechten’s time both Al Jolson and George Gershwin belonged to that tradition in their different ways, and even Van Vechten’s paradigm of black theater, Granny Maumee, had been written by a white playwright, Ridgley Torrence. Frequently Van Vechten expressed unease with this phenomenon. After seeing Granny Maumee, of course, he attempted to find a generation of black playwrights to express the African-American experience on the stage because relying on white writers to do so felt inauthentic. He was also of the firm belief that white singers should be kept away from the blues and spirituals because they did not have it within their racial gift to perform them as evocatively as black singers could. His words of warning in The Crisis about the risks of allowing white authors to write books about black street life emanated from similar concerns. Yet stunningly, he did not consider himself one of those whites who threatened to “exploit” black culture or bleed it of its “vitality.” There was no doubt in his mind that most white people could not be trusted with such a jewel, but he, Van Vechten told himself, was different. As with the use of “nigger,” he assumed he had special dispensation to uncover the “squalor and vice” of Harlem because he was at one with its people.