The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  * * *

  In the weeks leading up to publication, Van Vechten felt his affinity with black America strengthen. One afternoon Zora Neale Hurston took him to a sanctified church on West 137th Street located in the offices of a real estate agent, one of the many tiny charismatic sects that sprang up in Harlem out of nowhere only to disappear as quickly as they had emerged. He said the place rocked with “shoutin’, moanin’, yelling” for “hours on end to the music of a cornet & a guitar & jumping and dancing. Exactly like the jungle.” A similar feeling of awe struck him when the Johnsons took him to New Jersey to visit the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School, known as the Tuskegee of the North, and heard the young pupils sing spirituals in perfect pitch. It seemed there was nowhere in the black world of the North that Van Vechten felt out of place. During a trip to Virginia, however, he wrote Marinoff of his frustration that although he encountered black people at every turn, the strictures of southern society made him unable to communicate with his people in the same easy manner in which he could in Harlem.

  In June any illusions he may have had about being an honorary black man were burst as it became clear that “his” people might not embrace Nigger Heaven as the compliment it was intended to be. Two months ahead of publication a number of black newspapers revealed they would not allow the novel to be advertised within their pages. Walter White spoke out in Van Vechten’s defense in The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most influential African-American newspapers in the country. “There is seldom much prejudice of any sort, among those who are intelligent enough to do a bit of thinking and investigating for themselves,” White wrote tartly, comparing Van Vechten’s inquiring spirit with what he condemned as the knee-jerk reaction of certain blacks, chiming Van Vechten’s own belief in the oversensitivity of the race.

  By this stage Van Vechten was anxious about the book’s reception and, very often, obnoxiously drunk. For Marinoff the stress had become too much. When he returned from the New World speakeasy in Harlem at four o’clock one morning, he lashed out, either verbally or physically, and quite possibly both, his daybooks give only elliptical details of his behavior, and Marinoff made her escape. He went to bed still drunk and rose at ten, expecting Marinoff to come back before lunch, as she always did in these situations. Not this time. Unable to find her, Van Vechten asked Donald Angus to intervene. Over the telephone Angus tracked Marinoff down at the Algonquin. When Van Vechten came on the line, he was stunned. “She says she is through forever. If she is, what is there in life left for me?”

  His disbelief is hard to fathom; surely he must have seen this coming. The only surprise was that Marinoff had not left sooner. In October 1925, she even told the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper that she felt neglected by her husband, although she made no mention of the physical and verbal violence he subjected her to. Reminiscing about their first year of marriage, when she and Van Vechten kept separate apartments, she told a reporter: “I was having an affair with my husband. Living in sin, you know. Oh, I quite miss that.” Since Van Vechten had become a celebrity, however, she had to share him with the whole of New York and its never-ending parties, which made her feel lonely and unloved. On returning to New York from her recent trip to Europe she had been bursting to see Van Vechten, who had sent her numerous letters and telegrams communicating his misery at their separation. But on the first night back after three months she discovered that they were not to spend the evening alone; instead Carlo had invited some new friends to the apartment for a party. “Oh, yes, there were my friends there too, and the party was fine. It was thoughtful of him, but—.” She trailed off, not needing to finish the thought aloud.

  Remarkably, with his marriage falling apart around him, Van Vechten considered a dinner party at Rudolph Fisher’s that evening too important to cancel, though he did not enjoy himself or provide the other guests with much entertainment. Upon his return to the apartment he discovered that Marinoff had come back during his absence, but only to pack her bags. The next morning he got wind that she had taken shelter at her sister’s house in New Jersey. When he arrived around lunchtime, he was lucky to find her in a conciliatory mood. She agreed to give him another chance, and they talked things over while walking and picking flowers in the surrounding countryside. In the immediate aftermath a chastened Carl was on his best behavior. Early the next week he treated Marinoff to a romantic evening for two, dining together before catching Mae West in her outrageous new show, Sex, and then returning to the apartment to distill two gallons of homemade brandy, an unusual method of spousal reconciliation, perhaps, but somehow entirely fitting.

  * * *

  After months of nerves and drama, Nigger Heaven was finally unleashed on the American public on August 20, 1926. Alfred A. Knopf’s publicity campaign promised readers a genuine publishing landmark, a thrilling new type of American novel that would transport whites into a secret existence within their midst. An advertisement in Publishers Weekly advised bookstores that “between the covers of this unusual novel you will be selling your customers a new world.” Consciously or not, Knopf’s marketing blurbs described the novel in terms similar to those of the muckraking exposés of the early 1900s that had guided wealthy, respectable New Yorkers into the tenements of the Lower East Side, titillating, fascinating, and enraging them all at once. The feverishly positive critical responses from the white press took up the same line. Walter Yust, a leading literary critic of the 1920s, wrote admiringly in The Evening Post of Van Vechten’s “careful observations” of “the tortured ecstasies of Harlem,” a place populated by “a melodramatic people” of “unashamed passion” as if Van Vechten’s tale were a sober compilation of empirical facts. In a similar vein, the New York Times Book Review praised the novel’s “understanding and insight.” An effusive notice in the New York Evening Graphic stressed the authenticity of Nigger Heaven and made much of the fact that Van Vechten had “lived among the colored people” for nearly two years. “Read Nigger Heaven,” the reviewer exhorted. “Read it and think.”

  From across the Atlantic D. H. Lawrence rolled his eyes and dismissed the book as “a second-hand dish barely warmed up,” and suggested that Van Vechten’s idea of blackness was a myth: “It is absolutely impossible to discover that the nigger is any blacker inside than we are.” His compatriot M. P. Shiel was more complimentary about Van Vechten’s writing, yet he too thought the book curious. He found the issue of the color line fascinating, he said, because it revolves around the strange notion of “purity of race.” It felt to Shiel as if he were eavesdropping on an American conversation that was engrossing yet thoroughly peculiar. He was right too. Although Nigger Heaven found great favor with foreign readers the world over and chimed with Europe’s own explosion of interest in nonwhite culture after the First World War, this was a distinctly American novel. To the fashionable white crowd of Jazz Age New York, Nigger Heaven was a revelation. Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken thought it Van Vechten’s best work by far; F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to say he had read it in one night before pushing it into Zelda’s hands; Franklin Pierce Adams described it as “one of the most enthralling books we have ever read,” a “fine, exciting, heart-breaking, tragic tale of life in Harlem.” Arthur Davison Ficke asked what “the Race” thought of this grand work. “Probably enormously flattered, aren’t they?”

  The short answer was no. Hostility toward the book from African-American communities came loud and early. The Van Vechtens’ housekeeper, Meda Frye, depressed her employer when she came into the apartment one morning with a pile of furious reviews from the black press. They savaged Van Vechten for a prurient obsession with the underbelly of Harlem nightlife and for his dialogue, which many thought a ludicrous mangling of African-American dialect. Some critiques of the book failed to get beyond the title. One of the stinging pieces that Van Vechten masochistically cut out and pasted in his scrapbooks focused less on the novel and more on its impression of the author, whom it described as one of New York’s effete voyeurs who, “with
their noses arched, twirling their canes, and peeping over their eyelids,” go to Harlem simply to satisfy their voyeuristic impulses, before heading back down to Greenwich Village to swap stories about the outrageous things they have seen.

  Soon all manner of stories began to circulate: an elderly white man had been verbally and physically attacked in the 135th Street branch of the public library when mistakenly identified as the author of Nigger Heaven; a preacher had burned copies of the book as part of a protest against southern lynchings; Van Vechten had been barred and disowned by establishments all across Harlem and hanged in effigy on St. Nicholas Avenue. Some of these tales were accurate; others, apocryphal. But all conveyed the outrage that as many black people saw it, a wealthy white man from downtown had come up to tear around Harlem and then taunted its inhabitants with a book portraying black life as dripping in sex and drugs and violence, capping it off with the most offensive word possible. The Afro American of Baltimore summed up the incredulity when it reported a conversation about Nigger Heaven supposedly overheard in a Harlem beauty parlor: “You mean to say a man went to people’s houses and accepted their hospitality and then called ’em nigger?”

  For a brief moment Van Vechten feared that the community for which he had such affection was about to cut him off. Over the previous year Van Vechten had become friendly with W. C. Handy, the great blues pioneer. Handy was one of the most respected figures in Harlem, and a birthday party to which Van Vechten had been invited was due to be thrown for him at Small’s. Three days before the event, however, Van Vechten’s friend Lewis Baer contacted him to say that his presence at the party would not be tolerated by the management of Small’s, with which he had previously enjoyed good relations. “We don’t care when we get written about, but not when we get exaggerated about” was the line given to Baer. For a man who put so much stock in being “on the scene,” the prospect was humiliating, unthinkable; to be banished from the hub of Harlem nightlife would be banishment from Harlem itself. The more strident of his black friends rallied around and convinced him that he should attend the party regardless; if the management of Small’s decided to throw him out, the club would lose the patronage of Van Vechten’s supporters too. Accompanied by Zora Neale Hurston, a formidable character for any nightclub bouncer to deal with, Van Vechten arrived at Small’s for Handy’s party, and to his immense relief, the evening went without incident. It was ironic that Van Vechten, who was happy to end friendships over sins as trivial as tardiness or bad table manners, and who boasted that if “somebody does something to offend me, I can stop a relationship immediately,” could be so shaken when he feared that certain acquaintances might do the same. Again Van Vechten was shocked to discover that he could not always play by his own rules.

  Nora Holt had guessed Van Vechten would receive this sort of response. From France she wrote to say that although she thought Van Vechten had presented certain aspects of black life with unerring accuracy, she was certain the book would cause a stink. “The cries of protest from the Harlemites reach me even in Paris.” The loudest cries of protest came from two of the most influential African-American voices of the day: Hubert Harrison and W.E.B. DuBois. Both men delivered astonishing attacks on the novel and its author, accusing Van Vechten of being a crude, exploitative racist. Harrison’s lengthy invective characterized Nigger Heaven as a “breach of the peace” typical of “blase [sic] neurotics whose Caucasian culture has petered out and who come to this corner of Manhattan for pungent doses of unreality.” Deploying barely concealed homophobia to counter perceived racism, Harrison said the only good thing about the book was Van Vechten’s ability to “describe furniture and its accessories, female clothes and fripperies with all the ecstatic abandon of maiden lady at a wedding and the self-satisfaction of a man-milliner toying with a pink powder-puff. In that domain, I think, he hasn’t his equal—among men.”

  Zora Neale Hurston, c. 1938, photograph by Carl Van Vechten

  DuBois’s review was even more excoriating. Ignoring the book’s genteel, well-educated characters, DuBois lambasted Van Vechten for writing about the seedier side of Harlem, its nightclubs, prostitutes, gamblers, and street violence. It was evidence, he said, of Van Vechten’s shallow, inhuman nature: “It is the surface mud he slops about in. His women’s bodies have no souls; no children palpitate upon his hands; he has never looked upon his dead with bitter tears. Life to him is just one orgy after another, with hate, hurt, gin and sadism.”

  Harrison, DuBois, the incident at Small’s, the accusations of exploiting the community he longed to be admired by: it all hurt dreadfully. Van Vechten’s pattern of broken, drunken sleep became haunted by strange dreams that reflected his feelings of persecution and rejection. Shortly after the first bad reviews were published he experienced a vivid recurring nightmare in which he had turned into a black man and was being chased through the streets by an angry, rioting mob.

  The criticism was intense, but Van Vechten had certainly not been abandoned. Most of those Harlemites closest to him said both privately and publicly that Nigger Heaven was a powerful novel that portrayed black people and their place within the urban United States honestly and empathetically. Alain Locke, Eric Walrond, and Paul Robeson all wrote to congratulate him for having written a fine book, though Locke privately held mixed feelings about it. Charles Johnson, in his capacity as a friend and the editor of Opportunity, told Van Vechten that although some part of him wanted him to “make a stir about your title and be a good ‘race man,’” he thought Nigger Heaven very fine, a view of African-American lives that was neither hostile nor dripping with “patronizing sympathy.” Johnson subsequently published a glowing review of the book by James Weldon Johnson, who praised Van Vechten for paying “colored people the rare tribute of writing about them as people rather than as puppets.” With a dash of pride Van Vechten recounted to Johnson a scene at a popular Harlem restaurant when Langston Hughes tore a strip off some hostile critics, suggesting they might like to read the book before criticizing it. Moreover, when Van Vechten was pursued for breach of copyright for failing to gain clearance for song lyrics peppered throughout Nigger Heaven, it was Hughes who worked through the night at the Van Vechtens’ apartment, writing new verses to replace the copyrighted ones.

  The resoluteness of his black defenders bears testament to the genuine friendships he had forged in Harlem. But it is also true that Van Vechten was frequently the catalyst for outrage and argument rather than its object. Nigger Heaven and its depiction of nightclubs, promiscuous women, and murderous men were the perfect totem around which Harlem’s opposing camps aligned: DuBois’s bourgeois crowd and the rebellious youth committed to freedom of expression. Van Vechten’s black critics repeatedly accused him of insulting those Harlemites who had shown him hospitality. But equally criticized were the Harlemites who had supported and encouraged him in the first place. Hubert Harrison’s review, for instance, appeared under the title “Homo Africanus Harlemi,” a reference to a well-known article by L. M. Hussey that described how black Americans adopted shifting roles and personalities in order to navigate their way through white society. In converting Hussey’s title for his review, Harrison was speaking not to Van Vechten but to Van Vechten’s black friends, whom he mocked as “Harlem’s new and nocturnal aristocracy of ‘brains’ and booze,” chasing “salvation by publicity” and indulging the rank prejudices of white voyeurs. Harrison hated the book—and Van Vechten—but his criticism of it was part of a broader agenda against the way certain black youths chose to present their communities to the white world. On the other side of the argument, when Wallace Thurman predicted that a statue of Carl Van Vechten would one day be erected on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, he did so not because he thought Van Vechten a great man, or even a good writer, but because he wanted to rile the old guard, which deplored Van Vechten’s interest in a side of black life they wanted to keep hidden. Consequently, Wallace, Hughes, and the others who viewed art as a means of expression rather
than propaganda saw attacks on Van Vechten as attacks on their own creative freedom.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, the rumpus, Nigger Heaven was read voraciously in Harlem, becoming one of the most requested books of the 1920s at the 135th Street Library. In her column in the October 1926 edition of Opportunity, Gwendolyn Bennett remarked that “the vogue for Nigger Heaven has set its tentacles upon Negro readers. I have seen its pale blue jacket with its discreet white printing in more brown arms than I have ever seen any other book.” By the very next edition, Bennett reported, the book had caught the imagination of the city to such an extent that it had spawned a brand-new verb. “Sightseers, visitors and other strangers that might find themselves within the limits of Harlem … are said to be ‘vanvechtening’ around.” She also pointed out that by including his name in the book, Van Vechten had created a new wave of interest in the works of Charles W. Chesnutt, an overlooked elder statesman of African-American literature whose work Van Vechten greatly admired. In fact, librarians and rare book dealers were now contacting Van Vechten directly to find out where to get copies of Chesnutt’s work, and Chesnutt himself wrote to Van Vechten to thank him for the kind things he had said about his books. This delivers us to a crucial point about Van Vechten’s intention for Nigger Heaven and its legacy: though the novel had been about black Americans, it was most definitely not written for them. In the space of a single novel Van Vechten wanted to introduce white Americans to all the spectacles, challenges, joys, and frustrations that defined daily life for the diverse community of black people squeezed into a cramped quadrant of the modern world’s most exciting city. In that respect, at least, he had succeeded.

  In the months and years following its publication Van Vechten received letters from readers across America amazed at what Nigger Heaven taught them about black people. Almost all were dumbfounded by Mary and Byron. From Iowa, a hospital superintendent wrote to express her astonishment at his cultured black characters, who read Gertrude Stein, take trips to Europe, and hold elegant dinner parties. “Can it be possible that there are any like those of yours? And if so do they have a culture so like to our own sophisticated upper classes?” A student from New Haven wondered whether Van Vechten had done his research properly because although “all the other characters are vividly negro, with vivid negro traits,” Mary “is too fine” to be black. Most remarkable was a letter from a onetime New Yorker. She questioned whether the book had been written after close research because the wealthy and sophisticated characters bore no relation to any black people she had ever encountered. And could it really be true, she wondered, that there are white people in New York “who go to Negro homes or receive them in their own homes as social equals?” This, more than any other facet of the novel, she found wholly implausible. At the end of her letter, the correspondent revealed herself to be a white woman married to a Chinese man. As she herself could confirm, interracial marriages as mentioned in Van Vechten’s book can work perfectly well, though she suspected the problems between blacks and whites may prove intractable.