The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  A letter also arrived from Arthur Reis, a successful clothing manufacturer from New York. Recommended Nigger Heaven by their mutual friend Lawrence Langner, Reis found the novel so revelatory that he offered Van Vechten seventy-five dollars to give a talk to him and a group of other prominent Jewish businessmen about the realities of life in Harlem and the struggles of its people. Always strangely shy of public speaking, Van Vechten arranged for Walter White to address the group instead. Throughout the evening White explained that yes, just as in Nigger Heaven, there were indeed educated black people living in New York City who read books and ran their own businesses, all of which, apparently, came as a complete surprise to the white millionaires sat before him. Afterward White took the opportunity to write DuBois and let him know the impact Van Vechten’s work was having on white America: “The things that I said are commonplace to those of us who, being Negroes, know about them but to this group it was of amazing newness.” At the end of the event, two of the audience approached White to tell him that the greatest obstacle in eradicating the color line is that “the average white person knows nothing about the things which you have said here tonight which are set forth in ‘Nigger Heaven.’”

  Regardless of the energetic defenses that his black allies proffered on his behalf, the image of Van Vechten as a sinister white man whose interest in Harlem was driven by a desire to exploit back people lingered throughout the 1920s, among certain black critics at least. Langston Hughes’s second anthology, Fine Clothes to the Jew, was published to accusations that Van Vechten had “misdirected a genuine poet,” as Allison Davis put it in his damning appraisal of the book, which he thought vulgar, profane, and harmful to the Negro cause. Hughes responded by pointing out that he had written many of the poems in his collection before he and Van Vechten had even met and that Van Vechten had been critical of a good number of them. Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem was similarly identified by those who disliked its frank descriptions of working-class black life as having been inspired by Van Vechten. Really, the novel’s depiction of Harlem street life bares only superficial resemblances to Nigger Heaven, and McKay had been writing in that style even before Van Vechten’s obsession with the New Negro had begun. Van Vechten provided extensive editorial and business help to the novelist Nella Larsen in the late 1920s, but even she was arguably a greater influence on Van Vechten than the other way around. Born to a white Danish mother and a black father, who abandoned her as a child, Larsen struggled with her racial identity and served as one of the models for Mary Love, the awkward heroine of Nigger Heaven. The ambiguities and ironies of race provided the spine of her own novels too: Quicksand, in 1928, and Passing, the following year, both of which Van Vechten adored and found fascinating.

  What Van Vechten did best for these young African-American writers was to provide commercial opportunities for them by stimulating white readers’ interest in the lives of ordinary black people. His influence was always more on white receptivity than black creativity. Those writers he directly influenced were not the likes of Hughes, McKay, Thurman, or Larsen but white authors, such as Gilmore Millen. In 1930 Millen published Sweet Man, a novel about African-American life in California, essentially the Los Angeles version of Nigger Heaven. The novel was largely dismissed by black critics as predictable melodrama, though Van Vechten thought it “powerful … daring and even sensational.”

  * * *

  Looking at Nigger Heaven from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, one is struck by both the strangeness of the book and the familiarity of the arguments it provoked. To most modern readers Van Vechten’s attempt to distill the distinctive character of the black soul seems deeply odd, perhaps overtly racist. Yet the furor caused by the book’s title is entirely understandable to any reader. The arguments about who, if anyone, should be allowed to use “that” word are running as indefatigably as ever. The book is also one of many chapters in the long and meandering postemancipation story of white artists absorbing and repackaging black culture for white audiences. In the nation’s collective understanding of this still unfolding narrative, the moments from the 1920s that exert the tightest grip are Gershwin’s experimentations with African-American music and the white craze for Harlem-style cabaret. But upon its publication Nigger Heaven was as significant as either of those, and for the many thousands of Americans who read it, black and white, it posed urgent questions about the state of race relations that few other artistic works of the era seriously tackled. Perhaps more important, the clash within Harlem between Van Vechten’s supporters and his detractors over his portrayal of blackness publicly posed a question that twisted itself through twentieth-century American culture: Is positing the notion of racial difference in itself fundamentally racist, or is it a greater act of intolerance to reduce the uniqueness of racial groups by suggesting they all are essentially the same? To Van Vechten the answer was axiomatic. He not only believed in racial difference as a self-evident fact but thought it a blessing, part of the rich diversity that made urban life in the United States such a thrilling experience.

  Van Vechten’s love of black culture—and many black people—was genuine, and he sincerely intended his work in Nigger Heaven to challenge attitudes of racial prejudice among his fellow whites. To this extent he deserves to be remembered as a pioneer, an artist who attempted to remove the barriers of ignorance and hatred that kept Americans apart. His failing, as so often, was his haughty disregard of complexity. He was so desperate to be the first novelist to encapsulate black New York society that he shrugged off warnings about the book’s title and similarly brushed aside concerns that he as a successful white writer was exploiting African-Americans for his own ends. He had set his mind on writing the first novel about the New Negro and Harlem, complete with all its “squalor and vice,” and nothing would dissuade him. “I pay no attention to rules if I want to do something,” he once explained, bluntly. “The main difficulty you get into is that sometimes you hurt other people by doing what you want to do.” Simply, he concluded, “often it’s better to pay no attention to their opinion.”

  If Van Vechten had been less visible in Harlem, less proprietorial in his interest in black culture, and less keen to attach his name to the great African-American artists of the day, perhaps Nigger Heaven would not have attracted quite so much splenetic criticism. But that was not an option: Van Vechten without his bulldozing was not Van Vechten at all. His zeal for Harlem and his need to be publicly associated with it were the very things that drove him to promote black artists in Vanity Fair and to encourage his white friends and colleagues to share his appreciation. What was truly remarkable about his adoption of black culture was that he attempted to immerse himself in the everyday lives of black people in a way that few other white artists ever had, socializing with them in their homes, entertaining them in his. It says so much about his contrary, self-centered nature that he was willing to risk the friendships he had made with one sensationalistic novel entitled with a word he knew he should not use.

  * * *

  As 1926 drew to a close, Van Vechten, exhausted by the whole affair, rocked on his haunches while the volleys whistled over his head. Marinoff was desperate for him to escape, to expel Harlem’s air from his lungs as if the neighborhood were some fetid miasma that had infected him. He agreed that a period of self-exile was called for, but not this time in the capitals of Europe. America had alluring new playgrounds of its own way out west that he was eager to explore.

  TEN

  Cruel Sophistication

  On New Year’s Eve 1926 New York prepared for the biggest parties of the year. The Marx Brothers, Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson, Jack Benny, and other stars of vaudeville were gathering at Essex House for an evening of music and dancing, which doubled as an opportunity to perform material too risqué to use on the circuit. At the Algonquin various members of the Round Table dropped in for dinner and an illicit swig or three in the Cases’ quarters, while a few blocks north, at Alfred
and Blanche Knopf’s, sidecars and mint juleps were being mixed in anticipation of a long night ahead.

  For the first time in years Carl Van Vechten would not be at any of the celebrations. Staring out of a train window at “long, lone, uninspired Kansas,” he was heading west, tired and fretting. Two days ago he had left New York, showering Marinoff with the usual syrupy apologies for his most recent outburst of drunken boorishness. He had not heard from her since. Why had she not telegrammed the train to let him know she was thinking of him? He was always thinking of her. Six months ago she had packed her bags and headed for her sister’s house in New Jersey, threatening to leave him; he feared his absence now might give her the opportunity to follow through with the threat. He desperately needed to shed his Manhattan skin for a while but felt naked and vulnerable without it. And without his baby, his “nerves”—brief flurries of anxiety aggravated by too much drink and not enough sleep—always returned. After long, uncomfortable hours of travel, the first morning of 1927 finally arrived, and with it a world far removed from New York: “Stars everywhere, and at 7 in the morning a pale new moon over my right shoulder. We are now in New Mexico.”

  * * *

  Ever since they had reestablished contact in 1920, Mabel Dodge had tried to entice Van Vechten into visiting her at her new home in Taos. While postwar New York got in touch with its inner primitive self through Freudian psychoanalysis, jazz, and Harlem, Mabel found hers in the opposite corner of the United States among the indigenous people of New Mexico. Over the last few years she had hoped that Native Americans might become Van Vechten’s latest obsession too and that he would do for them what he had done for Russian composers, Herman Melville, and now, of course, the American Negro. She had written to ask whether Van Vechten might encourage Vanity Fair to publish an article about the Native American cause; for pointers on how to get a recording contract for them from Columbia or Victrola; and to suggest that he make the natives of New Mexico the subject of his next book. In vivid prose she described the local art to him as “naïve—yet blood stained—always sad—disheartened—sadistic—and childlike. Blood streams from brows and breasts.” She insisted there was all around her limitless material out of which he could fashion something truly remarkable, if only he would make the effort of leaving New York. “How can you like cities so much when you could vampire the country so much more[?]” she asked. Not many people could have accused Van Vechten of vampirism without his taking umbrage. Their friendship depended on those barbed little comments, praise wrapped up in criticism, and vice versa, that kept the spirit of competition between them crackling. To draw him west, she even appealed to his baser instincts, describing handsome young Native American men in fantastical costumes, one of whom, “tall and slight,” once danced in “an emerald green satin shirt with a magenta yoke” for the prim, elderly painter Mary Foote, “as she examined him sympathetically thro’ her pince nez.” Until the Nigger Heaven controversy none of it worked; the prospect of hauling himself away from the buzz and thrum of New York to spend weeks without nightclubs, blues records, parties, and theaters seemed almost sacrilegious. However, after the bruising friction of the past months, a temporary detachment from civilization was deeply alluring.

  In 1917 Mabel had herself withdrawn from urban society after she married her third husband, Maurice Sterne, an artist inspired by the untrammeled beauty of the American West. Though the marriage was doomed from the start—a combination of her possessiveness and his unfaithfulness—Sterne changed Mabel’s life when he introduced her to the Puebloan people of New Mexico. Captivated by their religious rites, their art, and what she regarded as their spiritual purity, Mabel wanted her husband to enshrine them in his painting. The only difficulty was that Native Americans could not be easily accessed from the comfort of a New York drawing room. As she often did, Mabel assumed her wealth could square the circle. From her home in Croton-on-Hudson, Westchester County, she suggested to Sterne something approaching a human zoo: “Couldn’t you pick out a family of Indians & put them to live in the cottage in Croton?… You could hire them for 6 months & you could get infinite riches out of them.”

  The plan, unsurprisingly, did not come to fruition. Mabel and Sterne instead moved to New Mexico permanently, settling in Taos, a small town a little north of Santa Fe and close to a large Native American pueblo of the same name. Since the late nineteenth century white artists had been coming to Taos because of the natural beauty of the surrounding area as well as the opportunities it offered to interact with Native American communities. When Mabel and Sterne arrived, the flow of outsiders increased sharply as the couple fostered a colony of European and American artists. Mabel thought that her colony could serve a mighty purpose: harnessing native traditions to establish an American artistic culture that was untainted by the ideologies and wars of Western civilization. To complement a new type of life, Mabel acquired a new type of husband. Tony Lujan, an imposing Native American from the Taos Pueblo, wooed Mabel with his drumming and singing and instructed her in his people’s traditional way of life. Through his guidance Mabel felt reborn. She had “finally overcome all the conditioning of the years gone by,” she wrote in her memoirs, “and all the crystallizations of heredity and environment.” They married in April 1923, much to the consternation of his community. While Mabel believed their union was ordering her life into a radical simplicity, the pueblo feared that exactly the opposite was happening to Tony, as he moved into Mabel’s enormous new home, acquiring expensive leather boots and the keys to his wife’s roaring Cadillac.

  Mabel Dodge Luhan, c. 1934, photograph by Carl Van Vechten

  Arriving in Taos on New Year’s Day 1927, Van Vechten shared Mabel’s initial sense of awe. He found New Mexico in winter eerily beautiful, “like the dawn of the world,” as Mabel put it, the arid russet landscape vibrant beneath brilliant sunshine and a crystalline blue sky. To help him strip off the layers of the metropolis, Mabel gave him a pile of clothes more in keeping with his western surroundings. Whether he gladly swapped his silk shirts for ponchos is highly unlikely, but he seemed happy with the change of environment at least. His letters to Marinoff raved about the balance Mabel had achieved between child-of-the-earth simplicity and East Coast comfort, creating yet another sumptuous environment after the Villa Curonia and 23 Fifth Avenue. He was also glad to be in the company of the others at Mabel’s house, who included the cubist painter Andrew Dasburg, the actress Ida Rauh, and Dorothy Brett, the deaf English artist who had served as D. H. Lawrence’s secretary when he stayed at the colony a few years earlier.

  Despite Mabel’s disapproval, with Van Vechten around her guests were keen to re-create just a little of the Jazz Age spirit in somnolent New Mexico. A steady stream of visitors appeared at Van Vechten’s door, seeking access to the alcohol stored in the cellar beneath his room, which he was only too glad to grant, so long as they poured some for him too. On his first Friday night there he and the others dived into the stash and partied in his room, before dining and then heading to the studio of another local artist, Kenneth Adams, for more drinking. “I got very drunk,” Van Vechten confided to his daybook, “& Loren [Mozley, the painter] again begins to scream. In bed at 3.” Their antics incensed Mabel. She retold the tale of Van Vechten’s stay in an unpublished short story entitled “Twelfth Night,” in which Van Vechten appears as Louis Van der Comp, a foulmouthed drunk who pollutes the purity of his surroundings with smutty jokes and coarse behavior. “His face was red and swollen … he had a mock of obedient submission in his lowered eyes and drooping lips. He was full of malice and moonshine.” She had never liked Carl’s vulgar streak, his preoccupation with sex, alcohol, and double entendre but had accepted that in New York such uncouthness—“cruel sophistication,” she called it—was inevitable. In the pristine wilderness, however, his drunkenness and shrieking laughter were revolting, demonic even. She particularly resented the way in which he and Andrew Dasburg acted like “two overgrown schoolboys” around Dorothy Brett, exploitin
g her deafness and her sweet-natured naivety in order to make her the butt of their teasing and innuendo. Furious, Mabel descended into sullenness, locking herself away in her room for long periods, avoiding everyone, just as she had often done at the Villa Curonia in 1914.

  Aside from artists Taos attracted a peculiar cast of drifters and eccentrics. In one of her more sanguine moments, Mabel took Van Vechten to the house of Arthur Manby, an Englishman who, convinced that she and her ex-husband Sterne were German spies, had a habit of climbing onto Mabel’s roof and putting his head down the chimney to earwig her conversations. Van Vechten developed a fondness for some of Taos’s oddballs: he was very taken with Dr. Martin, a physician who had lived in New Mexico for nearly forty years, knew all his patients’ secrets and peccadilloes, and, with scant regard for the Hippocratic oath, regaled Van Vechten with tales of a nearby whiskey priest who possessed two mistresses and a well-stocked wine cellar. Van Vechten wrote Marinoff to say that Dr. Martin had arranged for him to meet the priest later that week. A further letter, however, suggests there was a change of plan, and Van Vechten passed the evening in a bar that reminded him of something out of a cowboy movie, full of mustachioed gunslingers downing fortified liquor as the town sheriff looked on. He had been in New Mexico two weeks, had not once looked at a New York newspaper, and could not be happier about it, he told Marinoff. The only thing he was missing about home was his beloved baby, Fania.