The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  It was not the first time that Van Vechten had been awestruck in the presence of religious preachers. The Holy Jumpers service he witnessed in the Bahamas and the evangelical churches that he visited in Harlem had excited him because he viewed them as performances of undiluted blackness, a little like seeing Bert Williams or Nora Holt onstage. McPherson, however, was white, and the extreme reaction that Van Vechten had to her sermons is a sign of a tiny chink in his emotional armor presenting itself to the outside world. Usually he expressed feelings of self-doubt or weakness only to those closest to him—Marinoff, Avery Hopwood, or Donald Angus. Of course there is no chance that Van Vechten considered joining McPherson’s congregation, but after the bereavements, his illnesses, the rickety state of his marriage, and his dissatisfaction with his writing, McPherson’s offer of spiritual nourishment fell on receptive ears.

  Those stirrings of vulnerability evident in the spring consumed him just a few months later. On July 1, after an evening of cocktails and absinthe with some of the jeunes gens assortis, a reporter from The New York Times called Van Vechten at home to get his reaction to some terrible news: Avery Hopwood was dead. The story at first was that Hopwood had got into difficulties while swimming in the Mediterranean and drowned. Within three weeks Somerset Maugham wrote to say that in fact, a heart attack had been the culprit, the culmination of an epic binge. Maugham explained that Hopwood had arrived in Juan les Pins one evening after four days of heavy drinking in Nice. Already drunk, he helped himself to several more drinks before sitting down to dinner. “Immediately after dinner he insisted on going in to the water,” Maugham said, implying the outcome was inevitable. Hopwood’s death hit Van Vechten as hard as any of the recent family deaths, perhaps more so. Van Vechten’s experience of New York had been entwined with his relationship with Hopwood, who was one of the few close friends during the last two decades with whom he had never fallen out, as well as having been his lover, albeit briefly. Marinoff, away on another of her restorative breaks, wrote him a tender letter of sympathy but also implored him to learn from Hopwood’s demise. The issue was no longer merely the survival of their marriage, she said, but their very lives. “You just can’t beat that sort of game darling,” She said, referring to the recklessness with which Hopwood had faced life. “It gets everyone sooner or later.” She was terrified that Van Vechten’s turn was next.

  For the first time in their marriage Van Vechten paid serious attention to Marinoff’s supplications. On September 5 he boarded the SS Mauretania to join her in Europe, his first trip abroad since 1915. Perhaps there was a little of his essential selfishness in that decision. After all, he was reaching out to Marinoff at a moment when he most needed her support, after years of making little effort to atone for his atrocious behavior. Even so, the time they spent in each other’s company traveling through England, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Italy was physically and emotionally the closest they had been for many years, perhaps a full decade since Van Vechten had begun his affair with Donald Angus and certainly since his immersion in Harlem. The central problems of their marriage—Van Vechten’s chronic self-obsession and his alcohol dependency—were not obviated by the trip, but Van Vechten’s decision to leave New York and devote himself to Marinoff for a few weeks was a sign to her that he thought their relationship worth saving. Until now that had seemed very far from obvious.

  * * *

  The vacation afforded Van Vechten a vital moment of respite. Several thousand miles away from Manhattan he had the opportunity to break the rhythms of his usual existence, dedicate more attention to his relationship with Marinoff, and take stock of his life and career. That he was attempting to view the world from a fresh perspective that fall is evident from the journal he kept, in which he observed his European surroundings with a reflective, analytical calmness, a tone that he had not been using much of late.

  On his first visit to Europe, in 1907, Van Vechten had been among the many Americans who scampered there in search of enlightenment. When he had returned, in 1913 and 1914, his motivation was essentially the same, and his direct exposure to European modernism had set his life on a new course. Fourteen years later he found the United States’ relationship with Europe drastically changed. His nation was a genuine cultural force in the Old World; its newness and brashness, once reviled, were now widely envied. As he and Marinoff journeyed through Western and Central Europe, Van Vechten scribbled in his notebook his surprise at how thoroughly Europe had been seduced by the fashions of New York and Hollywood. He thought the new urban Germany of the Weimar Republic at night could almost be Manhattan: jazz bands played in New York–style cabaret venues, and assertive young women walked the streets in their modern finery, no doubt influenced by the emancipated flappers they had seen in American movies. In shops in Prague, American names jumped out from the shelves in translations of novels about urban America, such as Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos, and any number of books by Upton Sinclair. The streets may have been lined with bicycles rather than motorcars, and Czech women had not caught the smoking habit yet, but American shadows were cast at every turn.

  He noted all this with a combination of patriotic pride and a little amusement, a gentle disbelief that the cultural interests of the United States should have snaked their way not only across the Atlantic but down the full length of the Danube. It was with genuine excitement that he discovered the extent to which black America had made the journey too. Aside from the blare of jazz filling the streets, Van Vechten discovered photographs of Josephine Baker and other black American entertainers gazing out from magazine stands in numerous cities. The point of this trip was to cut the cord to Manhattan and heal the wounds he had inflicted upon his marriage. But try as he might, Van Vechten could not dislodge Harlem from his mind, and he pined for the company of the black people who inhabited his life in New York. A few days after spotting a black man in the center of Prague, Van Vechten was still rebuking himself for not having engaged him in conversation, as this man turned out to be the only person of color he saw in his whole time in Czechoslovakia. He was a snappily dressed fellow too, Van Vechten thought, who would have surely been wonderful company.

  In noting Europe’s pockets of blackness, Van Vechten was also measuring his success as the publicist in chief of the New Negro. Nigger Heaven was proving a great success in Europe, selling well in Britain and France and translated into several European languages; when he met Greta Garbo in Hollywood earlier that year, he cabled Marinoff to send Garbo one of the Swedish versions immediately. Even before the book was published, he was acting as tour guide to Harlem for inquisitive outsiders, many of whom were visiting European artists, writers, and journalists, such as Paul Morand, Beverley Nichols, Rebecca West, and Somerset Maugham, who returned home with tales of black New York that fascinated their compatriots. Van Vechten was a crucial influence in spreading knowledge of African-American culture among not just white Americans but white Europeans, an achievement of which he was immensely proud. “That was almost my fate for ten years at least: taking people to Harlem,” he recalled. “You’ll find little Harlems everywhere you go,” Langston Hughes wrote him regarding his travel plans; “you were a mighty big part starting it all.”

  When Van Vechten and Marinoff arrived in Paris in the fall of 1928, they encountered what the French called le tumulte noir, a craze for African-American art that swept all social classes right across the city. Van Vechten had played a small but significant role in this through his contribution as creative consultant to the producer Caroline Dudley on her La Revue Nègre show at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Marinoff’s desire to insulate Van Vechten from the hedonistic patterns of his life in New York was frustrated in Paris, where Carl’s old drinking pals, including Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Barton, turned up everywhere. However, his nights out on the town were curbed by illness, exhaustion, and another flare-up of the phlebitis in his leg, a sure sign to Marinoff that Van Vechten’s lifestyle during these last fe
w years threatened to drag him into dark territory from which he would never return.

  After a tour of the European mainland they decamped in November to London, where their social diary was full but less frenetic than in New York. Their arrival coincided with Paul Robeson’s highly praised reprisal of his role in Show Boat at the Drury Lane Theatre. Of all of Van Vechten’s causes Robeson was at this stage the most conspicuously successful, and when he wrote friends back home about how Robeson was stunning the English critics, he did so in the satisfied tones of someone who believed a good share of the credit was his. Showing off to Gertrude Stein, Van Vechten told her all about a party that the Robesons’ threw in his honor at their upscale house in Swiss Cottage. “It was their first party & a great success,” he began before providing a detailed breakdown of the guest list. “All the distinguished Negroes in London were there,” he said, along with many others, including Hugh Walpole, the politician and newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, the singer Alberta Hunter, and Fred Astaire. The British establishment mingling with a multiracial group of America’s pop culture icons: this was an eclectic guest list to rival one of Van Vechten’s own and had been an unthinkable proposition when he was last in London fourteen years earlier. Van Vechten took great pride in being the guest of honor at this extraordinary event, a sign that he held some exalted position among this remarkable company, the reason they all had been brought together. Before he left England, Van Vechten purchased a portrait bust of Robeson sculpted by Jacob Epstein to be displayed in the hallway of his apartment. It was a monument in stone of his link to Robeson’s celebrity and a reminder to all who entered his home that it was in this very space that Van Vechten had set the world’s most famous black man on his path to stardom.

  Van Vechten and Marinoff returned to New York laden with expensive gifts for themselves and others shortly before Christmas. If Marinoff had hoped the break would act as some sort of purification ritual from which her husband would emerge cleansed and reformed, she would have been disappointed. The anxieties of the last eighteen months had certainly eased, but Van Vechten still had a long way to go to shake off the grip that alcohol had taken on him. Over the next year he made repeated attempts to cut down on his drinking and told various friends that he was getting on the wagon for good. As often as not a declaration like that was quickly followed by a relapse, but he was earnest in his intentions of reining in the excess for fear of going the same way as Hopwood.

  In the summer of 1929 Van Vechten accompanied Marinoff back to Europe. Most of their time was spent in Spain and France, where Van Vechten passed several long nights in Paris in the bars of the rue de Lappe, picking up Arab soldiers and rent boys. Even if they did not discuss explicit details, Marinoff must have had a pretty good inkling of the sorts of things that Van Vechten was doing when he chose to stay up late after kissing her goodnight. Here they were on a joint vacation as part of an effort to strengthen their marriage, and Van Vechten was taking the opportunity to engage in sexual adventures without any apparent objections from his wife. Nothing better expresses the Van Vechtens’ peculiar arrangement. Marinoff was apparently content to let Van Vechten satisfy his sexual needs however he saw fit, so long as she did not feel neglected or taken for granted. In New York, where Van Vechten’s coterie of young men was always buzzing around him, she often felt as if she had to wait in line for an audience with her husband. Here she knew that Van Vechten was all hers until the moment she retired for the evening. In any case, his nighttime assignations were only fleeting; soon they would be leaving for some other destination, just the two of them. To Van Vechten the situation was even more straightforward: he was devoted husband by day, sex tourist by night, another bit of pragmatic compartmentalizing that allowed him to avoid compromising any of his varied desires.

  They returned to New York at the end of August. In October the stock market crashed. Manhattan’s gaudy carousel screeched to a sudden stop. Even with his unerring ability to disregard the realities of the outside world Van Vechten, who was relatively unaffected by the crash and barely mentioned it in his daybooks or in his letters to others, appreciated that the time had come to survey the devastation and count the bodies.

  Written over the early months of 1930, Parties was the final installment of Van Vechten’s Manhattan chronicle, a brutal send-up of the alcohol-induced insanity of the last few years. David and Rilda Westlake, based not too loosely on the Fitzgeralds, take center stage as the fulcrum of a community of dyspeptic party animals, who spend their time fighting, sleeping around, taking drugs, gossiping, dancing, and, most of all, drinking—until the debauchery and sexual jealousy result in a murder. It is in many ways Van Vechten’s most effective novel, a vivid evocation of a remarkable moment in American history, told with humor and insight, but it is also an exhausting read. As frenetically silly as any of his previous efforts, Parties contains a menace and viciousness entirely absent from other Van Vechten novels, a legacy of the bereavements that he had suffered in the last two years. The death of Avery Hopwood, who had treated life with the same reckless abandon that defines many of the characters in the novel, seems to have had a particular impact on Parties’s bitter atmosphere. Knopf’s advertisements announced it as a state-of-the-nation address told through a sly, caustic smile: “Exhausted by wars and peace conferences, worn out by prohibition and other dishonest devices of unscrupulous politicians, the younger generation, born and bred to respect nothing, make a valiant and heart-breaking attempt to enjoy themselves.”

  Weaving around the high-octane self-destruction is a valedictory salute to New York City. More sharply than in any of Van Vechten’s other books, the sensory experience of the city appears as a character in its own right. Its unmistakable landmarks, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, are name-checked, as are its smells—“hot asphalt, a distinct smell of chop suey and occasionally even of cooking opium on Broadway and the adjacent streets”—and its sounds, “most of which,” Van Vechten points out as if barely unable to believe it himself, “did not exist twenty years ago.” The novel unambiguously reiterates his long-standing belief that “what is new in New York is always more beautiful than what is old.” This is the strange ambiguity at the heart of Parties: that although New York is a mad, violent, exhausting city, it is the greatest place on earth for precisely those reasons. As detestable as the New Yorkers in the book are Van Vechten can never bring himself to condemn them because they represent much of what he thought best about the United States, a nation now imitated across the world. In publicity interviews he mentioned how his trips abroad had shown him “that interest in America is increasing rapidly in Europe.” Almost every European he encountered, he said, wanted to know about New York and Hollywood. In Parties he expressed this through the character of an elderly German aristocrat, the Gräfin Adele von Pulmernl und Stilzernl, who swaps the stuffy grandeur of her usual existence for the kinetic energy of New York. Among the first English words she learns are “bootlegger, speakeasy, buffet-flat, racketeer, stinko and ginny,” and she is enthralled of course by Harlem. In a scene that signifies a passing of the modernist torch from Europe to the United States, the Gräfin watches men and women dance the lindy hop, a new dance, which Van Vechten describes in detail as the greatest of all African-American dances, the one that “most nearly approaches the sensation of religious ecstasy.” The Gräfin looks on astonished at “the expression of electricity and living movement.” There was nowhere on earth quite like New York. The Gräfin speaks the novel’s telling final lines: “It is so funny, David, so very funny, and I love your country.”

  The reviews were mixed. Some admired its ingenuity; others found its satire too cynical and its characters loathsome. “‘Parties’ scared me to death,” wrote Mabel Dodge. “I think it must be well done since it is so upsetting.” A “strange” and “disquieting” work, was Joseph Hergesheimer’s verdict. Marinoff was less diplomatic and told Van Vechten she hated it, probably because it was a little too close to home. A perceptive reviewer no
ted that the novel was published in the same week as Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, which also deals with the alienation and unhappiness wrought by modernity, and that “they have so much in common that ‘Parties’ might be a case book for Freud.”

  It would not have taken a man of Freud’s deductive powers to fathom that Van Vechten had grown weary of the atmosphere that Parties evokes. In time he came to see the novel as his greatest literary achievement, a biting satire that delivered a sharper verdict on the decade’s follies than any other writer of the time achieved. In 1930 he found it difficult to judge its merits; he was just pleased to have finished it. For readers familiar with the hidden messages and in jokes of a Van Vechten novel, there was a transparent admission that the 1920s were over, even for the heartiest partygoer of them all, who had been forced to recognize his mortality by the turbulent events of the last two years. “He was getting on,” Van Vechten wrote of his character Hamish Wilding; “a career of drinking and drifting must stop at some date, he supposed: probably when he was fifty.” In August 1930, when the book was published, Van Vechten had just hit his half century.

  * * *

  At the moment Parties was published, Van Vechten ensured he was out of New York. As with Spider Boy, the writing process had been a protracted struggle, and once it was finished he was not sure whether he even liked the book, so could muster little enthusiasm for reading the reviews when they came out. For a third year in a row he and Marinoff sailed for a lengthy vacation in Europe.