by Edward White
The dancer Al Bledger, c. 1938, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
Bitterness, however, is not at all the controlling mood of the books, which also document acts of astonishing bravery. Christine Jorgensen, the first publicized subject of a male to female sex change, dominates an entire page, for instance, looking elegant and defiant in a picture accompanying the headline DAD PRAISES COURAGE OF SON-TURNED-DAUGHTER. The inclusion of the press clippings, mournful or triumphant, are evidence of Van Vechten’s scrutinizing eye rooting out sexual difference wherever it appeared and conjuring it up wherever it was absent, as the historian Jonathan Weinberg has noted. This was no recent habit, of course; it had been one of his favorite pasttimes for decades, and it informed much of the scabrous conversation that so infuriated Mabel Dodge. Had the great lady seen the contents of his scrapbooks, she would have probably pitied him for his arrested development that manifested itself in this inexhaustible—and sometimes exhausting—obsession with sex. Maybe, though, she would have also admired the inventiveness of his collages that constitute the most arresting part of the books. Frequently crass and juvenile, although just as frequently hilarious, the collages appear to have been constructed mainly in the 1950s and, probably unintentionally, display a certain ironic pop art sensibility, with faint echoes of the best-known work of Richard Hamilton. It is an irresistible image: a rich, venerable silver-haired gentleman in his seventies sat in his sumptuous apartment overlooking Central Park, rearranging newspaper cuttings to make dirty jokes that he can stick in his scrapbooks and pack off to the librarians at Yale, chuckling and hissing through his crooked teeth all the while. No other scene from his rich and varied life captures so perfectly the combination of instincts that drove his creativity: the attention seeking and love of bad taste on the surface and the current of a radical cause flowing urgently beneath.
Some of the pages feature sexually explicit photographs of young men, though judging from the sheer profusion of the images and from his long-standing glee at subverting convention, one senses that Van Vechten most enjoyed assembling the pages that fuse photographs of traditionally masculine men with headlines from entirely unrelated newspaper stories, mischievously turning the images into works of celebratory homoeroticism. In the sexual revolution of Van Vechten’s collages, all sorts of famous American males, from Montgomery Clift and James Dean to President Eisenhower and Bobo Holloman, the pitcher for the St. Louis Browns, were out and proud. The obvious delight that Van Vechten took in projecting the world through a filter of homoeroticism unveils one of the paradoxes of his identity: at times he actively enjoyed the furtiveness that his attraction to men compelled him to pursue. Being unable to publicly express love and affection for other men without fear of reprisal was obviously loathsome, but still, he felt there was something to be said for the thrill of clandestine activities, forbidden pleasures, and the intense bonds forged among members of a community only permitted to exist subterraneously.
Those bonds are quietly eulogized in the scrapbooks too. Van Vechten had been an enthusiastic trader of pornography and dirty jokes for many decades. Into his seventies and eighties he was still sending Aileen Pringle, his friend of nearly forty years, letters that ended with gags about fornicating rabbis or the homosexual termite that only had eyes for woodpeckers. With the jeunes gens assortis and other friends he similarly maintained an exchange of sexual gossip, jokes, and pictures. Most of his closest friends knew that his collecting interests extended to sexual matters and were aware of his top shelf, a portion of his bookcases dedicated to erotic material as well as more serious scientific works about sex, by writers such as Havelock Ellis and René Guyon. The painter Elwyn “Wynn” Chamberlain clearly had his tongue in his cheek when he sent Van Vechten deliberately camp sketches of angels and cowboys, knowing that the old man’s ribald sense of humor would be tickled by them. Other artists gave him much more explicit material. Thomas Handforth is best known for his elegant illustrations and etchings of China, but he drew for Van Vechten a side of the Far East that was never touched upon in his award-winning children’s books: pornographic drawings of American sailors and Chinese gigolos that, unlike Chamberlain’s gifts, were designed to arouse rather than amuse.
Considerable courage was required in exchanging those drawings. During the Eisenhower years Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield crusaded against what he termed “pornography in the family mailbox” and gained extensive powers to censor any materials sent via the post that supposedly promoted homosexuality. Being caught sending or receiving homoerotic material could have ruinous consequences, including prosecution for acts of sexual deviancy. One clipping in the scrapbooks comes from One, a periodical launched in 1953 by a homophile group named the Mattachine Society, whose mission was to counteract the slew of vicious antigay propaganda, and promote the message of gay rights. The FBI infiltrated the Mattachine Society, and after One had run a story claiming that homosexuals “occupy key positions with oil companies and the FBI,” agents outed the magazine’s staffers to their employers. A retired millionaire whose wife and close friends all knew about his sexuality, Van Vechten had relatively little to lose by being similarly exposed, but still, if he was receiving One in the mail, he was knowingly opening himself up to unpleasant forces.
A sketch by Wynn Chamberlain at some point during the mid-1950s that Van Vechten put in his scrapbooks. Chamberlain identifies this as a preparatory sketch for Doorway, a painting that was subsequently bought by Lincoln Kirstein.
Until his suicide in 1934, Max Ewing had been one of the most prolific correspondents, and his presence is strongly felt in the scrapbooks too, especially because he had an eye for the more subtle allusions to homosexuality of the sort that Van Vechten himself was adept at spotting. “Dear Carl,” he scribbled at the top of a poster mocked up to show the Marx Brothers in drag, “For one or another of your collections of AMATORY CURIOSA!” A story about plans in Italy to censor classical scenes on postcards on grounds of taste and decency also caught his attention; he forwarded the clipping to Van Vechten with a note suggesting “we should exchange a great many very soon before the movement gets under way here.”
Ewing had picked up the photography bug around the same time as Van Vechten, and from 1932 he sent him many prints of his work, including those from his “Carnival of Venice” series, studio portraits taken in front of a Venetian backdrop. Largely thanks to Van Vechten, Ewing had befriended many of the leading lights of New York’s art establishment, and Paul Robeson, Muriel Draper, and Lincoln Kirstein all posed for his camera before the painted gondolas and canals of a two-dimensional Venice. When Ewing wrote to inform Van Vechten about a winter exhibition of the Venice series, he said he hoped all his subjects would arrive in the costumes they posed in, though as “some of them have worn no costumes at all, it will be hard on them if the night is cold.” The photos of the disrobed models made their way to Van Vechten, naturally. One featured two shirtless men: the tall and powerful Herbert Buch next to the Greenwich Village eccentric Joe Gould, half Buch’s size, slight and fragile as a baby bird. “Note the influence of ‘Freaks,’” Ewing pointed out, a reference to one of his and Van Vechten’s shared enthusiasms, the 1932 movie about the lives of conjoined twins, hermaphrodites, bearded ladies, and other sideshow performers. The diversity of human forms that Freaks exhibits enthralled Van Vechten and it remained one of his favorite movies for the rest of his life. The fact that he was apparently unmoved by any suggestion that those in the film were exploited is perhaps a reflection of contemporary attitudes toward physical disability and certainly an insight into Van Vechten’s fascination with individual difference and unordinary lives.
Gould and Buch were not pretty enough to make it onto the pages of Van Vechten’s homoerotic scrapbooks, but Ewing’s nude shot of the dancer Paul Meeres did, in addition to some of Van Vechten’s own photographs of male dancers and naked male models. His earliest nudes were taken in the summer of 1933, but it was in the early 1940s that he shot a le
ngthy series of pictures with his two favorite models, Hugh Laing, a white dancer, and Allen Meadows, a black youth from Harlem. Often Van Vechten shot the two together, sometimes at his studio, other times in the lush grounds of Langner Lane Farm, the Connecticut home of his friends Lawrence and Armina Langner. Shared only with a select circle of friends during his lifetime, those photos are possibly the most explicit manifestation of Van Vechten’s abiding artistic obsessions: race, sexuality, and performance. In a letter to Langston Hughes he described Meadows as “my African model,” despite the fact that Meadows was American and lived on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. Yet it was an accurate description, for within the gaze of his lens that is exactly what Meadows represented: Van Vechten’s vision of the black African soul juxtaposed with the whiteness personified by Laing’s pale skin. In some shots they stand side by side, looking passively into each other’s eyes as if they are photonegatives; occasionally their hands, arms, and bodies interlock, two swirling halves of a single being. Almost always they are performing in highly stylized poses. Van Vechten might have Meadows hold an African mask in his hands or decorate him with African jewelry or a scanty piece of fabric, while Laing showed the power and elegance of his dancer’s body by stretching into a balletic position. The combination of their nudity and their performance is intriguing. Beyond the obvious pleasure he took in looking at their bodies, Van Vechten was returning to that ruling tension of American lives: the need to live honestly and unapologetically as an individual, while adopting guises to pass between a multitude of collective identities. Stood naked in the same frame, both of them revealed their inescapable selves. In performing, they embellished those selves, hinting at their potential for transformation.
Allen Juante Meadows, c. 1940, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
Hugh Laing, c. 1940, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
While his scrapbooks suggest that his collection of pornography was considerable, there is nothing close to a porn aesthetic in the photos he took of Laing and Meadows. They are erotic, undoubtedly, but they communicate a vulnerability that robs them of the ability to merely excite or titillate. Meadows, especially, with his sad eyes and the pimples of late adolescence still visible on his forehead, has an unavoidable fragility. It was something Van Vechten was aware of, and actively accentuated. One of his favorite themes for his nudes was that of St. Sebastian, the Christian martyr who was tied to a tree by the emperor Diocletian and tortured by arrows that punctured his flesh. Since the Renaissance, Sebastian—or at least his depiction on canvas—led a double life as a gay icon, his martyrdom in the name of God serving as a metaphor for the suffering of homosexual men. “Grace in suffering,” declared Thomas Mann in reference to his novel Death in Venice, “that is the heroism symbolized by St. Sebastian.” A little more than thirty years before, when Oscar Wilde entered self-exile after his release from prison, it was no coincidence that he chose Sebastian as his pseudonym. With Meadows, Laing, and other models Van Vechten repeatedly re-created the scene of Sebastian’s torment. Each stood alone, bound and naked, pained and vulnerable; in need of protection and prone to seduction. Behind the camera and in control of the image, it was Van Vechten who had the potential to do either or both. George George believed the photographs drove to the heart of Van Vechten’s attitude toward young men in his later years, which was a mixture of caring paternalism and eroticized indulgence. George wrote a fellow Van Vechten acolyte that Carl’s fascination with Sebastian, “drilled with poison-tipped arrows launched by an intolerant society,” shows that he was sensitive to the vulnerability of youth—but he was equally enamored by Narcissus, the cocksure and conceited young man obsessed with his own beauty.
The scrapbooks and the photographs represent the one portion of Van Vechten’s life that he could not parade in public, a defiantly irreverent avocation of his innate nature and a declaration that homosexuality is a form of love and not only a form of sex—although that could be tremendously good fun too. During the Second World War he told Arthur Davison Ficke that he planned to hold on to his collections of pornography and erotica until he died. He joked that the more graphic pictures would make “life more easy in a concentration camp.” Of course that eventuality never came to pass, and instead he decided to leave them for what he hoped would be the study and enjoyment of a more enlightened generation decades after his own demise. Perhaps the choice of Yale as the recipient was influenced in part because that same institution housed a collection of the papers of Walt Whitman, that lodestone of American literature whose homosexuality also left an indelible mark on his work. Without doubt it appealed to Van Vechten’s sense of humor to bequeath this celebration of homosexuality—ribald, explicit, delicate, scatological, thoughtful, and plain silly all at once—to such an auspicious seat of learning. The setup took a quarter of a century, but when the boxes were eagerly unpacked, it was discovered that through an inscription on one of the books Van Vechten had delivered the perfect punch line from beyond the grave: “Yale May Not Think So, but It’ll Be Just Jolly.”
Epilogue: The Attention That I Used to Get
After twenty-five years it felt as if history were repeating itself. In February 1951 the Avon publishing house reprinted Nigger Heaven in paperback, a quarter of a century after the book had first made such an impact on the American reading public. Months before its publication Avon prodded and cajoled Van Vechten, trying to persuade him to change the title, which it suspected might cause trouble. He would not budge. Nigger Heaven was the only possible title, he said, the only one that made sense, and without it the book could not be published.
His intransigence of course was not really about the title at all but about his freedom of expression. He would not be told what he could or could not say, especially when it came to a cause he knew as expertly as the American Negro. In his author’s note in the Avon version, Van Vechten went on the defensive, dedicating the first three paragraphs to the support that James Weldon Johnson had given Nigger Heaven in his autobiography. Van Vechten quoted Johnson’s belief that “most of the Negroes who condemned Nigger Heaven did not read it.” But even the sainted Johnson could not insulate Van Vechten from a second backlash, albeit one that was nowhere near as ferocious as the first. After complaints from the general public about the title, Avon decided to withdraw the novel in November 1951. With it went Van Vechten’s last significant appearance in public as a writer.
The irony was that this incident happened while the black establishment was celebrating Van Vechten’s contributions more than ever. In 1949 Fisk University, acknowledged Van Vechten’s role in persuading Georgia O’Keeffe to donate her collection of modern art to its institution by housing them in a room called the Carl Van Vechten Gallery. In further recognition of his foundation of the George Gershwin Memorial Collection and of his efforts to create an archive of African-American brilliance at Yale, Fisk also awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1955. When the time came for the ceremony, he took a couple of days off from his regimen of sifting through piles of old letters and developing photographs to attend the ceremony in Tennessee. Marinoff proudly took snaps of Dr. Van Vechten in his academic regalia, surely a sight that neither of them had ever anticipated. Amid the formality of the occasion, Van Vechten, now aged seventy-five, still found an opportunity to lower the tone by asking the Scottish academic seated next to him on the stage whether he was the type to leave himself exposed to the elements beneath his kilt.
Having ascended to new heights of respectability, Van Vechten was rewarded for his tremendous work in helping to bring African-American culture into the mainstream of white consciousness, an effort that only a few other Americans could claim to have matched. It was also a sign that his time as a dangerous voice was over, at least in the realm of race relations. Increasingly, his fixation with erasing the color line by throwing parties in which celebrated whites could meet celebrated blacks seemed antiquated. For his author’s note in the Avon reprint of Nigger Heaven in 1951 he wrote that “segregation is
being dealt severe blows from more vantage points than ever before,” citing as evidence the success of a host of black celebrities such as Jackie Robinson and Marian Anderson and also noting that the “captain of the football team at Yale is a Negro.” In an era when Rosa Parks, the Freedom Riders, and numerous other civil rights warriors demanded that the doctrine of separate but equal be sent to the furnace, the achievements—significant and impressive though they were—of a small group of conspicuously talented individuals felt more like light jabs than “severe blows” in the fight against segregation. The realization that he was gradually being consigned to the past in an area of life where for so long he had considered himself the future, was painful. “My relations with the NAACP are not so personal as they were,” he complained in 1960. “I usually don’t get anywhere near the attention that I used to get.”