FIVE
How to Read Gertrude Stein
In March 1913 Van Vechten interviewed John C. Freund, the editor of Musical America and one of the nation’s leading authorities on classical music, about how the United States might create art as great as that produced by its cousins in Europe. The key, according to Freund, was women. Just as reformers such as Frances Willard and Jane Addams sought to improve society by imbuing it with civilizing values, by opening salons in their own front rooms, the nation’s ladies could foster exciting new arts scenes, full of domestic virtue. “Any one or two dozens of great women in New York … could establish the first one,” Freund assured his interviewer. It must have amused Van Vechten that Freund appeared unaware that at that very moment a great New York woman was doing just as he suggested, though the things her salon promoted were a long way from the idyll of feminine purity that Freund had in mind.
The woman in question was Van Vechten’s remarkable new friend Mabel Dodge. After years of living in picturesque luxury in Italy and France, Mabel had begrudgingly moved to New York with her husband, the acclaimed architect Edwin Dodge and their son, John, in the summer of 1912, finding the United States’ most sophisticated city monolithic, gray, and lifeless. In the spacious rooms of her Fifth Avenue apartment, the second floor of an imposing brownstone, she passed her time daydreaming of the Renaissance splendor of Florence and the art nouveau glamour of Paris. “We have left everything worthwhile behind us,” she raged. “America is all machinery and money-making and factories—it is ugly, ugly, ugly!” She decided it was her duty and destiny to release this city into a new plain of experience.
The change began beneath her very feet. First, she ordered every inch of her apartment be painted and papered a brilliant white. Gleaming white marble mantelpieces and long white curtains were brought in too, along with yard upon flowing yard of white Chinese silk, “a repudiation of grimy New York.” While Edwin and John were attending football games, she crisscrossed the city in a chauffeur-driven limousine, peering out at the passing shopwindows, dashing out of the car only when a divine chandelier, chaise longue, or work of colored glass came into view, spending no more time on the mean, functional streets of New York than was absolutely necessary. On the second floor of 23 Fifth Avenue, Mabel created a pristine haven of sophistication. Now all she needed were some heavenly beings to share it with.
According to Dodge, she and Van Vechten first met at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend. Sitting opposite him at dinner, Mabel was instantly captivated by Van Vechten, who struck her as a large “porcine” man dressed fussily in a frilly white shirt with “finely textured red skin,” the teeth of a “wild boar,” and “brown eyes, full of twinkling, good-natured malice.” Van Vechten was equally intrigued by the exotic but taciturn Mabel. After dinner he sought her out and made her laugh by discreetly making “affectionate fun” of their hosts. “He seemed amused at everything; there wasn’t a hint of boredom in him,” Mabel recalled. At the end of the evening she offered him a lift in her limousine. Instead of wanting to go home to bed, Van Vechten asked to be taken to the Metropolitan Opera House. “I have to meet some fellows in the lobby at the last act and see what we’re going to say about it tomorrow,” he explained, trying to suppress a smile. “After all, one takes one’s job seriously, I hope.”
Van Vechten became a constant presence at the Dodge household, often arriving in the morning to take Mabel to watch rehearsals at the Metropolitan or the Manhattan. Unperturbed by his “warm friendships for other men,” for a time Mabel explored the possibility of taking Van Vechten as her lover. It was only when the intensity of Van Vechten’s attachment to Marinoff became apparent that Mabel settled for a close, if peculiar, friendship. “He was the first person who animated my lifeless rooms,” Mabel said, though he was far from the last.
From the early months of 1913 Mabel opened up her home to New York’s most influential people. On any given night a hundred or more extraordinary characters ascended the polished wooden staircase of 23 Fifth Avenue to enter Mabel’s immaculate chamber of white. Poets from Greenwich Village in scuffed shoes and frayed cuffs were followed by suave, well-fed art dealers, feminist radicals, free love evangelists, college professors, and Marxist agitators. In they filed like rare, exotic beasts stepping onto a bohemian Ark, each of them different from the last, all of them vital to the same outlandish project. They were there for one of Mabel’s Evenings, a chance for New York’s fractured array of radicals and dissidents to argue, debate, and create. Each Evening was themed by some vital current issue. There were Evenings on “sex antagonism,” cubism, “dangerous characters,” birth control, female suffrage, “art and unrest,” revolutionary socialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis. At Mabel’s salon the unthinkable was commonplace; the unsayable, routinely said.
Van Vechten adored the Evenings. He had no interest in the radical political ideas or the unsettling philosophical positions that were posited, but he loved the beautiful surroundings and the spirit of transgression that prevailed. He drank in the atmosphere as greedily as he did the champagne that sparkled and fizzed in Mabel’s thin-stemmed crystal flutes. The tiniest sensual details buried themselves into his memory: “Curtis Cigarettes, poured by the hundreds from their neat pine boxes into white bowls, trays of Virginia ham and white Gorgonzola sandwiches, pale Italian boys in aprons, and a Knabe piano.” The adornments that pleased him most were the clusters of exceptional people who spun like luminous tops across Mabel’s luxurious Angora rugs. “The groups separated, came together, separated came together,” Van Vechten wrote in re-creating the scene for a novel in 1922. “I talked with one and then another, smoking constantly and drinking a great deal of Scotch whisky.” At Mabel’s salon suffragists learned about mother complexes and penis envy; anarchists were introduced to spiritualism; bohemian artists discovered the mind-expanding power of peyote. In one corner Emma Goldman could be found in heated conversation with “Big” Bill Haywood, the irascible leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, while a Broadway celebrity like Avery Hopwood shared fine wine and cigars with Alfred Stieglitz in another. All the time Mabel floated on the periphery, sphinxlike, watching.
Mabel Dodge, c. 1910
This was Mabel’s genius, Van Vechten said: her ability to create a charged environment from thin air; her trick of bringing together incongruous groups of people and watching silently from the sidelines as they argued, joked, and got drunk together. It appealed to his sense of mischief as well as to his decadent instincts. The fact that the salon became an object of notoriety throughout the city, the physical embodiment of Greenwich Village degeneracy, added an extra edge. Newspaper reporters made their way into the apartment one evening and recounted the most heinous sights, of “women in low-necked gowns” smoking cigarettes and consorting with “men with long, black, flowing locks,” all of which was shorthand for sedition and sexual perversion.
Despite the salon’s reputation for radical politics and the mingling of unlikely groups, the attendees were still capable of being shocked, as Van Vechten proved when Mabel once allowed him to organize the program of entertainment. Inspired by his visits to the cabaret clubs in the Tenderloin, he arranged for a duo of black vaudeville entertainers to put on a little show at the salon, which for all its radicalism was a solidly white environment. Mabel and her bohemians were apparently horrified at what they witnessed. “The man strummed a banjo, sang an embarrassing song and she cavorted,” Mabel said. “They both leered and rolled their suggestive eyes and made me feel first hot and then cold, for I had never been so near this kind of thing before, but Carl rocked with laughter and little shrieks escaped him as he clapped his little hands.”
Van Vechten had expected and hoped for that response. The fact that many high-minded whites found African-American entertainment vulgar was one of the reasons he loved it. As far as he was concerned, an appreciation of black culture was a revolt against mainstream tastes and a means of confounding societal expectations. He was far from the first white bohemian to see blackness in this way, and he would certainly not be the last. In the early nineteenth century minstrel performers such as Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, and Frank Brower ran away from home and toured the country with their blackface acts as a means of repudiating the values and norms of the communities in which they had been raised. Van Vechten’s situation was very different, of course, but still, his connection to black people and their culture provided him innumerable ways of rejecting the conventions of society or rebelling against his upbringing, an adolescent urge that persisted in him until late middle age. Even his habit of using the word “nigger” to refer to black people was an immature act of defiance against his parents. Of course such language was not uncommon among white people of the time, but Van Vechten should have known better. After all, he had grown up in a household where racial equality was passionately supported and where racial epithets were strictly taboo; Charles Van Vechten despised the word “nigger” and would not allow it to be spoken in his house. Consequently, when Van Vechten used the word, he did so deliberately and precisely—not because he ever wanted to cause hurt or offense to black people but because the word for him held the allure of the forbidden, a quality he associated with much African-American culture.
Still, the revulsion that the appearance of black entertainers provoked among Mabel’s salon of self-proclaimed radicals demonstrates how strongly his ideas about American art and culture differed from many of those around him. Mabel, for instance, had started her salon to shake New York out of what she perceived to be a very American slumber of anodyne mass culture and commercialized frippery. Her tastes were radical but not remotely demotic, and she sometimes despaired of Van Vechten’s crudity, his resistance to drawing distinctions between low and high culture. She dismissed as cheap, vacuous, and soulless many of the things he loved best: backstreet entertainments, popular song and dance shows, and the hedonism of uncomplicated pleasures. For her the objective of all art was intellectual and spiritual enrichment. Van Vechten, on the other hand, had grown to love the arts for their capacity to stimulate the senses, to excite, to arouse with novelty and sensation.
Despite their very different sensibilities, Van Vechten credited Mabel with setting his life on a new course. “I think I owe more to her, on the whole, than I do to any other one person,” he once reflected. Given the combustibility of their friendship over the years, that was a remarkable admission. They periodically fell out over slights and indiscretions, real and imagined, causing silent feuds that dragged on for years before lines of communication were opened once again as if nothing had happened. During the détentes theirs was an extraordinary friendship sustained through an engrossing exchange of letters in which they joked, gossiped, and bickered. From the 1920s onward their correspondence also became an arena in which they jostled for primacy, each attempting to persuade the other of the superiority of his or her taste. But in that first year and a half of their acquaintance there was no debate about who was the senior figure. Mabel was the latest of Van Vechten’s female mentors to instruct him in the art of living. It was she who proved to him definitively that Americans were equal to Europeans in terms of their creative genius. Trivial though it might sound, she also taught him techniques for being the perfect host, managing to appear both withdrawn and omnipresent at the same time, a skill that was crucial to Van Vechten’s public reputation as an important figure on the New York arts scene in the decade following the First World War.
Perhaps, though, the greatest lesson Mabel taught him was how to bolster one’s profile by championing the work of others. That particular lesson started the day she handed him a book, slim and elegantly bound in ornate Florentine wallpaper, containing the text of Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia by Gertrude Stein, at that point a noted member of the Parisian avant-garde and friend to Picasso, Renoir, and Matisse, yet virtually anonymous in the United States. Written by Stein in the summer of 1912 at Mabel’s home in Italy, Van Vechten’s copy was one of a small number that Mabel had privately printed and dispersed to her flourishing crowd of New York acolytes. Beginning with one of Stein’s most famous lines—“The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant”—Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia is a typical example of Stein’s playful, disorientating prose in which words dance and jut from the page, their objective being to create a mood through sound and rhythm. In promoting the book, Mabel introduced Stein to numerous influential Americans, but she was motivated to do so as much by the prospect of enhancing her own reputation as a modernist trendsetter as by her love of Stein’s work. Stein, who was herself an immensely ambitious woman who carefully constructed her public reputation, suspected as much, and jealousy, distrust, and rivalry enshrouded their subsequent relationship.
When Van Vechten took up Stein’s cause, his reasons were a mixture of sincere admiration for Stein’s writing and a desire to attach himself to the stirrings of an exciting new moment in American arts. Immediately he was drawn to the euphony of her writing, and with his keen musical ear and his critical background he frequently described his interest in Stein through musical metaphors, stressing the rhythmical and phonological dimensions of her work. Beyond the words on the page, he was fascinated by Stein, the person, the writer who had the requisite chutzpah to break all the rules, to dump convention and dedicate herself to crafting something so resolutely unusual. To discover that the most radical voice in English literature was a middle-aged Jewish American lesbian in self-exile in France, whose home was decorated with canvases painted by the mercurial imaginations of Europe’s experimental visionaries, was too perfect for words. As with his attachment to African-American culture, the exoticism of Stein’s writing remained a strong attraction his entire life. In the 1920s, when he began to write bestselling novels, he incorporated a number of Stein’s devices and affectations in homage to the great lady in whose shadow he felt his generation of American writers toiled. Most notably, he refused to include speech marks in his writing, to the enduring irritation of his critics, who thought it a ridiculous affectation, an unsubtle shorthand to let readers know that they were in the presence of a genuine sophisticate.
Spotting an opportunity to use his position at the Times to glue himself to the burgeoning cult of Stein that was stirring among the members of Mabel’s salon, he worked to publish an article about her, this American “cubist of letters,” as he described her. After having had pieces rejected by various publications, he managed to persuade the Times to print a short profile of Stein, peculiarly, in its Monday morning financial section. In it, he described Stein as the creator of a new type of literature, comparing her writing with the paintings of Picasso. “This is post-impressionist, or cubist, or futurist literature,” he explained to New York’s presumably confused bankers and stockbrokers reading that morning; “it is impressionistic, emotional literature … a new attempt at feeling a thing.” He quoted an unnamed “friend” of Stein’s, Mabel Dodge, who attempted to explain the writer’s style and purpose. She is “tired of the limitations of literature,” Mabel declared, “and she wants to create a new field … the reading of this literature demands an entirely new point of view.” Just what that “entirely new point of view” was neither Mabel nor Van Vechten could quite articulate. But the significance of the article was not in its navigation of Stein’s style and philosophy, a task that keeps dozens of academics in heroic full-time employment to this day. Rather, Van Vechten had introduced the name and legend of Gertrude Stein to the pages of the nation’s most widely read newspaper. Without having ever met him, Gertrude Stein had an enthusiastic new cheerleader.
Just a few days earlier, on February 17, 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, or the Armory Show, as it is more commonly known, opened in New York. The Armory Show that year displayed the best of American modern art, as well as Europe’s cubists, fauvists, and futurists. Cézanne, Kandinsky, Gauguin, and Picasso all were displayed, though the work that became synonymous with the event was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, an abstracted depiction of a body in sequential stages of motion that signaled a bold departure from the realist tradition that most Americans considered art. Van Vechten excitedly attended the exhibition with his friend Henry McBride, an art critic and a fellow Stein worshipper who had just begun a new job at the Sun newspaper. “Everybody went and everybody talked about it,” Van Vechten remembered with pleasure of the Armory Show. “Street-car conductors asked for your opinion of the Nude Descending the Staircase, as they asked you for your nickel.”
The enthusiasm Van Vechten describes was not universally shared. With only rare exceptions, the prominent art critics in the United States ridiculed the Armory Show. It was all overly intellectual European nonsense, they raged, accessible only to metropolitan cliques. Van Vechten’s employers at the Times allowed the famous critic Kenyon Cox two pages to castigate the Armory artists and organizers as cynical charlatans who “seized upon the modern engine of publicity and are making insanity pay.” The Chicago Daily Tribune went in even harder with its headline ART SHOW OPEN TO FREAKS.
As the historian Patricia Bradley points out, critics like Kenyon Cox were born before the United States’ dislocating industrial revolution took hold. Their cultural world was shaped not by the roar of motorcars and the flash of electric lights but by a memory of a savage civil war that had brought the American project to the precipice. Like the box holders at the Metropolitan Opera House who threw up their hands in disgust at Salome, these critics believed the point of art was to unify and soothe, to create order from chaos, and to play a purposeful role in national life. To them modern art’s violent abstractions, sexual overtones, and reordering of the physical universe were not only unpleasant but un-American and an affront to the traditional values that held the nation together. Van Vechten, however, had come of age in the first years of the twentieth century, when the function of art was very often not to create consensus but to question and explore the powerful forces that were propelling the United States into the next chapter of its astonishing journey. In his promiscuity and unconventional love affairs and his fascination with African-Americans and their culture, Van Vechten experienced those forces as the essence of modern life.
His delight at discovering Mabel Dodge, Gertrude Stein, and the Armory Show within the space of a few months made it painfully obvious that his ideas about art and American life were increasingly out of step with the preoccupations of mainstream critics and especially of his employers at The New York Times. Six years into his career at the paper he was treading water, still playing second fiddle to Richard Aldrich and still writing without a byline credit. When in May 1913 he was offered the job of drama critic at a rival paper, the New York Press, he leaped at the opportunity, hoping to make a name for himself with the public. He was to begin the job as soon as he arrived back from a forthcoming trip to Europe, where he was planning to meet Gertrude Stein and stay with Mabel at the now legendary Villa Curonia. He wrote Marinoff, who was away working on a play in New Haven, that an exciting future lay ahead for them both.
* * *
Armed with letters of invitation from Mabel Dodge, Van Vechten arrived in Liverpool on May 27. By the twenty-ninth he was in Paris, spending the evening at the Folies Bérgère with his friend, and sometime lover, John Pitts Sanborn, an arts critic, with whom he had sailed from New York. Inside the club Van Vechten went backstage to see his old friend the actress Polaire, who, by a freak coincidence, happened to be entertaining Anna Snyder at that very moment. It was an awkward encounter for them both, and Van Vechten’s judgment on his ex-wife was far from kind. In his eyes she was haggard, overweight, and “altogether disgusting,” he told Marinoff. This was his first time in Paris since the divorce, and he had hoped to experience it afresh, free of the memories of his ill-fated marriage. It was an unfortunate start.
Two evenings later he pushed Anna Snyder from his mind, put on his favorite shirt, a fancy white number decorated all over with tiny pleats, and walked across town to have dinner with Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice Toklas, at their home in the Sixth Arrondissement. As he crossed the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus to the front door, his heart began to beat a little faster beneath his breast pocket. It was not like Van Vechten to be nervous, but on this occasion he could not help it. Over the last year the figure of Gertrude Stein had acquired mythical status in his mind: an avant-garde prophet who existed on a plain high above the common or garden artists of Greenwich Village. Even her address was legend, thanks to the amazing collection of art that she and her brother Leo had accrued. Van Vechten was expecting no ordinary home but a museum of wild curiosities, the Armory Show crammed between writing desks and dining tables.
When the front doors swung open and he was led inside, Van Vechten was astonished to discover that all he had heard was true: 27 rue de Fleurus was a veritable trove of modernist treasures. He told Marinoff about the remarkable Picasso paintings and sketches that met the eye at every turn, many of which featured “erect Tom-Tom’s [sic] much bigger than mine.” At the center of it all sat Gertrude Stein in a high-backed armchair. A portrait of her by Picasso, the jewel of her collection, hung close by on the wall. It showed her leaning forward into the viewer’s gaze, hands on thighs in a solid, masculine pose, her face shining out iridescently from the dark, shapeless form of her body. The message was clear: this was Gertrude Stein’s domain, and everyone who stepped inside was subject to her burning scrutiny.
Over dinner Van Vechten’s nerves dissipated slightly, and the conversation began to flow. Intoxicated by her company, he believed there was no topic that Stein could not talk about at length: “a wonderful personality,” he swooned to Marinoff. He loved her deep belly laughs, her inquiring eyes, and her supreme self-confidence; she was happy to greet the world in baggy brown corduroy skirts and carpet slippers. Van Vechten would not be the first or last young man to feel the force of her unconventional powers of seduction, not explicitly sexual but certainly sensual. Like a pilgrim in the presence of a holy relic, he was so eager to confirm Stein’s otherworldly qualities that he allowed himself to ignore the machinating, manipulating part of her character that displayed itself that evening, as Stein dropped several unsubtle references to his adulteries and divorce into the conversation. Van Vechten was bewildered and embarrassed but did not question where Stein had received her information or why she had chosen to behave so cruelly. Years later Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that Anna Snyder had been a dinner guest earlier that year and had spent much of the evening recounting intimate details of her marital difficulties. When Stein realized that Carl was the “villain of Mrs. Van Vechten’s tragic tale,” she could not help herself from having a little fun, she said. There was more to it than that. The teasing was a test of whether or not Van Vechten could be trusted as a friend and supporter. After all, he had been referred to her by Mabel Dodge, who Stein believed had exploited their friendship as a means of boosting her own profile. It was a favored tactic of Stein’s. The writer Bravig Imbs likened his first meeting with her to an audience with “a Roman emperor, taking a deep malicious pleasure in the all but mortal combat she encouraged among her guests.”
Being teased was a new experience for Van Vechten. He was usually the one who poked fun and made others blush for his amusement, pursuing his targets to the point of cruelty. If anyone tried to reverse the roles, he would react angrily and cut him off. In Stein’s presence his usual self-assurance abandoned him, and he reverted to the impressionable youth spellbound by a compelling older woman that he had been with Mahala Dutton and Mrs. Sublett. Evidently his willingness to submit to the teasing earned Stein’s approval. It set the tone for their relationship for the next twenty years: he was to be a faithful and unquestioning supplicant at the majestic court of Empress Stein.
* * *
Two days later, by either design or pure coincidence, Van Vechten and Stein were reunited, when they shared a box at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées for the second performance of Le Sacre du Printemps by the Ballets Russes. Van Vechten had hoped to be in attendance for the premiere four nights earlier, but when he and Sanborn arrived at the theater a couple of hours before the curtain, they learned it had long ago sold out. That first performance hit Paris like a thunderbolt. With its subjects of paganism and ritual human sacrifice, this was a very different kind of ballet from any that had gone before, even for the progressive Ballets Russes. Almost as soon as the curtain came down, stories began to spread, mainly about the astonishing behavior of the audience. In one camp, it was said, jewel-laden defenders of the elegant traditions of classical culture hissed and booed and shrieked in horror from the opening bars. In the other, long-haired, shabbily dressed bohemians applauded the subversion while bellowing insults at the Philistine snobs. Punches were thrown, and duel challenges were issued by affronted gentlemen for the following morning.
Van Vechten’s expectations for the second night were enormously high. He was not disappointed. In a letter to Marinoff he hailed it as the most remarkable theatrical event he had ever witnessed, even outstripping Salome. The dancing and the music he described as being of “an originality appalling,” and the whole event, including the unruly behavior of the audience, was “wildly beautiful.” Stravinsky’s score on its own, dissonant and wailing and hammered out in complex, brutal rhythms, would have been enough to cause a stir. Allied with Nijinsky’s impudent choreography, its every thrust and twist replete with a violent, primeval carnality, Le Sacre du Printemps was genuinely revolutionary. Van Vechten could have counted himself immensely lucky to have seen one of the first incendiary performances, but the fact that he had not made it to the premiere rankled him. Upon his return to the United States he decided to rewrite history by claiming he had been one of those privileged few who attended the infamous first night. The lie was a deliberate strategy to bolster his reputation as the United States’ leading dance critic. Yet May 29, 1913, was not simply the premiere of a modish new ballet; it was the point at which, to quote Modris Eksteins, art became “provocation and event.” Van Vechten grasped this immediately. He believed the opening night symbolized a crucial division between those who wanted to cling to the old values of the nineteenth century and those who wanted to embrace the new ones of the twentieth. In 1915 he published an account of what he claimed to be his experience of the debut performance, leaving nobody in any doubt where his sympathies lay:
A certain part of the audience, thrilled by what it considered a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art, and swept away with wrath, began very soon after the rise of the curtain to whistle, to make cat-calls, and to offer audible suggestions as to how the performance should proceed. Others of us, who liked the music and felt that the principles of free speech were at stake, bellowed defiance. It was war over art for the rest of the evening.
His account reached truly absurd proportions, worthy of his most lurid efforts for the American, when he claimed that a man who was seated behind him was so intoxicated by the music, the dancing, and the atmosphere that in keeping with the primitive theme of the ballet, he began “to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time … When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We had both been carried beyond ourselves.”
Van Vechten never intended to write accurate eyewitness testimony, although for decades many writers took his recollections at face value. In playing so freely with fact and fiction he was employing a favorite modernist technique, eliding the distinction between art and reality and using the mythology of Le Sacre du Printemps to furnish his own. After Stein read the piece, she wrote Van Vechten to query a minor detail of his recollection—but surprisingly not the date. Amused that she had not picked up on the fabrication, Van Vechten reminded Stein that it was the second night of the ballet that they had attended but assured her that the precise facts were of little importance, and that “one must only be accurate about such details in a work of fiction.” Stein presumably felt similarly when she later claimed to have anonymously encountered Van Vechten at the ballet for the very first time and was so struck by his dandyish appearance that she went home and wrote the poem “One Carl Van Vechten” all about her brief encounter with this mysterious stranger. For both Stein and Van Vechten, the event of Le Sacre du Printemps was too perfect a moment to be sullied by the straightforward truth.
* * *
In June, with her new lover, the twenty-five-year-old socialist poet John Reed, a darling of the Greenwich Village radicals, Mabel Dodge arrived in France from New York, where she had just staged a remarkable pageant at Madison Square Garden in support of striking silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey. Along with Robert Edmond Jones, the future theatrical visionary, Van Vechten, Mabel, and Reed set off for Florence and the Villa Curonia. With Mabel and Reed’s attentions firmly devoted to each other, Van Vechten provided most of his own entertainment en route, flirting suggestively with Jones and scaring the shy young man half to death in the process. He baffled the inhabitants of a number of medieval French towns as they motored through, standing on the backseat, lifting his hat, bowing, and shouting, “Au revoir et merci.”
The Villa Curonia was even more marvelous than Van Vechten had hoped. Suspended among the Apennine Mountains, the villa was surrounded by dense groupings of cypresses, gardenias, and bushes of sweet-smelling jasmine; peacocks strutted about the lawns as nightingales swooped and sang from the trees above. On the terrace where Van Vechten had his morning coffee, the soft contours of Florence clustered in the distance, the Duomo and Giotto’s famous tower stretching high above them. The rooms inside were beautiful too: modern comforts draped in a fluid patchwork of silks, antiques, and tapestries. This was Mabel’s Fifth Avenue apartment if decorated by the Medici. The cornerstone of the Italianate fantasy was Mabel’s own bedroom, in which she had a velvet ladder affixed to the ceiling above her four-poster bed and from which John Reed descended each night before they made love. Gertrude Stein had been invited that summer but declined. No matter, the other guests provided stimulating company. Paul and Muriel Draper, who ran a celebrated musical salon in London, were there along with the celebrated pianist Arthur Rubinstein, though Van Vechten thought his playing greatly overrated and was annoyed by the attention it drew from the others.
As was customary at the Villa Curonia, the days and nights were taken up with arguments about art. Van Vechten took to the task well, spouting a stream of trenchant opinions in a manner that irritated Muriel Draper, who heard more bluster than considered opinion in his conversation. John Reed, however, found something striking about Van Vechten’s swagger, a quality that was absent from any of his journalism, and urged him to adapt his writing to allow more of his personality to shine through. If he did, Reed felt, Van Vechten might find an authentic voice, certainly one that would separate him from the herd of bland American arts critics. At the end of a blissful summer it was a thought that Van Vechten took back with him to New York, Marinoff, and his new position at the Press.
* * *
With editorial control for the first time in his career, Van Vechten stayed true to the concerns he had spent the summer immersed in, those of the new, the sensational, and the primitive. All three of those encapsulated his review of My Friend from Kentucky, an African-American musical written by J. Leubrie Hill and performed by the Darktown Follies at the Lafayette Theatre, a newly desegregated venue, the first of its type in New York. The show embodied all the things he believed to be authentically black, the thread that bound together the best of the African-American entertainment that he had seen in Cedar Rapids, Chicago, and New York. He praised its exuberant physicality and its “spontaneity” and noted the “semi-hysterical state of enjoyment” it produced in the audience, all of who, apart from Van Vechten, were black: “They rock back and forth with low croons; they scream with delight; they giggle intermittently; they wave their hands; they shriek.” The visceral responses of the audience at Le Sacre du Printemps had sounded the arrival of a modernist revolt against tradition. Van Vechten was keen to point out that such reactions in the black theater were just a regular part of the evening’s entertainment. It was a sign, he thought, that the primitive emotions with which Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Picasso, and many other modern artists were attempting to reconnect lay, like the epidermis, just beneath the surface of black skin. It was the first time Van Vechten had expressed in print the nub of an unwieldy idea that would slowly develop and consume his private and professional lives: in its essential primitivism, blackness contains the essence of modern art. In the United States the phenomenon of primitivism—the urge among artists to turn from the traditions of white Western culture and look to the supposedly more primitive traditions of nonwhite communities—is generally associated with the 1920s, after the devastating shock of the First World War had taken its toll and the Jazz Age was in full flow. Yet even before the war broke out in Europe, Van Vechten was promoting black culture in the popular white press. He urged audiences and producers to open their minds to the brilliance of New York’s nonestablishment arts. “One thing is certain,” he concluded his review. “There are few musical entertainments on Broadway that compare with this one.”
Further notices about black theater followed, including a warm review of Bert Williams’s comeback show at the Palace Theatre and an effusive editorial about Granny Maumee, a play starring an African-American cast, which Van Vechten praised not just for its humanizing depiction of black people but because it “is not an imitation of a French play or an English play or a German play. It is an American tragedy which sprang from the soil.” He advocated that Granny Maumee should provide the template for a new phase in American theater, “using the negro or the Indian or something which really belongs to us,” an extraordinary notion in 1913. He went so far as to investigate the possibility of establishing a black theater company to perform serious dramatic work by and about African-Americans, a venture aborted only because he failed to find black playwrights who wrote of the “essentially Negro character” that he felt needed to be expressed—that is, stories about black people told from what he considered a purely black perspective.
Away from the Press he continued to promote Gertrude Stein, one of dozens of artistic causes that he took it upon himself to champion over the next half century. His efforts for Stein were unpaid, but from the beginning it was clear that he saw his own public profile bound up with hers. One evening, in the Brevoort Hotel with Marinoff and Avery Hopwood, he decided to educate the entire dining room by reading aloud passages from Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. Nobody had asked him to, of course, and Marinoff was mortified at his showing off. Hopwood, however, approved; he was so intoxicated, Van Vechten said, that he even claimed to have deciphered its meaning. In a more sober moment, Van Vechten found Stein her first publisher, Donald Evans, who agreed to take Stein’s Tender Buttons for his publishing company, Claire Marie. Evans had befriended Van Vechten a couple of years earlier, when working as a copyreader at the Times. Although demure and conventional on the surface, Evans was a deeply unusual character, like Van Vechten a devotee of Wilde and the decadents, and committed to living his life in accordance with his artistic principles. Also like Van Vechten, Evans believed himself special, a member of a natural aristocracy of artists. When Tender Buttons was published in June 1914, Evans wrote that “there are in America seven hundred civilized people only” and that the book was for them alone. In her very first published work in the United States Stein was depicted by Evans and Van Vechten as a complex author comprehensible only to a sophisticated minority. It was the opposite strategy to that of the Armory Show, which publicized modern art as if it were a circus coming to town with posters and buttons and merchandising of all kinds. In the future Van Vechten’s work as a promoter would employ a little of that same brashness to spread the popularity of various underappreciated artistic figures. For now he was content to carve himself a niche at the very heart of Stein’s following, proving to himself and the fashionable crowd around him that he was one of a select band of radicals who would shake things up in the United States as others had done in Europe.
The same attitude is evident in a lengthy piece he wrote for the arts magazine The Trend in August 1914, entitled “How to Read Gertrude Stein,” with which he established himself as Stein’s greatest American champion. Van Vechten’s essay was an attempt to demystify Stein as many recent articles, books, and public lectures had tried to do for other modernist causes. Frederick James Gregg, for example, published For and Against, which accessibly engaged with both sides of the debate surrounding the Armory Show, and Charles Caffin wrote How to Study the Modern Painters. What Van Vechten really did was reinforce the notion, still common today, that Gertrude Stein is a difficult author, explicable only when one has been guided through her work by an expert insider, and even then the mission may be fruitless; special writers require special readers, runs the notion.
He name-drops his way through the essay, allowing the reader to know that they are reading the opinions of a man who has surmounted the disorientating climes of modern art and is on friendly terms with not only Stein but her brother Leo, Henri Matisse, John Reed, and Mabel Dodge. Van Vechten wanted the world to appreciate Stein’s genius but was equally eager that it should be through him that its appreciation would flow. When it comes to grappling with Stein’s work, Van Vechten lets on that it is all a matter of technique. Only by reading it aloud, he says, can its innate musicality be felt. “Miss Stein drops repeated words upon your brain with the effect of Chopin’s B Minor Prelude,” he says, reaching for his favored musical metaphors. For readers hoping that Van Vechten might decipher for them the meaning of Stein’s writing, he has bad news: he has no more clue than they do. Even his special, direct access to Stein has not helped him. “I have often questioned her,” he writes, exaggerating the depth of their relationship at this point, “but I have met with no satisfaction.” However, the truly sophisticated will cherish her inscrutability. “Her vagueness is innate and one of her most positive qualities,” he declares in a statement as frustratingly vague as anything Gertrude Stein herself could have composed. It might sound like an elegant way of covering up his ignorance, but really this sums up his fascination with Stein—her strangeness and her indefinability. “How to Read Gertrude Stein” has a double meaning, referring to the work of the writer as well as to the personality of the woman. Both are apparently laden with mystery. In Van Vechten’s sketch Stein is a literary magician with an elusive yet spellbinding charisma who has alchemically “turned language into music.” There is nobody who can compare with her. “She lives and dies alone,” he says, “a unique example of a strange art.” Van Vechten sent Stein a copy of the piece upon its publication. She gave a measured, imperious response to let him know he had passed another test: “I am very pleased with your article about me.”
Gaining Stein’s approval was easier for Van Vechten than making a success of his new job at the Press. He had started with great energy and the best intentions, expanding the scope of the review section to include productions usually ignored by newspapers, and enlisted exciting new talent such as Djuna Barnes—his “favorite genius”—to write and illustrate reviews. Unfortunately for Van Vechten, the editors of the Press saw no signs of genius on his watch. The attention he lavished on black theater they could tolerate, but they became irritated by his refusal to tend to the paper’s commercial concerns, especially by repeatedly failing to give review space to those theaters that provided regular advertising revenue. Following several reprimands, he was eventually fired in May 1914. It was obvious that Van Vechten’s passions could no longer be accommodated within the narrow parameters of the daily press. He needed a new arena in which to work, but having spent the last decade on newspapers, he had little idea of where to turn next.
* * *
A few weeks later he was able to put the disappointment aside as he set off for Europe once more, the Villa Curonia being the ultimate destination, and before that, Paris with Marinoff. Among a crowded itinerary, the pair made a pilgrimage to Oscar Wilde’s tomb at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, the solemnity of the occasion undercut by the outbreak of one of their spontaneous livid rows, though the following day neither could remember what it had been about. Their evenings were split between the opera and ballet and the sweaty backstreet bars in which ordinary Parisians drank and danced frenetically on tiny dance floors to mazurkas played on accordions, men and women of various ethnicities pressed together in intimate proximity. In between Van Vechten took Marinoff to meet Gertrude Stein and was delighted to find Stein unchanged—the same “intellectual Jewess, the same brown corduroy skirt with a non-descript shirtwaist—and breasts dropping low over her belt—and carpet slippers.” It was obvious that Van Vechten was now firmly in Stein’s good books: she could not have been more engaging, talking for hours about Spanish dancers, Tender Buttons, Donald Evans, Abraham Lincoln’s Jewish ancestry, and Mabel’s chaotic love life. Most pleasingly of all, she and Marinoff got along famously.
After visits to Venice and London, Marinoff returned to the United States for work at the end of July. Van Vechten soon wished he had left with her. Upon his arrival at the Villa Curonia on the morning of Friday, July 31, he discovered the place enveloped in a strange atmosphere. Neith Boyce had been haunted by the villa’s resident ghost and had moved to an even more remote spot, a mountain retreat in Vallombrosa. As a result, Mabel had fallen into a gloomy mood. She had grown weary of the villa and was going to transport the entire household to Vallombrosa on Monday. In the meantime, other guests arrived: the English painter and writer Mina Loy, a zealous convert to futurism and mistress of its figurehead, Filippo Marinetti; Leo Stein, Gertrude’s now estranged brother, and his current lover, the artists’ model Nina de Montparnasse, a Frenchwoman of great charisma and physical beauty. In the evening Van Vechten found himself alone with Nina—who is perhaps better known today by her real name, Eugénie Auzias—and the two fell into a graphic conversation about their sexual peccadilloes, Nina recommending the thrills of exhibitionism. She also revealed that she knew Hener Skene, a Hungarian musician who claimed to have had an affair with Anna Snyder in the summer of 1911, a revelation that appeared to intrigue the voyeur within Van Vechten rather than cause him upset.
The following morning grave news came. Germany had declared war on Russia. The talk of war in Europe throughout the summer had not bothered Van Vechten much, and it took time for the seriousness of this new development to register in his mind. Greenwich Village and Mabel’s salon had been suffused in ideological argument and political activism for the last three years, but Van Vechten never showed the slightest interest in any of it. Even when Marinoff participated in benefit performances for striking workers, he could not rouse himself to take an interest in the substantive underlying issues. As an old man in the 1960s, having lived through two world wars, the Depression, and many stages of the civil rights struggle, he admitted he had neither the knowledge nor the vocabulary to join in conversations about politics. When it came to elections, he cast his vote only if a particularly charismatic candidate was standing. For that reason he supported Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, even though he thought the nation did best under “stupid republican [sic] presidents.”
On the day that war broke out his diary entry mentions the conflict only in connection with what he regarded as a much more significant event: his decision to abandon journalism for a more artistic calling. He envisioned a swirling work of prose that would combine futurism and the war with Neith Boyce’s visitation from a ghost and the bewitching character of Nina de Montparnasse. The disparate elements of the story would be pulled together in the half-fact, half-fiction format of George Moore’s that he so admired. Rapidly, however, the gravity of the situation in Europe sank in, though Van Vechten claimed that only Mabel foresaw that this war would have further-reaching consequences than any before. “I’ve done it all,” he had Mabel say in an account he wrote of the episode, “sixteenth, and seventeenth, and eighteenth century art. I’ve made a perfect place of this and now I’m ready for whatever will come after the war. I am through with all property, as every one else will have to be.” Frantic with worry about the war and yearning for the absent John Reed, Mabel recalled in her memoirs how she descended into a foul mood. Van Vechten’s flippant humor and his liberal consumption of red wine enraged her; his very presence made her seethe, but she refused to explain the cause of her temper. She screamed at him inside her head while remaining silent and withdrawn on the outside, wearing “a mask of quiescent boredom” that confused and unsettled the others.
For the next several days gloom and panic filled Vallombrosa. Communications with the United States were patchy at best, money was running worryingly low, Italy was descending into chaos, and opportunities to leave the country were few. Eventually Van Vechten and Neith Boyce decided to take their chances and bought themselves spots on a rickety ship back to New York. Mabel was incandescent. She had wanted to remain in Italy with her son long enough to meet John Reed before attempting to find a way home together. Boyce had children to look after, so her early return was understandable. But Mabel saw Van Vechten’s departure as an inexcusable act of cowardice, leaving a woman and her child vulnerable to invading troops and the pandemonium of war. As he sailed back to New York at the end of August, Mabel mentally cut him adrift. They would not see each other again for nearly a decade. In reconstructing those final fraught days in print, however, it was to Mabel that Van Vechten gave the gift of prophecy. “Just think,” he had her say as war commenced, “the world will never be the same again.”