SIX
In Defense of Bad Taste
Almost as soon as Van Vechten arrived back from Europe, he was approached by John Pitts Sanborn to take over the editorship of The Trend, the magazine in which his article about Gertrude Stein had recently appeared. Despite having concerns about the magazine’s finances—the last editor had resigned in a fury about the nonpayment of money owed to him by the publishers—Van Vechten agreed to step into the fold. Without his having to worry about the pressures of appeasing advertisers or writing copy that reflected the views of his superiors on a daily newspaper, this was his chance to develop his writing in the way John Reed had urged him to do. More prosaically, he was mighty relieved to have regular work again—especially now that he was a married man for a second time. The trauma of his separation from Marinoff made the couple realize that they could not live without each other, and in early October they married in a small, unfussy ceremony in Connecticut.
The experience of editing The Trend proved to be stressful yet satisfying. As editor he was able to shape the magazine in his own image, an image inspired by the milieu of Mabel Dodge’s salon and 27 rue de Fleurus, the Armory Show and Le Sacre du Printemps, the Villa Curonia and the European war. Van Vechten’s first editorial pledged to “exclude stupidity, banality, sentimentality, cant, clap-trap morality, Robert W. Chambersism, sensationalism for its own sake and ineffectuality of any kind.” The Trend was to be the intellectual space of his fantasies, “an arena in which fiction writers, politicians and poets may find themselves face to face with wild beasts.”
Fania Marinoff and Carl Van Vechten, c. 1925
In the three issues he edited at the end of 1914, Van Vechten devoted much space to emerging—mostly American—talents who had something vital and new to express. He published illustrations by Djuna Barnes, an essay by Mabel Dodge, polemic prose by Louis Sherwin, and poetry by Mina Loy, Donald Evans, and Wallace Stevens. Perhaps the most remarkable contribution came from the editor himself. Appearing in the November issue, “War Is Not Hell” was unlike anything Van Vechten had previously written, a solemn disquisition on the meaning of the European war for American civilization, a bold step on the road to becoming the new type of writer he had resolved to become at the Villa Curonia. In the vein of so many of the idealistic young artists of Europe, he explained that the true purpose of the war was to “destroy dilettantism and the spirit of imitation, to destroy smugness; to destroy the sense of ownership; property rights, and rights in general; to destroy laws, customs, traditions; to destroy religions; to destroy the domination of Things; to destroy system; to destroy formulae … to destroy the army; to destroy the bench; perhaps to destroy marriage.” Some of these opinions seem far too ideological to have been his own, borrowed instead from the Greenwich Village set or Mina Loy, who, under the spell of Marinetti, wrote excited letters from Italy about the cleansing properties of war and how her masculine spirit craved the heat of battle. However, the zeal for rebellion and the challenge issued to cultural orthodoxies were authentically Van Vechten’s. War was not hell, he stated, because hell meant the stasis of eternal pain and drudgery. War, on the other hand, entailed not just conflict but creativity, climactic ends in concert with exciting beginnings. The vicious reality of war, the deaths and the misery that inevitably attend any conflict, was of secondary importance to him. As Le Sacre du Printemps had dared suggest, through violence and death, beauty and youth emerge anew. “That is what the war is for, he declared, “to recapture the word ‘spontaneous,’ to make people realize the meaning of life.” It was a callous, idiotic statement, one that expressed nothing about the brutality of war, which of course he had been desperate to escape, but plenty about how he felt the last few months had liberated him.
Days after the article was published Van Vechten went to see a musical revue at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, the venue at which Al Jolson had soared to national stardom over the last three years. Jolson, it turned out, had read the latest issue of The Trend, presumably because it included another piece by Van Vechten, which described Jolson as “gifted with the most magnetic and compelling personality upon the American stage today.” Jolson sought Van Vechten out to tell him how much he had enjoyed reading the magazine and in particular “War Is Not Hell.” Usually, he said, he did not go in for high-minded stuff, preferring to leaf through popular magazines like Pearson’s Magazine instead. But “War Is Not Hell” had really grabbed him. Van Vechten was overjoyed; it confirmed his suspicion that a new path was beckoning. If such a mainstream Broadway star, a legend of vaudeville and blackface whose repertoire was studded with the songs of Jerome Kern and Stephen Foster, was intrigued by the stirrings of a new cultural moment, Van Vechten was sure that the United States was ready for a leap into modernity in its fullest sense, and if it was afraid to jump, then he would happily give it a push.
* * *
The trail to the cliff edge, however, was by no means straight and smooth. Shortly after that encounter with Jolson, Van Vechten’s association with The Trend came to a sudden end. Having gone weeks without a paycheck, Van Vechten resigned his position after the December issue had been edited, unfortunately before he had been able to publish any new work by Gertrude Stein, as had been his intention. Without a regular income he was in real financial trouble. Marinoff’s career was going well, but her earnings could scarcely cover their living expenses; they were particularly cash strapped because for the first year of their marriage they kept separate apartments, a bohemian arrangement that suited their independent lifestyles but bemused Charles Van Vechten, who thought it the latest example of his son’s infuriatingly weak grip on the practical demands of the real world. Van Vechten even stopped making his alimony payments to Anna Snyder, who, on March 9, 1915, applied to the courts for back payments of $738. Furious, Van Vechten declared himself both unable and unwilling to pay.
When the alimony payments were first ordered back in 1912, Carl had written to both his brother and father, whining about the injustice of it all, even claiming he was prepared to martyr himself with a prison sentence for nonpayment. Because Snyder had a job of her own and the support of her family, Van Vechten thought it grossly unfair that he should have to contribute to her upkeep out of his modest income. Neither Charles nor Ralph was at all sympathetic. Ralph bluntly told his little brother it was about time he faced up to his responsibilities. “While the alimony seems like a great injustice,” he conceded, “the best thing for you to do is buck up and pay it like a man. Your talk of going to jail is all bosh. You simply make yourself ridiculous and would disgrace your family … There is nothing like being a man when you are under the dog.” Three years later, on Ralph’s discovering that Carl had amassed several hundred dollars of arrears, his stance was barely more charitable, though he did provide him with an attorney, albeit one Van Vechten considered incompetent. Charles, ever the dutiful father, tried to soothe and reassure, but he told Van Vechten that he must find a dignified solution. The family’s masculine honor was at stake. “Don’t fear anything,” he wrote Carl. “Do the best you can and stand up like a man,” the implication being that thus far his behavior had been anything but manly.
Van Vechten repeatedly stated that he could not afford to settle the debt, yet Snyder refused to reduce her demands. She told the courts that her ex-husband had plenty of money sloshing about, but that he chose to spend it on expensive dinners, drinking sessions, and a wardrobe of fancy clothes, including numerous pairs of silk underpants. On April 5 Van Vechten was sentenced to the Ludlow Street Jail until the issue was resolved. Given the likely trigger of their separation—Van Vechten’s roving eye and his homosexual dalliances—Snyder’s decision to pursue him so vigorously for the alimony payments may have resulted from the hurt and confusion she felt now that he had a glamorous new wife with whom he was apparently besotted. Of course, if the reports are true, she may still have been grieving over the child they put up for adoption and been dismayed that Van Vechten was capable of putting the past behind him so effortlessly.
The sexual dimensions of the split from Snyder lurking unspoken in the background were not lost on Van Vechten, who wrote a comic verse while behind bars titled “The Ballad of Ludlow Street Jail,” an allusion to Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” His period of incarceration was, however, infinitely happier than Wilde’s and far less injurious to his reputation. Ludlow Street was a relatively relaxed institution, housing many civil rather than criminal offenders, and numerous small luxuries could be acquired for a fee. Van Vechten boasted that he decorated his cell with a Matisse etching, courtesy of the art collector Walter Arensberg, and always maintained that he rather enjoyed his stay. Greenwich Village friends who visited him thought being locked up with an exotic array of ne’er-do-wells was just the sort of scandalous thing they had come to expect of “Carlo,” as they all called him. “It was fearfully exciting going to meet you today,” wrote Louise Bryant, the far-left journalist. “I terribly envy you … Do become well acquainted with the Blue Beard of the many wives and concubines. He is very like my first abortion doctor.” From Florence, Mina Loy expressed similar envy: “The only place for a writer is prison.” Back in Cedar Rapids the situation caused pain and humiliation. Van Vechten’s father was only thankful that the editor of the local paper pledged to hush up the story out of respect for the family. Eventually Van Vechten was released on April 28 on the agreement that Snyder would receive a one-off lump sum of $2250, paid out of Van Vechten family money.
Over the years, Van Vechten embellished the tale of his imprisonment into something more befitting his self-image. He reveled in the notoriety, and with repeated telling his stories grew increasingly elaborate. He claimed to have had a piano in his cell—as was not the case—and his three-week sentence eventually became an ordeal of four months, a fabrication that possibly ended up supplanting the truth in his own mind. Following his release, he continued to write freelance, managing to get provocative articles published in various fashionable organs, including a fictionalized account of a visit to a Parisian brothel that was based on a Mina Loy painting, Love Among the Ladies, and heavily inspired in its form and style by George Moore. Entitled “An Interrupted Conversation,” the piece appeared in Rogue, a new magazine founded and run by Louise and Allen Norton. The Nortons were committed to publishing anything that seemed likely to outrage conservative sensibilities, and their magazine’s slogan “The cigarette of literature” neatly described a publication intended to be an illicit but sophisticated indulgence. Alongside his own work, Van Vechten convinced the Nortons to place pieces by Loy and Stein, to both of whom he was acting as agent-cum-cheerleader. Though Stein had numerous advocates and possessed the uncommon assurance of a self-proclaimed genius, Loy was far from certain that she had any talent for writing at all. Not only did Van Vechten’s enthusiasm bolster her confidence, but his promotion turned her into one of the most talked-about literary figures in Manhattan; her visceral, erotic poetry both extolled and excoriated the New Woman’s sexual awakening.
As an essayist, controversialist, and publicist Van Vechten’s reputation was growing fast. But fomenting American modernism was not exactly a lucrative career choice. Rogue, for example, rarely paid contributors, so he received no remuneration for his own writing, let alone that of the third parties he helped publish in its pages. Not that Van Vechten ever promoted other artists in hope of financial reward. His primary goal was cultural capital. It excited him to feel as though he had an influence on developing tastes and fashions, and publicizing unusual and emerging talents was a means of promoting himself as a man of foresight and sophistication. To be admired in that way was something money could not buy.
By the fall of 1915 Van Vechten had been forced to attempt to live within his means, and his and Marinoff’s separate domiciles were traded in for a single marital home, a three-room apartment at 151 East Nineteenth Street. They might conceivably have afforded a larger place elsewhere, but this was an achingly fashionable address. Tucked between Irving Place and Third Avenue and a stone’s throw from Gramercy Park, this is what the journalist Harriet Gillespie, in an article in American Homes and Gardens in 1914, had famously christened the Block Beautiful, many of the buildings customized and decorated with eclectic designs that made it one of the most attractive neighborhoods in the city, inhabited by dozens of celebrated people. Residents of the Block Beautiful included the muckraker Ida Tarbell and Robert Winthrop Chanler, the aristocratic bad boy of American painting and one of New York’s best-loved party hosts. Chanler’s parties were held on the top floor of his characterful house, recognizable to many New Yorkers today by the intertwined giraffes bordering the front door, and Van Vechten claimed he was all but forced to attend his raucous parties, “for his unrestrained guests kept me awake if I didn’t,” though it is difficult to imagine he was anything but a willing and voluble guest. This was the Van Vechtens’ kind of neighborhood, a perfect base for them to cultivate their profile as one of Manhattan’s most stylish couples: Fania, a left-field star of Broadway and the movies; Carl, a prophet of the United States’ emancipation into a new age of speed and sensuality.
In September Van Vechten accompanied Marinoff to New Providence in the Bahamas, where she was to have a starring role in a new movie titled Nedra. Even though Van Vechten had a tiny cameo in the production, he passed up the chance to write about the experience of making a movie on location and instead directed his voyeurism toward the island’s native population. During the days he strolled the beaches of Hog Island, studying the local youths bathing naked in the sea, admiring their sleek dark skins as they swam and then let their bodies dry in the arid heat of the afternoon. “Wonderful in their lithe nudity, these Negroes,” he reminisced in one of the two articles the trip produced, “gleaming in their bronze perfection.” He was both erotically and intellectually stimulated. To his eyes, the Bahamians shared the same uninhibited character as many of the African-Americans he had encountered in Chicago and New York, the “essentially Negro character” that he found in Granny Maumee. In fact, the Bahamians’ innate blackness seemed even closer to the surface of their being, unobstructed by the presence of white Western civilization. One evening a group of young local men and women agreed to entertain Van Vechten with a dance—in exchange for a small sum of money. Van Vechten sat transfixed as the dancers threw out their limbs and swayed their hips, their bodies illuminated in the flickering firelight, all the while accompanied by drumming and singing, a “primitive jingle,” as he described it, which was “in its inception, symbolic of manifestations of sex.” The Ballets Russes sprang to mind. The primitive feeling of Le Sacre du Printemps seemed spontaneously abundant in the folk culture of the Bahamians, their “wild leaps, whirls, contortions of the body, girandoles, occasionally suggesting the barbaric Polovtsian dances in Prince Igor.”
Another encounter on the island, this time with a charismatic evangelical sect known as the Holy Jumpers, encouraged him to draw even firmer parallels between blackness and the raw, rebellious spirit that surged within the new breed of radical artists. It was at a local tour guide’s suggestion that Van Vechten ventured out of town to a rickety little building, a tiny church made of timber posts and palm leaves. Dozens of parishioners were tightly packed on the church floor, “strewn with dried palm branches,” with even more worshippers spilling outside. On a platform at one end of the church, a preacher began an unrestrained performance, which Van Vechten thought resembled “a Mozart overture; there were descents into adagio and pianissimo, rapid crescendos and fortissimos; slowly, slowly, slowly the assemblage was worked upon and with the progression of the exhortation the emotion increased; the preacher was frequently interrupted by shrill distorted cries.” As the sermon continued, Van Vechten described the congregation’s losing control. His report soon skipped to improbable heights of melodrama as he likened the worshipers’ communion with God to a moment of pulsating orgasm:
A young negress rose and whirled up the aisle, tossing her arms in the air. “Oh God, take me!” she screamed as she fell in a heap at the foot of the platform. There she lay, shrieking, her face hideous, her body contorted and writhing in convulsive shudders. […] Her eyes rolled with excitement; supreme pleasure was in her voice. The crisis approached. It seemed as if the girl lying prone was in a frenzy of delight. Every muscle twitched; her nerves were exposed; her fists clenched and unclenched. Uncontrollable and strange cries, unformed words struggled from her lips … and then a dull moaning, and she lay still.
Aside from the narrow and, inadvertently, patronizing idealizations of black people, the Bahamian articles exhibit Van Vechten’s cultural worldview. With an insouciance that failed to disguise a calculated provocation, he proposed that at root Americans and Europeans were in pursuit of the same visceral experience displayed in the “ecstasy of a Negro’s sanctity,” striving to access raw, truthful emotion buried beneath the patina of manners and social conditioning. “Americans are easily thrilled at a base-ball game; at best they seek a prize fight.” It was the guiding force of the age, he argued, the thread that connected the bloodshed of Ypres with Keystone Kops. “Everywhere there is evidence of the search for the thrill, by the masses, by individuals: revolution, fast motoring, war, feminism, Jew baiting, Alfred [sic] Casella, aeroplaning, the Russian Ballet,” as well as lynching and public executions.
In an article titled “In Defence of Bad Taste,” written in September 1915 around the time of his trip to the Bahamas, he urged his compatriots to honestly engage with their instincts when he playfully mocked wealthy Americans who relied on interior decorators to tell them how a home should be properly furnished, for fear of straying from the herd and exhibiting “bad taste.” The reticence of creating a home to reflect one’s own identity, he argued, pointed to a greater truth about Americans’ relationships with art and culture. “Americans have little aptitude for self-expression,” he claimed. “They prefer to huddle, like cattle, under unspeakable whips when matters of art are under discussion.” The Bahamians exhibited their willingness to abandon themselves to the power of their instincts, as did the Ballets Russes and its fans. Until Americans learned to do the same, he said, they would remain desperately unfulfilled. In what reads like a metaphor for his refusal to deny his sexual proclivities as well as his artistic ones, he avowed it pure folly to live by the rules of others and deny the irresistible force of one’s true identity: “it is preferable to be comfortable in red and green velvet upholstery than to be beautiful and unhappy in a household decorator’s gilded cage.” It was the first time that Van Vechten crystallized on the page what was essentially his guiding philosophy: the objective of existence was to sate one’s innate desires rather than to conquer them through the intellect; to thrill, excite, and challenge the senses rather than to explicate or dull them. His encounters with black people in Chicago, New York, and now the Bahamas convinced him that they had an instinctive understanding of this, and access to a fount of primitive feeling that was out of reach of the many white Americans tethered to a prudish and reactionary culture.
The leaden shackle of “good taste” was the ultimate target of Van Vechten’s main venture of 1915, Music After the Great War, a collection of essays about the current and future states of music. The project had floated around his mind ever since that transformative trip to Europe in 1913. He was keen on the subject, not only because of his passion for and knowledge of new music but also because it was relatively open territory. For years James Huneker had occupied the position of the United States’ most radical voice in music criticism, championing Wagner, Debussy, and Strauss with a devilish erudition. But as lively and novel as his criticism had always been, Huneker, now approaching sixty, had little feel for the sounds of ragtime that delighted the general populace and were influencing classical composers at home and abroad. In this respect, Huneker was regarded as a fusty Victorian, a very different figure from the jousting maverick he had been just a decade before. Van Vechten’s reputation could barely have been more dissimilar. In 1912, while still at the Times, he had written an article about why ragtime was fundamentally different from other recent popular music fads, such as the Viennese waltz. Having interviewed the composer of the hit ragtime tune “The Gaby Glide,” Louis A. Hirsch, about its unique qualities of syncopation, Van Vechten suggested that ragtime “is really distinctively American” and more sophisticated than the popular music of any other nation. It was a gentle burst of heterodoxy, but still an opinion that any critic of Huneker’s generation would have choked on.
Handled by one of Huneker’s old publishers, G. Schirmer Inc., Music After the Great War was an audacious first book. Over the course of seven essays it told the American public that music was on the precipice of revolution: the exalted canon of German romanticism “has had its day”; the tradition of Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven was to be incinerated in the flames of war, clearing the way for an uncompromising movement, led by the Russians. Ridiculing the banality of American and English classical composers, he declared the brutality of Stravinsky and the twisting ambiguity of Schoenberg to be the future of music. With a typically breezy flourish he prophesied “beyond doubt that music after the Great War will be ‘newer’ (I mean, of course, more primitive) than it was in the last days of July, 1914.” The war would produce a “splendidly barbaric” new order in which the syncopations of Negro music, vulgar to the ears of most established critics, would thrive. The genteel tradition, he told his readers, was as good as dead.
Many reviewers, even those who praised the “clever” author for the robustness of his arguments, found the book so crammed with dissenting opinions that they found it difficult to believe it was meant to be taken seriously. A reviewer for The Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, summed up the sense of incredulity by concluding that the book contained “considerable enjoyment but less sound sense.” To some the book’s very title was a loathsome impertinence. The war that was supposed to have been over by Christmas 1914 was entering a phase of bloody attrition that nobody had foreseen. To consider how marvelous its effects would be on something as frivolous as music was irreverent in the extreme.
Naturally, the bombast was calculated. Van Vechten was sincere in his desire to shake the United States from its artistic conservatism, and he believed what he said about the arrival of new musical sensibilities. Even so, a film of self-aggrandizing superiority sticks to the profanations of Music After the Great War. It was here that Van Vechten first published his lie about attending the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps, clinging to the coattails of some of the greatest artistic innovators of his generation to gain notoriety by association and embroidering a personal mythology that he hoped might put the name Van Vechten in the same category as Duncan or Dodge or Stein. Modern music in America, after all, had no Armory Show moment as painting and sculpture had, so it was with this book that Van Vechten hoped to insinuate himself as a leader of the cultural rebellion. The preening did not go unnoticed. Not for the last time Van Vechten was dismissed by certain critics as a bohemian fraud. “His revolt,” one otherwise complimentary reviewer snorted, “goes so far in mad, mad daring that one hears in it the gurgle of the vin rouge of Greenwich Village.” Another said the book exhibited nothing more than that its author “has been in Paris, which seems to him to be a precious and exclusive privilege enjoyed by few, and that he has heard Russian music and seen Russian dancers, which are now about to bring glorification unto our poor souls.”
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Music After the Great War was published at a pivotal moment for the arts in the United States. In 1915 the author Van Wyck Brooks called for Americans to create a vibrant new culture, a “genial middle ground” between the highbrow of “academic pedantry” and the lowbrow of “pavement slang.” Throughout the war years the shoots of this new culture burst through the soil. The plays of Eugene O’Neill debuted, thanks to the Provincetown Players. Mabel Dodge had moved away from Manhattan shortly after returning from Europe in 1914, but Van Vechten’s friends Ettie, Carrie, and Florine Stettheimer opened their Upper West Side home to artists including Charles Demuth and Marcel Duchamp. Radical magazines, including Others, The New Republic, and The Seven Arts, among them published Robert Frost, Khalil Gibran, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Sherwood Anderson.
But more than any other person it was Carl Van Vechten who embodied Brooks’s notion of the “genial middle ground.” Embracing Stein and Stravinsky in one arm, ragtime and black musicals in the other, he elided the conventional distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow on and off the page. New York was the perfect—perhaps the only—place for such an existence. With Paris and London stymied by war with Germany, New York gained a prominent global standing. European avant-gardists such as Duchamp and Albert Gleizes thought the city more conducive to the creation of new art than anywhere in the Old World, not only because of the turmoil that war wrought in Europe but because New York was itself a work of art. Leon Trotsky, one of the many European radicals who sought asylum in the city, believed New York to be “the fullest expression of our modern age … a city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism.”
Integral to New York’s character was the growth of industries to harness the city’s creative talents. Publishing, in particular, boomed in the war years with dozens of ambitious new firms being established to promote and sell American literature. In 1916 Van Vechten signed a deal for his next book with perhaps the most exciting of all these outfits, Alfred A. Knopf, run by a twenty-three-year-old sharp-eyed whiz of the same name and his equally brilliant twenty-two-year-old wife, Blanche. Van Vechten was only the third author to join Knopf’s stable, the other two being the novelist Joseph Hergesheimer and H. L. Mencken, the essayist and coeditor of The Smart Set, who had a compulsion for speaking his mind and tearing into hypocrisy and intellectual laziness wherever he encountered them. On the surface, Mencken and Van Vechten were conspicuously different animals: Mencken, an irascible ball of impatient machismo who saw softheaded idiocy at every turn; Van Vechten a glib, effeminate dilettante with no interest in philosophy, politics, or anything that did not have a direct bearing on the arts. Yet the two formed an instant bond, sharing a sharp, cynical wit and an aversion to abstemious Victorians, who they believed still tyrannized the United States, a type that Mencken characterized as “boobus americanus.” They saw themselves as part of an elite order of outstanding citizens whose calling in life was to offer inspiration and guidance to the rest of the nation on all matters of sophistication and substance.
Van Vechten’s first book for Knopf, Music and Bad Manners, was an exhibition of this cultural leadership, another collection of heretical essays about the musical arts that added an extra coat of varnish to his self-portrait. He furthered his reputation as the United States’ lead combatant for contemporary music by taking the fight to its detractors, including his old boss Richard Aldrich, whom he described as “the enemy.” Even more than in Music After the Great War, this book positioned Van Vechten at the cutting edge, boasting that “even the extreme modern music evidently protrudes no great perplexity into my ears. They accept it all, a good deal of it with avidity, some with the real tribute of astonishment which goes only to genius.” He told his readers that they too could become up-to-the-minute connoisseurs, if only they discarded their irrational attachment to the past. Arguing about whether this newfangled music will catch on, he said, is as pointless as debating whether industrialization is here to stay. “Music has changed; of that there can be no doubt. Don’t go to a concert and expect to hear what you might have heard fifty years ago; don’t expect anything and don’t hate yourself if you happen to like what you hear.”
The collection set the template for the next four books of Van Vechten’s music and arts criticism that Knopf was to publish by the end of 1920. It unveiled obscure artistic geniuses and elevated things traditionally regarded by the cultural establishment as lowbrow, vulgar, or indecent to the status of high art, using the churning metropolis of New York as its backdrop. In “Music for the Movies” Van Vechten wondered aloud how peculiar it was that as of that moment no serious composer had written a score for a motion picture, pointing out that because the movies represented the most pioneering and demotic form of storytelling, they offered thrilling new opportunities for music, which could in turn transform the art of moviemaking. In other chapters he dealt with Spanish and African-American folk music and Stravinsky’s love of ragtime and music hall. The collection ends with a profile of Leo Ornstein, the Russian-American pianist from the Lower East Side, whose body of experimental compositions, Van Vechten said, “vibrates with the unrest of the period which produced the great war.”
Two years after he had fled Italy, Van Vechten was still writing about the war as if it were a beneficent force, a catalyst that had delivered the world from artistic sterility. In 1914 and 1915 it was a stance that could be easily maintained and was in fact in keeping with the fashionable attitudes of many radical artists across Europe. But after the United States entered the conflict in April 1917, all such opinions acquired a new piquancy. When conscription was introduced in June that year, a number of Van Vechten’s friends willingly filled out their cards. But not all did so in order to thrash the Boche. Donald Evans signed up straightaway and told Van Vechten he had done so “not to make the world safe for democracy, but for the aristocracy of thought. To make life comfortable once more for the decadent, the iconoclast, the pessimist.” Having escaped the war once, Van Vechten certainly had no intention of getting caught up in it a second time. A letter sent from John Pitts Sanborn to Van Vechten in Iowa confirmed that Sanborn had just signed himself up but that he had also inquired of the conscription official “narrowly about your case.” Eager to avoid any possibility of being called into service, Van Vechten appears to have temporarily removed himself from New York. “He says as the law stands if you left before the eleventh,” Sanborn continued, “and return only after registration is over you do not have to register.”
Blanche and Alfred Knopf, c. 1932, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
H. L. Mencken, c. 1913
While an artistic generation, including John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E. E. Cummings, left America to discover Europe from behind the steering wheel of an ambulance, Van Vechten stayed home, where he found the charged atmosphere thoroughly stimulating. The day before the United States officially entered the War, he wrote to Gertrude Stein to tell her how Isadora Duncan was whipping the theatergoers of New York into paroxysms of patriotism during her latest performances, which she conducted draped in the American flag, to her audience’s roaring delight. “It is very exciting,” he assured Stein, “to see American patriotism thoroughly awakened—I tell you, she drives ’em mad; the recruiting stations are full of her converts.”
That the energy of the times had grabbed even Isadora Duncan, a fairly unlikely flag waver, demonstrated New York’s excitation. Indeed, according to Van Vechten, Duncan was so overwhelmed by her sudden love for Uncle Sam that she seduced a sailor on the sidewalk one evening and spent a good while in the throes of passion with him in the gutter.
The fever of cultural nationalism found its way into Van Vechten’s own work too, albeit in his inimitable style. In Interpreters and Interpretations, a book of highly subjective pieces about his favorite performers and the art of performance, Van Vechten argued, with extraordinary prescience, that ragtime was the foundation stone of future American music, and named “Lewis F. Muir, Irving Berlin, and Louis Hirsch, the true grandfathers of the Great American composer of the year 2001.” To be sure, the United States’ “serious” composers, such as Edward McDowell, wrote pleasing enough melodies and harmonies, he conceded, but it was only the syncopated rhythms of ragtime songwriters that managed to capture the “complicated vigor of American life.” Van Vechten explained that the nation’s inability to recognize the artistic worth of its own culture was an inevitable consequence of the distinction that had been drawn between art and entertainment, a distinction that seemed increasingly false to him. “Americans are inclined to look everywhere but under their noses for art,” he explained. “It never occurs to them that any object which has any relation to their everyday life has anything to do with beauty. Probably the Athenians were much the same.” To his mind, refusing to acknowledge the worth of ragtime was folly not only because it denied the validity of American culture but also because it ignored the fact that no great art was ever created through imitation. Producing facsimiles of European art was sheer futility. “It is no more use to imitate French or German music than it is to imitate French or German culture,” he wrote. “The sooner we realize this the better for all of us.”
Mencken applauded his friend for recognizing that “a vast body of genuine American music has sprung up out of the depths of popular song, wholly national in idiom, as unmistakably of the soil as baseball.” More than any other writer, in his opinion, Van Vechten demonstrated that “a man may be an American and still give his thought to a civilized and noble art, and find an audience within America.” Others were less sure. Some critics accused Van Vechten of simply being Van Vechten, tossing out an outrageous idea for the delight of provoking an annoyed reaction rather than espousing a sincerely held belief. “He likes what is new,” sighed one writer, “because it is new or else because to say he likes a certain thing will shock a sufficient number of people to make him commanding in the solitude of his appreciation.” And in fairness, Van Vechten did nothing to discredit such a theory with the public image he projected. Still a relatively peripheral cultural figure writing esoteric books that sold to a small, discerning readership, Van Vechten was as well known for his exotic personality as for his writing. The character he had been developing for the last decade—that of the sophisticated dandy always ready with an acerbic put-down and a controversial bon mot—had now become a professional persona. When interviewed by The Morning Telegraph for a large feature on him in January 1918, he fed the interviewer a stream of quotable lines, some witty, some insightful, others pretentious, and others still just plain silly. “It would be much better for everybody,” ran one of his pronouncements, “if a law were passed consigning all creative work to the flames ten years after it saw the light. Then we would have novelty … it must have been thrilling to have lived in Alexandria at the time the library was burned.” When asked for his prescriptions for strengthening the health of the arts in New York, he said only constant invention would do, and of the sort that brought together the poles of American culture in the way that Van Wyck Brooks urged, splicing the salons of Greenwich Village with the Broadway stage. “I would ask Gertrude Stein and Irving Berlin to collaborate,” Van Vechten said, “or Avery Hopwood and Leo Ornstein.”
Although his rhetorical gambits were clearly Wildean, Van Vechten had become nothing less than the archetypal American modernist. His experiences in Europe, combined with lessons he had learned about the arts of mythmaking and promotion from the Everleigh Sisters in Chicago, Oscar Hammerstein, Mabel Dodge, and Gertrude Stein, taught him that being a great artist was far from the only contribution to be made in the war on convention. It was more important to Van Vechten to be on the scene, connected to every new and exciting thing that was going on. He was a one-man publicity machine for American modernism; the Armory Show on two legs, a self-styled tastemaker who embraced taboo and sprayed camphor on moth-eaten ideas of good taste in everything he did.
* * *
Back in Iowa, the Van Vechten clan struggled to see the utility in Carl’s radical work. As the war hauled itself into 1918 and the Allies inched closer to decisive victory, Charles Van Vechten urged his son to take some constructive part in the wartime displays of virile patriotism. Van Vechten Shaffer, Carl’s nephew, became the pride of the family by fighting bravely in France, apparently relishing the opportunity to uphold American ideals against the barbarous Germans. Charles was pleased by Carl’s success as an author, but he could not banish the distaste he experienced that his son, at the age of thirty-eight, should still be drawing on his wife’s income for financial support and devoting his energies to something as niche and unprofitable as music criticism. In ways subtle and unsubtle, Charles never let him forget that artistic fulfillment was no match for financial success. Upon the publication of Music After the Great War, Charles said that Van Vechten might become the more illustrious of his sons—but only if he sold enough books to become rich and famous, a reminder of what was expected of the Van Vechten men. The days when Carl was afforded special treatment for being the baby of the family were gone. When his next book, Music and Bad Manners, was published, Charles similarly sent sincere congratulations on its quality but again stated the need for Van Vechten to earn money, to take care of his wife and perform his male duty. Another book “for musical people” will “have necessarily a very limited sale,” he griped, adding, “I should gladly like to have you write a book that would sell to a million people.” The war, he suggested, could be Carl’s making, an opportunity to become the steely, self-reliant man he wanted him to be. “Really it looks to us as though your time had come to enter the service of Uncle Sam,” he wrote Carl in August 1918. “If you have the spirit which I suppose you must have you will wish to be ‘over there’ with the others … I only wish I was young and strong enough.”
Carl Van Vechten, c. 1925
Charles’s hopes for his son were simply unrealistic: there was no chance that Van Vechten could be dragged away from New York, not for the rush and push of war or even the bright lights of another metropolis. More than ever New York was filled with contradictory forces to shorten the breath and quicken the blood. In recent months Van Vechten had acquired a familiarity with the city’s vibrant Yiddish theatrical and literary culture through Marinoff, and his enthusiasm for the entertainments of African-Americans grew all the time. In addition to the plays and musicals that he had raved about in The Trend and the New York Press, he was enjoying the current surge in cabaret clubs and hotel bars run by and primarily for black New Yorkers, mostly concentrated around the Tenderloin. Marshall’s Hotel on West Fifty-third Street was the social hub for New York’s most prominent black citizens—chiefly musicians, performers, writers, and theater producers—and was to them what the Algonquin was to be to the celebrated whites of the 1920s: a place to eat, drink, swap stories, show off, make contacts, hatch plans, and be entertained. Marshall’s also attracted a coterie of liberal-minded whites, and Van Vechten was an eye-catching patron of its basement cabaret in the late teens, his presence there immortalized by Charles Demuth’s painting Cabaret Interior.
Multiethnic, polyglot New York was the only place he wanted to be, but the old routine of orchestral concerts and operas was beginning to grate, and in both his personal and professional lives, his attention drifted toward more exotic territory. In four essays written between October 1918 and May 1919 and eventually published together in a diverse book of themes entitled In the Garret in 1920, Van Vechten painted a picture of New York as a place of infinite variety, excitement, and pleasure by introducing his readers to the treasures buried within unfashionable parts of town populated by black, Italian, and Jewish communities. In this other New York Van Vechten depicted himself as an urban explorer. “Come with me on a Saturday or a Sunday night” begins one description of a trip to an Italian theater, as if he were placing the reader’s hand in his. “We are in one of the delightful old Bowery theatres with its sweeping horseshoe balcony and its orchestra sloping gracefully up to the orchestra circle, a charming old theatre of a kind in which it was possible for the audience to be as brilliant as the play.” A million miles from the conventional theaters that his readership frequented, his penetrating gaze locked on to the scrum of humanity inside and absorbed every sensory detail:
working men in their shirt sleeves … women with black hair parted over their oval olive faces suckling their babies, or with half nude infants lying over their knees. Boys in white coats, with baskets of multi-colored pop and other forms of soda … mothers and children, young girls with their young men, grey-haired grandmothers tightly bound in thick black shawls in spite of the heat, sipping the red and pink and yellow pop through long straws … In a box a corpulent gentleman fingers his watch chain stretched across his ample paunch. All this observed in the smoky half-light of the darkened theatre.
At another Italian theater, this time uptown in Harlem, he found a similar scene at a performance of Wilde’s Salome. “No hysteria or shuddering repugnance informed this mob,” he said, in contrast with the outrage that had greeted the American premiere of Salome, the opera, at the Metropolitan in 1907. “Young mothers were there with their babes; they suckled them, if nature so demanded. Young girls were there, with lovely black hair and gold earrings; children were there and grandmothers. They had come to see a play … it was just a play.”
Van Vechten was far from the first to write about the city’s ethnic diversity. A number of his friends, including Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Hutchins Hapgood, were among the writers and campaigners who had pulled back the curtains to reveal the lives of the millions of migrants and immigrants who constituted early-twentieth-century New York, but most had done so as part of a mission to expose squalor, inequality, and injustice. Van Vechten’s take was different. It was in its mixture of subterranean delights that he located the promise of New York, not its flaws. In February 1919 he wrote a panegyric to the city, rejoicing in its multifarious attractions. In his exhaustive lists of its different languages, communities, cuisines, and architectures, he intended to show that all humanity seemed to live within Manhattan’s borders, a place where any appetite could be sated and any sight experienced. By the end of the twentieth century this would have become a common perception of New York, one that New Yorkers would proudly use to define themselves. At the time, in the midst of widespread fears about the latest huge surge of immigrants into the city as Europe tore itself apart, Van Vechten’s unqualified celebration of difference was novel and bold. Soaring clear of the Progressive Era’s rancorous political debates about immigration, assimilation, and the American “melting pot,” he extolled New York’s extravagant variety as the secret of its creative genius. This was no mere city, but a fantasy made real. “New York,” he said, “is the only city over which airships may float without appearing to fly in the face of tradition. I might safely say, I think, that if a blue hippopotamus took to laying eggs on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Broadway every day at noon, after a week the rite would pass unobserved.”