NINE

Exotic Material

 

By the midpoint of the 1920s there were few aspects of contemporary life in New York that had not been penetrated by the nation’s crop of exciting young literary talents. In particular, the city’s fashionable and flighty spirits—the sorts of characters that filled Van Vechten’s books—had been thoroughly documented, celebrated, ridiculed, and pitied as the epitome of the Jazz Age. Yet no writer, black or white, had published a novel about the New Negroes of Harlem, the community that had set the Jazz Age in motion. The first one to successfully do so could secure canonical status. The idea of attempting a novel about Harlem occurred to Van Vechten as early as the fall of 1924, a few weeks into his friendship with Walter White. On October 23 he told Marinoff that should his proposed opera collaboration with Gershwin come to nothing he would try his hand at “a Negro novel.” As the Gershwin project drifted away, and his immersion into Harlem society deepened, the idea of writing a novel about its inhabitants gradually turned into an obsession.

But Van Vechten was nervous about such an undertaking from the very start. His tremendous self-confidence usually allowed him to write with an air of absolute authority on any number of subjects regardless of how new to him they were, including many aspects of African-American culture. Since meeting Walter White, however, his relationship with black people had changed profoundly: he had come to know them as individuals rather than mere character types. Finding a black person he did not like had been his “emancipation” on a social level, allowing him to see the individual personality beneath the skin color. From the point of view of a novelist hoping to capture the entire experience of the three hundred thousand citizens of Harlem, the knowledge that black society was every bit as complicated as white society was vexing. He confided to Langston Hughes that prior to his immersion in Harlem it would have been “comparatively easy for me to write” a novel about the place, but his recent experiences had simply underlined how much more complex black society was than he had hitherto realized. In the same letter he expressed his enormous admiration for Hughes’s ability to crystallize what he saw as the essence of black experience within his poems. “You have caught the jazz spirit and the jazz rhythm amazingly,” he gushed; “some of them ought to be recited in stop-time!” Achieving similar deftness in a full-length exposition of black New York was not a task that even Van Vechten would take lightly. The following month he told Gertrude Stein of his planned novel, though he still had no plot in mind, only its setting. “It will be about NEGROES as they live now in the new city of Harlem,” he said, informing her that the neighborhood contained aspects of black American life never before explored in a novel, and which hardly any white people knew about. With unintended irony Stein breezily replied that she could not wait to read “the nigger book.”

The breakthrough came in August 1925, on the day that Firecrackers was published. That evening Van Vechten went to The Crisis awards at the Renaissance Casino and on his return noted in his daybook: “Title of ‘Nigger Heaven’ comes to me today.” Although he was still not able to sit down and start writing the book for three months, stumbling upon the title was a catalyst. Two days later he told one friend that he had “found so good a title” for the new book that “it should be very easy to write.” To his mind, he had come upon not just an arresting title but a scheme for the novel. The term “nigger heaven” was a common colloquial expression for the balcony seating area in segregated theaters, high up in the gods, reserved for black audience members. Both shocking and tartly satirical, it suited Van Vechten’s desire to write an overtly serious novel—his first and only—without straying into polemical earnestness. Most important, framing Harlem as “Nigger Heaven” helped create a suitably epic atmosphere for a novel that would encompass the grand sweep of black experience.

Van Vechten eventually managed to begin his novel on the morning of November 3. By lunch he had finished the first chapter. Before Christmas he had an entire first draft. What he produced was a strange and sensationalist exposition of his ideas about what it meant to be black, set against a backdrop of the different Harlems that had so absorbed him over the last year: the nocturnal scene of jazz, drink, and casual sex; A’Lelia Walker’s expensively debauched high society parties; and the literary cliques, or “cultured circles,” as he had once described them to Edna Kenton. The plot is carried by the doomed love affair of two well-educated young Harlemites, Byron Kasson and Mary Love. Both are presented as having allowed white cultural influence to dilute their essential blackness, their “primitive birthright,” as Van Vechten puts it, which enables all black people to “revel in colour and noise and rhythm and physical emotion.” Mary is a bookish librarian with an interest in European history who can—somewhat unfeasibly—recite gigantic passages from “Melanctha,” Gertrude Stein’s story about a black woman from the South but cannot experience the ferocity of emotions that Melanctha feels. Byron is a writer who struggles to write, but not, like Peter Whiffle, because of indecision; instead he eschews race literature and attempts to imitate the white authors he read at college. This was a perennial bugbear of Van Vechten’s. When he attempted to find black playwrights to promote in 1913, he was frustrated that none seemed prepared to tackle subjects that he felt were “essentially Negro.” In the novel a magazine editor, clearly based on H. L. Mencken, tells Byron straight out that black writers who do not write about black subjects are being artistically dishonest.

Shut out of white New York because of his color and ridiculed by black society for having the fancy airs of a white man, Byron grows angry and despondent. Mary’s emotional and sexual frigidity renders her incapable of consoling her man, and Byron is soon seduced by the attentions of Lasca Sartoris, a cabaret star and professional man-eater modeled on Nora Holt, who draws him into her wild existence. This is Van Vechten’s other Harlem, his hell-raiser’s paradise of nightclubs, hustlers, pimps, and whores, where black people have no trouble acting on the primal instincts that supposedly flow through their veins. In this Harlem of the night, the threat of violence and the promise of casual sex are ever present. Van Vechten’s relish in describing it all is palpable, at points nauseatingly so. In one scene inside a nightclub he describes “men and women with weary faces tired of passion and pleasure” who resemble “dead prostitutes and murderers,” listening to “shrieking, tortured music from the depths of hell,” while a sixteen-year-old girl, “pure black, with savage African features, thick nose, thick lips, bushy hair,” and “eyes rolled back so far that only the whites were visible,” emerges naked in the center of the dance floor, brandishing a dagger, primed to perform “evil rites” as the scene ends. It brings to mind Van Vechten’s similarly overblown account of the Holy Jumpers’ religious ceremony in the Bahamas a decade earlier. His core idea of the black soul had barely changed in all that time.

When Sartoris tires of Byron, she discards him for another man. Driven by bitterness and wounded pride, Byron grabs a gun and heads for the Black Venus nightclub, planning to kill Sartoris and her new lover. But inside the club his immersion in white civilization proves to be his undoing: his calculating mind prevents him from committing a crime of passion. At that moment Sartoris’s lover is shot dead by another aggrieved rival, who has arrived deus ex machina. The book ends with the white hands of a policeman apprehending Byron for a crime he did not and, more important, could not commit.

Nigger Heaven is from start to finish a work of pure melodrama, peppered with Van Vechten’s usual adornments of lists, mentions of obscure artistic figures, and digressions into esoteric topics. There are also numerous set pieces that do nothing to propel the narrative and are included only to unveil aspects of African-American existence about which most white people were entirely ignorant. In one scene characters talk about passing as white; another explains the different types of parties to be found in Harlem. Van Vechten was demonstrating not only the breadth of Harlem society but also the depth of his expert knowledge.

One of the many things he had learned over the past year or so in Harlem was the power of language. From 1925 onward the abrasive racial epithets that he had routinely used to describe black people entirely disappeared from his writing, even in his diaries and notebooks. His new friendships with black men and women had taught him the hurt that such words can cause. The only term he now used to refer to black people was “Negro”—the n always capitalized—the accepted, respectful designation of the day. When reviewing his old notebooks in the 1940s prior to committing them to academic archives, he even crossed out some uses of “nigger” and wrote “Negro” over the top, embarrassed that he had once used the word so indiscriminately. He knew therefore that he risked causing offense with his title, but its dark, lacerating irony seemed too perfect to abandon, as did the prospect of flirting with another taboo. Its dangerousness made it irresistible. Commercial reasons probably came into his thinking too. As recently as the fall of 1923 he had of course urged Ronald Firbank to introduce himself to American audiences by changing the title of his novel Sorrow in Sunlight to Prancing Nigger in order to boost sales of the book. A shrewd promoter and an ambitious author, Van Vechten was attached to his title partly because he knew that it would get people talking—and spending.

Three weeks into writing, he revealed the title to his most trusted black friends. Grace Nail Johnson, James Weldon Johnson’s wife, warned him to expect a venomous response should he stick with it, though Walter White judged it a wonderful title and wished he had thought of it himself. Countee Cullen, on the other hand, was incensed that Van Vechten would even consider such a thing. As is often the way with those who are quick to offer it, Van Vechten had little capacity for taking criticism. It was not really Cullen’s opinion he sought but a rubber stamp. He wanted Harlem’s men and women of letters to sanction the title, thereby ridding him of any moral qualms about using it. Not gaining that from Cullen infuriated him. Van Vechten dismissed Cullen as oversensitive and incapable of understanding irony, failings he identified as common to most black people. Thirty-five years later his stance had not changed. When an interviewer asked him whether he had used “nigger” in the title of his book because the word had had fewer “unpleasant connotations” in 1925 than in 1960, Van Vechten was bullish: “It had more, I’d say … But emancipated people like [the African-American writer George] Schuyler and James Weldon Johnson understood the way it was used. It was used ironically, of course, and irony is not anything that most Negroes understand.”

That one barb lays bare the tension within Van Vechten’s personality that made his involvement with African-American culture so contentious: the conflict between his fierce individualism and his firm belief in immanent racial identities. He prided himself on being able to value black people as individuals yet repeatedly spoke of “Negroes” as a monolithic bloc, bound together by a common blackness inside and out. When it came to others’ judging him, he balked at the idea that he should be seen as anything other than a unique individual whose racial identity as a white man was of no consequence. In the novel Byron is portrayed as foolish and inauthentic for writing about issues that are not explicitly linked to his race. Van Vechten never considered imposing such parameters on his own work, as the very existence of Nigger Heaven demonstrates. In his mind he was free of all the constraints that bound others. The first chapter of Nigger Heaven includes a footnote that says as much, explaining that while the word nigger “is freely used by Negroes among themselves, not only as a term of opprobrium, but also actually as a term of endearment, its employment by a white person is fiercely resented.” The implication is clear: in the mouths of ordinary whites, with their lack of understanding and experience of the Negro, the n-word is a lethal weapon, but for Van Vechten the rules did not apply. Consequently, when some black people reacted negatively to his use of an inflammatory word, he lashed out with petty insults.

Perhaps the criticism that hurt the most came not from Harlem but from Cedar Rapids. When he wrote his father about his latest work, Van Vechten probably expected to receive words of congratulation for following the family tradition of challenging the rigidity of the color line. Instead Charles delivered his son a stern lecture. “Your ‘Nigger Heaven’ is a title I don’t like,” he said bluntly. “I have myself never spoken of a colored man as a ‘nigger.’ If you are trying to help the race as I am assured you are, I think every word you write should be a respectful one towards the blacks.” Insisting on using this horrid title was pure folly, he maintained, the behavior of an overindulged child who has never fully grown up. “You are accustomed to ‘get away’ with what you undertake to do,” he warned, “but you do not always succeed, and my belief is that this will be a failure if you persist in your ‘I shall use it nevertheless.’ Whatever you may be compelled to say in the book your present title will not be understood and I feel certain that you should change it.” Again Van Vechten dismissed the criticism. His father, after all, was an elderly midwestern businessman whose ideas about black-white relations had been shaped in the Civil War. What did he know of Harlem and the New Negro of the twentieth century? Although he recognized his father’s sensitivity was born of good intentions, he thought it as prissy and reactionary as Cullen’s. The matter was dropped, unresolved, over the Christmas of 1925. On January 4, Charles died of a sudden illness. It was a horrendous start to a long year of emotional strife, probably the most turbulent of Van Vechten’s life thus far.

Charles was buried on January 7 in a service attended by the great and good of Cedar Rapids, many wearing the distinctive sashes of the Masonic order to which he had belonged. On the ninth, Van Vechten was on a train heading back to New York, where he sat alone, drank a bottle of bourbon, and slipped effortlessly back into the old routine of self-destructive indulgence. Throughout January and February the evenings he stayed sober were so noteworthy that he recorded them in his daybook alongside the names of guests at the parties he attended. Naturally, the heavy drinking combined with his sudden grief was having a deleterious impact on his health. His letters to distant friends, which usually avoided any suggestion that his life in New York was anything other than the glorious fizz of one of his Manhattan novels, showed signs of strain. He told Hugh Walpole that this book was ruining him, exaggerating hugely that he had been working twelve hours a day for six months. He vowed that when it was all over, he would never write again. Nigger Heaven actually went to the printers two weeks after that letter, on March 18, fractionally more than four months from his writing the opening sentence of the first draft. Those years of churning out copy in Hearst’s Madhouse and dashing off reviews late at night for the morning edition of the Times had paid off; even under the most unpleasant circumstances, he could summon the powers of concentration and self-discipline to write, and write quickly.

If nothing else, the novel seemed to be well timed. In February Lulu Belle opened at the Belasco Theatre. The play was David Belasco’s take on Harlem street life, infused with all the striking realism for which the star producer had become renowned—save for the fact that the leading roles were taken by white actors in blackface. The play bore certain striking similarities to Nigger Heaven, especially in its melodramatic exposition of the characters’ inner blackness. Lulu Belle presented Harlem as the wild place of white American fantasies, in which the checks and balances of American civilization are no restraint on the inborn passions of its black population. The title character, a treacherous black prostitute played by the white actress Lenore Ulric, breaks hearts and marriages as she pursues a string of men before being murdered by one of her conquests. Audiences and reviewers alike were smitten. Among white New Yorkers it marked the moment when Harlem went from being the obsession of a small clique of artists and socialites to a bona fide mainstream craze. Even if black performers were not always as prominent as they should have been, Van Vechten was excited about the breakthrough of African-American entertainments on the mainstream stage. On March 4 he wrote Gertrude Stein that “the race is getting more popular every day.”

Within Harlem not everyone was so thrilled at how the community was being presented to the white population. A number of prominent literary and intellectual figures, most notably W.E.B. DuBois, were expressing serious concerns that the younger generation of Harlem writers was encouraging a portrayal of black people as drinkers, gamblers, and fornicators. A matter of weeks before Nigger Heaven was published Van Vechten dipped his toe into the debate, knowing that the rest of him would be submerged before long. In a provocative piece for DuBois at The Crisis he encouraged African-Americans to write about the underbelly of black society, as Langston Hughes and Rudolph Fisher did. “The squalor of Negro life,” he believed, provided wonderful material for artists, and he posed what he felt was the vital question facing Harlem’s creative community: “Are Negro writers going to write about this exotic material while it is still fresh or will they continue to make a free gift of it to white authors who will exploit it until not a drop of vitality remains?” It could be argued that the phrasing of that question was intended more as a rhetorical flourish to nudge black writers into action than an admission that he had “exploited” Harlemites or African-American culture. After all, it had been his contention for many years that Americans should engage with taboos as a way of producing distinctive and stimulating art. However, Van Vechten knew that in writing Nigger Heaven, he was joining an already lengthy roll call of white artists who had attained great success by absorbing or purloining black culture. It had started of course with minstrelsy almost a century earlier and was to carry on throughout the twentieth century, touching everyone from Elvis to Eminem via Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, developing into a central but problematic motif of American identity. In Van Vechten’s time both Al Jolson and George Gershwin belonged to that tradition in their different ways, and even Van Vechten’s paradigm of black theater, Granny Maumee, had been written by a white playwright, Ridgley Torrence. Frequently Van Vechten expressed unease with this phenomenon. After seeing Granny Maumee, of course, he attempted to find a generation of black playwrights to express the African-American experience on the stage because relying on white writers to do so felt inauthentic. He was also of the firm belief that white singers should be kept away from the blues and spirituals because they did not have it within their racial gift to perform them as evocatively as black singers could. His words of warning in The Crisis about the risks of allowing white authors to write books about black street life emanated from similar concerns. Yet stunningly, he did not consider himself one of those whites who threatened to “exploit” black culture or bleed it of its “vitality.” There was no doubt in his mind that most white people could not be trusted with such a jewel, but he, Van Vechten told himself, was different. As with the use of “nigger,” he assumed he had special dispensation to uncover the “squalor and vice” of Harlem because he was at one with its people.

*   *   *

In the weeks leading up to publication, Van Vechten felt his affinity with black America strengthen. One afternoon Zora Neale Hurston took him to a sanctified church on West 137th Street located in the offices of a real estate agent, one of the many tiny charismatic sects that sprang up in Harlem out of nowhere only to disappear as quickly as they had emerged. He said the place rocked with “shoutin’, moanin’, yelling” for “hours on end to the music of a cornet & a guitar & jumping and dancing. Exactly like the jungle.” A similar feeling of awe struck him when the Johnsons took him to New Jersey to visit the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School, known as the Tuskegee of the North, and heard the young pupils sing spirituals in perfect pitch. It seemed there was nowhere in the black world of the North that Van Vechten felt out of place. During a trip to Virginia, however, he wrote Marinoff of his frustration that although he encountered black people at every turn, the strictures of southern society made him unable to communicate with his people in the same easy manner in which he could in Harlem.

In June any illusions he may have had about being an honorary black man were burst as it became clear that “his” people might not embrace Nigger Heaven as the compliment it was intended to be. Two months ahead of publication a number of black newspapers revealed they would not allow the novel to be advertised within their pages. Walter White spoke out in Van Vechten’s defense in The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most influential African-American newspapers in the country. “There is seldom much prejudice of any sort, among those who are intelligent enough to do a bit of thinking and investigating for themselves,” White wrote tartly, comparing Van Vechten’s inquiring spirit with what he condemned as the knee-jerk reaction of certain blacks, chiming Van Vechten’s own belief in the oversensitivity of the race.

By this stage Van Vechten was anxious about the book’s reception and, very often, obnoxiously drunk. For Marinoff the stress had become too much. When he returned from the New World speakeasy in Harlem at four o’clock one morning, he lashed out, either verbally or physically, and quite possibly both, his daybooks give only elliptical details of his behavior, and Marinoff made her escape. He went to bed still drunk and rose at ten, expecting Marinoff to come back before lunch, as she always did in these situations. Not this time. Unable to find her, Van Vechten asked Donald Angus to intervene. Over the telephone Angus tracked Marinoff down at the Algonquin. When Van Vechten came on the line, he was stunned. “She says she is through forever. If she is, what is there in life left for me?”

His disbelief is hard to fathom; surely he must have seen this coming. The only surprise was that Marinoff had not left sooner. In October 1925, she even told the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper that she felt neglected by her husband, although she made no mention of the physical and verbal violence he subjected her to. Reminiscing about their first year of marriage, when she and Van Vechten kept separate apartments, she told a reporter: “I was having an affair with my husband. Living in sin, you know. Oh, I quite miss that.” Since Van Vechten had become a celebrity, however, she had to share him with the whole of New York and its never-ending parties, which made her feel lonely and unloved. On returning to New York from her recent trip to Europe she had been bursting to see Van Vechten, who had sent her numerous letters and telegrams communicating his misery at their separation. But on the first night back after three months she discovered that they were not to spend the evening alone; instead Carlo had invited some new friends to the apartment for a party. “Oh, yes, there were my friends there too, and the party was fine. It was thoughtful of him, but—.” She trailed off, not needing to finish the thought aloud.

Remarkably, with his marriage falling apart around him, Van Vechten considered a dinner party at Rudolph Fisher’s that evening too important to cancel, though he did not enjoy himself or provide the other guests with much entertainment. Upon his return to the apartment he discovered that Marinoff had come back during his absence, but only to pack her bags. The next morning he got wind that she had taken shelter at her sister’s house in New Jersey. When he arrived around lunchtime, he was lucky to find her in a conciliatory mood. She agreed to give him another chance, and they talked things over while walking and picking flowers in the surrounding countryside. In the immediate aftermath a chastened Carl was on his best behavior. Early the next week he treated Marinoff to a romantic evening for two, dining together before catching Mae West in her outrageous new show, Sex, and then returning to the apartment to distill two gallons of homemade brandy, an unusual method of spousal reconciliation, perhaps, but somehow entirely fitting.

*   *   *

After months of nerves and drama, Nigger Heaven was finally unleashed on the American public on August 20, 1926. Alfred A. Knopf’s publicity campaign promised readers a genuine publishing landmark, a thrilling new type of American novel that would transport whites into a secret existence within their midst. An advertisement in Publishers Weekly advised bookstores that “between the covers of this unusual novel you will be selling your customers a new world.” Consciously or not, Knopf’s marketing blurbs described the novel in terms similar to those of the muckraking exposés of the early 1900s that had guided wealthy, respectable New Yorkers into the tenements of the Lower East Side, titillating, fascinating, and enraging them all at once. The feverishly positive critical responses from the white press took up the same line. Walter Yust, a leading literary critic of the 1920s, wrote admiringly in The Evening Post of Van Vechten’s “careful observations” of “the tortured ecstasies of Harlem,” a place populated by “a melodramatic people” of “unashamed passion” as if Van Vechten’s tale were a sober compilation of empirical facts. In a similar vein, the New York Times Book Review praised the novel’s “understanding and insight.” An effusive notice in the New York Evening Graphic stressed the authenticity of Nigger Heaven and made much of the fact that Van Vechten had “lived among the colored people” for nearly two years. “Read Nigger Heaven,” the reviewer exhorted. “Read it and think.”

From across the Atlantic D. H. Lawrence rolled his eyes and dismissed the book as “a second-hand dish barely warmed up,” and suggested that Van Vechten’s idea of blackness was a myth: “It is absolutely impossible to discover that the nigger is any blacker inside than we are.” His compatriot M. P. Shiel was more complimentary about Van Vechten’s writing, yet he too thought the book curious. He found the issue of the color line fascinating, he said, because it revolves around the strange notion of “purity of race.” It felt to Shiel as if he were eavesdropping on an American conversation that was engrossing yet thoroughly peculiar. He was right too. Although Nigger Heaven found great favor with foreign readers the world over and chimed with Europe’s own explosion of interest in nonwhite culture after the First World War, this was a distinctly American novel. To the fashionable white crowd of Jazz Age New York, Nigger Heaven was a revelation. Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken thought it Van Vechten’s best work by far; F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to say he had read it in one night before pushing it into Zelda’s hands; Franklin Pierce Adams described it as “one of the most enthralling books we have ever read,” a “fine, exciting, heart-breaking, tragic tale of life in Harlem.” Arthur Davison Ficke asked what “the Race” thought of this grand work. “Probably enormously flattered, aren’t they?”

The short answer was no. Hostility toward the book from African-American communities came loud and early. The Van Vechtens’ housekeeper, Meda Frye, depressed her employer when she came into the apartment one morning with a pile of furious reviews from the black press. They savaged Van Vechten for a prurient obsession with the underbelly of Harlem nightlife and for his dialogue, which many thought a ludicrous mangling of African-American dialect. Some critiques of the book failed to get beyond the title. One of the stinging pieces that Van Vechten masochistically cut out and pasted in his scrapbooks focused less on the novel and more on its impression of the author, whom it described as one of New York’s effete voyeurs who, “with their noses arched, twirling their canes, and peeping over their eyelids,” go to Harlem simply to satisfy their voyeuristic impulses, before heading back down to Greenwich Village to swap stories about the outrageous things they have seen.

Soon all manner of stories began to circulate: an elderly white man had been verbally and physically attacked in the 135th Street branch of the public library when mistakenly identified as the author of Nigger Heaven; a preacher had burned copies of the book as part of a protest against southern lynchings; Van Vechten had been barred and disowned by establishments all across Harlem and hanged in effigy on St. Nicholas Avenue. Some of these tales were accurate; others, apocryphal. But all conveyed the outrage that as many black people saw it, a wealthy white man from downtown had come up to tear around Harlem and then taunted its inhabitants with a book portraying black life as dripping in sex and drugs and violence, capping it off with the most offensive word possible. The Afro American of Baltimore summed up the incredulity when it reported a conversation about Nigger Heaven supposedly overheard in a Harlem beauty parlor: “You mean to say a man went to people’s houses and accepted their hospitality and then called ’em nigger?”

For a brief moment Van Vechten feared that the community for which he had such affection was about to cut him off. Over the previous year Van Vechten had become friendly with W. C. Handy, the great blues pioneer. Handy was one of the most respected figures in Harlem, and a birthday party to which Van Vechten had been invited was due to be thrown for him at Small’s. Three days before the event, however, Van Vechten’s friend Lewis Baer contacted him to say that his presence at the party would not be tolerated by the management of Small’s, with which he had previously enjoyed good relations. “We don’t care when we get written about, but not when we get exaggerated about” was the line given to Baer. For a man who put so much stock in being “on the scene,” the prospect was humiliating, unthinkable; to be banished from the hub of Harlem nightlife would be banishment from Harlem itself. The more strident of his black friends rallied around and convinced him that he should attend the party regardless; if the management of Small’s decided to throw him out, the club would lose the patronage of Van Vechten’s supporters too. Accompanied by Zora Neale Hurston, a formidable character for any nightclub bouncer to deal with, Van Vechten arrived at Small’s for Handy’s party, and to his immense relief, the evening went without incident. It was ironic that Van Vechten, who was happy to end friendships over sins as trivial as tardiness or bad table manners, and who boasted that if “somebody does something to offend me, I can stop a relationship immediately,” could be so shaken when he feared that certain acquaintances might do the same. Again Van Vechten was shocked to discover that he could not always play by his own rules.

Nora Holt had guessed Van Vechten would receive this sort of response. From France she wrote to say that although she thought Van Vechten had presented certain aspects of black life with unerring accuracy, she was certain the book would cause a stink. “The cries of protest from the Harlemites reach me even in Paris.” The loudest cries of protest came from two of the most influential African-American voices of the day: Hubert Harrison and W.E.B. DuBois. Both men delivered astonishing attacks on the novel and its author, accusing Van Vechten of being a crude, exploitative racist. Harrison’s lengthy invective characterized Nigger Heaven as a “breach of the peace” typical of “blase [sic] neurotics whose Caucasian culture has petered out and who come to this corner of Manhattan for pungent doses of unreality.” Deploying barely concealed homophobia to counter perceived racism, Harrison said the only good thing about the book was Van Vechten’s ability to “describe furniture and its accessories, female clothes and fripperies with all the ecstatic abandon of maiden lady at a wedding and the self-satisfaction of a man-milliner toying with a pink powder-puff. In that domain, I think, he hasn’t his equal—among men.”

Zora Neale Hurston, c. 1938, photograph by Carl Van Vechten

DuBois’s review was even more excoriating. Ignoring the book’s genteel, well-educated characters, DuBois lambasted Van Vechten for writing about the seedier side of Harlem, its nightclubs, prostitutes, gamblers, and street violence. It was evidence, he said, of Van Vechten’s shallow, inhuman nature: “It is the surface mud he slops about in. His women’s bodies have no souls; no children palpitate upon his hands; he has never looked upon his dead with bitter tears. Life to him is just one orgy after another, with hate, hurt, gin and sadism.”

Harrison, DuBois, the incident at Small’s, the accusations of exploiting the community he longed to be admired by: it all hurt dreadfully. Van Vechten’s pattern of broken, drunken sleep became haunted by strange dreams that reflected his feelings of persecution and rejection. Shortly after the first bad reviews were published he experienced a vivid recurring nightmare in which he had turned into a black man and was being chased through the streets by an angry, rioting mob.

The criticism was intense, but Van Vechten had certainly not been abandoned. Most of those Harlemites closest to him said both privately and publicly that Nigger Heaven was a powerful novel that portrayed black people and their place within the urban United States honestly and empathetically. Alain Locke, Eric Walrond, and Paul Robeson all wrote to congratulate him for having written a fine book, though Locke privately held mixed feelings about it. Charles Johnson, in his capacity as a friend and the editor of Opportunity, told Van Vechten that although some part of him wanted him to “make a stir about your title and be a good ‘race man,’” he thought Nigger Heaven very fine, a view of African-American lives that was neither hostile nor dripping with “patronizing sympathy.” Johnson subsequently published a glowing review of the book by James Weldon Johnson, who praised Van Vechten for paying “colored people the rare tribute of writing about them as people rather than as puppets.” With a dash of pride Van Vechten recounted to Johnson a scene at a popular Harlem restaurant when Langston Hughes tore a strip off some hostile critics, suggesting they might like to read the book before criticizing it. Moreover, when Van Vechten was pursued for breach of copyright for failing to gain clearance for song lyrics peppered throughout Nigger Heaven, it was Hughes who worked through the night at the Van Vechtens’ apartment, writing new verses to replace the copyrighted ones.

The resoluteness of his black defenders bears testament to the genuine friendships he had forged in Harlem. But it is also true that Van Vechten was frequently the catalyst for outrage and argument rather than its object. Nigger Heaven and its depiction of nightclubs, promiscuous women, and murderous men were the perfect totem around which Harlem’s opposing camps aligned: DuBois’s bourgeois crowd and the rebellious youth committed to freedom of expression. Van Vechten’s black critics repeatedly accused him of insulting those Harlemites who had shown him hospitality. But equally criticized were the Harlemites who had supported and encouraged him in the first place. Hubert Harrison’s review, for instance, appeared under the title “Homo Africanus Harlemi,” a reference to a well-known article by L. M. Hussey that described how black Americans adopted shifting roles and personalities in order to navigate their way through white society. In converting Hussey’s title for his review, Harrison was speaking not to Van Vechten but to Van Vechten’s black friends, whom he mocked as “Harlem’s new and nocturnal aristocracy of ‘brains’ and booze,” chasing “salvation by publicity” and indulging the rank prejudices of white voyeurs. Harrison hated the book—and Van Vechten—but his criticism of it was part of a broader agenda against the way certain black youths chose to present their communities to the white world. On the other side of the argument, when Wallace Thurman predicted that a statue of Carl Van Vechten would one day be erected on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, he did so not because he thought Van Vechten a great man, or even a good writer, but because he wanted to rile the old guard, which deplored Van Vechten’s interest in a side of black life they wanted to keep hidden. Consequently, Wallace, Hughes, and the others who viewed art as a means of expression rather than propaganda saw attacks on Van Vechten as attacks on their own creative freedom.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the rumpus, Nigger Heaven was read voraciously in Harlem, becoming one of the most requested books of the 1920s at the 135th Street Library. In her column in the October 1926 edition of Opportunity, Gwendolyn Bennett remarked that “the vogue for Nigger Heaven has set its tentacles upon Negro readers. I have seen its pale blue jacket with its discreet white printing in more brown arms than I have ever seen any other book.” By the very next edition, Bennett reported, the book had caught the imagination of the city to such an extent that it had spawned a brand-new verb. “Sightseers, visitors and other strangers that might find themselves within the limits of Harlem … are said to be ‘vanvechtening’ around.” She also pointed out that by including his name in the book, Van Vechten had created a new wave of interest in the works of Charles W. Chesnutt, an overlooked elder statesman of African-American literature whose work Van Vechten greatly admired. In fact, librarians and rare book dealers were now contacting Van Vechten directly to find out where to get copies of Chesnutt’s work, and Chesnutt himself wrote to Van Vechten to thank him for the kind things he had said about his books. This delivers us to a crucial point about Van Vechten’s intention for Nigger Heaven and its legacy: though the novel had been about black Americans, it was most definitely not written for them. In the space of a single novel Van Vechten wanted to introduce white Americans to all the spectacles, challenges, joys, and frustrations that defined daily life for the diverse community of black people squeezed into a cramped quadrant of the modern world’s most exciting city. In that respect, at least, he had succeeded.

In the months and years following its publication Van Vechten received letters from readers across America amazed at what Nigger Heaven taught them about black people. Almost all were dumbfounded by Mary and Byron. From Iowa, a hospital superintendent wrote to express her astonishment at his cultured black characters, who read Gertrude Stein, take trips to Europe, and hold elegant dinner parties. “Can it be possible that there are any like those of yours? And if so do they have a culture so like to our own sophisticated upper classes?” A student from New Haven wondered whether Van Vechten had done his research properly because although “all the other characters are vividly negro, with vivid negro traits,” Mary “is too fine” to be black. Most remarkable was a letter from a onetime New Yorker. She questioned whether the book had been written after close research because the wealthy and sophisticated characters bore no relation to any black people she had ever encountered. And could it really be true, she wondered, that there are white people in New York “who go to Negro homes or receive them in their own homes as social equals?” This, more than any other facet of the novel, she found wholly implausible. At the end of her letter, the correspondent revealed herself to be a white woman married to a Chinese man. As she herself could confirm, interracial marriages as mentioned in Van Vechten’s book can work perfectly well, though she suspected the problems between blacks and whites may prove intractable.

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

*   *   *

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