The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America - Softcover

9780374535148: The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America
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A revealing biography of the influential and controversial cultural titan who embodied an era

The Tastemaker explores the many lives of Carl Van Vechten, the most influential cultural impresario of the early twentieth century: a patron and dealmaker of the Harlem Renaissance, a photographer who captured the era's icons, and a novelist who created some of the Jazz Age's most salacious stories. A close confidant of Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Knopfs, Van Vechten frolicked in the 1920s Manhattan demimonde, finding himself in Harlem's jazz clubs, Hell's Kitchen's speakeasies, and Greenwich Village's underground gay scene. New York City was a hotbed of vice as well as creativity, and Van Vechten was at the center of it all.Edward White's biography―the first comprehensive biography of Carl Van Vechten in nearly half a century, and the first to fully explore Van Vechten's tangled relationship to race and sexuality―depicts a controversial figure who defined an age. Embodying many of the contradictions of modern America, Van Vechten was a devoted husband with a coterie of boys by his side, a supporter of difficult art who also loved lowbrow entertainment, and a promoter of the Harlem Renaissance whose bestselling novel―and especially its title―infuriated many of the same African-American artists he championed. Van Vechten's defense of what many Americans considered bad taste―modernist literature, African-American culture, and sexual self-expression―created a popular appetite for these quintessential elements of American art. The Tastemaker encompasses its subject's private fears and longings, as well as Manhattan's raucous, taboo-busting social scene of which he was such a central part. It is a remarkable portrait of a man whose brave journeys across boundaries of race, sexuality, and taste helped make America fully modern.

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About the Author:
Edward White studied European and American history at Mansfield College, Oxford, and Goldsmiths College, London. Since 2005 he has worked in the British television industry, including two years at the BBC, devising programs in its arts and history departments. He is a contributor to The Times Literary Supplement. The Tastemaker is his first book. White lives in London.
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ONE
 

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Yesterday
 
From the beginning of their adventure in America, the Van Vechtens did things their way—with force, panache, and little regard for what others might think. The trend started with Teunis Dircksz Van Vechten, a twenty-eight-year-old farmer, who sailed with his wife and infant son from the Netherlands to the shores of the New World in the summer of 1638. Along with a dozen other farmers and merchants, the family set out from the tiny Dutch island of Texel aboard the Arms of Norway on May 12 and arrived in New Amsterdam nearly three months later on August 4 ready to transform the fecund, open land before them into their fortune.
After two years working as a laborer for another colonist, Teunis acquired the tenancy of a farm on the Rensselaerswijck patroonship, a vast manorial estate given by the West India Company to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a diamond merchant from Amsterdam. Teunis was soon making a fine living for himself and his family, amassing enough money to buy a 50 percent stake in a nearby brewery. Like many Dutch pioneers of the time, the Van Vechtens were pulled toward America rather than pushed from Europe. It was the promise of prosperity and the prospect of adventure, not the need for sanctuary from religious persecution or crushing tyranny, that tempted them across the ocean. For that very reason, some found life on Rensselaerswijck hugely frustrating, as the impositions of the colony’s rulers often seemed more exacting than those of the royal government back home. Yet few of the colonists made such a fuss as Teunis, who bridled at any attempt to impinge on his liberty.
If the patroonship records can be believed, Teunis was a hothead, an old-fashioned brawler, who liked to settle disagreements with his sharp tongue and sizable fists. But he was also a man of strong principle, whose lack of deference frequently enraged authorities. In 1651 he was prosecuted for publicly humiliating one official—the director of the patroonship no less—calling him “an old grey thief and a rascal.” More serious, he threatened to stab the Reverend Johannes Megapolensis with a knife; punishment, he said, for being “an informer.” Perhaps it had been Megapolensis who let slip that Teunis was selling produce at a price not sanctioned by the patroonship, a crime for which he received a further prosecution. There were other moments when the disdain for Old World bondage was less about taking a stand and more about indulging a wicked sense of humor. In September 1648, Teunis ordered a young employee at his brewery to fire a musket four times during the middle of the night, seemingly for the amusement of watching Jean Labatie, the self-important Frenchman in charge of the nearby Fort Orange, panicked into action.
These acts of rebellion were coupled with plenty of arduous endeavor. The Van Vechtens thrived in the New World, and by 1685 their coffers had grown sufficiently for Teunis’s grandson Michael to buy a plot of around nine hundred acres in the vicinity of the Raritan River in New Jersey, where he built a large family home. Nearly a century later, the house played a crucial role in the Revolutionary War, when it was willingly loaned by its owner, Derrick Van Vechten, to Quartermaster Nathanael Greene during the Middlebrook campaign against the British in the winter of 1778–79. Derrick Van Vechten had a reputation for throwing first-rate entertainments, and those he gave for Greene did not disappoint. At one soiree a high-spirited George Washington took a shine to the quartermaster’s famously beautiful wife. “His Excellency and Mrs. Greene danced upwards of three hours without once sitting down,” reported Greene, “a pretty little frisk.” A lively, star-studded party in support of a revolutionary cause; Van Vechtens past and future would have been proud.
*   *   *
In the eight decades that elapsed after the Revolutionary War, the scope of American civilization drifted decisively westward, and at least one branch of the Van Vechten family drifted with it. By the time Carl Van Vechten was born in 1880, the family name was fast becoming one of the most important in the burgeoning state of Iowa.
In 1877 a fire razed the general store Van Vechten’s parents, Charles and Ada, ran in Minneapolis, so they moved south to Cedar Rapids, where Charles’s brother Giles had recently opened a bank. Known as the Parlor City because of its reputation for being a well-ordered and respectable community, Cedar Rapids was booming. Although founded in the 1840s, its real genesis moment came in 1859, when the arrival of the railroad transformed what had been a small town of just a few hundred people into an important player in the industrialization of Iowa farming. By the 1870s large grain-processing and meatpacking firms, including Quaker Oats in 1873, had set up in Cedar Rapids, transporting produce to Chicago and beyond in enormous quantities. The town boasted around ten thousand inhabitants when Charles and Ada arrived with the children; by the end of the century it was more than double that figure, making it one of the largest settlements in Iowa and one of the fastest-growing communities in the Midwest.
For industrious men like the Van Vechten brothers, Cedar Rapids held glittering prospects. After working as the cashier in his brother’s bank for seven years, Charles struck out on a lucrative career in the insurance industry, an occupation he maintained well into his eighties. Throughout that time he strived hard to maintain a leading presence in the community. The fabric of civic life in Cedar Rapids was sewn together by voluntary associations of spirited individuals committed to the service of God and country, and Charles was involved in many of them; he sat as chairman of the cabinet at the First Universalist Church of Cedar Rapids and was a Mason, a Rotarian, and a member of the Knights Templar. The journalist William Shirer grew up in the Cedar Rapids of the early twentieth century and described it as “churchy, Republican, wholesome,” a pithy but accurate sketch of the ordered and genteel society that the elder Van Vechtens helped form.
Carl’s arrival into the world came as something of a surprise to his parents. Born on June 17, 1880, he was by far the youngest of Charles and Ada’s three children. Emma, their daughter, was thirteen when Carl was born; their son Ralph, already a strapping specimen of all-American masculinity, was nearly eighteen. Just entering middle age and assuming their years of child rearing were fast coming to an end, Van Vechten’s parents were, he said, “very surprised to have a visit from the stork,” though the new baby was greeted joyously by the entire family.
Ada was besotted with her little boy, whom she regarded as a gift from the heavens. At thirty-nine she savored the pleasures of motherhood that she had been too anxious and inexperienced to enjoy with her first children. She set about recording every moment of Carl’s young life as best she could in a journal solely devoted to his first three years. She studied him diligently as his personality developed, noting his burgeoning talents, the flourishing of his soft, cherubic features, and the joy that he brought her. “My little boy’s birthday,” her entry for June 17, 1882, reads. “Two years old, and oh what happy years they have been.” His specialness to Ada peeks through the numerous photographs she had taken of him too. At eighteen months she sat him alone before the camera, posed on a crushed velvet armchair, wearing a black dress with a white lace collar, wisps of his long hair falling over his ears. He was a gorgeous, fat-cheeked baby with brown eyes like little pools of melted chocolate; it is easy to see why Ada found him so adorable. This was one of the first of many photographs that Ada arranged for Carl throughout his childhood, and it was she who introduced him to the camera’s unique ability to extract and preserve beauty.
Other members of the family joined Ada in her efforts to make Carl feel precious and worthy of singular attention. During her pregnancy Ada’s brother Charlie made a grand sentimental gesture, promising to write a special letter to the new baby every Christmas until he turned twenty-one. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and at first Charlie wrote charming letters about all the marvelous things that Santa might bring and how lucky Carl was to have been born a beautiful baby boy in the United States at a time of peace and plenty. But each year it became harder to find homespun wisdom worth committing to paper. Fearful that Carl might feel hurt or rejected, Ada could not bear the idea that her brother should stop the letters, so Charlie was compelled to continue the tradition. By the boy’s ninth Christmas, Charlie said, the chore was enough to make a man “tear wildly at his hair and roll his eyes upward in a pitiful way.”
Among them, Ada, Charles, and the rest of the family spun around Carl a silken cocoon of genteel comfort. The family home, an elegant but restrained example of the Queen Anne architectural style so fashionable among the wealthy middle class in the late nineteenth century, had been gifted to Van Vechten’s parents by Uncle Giles, whose success in banking had helped him build a considerable fortune. Giles’s own house was a grand white-brick building with turrets, tall chimneys, and enormous bay windows “surrounded by great oak trees, their spreading branches shading the well-kept lawn.” In his 1924 novel, The Tattooed Countess, which drew upon his childhood for its setting, Van Vechten evoked Giles’s house as a midwestern temple to an age of prosperity, temperance, and moral certainty. Charles never matched his brother’s tremendous wealth—worth millions in today’s money—but a combination of astute investment and hard work ensured that he and Ada always kept a beautifully furnished home, maintained by a retinue of three or four domestic servants, and Carl of course was treated to the finest of everything.
The family began each day at 7:30 a.m. sharp with a vast hourlong breakfast, the sort of honest, gargantuan meal that drove back the frontier and furred up the arteries all at once. Bowls of fresh fruit and oatmeal preceded a main course of sausages, bacon, eggs, fried steaks, and potatoes in cream, with pancakes, buckwheat, corn, and doughnuts thrown in for good measure, all augmented by pots of steaming tea and coffee and thick milk delivered each morning fresh from the udders of Uncle Giles’s Jersey cow. The surrounding Iowan countryside offered a rural paradise for curious children. Immediately outside the town center there was a scraggy patchwork of mills, silos, grain elevators, and the other grimy apparatus of Cedar Rapids’s fortune. But beyond that no suburbs, only the Corn Belt: fields and open meadows, lightly pocked by a scattering of small farmsteads among a flourish of brooks, maples, willows, and wildflowers. Van Vechten’s connection to this landscape was forged early and remained his whole life. In its rolling, twisting hectares of green and pale yellows that shimmered and rippled in the summer breeze like an incoming tide he saw a deeply undervalued beauty that was “essentially American” and affected in him “a kind of inspiration associated with great rivers, high mountains, or that mighty monster, Ocean,” that others revered in more overtly dramatic locations. Old family photographs, some taken by Van Vechten himself, capture long summer days at Indian Creek, five or so miles from town, where he spent hours observing the wildlife, swimming in the warm, glistening waters, and camping out with his brother.
It would be hard to imagine a more indulged child in the state of Iowa. Van Vechten admitted he had probably been spoiled rotten as a boy. As the years passed, the material comforts and Ada’s swaddling adoration fostered a self-centered and importunate nature within Carl. His idea of playing with other children was bossing them around, and delayed gratification was an entirely alien concept to him. “I hated interference, objections of any kind,” Van Vechten recalled of his childhood, though he could have easily been talking about his adult self. He made that observation in 1921 while looking at a deep scar that ran across his palm, a legacy of the time he grabbed a kitchen knife by the blade from his mother’s hand, “in a fury at not compelling her immediate attention.”
Perhaps the impatience and egotism that caused his livid outbursts and squawking tantrums are not uncommon in children. The obsessiveness that began to exhibit itself around the age of twelve almost certainly is. It was at this time, during vacations at Uncle Charlie’s house in Michigan, that Van Vechten’s cousin Roy introduced him to collecting birds’ eggs. Roy was a studious young man, a bespectacled teenage oologist whose idea of a fun weekend was shinning up trees to study the nesting patterns of the eastern meadowlark. Taking just one egg from a nest, he maintained, was pointless. Only by taking a clutch—that is, the entire contents of a nest—could one hope to learn anything of value. Back home in Cedar Rapids, Van Vechten followed Roy’s lead, not out of intellectual curiosity but rather to satisfy the acquisitiveness that was a fundamental part of his personality. He recalled that “my mother, picturing the despair of the mother bird, begged me to leave at least one egg in each nest.” He never did. Often the need to own and control the beautiful things in his orbit was so insistent it overruled all appeals to both heart and head, even when it risked hurting those who loved him the most.
A half century of ardent collecting began with those clutches of eggs. It was, ironically, a birdlike quality, a magpie’s irresistible attraction to objects of ornament and beauty. Long after the ardor for birds had wilted, bangles and rings, objets d’art, precious first editions, rare recordings, silk shirts, and brightly colored neckties in their hundreds all became collecting fixations of his. Anything elaborate and exquisite, anything new or novel he scooped into his embrace, as man and boy. Even when he could not justify the expense, he spent extravagantly on the latest things: a Victrola phonograph; a sharp new suit; a sleek portable typewriter. During one of his trips to Europe just prior to the First World War, he procured an object apparently unfamiliar to Americans at the time, a timepiece that instead of resting in a pocket was attached to a dainty leather bracelet and worn around the wrist. Returning from another overseas vacation some years later, he disembarked his ship surrounded by porters hauling his twenty-five pieces of luggage onto the dockside, the spoils of a frenzied shopping tour of the markets and department stores of Paris and London.
Guided by the same acquisitiveness, as a child he gathered a peculiar menagerie of pets: pigeons, thrushes, field mice, canaries, pigs, turtles, chameleons, and, so he claimed as an adult, even an alligator all passed through his protection at one point or another. None of them survived long, and when they died, he was never very bothered. In fact, even the deaths of family members troubled him relatively little as a boy. The passing of his grandmothers, both of whom lived in Cedar Rapids, one of them in his home, caused him no great anguish, and the same was seemingly true when his cousin Roy died tragically young and in blackly ironic circumstances, in an elevator accident in a hospital where he was receiving treatment for an illness. It was not until the age of twenty-five when his mother died that Van Vechten endured the common experiences of bereavement. “Death, up to that time, had meant very little to me,” he admitted. “People died,...

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