Heart of Darkness - Harlem Renaissance - Nathan Huggins.pdf

3 Heart of Darkness The Negro, for sufficient reason, has felt himself outside American society. And white Americans, on the other hand, while intent on excluding Negroes from the mainstream of American life, were nevertheless dimly conscious of the black man within it. “Negroes,” as Henry May has s...

3 Heart of Darkness The Negro, for sufficient reason, has felt himself outside American society. And white Americans, on the other hand, while intent on excluding Negroes from the mainstream of American life, were nevertheless dimly conscious of the black man within it. “Negroes,” as Henry May has said, “like white Southerners, had to break into the dominant respectable culture of the day before they could break out of it.”1 Yet the black-white relationship has been symbiotic; blacks have been essential to white identity (and whites to blacks). This interdependence has been too profound to be measured by the simple meting out of respective contributions to American culture. Whites have needed blacks as they have needed the blackface minstrel mask—a guise of alter ego. And blacks—sensing this psychic dependency—have been all too willing to join in the charade, hiding behind that minstrel mask, appearing to be what white men wanted them to be, and finding pleasure in the deception which too often was a trick on themselves. The way that the Negro has been used by whites, and the way he has permitted himself to be used, exposes the deep moral tensions that have characterized American race relations. Harlem in the 1920s gave to this interdependency a sophistication and charm, but at its very core the game of masks remained the same. If black Harlem had been left alone, not been discovered by whites, the whole story might have been different. Chances are not so much prose and poetry (good as well as bad) would have been published. The sense of urgency to promote culture might have been less. And whatever the artistic output (bad and good), it might have been more honest. But black Harlem could not be left alone, for in a sense it was as much a white creation as it was black. “Harlem on My Mind,” in the 1920s or in the 1960s, brings into focus the necessary black-white association in American culture. At first, Harlem seems contradictory to the main thrusts of the American tradition. There was none of the austerity and anguished conscience of the Puritan fathers, none of the flighty idealism of the transcendentalists, nowhere Benjamin Franklin’s dicta—temperance, industry, frugality, chastity—nor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “self-reliance.” Indeed, one might look in vain for that secularized Protestant Ethic, Social Darwinism. These compulsive (some would say, anal) traits of American character seem absent from the black metropolis. For the popular mind, Harlem was associated with spiritual and emotional enthusiasm (some would say, soul), indulgence, play, passion, and lust. Where could these fit into the American past? On second thought, Harlem fits very well into that American tradition. There had of course always been antipodes to those pillars of American tradition. Puritanism contained arminian and pantheistic tendencies. And the same romanticism which generated transcendentalism could be subversive to decorum, emotional austerity, and rational intellect. The same sense of human volition that could sustain self-reliance opened itself to the tumultuous religious revival. The latter believed in the intuition. It was the stuff of the democratic faith because it was hospitable to the unschooled intellect. Innocence without artifice was an ultimate value. With such faith, the child could be father to the man. Black men, indeed, could be tutor to white. Furthermore, Harlem and black men had exotic potential in America, and the literature and personal accounts of Americans evidence a deep and abiding fascination with exotica. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, the fantasies of Edgar Allan Poe, the writings of Herman Melville, Ambrose Bierce, Lafcadio Hearn, James Branch Cabell, Joseph Hergesheimer. In certain views of the West, there was always something of the “heart of darkness.” Meriwether Lewis’ fascination with the West was highly seasoned with a mystical darkness; and his compulsion was not abated by his successful expedition into the Louisiana Territory. Or consider the way that China and the Orient have affected American imagination from before the clipper ships into our own time. Economic and political realities have often been distorted through our fantasy. Indeed, some aspects of America’s sense of mission can be explained by this continuous pull of the exotic. Americans have lived with their contraditions or, better, poles of tension. Should we be surprised that Melville and Emerson, both under pronounced Puritan influence, were drawn to exotica, the one to the South Seas, the other to the mysticism of Eastern religion? Will we pause at the notion that a people wedded to a work-save–build ethic would fantasy a black stereotype of indolence and appetite, and would find deep in their souls a thirst for the hot-blooded and impulsive life? The years following World War I seemed to encourage the obverse side of things. Or, as some saw it, to loose subterranean forces that had been held long in check. Nowhere was this more apparent than in sexual attitudes. The sexual life of the middle-class American of the late nineteenth century had been marked by denial and restraint. Practical as well as moralistic, the young go-getter could not get very far burdened with a large family. Idealized notions of the sexual union, however, made nonprocreative sex lustful and demeaning. The answer, the proper answer that is, had been delayed marriages and continence. The tension was great. Monument to the failure in practice was the unbroken success of brothels and “red-light” districts in every community of size in the country. But the failure produced revulsion. Thus, the revivalistic crusades against vice which closed those houses and dislodged the whores until backsliders started them up again.2 Changes which undermined the moral code came, however, in the early years of the twentieth century. Americans were moving away from rural areas; they were living in large cities, not small towns. Urban anonymity diffused community censure; family control was less immediate and important where children had greater mobility and earlier economic independence. But more jarring still to the traditional moral code was the popularization of Freudian psychology among young intellectuals and sophisticates. By the United States’s entry into World War I, Freudianism had become faddish in sophisticated circles. The Freud (or the psychology), however, that appeared in the popular press would not be recognized as that of the master. Much popularized psychology was heavily charged with naïve optimism which presumed the liberation of the soul from the strait-jacket of moralizing conventions.3 Freudianism had made popular the conceptions of the id and the super-ego. It could be understood too simply: the humananimal hungers which are forever seeking fulfillment are controlled by social forces made necessary by civilization, order, and decorum. Overburdened with conscience and guilt, civilized man indulged his passions always at the risk of neurosis or greater psychic disorders. By the same token, the man who was least touched by civilizing influences could be more immediate, more passionate, morehealthy. Civilizing artifice stripped away, men could dance, sing, and love with freedom and abandon. Seen through such lenses, looking at Harlem, it was easy to believe that Negroes had more fun. Another kind of primitivism played its part. Early in the century, European intellectuals, particularly the French, had discovered the sophistication of African culture. They saw forceful aesthetic statements in African art and music. The post-impressionists allowed the Africans to influence their sculpture and painting; this was particularly true of “cubism,” which like African art “analysed” form rather than reproduced it, emphasized design over representation. What the African craftsmen had accomplished was pure and essential. Could it not be their innocence of civilizing conventions and artifice, their simplicity—which made them primitive—that allowed them to be so pure? The war, too, had served to produce a disenchantment with civilization. The word “civilization,” itself, and other abstractions—loyalty, honor, truth, democracy, liberty—were war casualties because the war, especially for Americans, had been fought in terms of them. These values had lost currency in the postwar moral depression. It had been understood that the difference between the civilized man and the savage was less a matter of technology and materialism than it was of manners and style. It had been thought that the civilized man lived with inner checks which allowed him to create an environment of decorum and gentility. For the savage, on the other hand, natural forces were the only restraint to his inner freedom, so that his environment was chaotic, disorderly, and inhumane. Yet, mass warfare, the trenches, the gas, the weapons of the Great War exposed the ugly brutality that lurked beneath the surface of genteel manners. The most sensitive observers could see it all as a grand illusion. Was the sacrifice worth it—the surrender of the essential self to manners, decorum, and artifice—if the ultimate end of that civilization was a savagery beyond the ken of the most backward and primitive man? Postwar America was prepared to view the Negro from a different angle. Afro-Americans and Harlem could serve a new kind of white psychological need. Even if Harlem blacks had wanted it, there was little chance that they would have been left alone to shape and define their own identity. White Americans had identities of their own to find, and black men were too essential to them to be ignored. Men who sensed that they were slaves to moral codes, that they were cramped, and confined by guilt-producing norms which threatened to make them emotional cripples, found Harlem a tonic and a release. Harlem Negroes’ lives appeared immediate and honest. Everything they did—their music, their art, their dance—uncoiled deep inner tensions. Harlem seemed a cultural enclave that had magically survived the psychic fetters of Puritanism. How convenient! It was merely a taxi trip to the exotic for most white New Yorkers. In cabarets decorated with tropical and jungle motifs—some of them replicas of southern plantations—they heard jazz, that almost forbidden music. It was not merely that jazz was exotic, but that it was instinctive and abandoned, yet laughingly light and immediate—melody skipping atop inexorable driving rhythm. The downtown spectator tried to encompass the looseness and freedom of dance. Coffee, chocolate, and caramel-brown girls whose lithe long legs kicked high, bodies and hips rolling and tossing with insinuation; feline black men—dandies—whose intuitive grace, teased and flirted at the very edge of chaos, yet never lost aplomb. In the darkness and closeness, the music, infectious and unrelenting, drove on. Into its vortex white ladies and gentlemen were pulled, to dance the jungle dance. Heads swaying, rolling, jerking; hair flying free and wild; arms and legs pumping, kicking, thrusting—going wherever they, them–selves, would go—chasing the bass or drum or coronet; clenched eyes and teeth, staccato breath, sweat, sweat—bodies writhing and rolling with a drum and a beat as they might never with a woman or a man. It was a cheap trip. No safari! Daylight and a taxi ride rediscovered New York City, no tropic jungle. There had been thrill without danger. For these black savages were civilized—not head-hunters or cannibals—they would not run amok. At worst, if a man strayed from the known paths in search of the more forbidden exotic, he might get fleeced, but in a most “civilized” way. So, as if by magic, convention returned with little evidence that it had gone, except, perhaps, for the deeply insinuated music, the bodyremembered rhythm, and the subliminal tease; the self had been transported to a region of its own honesty which it could know again. How much was illusion? The white hunter in New York’s heart of darkness would not see (doubtless, would not recognize) his “savageprimitive” drummer and dancer, on sore, bunioned feet, picking their way on morning’s concrete to cold-water flats, to lose their rhythm-weary bodies in sexless sleep. Nor could he know the deep desolation of “savage” life that found only slight escape in alcohol, exotic fantasies in cocaine. Primitive, romantic Harlem was too simple a conception to survive the cold light of day. So, too, was the romantic view of Africa. Illusion though it was, it served the deep needs of those who nurtured it, provided some black men a positive image of themselves, and, most important, it brought downtown money uptown. What was looked for was found. Paul Morand, the French journalist, found Harlem the only relief from the relentless engine of America. Morand saw Negroes to be primitive men, but they had been ripped from their jungles and forever lost in the machine of the West. But Harlem allowed “these blacks [to] recover their identity and the quarter again becomes a place of exotic gaiety.” Blacks were a great relief to the traveler, because “they shatter the mechanical rhythm of America . . . people had forgotten that men can live without bank balances, without bath tubs.” Civilization, however, was always too close at hand. “Standing erect at the street-crossing, symbolic of white civilization, the policeman keeps his eye on this miniature Africa.” Perhaps unwittingly, Morand conjured up the image of the super-ego and the id when he wrote of the policemen on a Harlem corner. If “that policeman happened to disappear, Harlem would quickly revert to a Haiti, given over to voodoo and the rhetorical despotism of a plumed Soulouque.” 4 Nor was Morand alone. Carl G. Jung, whose psychology often implied racism, thought it inevitable that European Americans would be affected by the primitives in their midst. Indeed, that behavior which was peculiarly American, he thought, could be traced to African and American Indian influence.5 So viewed, Harlem was a means of soft rebellion for those who rejected the Babbittry and sterility of their lives, yet could not find within their familiar culture the genius to redefine themselves in more human and vital terms. The Negro was their subversive agent—his music, manners, and speech. Sheet music and phonograph records could be taken into the home (though the Negro could not) to undermine the sentimentality of conventional American popular music as well as the un-American formality of the standard classics. And the Negro’s speech, jazz speech—secretive, “in,” casual, and fluid—could be carried abroad to shatter the philistine with its impudence. Harlem was also therapy for deeper white needs. The most forbidden was most available: whiskey of course, but also cocaine and sex. The fantasy of Negro sexuality is fed by deep springs in the white psyche. Brown and black bodies—the color seemed lustier than white—full lips that quickened flesh to move, whole selves enlivened to blood-heat, seemed closer to the jungle source. Negroes were that essential self one some–how lost on the way to civility, ghosts of one’s primal nature whose very nearness could spark electric race-memory of pure sensation untouched by selfconsciousness and doubt. Fumbling self-doubt, groping for some hand known to the mysteries, seeking to untie the knots and let the welled-up passions flow; passion without ambivalence, love without guilt. Sensitive and tortured white men and women, whose psyches had somehow been wounded so that they cringed before their own white world, could find a strange comfort and peace among Negroes. It was not that Negro life was less brutal than their own; if anything it was more cruel. But whatever the wounds they brought with them, they were still more whole than the blacks from whom they sought succor. For white men were superior men. No matter how benevolent or genuine their love, they could not help but know that they were better than the Harlem Negroes they saw around them. Although they might damn and curse and spit epithets at a system that brutalized the beautiful blacks, they did so knowing that they were white. Their sense of wholeness could become more full as they watched the anguish of those more deeply hurt than they. White Americans got much out of blacks in Harlem, but there was a price. The money that fed the joints and cabarets, that kept Harlem flowing with bootleg liquor, that kept the successful pimps dressed and fed, that made Harlem jump, came from whites following a sex lust, or escape, or bindings for their inner wounds. Their money let Harlem Negroes, square and hip, live. Yet some whites paid more than money. Few were injured or lost their lives, but many discovered the narcotic that Harlem could be to the wounded soul. For while guilt might fly in the arms of a black whore, necessarily callous and indifferent, she could hardly have the gentle hands to make a man really whole. Sex, furtive and fugitive, could nurture another kind of guilt. Some whites, pulled into the black vortex, paid the ultimate price of their identity. They defected, became apostates; they became Negroes.6 Of all the whites to become associated with black Harlem in the 1920s, Carl Van Vechten was the undisputed prince. He had the reputation of knowing Harlem intimately, not only the places of entertainment but also the important people. He not only enjoyed Harlem, but he also catered to Harlemites by maintaining a kind of downtown salon to which Negroes were welcome as important guests. Indeed, he almost made a career of promoting, socially and professionally, Negro artists and performers. He counted James Weldon Johnson as one of his closest friends; Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Richmond Barthe, the sculptor, Ethel Waters, and Paul Robeson were befriended by him. He listened, without weariness or apparent condescension, to Negro writers and artists. He read and viewed their work, urged their interests before publishers and producers, made the important introductions, and, in that way, acted as a kind of midwife to the Harlem Renaissance. Even Langston Hughes, who had slight patience with patrons, welcomed Van Vechten’s friendship and supported and defended him against his Negro critics.7 Beyond this, Van Vechten was responsible for the gathering of Negro manuscript materials at Yale University, encouraging James Weldon Johnson to contribute the nucleus of the collection. Still, it is open to question how well, or in what way, Van Vechten served Harlem and the Negro.8 It is at least as important, however, to ask how Harlem and the Negro served him. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1880, Carl Van Vechten, whose productive life extended into the late 1950s, had a career that was not only long but varied. While his interests were always cultural, he exploited them in many different ways. Critic of music, art, drama, and literature, journalist, novelist, and photographer, he followed his mind and talent through successive changes of interest and fascination. And while at each point he demonstrated exquisite taste and potential, he never found anything wholly absorbing. Van Vechten was a dilettante in the best sense of the term, excelling where he had the talent, and pulling it off where he did not. Through all of the change, however, there was consistency. He was a collector of rare objets d’art and of rare people; rare, in both instances, because no one had stopped to see or think about them properly until Van Vechten showed them how. He enjoyed the discovery, and he enjoyed the display, as any collector would. He thrived in that thin, dangerous, and exhilarating atmosphere where one makes approving critical judgments about the very new and the very off-beat.9 It is remarkable how often his judgments—usually daring, seldom cautious—were right. As early as 1915 he recognized the revolution— predicted the influence—of Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. His championing of the modern in music extended to an early devotion to the blues, Clara and Bessie Smith. He wrote with discernment and appreciation about the modern dance of Isadora Duncan. He was responsible for getting Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons published (theirs was a lifelong friendship, and he became her literary executor). Wallace Stevens’ early poetry was published by Van Vechten. Elinor Wylie felt indebted to him. And in 1921 he took the occasion of reviewing a biography of Herman Melville to make the startling, for that time, statement that Moby Dick far surpassed all other American work and stood “with the great classics of all times, with the tragedies of the Greeks, with Don Quixote, with Dante’s Inferno, and with Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” 10 And, subsequently, Van Vechten went on to properly adjudge Melville’s minor novels, Mardi and Pierre, as being serious, powerful, and successful works of art. To this list should be added the Negro writers whom he helped. His publisher, Alfred Knopf, was persuaded to publish James Wel-don Johnson, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, and Chester Himes. Van Vechlen, more than Vachel Lindsay, was responsible for Langston Hughes’s first book of poems, Weary Blues. And, through Van Vechten, Hughes found his way to the pages of Vanity Fair. Of course, Van Vechten did support and promote writers who would not be recognized today, novels that enjoy the same oblivion as his own. It was more than a simple matter of literary judgment that caused his appreciation of writers like Edgar Saltus and Ronald Firbank, the British author; Firbank, at least, was a writer of consummate imagination and skill. Rather, here was further evidence of Van Vechten’s penchant for collecting the exotic and his fascination with decadence. For both Firbank’s and Saltus’ novels were fantasy creations. Firbank’s artificial worlds, which could seem more real than reality, contained the strong flavor of evil and decay that had thrilled the late Victorian readers. It is not surprising that, when Van Vechten concocted his own novels, they too would have the heavy odor of fin de siècle decadence. Reviewing Carl Van Vechten’s Blind Bow-Boy (1923), Edmund Wilson called it a “burlesque fiction of which we have all too little in America.” 11 Wilson noted how this novel and Ronald Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot harked back to the European literary decadence of the 1890s, specifically Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Conscious artificiality, aestheticism, cultivation of the perverse, and experiment (adopting evil as in the Black Mass) characterized this early movement. The American counterparts were mild; Henry F. May has called them “amoralists.” What was at work in the Blind Bow-Boy, as in the other Van Vechten novels, was a deliberate dislocation of conventional moral sensibilities, such that each novel, in some way, demanded of the reader some inversion of accepted values. Although Van Vechten’s novels, and his moral commentary in them, are serious, the tone is always light and comic. In Spider Boy (1928), and especially his last novel Parties (1930), a tragic element is heightened; Parties, especially, foreshadows some of the recent tragicomic art of the absurd. Indeed, throughout Van Vechten’s novels the absurd is given the face of reality, reality become absurd. There is a standard for human behavior, however. The ultimate and only truth is the self, properly expressed. The highest good is the indulgence of one’s mind and one’s sensations; the greatest fear is boredom. Carl Van Vechten’s fiction echoes late Victorian attitudes which have been brilliantly discussed by David Daiches in his Ewing Lectures in 1967.12 With much of the traditional basis of faith shattered by science and higher biblical criticism, many intellectuals embraced skepticism. Faith in purposeful order seemed no longer possible—ego without immortality meaningless—so they assumed attitudes which would justify action without purpose on the one hand or would allow them to retreat to aestheticism on the other. Daiches identifies W. E. Henley, A. E. Housman, and Rudyard Kipling as characterizing the late Victorian “mood of stoicism of heroic endurance for its own sake.” The game is more than the player of the game, And the ship is more than the crew! The aesthetes, like Oscar Wilde, lacking a world of external values, sought the intensification of experience for its own sake. “The aesthetic view of value,” says Daiches, “is entirely solip-sistic: all the aesthete seeks is to multiply and diversify inward personal experience.” Both the stoic activists and the aesthetes converted life into a game, the one sought meaning in the tests of sport and war that tried man and his endurance (the struggle had no meaning or purpose beyond itself) and the other reduced society and life to artifice and a game of wit. Carl Van Vechten was clearly an heir to the Wildean aesthetes. For him, too, purpose and meaning were to be found only in the personal experience, and the game itself was the ultimate value. Peter Whiffle, the subject of Van Vechten’s first novel, has spent a lifetime—a restless experiment in art, in sensation, and in literature— searching for a form with which to build a body of work.13 He is finally told that his conscious self is what holds him back. Rather than think and search, he should abandon thought so that his true self can come through. Ideally, he should be like the jazz musician who knows his instrument, knows his music, and knows himself on a level beneath thought. He should imitate the cat—the feline—in its self-cen–teredness. Campaspe Lorillard—who appears in The Blind Bow-Boy, Firecrackers (1925), and briefly in Nigger Heaven (1926)—achieved what Peter Whiffle could not: satisfying inward personal experience. Whatever was within was part of the self and needed celebration. “If it is there, in us, it can neither be virtue nor vice. It can only be ourselves. Whatever it is, if we admit that it belongs to us, we need it to complete ourselves.” Campaspe wanted to live herself, to be, what E. E. Cummings called, an IS; to make herself into a verb. The idea was to take oneself and life as they came, enjoying the entertainment they provided—develop one’s taste to its finest, and savor. Here too are the values of a dilettante and collector. Van Vechten created the character, Gareth Johns, who appears in several novels as a stand-in for himself. Johns, a young novelist, describes what makes a novel work: “. . . you must think of a group of people in terms of a packet of firecrackers. You ignite the first cracker and the flash fires the fuse of the second, and so on, until, after a series of crackling detonations, the whole bunch has exploded, and nothing survives but a few torn and scattered bits of paper, blackened with powder,” which can be taken not only as a scheme for entertaining oneself in a varied world, but also as the formula for a good party—a salon. The trick was to avoid boredom. Since spontaneity and extroversion were key values, there was a necessary dependence on the existence of an environment and people who could be catalyzed into enjoyment. Except for The Tattooed Countess (1924) and Spider Boy (1928), the characters in all of Van Vechten’s novels live in an exotic and artificial atmosphere. The artificiality defines the rules of the social games that are to be played. Some characters, like Campaspe Lorillard, master this life. Peter Whiffle, an “autobiography” which is really fiction, since it claims to be the subject’s life and works (Peter Whiffle has actually written nothing), was a game in itself. Van Vechten’s last novel, Parties (1930), is a crazy flight from boredom. Truly an example of the art of the absurd, it shows everyone on an endless round of parties. One drunk is succeeded by the next, so that the parties and the alcohol create the most artificial of worlds. The main characters—David and Rilda Westlake—have one brief, sober moment when they can talk to one another. This great chase and pointless round continues because the characters fear the emptiness that would remain if the parties were to stop. Parties is the logical end of Van Vechten’s fiction, the cul de sac where self-indulgence ends. Van Vechten’s most controversial novel, Nigger Heaven (1926), exemplified this inversion of values and fascination with the exotic. That work was a high point in Van Vechten’s long interest in Negroes. In his interview for the Columbia Oral History, Carl Van Vechten remembered that his interest in Negroes began very early. Even as a child, in Cedar Rapids, he remembered that his parents had insisted on the Negro servants being called Mr. and Mrs. In the first years of the new century, when Van Vechten was attending the University of Chicago, his broad cultural interests outside the University had brought him in touch with popular Negro performers. He had met Bert Williams, for instance. And his penchant for promoting Negro artists was foreshadowed. He recalled bringing Carita Day, who was “very beautiful and sang like an angel,” to his fraternity house; she was then performing with Ernest Hogan’s “Georgia Minstrels.” In 1902, black theatrical entertainment was considered a bit bawdy, so Van Vechten’s introduction of Carita Day to his fraternity brothers showed not only his characteristic desire to display and share his own taste, but also his lifelong posture of being intime with the underside of life. In 1912, even New York sophisticates and intellectuals were not accustomed to Negroes close up—except for servants perhaps—surely people did not invite them into their apartments. Carl Van Vechten persuaded Mable Dodge Luhan to allow two Negroes he had “discovered” to entertain at one of her parties. It was a thrill, of sorts. “While an appalling Negress danced before us in white stockings and black buttoned boots, the man strummed a banjo and sang an embarrassing song. They both leered and rolled their suggestive eyes and made me feel first hot and then cold, for I had never been so near this kind of thing before; but Carl rocked with laughter and little shrieks escaped him as he clapped his pretty hands.” 14 It was in 1922, after the publication of Peter Whiffle, that Van Vechten, to use his words, became “violently interested in Negroes.” “I would say violently,” he emphasized, “because it was almost an addiction.” Walter White had just published Fire in the Flint, and Van Vechten got to know him through Alfred Knopf. Walter White took him everywhere—parties, lunches, dinners—introducing him to everyone who mattered in Harlem. It was during this intensive induction into Harlem that he met James Weldon Johnson, who was to become his closest and most lasting Negro friend. In about two weeks, Van Vechten recalled, “I knew every educated person in Harlem. I knew them by the hundreds.” Paul Robeson, Rose McClendon, so many names and faces and talents; it was exhilarating. Nowhere but in Harlem could it have happened at the time. For nowhere were there so many Negroes, widely varying in talent and degrees of sophistication. Not in Chicago, and surely not in Cedar Rapids. Carl Van Vechten was drunk with the experience. “I remember once coming home almost jubilantly after a night in Harlem, and telling my wife in great glee that I hated a Negro, I’d found one I hated. And I felt that was my complete emancipation, because now I could select my friends and not have to know them all.” It was as if he had discovered an unknown country. It was not only the people but the life of Harlem that Van Vechten tasted —especially the night life. “I frequented night clubs a great deal. They were very popular at the time in New York—at least they were popular after I started going because I used to get other people to go and it became quite a rage for a year or two, to go to night clubs in Harlem.” He became, indeed, for those years and some years to come, the undisputed downtown authority on uptown night life. If you were white, even if you knew some Negroes, he was the man to see to put you in touch with the right person. It was a considerable privilege to be given a Van Vechten tour of the Harlem night; he knew the “authentic” places. He was always being asked to serve as a guide; it was expected. Doubtless, he delighted in the curator’s role. He recalled a considerable reluctance to guide William Faulkner, at Bennett Cerf’s request. He was mildly embarrassed by Faulkner’s persistent request of the musicians to play the “St. Louis Blues” when that song was out of fashion. It is hard to imagine, however, anyone knowing Carl Van Vechten and refusing or forgetting to ask him for a tour of Harlem. It would have been rude, like asking a performer not to do his act. Even foreigners knew where to turn to see the real Harlem. “Paul Morand,” Van Vechten remembers, “wrote me immediately when he got to New York . . . and the first thing he said to me—he wanted me to take him to Harlem. That was almost my fate, for ten years at least: taking people to Harlem.” Morand told his readers a different story. He had been guided away from such glitter as the Cotton Club, Sugar Cane, and the Second Part of the Night, and to the “African Room” of the Harlem Club, which featured murals by Aaron Douglas, and female impersonators. But Morand said that his guide was from Martinique. It may have seemed more authentic that way.15 The cultural interchange was two-way as far as Van Vechten was concerned. From 1923, he began to invite Negroes to his home and to the parties for which he became quite famous. “I don’t think I’ve given any parties since 1923, until the present, without asking several Negroes,” he said. Other white New York intellectuals copied Van Vechten’s parties, at least for those years that the “Negro was in vogue.” The idea was to compose parties of human ingredients that were electric and exciting, like setting off a string of firecrackers. Characteristically, Van Vechten prided himself on his singular taste in bringing just the right combination of people together. Late in his life, the charm still worked. When Isak Dinesen came to New York in 1958, she asked for, and got, a Van Vechten party. He remembered that the Danish noblewoman was particular: no “‘magazine or book editors, and not many authors—no ambassadors—and absolutely no merely social people. What I would prefer is to have you give me a Negro Party.’” He was, needless to say, happy to arrange it. He pleased himself, especially, with the fine touch of choosing as the countess’ escort that irrascible, Menckenesque journalist—become editor of the Pittsburgh Courier—George Schuyler. It was at one of the annual benefits for the NAACP that Van Vechten met Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Neither poet had published a book. Van Vechten was able to get Knopf to take Hughes’s Weary Blues (1925), which began a long publishing association of Hughes with Knopfs firm. Coun-tee Cullen, on the other hand, declined Van Vechten’s help, choosing his own way; in time, Harper published Color (1925). Van Vechten’s eagerness to help Negro writers and to broadcast Negro culture—as he understood it—knew no limit. He used his association with Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair, to get Hughes’s and other writers’ works in that magazine. And he wrote many feature articles for that magazine about Negroes: Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and others. “I wrote about these people as I would write about white people.” And he spread the message wide. “Everything I wrote about Negroes was published, and this did a lot towards establishing them with other editors because at that time it was very rare to have a story about a Negro even in the newspapers. And the magazines! . . .” He had almost been brought into a new life by the Negro and Harlem. He was thrilled by it all and devoted much of his energy to being a midwife, a patron, an interpreter of Negro culture. It “soon became obvious to me that I would write about these people, because my feelings about them were very strong.” The novel he wrote about them was Nigger Heaven. Most of the Negro commentary on that novel must have made them appear very insensitive, very ungrateful, to Van Vechten. Nigger Heaven tried to make two points. In the first place, it wanted the reader to know Harlem as a social microcosm of New York City. The reader had to reject definitions of the Negro as a type. There was a wide variety of characters, tastes, and values. You could witness as many kinds of social experiences—parties, intellectual salons, elegant dinners, brawls, and bashes—in Harlem as you could in the rest of New York. Harlem was no monolith, and the Negro fit no stereotype. Yet, at the same time, the reader was expected to accept the Negro as a natural primitive. Where he was true to himself, he was saved from civilized artificiality, and had preserved his mental health. Indeed, the novel seems to argue that the Negro “civilizes” himself at great cost. These rather contradictory assumptions are never reconciled. Present-day readers, however, should not underestimate the daring of the first point. Until the publication of Nigger Heaven, no generally read novel had chosen the Negro as its subject and abandoned the stereotype. It was not for many years after 1926 that the other popular medium, the movies, could dare to do the same. Whatever the novel’s faults then, it was a historic event. Nigger Heaven opens and closes with scenes of the “sporting” side of Harlem life, beginning with a street scene on Seventh Avenue and ending in a cabaret. Both focus on Anatole Longfellow, sometimes known as the Scarlet Creeper. He was sharp: He wore a tight-fitting suit of shepherd’s plaid which thoroughly revealed his lithe, sinewy figure to all who gazed upon him, and all gazed. A great diamond, or some less valuable stone which aped a diamond, glistened in his fuchsia cravat. The uppers of his highly polished tan boots were dovecoloured suede and the buttons were pale blue. His black hair was sleek under his straw hat, set at a jaunty angle. The reader is not informed how the Scarlet Creeper makes his way in life— pimp, male prostitute, narcotics pusher, numbers runner, bootlegger—but one or several of these occupations is implied. Whatever it is, he is good at it. His name, as well as his own words, tell us that he provides sexual interludes for women whose men are not watching. Almost as soon as he is introduced, he gets a prostitute to persuade him to let her pay for an evening’s sport. “Oh, Ah been full o’ prosperity dis evenin. Ah met an ofay wanted to change his luck. He gimme a tenner.” The Creeper assents, but maintains indifference through it all. “Ah sho’ will show you some lovin’ daddy, she promised.” The reader can only suppose that she did, because the Creeper does not appear again until the end of the book. But his very absence makes him hover over the central story. The plot tells the story of Mary Love, a prim, proper, and pretty Harlem librarian who falls tragically in love with a would-be writer, Byron Kasson. Byron has just graduated from The University of Pennsylvania, and while he has only published short things in Opportunity, he was told at college that he has promise. “I know what they meant, he added, pretty good for a coloured man.” Mary’s prudishness, sexual self-consciousness, and selfrestraint and Byron’s petulance and self-doubt, in time destroy whatever promise their love had. For Mary, unlike most of the Negroes she sees around her, takes love and sex quite seriously, which is not to say passionately. She expects, consistent with conventional canons of the moral order, to give herself—beyond passion or lust—to a man whom she can honor and live for. Until Byron, no man in Harlem has made the grade, especially not Randolph Pettijohn, the Bolito (numbers) King, who is relentless in pursuit of Mary as a “‘spectable ‘ooman” to wife. Pettijohn is definitely out of the question; it may be a class matter. He made it the wrong way: hot-dog stand to numbers to wealth. And he does not speak good English the way Mary and her friends do: “Ah ain’ got no eddication lak you, but Ah got money, plenty of et, an’ Ah got love.” That is no way to capture a girl like Mary. Byron, on the other hand, has the deft touch of innocence: Somehow, Miss Love . . . it was his turn to be embarrassed . . . you, stand out in a crowd like this. I couldn’t help liking you, even before I talked to you. I saw you first. . . diving. He smiled. That’s the only thing I do well. You do that well. Is it your profession? I haven’t any profession yet. I want to write, he went on. You’re a writer! Mary exclaimed with enthusiasm. As it turns out, Byron is not much of a writer. At least, he fails to get any commercial recognition. He fails despite Mary’s love (surrender?), devotion, and encouragement. The reader never knows whether or not Byron has real talent. Neither does Byron, as a matter of fact. Sensitive to racial discrimination, he can never distinguish between his own limitations and social oppression. His despair (a present-day reader might say self-hate) compels him into an orgiastic interlude with Lasca Sartoris, a totally selfindulgent woman of pleasure. Lasca disposes of Byron in her own time. Mary’s pride and Byron’s compounded humiliation frustrate any possibility of turning events and redeeming their love. Byron, at last, goes to the Black Venus Club intending to kill Randolph Pettijohn, who has taken Lasca Sartoris from him. But, alas! the fine hand of the Scarlet Creeper robs Byron of even this desperate assertion of manhood; the Creeper kills Pettijohn first. Byron is reduced to the ultimate futility of emptying his pistol into the corpse. “Mary, he cried aloud, I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” as the white hand of the law takes him away. Those reviewers who liked the book, and there were many, insisted that one of the novel’s strengths was its restraint from propaganda, from making sociological points. Edward Lued-ers, Van Vechten’s literary biographer, concurs in that judgment. In the sense that the novel does not probe very deeply into race relations (or racism) or engage the reader in any fundamental moral problem, this assessment is correct. But propaganda and sociological points the book makes, plenty of them. Carl Van Vechten goes to great lengths to show that besides the Scarlet Creepers and the Randolph Pettijohns, Harlem has some very cultured and intelligent people. Mary Love reads everything that is up-to–date and illuminates her bedroom with a single, framed reproduction of the “Mona Lisa.” Stravinsky is a part of her life, as well as the blues and spirituals—it is all culture. Mary quotes, from memory, poems by Wallace Stevens and, if that were not enough, about a page of “Melanctha” from Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. A dinner at the wealthy Aaron Sumners’ allows Van Vechten to employ his talent for description of rich furnishings and appointments. It also permits the famous author, Gareth Johns, to be openly astonished by the refinement of Negroes. They have read his books. They know Paris. One of the guests, Leon Cazique of the Haitian consulate, allows the conversation to drift into French, in which language Mary talks about an authentic African sculpture exhibit that she has arranged and, at another point in the novel, discusses Cocteau, Morand, and Proust with M. Cazique, who turns out to be something of an expert on modern French literature. In short, culture abounds. On reading Nigger Heaven, it is impossible to escape the feeling of being forcibly drawn to acknowledge these facts of Negro life, which have little, if anything, to do with the story. They are obiter dicta and no less propaganda because they condescend to the reader. The reader is also instructed about the “Blue Vein Set” and “passing.” The problem of Negroes’ being served in downtown restaurants or seated in the theaters is explained, as well as the advantages of light-skinned over dark-skinned Negroes in almost every walk of life, and other social differences among Negroes. Often, characters’ conversations are mere lengthy disquisitions on these subjects. The points of view are authentic enough, but they are designed to instruct the reader more than to develop the novel. Lest the reader draw racist generalizations from Byron Kasson’s failure, Van Vechten is careful to contrast it with the success, after long struggle with frustration, of Howard Allison, the fiance of Mary’s apartment mate. The presentation of statistics on the number of Negroes who pass every year is gratuitous. Often, speeches are no more than whimsical fantasies about how the “problem” will disappear, for instance through interbreeding. Van Vechten, throughout the novel, amuses himself by commenting upon the joke on the white world that “passing” is. All of this is propagandistic and sociological in petty ways. What is missing in the novel is a clear moral or intellectual perspective that might engage the reader in the dramatic issues of Negro life. The essential limitations that frustrate Mary and Byron are personal rather than societal. Racial problems form a backdrop for, indeed, inform everything they think or do, but it is character that makes them fail to be their best selves. They suffer, in fact, two varieties of the same malady. They are alienated from their ethno-spiritual roots but are unable to be anything else. Mary is plagued with her inability to be passionate, essential, primitive. Although spirituals or Clara Smith’s singing the blues can bring her to tears, she cannot abandon herself to men or to the Charleston until she meets Byron. She is said to be cold, and she has doubts about her priggishness and her persistent propriety. Her inhibitions keep her from what she really wants. When Lasca Sartoris charms Byron at a dance, Mary’s inner rage and jealousy make her want to kill Lasca. But she is reduced to priggish impotence by Lasca’s deft, feline verbal slashes. Mary is proper and polite; she has just witnessed two women fighting and screaming over a man and was revolted by the scene. Her impulse to act is throttled by her civility. Her inability to act on her feelings defeats her. Byron, on the other hand, is a very spoiled young man who has no nerve for the struggle forced on Harlem Negroes. He was educated in a white college, and he has lost all contact and sensitivity with Negro people. He despises the rich Negroes because he thinks them snobs. He resents the young, successful professionals and writers because they make his failure evident. He abhors the poor blacks because they shame him. Except for small checks from his father, he refuses help from anyone, turning down a good job when he learns that Mary had arranged it. His writing will be worth something, he is told by a magazine editor—a thinly disguised H. L. Mencken —if he observes what is around him, if he looks at Harlem life close up, and writes about it. Of course, Byron could not bear to look at Negroes, and he could not really see anything else. Rejected and defeated at every turn, he leaps into the arms of Lasca Sartoris. She uses him and rejects him after unmanning him. Present-day readers would be likely to interpret Mary’s and Byron’s problem as race-hate and self-hate. Neither of them can accommodate to the blackness they see around them and the suggestion of the blackness within them. Rejecting the Negro that they see, they must also deny themselves, which makes them less than whole. But Carl Van Vechten, true to his nineteenth-century influences, treats the matter differently. Both Mary and Byron, in characteristic ways, drift away from the primitive, natural, and intuitive springs of the race. Mary can only be abandoned in her dance as a result of her rage over Byron’s obvious receptivity to Lasca’s charms. Byron’s sexual passion turns to mere lust. And he lacks—as is made clear in a letter of advice from his father—that intuitive sense that has allowed the Negro to survive: the acceptance of the humble portion for the moment, the expectation of being helped and patronized, and the desire to be useful. In the end, neither Mary nor Byron can find the words, because of pride, to say what can reconcile them and avert tragedy. Pride is their fault. To Carl Van Vechten, their tragedy is that they have become civilized. Thus the epigraph of the novel is from Countee Cullen: All day long and all night through, One thing only must I do Quench my pride and cool my blood, Lest I perish in the flood. The sad thing about Nigger Heaven is that Mary and Byron, although the core of the novel, are not the most interesting characters. Mary is a sad little thing; one might feel sorry for her ineptitude; her problem is not fully enough understood to feel more than that. As librarian, Mary’s difficulties could as well be an occupational stereotype as anything, and Carl Van Vechten does not develop them enough for the reader to know. Byron, on the other hand, is too miserably weak; the reader is moved to disdain too quickly for any sense of tragedy to develop. Perhaps excepting Peter Whiffle, all of Van Vechten’s strong characters have been women, and emasculating women at that. Here, again, in this novel, the truly strong character is Lasca Sartoris. She overwhelms everything. The Scarlet Creeper, also, whose role is limited in the novel, is deftly drawn. Briefly introduced in the Prologue, making only one appearance before the concluding pages, the Scarlet Creeper is like a cocked pistol throughout the story. The reader is not disappointed: the pistol goes off; the Scarlet Creeper shoots Randolph Pettijohn and then disappears as the novel ends. Lasca Sartoris is a true Van Vechten female character. Like Campaspe Lorillard, she has all the right ingredients: self-cen–teredness, selfindulgence, moral inversion, indifference, and abhorrence of boredom. “She has found what she had wanted by wanting what she could get, and then always demanding more, more, until now the world poured its gifts into her bewitching lap.” That is Byron’s assessment. Her apartment, like herself, is richly and sumptuously decadent. Those chapters she shares with Byron are the most lively in the book. They go to the Winter Palace, get high on champagne and cocaine. They leave at six in the morning and go to a Black Mass: It’s a garden where champagne flows from all the fountains and the paths are made of happy dust and the perfume of the poppies is opiim. Kiss me! I’d like to be cruel to you! she cried after she had momentarily slaked her thirst. I’d like to cut your heart out! Cut it out, Lasca, my own! It belongs to you! I’d like to bruise you! Lasca, adorable! I’d like to gash you with a knife! Lasca! Lasca! Beat you with a whip! Lasca! She drew her pointed nails across the back of his hand. The flesh came off in ribbons. My baby! My baby! she sobbed, binding his bleeding hand with her handkerchief, kissing his lips. The Black Mass—they descended to a ring of hell: They stood in a circular hall entirely hung in vermilion velvet; even the ceiling was draped in this fiery colour. . . . The floor was of translucent glass, and through this clouds of light flowed,. now orange, now deep purple, now flaming like molten lava, now rolling sea-waves of green. An invisible band . . . began to perform wild music, music that moaned and lacerated one’s breast with brazen claws of tone, shrieking, tortured music from the depths of hell. And now the hall became peopled . . . men and women with weary faces, faces tired of passion and pleasure. Were these faces of dead prostitutes and murderers? Pleasure seekers from the cold slabs of the morgue? Into the awful scene of evil and decay a girl suddenly stood, bathed in purple and green light, mist and shadow. A pipe sounded, as if far away, accompanied by a faint reverberation of tom-tom. A bell in the distance tinkled, and the cloak fell to the floor. The girl—she could have been no more than sixteen—stood entirely nude. She was pure black, with savage African features, thick lips, bushy hair which hovered about her face like a lanate halo, while her eyes rolled back so far that only the whites were visible. And she began to perform her evil rites . . . Byron groaned and hid his face in his hands. He could hear Lasca emitting little clucks of amazement. Standing before him, she protected him from the horror . . . while she watched. When he looked again, the light on the body was purple; the body was purple. The girl lifted a knife. . . . A woman shrieked. The knife . . . Then follows a lacuna heavy with meaning. The story resumes three days later as Byron awakens at four in the afternoon in Lasca’s bed. Avoiding objective description, Van Vechten employs the period’s style of heavily suggestive language to imply the sensuality, the depravity of their lust: There were rages, succeeded by tumultuous passions; there were peaceful interludes; there were hours devoted to satisfying capricious desires, rhythmical amours to music, cruel and painful pastimes; there were the artificial paradises. Then, late one afternoon, Byron awakened to find himself alone. After reading these passages, Mary Love and her “New Negro” intellectuals pale for the reader as well as for Byron Kasson. The Scarlet Creeper, his masterful criminality (almost, but a not fully developed “MacHeath”); Lasca, the description of her environment, her “decor,” the suggestions of her lust; the Black Mass—it is in these particulars that the novel is most effective. After all, it was there that Van Vechten’s heart had always been. No wonder, considering Van Vechten’s life and style, that no matter how hard he tried, Mary Love, Byron Kasson, and all of the goody-good, respectable Negroes would seem bloodless next to his imps of Satan. And the message is strong; although perverted, the Creeper and Lasca are permanent, endurable, and perversely heroic because they have accepted without qualification their primitive and predatory natures-civilization, respectability, propriety, manners, and decorum are for others, for “niggers.” Try as he might to illustrate that Negroes were much like other people, Van Vechten’s belief in their essential primitivism makes him prove something else. It stands to reason, after all. Had he thought Negroes were like white people, he would not have adopted Harlem the way he did. His compulsion to be fair to the race while he exploited the exotic and decadent aspects of Harlem caused the novel to founder. The title of this novel, coming from a known friend of the Negro, was startling—no doubt intentionally so. Most of the reviewers who objected to the book—white and black—objected in some way to the title. That was unfortunate because Van Vechten and his admirers defended the novel by defending the title, ignoring the serious defects of the novel itself. There had been a precedent. Edward Sheldon wrote a play—The Niggers—which appeared on Broadway in 1909, and took a sympathetic (to Negroes) view of the Reconstruction period in the South. A few years before he published his novel, Van Vechten succeeded in getting Ronald Firbank to change the title of his Sorrow in Sunlight to Prancing Nigger in the American edition. Van Vechten insisted that in his own novel the title was used ironically. It was a play on the geography of Manhattan Island, where Harlem sits like a segregated balcony over the white “orchestra” of downtown New York. Within the novel, the term is used variously. The prostitute, who with the Scarlet Creeper begins the novel, apostrophes “Nigger Heaven!” as she sees the joy around her and contemplates the pleasure before her in the Creeper’s arms. In the too-frequent “race” discussions, characters refer to Harlem as the “Mecca of the New Negro,” and “Nigger Heaven” with a tone of sarcasm, but the irony is unclear. Byron Kasson, at a point of great despair, defeat, and self–(race–) hatred, begins a long apostrophe: “Nigger Heaven! Byron moaned. Nigger Heaven! That’s what Harlem is.” Byron plays out that figure of speech by imagining the whites in the “orchestra” below. “It doesn’t seem to occur to them either, he went on fiercely, that we sit above them, that we can drop things down on them and crush them, that we can swoop down from this Nigger Heaven and take their seats. No, they have no fear of that! Harlem! The Mecca of the New Negro! My God!” It is impossible to know from the novel what Van Vechten meant by all of this. Given Byron’s character and the context of his speech, Edward Lueders is not justified in reading here an “authentic prophecy.” 16 Criticism of the book by blacks apparently stung Van Vechten, because much of his interview for the Columbia Oral History was taken up with a discussion of the novel; and most of that with the title. He meant the title ironically, he reiterated, and only “emancipated people” like George Schuyler, James Weldon Johnson, Mrs. Alice Dunbar, and Langston Hughes understood that. Other Negro journalists complained about the title and charged that the author had exploited his friends in Harlem to get material for this highly commercial and sensational book. The problem was irony, “and irony,” he at last told his interviewer, “is not anything that most Negroes understand, especially the ones who write for the papers.” And Langston Hughes joined him in that judgment.17 Unfortunately, most of those who accepted Van Vechten’s view were too close to him to make free judgments. Van Vechten had both Hughes and Johnson read the manuscript for authenticity, and he discussed with these men his intentions. The same, too, can be said for Edward Lueders, who had the privilege of interviews with the author as well as correspondence. Surely, Van Vechten could be convincing about his intentions. The problem is, however, that they are not clear in the novel, where it counts. It is not irony that the reader, then or now, comes away with. Sensation is a better word. The title, the subject, and Van Vechten’s handling of the material evoked the sensational. Nor should that be surprising. Carita Day, Arnold Schoenberg, Ronald Firbank, Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, Campaspe Lorillard, Lasca Sartoris, Harlem itself, his Negroes, his parties—all had a sensational ingredient, and that is what had attracted Van Vechten to begin with. Nor should one ignore the sensual element in the sensational. And when the white man with the reputation for sensuality, and for knowing Harlem and Negroes best, wrote a book from the “inside,” there should have been little doubt what was looked for and what was found. The book sold 100,–000 copies almost immediately. It was its pretense to be something else that made the book seem false. When all of the hysteria had filtered out, it was this central problem that caused intelligent critics to reject the book—men as disparate as D. H. Lawrence and W. E. B. DuBois. D. H. Lawrence failed to see reality or honesty in the book, describing Harlem, he said, in “the daytime, at least, the place aches with dismalness and a