Carl Van Vechten | Biography

Carl Van Vechten, one of America's most eclectic men of letters, published six novels, two works on cats, and eleven collections of his critical essays on the arts. Although comfortable enough as the youngest son of prosperous parents in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he was born and raised, Van Vechten yearned for more exciting and exotic influences even as a child. In his continual search for expressions of genius in the art world, Van Vechten never discovered a more satisfying place than Paris.

As a writer of novels suffused with civilized humor, Van Vechten concentrated, he said, on "treating extremely serious themes as frivolously as possible." His first novel, published in 1922, perfectly blends these aims, presenting a whimsical chronicle of the author's experiences in Paris, Florence, and New York high society, thinly disguised as the story of a dissatisfied young genius known by Van Vechten. Peter Whiffle His Life and Works has been acclaimed by critics as Van Vechten's best novel. Readers have especially enjoyed descriptions of prewar Paris seen through the eyes of a dazzled young man.

Van Vechten first visited Paris in 1908, motivated by a burning need to attend opera on the Continent. The young correspondent for the New York Times carried back to America the bright picture of Europe's city of enchantments he presented in Peter Whiffle: "The aroma of the chestnuts, the melting grey of the buildings, the legions of carriages and buses, filled with happy, chattering people, the glitter of electricity, all the mystic wonder of this enchanting night will always stay with me." In other passages Van Vechten portrays the young artists of Paris through such characters as Martha Baker, a masterful portrait artist reduced to painting society ladies for a living; Frederic Richards, a blond giant who sketches telling likenesses on napkins which are snapped up by his fans; and, of course, Peter Whiffle, a young Werther with the giddy abandon of the fin de siecle in his blood and the concentration span of a five-year-old. In short, Peter Whiffle admirably evokes a Paris filled with young Americans, independent and sometimes talented, who contributed so much to the myth that "Americans go to Paris when they die."

Experimenters in form and theme dominated those prewar years in France. Van Vechten's work, both as critic and novelist, was influenced by poets such as Joris Karl Huysmans and Arthur Rimbaud, painter Edgar Degas, and British writer on the Symbolists Arthur Symons. His conception of Paris, and life in general, was always fundamentally romantic. Except in a later work on life in New York's Harlem, Nigger Heaven (1926), his prose was rarely concerned with world affairs, poverty, or violence. Unlike those who experienced the war firsthand, such as Ford Madox Ford and John Dos Passos, Van Vechten echoed the bohemian glitter of prewar Paris in the brightly colored surfaces of his novels.

By inclination and training a critic, Van Vechten expanded the role to suit his taste for the new, the exotic, and the neglected. The critical essays he wrote while working for a number of newspapers in Chicago and later New York are most impressive when fueled with his enthusiasm for the excellence of such new talents as Waslaw Nijinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ethel Waters, all of whom he helped introduce to the public. He was the first major music critic to recognize jazz as a peculiarly American contribution to European musical tradition, an early pioneer for social equality for Negroes, and the first to study thoroughly the music of Spain, publishing a major collection of essays on the subject. Several fine essays on Paris also found their way into his collections, foremost among them an enchanting description of the bal musette.

When Van Vechten visited Paris in 1913 for the second time, with Fania Marinoff, his fiancee, it was expressly to see Diaghilev's ballet and to visit Gertrude Stein, about whom he had heard from Mabel Dodge, a mutual friend. Stein and Van Vechten, or that "young man of the soft much-pleated evening shirt" as she called him later in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), hit it off immediately. Van Vechten not only became her good friend, but he championed her work in America, helping her to place one of her earliest works, Tender Buttons (1914), with Donald Evan's Claire Marie Press. As Edward Lueders says, "Through the years when her work provoked either derision or polite bewilderment, Van Vechten ... kept it alive and in print." As an admirer of those artists whose writings were intentionally obscure or difficult, Van Vechten championed many literary causes, yet never with the love he accorded Stein. In 1930 Van Vechten again visited Paris. During this time Stein wrote in his autograph book: "Carl is here which is a pleasure we are here which is a pleasure, and we all like nougat." Upon her death in 1946 Van Vechten became Stein's literary executor.

After renouncing his own literary career except to write introductions to books on subjects that interested him, Van Vechten took up photography in 1932. Although the craft had been one of his many pastimes, his hobby now became a serious art. He photographed many well-known people of his age, among them Stein. He once boasted, "I've photographed everybody from Matisse to Isamu Noguchi."

Although Van Vechten visited Paris several times both before and after World War I, his primary arena was New York. While living there with Fania Marinoff, he sent friends to visit Stein and received visits from European celebrities and American expatriates in exchange. The fame of those Van Vechten encouraged and championed has far exceeded his own renown. He was not simply a frivolous child of the twenties whose novels and critical works can be viewed as artifacts of a past decade. Although he is often remembered solely as Gertrude Stein's American friend, or as the man who awakened interest in the later works of Herman Melville, his own writing deserves recognition.