The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections From the Daybooks 1922-1930 (review)

Carl Van Vechten has long been the favorite whipping boy of the Harlem Renaissance, largely because of the persistent scholarly presumption that his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven marketed and promoted primitivism, thereby representing white cultural appropriation at its worst. No doubt Van Vechten himself contributed to this reputation through the flippant comments by which, in later years, he recalled his participation in the "new Negro" movement. Nevertheless, many complicated interactions between Van Vechten and Harlem's luminaries have long gone unexamined because a too-easy acceptance of the simplistic view dominates the scholarship. Indeed, Van Vechten's participation in the evolution of several literary, musical and artistic trends has long been underappreciated, a fact illustrated richly in The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections From the Daybooks 1922-1930.

These daybooks provide a wealth of primary material for the study of American modernism's evolution. As editor Bruce Kellner, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Millersville University, rightly notes in his introduction, "Even a partial list of Van Vechten's acquaintances suggests the value of the daybooks to future biographers and historians in supplying dates for the associations and alliances of many friends and enemies in a long list of luminaries of the early twentieth century" (xi). Kellner provides, in that essay's single endnote, a list of examples whose breadth and vivacity is stunning—a partial list that ranges from Charlie Chaplin to Ellen Glasgow to James Weldon Johnson to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (xvii). A certain disjointedness notwithstanding, these daybooks have a fascinating "You are there" quality to them, and an undeniably titillating appeal. Follow the torrid affairs of actress Mary Ellis as she moves from Edwin Knopf to George Gershwin to Basil Sidney; note how the tensions in Paul and Essie Robeson's marriage unfold one evening at dinner, during "a remarkable conversation in which Essie reiterates her desire to completely possess Paul & Paul expresses his resentment of this" (91); listen as Eugene O'Neill discusses his new play, Mourning Becomes Electra (294); watch the "remarkable performance" of oral sex offered by Ralph Barton and Carlotta Monterey (97); see Countee Cullen do the Charleston!

Some of the events recorded here quietly and unobtrusively document seminal developments in American literature and music, thereby revealing Van Vechten's heretofore unacknowledged authority as cultural arbiter. "Believes in 'mechanistic' music as opposed to 'rhapsodic,'" Van Vechten comments as a young George Anthiel plays his early compositions in a Manhattan living room (6). We meet George Gershwin at a cocktail party where Van Vechten divides his time "between the butler's pantry—where . . . the Irish Butler mixes cocktails & the piano where George Gershwin plays his 'Swanee' & 'I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise'" (14). These daybooks document Van Vechten's championing of Herman Melville at a time when his work was virtually forgotten, and they remind us that Van Vechten first brought Wallace Stevens's work to the attention of Alfred Knopf, who published Harmonium at his friend's behest. Van Vechten was also an early fan of Henry Blake Fuller; he owned a rare first edition of Bertram Cope's Year.

In addition to the catalogue of parties attended, people met, speakeasies visited and gin drunk, Van Vechten records his waking and sleeping hours, the weather, his own health and occasionally, that of his wife Fania Marinoff. He documents the decline and death of his father, brother, and cat, details his trips to Taos, Hollywood, Richmond, New England, and Europe; we read about his shopping sprees, his reading, his hangovers, his meals, and his and Fania's rotating cast of maids and cooks. These daybooks document a man who truly contains multitudes, a man whose personal shortcomings are occasionally on naked display. He writes, for example, "I get drunk & get rough with Marinoff & she goes upstairs to sleep in Knopf apartment" (71). His marriage to Marinoff lasted fifty years, and Van Vechten's abuse...