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2 “‘Et Que Cétait comme dans Le Livre’” —Wharton, the Harlem Renaissance, and All That Jazz I: “PLEBEIAN INTRUSIONS”AND JAZZAGE NEW YORK In 1927, the same year that she published Twilight Sleep, a searing indictment of New York society in the Jazz Age,Edith Wharton wrote to Galliard Lapsley about another novel of the 1920s city published the year before,Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926). Linking, as she often did, literary tastes to social developments (despite not having returned to the United States since early in the decade), Wharton told Lapsley that she found Van Vechten ’s work “nauseating” “rubbish” that made her “despair of the Republic.”1 While her response to Nigger Heaven is hardly surprising, what is a bit unexpected is that she was familiar with the novel at all, her conscientiousness about keeping up with American literary trends notwithstanding. But she apparently did not keep up enough to prepare herself for what she took to be Van Vechten’s accuracy in describing the cultural mecca du jour just north of Manhattan proper.“I thought the whole thing [Van Vechten’s novel] was made up,” Wharton confesses to Lapsley, “but the other day Mr. & Mme. Bourdet ...came to lunch,& they told me they had been to New York for the ‘premiére’ of the play there & had been taken by the ‘Jeunes’ into nigger society in Harlem ‘et que cétait comme dans le livre.’And now I must stop & be sick—.”Wharton’s incredulousness stems not just from Van Vechten’s novel itself—which she takes to be a bad enough sign of the state of her native city—but even more so from the existence of a “real” Harlem whose “nigger society” (probably a contradiction in terms for her) was popular among a range of whites, from Van Vechten to the Bourdets. As James de Jongh and other scholars have argued, the Harlem Renaissance “was taken to be Wharton, the Harlem Renaissance, and All That Jazz 51 a harbinger of change in who blacks were,” which, as Wharton’s letter indicates ,also portended a change in relations between blacks and whites.2 Made sick by Harlem culture and the fascination it held for some members of her own race, Wharton nonetheless felt compelled to respond to that fascination in Twilight Sleep, her take on what Langston Hughes calls “that fantastic period when Harlem was in vogue.”3 Although the novel is clearly a satire of the Van Vechtens of New York society, Twilight Sleep ironically shares some of the same concerns about the Harlem vogue exhibited in Nigger Heaven and, for that matter, in fiction by African American writers, especially Hughes’s “Rejuvenation through Joy” (1933), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928). Both Wharton’s novel and Passing, for instance, feature love triangles pitting Progressive Era, New Woman types against vampish flappers.Both novels as well as Nigger Heaven end in violence,and,most importantly,all four of these works examine cabarets , the popularity of jazz, and the interracial mingling that Harlem nightlife was thought to foster. Such comparable elements can further augment our understanding of how local culture influences literary production, as the question of how to interpret and portray Harlem in its relationship to white New York illustrates both the continued centrality of place in fiction and how chaotic and contested modern regional spaces were imagined to be. Van Vechten’s notion of Harlem as “Nigger Heaven”was based upon a metaphor of New York as a theater, whose gallery seats—the highest and worst seats—divided African Americas from whites in the orchestra below.4 What Hughes calls Van Vechten’s “unfortunate” title, then, expresses how New York combined disparate cultural traditions in its artistic life and,at the same time,practiced an unwritten segregation of the population that enjoyed that art.5 “The Mecca of the New Negro,” as several characters sarcastically call Harlem in Van Vechten’s novel, might be exotic fodder for the white novelist to praise (as Van Vechten did) or, as in Wharton’s case, to scorn. But the “gallery of this New York theater”also put African Americans on display,as Nigger Heaven’s Byron argues in what is clearly the authorial point of view: That’s what Harlem is. We sit in our places in the gallery of this New York theater and watch the white world sitting down below in the good seats in the...

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