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Introduction
- University of Georgia Press
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Introduction "In the early days of the Negro literary and artistic movement," wrote James Weldon Johnson of his friend Carl Van Vechten, "no one in the country did more to forward it than he accomplishedin frequent magazine articles and by his many personal efforts in behalf of individual Negro writers and artists."' When Johnson publishedthis tribute to Van Vechten in Along This Way in 1933, Van Vechten had just begun his important work in photography, a medium through which he would enlarge his contributions as a patron of African American culture. Indeed, most of the portraits published in this volume were decades away from conception and completion. Moreover, when Johnson published this tribute to VanVechten very few members of the African American intelligentsia held such a high opinion of what Johnson regarded as Van Vechten's unselfish commitment to the artists and writers of the New Negro movement, or Harlem Renaissance .2 The event that made African American intellectuals suspicious of Van Vechten's undisguised enthusiasm for African Americanculture, an enthusiasm Van Vechten shared with other American intellectuals of European descent, was the publication of Nigger Heaven (1926), his controversial novel of Harlem life. Although keenly aware of Van Vechten's efforts to promote African American culture , many African American intellectuals felt almost betrayed following the publication of Nigger Heaven, the first novel of Harlem life by a white author. It was the opinion of some of the most astute critics of African American culture that the novel celebrated only the most unsavory and unseemly aspects of African American life and, its flattering portrait of the black middle class notwithstanding, failed to suggest the diversity of African American life asit emergedwith all its force and beauty in Harlem. In the pages of the Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois expressed the opinion of many astonished readers in his review of Nigger Heaven: "I cannot for the life of me see in this work either sincerity or art, deep thought, or truthful industry. It seems to me that Mr. Van Vechten tried to do something bizarre and he certainly succeeded."3 Some years later, in his landmark study The Negro in American Fiction (1937), Sterling A. Brown offered an assessment that echoes the criticism of Du Bois and emphasizes what Brown terms VanVechten's predisposition for "exotic singularities": "Modern Negro life is not in Nigger Heaven; certain selected scenes to prove Negro primitivism are."4 Johnson's opinion of Van Vechten's achievement as a novelist was not altered by the furor ignited by Nigger Heaven: seven years after its publication, Johnson still regarded Van Vechten as "the most sophisticated of American novelists." In comparing Nigger Heaven with Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, also a novel Brown criticized for XV its emphasis upon "Negro primitivism," Johnson argued that Van Vechten's portrayal of Harlem life was more balanced than that of McKay: "[Home to Harlem] dealt with low levels of life, a lustier life, it is true, than the dissolute modes depicted by Mr. Van Vechten, but entirely unrelieved of any brighter lights; furthermore, McKay made no attempt to hold in check or disguise hisabidingcontempt for the Negro bourgeoisie.... From the first, my belief has held that Nigger Heaven is a fine novel." Johnson also argued that the severest critics of Nigger Heaven had never read the novel, since most "were estopped by the title."5 It is clear that such critics as Du Bois and Brown were offended not only by the portrayal of African American life but also by the racial slur that was part of the novel's title. These objections are certainly valid: asa white author writing about black life Van Vechten should have exhibited more tact. Van Vechten's regrettable choice of titles hasendowed his only novel of African American life with a prominence born of scandal. This unfortunate fact further distinguishes Nigger Heaven from other contemporaneous explorations of African American life by such authors as Eugene O'Neill, e. e. cummings,Waldo Frank, and Sherwood Anderson. If Van Vechten had chosen a less sensationaltitle, Nigger Heaven would have passed into the obscurity of his other novels,and hispatronage of African American culture would be more widely known and appreciated. Van Vechten's interest in African American culture started in the home of his parents , Amanda Fitch and Charles Duane Van Vechten, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His father was the cofounder of the Piney Woods School, a primary andsecondaryschool for African American children located in...