Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance (review)

While Carl Van Vechten was not the only white person involved with the Harlem Renaissance, he was certainly the most notorious. Emily Bernard's illuminating new book looks at Van Vechten's passion for blackness as a window onto "the essential contradiction" in which racial sameness and racial difference messily overlap. This is an original and provocative conceit, a progressive revision of scholars who, when they deal with Van Vechten at all, address "the simplistic question of whether Carl Van Vechten was a good or bad force in the lives of black people during the Harlem Renaissance and beyond" (2). Bernard has the courage to deal frankly with the life of a white man who understood the complexity and injustice of race relations in America, but whose sympathy for black people and love of black culture didn't preclude him from appropriating blackness when it served his creative or personal interests.

This book's achievement grows directly out of the impressive rigor of Bernard's archival research. While theoretically informed by criticism on race, gender studies, and Harlem Renaissance cultural criticism, the book's greatest scholarly debt is to the James Weldon Johnson Memorial collection itself (the founding of which is documented here in all of its fascinating detail). Van Vechten was an inveterate collector: his papers are expansive, and the author knows them well, in all of their messy, confusing, flamboyant complexity. And while the book does center on Van Vechten, the story Bernard tells here is less a linear narrative of one man's life than a survey of the constellations around him; individuals, careers, ideas, aesthetics, cultural forms, and social movements all orbit Van Vechten in a kinetic exchange of mutual influence.

The book is divided into three sections, each carefully attentive to writing—by and about Van Vechten. Bernard's story relies heavily on text, drawing from correspondence, fiction, reviews, and daybooks. Moreover, she reads meticulously the original documents that she cites. We benefit from her attention, for instance, as she reports on the personal notes Van Vechten has scribbled, for posterity's sake, on letters he's received and on carbon copies of letters he's written. When Van Vechten notes that "Mrs. Johnson did not reply to this letter and did not come to lunch," he documents a poignant moment in his efforts to establish a memorial to James Weldon Johnson. These notes help Bernard tell a more nuanced—and therefore more accurate—story about Van Vechten's intimate involvement in Harlem. Such detail also helps correct the record on Van Vechten, as it illustrates his tireless efforts on behalf of, and fastidious attention to, the causes through which he expressed his passion for blackness.

The first section, "A Niche Somewhere," takes its title from the meditations of Gareth Johns, the fictional protagonist (and alter-ego) of Van Vechten's 1924 autobiographical bildungsroman, The Tattooed Countess. This section examines the intersection of Van Vechten and the New Negro Renaissance, as it was then known. When Bernard explains how Van Vechten's early life predisposed him to an enthusiastic appreciation for black culture, she refuses to shy away from the unpleasant facts of his early racial ignorance. "How the darkies danced, sang, and cavorted. Real nigger stuff, this, done with spontaneity and joy in the doing," he wrote in an early essay on black theater (41). Reflecting on attitudes like these, Bernard notes, "To some of us today, it looks like racism" (71). But she invites us to consider the differences between racial hatred, and primitivism. In considering that "primitivists rejoice in the differences that racists disdain," Bernard opens up a space for conversation about the white mentor's negrophilia, a reconsideration that is long overdue. Van Vechten's youthful ignorance eventually gives way to a more complex and sensitive understanding of racial difference, a sense of nuance that is informed by his intimate, lifelong friendships with Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, among many others.

Bernard devotes the...