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Genders 28 1998
Inspectin' and
Collecting
By BETH A.
McCOY
[1] Avant-garde
chronicler, arbiter, and participant Carl Van
Vechten produced myriad texts during a career
deeply imbricated in those issues of race, gender,
class, and sexuality that continue to complicate
critical understanding of the early
twentieth-century avant-garde. Replete with nested
voyeurisms and repetitions from novel to scrapbook
to photograph, Van Vechten's texts are themselves
about watching and being watched; further, in their
intertextuality, these texts watch each other, so
to speak. The tangle of looks produced by these
intra- and intertextual relations tends to
problematize close reading as a means to an end and
indeed makes writing about Van Vechten's texts
quite difficult. For rather than yielding a series
of discrete art objects to be culled for some
synthesized organic knowledge (i.e., the ostensible
truth of an autotelic text), Van Vechten's oeuvre
leads the reader toward another sort of fetish,
this time a metatextual one--one that seemingly
offers the process of reading, rather than the
product, as the site of knowledge. For to "read Van
Vechten" is to be led inexorably through the
intricate maze of interlocked surveillances that
are his texts and brought up short against an
irreducible conceptual scene: that of Van Vechten
himself both as subject looking and object being
looked at. At once promising knowledge but yielding
none, this scene of the looking Van Vechten
functions as an ineffable object of critical desire
and signals the end--both the goal and the
annihilation--of reading in the advent of the
visual. [2] That the act of
reading arrives at the irreducible scene of his
looking self is, I will argue, exactly what Van
Vechten desired, particularly as his career became
oriented increasingly toward and enmeshed within
the visual. As demonstrated within and between
The Tattooed
Countess
(1924) and Nigger Heaven (1926), as well as through
the observations of some Van Vechten scholars and
contemporaries, this self-orchestrated scene
functions simultaneously as both critique and
exploitation of the economies of surveillance and
visuality governing identity aesthetics and
politics. Attending to this scene is imperative,
for it offers first a way to read Van Vechten's
career as an extended inquiry into what he realized
as the sexualized intersection of "race,"
surveillance, and subjectivity.
1
Further, attending to the
scene offers the chance for us as cultural critics
imbricated within those very intersections to
examine self-reflexively our own investments and
complicities in its re-enactment. In other words,
contemplating the Van Vechtenian scene has the
potential to, as Kaja Silverman has urged, "help us
to see differently."
2 "Any left in the
touch is a scene, a scene."3 [3] To write about
Van Vechten, however, I must first write through
Gertrude Stein's portrait of him, the one from
which the epigraph above derives. Van Vechten and
Stein first met each other face to face in 1913,
when, introduced via Mabel Dodge's letter, he came
to rue de Fleurus for dinner.4 The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas
reveals, however, that Stein had already seen Van
Vechten once before but did not know at the time
who he was. According to the Autobiography, this first sighting
occurred during what turned out to be Van Vechten's
second visit to see the controversial
Le Sacre
du
Printemps: Just
before the performance began the fourth chair in
our box was occupied. We looked around and there
was a tall well-built young man, he might have been
a dutchman, a scandinavian or an american and he
wore a soft evening shirt with the tiniest pleats
all over the front of it. It was impressive, we had
never even heard that they were wearing evening
shirts like that. That evening when we got home
Gertrude Stein did a portrait of the unknown called
a Portrait of One.
5 Though Stein here
misnames the portrait (its title as it appears in
Geography
and Plays
is "ONE"), both it and the encounter engendering it
seem to have affected her in some significant way.
But what exactly was it about the "tall well-built
young man" that apparently moved her both to write
the portrait that same night and remember it years
later in the Autobiography's litany of
accomplishments? Was it the shirt, which,
incidentally, Van Vechten wore again when he later
came to dinner at rue de Fleurus?6 Was it the young man's
ineffable ethnicity? Was it his apparent membership
as "one" of the mysterious "they" who had not yet
been heard to wear such shirts? [4] Unsurprisingly,
perhaps, "Alice's" brief account of the visual
encounter specifies no answers to such questions,
and neither does the portrait itself, for like much
of Stein's writing, it is coyly hostile to the
desires of close reading. The portrait appears to
be structured, for instance, around the doubling
integers ("one," "two," "four") that punctuate its
seemingly random pattern of prepositional phrases;
meanwhile, its more syntactically normative
interludes seem to focus, somewhat reassuringly, on
that shirt ("In the best most silk and water much,
in the best most silk").7 Yet "ONE" ultimately
resists both formalist demands for organic
narrative coherence and identity-based political
demands for fixed and articulable manifestations of
"sexuality," "gender," and "race," those terms of
difference for which both Stein and Van Vechten,
circulators of the American and expatriate
avant-garde, are often called to
account.8 Falling apart
typographically and spatially, the hoped-for
integer pattern provides scant information as to
how the portrait should or could be read. And the
ostensibly literal references to "silk" and
"elastic," which Bruce Kellner reads as "vividly"
describing Van Vechten's evening shirt, make
"sense" only if read with the Autobiography's gloss.9
The portrait itself simply
ceases, its end without closure yielding little or
no referential knowledge about Van Vechten or what
Stein believed she saw in him that night at the
ballet. [5] If my interest
were primarily in Gertrude Stein, the teasing play
of desire, knowledge, and desire-for-knowledge that
circulates between "portrait" and "autobiography"
could be read primarily as further evidence that
Stein's writing often repels the very questions
with which critics approach her work. But my
interest in the dynamic circulating between "ONE"
and the Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas
resides not in what it tells (or does not) about
Stein and her writing. Instead, I am intrigued by
how the process of reading "ONE" through the
Autobiography deflects readerly attention
away from the portrait as an art object itself and
towards a seemingly endless process of thinking
about that which lies behind its writing: the
scene, to borrow "ONE's" own term, of Stein looking
at and wondering about Van Vechten, who had himself
come (again) to look at something else. In this
scene, a chain of questing looks links reader to
Stein to Van Vechten and seeks to reveal the
meaning of both "ONE" and its backstory by
identifying Van Vechten on a matrix of race,
gender, ethnicity, sexuality, again the terms
through which both Stein (lesbian, female, Jew,
white) and, particularly, Van Vechten (bisexual,
male, gay, Nordic, white) are often filtered. The
implicit question posed by the chain of looks might
be phrased as "What is it about Van Vechten that so
drew Stein's attention?" or, perhaps more
basically: "What is Van Vechten?" No matter what the
phrasing, the question is never answered, and the
scene ends in a sort of closed system: the reader's
irreducible contemplation of Stein looking at Van
Vechten, caught himself in the act of looking at
something else. Stein's writing posits Van Vechten
as the visual residence of a wanted yet unknowable
knowledge and thus as the object of interpretive
desire, an object that, somehow bound up in
questions of race and sexuality, neither returns
the questing look with which it is approached nor
yields knowledge or certainty about difference (a
"they" apart from a "we"), its location, or its
meaning. [6] In the years
after this first sighting, Stein and Van Vechten
forged a lasting relationship that, with Toklas,
circulated around the curious dynamic of the
Woojums family.10 As "Papa" to Toklas' "Mama"
and Stein's "Baby," Van Vechten found a major
publisher for Stein's Tender Buttons and provided support and
companionship to Alice after her partner's death.
Yet of all the well-documented history between
Stein and Van Vechten, it is the scene of that
first meeting that is most valuable to me because
of its potential lesson: how to read Carl Van
Vechten. Over ten years before The Tattooed
Countess,
and perhaps even before he knew he would be, could
be, or wanted to be sought as the end of reading,
Stein's meditations upon her new friend function
presciently as an apt metonym for the racialized,
sexualized dynamic of surveillance that,
circulating around Van Vechten's own works, would
come to rest upon his own looking
self.11
"We read the old
critics to find out about the
critics,
not about the subjects on which they are
writing."12
[7] Carl Van
Vechten "was" many things. A novelist. A gay man
married to an actress. A "dilettante
extraordinaire," bon vivant, and avant-garde
raconteur.13 But perhaps first and
foremost, he was a collector and a cataloguer; in a
letter to Hugh Walpole, he coyly alluded to the
products of these "identities" as "part of my
interesting temperament": "As so many people object
to them I know that they must be an essential part
of me."14 He bequeathed prodigious
stores of texts--verbal, musical, visual--by and
about many folks and phenomena he deemed crucial to
American cultural history from the early twentieth
century through the 1960s. Virtually inventing the
cultural archive industry, Van Vechten urged Stein
to archive her materials at Yale and himself
established such varied collections as the James
Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts
and Letters at Yale University Library, the George
Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music at Fiske
University--even the Anna Marble Pollock Memorial
Library of Books about Cats.15 These collections have
yielded much documentary "knowledge" for scholars'
use; the Johnson collection, for example, provided
much of the source material for When Harlem was in
Vogue,
David Levering Lewis's influential history of the
construct known as the Harlem Renaissance.
[8] Yet even as
they are used by scholars used in pursuit of
knowledge, these collections have yielded something
further: an aspect of voyeurism and repetition that
inexorably doubles back onto the conceptual figure
of the collector himself. For at least part of Van
Vechten's collecting seems to have been connected
with a pleasure derived from thinking about the
knowledge-seeking bodies ("serious
students")16 circulating about his
collections--particularly those collections that
Van Vechten perceived to be explicitly organized
around the binary constructions governing mappings
of "racial" and "sexual" identity.17 Writing on Van Vechten's
homoerotic scrapbooks archived at Yale, Jonathan
Weinberg reads these scrapbooks as having an
"encyclopedic and historical quality" that yields
knowledge about "how gay people expressed their
forbidden desires and created spaces of freedom in
the period before so-called gay
liberation."18 The archiving of the
scrapbooks, like Van Vechten's series of
photographs, Weinberg establishes, is a gesture to
make knowledge that Carl collected over the years
"permanent," and a way to make sure that the
compilations "f[ind] their intended audience"--in
this case, other gay men.19 Weinberg's investigation of
these scrapbooks (and, by extension, Van Vechten's
love for collecting and cataloging as a whole)
reveals them largely as providing those who come to
peruse them with closure: knowledge gained, desire
sated, proper audiences found, collections made
permanent. What intrigues me, however, is how this
sense of closure morphs into a more fluid,
itinerant idea of desire even as Weinberg
re-presents information provided in Kellner's Van
Vechten biography. Weinberg writes: [Van
Vechten] purposely gave the [Johnson Collection] to
Yale because it was a white, Ivy League
institution, while he gave his collection of music,
made up mostly of material by and about white
composers, to Fiske University, a black college.
The idea was for whites to study black culture, and
blacks to study white culture. He was
particularly
delighted
by the idea that white scholars would have to
travel south to a black institution to study the
music collection.20
As Weinberg
re-tells the story, the integrationist aesthetic
governing the way Van Vechten apportioned these
particular collections manifests a distinctly
sexual subtext, one bound up in Van Vechten's
somewhat voyeuristic imaginings of scholars making
transgressive pilgrimages across racial and
regional boundaries to both look at the collected
material, and, one supposes, consider the collector
himself. Operating according to what he simply
refers to as "vague intention," Van Vechten emerges
in between the lines of Weinberg's account as a
subject who, having set in motion a chain of looks,
desire, and knowledge that keeps scholars running
(to paraphrase Ralph Ellison) towards him, has
already moved on to look at something
else.
21
[9] If, ensconced
in institutional collections over thirty years
after his death, the Van Vechten gaze seems
somewhat removed and theoretical today, it was
startlingly and materially acute during the 1920s,
when his activities on both sides of the color line
(DuBois's term for the effectively real boundary
erected upon the artifice of "race") caused popular
and academic commentators to evince a keen yet
cautious awareness of his penchant for
self-reflexive surveillance. In When Harlem was in
Vogue,
Lewis notes that by the middle of the decade, "Van
Vechten's weird six-foot presence seemed to be
everywhere" in New York in general and Harlem in
particular.22 But contemporary accounts
and representations, emphasizing his active,
acquisitive, and unilateral gaze, suggest that Van
Vechten was something more than a "presence." Andy
Razaf's popular song "Go Harlem!" referred, for
example, to going "inspectin' like Van
Vechten."23 And well-known caricaturist
Miguel Covarrubias produced the ironically titled
"A Prediction": a visually arresting profile of
Carl Van Vechten's distinctive face (again, looking
away from the viewer) transformed into a "black"
male stereotype, the end result, ostensibly, of
what Time magazine had snipingly called the
"sullen-mouthed, silky-haired" author's "playing
with Negroes."
24
The
squalor of Negro life, the vice of Negro life,
offer a wealth of novel, exotic picturesque
material to the artist. . . . The question is: Are
Negro writers going to write about this exotic
material while it is still fresh or will they
continue to make a free gift of it to white authors
who will exploit it until not a drop of vitality
remains?
25
Here, Van Vechten
seemed to be voicing exactly the sort of sentiments
that had two years earlier sparked Jessie Redmon
Fauset to write the signature Renaissance novel
(There is
Confusion
[1924]) as a corrective to T.S. Stribling's
Birthright: stereotypical assumptions of urban
African-American atavism and a territorializing
white preoccupation with making money from the
commodity that such atavism
represented.
26 And when these same
sentiments appeared to be reified just a short time
later in the already problematically titled and
best-selling Nigger Heaven, a critical tumult
resulted, a widely varied mix of protest,
ambivalence, defensiveness and apologia that seemed
only to augment the novel's public
appeal.27 By 1928, the book had seen
at least 14 printings, and by 1932, as Kellner
documents, it had been translated "in almost every
country where American literature circulated," from
Czechoslovakia to Italy.
28
[10] Particularly
when contrasted with the rest of his literary
career (deemed mediocre and "minor" according to
American literary histories29), it becomes easy to view
Nigger Heaven as
an isolated text, a troubling--if wildly
successful--aberration. Certainly, Van Vechten's
dilettantish reputation contributes to this
perception. As Van Vechten's sole literary foray
into Harlem and thus into "blackness," it is
perhaps understandable that Nigger Heaven
would merely look like another thing in which Van
Vechten dabbled and then abandoned after his
interest waned. And with the novel out of print (a
status shared by most Van Vechten novels), it is
difficult for many interested parties to read
Nigger
Heaven for
any reason, let alone attempt to contextualize it
and its transgressions within the idea of a larger
Van Vechten project.30 But when Nigger Heaven is
read in the wider context of Van Vechten's
career--particularly in conjunction with his third
novel, The Tattooed Countess--the Harlem novel can begin to look
quite different, appearing less as an isolated site
of contestation and more as a phase in a continuum
comprising attempts to repeat the same theoretical
scene: that is, the chain of intra-, inter-, and
metatextual looks that come ultimately to rest on
the idea of the looking Van Vechten. [11] At first
glance, Countess and Heaven would seem to possess little in
common. One novel, for instance, is set in
small-town [white] Iowa, the other in urban [black]
Harlem. In Countess, the protagonist is a young white
male who, by novel's end, transcends his rather
claustrophobic circumstances and liberates himself
to Europe; on the other hand, Heaven's protagonist, a young
black male, ends up about to be apprehended by the
police and holds, literally, a smoking gun in his
hand. The topographical differences (white male
liberation/black male imminent incarceration)
between these two narratives sadly mirror the
all-too-common binary trajectories seeming to
inform much Jazz Age cultural production,
trajectories that W.E.B. DuBois dryly noted in
"Criteria of Negro Art": In New
York we have two plays: "White Cargo" and "Congo."
In "White Cargo" there is a fallen woman. She is
black. In "Congo" the fallen woman is white. In
"White Cargo" the black woman goes down further and
further and in Congo the white woman begins with
degradation but in the end is one of the angels of
the Lord.
31
Yet the raced and
gendered binary that otherwise so glibly sums up
the two novels' narratives nevertheless obscures
substantial similarities between them. Both novels
share a virtually identical "bookend" narrative
structure, and both are highly focused upon
apparatuses of cultural surveillance. And, most
important, both Countess and Heaven explore variously what their author
sees as the liberatory potential of linking their
young male protagonists with female "exotics,"
whose shared yet shifting representations between
the two books reflect Van Vechten's repeated
attempt to draw the reader or, perhaps more
appropriately, the spectator into contemplating the
multilayered Van Vechtenian scene. As that scene
was apparently most successfully and satisfyingly
orchestrated via the visual's seemingly felicitous
relationship with the construction known as
"blackness," Van Vechten's status as subject
looking and object being looked at can be read as
one of the primary aporia in attempting to
re-negotiate, as Manthia Diawara suggests, the
relationship between black cultural production and
the white avant-garde.
32
"Que
sais-je?" [12]
The Tattooed
Countess is
strongly autobiographical, a factor that
foregrounds almost immediately the presence of the
overdetermined authorial scene within the book
itself. Set in 1897--the year that Oscar Wilde went
free and the year that Van Vechten himself was
17--the novel explores the somewhat panoptic nature
of small-town life in Maple Valley, Iowa, a
fictional town that is, as biographer Bruce Kellner
has established, quite similar to Van Vechten's own
hometown of Cedar Rapids.33 Most specifically,
The Tattooed Countess
investigates Maple Valley's impact upon the growing
subjectivity of a protagonist very similar to Van
Vechten: Gareth Johns, a white, middle-class male
who, just out of high school, wants both to escape
his small town and become a writer. As temporary
respite from the bourgeois white culture that
corrals him at the same time it accords him
privilege, Gareth collects and catalogues
everything from birds' eggs to tobacco-pictures in
order to satisfy a largely formal and somewhat
decadent "aesthetic sense."34 And in thwarted attempts to
"release his imagination," Gareth conducts both a
clandestine sexual relationship with a local girl
and an intellectually clandestine one with Lennie
Colman, an older and safely conventional school
teacher who desires the boy nonetheless (TC 105).
Though these social interactions appear
heterosexual, Gareth is nevertheless identified
within the town as a "sissy" (TC 24), a seeming
contradiction that not only suggests the
contingencies of sexual "identities," but closely
resembles Van Vechten's own double life as both a
husband in a 50-year marriage to actress Fania
Marinoff and, as George Chauncey has established,
as a central figure in New York's early twentieth
century gay scene.
35 So closely did the young
man resemble the Countess' author, that Van Vechten's sister
Emma "wrote that she had taken the boy to be Carl.
'Of course not wholly so as there are some things
about him that are different, tho [sic] generally
speaking it is as you were.'"
36
[13] Beneath this
autobiographical umbrella, The Tattooed
Countess depends on an economy of surveillance to provide
its structure and its plot. For Maple Valley, the
visible world is bound up in helping the town
compete upon an internationalist stage of bourgeois
cultural competition. When Mrs. Sinclair, for
example, speculates that "we do about as well in
Maple Valley, everything considered, as they do
everywhere in the world," Mrs. Darrell
responds: I get
all the fashion-books the world over . . . and
compare them, and then I select the best
details, but my dresses are all original. No two
alike. No lady that I dress can ever say that she
has seen any one else wearing the same model. She
might look from . . . Paris to Chicago and never
would she see the same model. (TC 66) Mrs. Darrell's
declaration here represents synecdochically Maple
Valley's stance as a whole: that acts of seeing and
repetition are only meaningful in that they are
[re]productive and that they confer knowledge of
the town's "originality" and "progress." Such a
stance constitutes a crucial tension within the
novel, for it is completely at odds with those such
as Gareth and the spinster schoolteacher who appear
not to participate in the town's teleological and
reproductive narcissism. [14] Significantly,
Van Vechten does not cast Maple Valley's "others"
from its boundaries but instead keeps them closely
within its watchful, recording gaze. The chief
agents of this marshaling surveillance in the
Countess are the Parcæ, two
stereotypically gossipy, middle-aged white women
who, seated in rocking chairs on their adjoining
front porches, "preside over human destinies in
every town in the middle west" (TC 18). Appearing
in the second and the last chapters, the
Parcæ form the novel's structural boundaries
and also function as Maple Valley's ideological
limits, disseminating the descriptive and
prescriptive metanarratives that govern the town's
white, bourgeois, and reproductively heterosexual
norms. Each day, the Parcæ sit upon their
front porches to watch and record--in
dialect--drunkards, adulterers, addicts, and,
apparently, homosexuals, for it is they who
identify Gareth as "sissy" after watching his
dandified self go by one morning. The Parcæ's
surveillance of these "others," the marginal of
Maple Valley, serves not only to vary the otherwise
monotonous tale of the town's material manifest
destiny but also helps the town to construct its
own normative presence against their bodies. For
all their heartland representational benignancy,
the Parcæ embody the often inescapable
panoptic trap that flower-bedecked, small-town
America was and still can become for those the
prevailing culture deems "different." [15] Early in the
novel, Gareth Johns walks by their house "without
hailing the Parcæ. He did not know them, nor
was he aware that they were Parcæ" (TC 24).
The privilege the young man enjoys in being white,
male, and middle-class allows him, for a while, to
fantasize an apparent exemption from the Fates'
marshaling looks. Nevertheless, when his mother's
illness and his father's hostility to college sever
the educational string that was to free Gareth from
the stasis in which the Parcæ symbolically
hold him, he nevertheless finds himself about to be
recycled as fodder for "progress": he is to take
over his father's business and thus assume the
heir's material and symbolic trappings. Even if he
were to go to college, the Parcæ predict, he
would just "come home an' do the housework" (TC
24), a trajectory that pinches Gareth in the same
cleft stick of privilege and
marginalization. [16] There is,
however, a way out of the "ugliness" of Maple
Valley (TC 104) for Gareth, one that seems to come
from outside the Parcæ's jurisdiction. For it
is in Chapter One, before the Parcæ's first
appearance, that Ella Nattatorini, Maple Valley
native and Italian count's widow, returns
scandalously to her hometown after repeating yet
another doomed love affair with a younger man. By
Maple Valley standards, all about the Countess
appears visibly to be "other." Hovering "at that
dangerous and fascinating age just before decay
sets in," the "well preserved" Countess is "aided
by artifice" (TC 1): ornate, fin de siècle
clothing, hair that "quite evidently owed its hue
to the art of the hairdresser" (TC 1), and an
eponymous tattoo that graces her forearm.
Symbolically and physically "darkened" by her
Italian marriage and the tattoo, respectively,
Ella, Gareth realizes, represents at least an
imaginative way out of Maple Valley, for she can
narrate to him strange tales of places and people
he has never seen. But to Gareth's surprise, the
Countess Nattatorini becomes of much more profound
use to him. [17] Despairing
after his mother's death, Gareth runs to Ella for
sympathy, but the Countess, having become obsessed
with what she perceives to be the boy's soft,
youthful naiveté, recognizes potential for a
last fling before she becomes too old and faded. In
an "unnatural mood," she receives Gareth and,
kissing him "passionately," confesses that she
loves him "that way" (TC 257, 259). Seizing the
opportunity by confessing, "truthfully enough" that
Ella is "'all there is' in [his] life," Gareth
cleaves to her, and in exchange, Ella secures his
passage to Europe, willing, it seems, to enjoy a
brief happiness before the boy inevitably (as his
interior thoughts reveal) leaves her, as he will
have already done by the time Ella and Gareth each
reappear in Van Vechten's fourth novel,
Firecrackers (TC 260).
37 [18] A possible
historical and visual model for Van Vechten's
unhappy Countess would seem to lie in the Countess
de Castiglione, Virginia Verasis, who, according to
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, was a celebrated Second
Empire beauty in the mid-nineteenth
century.38 This real-life Countess is
known to posterity chiefly via the hundreds of
photographs of herself that she composed and
commissioned, photographs that ranged from herself
in full court dress to pictures of her naked legs.
A set of photographs taken somewhere between 1895
and 1898--a brief period encompassing the time when
Van Vechten's fictional Countess returns to her
hometown--reveals an aging, heavier Countess
wearing an old ball gown that she had worn at
various occasions before. Some of the photos are
altered clumsily; the Countess had apparently
pinned strips of paper about her image "as though
to whittle down her girth."
39 For Solomon-Godeau, this
late stage in the photographic series is "a bleak
parable of femininity attempting its own
representation [wherein] the fetishized woman
attempts to locate herself, to affirm her
subjectivity within the rectangular space of
another fetish . . . ."
40
[19] It is thus not
only the seeming temporal coincidence between the
photos of the aging Verasis and the waning
Nattatorini on the "edge of decay" that binds the
two female figures in a sort of intertextual
continuum and lends a way to delve more deeply into
the novel's seemingly depth-less catalogues and
repetitions. It is also, to borrow Solomon-Godeau's
words, their subjectivities' shared apparent
conscription within "a scopic regime that
inevitably undercuts her pretended authority as
orchestrator of the look," a conscription to which
the detail of Ella's tattoo
testifies.41 It is "a skull, pricked in
black, on which a blue butterfly perched, while a
fluttering phylactery beneath bore the motto: Que
sais-je?" (TC 2). Though brazenly displayed on
Ella's forearm in a way that scandalizes her
sister, the tattoo speaks little of bravado and
confidence. Its visual imagery of decay and its
text ("What do I know?") openly establish the
uncertainty and fragility of Ella's subjectivity,
which, the novel establishes, has been contingent
almost solely on her ability to fetishistically
repeat the act of love with younger men. As Ella
has grown older, that subjectivity has become more
and more in doubt. She may view her body as a
medium that she can manipulate to a certain extent
via the "artifice" of dye for the hair and skin,
yet that same body, as a female body (and a white
one at that), is also forced to function as the
medium of image itself, measured always both in its
proximity to and distance from an
impossible-to-achieve (but nevertheless desired)
ideality, an ideality, which, as the aging Ella
loses her commodity value, becomes accessible only
through the accumulation of "marks": that of a
tattoo and that, seemingly, of a [young] penis, the
acquisition of which Ella conflates with possessing
the phallus, much as she conflates the
approximation of ideality with a substantive
subjectivity. Van Vechten puns on this conflation
when commenting to Arthur Davison Ficke upon the
book's title: "One of the reasons for [the title]
is that the Countess was certainly full of
pricks."
42
[20] Ironically, it
is this pricked inquiry--"Que sais-je?"--that
constitutes the novel's foundational critical
question, one that boomerangs back upon the woman
who wields its putative transgressiveness, but one
that also turns itself, in the end, against Van
Vechten. In the book's boisterous yet highly
critical set pieces, the very sight of Ella, marked
as artificial and foreign, is assimilated by Maple
Valley's citizens to confirm their own knowledge of
their present and future place in the world. At the
"gala entertainment" planned ostensibly in her
honor but really for the town's, her bodily
presence becomes to the spectators "proof"--a
fetish--that "a man who does his work in an honest
way right here in Maple Valley is just as good as
any king that ever lived (wild cheers). Better
(wilder cheers)" (TC 150). And while at that same
"gala entertainment," Gareth is as caught up as
everyone else in the Countess's spectacle ("Look at
her! "Look at her!" he cries), his look is somewhat
differently invested (TC 140). While Maple Valley
utilizes the Countess as the mirror of itself and
the mark, so to speak of its own "progress," Gareth
sees largely through her to the world beyond the
Parcæ. Ella's very instability, her very lack
of subjectivity is that which promises his ultimate
freedom; as Van Vechten writes forcefully to Hugh
Walpole, the Countess is "merely a worldly,
sex-beset moron, seduced, for purposes of his own,
by a ruthless youth whose imaginative
sophistication transcends all of the Countess's
experience."
43
[21] What I am
interested in here are the violences both committed
and managed by this circulation of looks that come
to rest largely upon Ella. Maple Valley's
ostensibly self-confirming scrutiny of Ella merely
serves to lock "others" such as Gareth and Lennie
Colman in the "bondage" of "family" and "town,"
where "[e]ven religion is mean . . . " (TC 130)
while Gareth's own escape via Ella from this
scrutinizing system is portrayed as equally--if not
more--violent, a violence characterized as
distinctly Oedipal: "his revenge upon his father,
his tribute to his mother" (TC 268). The critique
beneath The
Tattooed Countess's droll surface, then, would seem to
be directed not only towards the relative
fecklessness of his Countess, but also towards the
economy of visibility (Robyn Wiegman's term)
sustaining both the communal narrative of white,
bourgeois material "progress" and the individual
narrative of white, male, transcendence, recognized
here as sites for violence for which there is no
moral or ethical accountability.44 In the novel's final
chapter, the Parcæ resume their rocking and
watching, seamlessly weaving the wreckage left
behind by such violence (the desperate Lennie
Colman, Gareth's dead mother, the drunken Mr.
Colman--even the sad mother bird bereft of her eggs
by the collecting Gareth) into the larger tale of
Maple Valley's regional, national, and
international global destiny: "Let 'em take in the
prize fights at Carson City! Let 'em jubilee their
Queen! Iowa's a pure one hundred per cent American
state, an' it's lookin' up!" (TC 286). [22] In recounting
such a tale, of course, Van Vechten takes advantage
of the very surveillance that he has functionally
critiqued, utilizing "pages of notes, fragments of
conversation, remembered incidents and
descriptions, bits of information from his youth,
all that could lend authority and authenticity to
the framework of the novel" to draw his
contemporary readers' attention first to their own
specularized position within what is, in many ways,
a roman
à clef, and then to consideration of what it
might mean to be specularized by their own prodigal
native son.
45 As brother Ralph Van
Vechten wrote in a letter to Carl, such intricate
machinations could certainly be disruptive, if not
violent: "If you don't get murdered when you go to
Cedar Rapids I miss my guess."
46 Yet much as Maple Valley
assimilated and managed the scandal and violence
erupting from a visual economy of knowledge focused
upon the rather feckless Countess, Cedar Rapids
largely neutralized the potential disruption of Van
Vechten's reflection. As Kellner reports, "[o]n a
visit to Cedar Rapids [Van Vechten] discovered
several claimants for every character in
The Tattooed
Countess,
most of whom he did not even
remember."47 Seeming to absorb and
assimilate the author's ostensibly disruptive look,
Cedar Rapids deflects the tattoo's question--"What
do I know?"--away from itself and towards Van
Vechten, who later theorized to "several
acquaintances" that "[i]f he had left Cedar Rapids
as Gareth, he certainly returned as the
Countess."
48
He had written a scandalous
story based on his own home town, but there were no
book burnings, no town meetings of
denunciation--only an assertion that Carl was "dull
and piffling" because he had gotten some
information about corn wrong.49 In its reception of
The Tattooed Countess,
apparently, Cedar Rapids was focused on itself, and
not necessarily upon the figure of the looking Van
Vechten. The oscillation, the traveling of gazes
back and forth across apparent lines that
"particularly delighted" Van Vechten about the
interracial collections over which he theoretically
presided, was missing. And at the least, Van
Vechten was ambivalent about this apparent
lack. [23] Contemplating
the imbrication of narrative with (hetero)sexual
imperatives, Judith Roof writes that "[t]ogether
the perverse and the 'normal' produce a narrative
of joinder and production ending in marriage, a
child, victory, death, or even--and
especially--another narrative. 'The narrative,'
Tzvetan Todorov reminds us, 'will always be the
story of another narrative.'"50 Roof's account here helps
to articulate how, in the case of The Tattooed
Countess,
the elements necessary to play the Van Vechtenian
scene did not quite come together. Via the novel,
Carl Van Vechten (who reveled certainly in seeing
himself as part of "the perverse") and Cedar Rapids
(constructed as that most contingent site of "the
normal") do indeed conjoin reproductively--but
perhaps not in the way that Van Vechten,
positioning himself always as the object of
critical desire, might originally have wanted.
Instead, the narrative heterology of (ostensibly)
perversely authored text and (ostensibly)
normativizing reader response produces, two years
later, another novel and another attempt to sustain
the complex spectacle of the looking Van Vechten
being looked at. "It is not the
novelties that make happiness, but it is their
repetition."
51
[24] Perhaps even
more so than The Tattooed Countess, Nigger Heaven is both built upon
and is itself about the sexuality of surveillance, a
surveillance complicated this time by another
heterology, the visual heterology of racial
difference that "suddenly" emerges in and around
Heaven because of its engagement with what
the dominant white culture has constructed as the
"other." Attempting to prophylactically neutralize
the title's controversy by appealing to notions of
racial authenticity (i.e., a suggestion that the
title's o.k. if black folks use the phrase anyway),
Knopf publishers claimed that "Nigger Heaven"
referred to a black slang term that theorized the
theater balcony as symbolizing "the geographical
position of Harlem": specifically, that position
"from which the white world below can be seen, but
which it cannot see."
52 Knopf's explanation carries within it the trace--however mediated and
contained--of a complex and painful racial erotics,
one alluded to uncomfortably by Heaven protagonist Byron Kasson,
who exclaims bitterly that the metaphorical drama
of the theater balcony is one of a desiring look
that is never returned. Nigger
Heaven! That's what Harlem is! We sit in our places
in the gallery of this New York theatre and watch
the white world sitting down below in the good
seats in the orchestra. Occasionally they turn
their faces up towards us, their hard, cruel faces,
to laugh or sneer, but they never
beckon.53
In a Knopf
promotional illustration for the book, Harlem
Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas realizes visually
the dynamic to which Byron refers. In Douglas's
distinctive style, black theatergoers sit in a
balcony emblazoned with the words "NIGGER HEAVEN BY
CARL VAN VECHTEN." Within the balcony, the
theatergoers face each other; black monumental
figures uphold the balcony, which itself seems to
preside over a stage upon which nothing can be seen
but an undifferentiated and blinding whiteness
emanating from the footlights. Charles Scruggs, who
calls Douglas the book's "best critic" because of
such illustrations, interprets the spectators as
looking at each other in anger "not at the white
world but with each other" and reads this seeming
anger as Douglas's critique of "crab antics": that
which anthropologist Peter J. Wilson perceived as
intraracial competition within a colonized
system.
54
[25] It would seem
to me, however, that Douglas's promotional
illustration could just as easily and accurately be
narrativized as a gallery of black spectators
talking to each other knowingly of their own
complicated theoretical position as black-authored
"black" representations participating in an
illustration designed to sell what had already
become Nigger Heaven's metatextual drama. In
this reading, Douglas editorializes complexly upon
the positioning of black Harlem both within and
without the scene of "inspectin'" that
Nigger
Heaven's
author desired. "Within" that scene, Harlem
functions as Van Vechten's commodified
objet du
jour ("Now
that I have thoroughly explored Harlem," he wrote
to Louis Bromfield, "I think I shall take up the
Chinese"55); "without" it, Harlem
functions as the agencied critical subject whose
resistance is equally--if differently--integral to
the successful staging of the scene. One such
resisting response, Douglas's drawing suggests,
might be read as a critique of the content that Van
Vechten causes to emanate from his black
characters' mouths--including (but not limited to)
Byron's assumption that black folks, spectators to
the pornography that is white supremacist culture,
wish to be "beckoned" to in the first place.
[26] If my reading
here of Douglas has merit, it is supported by other
Harlem events around the publication of
Nigger
Heaven,
events that, supplementing the critical encomia and
condemnations of brahmins both black and white,
centered around some form of resistance to being
implicated in the unfunny circus of looks
comprising the book. For example, where Cedar
Rapids rather matter-of-factly absorbed and
contained the myopic white fantasy of stable
identity and linear progress that Van Vechten
mocked and yet tried to exploit via The Tattooed
Countess,
Harlemites reacted both angrily and astutely to
being [re]constructed (an insult doubled in
America) within Nigger Heaven's gaze.56 As Langston Hughes recalls
in The Big Sea, city
residents played a cat-and-mouse game of denial,
desire, and surveillance: many read the novel but
hid it behind a paper wrapper.57 Later, some residents hung
Van Vechten in effigy at the corner of 135th Street
and Seventh Avenue; the hanging actively
acknowledged and protested Harlemites' position
within Van Vechten's gaze, turned the spectacle of
lynching on its head and, perhaps most importantly,
placed Van Vechten at the unanswerable center of a
return gaze to his own.58 Indeed, perhaps as the
saying goes, "negative" attention is better than no
attention at all. And amid the tumult were implicit
questions that the heterology-cum-homology between
Van Vechten and his hometown had apparently failed
to produce, but that the "racial" heterology
between Van Vechten and Harlem apparently produced
plentifully: What was Van Vechten? What was he
doing in Harlem? And what did it mean to be looked
at by him? These cross-racial reactions, combined
with the interracial critical tumult surrounding
Nigger
Heaven, can
be read as producing a visible (because "racial")
oscillation foreshadowing that which later would
emerge around Van Vechten's collections to
conceptually "delight" him. [27] Commenting on
the vitriol of Harlem's response, Hughes declared
that Van Vechten "[c]ertainly . . . had treated the
Negroes of Harlem much better, for instance, than
he had treated his own home folks in
The Tattooed
Countess."
59 Like many of Hughes's
declarations about himself, the world, and people
among whom he moved, this seeming defense must be
mediated through his complex autobiographical
persona. Yet no matter what Hughes meant, his assertion performs
an important function, suggesting perceptively an
implicit link between Van Vechten's third and fifth
novels. For in addition to the metatextual and
paratextual furor over knowledge, seeing, and
visibility into which Nigger Heaven itself tapped, the Harlem
novel also takes up such issues inter- and
intratextually, looking back at the narrative of
The Tattooed
Countess in
order, apparently, to "do it again": that is, to
repeat, in an apparently symmetrical register of
"difference," the attempts of a nascent male
subject to escape circumscription within an
imprisoning local culture informed by the dominance
of white, middle-class metanarratives. For Van
Vechten, this attempt to "do it again" via
Heaven is a chance to exploit the artifice
of "racial" difference in order to better
orchestrate, watch, and become the focus of a
traveling and, at times, frustrated (and
frustrating) desire for knowledge that circulates
about the terms of difference produced among and by
power relationships deriving from what Van Vechten
himself would perhaps call "Nordic" patriarchy. Not
only would Heaven and the requisite tumult surrounding
the novel produce the scene that Van Vechten
desired, but the interplay between Heaven and Countess would, as well. [28]
Heaven concerns itself centrally with Byron
Kasson, a young black man whose circumstances are
strongly analogous to those of the Countess's Gareth Johns. Both men
are attractive, privileged, and middle-class. Both
men are in conflict with their fathers, and both
dream of being writers. Like Gareth, Byron
circulates within social and textual limits
embodied and marshaled by what Van Vechten seems to
view as mythical, archetypal figures. Where in the
Countess such limits are represented and
patrolled by the narratives of the gossipy white
Parcæ, Nigger Heaven is begun and ended with the
rovings of black dandy Anatole Longfellow (a.k.a.
the Scarlet Creeper), whom Addison Gayle reads in
1975 as a primitivistic white fantasy of a cabaret
crawler who seems to stand for that which Van
Vechten perceived as circulating within the "skull"
of "each black man": dominant white images of black
male hypersexuality.
60 Van Vechten's intertextual analogy suggests that if the Parcæ's gaze is
that which threatens the ostensibly linear path
towards the attainment of a certain kind of white
male subjectivity, then the Creeper's roaming in
search of women is that which threatens to derail
the attainment of black middle-class male
subjectivity. Homology slides across the "lines" of
racial and regional difference to construct an
apparent equivalence and symmetry between the
oppressed conditions of the two novels'
protagonists. Variables of difference are assumed
to be balanced on both sides of the equation, in
such a way that "small-town" is proffered as
equivalent and exchangeable for "urban," "white"
equivalent and exchangeable for "black."
[29] As if to
further emphasize this putative intertextual
equivalence, Van Vechten orchestrates a veritable
torch-passing so that not only is one book's male
subject ostensibly exchanged for another but a
replica of the looking Van Vechten is ensconced
with the Harlem novel. At a fashionable Harlem
dinner party, Gareth Johns makes a significant
cameo appearance and meets Byron Kasson. Now a
successful and middle-aged author, Gareth takes the
liberty of lecturing the young Harlemite on
literary markets and aesthetics. Significantly,
Gareth echoes Van Vechten's own earlier symposium
pronouncements about
black-culture-as-object-and-commodity: Gareth
informs Byron that an aspiring black writer should
write about Harlem's "exotic" "low life" (NH 107):
"It has a splendid, fantastic quality. And the
humour! How vital it is, how rich in idiom!
Picturesque and fresh! I don't think the Negro has
been touched in literature as yet" (NH 107).
Understandably, Byron resents the author's implicit
equation and responds in a "cold" tone: "I'm afraid
I don't know very much about the low life of my
people," yet Gareth fails to understand the other
man's upset: "I seem to have offended your friend,"
he says to someone else, "I wonder how" (NH 107).
The chapter ends as Gareth "shrug[s] his shoulders"
and recovers from his momentary sense of
culpability enough to ask that one of the black
partygoers sing "Stand still, Jordan" (NH 107).
Though this intertextual and "integrated" encounter
is obviously ironic, it is a somewhat disingenuous
and also rather ambivalent and complex deployment
of the trope. If it is assumed that the
representation of "Gareth Johns" remains constant
from The
Tattooed Countess to Nigger Heaven (i.e., it remains a thinly
veiled representation of Van Vechten himself), then
it would seem that the act of inserting a
blundering, insensitive, and inertial Gareth into
the Harlem novel might indeed signify a
self-reflective, self-interrogative, and
self-critical comment on Van Vechten's own
involvement in Nigger Heaven. Actively importing a
representation of his own gaze into the novel, Van
Vechten not only seems to implicitly critique that
gaze, but also has it yield to a subjectivity that
Nordic culture deems "other." In this way, the
apparent "darkness" of Nigger Heaven in general and Byron as the
surrogate subject in particular comes to take the
place and function of the earlier novel's tattoo:
"Que sais-je?" in a different, but equally visible
and ostensibly scandalous position. Appearing to
pass his mantle of subjectivity to Byron, Gareth
seems to yield to an idea of "genuine" racial
subjectivity, but such an apparent abdication is,
of course, complexitized and compromised by Van
Vechten's role in authoring it. Van Vechten may
sacrifice his own replica and may cosmetically
balance the equation between the two novels with an
equivalent and more "authentic" subject, but in the
end these acts serve to funnel attention to the
scene of the looking Van Vechten. After all, a
tattoo's function is--at least in part--to draw the
attention, the look of others, to the
wearer. [30] The further
irony is that regardless of the self-serving
purposes inherent in the attempted translation of
Gareth to Byron, the intertextual equation does not
balance; the torchpassing ceremony seems not to
work. By Heaven's end, Byron's trajectory looks
little like Gareth's, for on the last page, the
young black man faces a murder rap--not European
liberation. He has been thwarted by employment
restrictions carefully reserving almost all jobs
for whites. His writing has been rejected by a
Menckenesque editor who tells him bourgeois
blackness is no literary subject at all. In the
novel's last chapter, a thwarted and frustrated
Byron heads to a cabaret in vengeful search of the
Bolito King, the Harlem numbers runner who, despite
his class difference, has become Byron's rival.
Though armed and desperate, Byron does not act when
he gets to the cabaret, and while he merely
contemplates revenge, the Scarlet Creeper returns
to the novel and accomplishes what Byron could not.
The Creeper slays the Bolito King and goes free to
roam Harlem; immediately afterward, Byron shoots
into the King's corpse. Heaven closes as Byron, appearing guilty of
a crime he did not commit, gazes upward at a police
officer's badge. Contrasted with The Tattooed
Countess'
"Happy Ending"61 where Gareth exploitatively transcends social bounds, Nigger Heaven's ending seems indeed as
problematic as its slur of a title. Van Vechten
appears to capitalize on sadly familiar cultural
narratives attempting to limit black male options
to inaction and/or violence, and his attempt to
analogize white male transcendence with black male
subjectivity implodes into the dull predictability
of a dualistic racial determinism. [31] Yet mourning
solely the fact that the book offers implosion
rather than transcendence suggests at least a
masculinist reading bias assuming that Byron, as
the male protagonist and thus the traditional
Western narrative nucleus, is the figure whom
readers are supposed to be watching by the end.
Perhaps looking simultaneously at surrounding
narrative figures can yield insight into the
novel's seemingly thwarted repetition. In what
appears at first to be yet another replay of
The Tattooed
Countess,
Van Vechten employs a female exotic as a cure for
the young male subject's entrapment and thus
invokes the convenient return of the notorious
woman whose rumor scandalizes and titillates. The
two novels' female exotics, however, are not
exactly the same, for where fading Ella Nattatorini
is exploited by Gareth, vibrant Lasca Sartoris
vanquishes Byron. Exploring this dyssymmetrical
intertextuality suggests how Nigger
Heaven
constitutes a compelling shift in both the medium
and the method of staging the narcissistic
spectacle of the Van Vechten scene. [32] Van Vechten
modeled Lasca after singer, actress, and "glamour
girl" Nora Holt, whom he dubbed the "Sheka of
Harlem." "[H]er trail is strewn with bones," he
quipped lasciviously to H.L. Mencken, "many of them
no longer hard."62 To Van Vechten's mind, Holt
embodied qualities that made "her" essential to his
Harlem project: a commodified and proliferated
visibility as a star (publicity photos, public
performances), spectacularized itinerance (he sees
her as having blazed a "trail"), and putatively
"exotic" sexual prowess (the flaccid "bones").
Within Nigger Heaven, these "qualities" coalesce
into Lasca, the femme fatale who ritually "bounces the papas off
their rails" each time she returns to Harlem (NH
85). Loyal to neither Jim Crow nor Carry Nation,
she disdains the innocent--they never "do"
anything--and aligns herself with the guilty; "I'm
for them!" she cries (NH 238). Indeed, according to
Mary's friend Adora Boniface, " . . . Lasca knows
what she wants and goes after it, more than most of
us do. That girl's got a positive genius for going
after things" (NH 85). Certainly, the
representational and functional differences between
the tragically waning Ella and the transgressively
waxing Lasca are vast, and such differences exist
in tension with the equivalence of "otherness"
through which Van Vechten apparently links the two
novels' women. In at least some part, the contrast
that emerges between the characters can be read as
deriving from Van Vechten's perhaps tacit
realization that, as Robyn Wiegman observes, "To
mark the body is not the same as being a bodily
mark."63 As Van Vechten imagines
her, Ella is a creature of "artifice" who marks her
aging white body with a tattoo in an attempt to
achieve a transgressive subjectivity and thus
perhaps prolong her viability as a female
commodity. As I suggest above, Van Vechten seems to
ridicule and undercut this attempt via the tattoo's
imagery of decay and its message of subjective
uncertainty. As it emerges in Heaven, however, Lasca's
transgressiveness is "real"; it is an exoticized
primitivism that Van Vechten figures as inhering
visibly within her body, a lean amalgam of "light
brown" complexion and "Spanish or . . . Portuguese"
features (NH 79). In other words, where Ella was
merely a fecklessly marked body, Lasca is a "bodily
mark." [33] As manifested
in Heaven, Lasca is strongly connected both to
the visual and to visual technologies, which convey
but do not contain the multiple intersections of
movement, desire, and "race" that Van Vechten sees
her as embodying. In the book's first half, Lasca
herself does not appear; instead, she is merely a
rumor whose threatened return rumbles behind the
book's tangle of middle-class theorizing. Yet when
Mary Love, Byron's conventionally bourgeois
girlfriend, picks up a photograph of Lasca, she
becomes curiously drawn to it, for even the "dead,
flat" representation expresses the "abundant
sex-appeal in this lithe creature's body, an appeal
which had filtered through the lens, been caught on
the negative, and finally been stamped perdurably
on this sheet of paper" (NH 80). [34] As Mary
questions her friend Adora about the photograph,
the "story" of Lasca emerges, a story replete with
the "signs and portents" of the constant
oscillation between ostensibly stable endpoints
that so seemed to attract Van Vechten's eye and
attention in the first place. She looks neither
white nor "Negroid" (NH 79). The daughter of a
"hell and brimstone" Southern preacher, Lasca
migrated North but--at least at first--"never quite
went to the devil" (NH 84). She married a rich
African who, dying before he knew that she had left
him for a "trap-drummer," left her the "bulk of his
huge fortune" (NH 80-81). [35] At this point
within the novel, Lasca's kinetic story serves as
the backdrop for staid Mary's realization of her
own bourgeois repression, her "lack" of the
emotion-driven passion that Van Vechten strongly
figures as her "racial" birthright. As the
narrative progresses, however, Van Vechten
transforms Lasca's effect upon Mary in particular
and the novel's denizens in general from ambient to
acute. At a charity ball, jealous Mary declares
Lasca "the most striking woman" she has ever
seen. A robe
of turquoise-blue satin brought out in relief every
curve. The dress was cut so low in front that the
little depression between her firm, round breasts
was plainly visible. Her golden-brown back was
entirely nude to the waist. The dress was circled
with wide bands of green and black sequins,
designed to resemble the fur of the leopard. (NH
163) Where Ella
Nattatorini's clothing sought to mask her body with
artifice much in the same way that the Countess
Verasis sought to mask the photographic
representation of her own figure with bits of
pinned paper, Van Vechten's portrait of Lasca is
one of physical essence, "supervitality"(NH 80)
merely made visible: a body revealed both in itself
and in its figuratively verisimilitudinous
relationship to "nature" ("the fur of the leopard")
rather than "culture" (the drone of blue-vein
dinner parties). [36] After the
ball, Lasca vanishes temporarily, but her aura
lurks behind the events that drive Mary and Byron
apart and send Byron himself to despair. Finally
"[r]ealiz[ing] his impotence" and "[f]linging
himself upon a Park bench" (NH 231), Byron
surrenders to a Harlem of "[b]lood and cruelty;" it
is here at his most static moment that he is
"summon[ed] by Lasca, visually fetishized as
"flashing" eyes and gloved hand beckoning from a
limousine (NH 230-31). However, where Gareth
appraised coolly the opportunity costs of an affair
with Ella, Byron can only moan, "I must have been
waiting for you!" (NH 231). Thus lured by "this
lovely animal" (NH 231), Byron abandons his
middle-class attachments and descends with Lasca
into a sanctuarial "hell" (NH 252) laced liberally
with cocaine, absinthe, sex, and "cruel and painful
pastimes" (NH 261). [37] Devoid of
constraint, Lasca's hell, according to Van Vechten,
is an exotic, "artificial environment" (NH 237), a
free space where race and gender do not matter, as
long as one does what one wants, regardless of
written or "unwritten" law (NH 235). Interestingly,
however, Van Vechten makes it clear that his
serious protagonist cannot live in such an
artificial world. Though Byron claims he'll "never
say Amen!" to the debauch, he nevertheless desires
conventional relationship closure and attempts to
extract promises of "for ever" from Lasca, who
simply warns him that she has "worn out better men
. . . " (NH 239, 250). And indeed, after a last set
of "rages, succeeded by tumultuous passions" and
"hours devoted to satisfying capricious desires,"
Lasca turns Byron away at gunpoint, declares him a
bore, and hooks up immediately with the Bolito King
(NH 261). Thus does the déclassé
numbers runner become the bourgeois man's rival,
and thus does Byron slip into the default narrative
of adversarial and predatory black manhood that
seems to constitute Nigger Heaven's focus. [38] Refusing,
however, to be distracted by this masculinist
combat, Hazel Carby uniquely reads Nigger
Heaven as a
response to cultural anxieties roused by the Great
Migration, the demographic shift of African
Americans from agrarian South to urban North that
"generated," Carby argues, "a series of moral
panics" about migrant and ostensibly rampant,
"degenerate . . . and socially dangerous" black
female sexuality.64 In a book marketed largely
at whites, libertine Sartoris reads as the
plantation drama temptress moved north and to the
city and thus becomes Van Vechten's fearful warning
about "a problem that had to be rectified in order
to restore a moral social order": Byron's "failure
. . . to recognize the worth of Mary to the social
security of his own future" and his concomitant
"choice of . . . Lasca" directly causes "his social
disintegration."65 Ultimately, Carby reads Nigger Heaven as
Van Vechten's embrace of a middle-class order:
Byron could and should have restored order by
cleaving not to Lasca, but to Mary, whose "disdain
of sexual promiscuity is firmly embedded, by Van
Vechten, in a middle-class ideology of endlessly
deferred gratification."66
[39] Reading Van
Vechten's novel alongside of Claude McKay's
Home to
Harlem,
Carby's analysis is exceedingly valuable. Yet, I
think there is something in Nigger
Heaven that
happens not instead of but in addition to (and I emphasize the
readings' covalence rather than their exclusivity)
the textual anxiety about black female sexuality
that Carby identifies. Where The Tattooed
Countess
kept its focus on Gareth as he exploitatively
cleaved to Ella, Nigger Heaven shifts its lens to Lasca.
In fact, when Byron exclaims that he "must have
been waiting for" Lasca (NH 231), it seems that it
is actually Van Vechten himself who has waited most
of all, for when she is present, the author's
narrative style shifts, moving from the careful,
allusive attention he paid to Harlem's middle class
to the over-the-top imagery and innuendo that,
marking his other novels, earned him labels of
"perverse" and "nasty." 67 She whom Carby interprets
as Nigger Heaven's anxious response to a perceived sociopathic threat
also becomes Van Vechten's essentialized--if
admired--fantasy of spectacularization: an
alchemical mix of subject (an itinerant and sexual
agency) and object (a hypervisibly racist object of
desire): As
Byron's lips brushed Lasca's cheek, an exotic
fragrance assailed his nostrils, a fragrance with
which he was becoming more and more familiar, a
fragrance it would be impossible henceforth for him
to forget. Coty?
he whispered interrogatively. No, body, she
lisped. (NH 245-46) Lasca tears her
dress and declares that she'll "go naked to the
Black Mass!," rakes Byron's hand to ribbons,
declares she'd like to "cut his heart out," "bruise
him," "gash [him] with a knife," "beat [him] with a
whip" (NH 252-53). This shift into narrative
floridity suggests that what Carby sees as Van
Vechten's paternalistic fear of Lasca can
also be read as his desire for the liberatory space he
interprets her as occupying, a space that only
Gareth Johns as an [apparently closeted] gay white
male had before been able to achieve--but then only
invisibly, outside the text in a European venue the
readers never get to see. Nigger Heaven becomes a text unable to
reconcile Van Vechten's fearful white fantasy of
unbridled black female sexuality with his
simultaneous attraction to the freedom to be both
subject and object that his own narratorial melding
with that fantasy seems to constitute.
Interestingly, this tension subtly revises the
heterosexual paradigm informing the plantation
drama's script, for Van Vechten's desire is not a
heterosexual one for Lasca herself. Instead, rather
than wanting her, Van Vechten wants to
be her. Sadly and importantly, however,
Van Vechten's "wanting to be her" is predicated
upon an objectification of "black woman" that is
much the same and as violent, in its own way, as
"wanting her" would be, for both desires depend
upon the putative constant of Van Vechten's
nominative privilege of white male subjectivity.
Having revised the drama's heterosexual paradigm so
that he becomes, via narrative, both subject
pursuing and object pursued, Van Vechten does not,
cannot, or will not question the very script that
enables the construction of the scene through
Nigger
Heaven in
the first place. "The freest
things on Earth" [40] An
acknowledgment of this sad recalcitrance of desire
appears to inform Miguel Covarrubias's drawing
"Nude," a visual text that can be read as
explicitly invoking the scene of the looking Van
Vechten. Appearing "Courtesy of Carl Van Vechten"
in Negro
Drawings
(1927), "Nude" seems to perform a process akin to
that which we now call "morphing" and mingles a
portrait of an unclothed African-American woman
with Van Vechten's unmistakable facial
features.68 In superimposing the white
male interloper's visage over a black female body,
the wry Covarrubias seems to realize visually the
liberatory desire that Van Vechten realized
verbally in Nigger Heaven: to be both of what Zora
Neale Hurston ironically called the "freest
thing[s] on earth": a white man and a black
woman.69 Contemplating the scene of
the looking Van Vechten by reading "Nude" alongside
of Nigger Heaven seems to promise tantalizingly to bestow a sort of
knowledge, not only about the author's apparent
fascination and identification with Lasca Sartoris,
but also about what Nigger Heaven, that eminently troubling
text, means. [41] But in
revising this essay from an earlier form that
concluded, effectively, with "Nude" as a metonym
expressing what I then figured as Nigger
Heaven's meaning (i.e., the novel suggests Van Vechten's
desire to "be" a black woman), I discovered that
revision itself meant returning, again and again,
to the Van Vechtenian scene. For example, I found
myself contemplating another Covarrubias
caricature, "A Prediction," which I have mentioned
briefly above. Like "Nude," "A Prediction"
meditates strikingly on the scene of the
"inspectin'" Carl Van Vechten. Glossed by its
title, "A Prediction" presumably speculates a
future closure to what, in the 1920s, was a present
story: that Van Vechten's involvement with black
culture would result in a visual blending of his
"self" with a collectivized "blackness." In other
words, Van Vechten would turn black, a process that
Vanity
Fair, for
one, perceived as already well under
way.70 At first, "A Prediction"
seemingly confirms the story's "meaning" by merging
Van Vechten's distinctive facial features with
[spurious] corporeal sureties of blackness
(darkened "skin," linearly "nappy"
hair).71 Accordingly, Kellner reads
"A Prediction" as "Van Vechten in blackface" while
Lewis describes it as a "coal-black Van Vechten,"
and Worth calls it a "black Van
Vechten."72
[42] Following this
synthetic logic, "Nude," which appears in
Covarrubias's 1927 Negro Drawings, could then be read as a
variation on "A Prediction": Van Vechten in
black[woman]face. Given the fact that the drawing
appeared closely after Nigger Heaven, such a conclusion worked
initially for me to confirm my reading of the novel
as expressing Van Vechten's ostensible desire to
"be" a black woman, whatever that might mean.
However, I became increasingly troubled about my
own reading of "Nude" as I reflected further upon
the interpretations of "A Prediction." Kellner,
Lewis, and Worth all figure the meaning of the
drawing as the sum total of two--and only
two--constitutive identities putatively knowable
through sight: the "individual" named Carl Van
Vechten plus "race" (i.e., blackness) equals black
Van Vechten. Other elements that might be drawn
upon explicitly in the construction or speculation
of meaning (e.g., gaze, context, etc.) do not
factor into the equation. Certainly, I thought,
Kellner's, Lewis's, and Worth's readings are all
problematic, relying upon and preserving as they do
the visible traces of the dual Western
apportionment of "abstract [individual]
citizenship" to white males and an undifferentiated
"racial and gendered embodiment" to
"others."73 When I then looked back at
"Nude," however, my own complicity with that which
I had just critiqued became strikingly clear. For
my own reading of "Nude" had itself preserved "Van
Vechten" as a coherent subject, one that remains
whole even when augmented with "race" (blackness)
and "gender" (femaleness), and such a reading
called into question exactly what and how I see.
Under questioning, then, the various manifestations
of the Van Vechten scene shifted for me from being
"readable" texts that allegedly produce knowledge
(i.e., providing answers to what Van Vechten was
doing, what Nigger Heaven meant) to ones that are
essentially "unreadable," ones that perhaps produce
only the knowledge or awareness that the reader is
looking at Van Vechten looking. In this way, "Nude"
and "A Prediction" (as well as Stein's "ONE" and
Autobiography) function much the same way
that, inevitably, The Tattooed Countess and Nigger
Heaven do, bouncing the questing reader circularly back to the
scene of unreadableness--the looking Van Vechten
himself--and producing not "meanings" but instead
processes of readerly self-reflection and
interrogation that circulate unceasingly around Van
Vechten as the object of our desire, the critic
whom we long to know. For to contemplate the
looking Van Vechten means also to contemplate
ourselves in the act of looking--a realization that
is both critically nourishing, as it invites as a
response, a dialogic engagement (e.g., more
narrative) and vexing, as it requires effort
towards contributing, as Kobena Mercer has outlined
in his own self-reflective responses to Robert
Mapplethorpe's black male photographs, "to the
mapping of the political unconscious we all inhabit
as embodied subjects of identity, desire, and
history."74
[43] In the end it
is worth mentioning, I think, that much as the
visual image of "Nude" contributed both to my
"solution" to Nigger Heaven and my subsequent
problematization of that "solution." Lasca's
felicitous relationship to the visual itself seemed
to promise both a more productive and a more
problematic medium for Carl Van Vechten's apparent
quest to stage the scene of his looking self. For
soon after the Harlem novel, the "inspectin'" Van
Vechten relocated himself to the West Coast:
Hollywood and the motion picture industry. A 1927
Vanity
Fair
cartoon features scores of L.A. notables "Tuesday
Night at the Cocoanut Grove;" amid this tableau is
sketched a tuxedoed Carl Van Vechten who neither
looks directly at the magazine's viewer nor meets
another reveler's eyes.75 Instead, his gaze is
directed somewhere else, a detail that again
constructs him as a detached and elusive object of
visual desire. And two years after the Harlem
novel, Van Vechten wrote his sixth and penultimate
novel Spider Boy (1928), which follows the fortunes of Ambrose Deacon, a
playwright pursued (quite against his will) by
Hollywood folk wishing him to write the definitive
script for them; in other words, the promulgator of
the gaze--a potential script-writer--becomes the
object pursued and desired by all. Despite the
book's status as the "gayest" of all Van Vechten's
novels, however, Spider Boy did not sell well; one of Van
Vechten's correspondents observed that the novel
"caused no stir in Hollywood 'because nobody out
there read any books.'"76 The celluloid--the visual
image--had become all. After 1930's Parties, Van Vechten left novel
writing altogether and threw himself into the
visual, embarking on the decades-long career in
intra- and interracial portrait photography that,
providing us with some of the best-known images of
such artists as Billie Holliday, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and Nella Larsen, has also constituted
a key site of critical compilations and
investigations of his work.77 Ultimately, acknowledging
Van Vechten's apparent shift from the verbal to the
visual enables critical re-vision (to borrow
Adrienne Rich's terminology) of his novels and
encourages us, as his critics, to interrogate our
own complex investments in his visual work--often
at the expense of the verbal--as well. I would like to thank William Harrison, Melissa Mowry, and Judith Roof for their insightful and helpful readings while this essay was in progress. Additionally, I am grateful to the anonymous readers at Genders for their keen and excellent advice.
1. I place the
term "race" here in quotes to indicate at the
outset the concept's status as fantastic artifice
naturalized into a force with very real effects.
Reading Van Vechten's career as an extended inquiry
into such concepts as race is, in part, in answer
to Chidi Ikonnè's long-ago and careful call
to reconsider Van Vechten and his novels (36). See
Ikonnè,
From DuBois to Van Vechten: The Early
New Negro Literature, 1903-1926(Westport: Greenwood Press,
1981), 36.
2. Kaja Silverman,
The
Threshold of the Visible World(New York: Routledge,
1996), 227.
3. Gertrude Stein,
"ONE,"
Geography and Plays(Boston: Four Seas, 1922),
200.
4. Diana Souhami,
Gertrude and
Alice (San
Francisco: Pandora, 1991), 118.
5. Gertrude Stein,
"The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,"
Selected
Writings of Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, ed. (New
York: Vintage, 1990), 128.
6. Ibid., 128.
7. Stein, "ONE,"
199.
8. Much of the
more recent work on Gertrude Stein has circulated
around questions of how (or if) her "identities" as
woman and as lesbian play into her work. Works that
grapple with such issues include Elizabeth Fifer,
Rescued
Readings: A Reconstruction of Gertrude Stein's
Difficult Texts
(Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1992); Harriet Scott Chessman,
The Public
is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and
Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1989); Shari Benstock,
"Expatriate Modernism: Writing on the Cultural
Rim,"
Women's Writing in
Exile, Mary
Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, eds. (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1989);
Elizabeth Meese,
(Sem)erotics: Theorizing Lesbian :
Writing
(New York: New York University Press, 1992). It is
with "Melanctha," most often, that "race" becomes a
critical issue; see Corinne E. Blackmer, "African
Masks and the Arts of Passing in Gertrude Stein's
"Melanctha" and Nella Larsen's Passing ,"
Journal of the History of
Sexuality
4.2 (1993).
9. Bruce Kellner,
Carl Van
Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1968), 75.
10. Edward Burns notes that the term "woojums" first appears in Van Vechten's Parties (1930) as a synonym for an absinthe cocktail. Souhami observes that Van Vechten seems to have first called Stein "a woojums" as a term of endearment in 1932; it was not until two years later, however, that the "Woojums" family dynamic coalesced, when Stein and Toklas visited America. As Souhami writes,
See The Letters of Gertrude
Stein and Carl Van Vechten , Edward Burns, ed. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 255, note
2; Souhami, 210.
11. Intriguingly,
Stein's own work can be read as manifesting a
dynamic whose contours, at least, are similar to
the one that she perceived to be circulating around
Van Vechten. As Jane Palatini Bowers has observed,
Stein's 1933 play
Byron
contains the line "They watch me as
they watch this," a line that Bowers selects as the
emblematic title to her book on Stein's
"metadrama." See Bowers,
"
They Watch Me as They Watch This":
Gertrude Stein's Metadrama (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 83.
12. Carl Van
Vechten,
Peter Whiffle: His Life and
Works (New
York: Knopf, 1922), 187.
13. David
Levering Lewis,
When Harlem was in
Vogue (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 114.
14. Carl Van
Vechten, "Letter to Hugh Walpole," Letters of Carl Van
Vechten,
Bruce Kellner, ed. and sel. (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), 72.
15. Kellner,
280-82.
16. Carl Van
Vechten, "Letter to Arna Bontemps," Letters of Carl Van
Vechten,
232.
17. Walter
Benjamin expresses the pleasure circulating around
the project of collecting in a somewhat similar,
though perhaps more hermetic, vein: the "existence
[of a collector] is tied to . . . a relationship to
objects which does not emphasize their functional,
utilitarian value--that is, their usefulness--but
studies and lives them as the scene, the stage, of
their fate." See "Unpacking My Library: A Talk
About Book Collecting,"
Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. and
intro. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc.,
1955), 60.
18. Jonathan
Weinberg, "'Boy Crazy': Carl Van Vechten's Queer
Collection,"
Yale Journal of
Criticism
7.2 (Fall 1994), 47, 48.
19. Ibid., 27,
47.
20. Ibid., 47.
21. Quoted in
Kellner, 280.
22. Lewis, 182.
23. Quoted in
Lewis, 182.
24. Quoted in
Kellner, 195. Gleaned largely from information
found in Kellner's Van Vechten biography, this
litany of scene-setting anecdotes has been
proliferated widely, from Nathan Huggins's
Harlem
Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) to
Lewis's When
Harlem Was in Vogue
to Robert F. Worth's recent article
in African
American Review,
"
Nigger Heaven and the Harlem Renaissance"
(Fall 1995).
Time
's jab here is worth attending to more
directly, for its tone and content constitute an
apt synecdoche for a larger, disturbing critical
tradition of responding to and/or managing the
complexities of the Van Vechten scene. This
tradition explicitly or implicitly "explains" Van
Vechten's oscillation around and across the color
line as a matter of opportunistic homosexual
predation and is manifested most visibly (though
not uniquely) around the Black Arts movement,
echoing perhaps the defensively homophobic
pronouncements of LeRoi Jones and Eldridge Cleaver.
The most striking emblem of this tradition is
perhaps found in Ishmael Reed's tour de force
Mumbo
Jumbo
(1972), where the character Hinckle Von Vampton
represents at least in part an obvious play upon
Carl Van Vechten. Shifting "Van Vechten" to "Von
Vampton" of course invokes "vampire" and "vamp,"
terms that connote not only the vampirization of
black culture of which Van Vechten was accused, but
also the decadent, threatening sexuality inherent
in the concept of the vampire. In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed manipulates
allegations of racial exploitation with an idea of
homosexuality as perversion and further embellishes
that intersection with intimations of pedophilia
and necrophilia. Though certainly less florid than
Reed, Nathan Huggins and David Levering Lewis both
cast Van Vechten similarly, as a "tittering" gay
white icon whose interests in black culture were
inauthentic. It should be noted here that one of my
goals in this essay is to intervene in this
tradition, not to defend Van Vechten against
allegations of exploitative racism but to expand
the scope and complexitize the stakes in
understanding the nuances of race and sexuality as
such terms are figured by and around Van Vechten
and his work. See Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Atheneum, 1972).
25. Carl Van
Vechten, Response to "The Negro in Art: How Shall
He Be Portrayed[?] A Symposium," The Crisis 31.5 (March 1926): 219.
26. Lewis, 123.
27. For a deftly
thorough account of what Eleanor Perènyi
recalled vaguely as the "furore" surrounding
Nigger
Heaven, see
Worth, who synthesizes both the widely known
responses (Rudolph Fisher's and James Weldon
Johnson's support of the book, for example, and
W.E.B. DuBois's declaration of it as a "blow in the
face") and those that are perhaps lesser known
(such as Hubert Harrison's "Homo Africanus Harlemi"
in the 1926 African American newspaper
Pittsburgh
Courier.
Harrison "mockingly" praised Van Vechten's
implicitly feminized eye for description).
Perènyi, "Carl Van Vechten," The Yale
Review 77.4
(Summer 1988): 531; Worth, 464, 468.
28. Kellner, 220.
29. The
Literary
History of the United States buries Van Vechten in a
list of "representative writers during the
twenties" who "achieved varying degrees of popular
success" while Robert Stepto in the more
contemporary
Columbia Literary History of the
United States
dismisses him as a producer of "minor
novels." See Robert E. Spiller, et al, eds.,
Bibliography, Volume 2 of Literary History of the
United States
(New York: MacMillan, 1974), 150;
Stepto, "Afro-American Literature," Columbia Literary History of
the United States, Emory Elliott, ed. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988), 788.
30. Marcy Jane
Knopf and Elizabeth J. Swanson Goldberg recount
their difficulties in attempting to find a
publisher for a new edition of Nigger
Heaven in
"On Judging Books by Covers: Re-Reading Carl Van
Vechten's
Nigger Heaven, "a paper presented at the
24th annual Twentieth Century Literature
Conference, University of Louisville (February 22,
1996).
31. W.E.B.
DuBois, "Criteria of Negro Art," The Seventh Son: The Thought
and Writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Volume II, Julius Lester,
ed., and intro. (New York: Random House, 1971), 319
(the essay appeared originally in The Crisis 32 (October 1926).
32. Manthia
Diawara, "The Absent One: The Avant-Garde and the
Black Imaginary in
Looking for Langston,"
Wide Angle
13.3-4 (July-October 1991): 99.
33. Kellner, 153.
34. Carl Van
Vechten, The
Tattooed Countess
(New York: Knopf, 1924), 102. Further
references to this work will be included
parenthetically in the text and will be abbreviated
as TC.
35. George
Chauncey,
Gay New York
(New York: Basic Books, 1994).
36. Kellner, 153.
37. In
Firecrackers
(New York: Knopf, 1925), the Countess
meets her tragic end. Tended on her deathbed by
Campaspe Lorillard (another recurring Van Vechten
character), Ella summons a priest to administer the
last rites to her. Before the priest's arrival,
Ella spurs herself into euphoric fantasies about
how young and therefore handsome the priest will
be, yet even in the end, Ella's desires are
thwarted: an elderly priest enters to give her the
last rites.
38. Abigail
Solomon-Godeau, "The Legs of the Countess,"
Fetishism as
Cultural Discourse
, Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds.
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 271.
39. Ibid., 282.
40. Ibid., 284.
41. Ibid., 306.
42. Carl Van
Vechten, "Letter to Arthur Davison Ficke,"
Letters of
Carl Van Vechten
, 68.
43. Carl Van
Vechten, "Letter to Hugh Walpole," Letters of Carl Van
Vechten,
72.
44. Robyn
Wiegman,
American Anatomies: Theorizing Race
and Gender
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 3.
45. Kellner, 157.
46. Quoted in
Kellner, 157.
47. Kellner, 157.
48. Ibid., 157.
49. Quoted in
Kellner, 157.
50. Judith Roof,
"Introduction: 'Concentrate on sex. Leave out the
poetry',"
Modern Fiction Studies 41.3-4 (Sexuality and
Narrative Double Issue) (Fall-Winter 1995), 430.
51. This
quotation by Raymond Radiguet appears in French
("Ce n'est
pas dans la nouveaute, c'est dans l'habitudé
que nous trouvons les plus grands
plaisirs")
as the epigraph to Van Vechten's Parties, his final novel.
52. Quoted in
Charles Scruggs, "Crab Antics and Jacob's Ladder:
Aaron Douglas's Two Views of Nigger
Heaven,"
The Harlem
Renaissance Re-examined
, Victor A. Kramer, ed. (New York: AMS
Press, 1987), 150. As with any text, opposing
readings of the balcony metaphor exist in tension
with the one proffered by Van Vechten and echoed
not only by Knopf but also by pro-Van Vechten
critics. DuBois, as Worth points out, generated one
of those opposing readings; what Van Vechten saw as
a "haven," DuBois characterized as a "nasty, sordid
corner into which black folk are herded, and yet a
place which they in crass ignorance are fools
enough to enjoy" (see Worth, 464). One location
where this advertisement for Nigger Heaven may be found is
Publishers' Weekly 109 (June 26, 1926): 2008.
53. Carl Van
Vechten,
Nigger Heaven (New York: Knopf, 1926),
149. Further references to this work will be
included parenthetically in the text and will be
abbreviated NH.
54. Scruggs,
149-51.
55. Carl Van
Vechten, "Letter to Louis Bromfield,"
Letters of
Carl Van Vechten
, 88.
56. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam might characterize Harlem's response as one rebelling not only against being positioned as objects within the novel, but also against being positioned as "spectators . . . who become slaves, as Fanon puts it [in Black Skin, White Masks], of their own appearance: 'Look, a Negro! . . . I am being dissected under white eyes. I am fixed '." On a very basic level, the difference between the reactions of Cedar Rapids and Harlem to being reconstructed with a Van Vechten novel has to do with the non-equivalence and asymmetricality of the two communities' positioning within a political and representational "continuum" where all negative stereotypes are hurtful . . . [but] do not all exercise the same power in the world. The facile catch-all invention of 'stereotypes' elides a crucial distinction: stereotypes of some communities merely make the target group uncomfortable, but the community has the social power to combat and resist them; stereotypes of other communities participate in a continuum of prejudicial social policy and actual violence against disempowered people, placing the very body of the accused in jeopardy. This distinction is
crucial to
Nigger Heaven's particular historical
moment; as Worth notes, though lynching had been
relatively quiescent in the early 1920s, the crime
took a sudden leap in 1925-1926. To Harlemites, the
difference to be traveled between what could be
taken as whites' verbal violence and whites'
physical violence was as miniscule and as quickly
traversable as ever. See Shohat and Stam,
Unthinking
Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the
Media
(London: Routledge, 1994), 348, 183; see also
Worth, 466.
57. Langston
Hughes, The
Big Sea
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 270.
58. Lewis, 194.
59. Hughes, 270.
60. Addison
Gayle, The
Way of the New World: The Black Novel in
America
(Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1975), 87.
61. The novel is
subtitled "A Romantic Novel with a Happy Ending."
62. Carl Van
Vechten, "Letter to H.L. Mencken," Letters of Carl Van
Vechten,
87.
63. Wiegman, 25.
Wiegman's observation is made within the context of
her exploring the incommensurabilities between
America's putatively heritable slavery and ancient
modes that did not see "enslavement" as a feature
emerging biologically from an immanent, immutable
difference.
64. Hazel V.
Carby, "Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban
Context,"
Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 739.
65. Ibid., 740,
747-49.
66. Ibid., 748.
67. As Kellner
confirms, Van Vechten's careful (if patronizing)
championing and critiquing of the black bourgeoisie
caused him to "purposely . . . avoid his usual,
light-fingered, sleight-of-hand manipulations of
syntax." See Kellner, 215. The adjectives for Van
Vechten's prose are quoted in Kellner, 141.
68. Miguel
Covarrubias, "Nude," Illustration 23,
Negro
Drawings
(New York: Knopf, 1927).
69. For Hurston,
the irony underlying this adage is clear: the two
types of freedom are not commensurable, one being
the residence of dominant cultural power, and the
other the site of, as Aida Hurtado observes,
dominant culture's rejection. See Zora Neale
Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching
God
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 280;
Aida Hurtado,
The
Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies
on Race and Feminism
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996).
70. Quoted in
Kellner, 198.
71. The following
passage from
Passing
, written by Van Vechten's friend
Nella Larsen, is worth quoting here: "White people
were so stupid about such things for all that they
usually asserted that they were able to tell; and
by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms
of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally
silly rot." See Nella Larsen, Quicksand and
Passing,
Deborah E. McDowell, ed. and intro. (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1986), 150.
72. Kellner, 198;
Lewis 182; Worth,462.
73. See Lauren
Berlant, "National Brands/National Body: Imitation
of Life,"
Comparative American Identities: Race,
Sex, and Nationality in the Modern
Text
(Essays from the English Institute), Hortense J.
Spillers, ed., (New York: Routledge, 1991), 113.
74. Kobena
Mercer, "Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs
of Robert Mapplethorpe,"
Fetishism as Cultural
Discourse,
Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993), 329. As a similar
example of complex self-interrogation, I would also
like to call attention to an essay that appeared in
these pages just as this article was being
reviewed: James Smalls, "Public Face, Private
Thoughts: Fetish, Interracialism, and the
Homoerotic in Some Photographs by Carl Van
Vechten,"
Genders
25 (1997).
75. Ralph Barton,
"A Tuesday Night at the Cocoanut Grove in Los
Angeles as Imagined by a Noted American Artist,
Ralph Barton,"
Vanity Fair
28.4 (June 1927): 62-63.
76. Quoted in
Kellner, 233, 235.
77. See Rudolph
Byrd,
Generations in Black and White:
Photographs by Carl Van Vechten from the James
Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1993); Paul Padgette, sel.,
The Dance
Photography of Carl Van Vechten (New York: Schirmer, 1981);
Keith F. Davis,
The Passionate Observer: Photographs
by Carl Van Vechten
(Kansas City: Hallmark Cards, 1993).
BETH A. MCCOY is an assistant professor of English at SUNY Geneseo. Her primary research and teaching interests are in the Harlem Renaissance and critical race feminism. Her article "A Nation's Metalanguage: Misogyny in Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and The Slave appears in Staging the Rage: The Web of Misogyny in Modern Drama . Additionally, she has published an essay on the 1950s film Blackboard Jungle , forthcoming in Cinema Journal. Currently, she is at work on a book manuscript tracing shifts in white masculinity as seen through the works of black women writers. Copyright ©1998
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