Review: ‘Carl Van Vechten & the Harlem Renaissance’ by Emily Bernard

Carl Van Vechten & the Harlem RenaissanceA Portrait in Black & WhiteEmily Bernard
Yale University Press: 342 pp., $30
The line separating passion and obsession is porous. One step over that boundary, the territory becomes fraught — rutted with suspicion, quiet judgment if not outright accusation. This was the territory Carl Van Vechten — critic, novelist, photographer and, most famously, patron of the Harlem Renaissance — traversed with a singular vigor and preoccupation that bordered on fetishism.

He counted the black literati of the era — among them Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson — as collaborators and confidants. An idiosyncratic white man, of Dutch descent, Van Vechten dedicated his life’s work to, as Hughes once put it, “all things Negro” — literature, theater, ragtime, jazz and blues — nurturing art and alliances, but not without acrimony.
Van Vechten’s theater of life unfolded across Manhattan: both in opulent drawing rooms and at formal dining tables as well as Harlem “rent parties” or at smoky Uptown clubs. He “lived at the intersection of black and white,” writes Emily Bernard, an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont, in her deeply absorbing and elegantly evoked biography of a man and his era, “Carl Van Vechten & the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black & White.” His presence, however, among the black intelligentsia was far from neutral: Was he an insider or an intruder? An advocate or a voyeur? Van Vechten was not simply a champion of the black arts movement flourishing in the first decades of the 20th century but, suggests Bernard, a man who helped it “to come to understand itself.”
Van Vechten was born in 1880 and grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a child of progressively thinking parents — his father operated a lumber mill; his mother was “a suffragette who kept company with abolitionists.” He exhibited an interest in art early: photography, opera and writing. And though he made his way to the University of Chicago for his studies, “a formal education was not on his mind,” writes Bernard. “He went to Chicago for the art.” Once there, he set himself on the road to become a journalist — a critic, first with the Chicago American and later the Chicago Tribune. It would be his launching pad into the world of arts criticism and finally into a post writing about opera and ballet — in New York City — focusing on artists who were pushing boundaries. He was, Bernard writes, “the first serious American ballet critic” and the first to seriously appreciate the work of writer Gertrude Stein.
In those years, as a critic for the New York Times and Vanity Fair, he pressed his highly placed connections — most effectively Alfred and Blanche Knopf — to publish the work of heretofore unheard of poets, essayists and novelists writing forthrightly about the black experience in America.
But it was a very particular expression of “blackness” with which he was most enchanted. In a piece written in 1925 for Vanity Fair, he posited that “authentic black theater would not succeed until black artists began to value what was already there, which included ‘honest-to-God Blues, full of trouble and pain and misery and heartache and tribulation…'” [Africa, writes Bernard, “to Van Vechten was black authenticity, a primitive birthright that Negroes must reclaim if they wanted to make commercially viable art.”
He meant his statements not as patronizing but as a prescriptive. He viewed himself as an “insider” — a status that, Bernard explains, “he claimed and cultivated for the rest of his life — that of an exceptional white person among black people.” He would count many of the Harlem Renaissance writers not just as professional connections but as intimates. Out of his proximity came a 1926 novel that was to be Van Vechten’s “celebration” of Harlem, to advertise, literally, its “virtues and vices to white readers,” writes Bernard. The title, however, contains a racial epithet that proved beyond problematic then and is still charged nearly 100 years later. It was an audacious choice. One that would strain those long-cultivated friendships (as it did with Cullen) — and vilify Van Vechten beyond the circle. That choice was, as one of Van Vechten’s most vocal critics, W.E.B. Du Bois, characterized, “an affront to the hospitality of black folk.” The move was a breach that would shadow him the rest of his life, but one he never capitulated on nor apologized for.
Bernard’s examination, told in three acts, isn’t simply an exploration of Van Vechten’s life, letters and various boundary crossings; it’s also a meditation on a personal passion turned obsession — Van Vechten’s role as literary impresario had haunted Bernard since her junior year at Yale — more than 20 years ago. “It would be years before I learned to love the seeming paradox: a black woman inspired by the black addiction of a white man,” she writes in an author’s note at the end of the book.
Van Vechten didn’t just live his life, he consciously documented and curated it. He kept copious daybooks and composed long, elegant letters and took thousands of photographs, many of which are now housed at Yale University in a collection Van Vechten named for the man he felt embodied the dignity of the Harlem Renaissance: The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection “founded by Carl Van Vechten” — the culmination of his life’s work to once again convene the voices of those architects of the movement. Bernard (who previously visited the correspondence between Hughes and Van Vechten in 2001’s “Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten”) dips into all of these troves to animate a narrative; consequently, the text feels alive with cocktail party conversation, vivid anecdotes, whispered intimacies and trenchant debates with friends and enemies.
It’s a bit like eavesdropping on a historic work in progress. Did Van Vechten overstep? Did arrogance obscure his intent to elevate? Bernard explains at the outset that her quest was not to determine whether Van Vechten was a “good or bad force”; rather, it’s a measure of legacy and the potency of language — the fraught territory of race and the still-present wound of racism. Van Vechten’s choices and motives became a catalyst for discussion among the black literati who would debate and sculpt and define for themselves — not simply the stigma of one word but also the language and stories that would come to define the complexity — “the epic theater of blackness.”
George is a Los Angeles-based journalist and an assistant professor of English and journalism at Loyola Marymount University.