{"id":71247,"date":"2014-05-14T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2014-05-14T16:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=71247"},"modified":"2016-04-08T14:48:33","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T18:48:33","slug":"the-making-of-an-american","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/14\/the-making-of-an-american\/","title":{"rendered":"The Making of an American"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carl Van Vechten shaped and burnished the legend of Gertrude Stein.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"G<\/a>

Carl Van Vechten\u2019s iconic 1935 portrait of Gertrude Stein<\/p><\/div>\n

Tender Buttons<\/em>, Gertrude Stein\u2019s collection of experimental still-life word portraits split into the categories of objects, food, and rooms, and which\u2014excluding a vanity publication in 1909, which she paid for herself\u2014was the first of Stein\u2019s work to be published in the United States. Stein had hoped that this enigmatic little book would be her big break, the thing to convince the American people of her genius. That was not to be. Tender Buttons <\/em>left critics bemused and made barely a dent on the consciousness of the wider reading public. There was no great clamor for more of her writing; Stein would have to wait another twenty years to become a household name. Nevertheless, the publication of Tender Buttons <\/em>is now widely regarded as a landmark in American literary modernism, the moment when one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century first unfurled her avant-garde sensibilities before the American public.<\/p>\n

That moment would never have arrived had it not been for the work of Stein\u2019s most important champion, Carl Van Vechten, the man who arranged for the book\u2019s publication. Little remembered today, Van Vechten was a pioneering arts critic, a popular author of tart, brittle novels about Manhattan\u2019s Jazz-Age excesses, an acclaimed photographer, and a flamboyant socialite whose daring interracial cocktail parties were a defining part of Prohibition-era New York\u2019s social scene. But his greatest legacy is as a promoter of many underappreciated American writers, artists, and performers who went on to gain canonical status. Names as diverse as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Herman Melville all felt the effects of Van Vechten\u2019s boost. His first great cause was Gertrude Stein. He did more than anyone else to carve her legend into the edifice of the American Century, arranging publishing deals for her, photographing her, and publicizing her work, a task he continued long after her death.<\/p>\n

Stein knew how crucial Van Vechten was to her career\u2014not merely in the practical aspects of getting her work into print, read, and discussed, but in helping create and disseminate the mythology that surrounds her name. \u201cI always wanted to be historical, almost from a baby on,\u201d Stein freely admitted toward the end of her life. \u201cCarl was one of the earliest ones that made me be certain that I was going to be.\u201d Van Vechten and Stein were strikingly different, led wildly different lives. Hers was rooted in the domestic stability she enjoyed with her partner Alice B. Toklas; his was an exhausting whirl of binges, parties, and pansexual escapades. But they had two crucial things in common: the conviction that Gertrude Stein was an irrefutable genius and a love of mythmaking, an obsession with re-scripting reality until they became the central actors in the fantastical scenes that unfolded in their heads. When Stein played fast and loose with the facts in her memoirs, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas<\/em>, many were furious over her distortions. But Van Vechten understood that telling the literal truth about her life\u2014or anybody else\u2019s\u2014was never Stein\u2019s concern. <\/p>\n

\"van<\/a>

Van Vechten\u2018s self portrait, 1933<\/p><\/div>\n

Indeed, one of those fabrications originated from an essay Van Vechten himself had written, about his experience of the remarkable Paris premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps<\/em> two years earlier. That first performance of Stravinsky\u2019s taboo-busting ballet was a defining moment in the emergence of modernism as an artistic force, and Van Vechten\u2019s ecstatic review of it has been cited over the last century as a key eyewitness account of the event. But he never attended the first night: he had failed to get tickets and had to content himself with the second performance instead. Still, Van Vechten immediately understood the epochal significance of the occasion. He decided he would not allow such a trifling matter as the truth to prevent him from finding a place at the center of events. Gertrude Stein happened to be in the audience with Van Vechten for that second performance, and when he wrote her about his deception, he breezily reassured her that writers such as they \u201cmust only be accurate about such details in a work of fiction \u2026 I am not a bit muddled about the facts<\/em>.\u201d Stein could not have agreed more. In fact, she so approved of Van Vechten\u2019s fiction that she embellished the story further in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas<\/em>, suggesting that the first night of Le Sacre du Printemps<\/em> was also the occasion of their first meeting, and that after the performance she rushed home to write a portrait of her new acquaintance.<\/p>\n

Van Vechten and Stein had actually met in that summer of 1913 at the Parisian townhouse Stein shared with Toklas. Over the previous several months, Van Vechten, at this point a critic for the New York Times<\/em>, had developed a fascination with Stein and her burgeoning legend\u2014his friend, the shamanic Fifth Avenue salon hostess Mabel Dodge, had given him a copy of the prose poem that Stein had recently written about her, Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia<\/em>. Van Vechten, always drawn to novelty and exoticism, was immediately captivated by the thoroughgoing oddness of the writing, as well as the tales he had heard about the deeply unconventional woman responsible for it: a middle-aged Jewish lesbian in self-exile in France. On meeting Stein for the first time he was thrilled to discover that she was every bit as strange and marvelous as he had hoped she would be. He wrote his lover back in New York about Stein\u2019s charisma and intelligence, as well as the delicious male nudes by Picasso that hung on her walls, some with \u201cerect Tom-Tom\u2019s much bigger than mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

After that first meeting Van Vechten\u2019s interest in Stein swiftly morphed into an obsession. Back in New York he set himself the task of hauling her from obscurity and into the mainstream. Van Vechten\u2019s encounter with this \u201ccubist of letters,\u201d as she was described in a New York Times <\/em>article he wrote about her, came at a perfect moment for both of them. In the early months of 1913, many Americans got their first glimpse of artists such as Kandinsky, Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp when the Armory Show exhibition of modern art hit New York with incendiary force. Stein\u2019s links to these European radicals\u2014\u201cfreaks,\u201d as at least one American newspaper labeled them\u2014generated much curiosity about her. Van Vechten, for his part, was at the beginning of his journey as a Manhattan tastemaker, loudly extolling the virtues of African-American theater, ragtime, and modern dancers such as Isadora Duncan. In Stein he found the perfect cause to champion: a unique artist whose mercurial work pulsated with the spirit of the age, but also one whose public image he could shape and bind himself to.<\/p>\n

Early in February 1914, Van Vechten urged his friend and New York Times <\/em>colleague Donald Evans to publish the manuscript of Tender Buttons <\/em>through his new publishing house, the Claire Marie Press. A thousand copies were printed, but Evans suggested he did not expect them all to sell: \u201cThere are in America seven hundred civilized people only\u201d Claire Marie\u2019s brochure claimed, and it was \u201ccivilized people only\u201d that the company said it was interested in reaching, which begs the question of whom exactly the remaining three hundred books in Tender Buttons<\/em>\u2019s print run were intended for. Of Stein\u2019s work, Evans said that \u201cthe effect produced on the first reading is something like terror.\u201d It was an unconventional means of promotion\u2014but one that ensured Stein remained the very image of the aloof literary genius.<\/p>\n

Van Vechten did a better job of bringing Stein\u2019s writing to public attention with an article, \u201cHow to Read Gertrude Stein,\u201d published in the fashionable arts magazine The Trend<\/em> in August 1914. As the double meaning of the title suggests, it was intended to be an insider\u2019s guide to understanding Stein\u2019s work as well as her personality, framing Van Vechten as the man with an all-access pass to the great enigmatic genius of the age. Always a more assured critic of music than of literature, Van Vechten turned to musical referents for his most effective explanations of Stein\u2019s writing, a tactic that countless others have followed in the intervening century. \u201cShe has really turned language into music,\u201d he asserted; \u201cMiss Stein drops repeated words upon your brain with the effect of Chopin\u2019s B Minor Prelude<\/em>.\u201d The article also helped to develop and solidify Stein\u2019s image as a guru-like figure, the sort of character Jo Davison would capture in his famous sculpture of Stein as Buddha some years later. \u201cAs a personality Gertrude Stein is unique,\u201d Van Vechten wrote. \u201cShe is massive in physique, a Rabelaisian woman with a splendid thoughtful face; mind dominating her matter.\u201d Stein wrote her charge to let him know that she was \u201cvery well pleased with your article about me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Considering Van Vechten\u2019s hero-worshipping of Stein, it was more than a little strange for them both that over the next dozen years she remained a cult figure while his fame and importance soared\u2014as a critic and a novelist, but most crucially as a trendsetter and the premier white promoter of the Harlem Renaissance. Success and celebrity never dampened his ardor for Stein, though, and he worked tirelessly on her behalf. In 1922 he came close to convincing Alfred A. Knopf to publish Stein\u2019s Making of Americans<\/em>, and references to her writing suffused his own literary efforts, which always attempted to frame Stein as the most important author of her generation, the light source from which all modern American writers took their nourishment. He even found opportunity to crowbar Stein into the heart of his infamous 1926 bestselling novel about the lives of African-Americans in Harlem, Nigger Heaven<\/em>\u2014a mind-blowingly insensitive title that caused every bit as much offence to black people then as it would now. The novel\u2019s heroine is Mary Love, a young black woman with a passion for literature and European history, but who struggles to connect with what Van Vechten characterizes as her innate blackness, her \u201cheritage of rhythm and warmth.\u201d Accordingly, Mary develops an obsession with Gertrude Stein\u2019s depiction of the black experience in \u201cMelanctha,\u201d Stein\u2019s novella about an African-American woman from Baltimore. In fact, Mary has committed great chunks of the book to memory, and Van Vechten dedicates a page-and-a-half to her recitation of a particular passage. It is a preposterous moment in an often bizarre novel, but nothing better reflects Van Vechten\u2019s fealty.<\/p>\n

\"van<\/a>

Van Vechten\u2019s self portrait, 1934<\/p><\/div>\n

Publicly and privately, Van Vechten lavished Stein\u2019s work with praise, but in thirty-three years of friendship, Stein never returned the compliment. The mountains of letters the two swapped over the decades clearly show that Stein\u2019s affection for Van Vechten was genuinely deep, but her faint praise for his literary work is hugely conspicuous. \u201cWhat you have done is very clear and I like it\u201d was her tepid response to Van Vechten\u2019s novel The Blind Bow-Boy<\/em>, widely thought to be his finest moment as a novelist. It was the most effusive she ever got about his work.<\/p>\n

In almost all of his friendships, Van Vechten liked to assert himself as the senior partner, a bossy proprietorial force of nature who dazzled and bulldozed with wit and charisma. Yet with Stein, whose singular genius he never doubted, he was happy to play the supplicant; at her he never lashed out or sulked as he did with so many others when he felt his specialness was being ignored. It was the reason that the two of them were able to maintain such a happy relationship for so many years. Ernest Hemingway once noted that Stein could never remain friends with anybody whom she saw as a threat. Van Vechten, a man she considered a literary lightweight and who was forever vociferously renewing his oath to her, was about as far from a threat as it was possible for her to imagine. Whenever Stein and Toklas executed one of their periodic culls of friends and groupies, Van Vechten, singing Gertrude\u2019s praises thousands of miles away in his Manhattan bubble, avoided the blade.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

By the start of the 1930s, Van Vechten, rich and bloated from what he termed \u201cthe splendid drunken twenties,\u201d had given up writing and taken up portrait photography, spending days on end locked away from the unpleasant realities of Depression-era America surrounded by prints of his beautiful and celebrated subjects. He shot an astonishing array of noteworthy people, from George Gershwin to Georgia O\u2019Keeffe. When The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas<\/em> became an unexpected bestseller in 1933, Van Vechten became impatient to add her picture to his gallery. The suddenness of Stein\u2019s success surprised Van Vechten as much as anyone. Almost the moment her book hit the shelves she morphed from a cult figure into a bona-fide celebrity. Fulsome reviews by prominent writers appeared everywhere, and a photograph of her taken by one of her new favorite courtiers, George Platt Lynes, graced the cover of Time<\/em>. Van Vechten was thrilled for her\u2014but bitterly jealous, too. He feared that in the frenzy of acclaim, he would be pushed from the frame at the expense of new, younger disciples.<\/p>\n

The chance to link himself definitively to Stein in this phase of her career came in the fall of 1934, when she arrived in the United States for her triumphant homecoming lecture tour. Van Vechten was partly responsible for instigating and arranging the tour, and he provided invaluable assistance in soothing her nerves and cooing praise into her ears, reassuring her that her time had come; the American public really was crazy for her at last. He saw the proof himself as he followed Stein to many of her engagements across the country\u2014striding around the stage with her hands in her pockets, she charmed audiences with a beguiling mixture of esotericism and folksy, homespun wisdom. To some she seemed like an adorably eccentric grandmother; to others, a radically prophetic voice. To just about everyone she was as enchanting as the woman Van Vechten had first met in Paris in 1913.<\/p>\n

When he got the chance to photograph Stein during her tour, Van Vechten made sure he did so in a way that took her public image to a new level of grandeur. In Virginia, he shot her in front of neoclassical buildings, including the Rotunda designed by Thomas Jefferson, deliberately placing her within the pantheon of historic American heroes. Once again their shared instinct for myth creation kicked in; they both understood that this was the moment in which Gertrude Stein would achieve her immortality. Touring America, she saw the history of the nation more vividly than ever before, and she sensed her place within it. When she passed through Dayton, Ohio, she noted to Van Vechten that this was where the Wright Brothers had started out; Marion, Ohio, she learned excitedly, was Warren Harding\u2019s hometown. From Illinois she wrote Van Vechten breathlessly, urging him to \u201cmake a pictorial history of these United States and I will write one and we will all be so happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"vvc<\/a>

Van Vechten\u2019s self portrait, 1935<\/p><\/div>\n

By now, Stein\u2019s letters to Van Vechten were routinely addressed to \u201cPapa Woojums,\u201d Woojums being the name of the family unit that Stein, Toklas, and Van Vechten created for themselves around this time, and in which each adopted a distinct role. While Van Vechten and Toklas were the parental figures\u2014Toklas was \u201cMama Woojums\u201d\u2014Stein was \u201cBaby Woojums,\u201d not because she was helpless or vulnerable but because she was special, a treasured jewel who needed coddling and directing lest her savant genius go to waste. It was a subtle but telling reconfiguration that recognized Van Vechten\u2019s talents and satisfied his self-image as a man of importance\u2014yet still ensured that Stein remained the center of attention.<\/p>\n

The night before Stein sailed back to France, Van Vechten had her come over to his apartment for a final photo shoot. In his cramped makeshift studio, he positioned her in front of a crumpled and ragged Stars and Stripes, as if the flag was being blown about in a strong breeze. This was not a Gertrude Stein that had ever been seen before; not a Delphic oracle or a bohemian eccentric, but a pillar of the establishment. With a firm, unsmiling gaze and the haircut of a Roman senator, Stein had been transformed by Van Vechten\u2019s lens into something permanent, weighty, and emphatically American, like a female addition to Mount Rushmore. Van Vechten\u2019s mission to embed himself in Stein\u2019s public profile was complete. The photograph has become perhaps the definitive image of Stein, and when a book of her lectures was published shortly after the tour, it was this photograph that adorned its front cover, chosen by Stein herself.<\/p>\n

When Stein died in 1946, it was to Papa Woojums that she left the task of getting her large number of unpublished manuscripts into print, the measure of her respect and affection for him. Despite fearing that \u201cGertrude had bitten off more than I could easily chew,\u201d Van Vechten faithfully undertook his duty. Within a little more than a decade, Stein\u2019s complete works had been published.<\/p>\n

Edward White is the author of<\/em> The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America<\/a>. White studied European and American history at Mansfield College, Oxford, and Goldsmiths College, London. Since 2005 he has worked in the British television industry, including two years at the BBC, devising programs in its arts and history departments. He is a contributor to <\/em>The Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carl Van Vechten shaped and burnished the legend of Gertrude Stein. Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein\u2019s collection of experimental still-life word portraits split into the categories of objects, food, and rooms, and which\u2014excluding a vanity publication in 1909, which she paid for herself\u2014was the first of Stein\u2019s work to be published in the United States. Stein […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":695,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[12956,3292,13909,4524,124,270,13908],"class_list":["post-71247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-carl-van-vechten","tag-gertrude-stein","tag-literary-friendships","tag-modernism","tag-new-york","tag-paris","tag-tender-buttons"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Making of an American<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Edward White on how Carl Van Vechten shaped and burnished the legend of Gertrude Stein.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/14\/the-making-of-an-american\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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