Carl Van Vechten & the
Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black & White
By Emily Bernard
Yale University Press
368
pages
The Crisis Magazine
Summer
2012 
The Mexican visual artist
Miguel Covarrubias once presented Carl Van Vechten, his friend and patron, with
a caricature called “A Prediction.” The drawing presents Van Vechten, an Iowan
of Dutch ancestry, in profile, with a rounded jaw-line and chin, pronounced
forehead, puffed and thickened lips around buck-teeth, and browned skin. The
artist’s prediction illustrated Van Vechten shifting from being simply a “White
Negro” to becoming Negro. Emily Bernard’s close reading of Van Vechten’s career
doesn’t confirm Covarrubias’ prediction, but it’s hard to read her substantial
new work, Carl Van Vechten & the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black
& White, without imagining that Van Vechten, at some point, wanted to
be an African American.
Posed as literary study,
Bernard’s book is actually a meditative culmination of her 20-year obsession —
call it “archive fever” — with Van Vechten. Presenting him as a significant
maker of the New Negro Movement/Harlem Renaissance, Bernard pulls Van Vechten
from its narrative margin to center stage. She offers her subject through three
portraits, each examining Van Vechten’s investment in Black American arts;
there is Van Vechten acting as critical agent on behalf of African American
artists and cultural workers; Van Vechten creating as controversial “White
Negro” novelist; and Van Vechten collecting, preserving and canonizing African
American literary and cultural artifacts.
 |
| Ethel Waters |
As a cultural critic and
aficionado, Van Vechten promoted African American experience and culture as
central to American life. His “passion for Blackness,” as Bernard puts it,
allowed him to create a niche as an advocate, befriending and sponsoring many
of the foundational figures of twentieth-century African American arts: Zora
Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Aaron Douglas, Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Rudolph
Fisher and Langston Hughes. Bernard’s first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The
Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (2001), is a strong initial
explanation of Van Vechten’s prowess. Beginning with Hughes’ first poetry
collection, The Weary Blues (1926), Van Vechten encouraged his publisher
to usher young New Negro literary artists like Fisher and Larsen into the
literary mainstream.
Van Vechten’s
“negrophilia” drew the ire of some prominent African American critics who were
dubious of Van Vechten, thinking his influence led Black artists to exoticize
Negro life as primarily carnal and primitive. As significant as this worry was,
Bernard explains, was the realization that “without this White man, Hughes may
not have emerged as the celebrated Black poet he came to be.”
Hard feelings against Van
Vechten are largely due to his infamous fifth novel, Nigger Heaven
(1926). Known across Manhattan as a hard-drinking socialite, Van Vechten
massaged access into the homes of Harlem’s social elite, making mental notes
for his theories on Negro life. This is Bernard’s most important portrait
because she illustrates how Nigger Heaven, the best selling novel of the Harlem
Renaissance, inspired writers like Claude McKay and Nella Larsen to seek
commercial attention by creating audacious fictions modeled after Van Vechten’s
novel. At the end of this middle portrait, Bernard offers a personal narrative
about teaching Nigger Heaven and the powder keg qualities of “nigger”;
this is a fine gesture. However, Bernard’s whole meditation would have been
bolstered had she reprinted the whole of her superb essay, “Teaching the
N-Word,” within it. Bernard’s piece would counterweigh her history with the book
and the word against Van Vechten’s intentions.
 |
| Carl Van Vechten |
After the stinging
criticism surrounding Nigger Heaven, Van Vechten gave up writing in
favor of creating The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts
and Letters. After Johnson’s death in a 1938 car accident, Van Vechten was
determined to maintain his close friend’s legacy, compelling the historically
White Yale University to become the repository for Johnson’s manuscripts, those
of other African American artists, and his own personal archive of Negro
artifacts, including his vast photographic record of American and Black
American artists. Fixed on mixing Black and White artists together through
institutional endowments, Van Vechten spent the last 24 years of his life
developing racial crossed archives at Yale, Fisk, and the Library of Congress.
 |
| Norman Mailer |
One of Van Vechten’s best
images is his portrait of 25-year-old Norman Mailer. As if predicting Mailer’s
future theories of Black jazzmen and White hipsters, the photographer situates
the subject so that his thick wavy hair and shaded facial features seem to
evoke an American Negro genealogy: The White Negro making the White Negro.
Bernard’s Carl Van Vechten, written in clear, elegant prose, makes her
subject too. Though one could quibble, desiring more straightforward literary
critique of Nigger Heaven or expanded art-historical analysis of Van
Vechten’s photographs, Bernard’s book is a compelling, challenging addition to
the ongoing racial remixing of American literary history.
Walton
Muyumba
