Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance

A Critical Assessment

Leon Coleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317776659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This book evaluates Carl Van Vechten's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance by presenting hitherto unexamined documentary evidence. The author draws on correspondence, manuscripts, personal memorabilia, and published materials to examine the origins and development of the period in the 1920s which was termed the New Negro Renaissance. In the later years of the 1920s, as a result of the success of his novel, Nigger Heaven, Carl Van Vechten received extensive publicity associating him with Harlem and with the Harlem Renaissance. The vehement controversy which the book aroused among African American critics and the black press, who attacked it, and the African American authors and friends of Van Vechten who defended it, obscured the true extent of Van Vechten's role in the Harlem Renaissance. This study sheds light on the Van Vechten controversy which has continued to the present day. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1969; revised with new preface)

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Negro Renaissance of the 1920s was a reflection in literature and art of the cultural changes experienced by the African Americans, as they left the rural South for the economic and social advantages to be found in northern cities. The crowded, bustling life of the northern ghettoes accelerated the breakdown of older patterns of Negro life and thought, and gave rise to the concept of the "New Negro." Although the meaning of the term was somewhat vague, it contained the implication of the Negro's psychological break with past racial attitudes of subservience, humility, and self-apology. Black writers, musicians, and painters of the Twenties attempted to give artistic expression to the more positive attitudes of self-acceptance and self-respect, which the image of the New Negro seemed to connote.¹ Rejecting past depictions of African American life by black artists as being either too polemical or too apologetic, many of the young artists of the Negro Renaissance sought to portray Negro life objectively.

During the early years of the decade, writers of the black intelligentsia, who aspired to portray the image of the New Negro were faced with two major difficulties; the absence of an audience for their work and the lack of the means of publication. In addition, there was disagreement among the artists of the Negro Renaissance as to how African Americans should be portrayed. Some felt that the lower class stratum of black life should be ignored; others believed that the vital elements of the African American's cultural heritage were to be found primarily in lower-class black folk-life. These problems were further complicated by the struggle of most black artists to overcome the cultural dualism inherent in being both black and American.

The publicity which attended the announcement of the New Negro concept was instrumental in bringing the problems confronting Negro Renaissance artists to the attention of white sympathizers. Of all the white well-wishers who became interested in the advancement of African American expression in the arts, Carl Van Vechten was the person who figured most prominently in assisting the members of the Negro Renaissance in their search for solutions to these problems.

In the latter years of the Twenties, as a result of the success of his novel, Nigger Heaven, Carl Van Vechten received extensive publicity, both in America and abroad, associating him with Harlem and with the Harlem Renaissance. Unfortunately, the vehement controversy aroused by the book, among Negro critics and the Negro press who attacked it, and the Negro authors and friends of Van Vechten, who defended it, had the effect of obscuring the true nature and extent of Van Vechten's role in the Negro Renaissance. Many of the later African American scholars and critics have not escaped a partisan view of Van Vechten's contribution, while others have virtually ignored him.

Professor Sterling Brown of Howard University has dismissed Van Vechten as "one of the pioneers of the hegira from downtown to Harlem; he was one of the early discoverers of the cabaret, and his novel, Nigger Heaven, is to the exotic pattern what Swallow Barn was to the contented slave."² Hugh Gloster, writing in 1948, characterized Van Vechten as "merely a literary faddist capitalizing upon a current vogue and a popular demand."³

In discussing the significance of the Negro Renaissance at a forum concerned with a retrospective view of the New Negro, Charles S. Johnson, then President of Fisk University, mentioned Van Vechten only as one of a number of white judges of Opportunity magazine's literary contests, although five years earlier he had publicly acknowledged that Van Vechten was the first white American writer to portray the New Negro objectively.⁴ Benjamin Brawley, on the other hand, condemned Van Vechten for debasing the writing of Negro authors through the influence of Nigger Heaven.⁵ In John Hope Franklin's history of American Negroes, a chapter is devoted to the Harlem Renaissance in which Van Vechten is referred to as one of a group, including Victor F. Calverton, H. L. Mencken, and Joel Spingam, who lent their pens "to the encouragement of Negroes and the use of Negro materials."⁶ Another black scholar, J. Saunders Redding, merely lists Van Vechten among other active white liberals of the period who were invited to parties given by the Negro elite.⁷

The importance given to Van Vechten's role in the Negro Renaissance by his adherents contrasts markedly with these minimizing estimates. George Schuyler, a member of the Harlem group, has stated that:

His 9 Vechten's] great legacy to future generations is the honor of having boldly entered where lesser men feared to tread . . . having wrought a real revolution in the white man's thinking about the Negro.⁸

In a letter to Van Vechten concerning his approval of the article cited above, Schuyler further credits him with securing for the Negro artist the psychological satisfaction of "recognition and acceptance from the top."⁹ James Weldon Johnson, who was the closest friend to Van Vechten among the African American writers, felt that his importance in aiding black artists should not be underestimated.¹⁰ At least one black author, Zora Neale Hurston, feared that the magnitude of Van Vechten's contributions to Negro arts and letters might suffer diminution with the passing of time. She wrote to him in July, 1947, requesting permission to do his biography because, as she stated:

You have had such a tremendous influence on the arts of the last twenty-five years, that I think it ought to be precipitated out of the mass of lies that are now growing up. People are now brazenly claiming credit for the many things that you were responsible for.¹¹

Among the scholars who have called attention to Carl Van Vechten's role as mentor for the New Negro, Cedric Dover in American Negro Art (1960), Robert Bone in The Negro Novel in America (1958), Klaus Jonas in Carl Van Vechten: A Bibliography (1955), Edward Lueders in Carl Van Vechten and the Twenties (1955) and in Carl Van Vechten (1964), Bruce Kellner in Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (1968), and Hisao Kishimoto in Carl Van Vechten: The Man and His Role in The Harlem Renaissance (1983) unanimously agree that Van Vechten fulfilled a unique role in furthering the Harlem Renaissance, but none of these authors has considered the extent of Van Vechten's contribution in sufficient detail to provide a definitive evaluation. Without this kind of evaluation it is impossible to judge the validity of statements about Van Vechten such as that made by Lincoln Kirstein in 1964 regarding the influence of Carl Van Vechten upon the freedom marchers in Mississippi:

Carl was too old to march to Mississippi last summer, but many who did go, even if they never suspected it, may have been reinforced by his long labors in the preservation and vitalization of everything that is best in the American Negro tradition.¹²

Nor is it possible to determine how true is the statement made by E. M, Benson in 1930 that "Carl Van Vechten was, in a way, responsible for the class-conscious revolt that the enlightened Negroes were exhibiting during the Twenties."¹³

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the nature and the extent of Carl Van Vechten's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance by presenting extensive documentary evidence, which will be used in support of an objective assessment. Correspondence, manuscripts, personal memorabilia, as well as published materials, will be utilized to examine the origins and development of the Negro Renaissance, to establish the relationship of Carl Van Vechten to the movement, and to indicate Van Vechten's influence upon it.

The two primary source collections of manuscript materials used in this study were the Carl Van Vechten Collection of the Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library, which contains reviews, newspaper clippings, various periodical articles, and Van Vechten's correspondence, manuscripts, and memorabilia; and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University, which is the repository of most of Van Vechten's correspondence with Negroes, of manuscripts and published copies of Negro works, and of articles, newspaper clippings, and other materials relating to African American life. The unpublished memoirs of Carl Van Vechten, which are contained in the Oral History Collection of the Oral History Office of Columbia University, were also a valuable source of information.

The cultural changes in African American life that made possible the Negro Renaissance begin earlier than 1920 and the influence of the movement extends far beyond 1930. However, the Negro Renaissance itself came to fruition and ended within the compass of these dates. The character of the New Negro movement was partially molded and sustained by the spirit and the turbulence of that hectic period in American history known as the Roaring Twenties. So close was this relationship that, with the beginning of the depression in 1930, both phenomena shared a common termination. Therefore, after tracing the origins and development of the Negro Renaissance, the main emphasis of this study will be upon the relationship of Carl Van Vechten to the Negro Renaissance within the ten-year period from 1920 to 1930.

There has been a continuing interest in the Negro Renaissance and its expression in Harlem as African American students and scholars throughout the nation look back into American history, searching for their cultural roots and for cultural reflections of black life. Evidence of this interest is to be found in reprints of material published during the Twenties, such as Jean Toomer's Cane and Alain Locke's The New Negro. In addition, many anthologies of poetry and prose, some of which contain excerpts from Negro Renaissance writing, are being published in response to a growing demand. Any consideration of African American culture must give cognizance to the Negro Renaissance, as an important period in the development of the African Americans in the arts, and should acknowledge the efforts of men like Carl Van Vechten who contributed to its growth.

Endnotes

1. For a discussion of the importance of the concept of the New Negro to writers of the Negro Renaissance, see Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed. (New Haven, 1965), 57-58.

2. Sterling Brown, "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors," The Journal of Negro Education, II (January 1933), 182.

3. Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (Chapel Hill, 1948), 162.

4. Charles S. Johnson, "The Negro Renaissance and Its Significance," in The New Negro Thirty Years Afterward: Papers Contributed to the Sixteenth Annual Spring Conference of the Division of Social Sciences, eds., Rayford Logan, et al„ (Washington, D. C., 1955), 85.

5. Benjamin Brawley, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (New York, 1937), 235-238 passim.

6. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York, 1961), 490.

7. J. Saunders Redding, The Lonesome Road: The Story of the Negro's Part in America (Garden City, 1958), 277.

8. George Schuyler, "The Van Vechten Revolution," Phylon XI (December 1950), 368.

9. Letter dated November 4, 1950, The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters (hereafter cited as the Johnson Collection), Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut.

10. The following inscription, signed by James Weldon Johnson and dated September 28, 1929, appears on the back cover of a compilation of gifts of Carl Van Vechten to the Johnson Collection, Yale University Library.

Dear Carl-

Has anyone ever written it down -- in black and white -- that you have been one of the most vita! factors in bringing about the artistic emergence of the Negro in America?

11. Letter in the Johnson Collection.

12. From an unpublished eulogy by Lincoln Kirstein for Carl Van Vechten (December 23, 1964), Johnson Collection.

13. E.M. Benson, "Re-edited Articles," a review of Sacred and Profane Memories, New York Sun, April 15, 1930.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on the Text
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Background of the Negro Renaissance
• Chapter Three: The Beginnings of the Negro Renaissance
• Chapter Four: Some Important Aspects of the Negro Renaissance
• Chapter Five: Enter Carl Van Vechten
• Chapter Six: Carl Van Vechten Presents the New Negro
• Chapter Seven: "My Only Serious Novel" — Nigger Heaven
• Chapter Eight: The Influence of Nigger Heaven Upon Harlem Renaissance Authors
• Chapter Nine: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index