Why Carl Van Vechten Helped Harlem

Carl Van Vechten and his Influence on the Harlem Renaissance: Annotated Bibliography
Introduction
The best way to describe Carl Van Vechten is to say that he was a wealthy, upper class white male from Middle America, who moved to the big city, loved the concept of blackness and thus played a pivotal role in shaping and supporting the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten was a photographer, a novelist, and an artist and his patronage of the Harlem Renaissance helped make the movement come to life, though not everyone saw his literary contributions as worthwhile. Ralph Ellison viewed Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven as a book that had a negative influence on the Negro novel’s development (Sanneh, 2014). This annotated bibliography will describe a number of different sources that help to explain and describe Carl Van Vechten and his influence on the Harlem Renaissance.
Annotated Bibliography
Bernard, E. (1997). What He Did for the Race: Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 80(4), 531-542.
This article looks at the ways in which Van Vechten helped the artists of the black race to become more popular—artists like Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and Taylor Gordon. It contrasts their praise for Van Vechten as the man who most supported them and their arts, allowing them to become household names, with the detractions and criticisms of other prominent blacks, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Benjamin Brawley, Hubert Harrison, and Floyd Calvin. The picture the article paints is thus one where the positives of Van Vechten’s influence are compared and contrasted with the negatives. It shows how Van Vechten was at once both a necessary component of the Harlem Renaissance and alternately a symbol of the kind of thing that the black race felt it needed to move beyond—i.e., white patronage.
Bernard, E. (2009). A familiar strangeness: The spectre of whiteness in the Harlem
Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, 165.
This essay looks at the complex relationship between Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes. It shows how the African Americans involved in the movement wanted to be accepted and acknowledged as being their own people and how their own race was what mattered in terms of promoting their works. However, there was also a sense of wanting to be accepted by the white culture and of in fact wanting to be white. It shows how Langston Hughes himself put out the idea that he wanted to be white in one of his articles. The role that Van Vechten played in this was to highlight the differences and tensions between the races while also giving a platform for the black race to become more prominent and for its works to become more popular all over the world. The article mainly spends time focusing on the black writers of the time and their own conceptions of blackness and what it meant for them to be black and alive in the world.
Coleman, L. (1974). Carl Van Vechten Presents the New Negro. Studies in the Literary Imagination, 7(2), 85.
This article describes how Van Vechten helped to present the idea of the New Negro to the world stage by patronizing what the African American artists of the 1920s were doing in music and writing. The article defines the somewhat ambiguous term New Negro as a kind of African American who was no longer going to abide by the Old World standards—the Uncle Tom mentality of how a Negro should be. Van Vechten is shown as a white patron who admired this type of rejection of the past and is shown as being particularly helpful towards the artistic community of Harlem as it came to define itself and create its own following. Van Vechten wanted to be of that world and wrote about it in Nigger Heaven, but this was not received well by many African Americans, who looked at it as a white intrusion on their own world and a way of white culture continuing to try to take control of what the Negros were doing.
Coleman, L. (1998). Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Critical Assessment. Taylor & Francis.
This book shows how Van Vechten’s dissatisfaction with his hometown life in Cedar Rapids led him to find another side of life that he could admire, which he found in Harlem in the 1920s. What attracted Van Vechten was the “gay, uninhibited, primitively exotic” characterization of the people of Harlem—“a zestful life unfettered by the restrictive prohibitions of white society” (p. 68). Drawn by this allure, Van Vechten, who despised conventional white society, found a place for his own out of sorts life style. For that reason he sought to promote the Harlem ideal, which was perpetuated in the Harlem Renaissance. The book shows Van Vechten as both an outsider in Harlem and as one of its main promoters. Van Vechten is described thus as a kind of two-sided figure in the Harlem Renaissance, one without whom it could have never got going and yet with whom its true nature and character may have changed in some fundamental ways—such as in terms of the tastes and expectations of the white community.
Flora, P. (1996). Carl Van Vechten, Blanche Knopf, and the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance, 1920–1940: Analysis and Assessment, 1980–1994, 267-85.
This article shows how Van Vechten influenced Knopf to fund the Harlem Renaissance, as he was an influential member within the Knopf clan and was also enamored of the Harlem scene. The article notes that Van Vechten was viewed as both “boon and bane,” which aligns with how most historians and critics view his role in the Harlem Renaissance, double-sided and complex (p. 268). The article gives a brief background on Van Vechten and describes how he cultivated a love for the arts from an early age, and it shows how he used in his own elitist background to become a patron of the Harlem Renaissance.
Holmes, D. G. (2006). Cross-racial voicing: Carl Van Vechten's imagination and the search for an African American ethos. College English, 68(3), 291.
This article examines the concept of cross-racial voicing—i.e., of a person of non-color crossing the color divide in society and in groups to lend his voice to issues and causes that are meaningful to the color group. If they are also meaningful to the non-color group then there is a true cross-racial voicing that transpires. The author uses the example of Eminem in 8-Mile to make the case for cross-racial voicing. With Van Vechten it is different. While Van Vechten lent his voice to the African American community, their struggles were certainly not his. That is why there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether his support of the Harlem Renaissance was authentic and legitimate or not.
Kellner, B. (2004). “Re?ned Racism”: White Patronage in the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance, 53.
Kellner echoes the themes touched upon by Perkins by highlighting the good intentions of the white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance—men like Van Vechten—but also how there were some negative effects, too. The blacks in Harlem were able to present their side of life, but they were also being pushed to adopt white culture at the same time. Kellner does show that were it not for men like Van Vechten, the Renaissance in Harlem never would have grown, however. Thus, it describes the complex nature between the white society of the ruling class and the downtrodden society off Harlem that lifted itself up through the arts and through its letters.
Perkins, M. V. (1998). The Achievement And Failure Of" Nigger Heaven": Carl Van Vechten And The Harlem Renaissance. CLA Journal, 42(1), 1-23.
In this article Perkins describes the effect of Van Vechten’s book Nigger Heaven on American audiences in the 1920s. The book’s title is described as being offensive to African Americans when used by whites but not offensive when used by blacks. The difference, Perkins shows, was that blacks considered Harlem to be their own place—distinct from other places in the U.S. that were controlled by whites. Harlem was their town and so they could describe it amongst themselves as their own “Nigger Heaven”—but for a white, even a sympathetic one like Van Vechten, to use that phrase was offensive to them. Thus, this article shows the problematic role Van Vechten played as admirer of Harlem but also as symbol of white condescension.
Sanneh, K. (2014). White mischief. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/white-mischief-2
Sanneh describes Van Vechten as “a New York hipster and literary gadabout” who started out as a sophisticated art critic in New York and ended up becoming fascinated with life in Harlem “where raucous and inventive night clubs were thriving under Prohibition.” Van Vechten would go on to describe these scenes in his novel Nigger Heaven, which focused on a group of educated young blacks who spoke about art and literature. It also focused on the Harlem cabaret and thus showed a mixed kind of atmosphere and lifestyle in Harlem. The title itself referred to the balcony seats in a theater that were reserved for blacks while the whites got to sit in the orchestra. Thus, the title served as a symbol of the segregation of America and it also served to annoy many people at the same time. Blacks thought it was derisive and that Van Vechten was mocking them. Whites thought it was in poor taste. Yet others thought it expressed the situation in Harlem and in America perfectly justly. Van Vechten himself was not making fun: he found the situation there wholly interesting to him. Yet Van Vechten himself was inscrutable—a domesticated werewolf as one biographer described him. The article tells about Van Vechten in great detail and provides a good sense of the man’s role in the Harlem Renaissance.
Smalls, J. (2006). The homoerotic photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public face, private thoughts. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
This book presents Van Vechten from another angle—i.e., the angle of the homosexual lifestyle that it is said he also led behind the scenes. The book shows how Van Vechten’s penchant for photography and for homoerotic images was a sign of his own latent homosexuality and that this lifestyle of his was what drew him into the marginalized society that was Harlem. He was looking for something decadent and different from the white norms that he had left behind in Cedar Rapids. He wanted to embrace a lifestyle that was open to anything and his photography was an artistic way for him to explore those ideas. The book suggests that Van Vechten thus had more in common with the Harlem Renaissance than his critics may have at first supposed, especially if he himself felt marginalized.