Arts and Letters

A sure sign of old age is when a man begins to disapprove of the young. At the age of 84, Carl Van Vechten had not yet grown old. His enthusiasm for youth in the arts, and his quest for new talent, remained until the end unabated in music, in theatre, in writing, and in painting. His tastes continued as catholic as ever. Despite Carl Van Vechten's long-known deep interest in the creativity of the Negro people, and the immense amount of time he devoted to Negro activities, his concerns were by no means limited to darker Americans. James Purdy is a recent example of Van Vechten discovery and interest from manuscript to final printed page. In music from blues to bop and beyond, from Yvette Guilbert to Mahalia Jackson, from the long ago Mary Garden to the contemporary Leontyne Price, from George Gershwin of the twenties to Charlie Mingus of the sixties, Carl Van Vechten kept a listening ear as to the grace notes, and a listening heart as to the meanings of the music of each generation—in spite of the fact that he gave up professional music criticism at the age of forty because, he said, "intellectual hardening of the arteries" made one unreceptive to innovations. As subsequent enthusiasms indicated, however, he must have found this statement untrue during the decades that followed.

Almost always Carl Van Vechten was ahead of his times insofar as public taste and the canons of publicity went. The times had to catch up with him. In 1924, when most "cultured" people ignored America's basic Negro music, Carl Van Vechten wrote, "Jazz may not be the last hope of American music, nor yet the best hope, but at present, I am convinced, it is its only hope." In 1942, when he founded the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University, he presented it his enormous collection of recordings, jazz and otherwise, by colored composers and artists, as well as his many letters and manuscripts from Negro writers, painters, and theatre people. Dr. Charles S. Johnson, then president of Fisk University, termed Carl Van Vechten "the first white American to interpret objectively, with deftness and charm, the external features of the American Negro in a new age and setting."

Deftness and charm were so much a part of Carl Van Vechten's articles and critiques hailing his various enthusiasms, that some, accustomed to more ponderous academic criticism, felt that the Van Vechten personality consisted mostly of fanfare and fun. It did possess these attributes. But behind the fanfare lay genuine critical acumen, often of a highly prophetic nature. And humor, wit, and sophistication in the best sense gave yeast to all the fun Van Vechten found in writing and living. He might be called both a hedonist and a humanist. In New York, Hollywood and Paris, he had a wide circle of lively, intelligent, and decorative friends, particularly in the arts. There were no ethnic or religious barriers to his friendships. For many years on June 17 the joint birthdays of James Weldon Johnson, Negro, Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., Jewish, and himself were celebrated together with the three colors of our flag—red, white, and blue—on the cakes at dinner, presided over by his charming wife, Fania Marinoff.

When, late in life, he became a serious photographer, Van Vechten photographed not only his friends, but hundreds of valued and celebrated personalities, to the extent of some 15,000 negatives. Steichen termed his photography "darned good." On the shelves of the world's libraries, Van Vechten leaves for the pleasure of future readers who will discover him, seven novels, numerous critiques, essays and memoirs, and three charming books about cats. He established the Anna Marble Pollack Memorial Library of Books About Cats at Yale. Fisk University has the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musical Literature, as well as his gift of the Florine Stettheimer Memorial Collection of Books About the Fine Arts. The New York Public Library possesses his personal papers, letters, and manuscripts. And, of his long and happy sojourn among us, his friends possess a rainbow of memories.