Any discussion of the New York 1920s avant-garde must include Van Vechten — music critic, drama critic, photographer, novelist, Florine Stettheimer subject, and friend and editor to Gertrude Stein, among many, many other things. Van Vechten is frequently described as a champion of the Harlem Renaissance and is often credited with sparking interest among white bohemians (and bored socialites) with jazz and Black culture. For a full and nuanced portrait of his contradictory and wildly prolific life and career, I implore you to read his collected correspondence with Langston Hughes as well as Edward White’s excellent 2014 biography, “The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.”
For 1920s backbiting, read “Parties.”
This brisk, brief comic novel follows Hamish (a thinly disguised stand-in for Van Vechten) as he chronicles the exploits of the alcoholic David and his flaky wife, Rilda (thinly disguised Scott and Zelda), along with a cast of jaded frauds, hangers-on and actual artists. There are speakeasies and post-speakeasy trips to Harlem and lots of cocaine and tons of empty, casual sex. There’s a silent movie actress, “Midnight Blue,” who won’t be touched by “anything but silk and flesh.” There’s a murder. And there are parties — endless, pointless rounds of them.
“Hamish had been to a tea, as cocktail parties are still occasionally called in New York, for the great English novelist, attended by most of the local literati. The visiting celebrity talked a great deal about himself, his plots and plans, and the others talked a great deal about themselves, their plots and plans. Fortunately, nobody listened to anybody else. Hamish left this house to drift, by way of taxi, into another cocktail party given for a lady who had left society to become an actress by an actress who had given up the stage to become a lady. They both explained why at great length, although everybody had heard the story many times before. But that was quite all right because again nobody listened.”
The book, described in these pages as having “closed out the Jazz Age,” flopped on the heels of the stock market crash. But for anyone who wants to understand that feverish moment in America beyond long necklaces and recherché cocktails, I think it’s essential reading.
