Modernism/modernity

In March 1922 Carl Van Vechten wrote with tongue-in-cheek respect to Ronald Firbank, whom he did not know personally, in appreciation of his novels. “Dear Mr. Ronald Firbank,” he began, “I am very sorry to be obliged to inform you that, I think, there is some danger of your becoming the rage in America.”¹ Firbank was flattered, touched even. “Nothing would give me more happiness than that my books should be known in America,” he replied.² This flirtatious transatlantic correspondence lasted over three years and comprised at least 58 letters, though the two men would never meet.³ Almost ignored by scholars hitherto, the letters not only reveal a personal relationship between Van Vechten and Firbank, but redefine our understanding of how and when camp style emerged.

Discussions of Van Vechten and Firbank together hitherto have been few and brief. They have focused on Van Vechten’s professional advice to Firbank regarding his black novel, Sorrow in Sunlight, retitled The Prancing Nigger (1924) in the US edition on Van Vechten’s recommendation.⁴ In large part this emphasis is due to the fact that only five of their letters (all written by Van Vechten) have been published. These have given the impression of a short exchange which ended in October 1923 with Van Vechten advising Firbank on how to publish in the United States.⁵ Although Brigid Brophy alludes to the full correspondence in a number of places in her magisterial biography of Firbank, attention to the extensive unpublished correspondence is necessary in order to reveal its untapped significance.⁶ It is an overlooked [End Page 165] source highly pertinent to current scholarship on “Camp Modernism,” in the 1920s as well as the post-1895 history of decadence.⁷ These letters show Van Vechten and Firbank cultivating what they call “camping” as a self-conscious performative style inextricably linked with both the principles of fin-de-siècle decadence and their own affectionate friendship, over ten years before self-conscious camp style is thought to have emerged in America. In light of this correspondence, what critics have regarded as apparently unconscious instances of camp writing by Firbank and Van Vechten separately, must be understood as emerging from a fully self-aware discussion-cum-performance of “camping,” developed in a transatlantic dialogue that helped to define modern camp.

A 1923 article by Edmund Wilson suggests a starting point for how to approach this evolution of decadence into camp in the works of Van Vechten and Firbank. Seemingly unaware of their personal relationship, Wilson ambivalently links them as “Late Violets from the Nineties” before suggesting that the genesis of their fiction lies in the fin-de-siècle decadent movement.⁸ Subsequent assessments of Firbank have similarly viewed him as a successor to 1890s decadence.⁹ Indeed Van Vechten was one such critic, as his most famous comment about Firbank attests: “To be 1890 in 1890 might be considered almost normal. To be 1890 in 1922 might be considered almost queer.”¹⁰ Firbank’s debt to decadence was clear from the time he went up to Cambridge, where his reading centered on The Yellow Book, The Savoy, and works by Oscar Wilde.¹¹ Despite Van Vechten’s comment, he knew that Firbank’s fiction was not a mere vestige of the 1890s; rather, it develops its overt references to Wilde’s Salome (1893) into the possibility of a cosmopolitan queer citizenship that is distinctly modern.¹² Van Vechten himself became acquainted with the literature of European and American decadence as an adult in Manhattan; he positioned several of his novels in “the new decadence” or “decadent revival” of the 1920s when this was a hallmark of sophistication.¹³ The title figure of his debut novel Peter Whiffle (1922) draws heavily on the quintessential decadent anti-heroes Dorian Gray and Des Esseintes, and its style exemplifies the stifling “cataloguing” of beautiful objects and sensations characteristic of decadent literature at the fin de siècle (MacLeod, “Making it New,” 214). Subsequent novels—including The Blind Bow-Boy (1923) and Parties (1930), discussed...