Dear readers,
The Museum of the City of New York recently unveiled the refurbished Stettheimer Dollhouse, the decades-long creation of Carrie Stettheimer — who, with her sisters Florine (a painter) and Ettie (a writer), hosted notable salons for the 1920s avant-garde in their vast suite of apartments at a Midtown apartment building called Alwyn Court.
I have been to see the house (“dollhouse” is almost a misnomer) a number of times since the museum brought it back on display, and have admired the miniature Marcel Duchamps and Gaston Lachaises as well as the fabulous interiors. It’s a true work of art in its own right. And it’s sent me down a rabbit hole.
—Sadie
“Parties: Scenes From Contemporary New York Life,” by Carl Van Vechten
Fiction, 1930
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.
Read if you like: Dawn Powell’s “The Wicked Pavilion,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise.”
Available from: You can get the paperback Sun & Moon edition used; it’s also available digitally (for now) and on Kindle.
“J’Aime Paris: Photographs Since the Twenties,” by Andre Kertész
Photography, 1974
If all of this brittle 1920s NYC hedonism leaves you with a hangover (and, my god, do they get a lot of hooch hangovers in that book), why not pick up sticks for the Latin Quarter, where at least the drinking was legal?
I recently read Josephine Baker’s newly translated autobiography, recounting her move from New York to Paris in 1925. So it felt like fate to come upon this un-stunning copy of Kertész’s stunning book on a sidewalk vendor’s table. Kertész’s Paris years (he too moved there in 1925, from Hungary) are marked by his involvement with the avant-garde. This collection, beginning in the Jazz Age and spanning decades, reminds you why his early work was considered too modern to succeed commercially. The subjects are familiar enough — they include lovers and bouquinistes and many, many views of the Seine — but every angle is unexpected; no grubbiness is sanitized; there is a sly voyeurism to it all.
Read if you like: The work of Germaine Krull and Ilse Bing; “The 400 Blows.”
Available from: I had no trouble finding this on used book sites; you can also see a number of his “Postcards From Paris” here.
Why don’t you …
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Make a move? Katherine Neville’s “The Eight” offers more escapist time-travel, shifting between 1970s New York (where the computer whiz Cat Velis gets her palm read, is warned of danger and still accepts a shady commission to find an antique chess set in Algeria) and 1790s France, where two young novices at a convent discover a chess set, said to belong to Charlemagne, possibly possessing supernatural powers. Is this actually a “feminist answer to ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’” as claimed by a blurb on the cover? I suppose it depends on what in hell that means. But it certainly kept me off social media for a few days.
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Listen to your poetry? Judith Chernaik’s “Schumann: The Faces and the Masks” is fascinating on the composer’s dialogue with the Romantic literature of his moment. Listen to Vladimir Horowitz play “The Poet Speaks.”
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