The Merry-Go-Round

Carl Van Vechten collected these thirteen essays in 1918, more than a decade into his work as a New York music and drama critic and a few years before he turned to writing novels. The pieces range widely: a defense of what polite society called bad taste, a tribute to the neglected novelist Edgar Saltus, riffs on singers and modern composers, an evening at a Paris bal-musette, and a set of theater impressions. His method is personal and combative rather than academic, closer to conversation than to formal criticism, and he uses each subject to argue for individual taste over received opinion. Readers curious about early modernist arts writing, or about the man who later became a Harlem Renaissance patron and Gertrude Stein’s literary executor, will find his voice sharp and self-assured throughout.