*The Blind Bow-Boy by Carl Van Vechten (Knopf, 1923)

 

An amusing, risque novel set in Manhattan in the early 1920s.  Howard Prewet's mother died in childbirth, a fact that displeased his father, who was also disappointed that Howard was not born a girl.  So Harold is paternally disowned and exiled to his Aunt Sadi's farm in Connecticut, where he is raised in the benign and unenlightening  company of women and animals.  He's sent off to a college, and when he graduates, his father, who he has never met, summons him to New York City and tells him that he has arranged to support Harold for a year, allowing him to do whatever he wants.  He provides his son with an apartment on East 18th Street, an enabling English butler named Drains, and a dissolute, amoral tutor whose job is it to expose Harold to the worldly vices his bucolic childhood sheltered him from.  Mr. Prewet Sr. made a fortune in the "cloak and suit" trade, a business that Harold loathes and refuses to enter because while at college he was teased for his expensive and fastidious wardrobe.

Paul Moody is Howard's tutor, and introduces the boy to his charming, eccentric, wealthy group of friends, which  include the Duke of Middlebottom, a British peer slumming in New York City who dresses in a sailor's costume and carries an umbrella (something a real sailor would never do); Bunny (Titus) Hugg, an avante garde composer of very short, atonal pieces; and Campaspe Lorillard, a beautiful woman with exquisite taste and remarkable cleverness and empathy.  She, particularly, oversees and guides Howard's sentimental education, which involves an unsuccessful seduction by a nubile 17-year-old faux-ex-snake charmer named Zimbule O'Grady, and a brief but disastrous marriage to Campaspe's boring and conventional sister Alice Blake.

Campaspe is a delightful and original character.  She's married to an unattractive but wealthy man she does not love and ignores, and has two sons she does love but also ignores.  She lives a life of indolence and luxury and invests more energy in other people's lives than in her own.  Although she appears to be happy and content with the life she has fashioned for herself, a poignant rueful sadness permeates it.  For an ethereal character fashioned out of lace and silk and crepe de chine, she possesses a haunting realness -- more than any of the other characters.

Van Vechten's giddy style and tone are modeled on Firbank, who is directly evoked in these pages, but Van Vechten's world, though gilded and bejeweled, is more realistic and recognizable than Firbank's.  Van Vechten indulges his penchant for art, design and fashion by paying an inordinate amount of very detailed attention to books, music, paintings, clothes, and interior design.  The character's costumes are all described in exhaustive detail (from their hats to their shoes and slippers), as are the beautiful and opulent rooms (and gardens) they inhabit.

I wasn't sure what to make of the ending, where Campaspe discovers Howard and the Duke of Middlebottom, an avowed sexual deviant, traveling together to Europe aboard the same boat she is on.  I suppose that Howard, having tasted and despised conventional married life, is fleeing even further into eccentricity and debauchery.  Good for him.

An interesting, unique, delightfully vivid and well-written book.