The Tattooed Countess: A Romantic Novel With a Happy Ending

by Carl van Vechten

A Lady with a Past. A sensitive but immensely practical boy. A staid Midwestern town at the turn of the century. Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess hit Midwestern society where it hurt most—in its respectable foundations—when it appeared in 1924.

The Countess Nattatorrini, née Ella Poore, has returned home to Iowa after twenty tempestuous years on the Continent. Time has stood still in Maple Valley—a Cedar Rapids look-alike whose residents are seen as little more than animated rocking chairs who chew gum, gossip on their front porches, enjoy euchre parties and buckwheat griddle cakes, and brag endlessly of the new waterworks.

Into this complacent town bursts the Countess, a full-blown, impulsive widow who dares to dye her hair, smokes cigarettes in public, wears her gowns cut low and her jewels in layers, and admits that after her lips are made up she can say things she could never have said before. Needless to say, the good folks of Maple Valley are awestruck—but not struck silent—by this exotic vision.

Just as the Countess finds herself bored beyond endurance, she meets the one boy in Maple Valley who deserves a good education.

Van Vechten's novel is clever, caustic, but loving in its portrait of the Iowa of the 1890s. Truthfully subtitled "a romantic novel with a happy ending," it should be hugely enjoyed by today's Iowans and their neighbors.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Carl van Vechten (B.A., University of Chicago, 1903) was a photographer, music-dance critic, novelist, and patron of the Harlem Renaissance who served as literary executor for Gertrude Stein.

Van Vechten was among the most influential literary figures of the 1910s and 1920s. He began his career in journalism as a reporter, then in 1906 joined The New York Times as assistant music critic and later worked as its Paris correspondent. His early reviews are collected in Interpreters and Interpretations (1917 and 1920) and Excavations: A Book of Advocacies (1926). His first novel, Peter Whiffle (1922), a first-person account of the salon and bohemian culture of New York and Paris and clearly drawn from Van Vechten's own experiences, and was immensely popular. His most controversial work of fiction is Nigger Heaven (1926), notable for its depiction of black life in Harlem in the 1920s and its sympathetic treatment of the newly emerging black culture.

In the 1930s, Van Vechten turned from fiction to photography. His photographs are in collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and elsewhere. An important literary patron, he established the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale.

Reviews

[Sketchbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I want to know everything," says the teen lad, a stand-in for CVV. "I want to get away from this town. I want to visit the theatre and the opera and art galleries. I want to learn. Somewhere there must be more people like me." The youth is Gareth Johns and he's stuck in Smalltown, USA, c 1900. But, really, does anything change ? Not much.

CVV, w approving parents, got away to Chi and then NYC where he became one of the Great US Characters of the 20th-Century. Gareth plots his getaway after meeting the 50 year-old Ella Poore, now the Countess - having married an Ital aristo for his money (why else marry?) - who has returned home for a revisit. Her spinster sissy is shocked at Ella's use of lipstick and her cigarette smoking. Perhaps worse, the tattoo, "Qui sais-je?," on her wrist. "On the wrist, where it shows?" wails sissy. Couldnt she have put it where it could be concealed? Ah, yes, American values in philistia.

Lennie Colman, a high school teacher, has a crush on Gareth: they discuss the Cambridge poets, Browning, Byron, Pope. Pudgy Clara, who plans to sing opera, patiently listens to him discuss Melba "and Nordica's row with Jean de Reszke." Gareth himself longs to see stage stars Richard Mansfield and Ada Rehan. Oh, yes, books to be read : The Third Violet, Chimmie Fadden, Mrs. Cliff's Yacht, among the newer titles.

Ella, fidgeting in Maple Valley (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), confronts an Evangelical who wants her to "go down on your knees" w preacher Brother Eldridge, "and come to the arms of Jesus."

The figure of speech is unfortunate. When the Countess considered anyone's arms, they belonged to her recent gigolo in Paris. "It might be advisable for you to mind your own business," says our Countess, who then goes to the piano and slams into Chaminade's Scarf Dance.

A best-seller in 1924, and relevant today, here's a witty teaser and yummy amoral social comedy. "A cruel masterpiece," said Elinor Wylie. It ends w the manipulative Gareth sneaking off to Europe with the Countess. Her last lover.

After pub, CVV popped into Cedar Rapids where he'd grown up. He had a rousing welcome. His novel : "It was too much like life to be altogether agreeable," he mused. And his success : "I left here as Gareth Johns and returned as the Countess."

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel that almost certainly would have fallen into complete obscurity if it wasn't attached to a name that has retained some currency in our present day. Which is not to say such a fate would be deserved—I liked this very much—but more to acknowledge just how many interesting texts evaporate completely from historical memory.

Van Vechten is more remembered today for his photography & his tireless promotion of the Harlem Renaissance & Black art & culture, but during his own time he was most celebrated for his writing efforts, both as a novelist & a critic. The Tattooed Countess, which looks back to his own youth to wittily if gently parody small town Midwestern life in the 1890s, might be the least interesting of his run of novels in the 1920s simply because it doesn't capture up-to-the-moment sophisticated urban living of the Roaring 20s. But it nonetheless has many points of interest.

I found it most interesting as a "fairy tale," so to speak, depicting a very specific type of wish fulfillment for sensitive, "artistic" (read: gay) boys from rural backgrounds who dream of someone recognizing their uniqueness & whisking them away to the glamorous cosmopolis so "real life" can finally begin. I speak from personal experience here, & it was kind of startling to recognize how perennial this desire is.

There's not much plot here, unless you are a reader like me who finds plot in the accumulation of evocative details. Van Vechten is much better at world-building & characterization than constructing narrative; hardly anything at all actually happens. Instead you get granular details of a particular time & place: what people's homes looked like at the turn of the century, what they wore, the songs they sang together around a piano, the artwork they had on their walls. I totally get why that wouldn't be enough for many readers, but as an anthropological-minded reader it thrilled me.

Also Van Vechten can be a very funny writer, if you like your humor ironic & arch.

"The Countess reminded herself that in any case she did not care what happened amongst these provincials who had so much regard for surfaces, but who all wore hidden scars. I am tattooed on my arm while they are tattooed on their hearts, she smiled."

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ironically subtitled portrait of some colorful characters in Victorian-era Iowa who each have their own special weaknesses. Published in the 1920s and considered a "light" novel. Something about the author's attitude towards people and their longings and motives makes me think of Truman Capote just a bit. Van Vechten has a love of long, obscure but lovely words such as "atrabilious" and "epithumetic." Interesting contrast to Willa Cather's My Ántonia, which I read last year, and which was set in approximately the same era and region of the U.S.; but which has a much warmer spirit than The Tattooed Countess.

[Side Real Press · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the second Van Vechten novel I've read in the last few weeks (thank you archive.org!) and it is once again a comedy of manners.

The blurb and another reviewer (who obviously knows a lot about Van V) tells you pretty much all you need to know about the book, but, in brief; our Countess returns from he rich European life to her samll conservative home town licking the wounds received from her toy-boy. Meanwhile on the other side of town a 17 year old longs to escape the town and experience life. What, you might ask, could possible happen...?

So; no marks for the basic plot, its all in the detail, our Countess (shock!) wears make-up, (horror!) smokes fags and doesn't like breakfast at 8am. She must also endure the crushingly dull conversations "have you seen the new waterworks?", the local politics, small town hypocrasies etc etc.

The characters vary in their delineation, some are obviously just sketched in to provide 'type' but Van Vechtens females are generally better drawn and who the (this) reader ifelt he was being asked to sympathise with; the school teacher Lennie Coleman who has a crush on the male love interest of the book, Clara Barnes, the rather inept adolescent singer who dreams of going to Chicago and becoming an opera star and even Lou ("as plain and commonplace as a female robin") who is both proud and shamed of her aristocratic Countess sister.

Its amusing tosh and I enjoyed it but at times it seemed rather like shooting fish in a barrel. Perhaps it had them rolling in the aisles more in the twenties.

Enjoy it for free here:

https://archive.org/details/tattooedc...

but, if you fancy sampling a Van Vechten then I would pick the (far better) 'The Blind Bow Boy'. My review of that is here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[house targaryen · Rating 5 out of 5]

HARD TO FIND Van Vechten Gem

I finally found an old battered copy, and wish I had read it earlier in my life. Its one of those books.

[Creolecat]

A Woman of the World (1925)

[Keshaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carl Van Vechten was a controversial figure both in his own time and after it. Despite all that, here he proves to be an excellent writer.