Vechten Heaven
I've had a weird and boozy summer. Every day for the last few months I've awoken in the sort of bright haze that is an admixture of hangover, heartache, and societal dread. This hasn't prevented me from doing things. I have left jobs and left the apartments of lovers and left town (only, alas, to return); I have eaten in popular Greenwood restaurants I'd never previously heard of and read books I'd never previously heard of and dropped pants sizes to a waistline that is previously unheard of for me. I've taken jobs and overspent my earnings and gone for days and days without shaving, and though I've occasioned to drink myself into a state of double vision (a first for me), I've never passed out or seen things that didn't exist.
Less can be said for David Westlake, the hatless, hapless drinker who, already drunk, stumbles into a bar on the first page of Carl Van Vechten's 1930 novel Parties, announcing that he has killed someone. (He is so drunk he is hallucinating.) Pages later he's with a friend in what seems to be a hotel speakeasy, this being the era of Prohibition, drinking brimming glasses of brandy and Pernod and ordering up sidecars from a room-service attendant called Boker. They converse impetuously with their wives by telephone and drink: "Boker entered bearing a tray containing two highball glasses full of sidecars. He left with orders for two more."
The prose itself is anthropomorphic, styled on drunkenness: ecstatic and fractured, with bursts of alacrity and bouts of viciousness, lumbering one minute and lunging the next, sliding and contorting and splaying itself across the rug, it affectionately mimics the aslant posture of a cast of brightly drawn, eupeptic sophisticates ("Simone sprawled on a wooden chair, her turquoise legs stuck out in front of her, her head waving from side to side, rooster fashion, while she flourished a highball in her right hand"). It is a rich and vivid novel, crammed with salty meals, unsubtle humor, and sapient overtones, though it's less a parody of hedonism than, to my loose mind, an endorsement of it.
Parties was a flop when it came out--at the dawn of the Great Depression--because, given the state of things, no one wanted to read books about lavish parties thrown by flaxen-haired women and sidecar-slurping young men who toss canapés out the window and pour the contents of cocktail shakers into grand pianos. But I am surprised it's not more celebrated, however untimely its original circumstance: The economy was horrifying in 1930 and it is horrifying now, and rereading the book last week (it can be found in any used bookstore) was all pleasure. I suppose I'm drawn to pleasure in spite of the economics: I'm flat broke, and yet I've been drinking strong, sugary, expensive sidecars all summer.
