Invention and Veracity
There may be a line which separates fiction from biography but it is a metaphysical affair about which no one need worry much. On one side, let us say, is invention and on the other is veracity; every biographer, however, has now and then to invent, and veracity is often indispensable to the novelist. It is strange that the two forms have so rarely been compounded: that, for instance, so few authors have written biographies of imaginary persons. The mixture is particularly tempting. It makes possible at once the freedom of the novel and the sober structure of the biography; it has the richness, though perhaps also a little of the perverseness, of certain hybrid types. In Peter Whiffle Carl Van Vechten has crossed the two literary forms fascinatingly. His hero has a fin de siècle look about him, as if he were, perhaps, a version of Stephen Crane or of one of his contemporaries. When Peter first dawns upon his biographer he has in mind to beat such decorative geniuses as Edgar Saltus at the art of producing fine effects by the sheer enumeration of lovely or definite things: he will make his masterpiece the catalogue of catalogues. Later, he has shifted to the mode of Theodore Dreiser, having been converted by Sister Carrie, and is a revolutionist wedded to the slums. Eventually he turns to the occult and the diabolical and ends in about that spiritual longitude and latitude. Does Peter suggest some of Max Beerbohm’s men too much? The question will be asked. At least it is certain that he is piquant, arresting, brightly mad. Whether in Paris or in New York he glitters in his setting. And that setting is even more of a triumph than the character of Peter. Mr. Van Vechten, however he made up his protagonist, has taken his setting from life: actual persons appear in it, actual places. He deals with it now racily, now poetically. He is full of allusions, of pungencies, of learning in his times. He knows how to laugh, he scorns solemnity, he has filled his book with wit and erudition. He is a civilized writer.