Peter Whiffle by Carl Van Vechten

Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works, Carl Van Vechten's 1922 novel presented as the memoir of a literary friendship, opens with the narrator's own rapturous first arrival in Paris as a young man in May 1907, before he meets, through the portraitist Martha Baker, an eccentric young American named Peter Whiffle, who is convinced he will write a great book but has no idea what it will be about—first proposing an "encyclopedia" of catalogued objects (perfumes, jewels, flowers) arranged for pure stylistic effect, since he believes art is a matter of form and arrangement rather than subject or idea. The two drift in and out of each other's lives across Paris, New York, and eventually Florence over several years: Peter briefly courts an untalented opera-singer named Clara Barnes, vanishes into an undocumented six-year gap, resurfaces destitute and radicalized in New York's Bowery planning a proletarian novel about revolution before abandoning that scheme too, becomes wealthy after inheriting his eccentric collector-uncle's fortune, cycles through infatuations, an aborted marriage engagement to Mahalah Wiggins that he cancels on the wedding day, and a near-fatal fever in Africa where he hallucinates Death, the Devil, and an Angel forcing him to choose Heaven or Hell—and simply refuses to decide, surviving instead. Throughout, Peter is defined by his congenital indecisiveness (a modern Buridan's ass), his mercurial theorizing about art, truth, and criticism (arguing that only contradiction and inconsistency approach truth), and his inability to ever actually write anything, torn permanently between infinite artistic possibility and paralysis. The narrator, a stand-in for Van Vechten himself, functions as witness and confidant, weaving in real Belle Époque and bohemian figures—Olive Fremstad, Gertrude Stein, Edith Dale (modeled on Mabel Dodge), Bill Haywood—into Peter's restless, unrealized quest to reconcile living and creating.

By Carl Van Vechten · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary fiction, Biographical fiction, Modernist fiction · 11 chapters

Contents

• CHAPTER I
• CHAPTER II
• CHAPTER III
• CHAPTER IV
• CHAPTER V
• CHAPTER VI
• CHAPTER VII
• CHAPTER VIII
• CHAPTER IX
• CHAPTER X
• CHAPTER XI

More by Carl Van Vechten

• Music after the Great War (1915)
• Music for Museums? (1915)
• Secret of the Russian Ballet (1915)
• Strawinsky: a New Composer (1915)
• Massenet and Women (1915)
• Stage Decoration as a Fine Art (1915)
• Adolphe Appia and G. Craig (1915)
• All works by Carl Van Vechten