The Blind Bow-Boy was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1923, and if Peter Whiffle had made Van Vechten fashionable, this novel made him notorious. The “blind bow-boy” is Cupid — love that strikes without seeing, without discrimination — and the novel is a comedy of desire in which nearly every character is attracted to nearly every other character regardless of sex.
Harold Doolittle Prewett is a conventional young man sent to New York by his father with instructions to “see life.” He is taken up by the Doolittle Doolittle society hostess Campaspe Lorillard and introduced to a world of parties, costumes, sexual experimentation, and extravagant consumption. Harold, bewildered but willing, is passed from one sophisticated mentor to another, each offering a different philosophy of pleasure. The Duke of Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle — Van Vechten’s names are part of the joke — represents perfect amoral hedonism; Campaspe represents aesthetic refinement; Zimbule O’Grady represents uninhibited appetite.
The novel’s treatment of homosexuality and bisexuality was remarkably open for 1923. Van Vechten did not treat same-sex desire as pathology, tragedy, or even rebellion — he treated it as a normal feature of sophisticated life, which was far more unsettling to conventional morality than any dramatic confrontation would have been. The blind bow-boy shoots where he will, and Van Vechten’s characters accept the arrows without the guilt that contemporary fiction demanded.
Collecting The Blind Bow-Boy
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1923): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $25–$60