The Tattooed Countess was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1924, and it draws on Van Vechten’s own background — he grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and fled to New York as soon as he could. The Countess Ella Nattatorini, née Poole, left the fictional town of Maple Valley decades ago, married an Italian count, and lived a life of cosmopolitan pleasure in Paris, Rome, and Vienna. Now, widowed and world-weary, she returns to Maple Valley for reasons she cannot quite explain — nostalgia, perhaps, or the hope that the simplicity of her youth might offer some relief from the exhaustion of sophistication.
She finds instead that Maple Valley is exactly as she left it: narrow, suspicious, pious, and boring. The townspeople regard her with a mixture of awe and disapproval — her foreign clothes, her cigarettes, her whispered-about past. The only person who interests her is Gareth Johns, a seventeen-year-old boy with artistic ambitions and a desperate need to escape. Their relationship — part maternal, part romantic, entirely scandalous by Maple Valley standards — culminates in their departure together for Paris.
The “tattoo” is literal — a butterfly on her arm, acquired in a moment of drunken whimsy — but also metaphorical: she is marked by experience, and in Maple Valley, experience is a form of contamination. Van Vechten’s satire of small-town America is sharp but not cruel; he understands why people cling to convention, even as he insists that convention is death for anyone with imagination.
Collecting The Tattooed Countess
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1924): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$250
- Without jacket: $20–$50