James Huneker is now a somewhat neglected figure in the pantheon of American literary and critical achievement. In his time though (from the 1890s through to his death in 1921) he was perhaps the USA's most revered and respected cultural critic, occupying a position that would eventually, perhaps, be taken by the presently-more-famous H. L. Mencken. A passionate and relentless advocate for cosmopolitanism in art, literature and politics, and opposed to the rising nationalistic fervours of the 1910s that I spoke about in the previous chapter, he was also an unapologetic champion of bohemian morals and a critic of the Puritanical sexual pieties of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie. His life-long bohemianism, campaign for the improvement of aesthetic and cultural values in American literature and art, and wide, international reading might make Huneker an obvious candidate for a position within the fold of the emerging ‘high modernism’; or, at the very least, as one of its clear progenitors. Yet, Huneker is more a figure of the transitional (but no less distinct) moment I have outlined in this book. Indeed, he shared with Edith Wharton (who adored his writings on music and theatre especially) and others a suspicion about the meaning and direction of so-called ‘modernism’ and its various sub-cults in the arts. Moreover, Huneker was quite assuredly the inheritor of the variant of cultural critique associated with José Martí, whom he followed into the major role of society and culture critic at The New York Sun.

In his 1919 novel Painted Veils (a borderline pornographic romp through the theatre and opera world of Gilded Age New York), Huneker pokes fun at the then current vogue for forms of ‘primitivism’, anthropological deep reading, and esoteric orientalism as so much pseudo-intellectual chaff covering more base needs and desires. The novel, which follows the sexual and social exploits of a popular opera singer, Esther Brandés, and her melancholic man-about-town suitor Ulick Invern through a plot involving religious revivals that transform into orgies, orgies that transform into near-religious revivals, and a whole parade of chorus girls in various bohemian locales, opens by calling out the misogyny and voyeurism of literary and artistic history.