‘Queer Moderns: Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York’
By Alice T. Friedman
Princeton University Press, 280 Pages

A musician, novelist, photographer, and bon vivant, Max Ewing (1903-1934) collected avant garde art and cultural ephemera, befriended Black and white and queer artists and eccentric personalities — virtually anyone and everything that had no place at Pioneer, Ohio, where he grew up gay and estranged from his community and buffered by his well-to-do family in a fragile, peripatetic existence that came to grief when the props his parents had provided perished with their deaths.

When Ewing committed suicide, after his depression worsened with the Great Depression, his friend, Carl Van Vechten, realized that for all of Ewing’s unfulfilled promise, he had assembled a profound cultural archive not only of his activities but of those he had fostered and loved in the form of photographs, letters, theater programs, paintings, and more that could be preserved and donated to a repository that turned out to be Yale University, and that now has become accessible in Alice T. Friedman’s sumptuous and sensitive narrative of Ewing and his cohort.

Ms. Friedman expertly demonstrates that modernism, as Ewing encountered it, was everywhere — not just in high art but in movies, parties, people of all kinds, and in sports like boxing. In a letter home to his parents, he explained: 

“My going to the fight is nothing to be surprised about. I am all right about all those things now. And not at all as intolerant as I once was, or as exclusive in my enthusiasm. More and more it becomes apparent that it doesn’t matter particularly what you do if you do it well enough and I am willing to grant you that a swell fighter is about as valuable as a swell singer, and a lot more so than a bum singer, so there you are. … What I mean is that almost everything interests me now, whereas only a few things did once. Of course I do think that Mary Garden [opera singer] and Glenway Wescott [writer] are more ultimately important personages than Gene Tunney. But Tunney is a spectacular beauty who behaves in a charming and often amusing manner, and is therefore treasurable.”

For Ewing, modern culture was a palimpsest, so that, for example, he had in his collection a photograph of Greta Garbo superimposed on the face of the sphinx. 

Modernism could collapse periods of history and sexual categories. Ewing sent to Van Vechten a program from the famous Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, headed “HOLIDAY MENU,” and below that, “Starting Saturday, December 30, 1933,” with the headline: “Duck Soup to Nutty Nuts,” featuring the Marx Brothers in drag, three of them wearing evening gowns (a flamboyant Groucho with his cigar), Zeppo and Chico looking rather demure, and Harpo in his trademark top hat in a two piece (bra and shorts) showing off his shapely legs in high heels.

Ewing appended a note to the program sent to Van Vechten: “Dear Carl, For one or another of your collections of Amatory Curiosa.” Think of all those movie scenes with the brothers chasing women; they seem comfortable going in quite another direction, which was Ewing’s point about modernism.

Most fascinating is Ms. Friedman’s account of “The Gallery in the Closet,” a four foot by four foot walk-in closet lined with ephemera, including playbills, clippings, advertisements, autographs, photographs — what Ms. Friedman calls a “3D scrapbook” that functioned as “Ewing’s self-invented realm of queer, interracial confraternity, a family that became real because he had so diligently assembled his collection of portraits and shown it to his friends.”

When first his father, and then his mother, died, Ewing had to return to Pioneer to settle family affairs — a task he was manifestly incapable of concluding. His pleas to friends proved unavailing. None of them visited him, perhaps thinking he could weather the conservative culture that rebuffed him, or perhaps dreading even a visit to a world so alien from the one that Ewing had perpetuated for them.

Heretofore, as Ms. Friedman’s puts it, Ewing’s “Herculean efforts to gather and preserve his archive did in the end succeed in carving out precisely the sort of fragile, messages, and yet entirely believable queer space—a space of contradictions, alive with politics, poetry, and feelings—that we must fully embrace as we try to reimagine Ewing’s queer life and the experience of other men and women throughout history.”

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”