Rachel Cohen - A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967

A Chance
Meeting

Intertwined Lives of
American Writers and Artists,
18541967

RACHEL COHEN

RANDOM HOUSE

New York

CONTENTS

...

To Hilary and Michael Cohen

If a walk across the Park, with a responsive friend, late on the golden afternoon of a warm week-day, and if a consequent desultory stroll, for speculations sake, through certain northward and eastward streets and avenues, of an identity a little vague to me now, save as a blur of builded evidence as to proprietary incomesif such an incident ministered, on the spot, to a boundless evocation, it then became history of a splendid order: though I perhaps must add that it became so for the two participants alone, and with an effect after all not easy to communicate.

Henry James, The American Scene, 1907

ILLUSTRATIONS

...

A CHANCE MEETING

INTRODUCTION

...

THE THIRTY PEOPLE GATHERED HERE MET IN ORDINARY WAYS: A careful arrangement after long admiration, a friends casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. They saw each other first in a photography studio, or a magazine office, and they talked for a few hours or for forty years. Later it felt to them, as it often does, entirely by chance that they had met and yet impossible that they could have missed each other.

Some of their encounters left a memorable impression, though they never spoke again; on other occasions strong and altering loyalties emerged, permanent conditions of influence were established, and acts of rebellion were set in motion. Writing of their own lives, they very often identified the crucial shifts as having happened in the moment of going through a new door or in the grasp of an unfamiliar hand.

A suggestion of what passed between them was sometimes recorded in a single photograph and other times in the long history of a friendship. As they knew each other better, they wrote encouraging letters, edited each others novels, went swimming, fought bitterly, dedicated poems to one another, and played chess.

They came and went over the course of a centurythe fruitful, difficult period that held two related struggles, the Civil War and the civil rights movement. Once in a while they met behind the lines or on the field of protest, but war and politics were also in their minds when they sat together in someones library or in a taxi.

MANY OF THESE PEOPLE began keeping me company ten years ago, during a solitary year I spent driving around the United States. I had in my trunk two crates of books, by Henry James, Mark Twain, and Ulysses Grant, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. I was reading books, as I had not before, to know their authors. I watched these writers responding to love, solitude, religion, the natural world, history, reading, and their families, but I cared most to know how they felt about friendship.

I started to read collections of essays and letters and I realized that many of the writers in my trunk had known one another. Mark Twain had been the first to publish Ulysses Grants Personal Memoirs. Willa Cather had written beautifully about her debts to other writers in her memoirs of Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett and in the essay from which, after long thought, I borrowed the title, A Chance Meeting. It turned out that Katherine Anne Porter had practically thrown Hart Crane out of her house in Mexico; Elizabeth Bishops poem for Marianne Moore had hundreds of letters behind it; and James Baldwin had finally stopped speaking to Norman Mailer after a prizefight.

These all seemed to me incidents in what Mark Twain had helpfully called a private history. At first I thought of each encounter separately, but this didnt account for the fact that Twains lifelong friend William Dean Howells was also very dear to Henry James; it is in the nature of private history that its pieces overlap. I began arranging the fragments I had found and I saw that, though there were discontinuities, the pattern itself came forward in time and would lay out over decades or centuries. I wondered whether it would be possible to create an experience of reading a longer private history, and what that experience might reveal.

IN THE YEARS that followed, new figures joined the original company and lines of influence emerged. Pursuing the effects of presence, I read all I could of what has been publishedessays, autobiographies, letters, diaries, notebooks, novels, poems, the memoirs by other people, and biographiesand I studied the galleries of four portrait photographers: Mathew Brady, Edward Steichen, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Avedon.

As I worked, I came across details that stayed with me: Walt Whitmans skin looked unusually rosy to the soldiers he visited in hospitals; W.E.B. Du Bois loved the movies; Gertrude Stein found her first plane ride thrilling; and Edward Steichen could take someones portrait in a few seconds. I read until these figures seemed to me to stand and walk around of their own accord, to have the kind of coherence I would hope to know in my friends. I tried not to shy away when they wrote vituperative letters and were sometimes racist and broke their wives noses.

Working to keep their interactions in historically appropriate language, I used black rather than African-American, and referred to tribes and regions rather than writing Native American. I adhered to peoples actual attitudes and choicesreaders will notice the fluctuating presence of women and the uneasy relations between races. Perhaps it does not need saying that I was often disappointed in the insularity of these social circles.

The writers and artists Ive written about either were born in America or did important work here. They lived in cities, spent quite a lot of their time visiting and talking, wrote copious letters when they were away, and were, to their friends, never really lost from view. This was not the right setting for Emily Dickinson, Jean Toomer, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, or Flannery OConnor. The people in this book were interested in social reality, but by and large they did not document ita partial explanation for the absence of Henry Adams, Jane Addams, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright. And, if they were visual artists, they were portrait photographers or portraitists who worked in a single sitting, or they made assemblagesI did not choose as central figures John Singer Sargent, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia OKeeffe, or Mark Rothko. Finally, and fundamentally, I wrote about people whose company I felt I had an instinct for. I often thought about the way Hart Crane had addressed Walt Whitman in