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Everybody’s biography
Rachel Cohen traces an American century
BY JON GARELICK
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Rachel Cohen’s book of "chance meetings" among writers and artists spanning a century goes down so smoothly that you could easily dismiss it as a mere collection of entertaining anecdotes, something along the lines of the "First Encounters" series created by Edward and Nancy Sorel for the Atlantic Monthly. You wouldn’t necessarily know that Marianne Moore, at age 77, attended the 1965 Floyd Patterson-George Chuvalo heavyweight fight with George Plimpton, where she met Norman Mailer — and that she enjoyed both the fight (Patterson won on points) and Mailer. Neither would you necessarily know that Mark Twain published Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and that the two were friends. By themselves, these anecdotes make good enough stories. But as it progresses, Cohen’s book takes on surprising heft. In the opening chapter, Henry James Sr. and Henry James Jr. (age 11) sit for a daguerreotype in Mathew Brady’s New York City studio. In the final chapter, Mailer and Robert Lowell are drinking bourbon in Washington, DC, two days before the march on the Pentagon. In between, relationships overlap (Brady and Ulysses S. Grant, Grant and Twain, Twain and Willa Cather), the cross-references multiply, and what emerges is a beguiling daisy chain of anecdote and insight. I don’t know that Cohen has unearthed any new information for A Chance Meeting (the title comes from an essay by Willa Cather) — she cites letters, biographies, fiction, and poetry, the occasional interview. What she has done is read — everything, with a scholar’s rigor and a fan’s devotion — and reassembled her reading in short dramatic narratives. Lots of people know some of these stories, but I’d wager that very few know them all and have made the kind of connection Cohen makes. She’s practicing a kind of literary biography here, but, to paraphrase one of her subjects, Gertrude Stein, it’s everybody’s biography. She gets there by working around the margins. Some of these relationships are well known, the stories famous, such as Gertrude Stein’s note to her psychology professor, William James, at Harvard: "I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day." The stories about Stein’s friend the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten are probably less familiar. Van Vechten (1880–1964) often shows up in cameos in other people’s biographies. In Cohen’s book, his role is recurring and central to the lives of Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. (The chapters on Van Vechten and Stein and Van Vechten and Hurston are two of the most moving the book.) He also becomes part of the chain of connection in the portrait photographers Cohen studies, photographers whose work is interspersed throughout the book, from Brady to Stieglitz and Steichen all the way to Richard Avedon (who photographed Van Vechten and Hughes). When Cohen writes about Van Vechten, she even takes on a bit of Stein’s inflection: "Certainly there had always been that in him that makes a portrait photographer." These various strands contribute to a kind of genealogy of American thought. Cohen’s insights are never labored or strained — they emerge organically from the narrative, from her enchantment with her subject matter, and so they sneak up on you. "Van Vechten collected people, in much the same way that Hurston collected folklore, by throwing himself headlong into each one’s project. . . . " She has a knack for zeroing in on the tongue-and-groove nature of literary friendships, comparing Robert Lowell’s affinity for history and Elizabeth Bishop’s for geography: "Lowell was someone who consumed, who had no boundaries at all, who made epics, who put everything in. Bishop selected, she made discrete things; as befitted a geographer, she had a clear sense of boundaries. He thought the best you could be was inclusive; she thought the best you could be was exact." Cohen offers a bit of conjecture in creating her narratives, which she qualifies by words like "perhaps" and "could," to distinguish fact from speculation. Sometimes the chapter-ending suppositions verge on cutesy, and when she depicts an intimate scene between Charlie Chaplin and his much younger wife Oona, you can feel the writer being drawn as if by erotic power into fiction. But these moments hardly register as flaws, so well documented are her stories, and so careful is she to specify what’s been imagined. (Her endnotes serve as keys to each chapter.) In the meantime, she’s given us another angle on century framed by the Civil War and the Vietnam/civil-rights era — a "private history," in Twain’s words. Whether her various pairs of friends and acquaintances are quarreling or supporting one another’s latest work, she finally does make her argument that "history is personal."
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