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Brief encounters
A Review by James Atlas

Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting has attracted a good deal of positive attention in the United States. The first book by a young American writer who has spent a decade engaged in her research, it chronicles, in thirty-six brief chapters, encounters between American writers, artists and photographers over roughly a century, from the Civil War through to the 1960s. They met in ordinary ways, she writes in her introduction: "A careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend's casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks".

Her book takes its title from that of an essay by Willa Cather, in which Cather describes an encounter with Flaubert's niece at a hotel in Provence. When she found out who the lady was, Cather wrote, "I took one of her lovely hands and kissed it, in homage to a great period".

Some of the encounters Cohen chronicles were indeed serendipitous. William Dean Howells shook hands with Walt Whitman at Pfaff's Tavern, and fretted for the rest of his life that failing to establish a bond with the fabled poet was "one of the greatest missed opportunities of (his) life". John Cage became a friend of Marcel Duchamp after glimpsing him "at the same parties four nights in a row". But most were deliberate. Henry James and Matthew Brady, the subjects of Cohen's first chapter, were brought together by Henry James Sr, who arrived with his son, then eleven, at Brady's studio on a summer morning in 1854 to have their portrait taken. Brady then headed off, in a later chapter, to photograph Ulysses S. Grant, while James crossed paths with Howells, who cultivated the friendship of Mark Twain. This linkage proceeds, in a faltering and at times random order, through such unlikely pairings (and occasional triads) as Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin, Cather and Edward Steichen and Katherine Anne Porter.

Discipleship is a significant theme. Howells, as a young writer from the Midwest eager to make his way in the literary world, arrives on the doorstep of James Russell Lowell, Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which leads to an acquaintance with the magazine's publisher, James Fields. Gertrude Stein, as a precocious Harvard undergraduate, cultivates William James, a senior member of the college's faculty who has encouraged her preoccupation with automatic writing. Elizabeth Bishop, an ardent fan of Marianne Moore, secures an introduction through a Vassar librarian. Unlike the poets whose life-and-death struggles for autonomy are dramatized in Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, the writers and artists in A Chance Meeting are in search of guidance — they prefer mentoring to fighting for dominance.

Cohen's artfully interwoven account of her subjects' lives is reminiscent of the group portraits in Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club (reviewed in the TLS, July 26, 2002) and Nicholas Delbanco's Group Portrait: Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, and H. G. Wells (1982). But A Chance Meeting is both an exercise in the brief — very brief — biographical form and a history of modern American literature. Cohen's range is laudably ambitious, and she succeeds in breaking down the wall erected by the academy to separate black writers from gay and lesbian writers, poets from novelists, painters from photographers. The intention is to show that none of the genres or their practitioners evolved independently of the others; their convergence is what made each flourish. Thus the novelist and painter Carl Van Vechten, who took up photography later in his career, meets Richard Avedon when Langston Hughes invites him along to Avedon's studio. Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell, thrown together at the epochal march on the Pentagon in 1968, surface in each other's work — Mailer in three of Lowell's Notebook sonnets, Lowell in Mailer's Armies of the Night. Influence isn't only handed down from generation to generation, it operates within members of the same generation. It is not only vertical but horizontal too.

Cohen has done little original research, as she admits in her introduction. There was some browsing in archives, but for the most part she has relied — heavily, it must be said — on readily accessible sources. Instead of footnotes, she offers up vague citations: "My sense of William Dean Howells — his diffidence, his ambition, his feelings about Boston, and his relationship to Whitman — is very much influenced by the portrait of him in Kenneth Lynn's William Dean Howells: An American Life." "Much of this chapter comes right out of the correspondence of the two principals as I found it in Marianne Moore: Selected Letters...."

One feels that the author has been browsing in the library, pulling books off the shelf, communing with her material. The narrative voice is intimate, verging on confessional. "Many of these people began keeping me company ten years ago during a solitary year I spent driving around the United States", she writes. "I had in my trunk two crates of books. 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."

The easy familiarity Cohen developed with her subjects has enabled her to evoke them with engaging vigour. She is good at capturing the look and feel of the period she covers. A seventieth birthday party for Mark Twain (and attended by Willa Cather) was held in the Red Room of Delmonico's restaurant: "The Red Room had potted palms and gilt mirrors; the forty-piece orchestra from the Metropolitan Opera played for the enjoyment of 170 guests". Edward Steichen, arriving in New York from the provinces, "stopped on the street corner, propped his bag at his feet, looked up, and saw, directly across from the station, a billboard advertisement that he had designed for Cascarets Laxatives. It showed a beautiful girl asleep on a couch shaped like a giant 'C,' and the caption read, 'Cascarets: they work while you sleep'". She also has a gift for storytelling. Each chapter begins and ends with a scene. Cather, visiting the home of Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, her partner in a "Boston marriage", is ushered into a drawing room "that stretched from the street to the back of the house, the windows at the end looking over the back garden and down to the Charles River". On this day, "the sky had the thin light of a late winter afternoon; the river was a little misty". "James Baldwin wasn't sure he felt like going to another party. Jean Malaquais was always hospitable, but Baldwin wasn't in the mood for one of his lectures on existentialism. He considered just going down to the bar where he'd been spending a lot of time, but all the Americans in Paris would be at Malaquais's, and Baldwin decided to go."

The problem — and it is a major one — is that these scenes are invented. The frequent recourse to what "might have" been and what "perhaps" might have been tips us off to their fictionality. William and Henry James "perhaps" stopped for an ice cream at Thompson's Dining Saloon; William Dean Howells was "perhaps" moved by Whitman's recital of "Oh Captain! My Captain!" at a public reading. One is tempted to retort, and perhaps not.

Cohen makes no secret of her method. "I wanted to offer the reader the pleasure of moving back and forth between what is known to us and what can only be imagined, and I also wanted to be very clear about the distinction." What she is writing, she stresses, is "imaginative nonfiction". But she has gone too far. Did Charlie Chaplin fondle his wife Oona's breast through her kimono? Did the receptionist in Edward Steichen's studio show Willa Cather the way to the ladies' room? Characters — I use the word deliberately — utter trivial salutations: "Evening, Delaney" and "Excuse me, Miss Cather". The effect of this striving for verisimilitude is a descent into the banal. The invented passages tend to flatten out the styles and personalities of her subjects; they all sound the same.

Cohen's effort to enliven the practice of biography, to give it a personal voice, is admirable. In this regard, the United States has always suffered by comparison with Britain, where the genre belongs to novelists, poets, journalists and professional biographers such as Michael Holroyd, Claire Tomalin and Victoria Glendinning. Where are the American counterparts to Virginia Woolf's Roger Fry, E. M. Forster's biography of his great-aunt Marianne Thornton, or Evelyn Waugh's Ronald Knox? Americans don't possess what might be called the habit of biography; the job has been left to academics who labour at their brick-like volumes with dutiful industry, and the results can be joyless and unimpassioned. As Christopher Benfey, reviewing A Chance Meeting in the New Republic, noted acidly: "One sees the wisdom of the editors of the Library of America in excluding (biography) altogether from our American Pleiade".

On the other hand, how many major subjects are left? Some will always require biographical renovation — George D. Painter's two-volume Proust, major achievement as it was, has a faded air about it now; Proust needed the refurbishing that he has been given by William J. Carter and Jean-Yves Tadie. But how many biographies of Orwell can we absorb? Just to choose a random example from my own shelves, I find, in addition to Michael Shelden's authorized Life, biographies by Peter Davison, Peter Stansky and Jeffrey Meyers. There are more recent volumes by D. J. Taylor and Gordon Bowker (both reviewed in the TLS, June 20, 2003). I suspect that one of the motivations for Cohen's idiosyncratic approach was to get round this sense of biographical redundancy. Like Lucasta Miller's widely praised The Bronte Myth (2001), which examines the way in which the Brontes have been depicted in earlier biographies, novels, poems and even films, A Chance Meeting is a book about earlier books, an interpretation of the ways in which we experience some of the key figures in American art and literature. Cohen's willingness to step outside the boundaries of fact, to adopt the role of the unstable narrator (I employ the word in the academic rather than the psychoanalytic sense), is at least in part a creative strategy for dealing with the familiarity of her material. Rather than imaginative non-fiction, it should be called fictional biography. Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of Dickens, made up fictional scenes with impunity and to great effect, even going so far as to imagine what it would have been like to meet his subject. Cohen, too, has almost got away with it.

Despite its defects, A Chance Meeting is a spirited and lively book. At her best, Rachel Cohen brings to her subject — or subjects — an appealing verve and grace. Even so, one has to ask whether biographers should have a licence to make it up. Leon Edel posed (and answered) the question in his Principia Biographica: "Are biographies a form of fiction? Some critics hold this belief. But they are wrong. In a novel, the novelist knows everything about the hero or heroine. His characters are his own invention and he can do whatever he wishes with them. Novelists have omniscience. Biographers never do".

James Atlas is the founder of Atlas Books and the biographer of Saul Bellow, 2000. His memoir, My Life in the Middle Ages, will be published next year.