Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Welcome to an astonishing new literary form -- an interlocking "family tree" of American writers, poets, photographers, musicians, editors, and critics that is part literary gossip, part biography, part cultural history, history of ideas, and, finally an unexpectedly moving elegy of a vanished era whose echoes still sound in our own.

A CHANCE MEETING recounts, elaborates and meditates upon the personal connectedness of some of America's greatest artists, connections which range from correspondences and friendships that last more than 40 years (William Dean Howells with Mark Twain and Henry James) or chance meetings which go no further (William Dean Howells and Walt Whitman's meeting at Pfaff's on Broadway in 1850s and once more during Whitman's last years). Starting with its headwaters in Whitman and Hawthorne, Cohen takes us on a voyage down the grand stream of American artistic and literary life, down thickening tributaries unleashed by Henry James and Twain, the shifting crosscurrents of activist W.E.B. DuBois and modernist Gertrude Stein (both students of William James), down new streams from Sarah Orne Jewett and contemporaries Hart Crane, Hurston, Hughes, and Baldwin. She brings in also the rich poetic and artistic contributions of Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Bishop. Key networkers and artists include photographers Matthew Brady, Stieglitz, Steichen, and Avedon, the insightful and supportive critic from the New York Times, Carl Van Vechten, the brilliant Marcel Duchamp - and this list is nowhere near exhaustive.

Henry James once said there is not one but a million windows in the house of fiction. What A CHANCE MEETING remarkably gives us at the end of the journey is the news of the goings on inside that great house, the rivalries, the disagreements, the love affairs, broken friendships, feuds, reconciliations, but most importantly and persistently, the long, looping intimate conversation that flows through and binds together these generations of American artistic life. In so doing, Cohen examines obliquely the alterations in the reportage on the American character, the re-examination of the American character in each generation, revisions which never lose sight of the conversations that have gone before. Profound and playful, Cohen takes some imaginative risks that might unsettle those with strict ideas of what is acceptably told as history. In this regard, Cohen quoting James' insight that Americans have trouble "seeing through to the reality of others" is appropriate: Cohen can and does see through to the reality of these most remarkable others, and we are much the richer for her wise and stylish audacity.

Rachel Cohen has created a diversion in A CHANCE MEETING: INTERTWINED LIVES OF AMERICAN ARTISTS, 1854 - 1967 that is more a series of illuminated daydreams than it is a sourcebook for biographical data on the important artists in American over a century spanning 1860s through 1960s. No, this is not a code of secretive encounters between unlikely and disparate writers, photograpahers, and artists, nor is it a professed series of inside stories meant to reveal the truths about those we deem as gifted. Cohen writes splendidly, and though she documents with copious bibliography and chapter notes the instances she encountered in her survey of 'chance meetings ' by a diversity of disparate artists, she seems more intent on using fact as springboard to create cadenzas of intricately woven possibilities to stimulate the reader to enter the wonderful world of 'what if?' than in declaring new-found discoveries of data/gossip.

Here in short and terse chapters we meet Matthew Brady, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Marcel Duchamp, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Alfred Steiglitz with and without Georgia O'Keefe, Charlie Chaplin, Richard Avedon, Gertrude Stein with and without Alice B. Toklas, etc., etc. - you get the picture. The joy of Cohen's writing is the possibilities created by perseverating on the conversations that might have occurred among these people, whether in duet or in orchestrated outcome. My bet is that if the casts of characters here discussed were to read these informative and provocative pages, they doubtless would smile, swoon, curse, or laugh, but in some way react to the vision and imagination of Rachel Cohen. This is a delightful book for devout readers and lovers of artistic history. There is so much to learn about artists who even today are on the periphery as well as the giants we all 'think' we know! This wonderful book is for relaxation and diversion and the rewards are many.

If you have even the slightest curiosity of the lives of famous American writers, poets, artists, or otherwise cultural icons--this book is for you. How would you like to visit Mathew Brady in his studio in New York City when he photographs Walt Whitman? How about walking alongside Mark Twain in Boston as he enters the publishing office of William Dean Howells to thank him for a great review? Or witness the intersection between the lives of writer Katherine Anne Porter and tragic poet Hart Crane in Mexico in the early 1930s. Each chapter introduces a meeting between two or three famous figures ranging in time from the Civil War Era to the Civil Rights Era, over a period of 100 years. Alfred Stieglitz pops up in three different "meetings" as a central figure of importance to the avant-garde at the turn of the century. I also enjoyed the chance meetings between younger figures and their older mentors such as Willa Cather and her mentor Sarah Orne Jewett, or Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. For humor, the story of the genesis of Marcel Duchamp's urinal "the Fountain" was well worth it; or Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological measuring of heads in New York City streets that made me chuckle. It turns icons into people and gives us a glimpse of what might have been. If you are looking for biography, this is not it; but you will end up a little richer in your who's who in American culture list. Each `meeting' is the spark which brings the `chance meeting', then the author interweaves short histories of the characters involved, to return again to the original spark of the `chance meeting' in the first place. Each visit or encounter has notes in the back of the book, which explain where the idea germinated. All of these chance meetings are backed up with a smorgasbord of evidence, even more to the reader's delight to find an impressive and tantalizing bibliography for further reading.

Rachel Cohen researches and expands biographies to create 36 chapters, each depicting a hypothetical meeting among 30 well-known (at least to the student of American history) cultural icons. The author, Rachel Cohen, calls this "imaginative fiction." I prefer to call it "imaginative nonfiction." But, nevertheless, an interesting slant on biography for 30 American cultural icons. Grab a cup of tea and let your imagination soar.

American Literature's repertoire can use books with unique perspectives like this. Historical works and biographies can be too limited, too large, and too pedantic as a sole reading source for the literature lover. So I applaud this new perspective and the work it took to bring it all together. As a teacher, I would like to see more of this for the secondary marketplace to reach the imagination of students.

Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists 1854-1967 is an exceptional work of literary detection and interpretation. In thirty-six chapters, Cohen narrates a set of encounters of distinguished American literati and artists across the span of 113 years, laying out changes in the preoccupations and sensibilities of American writers and artists in the century that followed the Civil War. Some meetings are brief, even one-time, and peripheral to the protagonists' lives as, for instance, the Henry James, still a child, sitting with his father for a photograph by Matthew Brady, or William Dean Howells' one-time meeting with Walt Whitman, or Richard Avedon's photo shoot of modernists Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. The meeting of James and Brady is also a "might have been" meeting, for Cohen takes a daring chance to capture and describe James's literary and intellectual sensibility on the brink of radical change. Other chapters describe longer standing relationships -Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz, Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore, Hart Crane's disastrous stay in Mexico with Katherine Anne Porter, the complicated father and son relationship of W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, the advance-retreat relationship between Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

This is not a book of strict factual history (although nothing in it runs counter to what can be proved using historical methods) but rather a book of rich historical sensitivity that illuminates a critical period in the maturing of our country's literature and art. It is written with exceptional grace: each chapter can be read separately without loss in pleasure or comprehension. This is a bold venture that deserves a wide readership.

The reader who enjoys A Chance Meeting may also enjoy Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A History of Ideas in America (which I am reading right now).

Each chapter tells a story of artists interacting with one another. The book is a great look at the cross-pollination of ideas in the American artistic community. You also get the sense that Cohen loves her subjects and there is an intimacy to the stories that makes you feel like Carl Van Vechten were recounting a juicy bit of gossip about one of his fabulous friends.

The book also explores the themes of community vs solitude in the artistic process, the role money plays in an artist's life and how outsider status can both promote and thwart the creative process. Cohen never editorializes but these issue present themselves over and over.

A great read for creatives and history buffs alike!

What an exhilierating experience! I savored these 36 essays over a few weeks, reading only a handful a night before I went to bed. The book is just beautiful; there is no other word to describe the writing, tone, and voice of Rachel Cohen's book.

This is a collection of essays about the private lives of important American authors and artists. Cohen's essays are based almost entirely on secondary works and begin with 19th Century authors and artists and then continue on through the 20th Century.
These essays are written in such a way that you get a feel for the kind of folks that these artistic types actually were. The reader learns all sorts of interesting things about these people such as their vices, lusts and secret desires.

This is an excellent book about the history of artistic endeavor in America.

A CHANCE MEETING, divided into into 36 short chapters, contains stories of the relationships between noted writers and artists from just before the Civil War to the late 1960s. Most of the chapters are framed around a single meeting, but contain digressions which sometimes encompass other famous figures.
What are we to make of this unique, celebratory, and quite often infuriating work? Each chapter is backed up by Rachel Cohen's source notes, detailing the basis for the events and behavior described. Yet, throughout the book there's a curiously speculative tone, Cohen describes many of her beloved figures as "maybe" doing or thinking this or that. In the opening chapter, Henry James (then a young boy) is described as feeling a "persistent uneasiness" while eating ice cream after having his portrait taken by Matthew Brady. Cohen notes this episode is invented, but then one must ask, "Why is this important?" Surely a book very much like this could have been written without such flights of fancy?

Indeed, several chapters fail to coalesce at all. In a chapter on Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett, Cohen asserts that the fact Cather did NOT meet Henry James changed the artistic direction of her career. How can this be proven? In most of these vignettes, no direct suggestion is made of how the characters influenced each other. Cohen is edging away from history and criticism and dangerously close to short fiction here. The book picks up in the last third, with some gossipy stuff about Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and a funny scene of Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali together, but the whole thing is much too ephemeral. The photographer Richard Avedon provided several photos - he's thanked in the acknowledgements - but did he deserve to be included in the title of several chapters? It's not as if the people he photographed (Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, for example) hadn't met before.
A suggestion: read some of the books Cohen sites in her bibliography instead of A CHANCE MEETING.

More fiction marketed as non-fiction. Why is this a trend?