Links in a creative chain

It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that a phenomenon of culture, particularly a book, to be properly enjoyed, is best and properly known for what it is (and not for what it is not).

Rachel Cohen’s enthralling “A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Artists and Writers, 1854-1967” is a series of linked explorations of intimacy and amity (including certain failures of intimacy, certain violations of amity) among American writers and artists. The 36 essays, as they progress (if that is the word) from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, constitute something of a new genre, rare in our period: “A Chance Meeting” is a Divination by Affective Nearness, or as I would like to call it, a proximanteia. And what is being divined is nothing less than a century or so of American taste, the nature of modern literary and artistic tangency in the United States.

In some quarters -- Christopher Benfey in the New Republic, for example -- “A Chance Meeting” has been mistaken for literary criticism, which it is not, although there are many pages that will do excellent service as literary criticism:

“Gertrude Stein explained that she had noticed that every American starts over on the project of writing American history or the American novel. She did that. And, at the same time, she had also noticed that each American chooses a tradition, collects, in some sense, his or her own sensibility, and she did that, too.”

Cohen has also been mistaken for a biographer, which she is not, although there are many acute insights in the course of her “intertwined” essays that identify and articulate the necessity of biographical intelligence:

“[Hart] Crane sent Chaplin his first book of poems, ‘White Buildings,’ which included ‘Chaplinesque,’ and, writing his memoirs thirty years after Crane’s death, Chaplin mentioned being glad to receive it. Chaplin was always gracious about the dead.”

It is easy as well to mistake the tone of Cohen’s essays for the resonance of gossip, which it is not, although her book sports many passages of superior and highly speculative gossip:

“John Cage was worried about Marcel Duchamp. By chance, they had been at the same parties four nights in a row, and he had looked and looked at Duchamp and realized that Duchamp was old. He wanted to be with him; he wondered why he hadn’t made an effort to be with him all the time.”

And easier still, Cohen’s text, always in the light, or the darkness, of the century she has focused upon, may be mistaken for literary history, which it is not, although many cunning corridors of such history are traversed:

“[Robert] Lowell had written ‘For the Union Dead,’ published three years earlier, thinking that many of the fault lines in the country were very like those that had opened when his distinguished ancestors were serving in the Civil War. The title poem considered the monument of Colonel Shaw, leading the 54th Massachusetts, the colored brigade. ‘At the dedication,’ Lowell wrote, ‘William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.’ Lowell found the sculpture a painful reminder of all that had not happened since the city of Boston optimistically gathered to start a new era: ‘Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat.’ ”

I grant that there is a good deal of overlap, what I should prefer to call imbrication, in Cohen’s book between gossip and biography and criticism and history on the one hand and on the other the work she has actually written, but that is merely a consequence of its genre -- indeed such confusions are in the nature of this genre she has recovered, if not invented.

Yet it is not abruptly or rashly that Cohen has undertaken this manteia, or mode of divination, as I must call it, for not only is the resonance of her inquiry, or rather of her adoration, enunciated in the gentlest, most solicitous terms, but she has limited its scope to the figures -- writers, artists, photographers, poets, even the single most iconic performer of the century (Chaplin) -- who “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.”

“[F]undamentally,” she remarks, “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 ‘The Bridge’: ‘Not greatest, thou -- not first, nor last -- but near.’ ”

Emily Dickinson, who, like Frost and Faulkner, is the kind of person not at all engaged in the sort of enterprise Cohen is pursuing, nonetheless supplies the perfect formulation for Cohen’s braided congregation of numinous companions: “The soul selects her own society-- / then shuts the door.” “A Chance Meeting” is by no means an exhaustive tabulation of luminous American culture-heroes -- the book is rather a shapely breviary of acknowledgment and homage, the fragments of “private history” carefully and discreetly arranged to reveal a pattern that emerges quite naturally and almost predictably over the decades explored, through what Cohen calls “effects of presence” pursued. How attractive is her dedication to this pursuit, how diligent and resolved her quest for the articulation of a world of contiguous makers!

At the outset she confides her method, or at least the skeleton of her method: “I read all I could of what has been published -- essays, autobiographies, letters, diaries, notebooks, novels, poems, the memoirs by other people, and biographies -- and I studied the galleries of four portrait photographers: Mathew Brady, Edward Steichen, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Avedon.... I read until these figures seemed to me ... 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.”

It is this kind of inquisitively amicable, labile sympathy that plays over all the accounts of relationships or failures of relationships in the book -- so that Henry James’ warm friendship with William Dean Howells is examined with no more approval than James Baldwin’s resentful quarrels with Norman Mailer, and with no less analytical fervor -- neither concessive nor defensive but the sort of careful response to individual experience which, for example, the psychoanalyst accords his patients’ free associations, without the pressure of immediate apprehension or forced judgment:

“As I worked,” Cohen reports, “I came across details that stayed with me: Walt Whitman’s 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.... “ It is the patient and fond exfoliation of the largest possible stock of evidence that grants Cohen her ultimate authority, the revealing insights into character, its composition and even its cancellation, which are so striking and so convincing:

“Langston Hughes had a way of being indispensable but absenting himself if you asked too much. [Zora Neale] Hurston had a way of asking too much.”

Perhaps it is in the temper of the figures she has chosen (or been chosen by, according to the stipulations of solicitude) that so many of the relations Cohen has articulated are homosexual, or homoerotic, as we are prompted to say. It is with great frankness as well as great delicacy, at least in the first 27 chapters, that these matters are handled; the corresponding warmth of address is evident in the treatment of the several African Americans who constitute such a vivid part of the chain. (“[T]o keep their interactions in historically appropriate language, I used ‘black,’ rather than ‘African-American,’ ” Cohen writes, “and referred to tribes and regions rather than writing ‘Native American.’ ”)

Indeed I know of no remotely analogous cultural articulation -- not even Alfred Kazin’s richly rehearsed “An American Procession” -- that ventures so explicitly, and so readily, into the American briar patch of racial and sexual encounters.

Kazin too describes certain crucial encounters, what Cohen calls “stories about people” that assume symbolic dimensions for him -- he uses them as modes of transition. Clover Adams and Margaret Fuller serve as a structural device to get from Emerson to James, from Hawthorne to Faulkner: They are joints. Kazin’s marchers in his procession are giants in time, and he knows where to go to afford them their grand dimension; he goes outside of mere literature on certain occasions, returning with the spoils to enrich his analysis of the texts.

It is an altogether different project that Cohen has undertaken, and I invoke Kazin’s splendid book only to suggest the equivalent scope and value of her enterprise. For she has afforded a vision of the lives of the makers that proposes, as she rolls out the links of the chain, a sort of fraternal structure in which her consciousness -- and as a result, ours as well -- can dwell, as if it were the most natural, the most logical thing in the world these days to regard literature and art and music as affording the soul a lodging, indeed a palace of pleasure.

For that is the secret sense of the braid of lives she has recounted so affectionately, and why I have insisted on the peculiarity of genre that “A Chance Meeting” represents. The peculiarity that so often asserts “it would be nice to think that they walked down the street together,” or “perhaps he waited for her downstairs,” or “it must have been the case that she laughed at the joke.”

Let me invoke again our psychoanalyst, who is not at all flummoxed when his patient happily remarks, “I didn’t really have that dream, you know, I just made it up.” The book is an informed vision, not a collection of facts.

We are not accustomed nowadays to regard such an array of contacts among the makers, especially American makers, as comfortable, as consoling, even as euphoric. But for Cohen that is the prospect before us, that is the story she has to tell, even when it is a story of missed opportunities and foiled occasions. She has had a vision of what Shaw used to call the sanity of art, and what in reading her I would describe as the felicity of engaging in the intimacy of cultural production, something very rare in our moment of subversion and repudiation, when so many notions of the pleasure of the arts, and of art-making, as a primary spiritual resource have been contested.

It is an indication of the insecurity and the fragility of such pleasure these days that Cohen chooses the term “chance meeting,” taking it from an essay by Willa Cather, to identify her governing structure; in less menaced and menacing times, a visionary author would have called such contacts Fate and reveled in the transcendence of the accidental. It is an evidence of our incomparable modernity that we find it appropriate to attribute the felicities of friendship, and the failures too, to Fortune and no longer to Fate.

But even under the sign of accident, Rachel Cohen’s vision of the life of art in her chosen century, and the effect of that vision upon her reader, is one of an astonishing gladness. Not that she scants misunderstanding or misery, or even the makings of tragedy. But such makings are the kind that compelled Yeats, in his furious old age, to invoke the gaiety of Hamlet and Lear. *