A Chance Meeting: American Encounters
Rachel Carson
NYRB Classics (March 2024)
What if?
At some point, Rachel Cohen must have asked herself, “What if I were a fly on the wall” when two or three American writers or artists were engaged in conversation? What would they talk about? How would they get along? The answers to these and other questions — perhaps including a few questions that may occur to you — are provided in A Chance Meeting, first published in 2004. There are 36 encounters (1854-1967). The first involves Henry James and Matthew Brady; the last involves Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell. Readers will appreciate Cohen’s Notes for each of the 36 encounters (Pages 329-346). She creates an historical context for them from research that included 350+ sources listed in her Bibliography (Pages 347-365).
In or near the central business district of most major cities, there is a farmer’s market where, at least prior to the Covid pandemic, several merchants have offered slices of fresh fruit as samples of their wares. In that same spirit, I now offer three brief excerpts that suggest the thrust and flavor of Cohen’s lively narrative:
o From “Matthew Brady and Ulysses S. Grant”: “Brady, standing behind the camera, looking at Grant leaning against the tree, felt something was still not right. He sent one of his assistants to stand off to one side and told Grant to look just above the assistant’s head. Grant’s eyes refocused; his whole face became stronger, more resolute…People seeing the photograph would sense the authority with which he held the whole war in his hands. They would imagine that he always looked like this, in the midst of carnage, still standing calmly, as if he were merely looking for someone to come.” (Page 36)
o From “Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin”: “Taking his courage in his hand, Crane had mailed a copy of ‘Chaplinesque’ to its subject, who had written him a nice letter about it. Chaplin’s usual response to the thousands of fan letters he received each week was to throw them away. To Crane’s immense gratification, Chapilin redcalled the exchange and the poem on the evening rthey met. Chaplin, often a little unsure of himself with writers, remembered that he tried to say something about poetry that night. He wrote in his autobiography that when he said to Crane that poetry was a ‘love letter to the world,’ Crane had replied, ‘A very small world.'” (166-167)
o From “Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell”: “It was perhaps Mailer’s fear of modesty, his private competition with Lowell, or his genuine practical conviction ‘that the two halves of America were not coming together, and when they failed to touch, all of history may be lost in the divide’ that prompted him, on the day of the march [10/21/1987], wearing his blue suit and the maroon tie with the Windsor knot, after listening to some music by the Fugs, to march resolutely up to the MPs and simply keep insisting that he was going to the Pentagon until they arrested him. Lowell joined a sit-down protest on another part of the lawn and, to Mailer’s satisfaction, was not arrested.” (313)
In his review of A Chance Meeting for Harvard Magazine (July-August 2004), Justin Kaplan points out that the starting point for each chapter is an authentic episode in the lives of Cohen’s featured writers and artists. “For example, at two o’clock one morning in October 1923, Charlie Chaplin pays a surprise visit to the poet Hart Crane (‘I was smiling into one of the most beautiful faces I ever expect to see,’ Crane wrote) and they talk for hours. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston meet at a 1926 awards banquet for Harlem’s newest literary magazine, Opportunity. In February 1965, George Plimpton takes Marianne Moore, wearing one of her tricorner hats, to the fights at Madison Square Garden. Afterward they go to Toots Shor’s smoky saloon, where she sits at Norman Mailer’s table. Cohen encloses such encounter within a largely invented narrative frame, a prelude and postlude, that sets the scene and finally ties off the story.
“She describes her method as ‘imaginative nonfiction’ and explains that she ‘wanted to offer the reader the pleasure of moving back and forth between what is known to us and what can only be imagined.’ To signal a ‘change in register’ between the ‘real material’ — the ineluctable, historical facts of time and place — and the frames that she provides, she falls back, maybe a little too often, on candid warnings about the conditional, the guessed-at, and the imagined in her story: ‘perhaps,’ ‘could have,’ ‘may have thought,’ and the like. And once in a while, her bid for an emphatically casual entrance to a highly charged central narrative may seem a bit arch. ‘John Cage was worried about Marcel Duchamp,’ for example (Cage ‘realized that Duchamp was old’), and, ‘Norman Mailer was in just the right mood’ (arm in arm with Robert Lowell, he was about to march on the Pentagon). But such flickerings of control can be easily overlooked in an excursion into cultural history that is richly informed and consistently entertaining.”
No brief commentary such as mine could possibly do full justice to Rachel Cohen’s brilliant portrayal of 36 American encounters. A Chance Meeting offers an archetypical example of “imaginative nonfiction” in ways and to an extent that are unsurpassed by any other literary work that I have as yet encountered. Bravo!