A Chance Meeting, page 32
Mailer was leaning on Whitman and Hart Crane and, possibly, Robert Lowell. In his own account, Mailer quoted one of the poems Lowell later wrote about the march; they traded their sense of the events back and forth. Lowell wrote: “then to step off like green Union Army recruits / for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers,” which may have been what suggested to Mailer, when he thought about the phalanx of young men charging the Pentagon, that he “knew where he had seen this before, this posture of men running in a charge, yes it had been in the photographs by Mathew Brady of Union soldiers on the attack across a field.” Perhaps, though, what made Lowell and Mailer think of Brady wasn’t the soldiers charging, which Brady never photographed, but the faces of the young men as they went into combat.
Around the time of the march, many of its major figures, those present and those hovering in the background—Abbie Hoffman and Tuli Kupferberg and William Sloane Coffin and Henry Kissinger and the various generals of the National Security Council and Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer—were photographed by Richard Avedon. Most of these photographs, along with ones of James Baldwin, Marianne Moore, and John Cage with Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg, were assembled in Avedon’s book The Sixties. Lowell and Mailer, had they leafed through, would have seen a range of faces and allegiances that resembled Mathew Brady’s portraits of a century before.
Mailer and Lowell stood on the lawn of the Pentagon, arms linked, and felt accompanied, Mailer wrote, by “the ghosts of the Union dead.” Mailer thought of “the dark somewhat incoherent warnings of Jimmy Baldwin being true to his own, yet trying to warn his old white friends.” Robert Lowell might have thought of a line he admired by Marianne Moore, “There never was a war that was / not inward.” Perhaps they both sensed, as Mailer wrote, “shades of Henry James.”
Robert Lowell always talked of historical figures as if they were right there in the room, and Norman Mailer always thought of himself and the people he met as the future figures of history. When he wrote The Armies of the Night—five years before Lowell published his own autobiographical History—Mailer divided it into two sections: “History as a Novel” and “The Novel as History.” They came to the idea from different directions, but they agreed, and knew they did, standing there, on the lawn of the Pentagon, that history is personal.
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It was perhaps Mailer’s fear of modesty, his private competition with Lowell, or his genuine political conviction “that the two halves of America were not coming together, and when they failed to touch, all of history might be lost in the divide” that prompted him, on the day of the march, wearing his good 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.
Norman Mailer was still in exactly the right mood. He took it all in, in jail, where he was held overnight. He made a phone call to his wife, who told him that Lowell, worried, had called several times. He went before a judge and extricated himself from a five-day sentence. And when, finally, he was released on his own recognizance, he paused outside the jail and, surrounded by reporters, gave a brief, incomprehensible speech about the faith that would eventually reunite America, by which he perhaps really only meant that he had been glad to discover that he and Robert Lowell were on the same side after all, and then he was allowed to go home.
AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD
DOUBLE portraits are an uncommon form in essays and biography, and, thirty years ago, I could not have said why it became an internal imperative for me to learn to write them. I knew that I was fascinated by those I saw in the visual arts, and I pored over examples in photographs and paintings. A part of the appeal must have been that I was myself in the midst of the vivid loneliness and powerful companionship a young writer may have on arriving in a new city and a new part of life. But it also turned out that I would remain preoccupied by the ways our literary forms cut too-sharp lines around isolated individuals. In any case, the double portrait was what I was after. As I searched through pairs of lives, I would occasionally get the feeling of looking into an old stereoscope: the effort to see from two disparate points of view would suddenly result in a picture of surprising dimension.
How to render this in writing was another matter. Essays can be roomy and eccentric, but it is a challenge to get them to accommodate two perspectives, and I had many trials and failures in the ten years I worked on A Chance Meeting. Gradually, certain discovered intersections gave me a tone I could work from—that Elizabeth Bishop had a tendency to be late, while her friend Marianne Moore wore three watches to be sure she never was, or that Mark Twain told the jokes William Dean Howells felt he couldn’t. The particular aura of a relationship—whether its members were tender, furious, admonishing, adventuresome, conflicted, or inquiring—would have persisted somewhere, in a letter, a memoir, a photograph. If I could hold to this tone, almost like the oboe’s A when the orchestra tunes, it would help the essay to turn from one voice to another as it investigated.
Twenty years after its first publication, A Chance Meeting appears in its original form, with but a few small corrections. I think the book, written largely before internet research or social media, caught at intimacy and presence in a way that itself now seems historical. If one undertook a similar project now, there would be new information and brilliant scholarship to draw on, and at the same time one would be farther away in many regards. It would go on being quite challenging to try to retrieve, as I wanted to do, how these figures felt about one another.
With the chance, in 2023, to think about the project from a later vantage, I am interested to reflect on how reputations have fluctuated, and to consider whether, in a new period of political and environmental awareness, the very idea of being an American writer or artist has changed. I see that my own experiences of land and movement affect my understanding of double portraits, both those within A Chance Meeting and those beyond its frame. And I am led to remember, with renewed attention, conversations I had with three of these figures—Richard Avedon, Norman Mailer, and Merce Cunningham—astonishing presences, now gone.
A few of the figures depicted in this book are more obscure than they were, while others have gained markedly in prominence. Among these, it is Beauford Delaney who has undergone the most radical change in reputation. When I began to work on the chapters in which Delaney appeared, I had relatively little material to go on and was filled with uncertainty. I knew that Delaney thought of himself as gay and Black, and that he and his mother both spoke of her maternal grandmother being Cherokee. I knew that his paintings defied divisions of genre and category, that he heard voices and struggled for stability. But I had never been in a room with one of his works, and, as a young writer in Brooklyn with many roommates and many jobs, it did not occur to me to request that museums and dealers open the vaults where his work was largely confined. I leaned on the biography by David Leeming, who had known Delaney personally and closely, and on the writing of one of Delaney’s dearest companions, James Baldwin. After my book was published, I was grateful to receive a note from the historian David Levering Lewis, on whose work I also depended, letting me know that he had been glad to recognize in the book’s pages the Delaney he and others knew. In the note, I glimpsed a network of people who felt keenly Delaney’s under recognition and were at work to right it.
Since then, through the tireless labor of many, Delaney exhibits have become an annual event, museums have come to present his work with pride, and the significance of his influence on Baldwin has been the subject of conferences and volumes. For my own part, I have been asked to write more about Delaney—essays, reviews, presentations, catalogue entries, interviews—than about any other figure in this book. Hours with his paintings have become some of my most cherished experiences. Yet, as I go on with Delaney, layers of mystery and understanding accumulate, and I still turn to the accounts of those few who knew him sixty and more years ago, and who saw Delaney and his future with such depth. James Baldwin wrote: “Perhaps I should not say, flatly, what I believe—that he is a great painter, among the very greatest; but I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush.”
The photograph of Delaney included here is by Carl Van Vechten, who took many of the portraits in this book, and whose reputation has also fluctuated widely. Controversial in his own time, and ever since, for his roles in and around the Harlem Renaissance, and for his appropriations of language and manner, Carl Van Vechten was a person whose disregard for boundaries was both a weakness and a strength. He saw and celebrated the work of many Black figures we now admire and who were then or later disregarded, and his distinctively patterned photographic backgrounds have become a more regular feature of our current cultural life than they were twenty years ago. Van Vechten and his close friends—Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston—all looked for intimacy and freedom in the artistic work they made and championed. They sent one another reports from far-flung locations, and what they learned from these places and from one another is a part of their relevance to us now.
The category “American” more or less holds the assembled company of A Chance Meeting, and has generally been part of the book’s subtitle, but the designation has always made me uneasy. Many of the figures in the book were born in other countries, or their families had only recently arrived, or they or their ancestors had been forced into being American under colonialism and slavery; some of them considered the Americas a hemisphere, not a country, and a number were best able to work when they could leave the United States. In the book, I quoted what James Baldwin had written, himself quoting Henry James: “‘It is a complex fate to be an American,’ Henry James observed,” and, Baldwin goes on to say, “the very word ‘America’ remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun.”
The complex fate of being an American is also geographic and environmental. Like many, over the last twenty years, I have become more conscious of land and environment, and this underscores, for me, certain passing moments in A Chance Meeting. For example: Zora Neale Hurston’s work collecting stories, practices, and songs in Haiti, Florida, and New Orleans; Langston Hughes’s poem with the line: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers”; Willa Cather’s recognition of the transformation of the Plains grasslands in My Antonía; and Sarah Orne Jewett’s documentation of the plants and animals of Maine. There are veins among these works: Jewett’s letter of advice to Cather, “You must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society,” reverberates not only in My Antonía but in the influence My Antonía had on Zora Neale Hurston as Hurston pursued her own revelatory point of view.
A double portrait always implies another; these two people will separate and each will go on to stand next to someone else, carrying something of this encounter that may be handed on. I might say now that Jewett’s quietness, in which one may get an intimate view, is bound up both with the place where one is standing and with the motion one is in.
I began A Chance Meeting with the sentence “They had come in from the country.” The young Henry James, so self-observant and conscious of his buttons while being photographed by Mathew Brady, had, that day, been in both the country and the city, and had the special physical awareness of both. The figures in my book circulated, even within a small compass of a few streets or the regions of their minds, and this was part of how they were alive to noticing and being noticed.
Like the writers I admired, I, too, had left a quieter, greener place, in my case Ann Arbor, Michigan, for education in Boston and New York. I adored the chance and circumstance of city life, and the flow of people walking by. Ways I had been shaped by the land were part of the work that I was doing, and I went on being shaped by rivers, the Hudson and the Charles, and the Huron I had grown up with. Looking again at Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of skyscrapers and clouds, I see the intimacy with a continually changing environment that he tried to offer.
Seven years ago, our family moved back to the Midwest, to Chicago, where the sky is conscious of the lake and the plains. Work being done here illuminates the history of Chicago as a place of wind and movement, a gathering place for the Potawatomi, the Ojibwe, the Ottawa, and people of many other tribes; a place where Black migrants came from the South and where refugees continue to arrive from around the troubled globe. This gives me ideas for further essays of traced interconnections. Nodes in the pattern go on forming rapidly in my mind.
In one relationship that has occupied me recently, I watch Margaret Burroughs go to study Mexican and Indigenous art and print-making in Mexico City, and bring back what she learned to the South Side of Chicago, showing her woodcuts to her friend the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. I picture how they would sit on the steps together, considering the girls of the neighborhood as these girls played and studied, as in one of Brooks’s poems:
Small Narcissa sits upon
A brick in her back yard
And looks at tiger-lilies,
And shakes her pigtails hard.
Although the pattern of encounters stretches ever outward, one can draw together a group of them that will have a unity. As A Chance Meeting came together, I actually did draw and redraw a web of overlapping relationships. A version of this drawing has been included in most of the editions and translations of the book, including this one. I like to see the scrawled names and lines there, in the background—a bit rough, tangible, in motion, ready to extend to other encounters, and, also, whole.
When I originally explained the process by which I had come to the group of figures in A Chance Meeting, I wrote that, in part, they were people whose company I had an instinct for, but I might also have said that, over a decade of putting people in and taking others out, they had come to have a completeness as a group, as a company of dancers might for a choreographer. I learned from the figures themselves; they had chosen their own groups of friends, and their own lineages of influence, and I overlaid these as I made my own. Each person had antecedents and inheritors, each took different, necessary roles. There were those who were hubs and connectors, poets who sharpened and gave voice, archivists and historians, geographers with their sense of land and maps, generals to marshal forces, and portraitists. I loved their entrances and exits, and the use they made of the stage while they were there.
At the end of the process of writing this book, I did encounter, in actual rooms and on actual phones, three of the figures. There is now no central figure from this book still living, and I think it may be of interest to say a few words about my interactions with Richard Avedon, Norman Mailer, and Merce Cunningham.
When A Chance Meeting was accepted for publication, my friend Lawrence Weschler offered to take me to meet Richard Avedon, with whom he was friendly. Avedon was still vigorously at work that year. He was very warm to me, and I had more than one memorable visit to his capacious studio. He told me a little about photographing James Baldwin, and how he had flown to Puerto Rico and to Finland to get the text of Nothing Personal from Baldwin; he told me, with vivid gestures, the well-known story of his own mother punching a racist doorman; he brought out contact sheets to demonstrate his process of selection. I remember one phone conversation with him in particular. I was at work on late revisions, and I felt an echo I was trying to articulate between Avedon’s portraits from the 1960s and the period of the Civil War. On the phone, pacing around my cramped room, crowded and piled with books, I tried to suggest something of the connection, and Avedon suddenly told me about how, as a child of twelve and thirteen, he had been engrossed in the history of the Civil War and had persuaded his father to let him go to Washington, DC, alone. He had stood at the Smithsonian among the photographs and become aware of Mathew Brady as a photographer with an artistic project. I rushed to my desk to scribble notes.
My favorite memory is of arriving at the bottom of the staircase that went up to his studio. Avedon was standing at the top of the stairs and reaching both arms out. He really did dance from foot to foot in the energy and eagerness of his welcome—a warmth that I have since thought was part of his ability to hold together so many very disparate people, and that was in interesting tension with the scrutinizing portraits he made.
Frames were tremendously important to Avedon. He had, with great generosity, offered that I might use his photographs in A Chance Meeting but worried that there might be hokey borders around the book’s images, cutting them off from the flow of the work. When, at his suggestion, we met with the book’s designer, Barbara Bachman, he was relieved to hear that she had worked on the interiors of W. G. Sebald’s books. Avedon was interested in Sebald’s use of photographs as strange evidence, and after that I saw his own photographs quite differently. He made specific, considered decisions about which of these should be printed unframed, and which should appear with a frame that he carefully worked out. This was not just bits of negative allowed to show but designed irregular black lines laid down around the image and meant to draw attention to themselves and either increase or question the sense of continuity.
My brief encounter with Norman Mailer was both more uneasy and more comic. Our interview, by phone, had been arranged by our shared publisher, Random House, after my book was in the final stages of editing. I remember the phone, the plastic handset in its cradle in the living room of the apartment in which I rented a bedroom. A time had been set for our call, and never having conducted an interview before, I thought it might be the practice, as I had learned it was at a dinner party, not to arrive at the minute. So I was scrupulously sitting by the phone, staring at it and waiting to call, when it rang, and it was Norman Mailer saying, are you calling or not, and I realized that to do an interview was quite different from going to a dinner party. He hung up and I called him back. He had read the three chapters in which he appeared with care, he added a little information and reflection to the scene in which he met Marianne Moore, and he wanted one thing changed: he wanted it included that when he had stabbed his then wife Adele Mailer, née Morales, that he had done so only with a small penknife. I felt he intended for this detail to diminish both the weapon and the violence of his act. Perhaps it was characteristic of him to demand or attack and then to mitigate in close succession. Just before we hung up, he told me, brusquely but not unkindly, that he had not had time to read the whole book, but that it was a good idea for a book.
