A Chance Meeting, page 33
I was uncomfortable with his request and struggled with how to respond. I read through all the Mailer material again. I decided to include that the weapon was a penknife and to add a further true detail, that he had stabbed her three times in her back and near her heart. Mailer’s violence ran through his interactions with James Baldwin, too, but he did not give any comments about Baldwin, nor did I ask.
Last of all, I had an instant with Merce Cunningham, whose choreography I continue to learn about, and whose importance to me goes on increasing. A few years after my book had come out, I was at a party where he was a guest of honor, and some kind person introduced me. Cunningham was by then in a wheelchair and I leaned forward a little, and began to form a sentence about how I had written a book in which he was a figure, but I noticed that his attention had deepened and fixed over my left shoulder. I felt distinctly that he experienced a powerful feeling and, though he could not stand, I could see in his face that he rose to meet an occasion. I turned to see what he regarded. Jasper Johns was a few paces behind me. I had no claim on that moment, and I got myself out of the way.
As I have written before, the chapters of this book are meant to give a reader space for imaginative experience—my large debts to other scholars, writers, and artists are explained in the book’s first introduction, in the notes at the back for each chapter, and in the bibliography and acknowledgments. There is another, very fortunate, debt, one a new book hopes to accumulate, and a book of longer standing has the chance to acknowledge: the debt to unknown readers who give a book its meaning and place in the world.
It has been a joy of my writing life to have heard from readers that A Chance Meeting stayed with them over time. Reading is a little different in every time and circumstance; I hope, for you who find this book now, that it may go on offering something of the strange and wonderful companionship these figures found among themselves.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
2004 EDITION
“ACKNOWLEDGMENTS other than performance are artless,” Marianne Moore wrote, and added, “besides running the risk of being incriminating rather than honoring.” Still, it is a joy to try to honor the many people whose hard work and thoughtfulness are in this book.
It has helped me immeasurably to have the commitment and insight of two wonderful readers: my editor, Ileene Smith, and my agent, Eric Simonoff. I have been thankful for the erudite and meticulous attention of Timothy Mennel and Veronica Windholz, the many crucial contributions of Dan Franklin, Robin Rolewicz, and Zachary Wagman, the illuminating work of Allison Merrill, Evan Stone, Holly Webber, and Judith Hancock, and the care and enthusiasm of everyone at Random House—Barbara Bachman, Benjamin Dreyer, Deborah Foley, Jynne Martin, and Stacy Rockwood.
This book owes a great deal to Richard Avedon, who so graciously offered his time and his photographs. I’d also like to thank the people in the Avedon studio—Bill Bachmann, Michael Wright, and particularly Daymion Mardel—for all their work. I am grateful to Norman Mailer for talking to me about the chapters in which he appears. And I have been lucky to have the eye of Bruce Kellner and his knowledge of Carl Van Vechten, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Kind help came from many people working in archives, libraries, literary estates, publishing houses, photograph collections, and museums; they are specifically thanked in the permissions section at the end. Over the years, all of the people acknowledged here and many, many others offered insights or drew my attention to important facts. Those mistakes that remain are my own.
I have had dozens of occasions to be grateful to Wendy Lesser, who published the first of these essays in The Threepenny Review. Thankful acknowledgment is also made to McSweeney’s and to Double-Take Magazine, where earlier versions of two chapters appeared. Work on the project was supported by the Catherine Innes Ireland Radcliffe Traveling Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts. The MacDowell Colony was extremely hospitable—my thanks to Michelle Aldredge and Blake Tewksbury. I have also very much appreciated the patience and support of my colleagues at Bang on a Can, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and the Poetry Society of America.
A number of writers and editors made helpful and memorable suggestions during the years of research and writing. I am glad to have the chance to thank Dave Eggers, Saskia Hamilton, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Toby Lester, William Louis-Dreyfus, Ethan Nosowsky, Alice Quinn, and, most especially, Vijay Seshadri. For years I have been encouraged by Lawrence Weschler’s inspired generosity. And, last, this book would have been quite different without the fine judgment of Rachel Eisendrath.
•
“Imprudence,” Moore said, “is not considerate and, inconsistently, I am tempted to say that I associate much of what is here, with friends.” Many of my ideas about friendship and art were formed in the generous and sustaining company of Kris Anderson, Suzanne Bocanegra, Matt Boyle, Sophie Degan, John Frazier, Tara Geer, Michael Gordon, Peter Helm, Laura Helton, Jessica Francis Kane, David Lang, Peter Parnell, Beth Schachter, Mike Sonnenschein, Julia Wolfe, and, from the beginning, Justin Richardson.
I am deeply grateful to my extended family, both to those who are living and working now and to those whom I remember in all their vitality. The company and conversation of my sister, Amy Cohen, have been an inspiration for this project and for me. Finally, this book was, in every way, supported and influenced by my parents, Hilary and Michael Cohen, to whom it is dedicated, with love and gratitude.
2024 EDITION
Many people have supported the continuing life of A Chance Meeting, and, twenty years on, it is a great pleasure to add to these acknowledgments. This new edition has been beautifully seen through by those at NYRB Classics. I am honored to be part of this series, and grateful, first and foremost, to the brilliant Edwin Frank. At the press, I so much appreciate the fine work of Sara Kramer, Alaina Taylor, Alex Andriesse, Nick During, Linda Hollick, and many others. Warm thanks also to Michael Steger and Janklow & Nesbit for their continued representation of this book.
A Chance Meeting is very much bound up with ideas of photography, and I thank the Edward Steichen Estate and the Carl Van Vechten Estate for their permission to use photographs. Richard Avedon was extremely generous with me when the first edition of this book was being edited for publication. He died about six months after it was published, and his generosity has so kindly been remembered and continued by his estate. I am glad to see his photographs here as he intended.
My thanks to those who have worked on the careful renderings of foreign editions. In England, to all at Jonathan Cape, to Kate Worden, and Chloe Johnson-Hill, and, with special gratitude, to the wonderful editor Dan Franklin. In China, to those at the New Star Press in Beijing and to the translator, Gao Wei. In Austria and Germany, to the editor Piet Meyer at Piet Meyer Verlag and to the very fine translator Michael Mundhenk, who caught a number of errors and infelicities that have been corrected in the present edition. In Italy, to long-standing supporters at Adelphi Edizioni: Matteo Codignola, Benedetta Senin, Giulia Arborio Mella, and the translator Stefano Manferlotti. I treasure the memory of a number of serious literary conversations with Adelphi’s guiding spirit, the late Roberto Calasso.
Looking back over the original acknowledgments, I want to thank again all the friends, family, colleagues, and editors who first helped bring this book into daylight. The labors of the original production were substantial and go on making the book what it is. I am enormously grateful for decades of support from Eric Simonoff, still my agent, and from Ileene Smith, the book’s original, deep, and insightful editor, and the editor of my subsequent books.
In considering A Chance Meeting again, I have been helped by colleagues at the University of Chicago and by dear friends, near and far. In particular, my heartfelt thanks to Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, and to Maya Jasanoff, for her books, her friendship, and her reading of this book, its afterword, and so much else.
It is one of my life’s good fortunes that I met Vijay Seshadri, at a dinner, after a reading, in the middle of September 2001, and that we began a conversation that has continued as a sustaining force in all the years since. I thank him for his introduction.
Finally, I am grateful to, and for, Matthew, Sylvia, and Tobias Boyle.
—R.C.
NOTES
1. HENRY JAMES AND MATHEW BRADY
Mathew Brady did not leave nearly as much documentation of his own life as he did of other people’s. For his work and the details on daguerreotypes and New York commerce, I relied on Mary Panzer and the other essayists in the catalog for Panzer’s beautiful Smithsonian exhibition, Mathew Brady and the Image of History.
Nearly all the details regarding the James family, with the exception of the invented moment of eating ice cream at the conclusion, are to be found in A Small Boy & Others, the first volume of Henry James’s autobiography. They did come in on the ferry and go down to the studio unexpectedly, and James was wearing a coat that, after his conversation with Thackeray, he felt had too many buttons on it. The James family lived on Fourteenth Street and frequented those stores on Broadway, and they were always talking of going to England. The quotations from James are from this account.
I am particularly grateful to Leon Edel’s foundational biography of Henry James, and for this chapter the initial volume, The Untried Years: 1843–1870. My understanding of Henry James, Sr., and of the whole James family, grew out of F. O. Matthiessen’s The James Family: A Group Biography, Linda Simon’s Genuine Reality: A Life of William James, Jean Strouse’s Alice James, and Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. I worked with both the first volume of Edel’s edition of Henry James’s letters and with the fine Henry James: A Life in Letters, edited by Philip Horne. Finally, much of my thinking about photography began with Susan Sontag’s On Photography.
2. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS AND WALT WHITMAN
The texture and atmosphere of this essay come very directly from William Dean Howells himself and the engaging description of “My First Visit to New England” in his memoir Literary Friends and Acquaintance. All of Howells’s observations about his trip are quoted from this account. Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and his poems from this period were also part of my thinking. Nearly every detail of these scenes, down to the blueberry cake, is a matter of record. Annie Adams Fields sent money to Walt Whitman on at least one occasion; whether she contributed to the fund for the poet’s buggy is a matter of speculation.
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. Howells’s relationship to Annie Adams Fields, and hers to him, came across to me in reading Rita Gollin’s Annie Adams Fields. Justin Kaplan’s biography, Walt Whitman: A Life, is a wonderful source on Whitman and also gave me a sense of how important Lincoln was to the poet.
3. MATHEW BRADY AND ULYSSES S. GRANT
The look of Grant’s tent and its lack of a map are well documented. The scene in which the photograph is taken is my own. My greatest debt in this chapter is to William S. McFeely’s Grant: A Biography. Much of my understanding of Grant’s character, in particular his desire to be president, comes fairly directly from McFeely’s portrait. Information about the Civil War was largely gleaned from James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Additional information is in Shelby Foote’s The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862–July 1863 and in Grant’s finely wrought Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. The details of Brady’s darkroom wagon enterprise are mostly to be found in Mathew Brady and the Image of History, edited by Mary Panzer, and in Roy Meredith’s Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man, which accepted a few too many of Brady’s own claims but has an interest of its own.
4. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND HENRY JAMES
I am not sure if William Dean Howells and Henry James walked as far as Fresh Pond on the night they had their talk of talks, nor am I sure that they came back to dinner that night, though they often did, and Henry James never ate anything. My sense of the way the Howellses talked to each other comes from the domestic conversations in Howells’s fiction, particularly A Chance Acquaintance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes. Elinor Mead Howells was observant and noticed what situations other people were in—such as young Harry’s straining to get away—but whether she said so in that moment is strictly my own guess. The atmosphere of this piece also draws on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, on Howells’s Italian Journeys, and on Henry James’s Roderick Hudson and Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi.
Kenneth Lynn’s biography of Howells introduced me to the idea that Howells had originated the American girl characters developed by both Howells and James. I am glad to repeat my gratitude to Lynn and to Leon Edel, whose books led me gently through the complexities of the long relationship between Howells and James. I was not, at the time I wrote this chapter, aware of Michael Anesko’s book-length study of the Howells and James relationship, though I wish I had been. My feeling for their sisters came in part from Henry Adams’s description of his own and also from Alice James’s diary and Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James.
5. WALT WHITMAN AND MATHEW BRADY
The entire opening sequence is my invention, based on Walt Whitman’s clothes in the Brady photograph. There is no Mrs. Jennings, though Whitman’s neighbors were fond of him. Whitman was in love with Peter Doyle and Doyle’s route was the length of Pennsylvania Avenue, but I do not know how Whitman got to Brady’s studio that day. The descriptions of how Brady and Whitman felt about each other’s work, except the quotations, also contain a fair amount of my own guesswork, based mostly on reading Whitman’s prose and noting the occasional mention of photographs in his poetry. All the details of the physical interaction between Brady and Whitman—the arranging of Whitman on the sofa, Brady running his hands through his hair until it stands up—are my own way of describing the effect Whitman had on people.
I was deeply influenced by Randall Jarrell’s essay “Some Lines from Whitman,” which so beautifully brings across the immediacy of reading Whitman. My physical sense of Whitman came largely from Justin Kaplan; Kaplan quotes the man who slept next to Whitman and thought the poet looked “good enough to eat.” The long quote from Whitman on his sense of photography and history is in Mary Panzer’s Mathew Brady and the Image of History catalog. I learned a great deal about Walt Whitman’s presence and a great deal about attending to historical figures from Peter Parnell’s play Romance Language.
6. MARK TWAIN AND WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Mark Twain did go to the offices of the Atlantic Monthly to express his gratitude, and James Fields did call William Dean Howells in from another room. The other incidents are documented as I have reported them here. The wonderful Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872–1910, edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, is the core of my understanding of the relationship between Twain and Howells. Most of the quotes here are taken from the letters, but Howells’s descriptions of Twain are in his memoir My Mark Twain. The domesticity of both men is partly to be found in Howells’s fiction and Twain’s The Autobiography of Mark Twain and in certain stories that have been collected in Twain’s Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches. In addition, my sense of the characters of the two men was heavily influenced by one of the biographies that gave form to this endeavor, Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, as well as by Kenneth Lynn’s William Dean Howells: An American Life. Smith, Gibson, Kaplan, and Lynn all give valuable accounts of the way Howells helped Twain to write the Mississippi sketches and the way Twain helped to liberate Howells from the constraints of his Boston life.
7. MARK TWAIN AND ULYSSES S. GRANT
A thousand men at the Haverley Theater in Chicago really did sing “When we were marching through Georgia”; Twain was the last speaker at the Palmer House banquet and he did toast “The Babies.” Twain’s version of the story is both in his autobiography and in the letter to Howells quoted here. All quoted letters are in Mark Twain-Howells Letters, edited by Smith and Gibson. Some sense of Grant’s cast of mind in the years covered by this chapter can be found in his Personal Memoirs.
My understanding of the tenor of the relationship between Grant and Twain is most indebted to Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, which is where I first learned of the piece Twain originally called “My Campaign Against Grant.” William S. McFeely takes up Kaplan’s analysis of the damage done by the banquet in his own Grant: A Biography, another important source. I was also grateful to have had the chance to read John Guare’s imagining of this relationship in his play A Few Stout Individuals.
