A Chance Meeting, page 34
8. W. E. B. DU BOIS AND WILLIAM JAMES
William James and his admiring student W. E. B. Du Bois did go to visit Helen Keller together. The carriage ride and conversation are largely extrapolations from reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, Darkwater, and The Souls of Black Folk, and from the tiny suggestive paragraph Du Bois wrote on Helen Keller that was collected by Herbert Aptheker in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Non-Periodical Literature Edited by Others.
David Levering Lewis’s two-volume W. E. B. Du Bois is one of the great achievements in biography and was also a major source of information about American history, providing me with details of race and class relations that I have used throughout. I am also indebted to the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who has illuminated Du Bois’s work. Linda Simon’s Genuine Reality: A Life of William James held important details about the life of William James. I would have liked to report more from Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life. I found helpful Louis Menand’s essay “William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient,” published in The New York Review of Books. Menand’s The Metaphysical Club was a close companion of my thinking for two years while I was working to get hold of the influence and personality of William James.
9. GERTRUDE STEIN AND WILLIAM JAMES
Gertrude Stein did experiments of the kind described here, usually as part of her close working relationship with Leon Solomons, another student in the department. During their junior year Stein and Solomons were both under the supervision of William James. James did charge around and request the company of his students at unlikely times. This particular day, the interruption, and the walk are my own invention.
I tried to stay close in spirit to William James’s Psychology: Briefer Course and his Talks to Teachers on Psychology. Most of the quotes from Stein are in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. As many scholars have noted, Stein explains a good deal about herself in early work such as Fernhurst, Q.E.D., Three Lives, and some of The Making of Americans. I also drew on Alice B. Toklas’s What Is Remembered.
I am happy to have the chance to acknowledge Brenda Wineapple’s brilliant Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, which gave me virtually my entire sense of the sibling relationship between Gertrude and Leo Stein. The works of Leon Edel and F. O. Matthiessen both offered nuanced portraits of the relationship between the James brothers. Linda Simon’s Genuine Reality was particularly helpful in allowing me to grasp James’s relationships with his women students. And, again, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club was invaluable.
10. HENRY JAMES AND ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS AND SARAH ORNE JEWETT
It is my guess that Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett would have made a particular point of visiting their old friend Henry James after his sister Alice died. Fields’s edition of Jewett’s letters and Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, A Country Doctor, The Tory Lover, and The Queen’s Twin were the source for some of the atmosphere of this chapter. Many of the details of the visit are recorded in Annie Adams Fields’s diary, details put to good use in the fourth volume of Leon Edel’s life of Henry James, The Treacherous Years: 1895–1901, and also in Paula Blanchard’s lovely Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work. My sense of Rye at this time draws on Nicholas Delbanco’s Group Portrait. Certain details and, I hope, something of the tone of Henry James’s life in Rye came across to me in conversation with Ben Sonnenberg. I also used Philip Horne’s Henry James: A Life in Letters.
11. EDWARD STEICHEN AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
This opening sequence is as Steichen and Stieglitz used to tell it. With regard to the closing scene, I do not know for sure that Steichen saw the O’Keeffe photographs at the home of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, but that seemed the most likely, as the gallery was then closed and Steichen was going over to their house regularly. I think Stieglitz would have expected Steichen to come to him to look at new pictures. Stieglitz did use to tell the story that Steichen, when faced with the O’Keeffe images, began to cry.
Richard Whelan is very lucid on Stieglitz, and I learned from his writing a great deal about Stieglitz’s sexuality, affairs, and the convolutions of the relationships with Paul and Beck Strand and with O’Keeffe. Many of the other details come from Penelope Niven’s Steichen: A Biography.
12. WILLA CATHER AND MARK TWAIN
Willa Cather did come into New York for Mark Twain’s seventieth-birthday party in November of 1905, but I don’t know what she wore, whether or not she stayed with Edith Lewis, or if it was the occasion for her realization that Twain had “a style all his own.”
My primary debt here is to Eudora Welty’s essay on Twain and Cather, which helpfully defines one of their similarities: “They stand together in bigness—their sense of it, their authority over it.” In Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, Sharon O’Brien broke new ground with her unhesitating elucidation of the links between Cather’s childhood and her grown-up sense of herself in the world and literature. James Woodress’s Willa Cather: A Literary Life has the record of Cather’s presence at the banquet and of her later visits to Mark Twain. The details of the party itself—the palms, the orchestra, the foot-high statues of Mark Twain—are to be found in Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.
13. WILLA CATHER AND ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS AND SARAH ORNE JEWETT
The essays of Willa Cather collected in Not Under Forty, in particular her pieces “A Chance Meeting,” “148 Charles Street,” and “Miss Jewett,” have remained important to me and are at the heart of my understanding of what Cather was like in a room with an older literary woman. It was Edith Lewis’s memoir, Willa Cather Living, that first drew my attention to the crucial letter from Jewett to Cather. The rest of the letters by Jewett, as edited by Annie Adams Fields, were important to the tone of this chapter. Henry James’s The American Scene and his letters from this period provided further dimensions.
Cather’s book on Mary Baker Eddy—she is now listed as co-author with Georgine Milmine—is of interest for seeing how Cather incorporated certain traits belonging to Eddy into her character Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy. Significant additional sources are Paula Blanchard’s Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work and Leon Edel’s Henry James: The Master (1901–1916).
14. EDWARD STEICHEN AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ AND GERTRUDE STEIN
It is my own conjecture that Stieglitz felt a little abashed in the presence of the Steins. That Steichen was worried by Leo Stein’s comments is a matter of record, as is Stieglitz’s unsympathetic reply. Some of the quotes and quite a bit of the atmosphere come from Alice B. Toklas’s What Is Remembered. Again, I am indebted to Brenda Wineapple, in whose Sister Brother, along with many other discoveries, I found the pleasing detail that all the Steins had been reading Willa Cather’s pieces on Mary Baker Eddy in McClure’s Magazine. Aspects of this meeting are reported in the biographies of all those present—I found the account in Richard Whelan’s Alfred Stieglitz particularly helpful, though I also referred to Penelope Niven’s Steichen: A Biography. Herbert Seligmann’s Alfred Stieglitz Talking is an aid in getting a sense of Stieglitz’s conversational style. The exhibition catalog for Four Americans in Paris, a 1970 Museum of Modern Art show featuring works owned by Gertrude and Leo and Michael and Sarah Stein, was also of interest.
15. CARL VAN VECHTEN AND GERTRUDE STEIN
My own speculations are here complicated by the fabrications of Stein and Van Vechten, but I hope it is clear to the reader that Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas found each other, in a box, at the second night’s performance of The Rite of Spring, having become acquainted some days earlier. The most detailed account of this meeting is in Edward Burns’s note following his edition of The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946. Van Vechten’s executor Bruce Kellner explained to me that Van Vechten had told him that the meeting in the box was a coincidence. I am extremely grateful for this and many other delightful pieces of information that Bruce Kellner graciously shared with me.
Many of the quotes in this chapter are from Ulla E. Dydo’s A Stein Reader or from Bruce Kellner’s Letters of Carl Van Vechten. I am also glad of details I found in Stravinsky in the Theatre, edited by Minna Lederman, and The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten, edited by Paul Padgette. My sense of Van Vechten’s sexuality comes from Kellner’s biography Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades and particularly from Van Vechten’s own under-recognized novel The Tattooed Countess. Stein’s lectures are collected in Lectures in America. I have been helped by the work of Janet Malcolm, particularly in her essay “Gertrude Stein’s War,” published in The New Yorker. Finally, I am moved, every time I read them, by Van Vechten’s introductions to Three Lives, to Last Operas and Plays, and to the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein.
16. MARCEL DUCHAMP AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
This opening scene is often written about—accounts appear in a number of places. I do not know for sure how much wine they had. The committee did reject the urinal, it did go to Stieglitz’s, and he did photograph it in front of the Hartley painting. The quotes are mostly out of Duchamp’s letters, collected in a bilingual edition under the title Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp and edited by Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk.
Calvin Tomkins’s biography Duchamp: A Biography was of critical importance to me when it came out in 1996. I also worked with Octavio Paz’s book Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare and learned a great deal from Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996. Other details are in Richard Whelan’s Alfred Stieglitz.
17. WILLA CATHER AND EDWARD STEICHEN AND KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
As Cather and Porter did not meet, the reader will have understood that the scene at the end of this essay is imagined. Cather’s walk to the studio is likewise an invention, and the mood of Katherine Anne Porter in writing her essay is guesswork, though based closely on the alternating phases of possessiveness and rejection to be found in the Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Isabel Bayley. I do not know whether Porter had a copy of Cather’s photograph; it was widely circulated in publicity materials. The works of Willa Cather mentioned here—The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, Lucy Gayheart, Shadows on the Rock, and Death Comes for the Archbishop— were important to my thinking, as were the collected stories of both Cather and Porter and particularly Porter’s wonderful Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Finally, the pair of essays—Cather’s “A Chance Meeting” and Porter’s “Reflections on Willa Cather”—were formative.
Edith Lewis’s generous memoir of her longtime companion, Willa Cather, was a constant source. It is from Joan Givner’s fine study Katherine Anne Porter: A Life that I have my understanding of how much of her own life Katherine Anne Porter made up. I got the particulars of Steichen’s studio—and the way he would park his roadster next to the receptionist’s desk—from Penelope Niven’s biography; they were originally reported in a New Yorker profile written by Matthew Josephson, who was, after the time frame of this chapter, Katherine Anne Porter’s lover.
18. ALFRED STIEGLITZ AND HART CRANE
Stieglitz’s cloudscapes and the portraits mentioned were actually on the wall when Hart Crane first went to his gallery; the details of the exhibit are in Richard Whelan’s biography. Stieglitz was standing in the back room when Crane and Gorham Munson walked into the space. The verse of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” quoted at the end, particularly its last line, “Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer,” seems to me close to Stieglitz’s preoccupations and his conversational style.
My information comes primarily from the meticulous work of Clive Fisher in Hart Crane: A Life and Whelan in Alfred Stieglitz, both of whom quote the correspondence between the two men. I also referred to Paul Mariani’s The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane. The letters of Stieglitz and Crane were valuable resources—in the case of Crane, particularly the Letters of Hart Crane and His Family, edited by Thomas S. W. Lewis, and The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932, edited by Brom Weber. I also consulted Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923–1932, by Susan Jenkins Brown.
19. HART CRANE AND CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Hart Crane did read a lot of Elizabethan poetry, but his movements here are my own guesses. They did walk over to Paul Rosenfeld’s, where Waldo Frank was staying, and at the end of the night Chaplin did take Crane home in a cab. Chaplin watched everyone’s gestures, but I don’t know what he thought of Crane’s.
Most of the evidence for this piece resides in Crane’s letter to his mother, sent the day after his encounter with Chaplin, and in the poem “Chaplinesque.” In addition, I was helped by two biographies for each of these men—those of Paul Mariani and Clive Fisher for Hart Crane and those of David Robinson and Kenneth Lynn (also a biographer of William Dean Howells) for Charlie Chaplin. Robinson was particularly helpful on the subject of Chaplin’s London childhood and on the method Chaplin used for making his early comedies. I was pleased in Charlie Chaplin and His Times to come across Lynn’s sense of the long-lasting effect of Crane and Crane’s poetry on Chaplin; he makes a fairly definite assertion of the influence that I have also drawn on in Chapter 31.
20. LANGSTON HUGHES AND ZORA NEALE HURSTON LANGSTON
Hughes’s opening comment is in keeping with many things he said about Zora Neale Hurston, who really did stand on corners in Harlem, calipers in hand. The trip Hughes and Hurston made together is documented in biographies of each figure and in Hughes’s The Big Sea. Hurston’s collecting efforts are in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, and in her collection Mules and Men. The fact that Hughes and Hurston were important to each other is beyond question, but the subtleties of the feelings they had for each other have been a tangle to scholars who have devoted much more time to the question than I have.
I have benefited enormously from renewed academic interest in Zora Neale Hurston. Valerie Boyd’s new biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, Carla Kaplan’s recent and very thoughtful edition of Hurston’s letters, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, and the continued reissuing of Hurston’s lesser-known works are things to be grateful for. The foundations of this work were laid by Robert Hemenway, Alice Walker, and Carl Van Vechten himself.
My sense of the Harlem Renaissance was given dimension by Emily Bernard’s groundbreaking Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. Those letters were my source for many of the perspectives on the fight recorded here. Further details are to be found in Bruce Kellner’s edition of the Letters of Carl Van Vechten and in Arnold Rampersad’s two-volume masterwork The Life of Langston Hughes, particularly volume one: 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America. Rampersad’s work was my guide in much of what I have said here of Hughes. W. E. B. Du Bois’s feelings about the younger generation of artists coming up around him come from my reading of David Levering Lewis’s W. E. B. Du Bois. Bruce Kellner kindly relayed details from Van Vechten’s daybooks, such as the rumor that went around after the publication of Nigger Heaven that Van Vechten was no longer welcome at Small’s Paradise.
21. BEAUFORD DELANEY AND W. E. B. DU BOIS
Beauford Delaney’s walk through Washington Square is a route he often took, though the occasion itself is an invention. In 1941, a friend of Delaney’s actually witnessed almost precisely this interaction, of Du Bois raising his hat to Delaney in Washington Square Park, though Du Bois said, “Good afternoon, Delaney,” instead of “Evening, Delaney.” This is reported in David Leeming’s biography of Delaney, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney. I took the liberty of moving the scene back a decade. The interaction over the sketching session in the office is not well documented and I have added the details of atmosphere.
My sources here are, again, David Levering Lewis’s magisterial W. E. B. Du Bois and also David Leeming’s Amazing Grace, and the exhibition catalog of the recent show Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow, curated by Richard J. Powell at the High Museum of Art.
22. HART CRANE AND KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
This period in Mexico is minutely documented by a number of people: Paul Mariani and Clive Fisher in their biographies of Crane, and Joan Givner in her biography of Porter. Porter’s letters were central, as were her short stories set in Mexico. An essay by Malcolm Cowley, “Hart Crane: A Memoir,” in Cowley’s collection A Second Flowering, had a personal quality that gave me some sense of the attractive and disintegrating poet. The speculation here is mostly toward the end, in guessing what the two writers may have meant to each other. An eye-witness account is the source for the precise set of details included about the last moments in the life of Hart Crane.
23. ELIZABETH BISHOP AND MARIANNE MOORE
Elizabeth Bishop did take the train in from Vassar to meet Marianne Moore, she was often late, she did carry with her notes of questions, which have survived, and the two women really did meet outside the reading room of the New York Public Library on the bench to the right of the door. Many of the most telling details in this chapter come from Bishop’s own essay “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore” and her poem “An Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” Elizabeth Bishop’s collected letters, One Art, edited by Robert Giroux, were a deep influence on this book. The delightful letters of Marianne Moore, edited and carefully contextualized by Bonnie Costello, are quoted liberally here.
The late David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell contains, with great subtlety and thoroughness, the nuances of the intellectual relationship between Bishop and Moore. Brett Millier’s fine biography Elizabeth Bishop was important to my understanding of Bishop’s relationship to her absent mother, her difficulties with alcohol, and her reading. Bishop’s feeling for travel and her homesickness are also thoughtfully addressed in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. The detail of Moore’s two watches is in the first of two essays that George Plimpton wrote about the poet. I also referred to Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, edited by George Monteiro, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, compiled by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, and Charles Molesworth’s biography Marianne Moore: A Literary Life.
