A Chance Meeting, page 35
24. ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND CARL VAN VECHTEN
Admiring Carl Van Vechten’s commitment to the personal quality of breakfast, explained in “A Note on Breakfasts” in Sacred and Profane Memories, I set this chapter then, though I don’t know what time of day Hurston came to be photographed. The scene at the end, of Van Vechten opening his mail after his second cup of coffee, is based on his description of his own slow waking in the morning. Though he did receive a letter from Hurston, I’m not sure what time it actually arrived. My main speculations here are in the arena of how the two people felt about each other. Hurston did think that it was a shame Van Vechten had given up writing—she says so in her letters—and she did think he was “God’s image of a friend.” Van Vechten did think that Hurston had “a talent, possibly genius” for collecting, but it is only my guess that he understood that Hurston’s lack of resources was an artistic problem for her. Van Vechten was, though, unusually clear about how helpful it is to a struggling artist to have money, and he was unusually generous with his own funds.
Two important resources on Zora Neale Hurston are the recent biography by Valerie Boyd and Hurston’s collected letters, edited by Carla Kaplan. It was from Kaplan’s fine introductory comments that I learned some specific details, such as the fact that Hurston always employed a typist if possible, and it is from the letters themselves that I have gained a sense of Hurston’s own intellectual tradition. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I was also glad of Emily Bernard’s edition of the letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, and of Bruce Kellner’s edition of Van Vechten’s letters.
25. JOSEPH CORNELL AND MARCEL DUCHAMP
One of the pleasures of studying Joseph Cornell is Mary Ann Caws’s edition of his notebooks and letters, Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files. All the opening guesses about how certain days felt to Joseph Cornell are based on Theater of the Mind and my experience of his work. Something of the feeling of being in a room with both Cornell and Duchamp comes from conversations I had the good fortune to have with the curator Walter Hopps, whose own work to rescue the archive of Cornell papers now at the Smithsonian Institution was of the greatest importance to Cornell scholars.
Hopps’s essay on the friendship between the two men, “Gimme Strength: Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp Remembered,” appeared in the catalog for the show mounted at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Joseph Cornell/ Marcel Duchamp. . . in resonance. The show and catalog did a great deal for my understanding of the way Cornell and Duchamp played off each other in their lives and in their work. I used Deborah Solomon’s welcome biography, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, and Calvin Tomkins’s Duchamp: A Biography was helpful here, too. The story of Brancusi battling with the customs officer is reported, among other places, in Penelope Niven’s Steichen: A Biography.
26. BEAUFORD DELANEY AND JAMES BALDWIN
James Baldwin did go to see Beauford Delaney in his Greene Street studio, and he did write that Delaney X-rayed him with a look before letting him in. I do not know whether Delaney was listening to Bessie Smith on the Victrola at that moment, but Baldwin and Delaney did listen to Bessie Smith together fairly often. Delaney knew Alice B. Toklas in Paris, and she told him the story of the intruder, which he used to repeat to his friends. Other details are taken from Baldwin’s many wonderful autobiographical essays, particularly in Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and No Name in the Street, and from the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Baldwin’s childhood, time in Paris, and relationship to Richard Wright are considered in David Leeming’s James Baldwin: A Biography. My knowledge of Baldwin’s dealings with Langston Hughes comes from Arnold Rampersad’s The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 2, 1941–1967, I Dream a World. I also relied on David Leeming’s Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney. The catalog of the recent show Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow was helpful here, too. I also consulted James Branch Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin.
27. JOSEPH CORNELL AND MARIANNE MOORE
Much of this chapter comes right out of the correspondence of the two principals as I found it in Marianne Moore: Selected Letters, edited by Bonnie Costello, and Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws. I also relied on Marianne Moore’s poems and prose as collected in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore and in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, edited by Patricia C. Willis. There are guesses where there are no quotation marks, particularly in my attempt to imagine the relationship of Carlotta Grisi, Marianne Moore, and Coney Island for Joseph Cornell. Deborah Solomon’s Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell has in it Cornell’s relations to his family, the stories of his various romances, and the details, corroborated in conversation by Morton Janklow, of Cornell’s proclivity for giving gifts and then taking them back. Additional sources were Charles Simic’s Dime Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell and Charles Molesworth’s biography Marianne Moore: A Literary Life.
28. JAMES BALDWIN AND NORMAN MAILER
This opening scene draws on Baldwin’s description in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” though I have guessed about Baldwin’s indecision before going to this particular party and his reservations about his host. The closing scene and Mailer’s final comment did transpire at Hugh Hefner’s mansion. I was grateful to Norman Mailer for talking with me about his sense of the relationship and I was glad of Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself and his piece “Ten Thousand Words a Minute.”
James Branch Campbell’s Talking at the Gates has a useful interview with Mailer, and I referred constantly to David Leeming’s James Baldwin: A Biography. Norman Mailer’s biographer Mary Dearborn makes a number of contributions to understanding his relationship with Baldwin. For the sense of the undercurrent in that relationship, I found it extremely helpful to read Adele Mailer’s The Last Party: Scenes from My Life with Norman Mailer. Some of my information about the Liston-Patterson fight and about Mailer’s and Baldwin’s pieces on it comes from David Remnick’s book on Muhammad Ali, King of the World. Some aspects of Mailer’s early essays were elucidated for me by Louis Menand’s essay on Mailer, “Beat the Devil,” published in The New York Review of Books.
29. ROBERT LOWELL AND ELIZABETH BISHOP
There are a variety of opinions about whether or not Robert Lowell actually asked Elizabeth Bishop to marry him; I have tried to stay close to the published record. On the questions of appropriation and forgiveness, I have cited actual textual appropriations, and I have made my best guess about forgiveness based on her letters. The poems from Bishop’s Complete Poems, 1927– 1979, her “In the Village” as it appears in her Collected Prose, and Lowell’s Life Studies, For the Union Dead, History, The Dolphin, and Imitations are all central sources, as are Bishop’s letters in One Art. Saskia Hamilton, whose edition of the letters of Robert Lowell is forthcoming, kindly helped me to clarify complexities of chronology and nuances of the relationship.
The most important secondary source for this chapter is David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet. I’m also grateful to Ian Hamilton, whose fine biography of Robert Lowell was a frequent guide, and to Brett Millier, whose life of Bishop was very helpful. I referred to Rampersad’s Langston Hughes for Hughes’s participation in clearing the name of the Yaddo director whom Lowell persecuted. For Elizabeth Bishop’s stay at Yaddo, I read Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, edited by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, and was delighted to discover information about Beauford Delaney and Katherine Anne Porter in the recollections of Pauline Hanson and Ilse Barker. At the end of my project, I had the pleasure of consulting Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s new edition of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems. I read with attention Randall Jarrell’s essay on Lowell’s early work, “From the Kingdom of Necessity.”
30. JOHN CAGE AND RICHARD AVEDON
Richard Avedon graciously spoke with me about all the scenes in which he appears. He does not himself remember the order in which images were made during the session. Rauschenberg’s lithographic stone did break on at least one occasion. Avedon went and still goes regularly to performances, but whether he had recently seen a Cunningham performance I don’t know.
The atmosphere of this piece was defined in part by Calvin Tomkins’s exuberant Off the Wall, which centers on Rauschenberg. I used Avedon’s books The Sixties, written with Doon Arbus; An Autobiography; Evidence, 1944–1994; and the catalog to his recent show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Richard Avedon Portraits, with an essay by Maria Morris Hambourg. I was greatly helped by the essays in these books by Adam Gopnik and Truman Capote and the interview-essay by Jane Livingston from February of 1993. Gopnik reported the story of Avedon’s intuition for the faces of the Roman emperors. John Cage’s own writing, particularly in the musical piece Indeterminacy and in the books Silence and A Year from Monday, was one of the best sources. I turned to David Revill’s biography, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life for the sense of Cage’s early entrepreneurial spirit.
31. W. E. B. DU BOIS AND CHARLIE CHAPLIN
That W. E. B. Du Bois loved the movies is documented by David Levering Lewis. That Du Bois met Chaplin in Switzerland is mentioned glancingly in the foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to one edition of The Souls of Black Folk and in the chronology in the Library of America edition of Du Bois’s writings. The Du Boises’ viewing of A King in New York and their visit to the Chaplins in Vevey are based on little information but adhere to the descriptions of the gestures and behaviors of the two men given by their acquaintances and, later, by their biographers. Chaplin’s My Autobiography contributed to my sense of the man and his preoccupations, as did both Limelight and A King in New York. [Addendum, 2024: Long after this book’s first publication, I learned that A King in New York was effectively banned from U.S. movie theaters until 1972, so Du Bois could not have seen that film until he was himself able to leave the country.]
My debt to David Levering Lewis continues in this chapter, which again relies heavily on his work for both biographical and historical information. My picture of the Chaplins’ life in Switzerland draws on the work of both Kenneth Lynn and David Robinson. Lynn quotes Marlon Brando on Chaplin’s sadism and tells the story of the stuffed cat’s appearance on the set of Monsieur Verdoux, and believes that Hart Crane’s kitten was still on Chaplin’s mind.
32. LANGSTON HUGHES AND CARL VAN VECHTEN AND RICHARD AVEDON
Langston Hughes often mentioned doctors, but I don’t know what Hughes did on the day before going to Avedon’s. Hughes was sorting through letters in this period. Richard Avedon kindly confirmed that he did invite Hughes in part because of his interest in the civil rights movement in 1963. Avedon did not have much sense of Van Vechten.
For Langston Hughes’s retrospective sense of his life, I was helped by his autobiographical volumes The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander. Arnold Rampersad was the central source for this chapter—most of the biographical information here is to be found in his work, though Du Bois’s reaction to Hughes’s testimony is recorded by David Levering Lewis in the second volume of his Du Bois biography. I was also glad, again, of Emily Bernard’s Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, and I referred to Bruce Kellner’s Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades and to Kellner’s edition of Van Vechten’s letters.
33. RICHARD AVEDON AND JAMES BALDWIN
Richard Avedon’s flight and arrival at the hotel and the drinks in the evening are my own guesses; Baldwin did take a vacation in Puerto Rico. The description of Avedon rushing home to work with the photos of the divided face is also my invention. For many of the rest of the details, I am grateful to Richard Avedon, who spent some time telling me of his relationship with Baldwin. The reminiscences in that interview (the story of Avedon’s mother hitting the doorman, the incident of the two shearling coats in the “down” bar, the photomat image) are quoted here, as is the book Baldwin and Avedon worked on together, Nothing Personal. I would also like to express my admiration for Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, central to my thinking about Baldwin at this time.
Again I depended on David Leeming for information on Baldwin, and on Avedon’s books The Sixties; An Autobiography; Evidence, 1944–1994; and the catalog to Avedon’s 2002 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Richard Avedon Portraits. I drew on the essays by Adam Gopnik and Truman Capote and the interview-essay by Jane Livingston from February of 1993.
34. MARIANNE MOORE AND NORMAN MAILER
Marianne Moore did go to the fights with George Plimpton and the details are quoted from her letter to her brother, John Warner Moore. Whether she had a little feeling of attraction for Mailer is my own speculation. Norman Mailer kindly spoke with me about this scene and it was on that occasion that he said, “one had never met anyone remotely like her.” Of the many comments Muhammad Ali is reported to have made with regard to service in Vietnam, the one that Mailer refers to is the one quoted here.
George Plimpton records some of the most fetching details in this chapter in his two essays on Marianne Moore, collected in The Best of Plimpton. Other quotes are from Moore’s liner notes to I Am the Greatest!, to be found in an appendix of The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, edited by Patricia C. Willis. Mailer’s many records of fights, including his essays on Cassius Clay, his book The Fight, and “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” were also helpful. I referred to the Mary Dearborn biography Mailer particularly for the details of Mailer’s changing political convictions in the moment of this chapter.
35. JOHN CAGE AND MARCEL DUCHAMP
I first learned that John Cage took chess lessons from Marcel Duchamp in Calvin Tomkins’s Duchamp: A Biography. The opening sequence is very much as Cage always told the story, including the fact that Cage was worried about Duchamp. Much of the sense of Cage’s relationship to Duchamp comes from Cage’s own work in Silence and other writings and from the David Revill biography. The late interview in which Duchamp compares himself to Gertrude Stein was with Pierre Cabanne, whose book Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp makes wonderful reading. Tomkins’s book on Rauschenberg, Off the Wall, also provided information. The final chess match is described in the most specific detail by Alice Goldfarb Marquis in her Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare: A Biography, which also gives the details of Teeny and Marcel Duchamp’s work as art dealers.
36. NORMAN MAILER AND ROBERT LOWELL
The main source for this chapter is Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which influenced this whole project. Robert Lowell did go home and write poems about the march and one of these was titled “Norman Mailer.” The only real speculation in this essay is in the final paragraph.
It was from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell that I learned that Lowell felt Mailer’s description of him was one of the best ever written. Mary Dearborn’s biography, Mailer, and other Mailer essays, including those in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, also helped me to situate Mailer’s thinking at this time.
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