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A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967

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Overview

Therese Borchard has written seventeen books, including "They met in ordinary ways," writes Rachel Cohen in her introduction, "a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend's casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. . . . They talked to each other for a few hours or for forty years, and later it seemed to them impossible that they could have missed each other."Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, Henry James, as a boy, goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady and is captured in a moment of self-consciousness about being American. Brady returns to photograph Walt Whitman and, later, at City Point in the midst of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant. Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather.

Editorial Reviews

Though writers are notorious loners, they often form bonds with their peers. By focusing on these irregular alliances, Cohen, in her book debut, provides an engrossing, if simplistic, cavalcade of American arts from the Civil War period through the 1960s. She has selected 30 American artists (mostly writers) and produced admirably vivid portraits of their friendships with their fellow artists. The picturesque and piquant are paramount in Cohen's method-Marianne Moore sports a tricorn hat, Elizabeth Bishop sips coffee in Brazil. Though her anecdotes will be familiar to cognoscenti, Cohen does a fair job of digesting and recapitulating Leon Edel's Henry James, Arnold Rampersad's Langston Hughes, Justin Kaplan's Twain et al. into pointillist chunks that have their own febrile charm. The visual arts are represented largely by portrait photographers such as Steichen, Van Vechten and Richard Avedon. Since their circles of acquaintance were larger, the gregarious and extroverted get more space in Cohen's presentation. This has the effect of skewing the big picture of American letters into a continuous cocktail party. And while Cohen shines at description-taking the reader into the streets and into the parlors of a dozen different eras-the book as a whole suffers from a persistent use of what Cohen calls "guesswork," including imagined conversations and invented characters that lend a novelistic sheen to the proceedings. Never less than readable, this book bears the same relation to history as Irving Stone's once-celebrated treatments of notable lives (Lust for Life, The Agony and the Ecstasy)-only he called his fantasias "novels." (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Rachel Cohen

RACHEL COHEN grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and graduated from Harvard. She has written for The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, McSweeney's, and other publications. Her essays appeared in Best American Essays 2003 and the 2003 Pushcart Anthology. Cohen has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and won the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for the manuscript of A Chance Meeting. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House Inc

Filesize

1.71 MB

Number of Pages

392

eBook ISBN

9781588363701

Awards

  • Guardian First Book Award

Excerpt from: A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen

CHAPTER ONE

Henry James and Mathew Brady

They had come in from the country. It was August, the attractions of the summer house had begun to wane, and Henry James, Sr., had discovered that he had a bit of business at the New York Tribune-that he had, pressingly, to see a gentleman about an idea. He had kissed his wife and collected his small son, Henry, Jr., and they had taken the ferry. Once they were under way, the senior James had been seized with the happy thought of presenting Mrs. James with a surprise, a daguerreotype of the two of them. When Henry James, Jr., wrote about that day years later, he couldn't quite remember but was affectionately certain that his father would have given away the secret the moment they returned: "He moved in a cloud, if not rather in a high radiance, of precipitation and divulgation."

When they got off the ferry perhaps they went home first. It was 1854, the year Henry James turned eleven, and the James family was living on Fourteenth Street, off of Union Square. The little boy and his father used to spend a great deal of time walking around lower Manhattan. Henry James, Sr., liked to walk-though he had lost a leg in a fire when he was thirteen and had a wooden leg, and later a cork one-and Henry James, Jr., liked very much to have his father to himself, away from the overshadowing presence of his always-more-brilliant older brother, William. When they came to Union Square, they used to pause to read the playbills with the details of the latest theatricals. Then they would wander down Broadway to Fourth Street, where they stopped in to talk with Mrs. Cannon, who ran the welcoming downstairs shop of items necessary to gentlemen-pocket handkerchiefs, collars, neckties, and straw-covered bottles of cologne-and finally they descended to the lower reaches of Broadway, to the Bookstore, whose friendly British proprietor sometimes came to dinner at their house. At the Bookstore they always asked for the latest issue of The Charm, a yellow periodical from England to which the father subscribed on behalf of his son, and which never came often enough.

The two Henry Jameses almost certainly walked to Mathew Brady's studio at 359 Broadway, somewhat north of P. T. Barnum's Museum. The studio was on the second floor, above Thompson's Dining Saloon, where the James family very often went for ice cream, in those days a great delicacy, though the Jameses were known to eat it weekly. James remembered in his autobiography A Small Boy & Others that they frequented two ice-cream parlors, Thompson's and Taylor's: "the former, I perfectly recall, grave and immemorial, the latter upstart but dazzling."

Brady's studio was admirably placed, next to a piano store, among dressmakers and other portrait studios, in the midst of the heaviest traffic of the wealthiest residents. In 1854, there were well over one hundred daguerreotype shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn-Brady's was among the most luxurious. His studio had velvet carpets, fine lace curtains, satin and gold on the walls, an immense chandelier, waiting areas with little couches and marble-topped tables, great brilliant skylights that Brady had designed himself, and, hanging on the walls, daguerreotypes of generals and presidents, kings, queens, and nobility.