Browser.final 6/16/04 5:40 PM Page 17 THE BROWSER Lives Intertwined Imaginative expeditions into America’s cultural history by justin kaplan B O O K S or years, side by side with a photograph of my best dog ever, I’ve kept on my o∞ce mantelpiece Mathew Brady’s portrait of the 11-year-old Henry James and his father. The boy wears a tight-fitting jacket with a line of brass buttons running up the front. His right hand rests on his father’s left shoulder in a delicate gesture of intimacy and trust. His eyes are fixed in the spectral stare that book, A Chance Meeting, subtitled Intertwined theF long exposure time of daguerreotype Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967. portunity. In February 1965, George Plimp- photography required of subjects with The author is Rachel Cohen, a Brook- ton takes Marianne Moore, wearing one their heads clamped in Brady’s vise. But I lyn resident and contributor to the New of her tricorne hats, to the fights at Madi- like to think that we can see even then Yorker, Threepenny Review, and other publi- son Square Garden. Afterwards they go the eyes of the great novelist who dedi- cations who teaches in the nonfiction to Toots Shor’s smoky saloon, where she cated himself to being (in his words) “one Master of Fine Arts program at Sarah sits at Norman Mailer’s table. Cohen en- of the people on whom nothing is lost.” Lawrence. The starting point for each closes such encounters within a largely Brady’s eloquent double portrait chapter in A Chance Meeting is an authentic invented narrative frame, a prelude and catches inner-ness on the fly, just as he episode in the lives of her writers and postlude, that sets the scene and finally was to do in his pic- artists. For example, at two o’clock one ties o≠ the story. Rachel Cohen ’94, tures of Abraham Lin- morning in October 1923, Charlie Chaplin She describes her method as “imagina- A Chance Meeting: coln and Ulysses Grant. pays a surprise visit to the poet Hart tive nonfiction” and explains that she Intertwined Lives of James used it at the Crane (“I was smiling into one of the “wanted to o≠er the reader the pleasure American Writers front of his autobiogra- most beautiful faces I ever expect to see,” of moving back and forth between what and Artists, 1854- phy, A Small Boy and Oth- Crane wrote) and they talk for hours. is known to us and what can only be 1967 (Random ers, and it is now the Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hur- imagined.” To signal a “change in regis- House, $25.95). lead picture in a thor- ston meet at a 1926 awards banquet for ter” between the “real material”—the in- oughly engaging new Harlem’s newest literary magazine, Op- eluctable, historical facts of time and Illustration by Istvan Orosz Harvard Magazine 17 Browser.final 6/17/04 5:12 PM Page 19 place—and the frames that she provides, she falls back, maybe a little too often, on candid warnings about the condi- tional, the guessed-at, and the imagined in her story: “perhaps,” “could have,” “may have thought,” and the like. And once in a while, her bid for an emphati- cally casual entrance to a highly charged central narrative may seem a bit arch. “John Cage was worried about Marcel Duchamp,” for example (Cage “realized that Duchamp was old”), and, “Norman Mailer was in just the right mood” (arm in arm with Robert Lowell, he was about to march on the Pentagon). But such flickerings of control can be easily over- looked in an excursion into cultural his- tory that is richly informed and consis- tently entertaining. Henry James and Mathew Brady may be called the presiding, truth- seeking spirits of her stories. Willa Cather, John Cage, Elizabeth Bishop, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Katherine Anne Porter, the artists Joseph Cornell and Bradford Delaney, the pho- tographers Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Richard Avedon: these are among the braided or paired figures read- ers will meet up with in the course of Cohen’s 36 chapters of chance but mean- ingful encounters. Henry James and Mathew Brady make frequent and significant appearances throughout and may be called the presiding, truth-seek- ing spirits of her stories. Had she chosen to do so, she could undoubtedly have de- veloped illuminating “chance meetings” in the lives of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, or Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, and I would be eager to read whatever she does. In any case, I was relieved to see that she gave the Ernest Hemingway/ Scott Fitzgerald dyad a pass, it having been already ploughed down to bedrock. Many of the writers and artists in A Chance Meeting have been fairly well docu- Harvard Magazine 19 Browser.final 6/16/04 5:41 PM Page 20 OPEN BOOK mented in biographies and memoirs, and Cohen is scrupulous in giving her sources. (In the service of full disclosure, I What Do Your Feelings Have to Do with Literature? here gratefully acknowledge her generos- ity in acknowledging my own work.) She “How strange it is…that we are so often locked out of ourselves,” writes Arnold writes beautifully, with clarity, firmness, Weinstein, Ph.D. ’68, in A Scream Goes through the House: What Literature Teaches Us about and steady command of her materials, Life (Random House, $29.95). “We have electronic access to the globe, we can go on the and she places her characters in dramatic, most exotic trips, yet we are often exiled to our own surface. The encounter with art of- often emotionally charged encounters fers…a rare form of self-encounter; it enables a voyage into our own depths.” The Sa- with one another. Henry James’s phrase lomon Distinguished Professor of comparative literature at Brown writes here of Sopho- for such encounters is “discriminated oc- cles, Shakespeare, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Proust, O’Neill, Burroughs, DeLillo, Tony casions.” Kushner, Toni Morrison, and our selves. Once, at the start of a literature course he was In one familiar but now freshly retold teaching, Weinstein asked his students a question that puzzled them. episode, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells meet in the o∞ces of the Atlantic ow many of you are hurt- Monthly in 1869. As Cohen develops ing?” I asked my students. I her story, this encounter is the be- could have asked, “How many ginning of a friendship, at first for- of you are delighted?” and mal and slightly edgy but eventu- they would have been equally ally both personal and editorial, Hsurprised. Feeling—personal pain and that ends four decades later with personal pleasure—may well be the Howells paying tribute to his old central currency of our lives, but we do friend, dead and lying in his co∞n, not expect to find such items in a col- as “sole, incomparable, the Lincoln lege curriculum. The curriculum, the of our literature.” In a later chapter materials of an education: theirs, mine, Cohen shows Professor William yours. Why is feeling absent from the James and an undergraduate psy- list? My answer is: knowledge, as it is chology student, Gertrude Stein, packaged in universities, as it seems walking together in Harvard Yard, packaged in books, is thought to be an with James, presumably, initiating a≠air of reason, consisting of concepts the conversation. “When asked to to be mastered and facts to be learned. describe his vision of heaven,” From kindergarten to university, there Cohen writes, William James “once seems to be a disconnect between edu- said he imagined it would look a cation and the whole person—body, great deal like Harvard Yard.” mind, feeling. Fifty pages on we meet Gertrude Yet, we are somatic creatures, living Stein again, this time with Alice B. in bodies, having emotions, bathed by Toklas in the near-rioting Paris au- sensations, at times bubbling and sim- dience that in 1913 greeted Stravin- mering, at times dawdling and eddying, sky’s ballet The Rite of Spring. “People hot and cold, nervous and calm, fearful nerves and visceral tra∞c that is hard to screamed and whistled, ladies slapped and yearning, hungry and satiated. We measure. Art reflects this realm; art men’s faces, canes crashed down on top are pulsions. Life is feeling. Our lives are takes this measure. Novels and poems hats, men exchanged cards for fights later a≠ective from the get-go: from infancy and plays are not just “stories.” They are, in dark streets, and people leaned out of to death, from getting out of bed in the to borrow Dostoevsky’s title, notes from balconies and cheered their approval. It morning to getting back in it at night underground, or, to put it another way, re- was an unmitigated success and failure.” (not to mention the time spent in it, in ports from the front: our underground, our Stein and Toklas are joined in their box between). We all know this, yet the front. Literature illuminates who “we” by novelist, photographer, champion of knowledge we acquire in school, and are are: the repertory of selves we harbor negritude, dance critic, swell dresser, and taught is in books, seems not to take within, the countless feelings we expe- bon vivant Carl Van Vechten, a man who into account these home truths. rience but never express or perhaps “barked to show enthusiasm, claimed to Sometimes I think that the brave pic- even acknowledge, the innumerable be the first person in New York to wear a ture we have of humans as rational be- other lives we could but do not live, all wristwatch in public, and had been ings is utterly misleading, a kind of pho- those “inside” lives that are not on show, known to bite people whom he liked and tograph of our surface composure, and not included in our résumés.