A BRILLIANT BUT hard-to-describe book. The original subtitle of 2004 does a better job of suggesting the book's project than that of the 2024 NYRB reprint I read: "Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967." We have something like a group biography (Leon Edel's Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men), but not exactly, because we are talking about a much longer stretch of time (over a century) and the figures do not constitute a movement or a group.
What we get are thirty-six chapters, each what Cohen calls a "double portrait," each presenting an occasion when one well known American writer (or photographer, or composer, or painter) met another: "intertwined lives," as the original subtitle had it. We have chapters, for example, on Gertrude Stein and William James (she studied with him at Harvard), on Mark Twain and Willa Cather (she got to go to his 70th birthday party, which was quite a big bash), on Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore (two deeply idiosyncratic artists who got along famously). Some meeting were fortuitous and never repeated (Matthew Brady photographed the eleven-year-old Henry James and his father), some became collaborations (Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes) or lasting friendships (Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore), some went badly, badly wrong (Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane).
The book does not have a thesis, exactly. It does not seem to be making an argument. But you nonetheless seem to be watching a kind of tapestry being woven, or a kind of fantastically ornate braiding, the cultural life of a country coming into being as the practitioners of one art or another cross paths, acknowledge each other, strike sparks, and return to their paths. Something, the reader feels, is being intangibly communicated among all of them and passed on from one generation to the next, mysteriously making things cohere.
Not everyone who might be here is here--no Dickinson, no Fitzgerald, no Hemingway--and the figures chosen are mainly people who mostly lived and worked close to New York City. Somehow, the field we are looking out upon still feels broad, even representative.
The time Cohen invested in this book must have been immense, but all her research is carried lightly, and the prose is as swift as a running brook. A Chance Meeting is one of a kind and a delight.
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