‘A Chance Meeting: American Encounters’
By Rachel Cohen
NYRB Classics, 416 Pages

This new paperback edition of profoundly imagined stories about encounters between American notables such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Norman Mailer and Marianne Moore, Henry James and Matthew Brady, as well as figures like W.E.B. Dubois and Willa Cather who circumnavigate Rachel Cohen’s cultural universe, can best be described as a work of wonder.

Ms. Cohen seems to have read nearly all the biographies of her subjects. Her Notes section is a narrative of her enthusiastic embrace of biographies that she calls “brilliant,” “fine,” and others she is “glad of” having read. I have never encountered in the notes of any biographical study such a generous and informative survey of what modern American biography has contributed to an understanding of American cultural life.

As you read these American encounters, you may muse about what is made up, and that is where the fun begins. You can either wait until completing the book and read the explanatory notes, as I did, or track chapter by chapter what is invented and what is on record. Either way, what is usually annoying about biographers who strain to say what “must have been,” becomes, in Ms. Cohen’s book, the modus operandi. In other words, “A Chance Meeting” is all about how knowing so much makes us want to know so much more.

Here is a sampling of Ms. Cohen’s method: William Makepeace Thackeray, on a visit to America, lifts his eyebrows in amazement at all the buttons on the jacket the boy Henry James is wearing and tells him that in England James would be addressed as “Buttons.” Then James is quoted: “My sense of the jacket became from that hour a heavy one.” Could there be a neater way of signaling James’s early interest in England and why it had to become the subject matter of an American suddenly imbued with a sense of history?

Or how about this stunner about Twain and Grant: “At that time, Grant was the man against whom every other man in America measured himself. Sitting in a room with Grant it was hard not to imagine being Lee.” Or this about Gertrude Stein: “The girls at what was soon to become Radcliffe College were mostly not from California and were mostly not Jewish and were mostly not of solid dimension. When they posed for pictures they looked willowy, corseted, and Christian. Gertrude Stein had a bit of the Buddha about her; the photographs she was in seemed to settle down and hold still around her.”

The urge to quote from Ms. Cohen is very difficult to restrain. Richard Avedon takes a picture of himself in a photo booth with half of James Baldwin’s pictured face plastered to one half of Avedon’s: “Baldwin, looking at the image, might have thought of W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness. … He might have been a little uneasy about whatever it was that Avedon needed from half his Black face. Avedon worried about that, too. The photographer had also become more skeptical of how close a Black American and a white one could be.”

The passage above and the accompanying photograph appear after reading that the two men went to school together. Their friendship exemplifies the coincidence and collision of sensibilities that are the gravamen of “A Chance Meeting.”

From whence does Miss Cohen’s compendium of encounters originate? Look to the Notes on the Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell meeting: “The main source for this chapter is Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which influenced this whole project.” 

It is part of the current cant to make apologies for reading Norman Mailer, but like Joan Didion, Ms. Cohen will have none of that kind of tsk tsk school of criticism. No major American writer has done more to develop an understanding of memoir and biography than Mailer, though Ms. Cohen is not in the business of making such large claims for him. She just gets on with continuing his work of showing how modern sensibilities and events come together in unexpected and yet, in her narrative, inevitable ways.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography,” “Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic,” and “Amy Lowell Among Her Contemporaries,” which is similar in method to “A Chance Meeting.”