Literary History: In the legendary Ronseal advertisement a cheerful cockney chap pronounces: "Ronseal . . . It does exactly what it says on the tin." Lucky Rachel Cohen, when she promotes this book, will be able to make a similar pitch. A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists 1854-1967 is reviewed by Carlo Gébler.
"My book," she'll be able to say, "is exactly what the title says . . . it's about the chance meetings of American artists between the Civil War and the Vietnam War." In an age when titles are increasingly inflated and misleading, one is thankful for such specificity. And the work, I can happily report, is as notable as its title for its accuracy.
Opening the contents page I was confronted with a long list of chapters. Each consists of the names of well-known artists. The first brackets Henry James, the great novelist, and Mathew Brady, the photographer. Brady was the society portraitist who also photographed Civil War battlefields with the Union and Confederate dead artfully arranged.
The chapter describes the boy Henry with his father, going to have their photograph taken by Brady in his studio. Cohen has assembled the description, like all the chapters in her book, from her reading. Although she allows herself the odd speculation as to what Henry and his father might have thought, and tactfully signposts that these are her input, by and large she sticks to the agreed facts. If Henry and his father were alive today I believe they would recognise themselves and their experience in the account Cohen provides. Similarly, all the other figures in the book would recognise themselves in their chapters. This book is free of fancy and bristles with certainty.
Chapter two juxtaposes the early encounters of a young William Dean Howells, before he became a novelist and celebrated literary editor, and Annie Adams Fields, wife of the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, with Howells's later encounters with Walt Whitman, when both were famous. This reads like a complex short story - it stretches from the 1850s to the 1890s - and tells a melancholy but ultimately reassuring tale about how Howells matured from callow literary wannabe to socially committed literary editor.
In chapter three, we loop back 40 years to 1864 for the encounter of Ulysses S. Grant, supreme general of the Union Army, with Mathew Brady, who photographed the commander outside his bivouac at City Point, Virginia. Like a good short story writer Cohen provides only the minimum of back-story required to understand the characters. However, because we've met Brady before, and because we've acquired a sense of the Civil War's horrors through the description in chapter two of Whitman's work in the Union field hospitals (he used to visit dying boys and wash their bodies), this chapter has a powerful effect.
As Cohen describes Brady photographing Grant, we know the context. Grant was fighting a terrible war. He was struggling to contain the Confederates who were trying to punch north. And he was sustaining horrendous casualties. Yet nothing of this was in the photograph Brady produced and that is printed with the text. Grant needed to present a calm face (especially as he was hoping to stand for president), and Brady had no doubt it was his duty to provide such an image. Spin has always been with us.
Suddenly, as I read this chapter, I sensed that this was not going to be just a set of well-written pieces grounded in detailed research, though such a book would have been perfectly acceptable. I sensed that this was going to be something much greater and more unusual. It was going to be a book of conjunctions and shifting perspective,with image laid over image, that would amount to a unique picture of the US in all her glory as well as her misery.
In the 32 chapters that followed, this intuition was triumphantly confirmed, with Cohen describing encounters between artists as varied as Charles Chaplin and Willa Cather, Hart Crane and Katherine Anne Porter, John Cage and Richard Avedon. By the time I closed the book, after a description of Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell marching on the Pentagon to protest against the American military presence in south-east Asia, I felt fulfilled and rewarded. I had been given a magnificent and highly original picture of the US, as seen through her artists. In an age when anti-American sentiment is in the ascendant, it was salutary to be reminded that the US's artists have a magnificent tradition of dissent against their government. Besides this polemical achievement, it was also a delight to read accounts as well told as these. Finally, this work had the great virtue of making me want to read or re-read the works of the writers described. It is the surest sign of quality in a book that it inspires the reader to go on to other books.
Carlo Gébler's novel, August '44, was recently shortlisted for the 2004 Bisto Book of the Year Awards. His account of the siege of Derry is published later this year. He is writer-in-residence in HMP Maghaberry
A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists 1854-1967/. By Rachel Cohen, Jonathan Cape, 363pp. £18.99