The poet, painter and mystic AE (George Russell) always held that we should never deliberately set out to meet a famous man or woman, writes Anthony Glavin.
As AE saw it, any souls whom we are truly destined to encounter will at some point inevitably cross our paths.
There are exceptions of course, such as the circumstances that prompted H.M. Stanley to track down David Livingstone in Africa - not least the fact that Stanley's trip was paid for by the New York Herald. However, there seems to be a good deal of common sense in AE's stricture, and had I known of his views more than 40 years ago, I might have spared myself an awkward, albeit memorable, moment in my own pursuit of a veritable demigod.
I was all of 12 years old at the time, a sunny autumn Saturday when, with autograph book in hand, I approached Mickey Mantle, the legendary centerfielder of the New York Yankees, as he crossed the lobby of the Statler Hilton Hotel in Boston on his way to the team bus. Acknowledging my polite request, Mantle, one of the greatest sluggers in baseball history, was on the verge of signing his name, when my best pal Danny Brennan, mistaking the besuited outfielder for a mere mortal businessman, loudly advised me: "Forget him, Tony, he's no ball player!" Misconstruing a case of mistaken identity' for a studied insult, Mantle gave Danny a brusque shove, flipped my autograph book back at me, and strode briskly out of sight.
Obviously, as AE would have had it, Mickey Mantle and I had never really been destined to meet.
Around that same time, a son of Henry Morgenthau Jnr, who had served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, came to live up the street from Danny and me in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some time after, Eleanor Roosevelt herself came to take tea with the Morgenthaus in their garden. As it happens, the house next door belonged to a Harvard history professor, a lifelong, ardent Democrat, and himself a member of President John F. Kennedy's kitchen cabinet. Espying the former First Lady in the adjoining garden, the professor's wife - unable to contain herself and obviously unaware of AE's thoughts on such matters - clambered over the fence and introduced herself to Mrs Roosevelt. Needless to say, most of the street talked of little else for days after.
A few years later, I was working as a bar-boy at the novelist Norman Mailer's 25th Harvard College reunion. By this stage I had outgrown my autograph book, and so kept my distance - though had the celebrated writer come up and asked for a bourbon and soda, I might have informed him how The Naked and the Dead was the only book my otherwise permissive mother had ever deemed too raw for my tender years. Lord knows how Mailer might have responded, but as regards war novels and impressionable youth, James Jones's From Here to Eternity, with its graphic grapplings of the naked and the live, made far more of an impression on this excitable boy.
I might blame another novel, namely The Ginger Man, for my approaching the dead spit of its author, J.P. Donleavy, in Montreal Airport 30 years ago, and inquiring if he was in fact the writer? Had I known then of AE's advice on seeking out the illustrious, I might have spared both myself and the dead spit, who in any event denied being Donleavy, even though I later spotted him, tweeds and all, several rows behind me on the plane to Dublin.
It is not so clear, however, if AE's wisdom applies when the autograph seeker is him or herself of some renown. At least that seems to be the moral of a story told by the American essayist Logan Piersall Smith, whose elder sister once encountered the English novelist Edmund Gosse as a fellow passenger on the small ferry between Baltimore, Maryland, and Camden, New Jersey.
Gosse, it seems, was on his way to a hoped-for meeting with Walt Whitman, who happened to be a family friend of the Piersall Smiths.
There was no answer at the poet's house, but Logan Piersall Smith's sister, convinced that Whitman was at home, suggested that she boost Gosse up through a window. The English writer was predictably astonished at such American practicality, whatever about presumption, but having come all that distance to meet Whitman, he consented.
It turned out Whitman was indeed within, and the visit itself proved a great success; but years after, when Logan Piersall Smith himself met Gosse at a dinner party, the English novelist hotly denied having ever entered Whitman's premises in such cat-burglar fashion.
Be that as it may, Whitman, by staying at home and minding his own business as AE suggests we do, was clearly destined to meet Edmund Gosse. But if that is true, I suppose Gosse - even if he did climb through the poet's window - was by default no less destined to meet Walt Whitman.