A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen
(Random House) $25.95
In the First chapter of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists 1854-1967, an 11-year-old Henry James goes with his father to sit for a photograph by renowned early photographer Mathew Brady. As Rachel Cohen describes it, the sitting wasn’t planned, and as the exposure was made James “had a moment of excruciating self-consciousness” because he was embarrassed about what he was wearing: a coat that William Makepeace Thackeray, a family friend, had previously mocked because it was not in keeping with the English style of the period.
It’s an inconsequential, specific, fitting little story, and it demonstrates that, even as young as 11, Henry James was: 1. unduly obsessed with England; 2. unduly obsessed with matters of style; and, 3. excruciatingly self-conscious. (If you know anything about James, or if you’ve ever read any of his sentences, these are things you already know.) Strangely, it evokes, in a couple of quick strokes, a rich sense of James not as a writer but as a person–a person related to and distorted by people around him.
The dysfunctional and usually contentious relationship that writers have to other writers and artists is the subject of this book. The chapters involving James are not the most riveting–imagine that–but skip ahead to the one about Hart Crane and Katherine Anne Porter; or the one about the lustful James Baldwin and the object of his lust, Normal Mailer; or the one about the sweetly reserved Langston Hughes and the rambunctious Zora Neale Hurston, which begins: “Langston Hughes always said that Zora Neale Hurston was the only person he knew who could stand on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue with a large pair of calipers in her hand and persuade strangers passing by to stop so that she could measure their heads.”
