A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967
by Rachel Cohen
388pp, Cape, £18.99
私人史料
偶遇. 副标题: 美国作家与艺术家的多维私交 作者: [美] 瑞切尔·科恩 译者: 高伟 出版社: 新星出版社 出版年: 2009-6 页数: 402 . 書本製作不良
從某種意義上來說，《偶遇:美國作家與藝術家的多維私交》又似系列評傳，從亨利？詹姆斯到羅伯特？洛厄爾，以偶遇為線，把一個個孤立的人物和一件件孤立的事件串成了富於生機的鮮活整體。作者觀察這些作者如何對待愛情、孤獨、宗教、自然界、歷史、閱讀以及他們的家庭，尤其是他們如何看待友誼。這部時間跨度長達百年的“私人歷史”為我們編織出19-20世紀西方文藝界的錯綜複雜的立體的社交關係，並以這個獨特的角度展示了一幅氣勢恢弘的逝去不久的黃金時代。
The secret spring of this strange, beautiful and unclassifiable book is revealed in what seems no more than a mild aside buried in the closing pages. Describing an interview Marcel Duchamp gave to Pierre Cabanne towards the end of the old artificer's life, long after he had settled in New York, Rachel Cohen notes that Duchamp, although insisting with approval that America cared nothing for tradition and was therefore "a perfect terrain for new developments", nevertheless admitted that his own work had an American lineage, and compared himself to Gertrude Stein, with whom he had shared important conversations in Paris 50 years before. According to Cohen, however, Cabanne missed the significance of what Duchamp was telling him because he "had made the common mistake of believing that because each American chooses his or her own influences, America lacks tradition".
A Chance Meeting - the title is taken from an essay by Sarah Orne Jewett 此句錯誤 作者自序中說明 - is a sly yet ringing affirmation of the existence of an autonomous American cultural tradition, especially in literature and related arts. Many Europeans, and, indeed, not a few Americans, unthinkingly consider that the culture of the United States is a continuation of, or at best a reaction against, the culture of Europe. America, however, is not a highly coloured and violent imitation of the Old World, but is a wholly new thing (one thinks of Beckett's brisk reply when asked if he was an Englishman: " Au contraire "). The many artists woven into Cohen's intricate tapestry are quintessential Americans, even when they are English, as in the case of Charlie Chaplin, or French, in the case of Duchamp.
Cohen, a teacher and arts journalist, tells us in her introduction that the book originated in a solitary year she spent driving around the United States - alone, but not unaccompanied, for she had with her two crates of books by American authors from Mark Twain and Henry James to James Baldwin and Elizabeth Bishop. She was reading these books, she says, "as I had not before, to know their authors"; and as she became acquainted with the writers - how they do speak, the books, when one is on one's own - she realised that many of them had known each other, either fleetingly, or over many decades. Twain had published Ulysses S Grant's Personal Memoirs , Willa Cather had spent delightful afternoons by the fireside in the house shared by Annie Adams Field and Sarah Orne Jewett, Robert Lowell had almost married Bishop, and Baldwin and Norman Mailer had shared ringside seats at a boxing match and never spoke to each other afterwards.
The 30 people Cohen gathers into her splendid gallimaufry met, she says, in ordinary ways, seeking each other out because of a mutual admiration, being introduced by friends, chancing on each other in the offices of magazines, or because they "just happened to be standing near the drinks". Usually the significance of the encounters was out of all proportion to their duration or their seeming importance at the time they occurred. Twain made a fortune for Grant's widow out of Personal Memoirs ; Lowell incorporated Bishop and Mailer, as he did so many other "real" people, directly into his poetry; Mailer, listening to the manic-depressive Lowell sonorously addressing an anti-war gathering, had a moment of existential self-doubt. "Mailer felt that when he pulled a stunt it was an amusing antic but that people saw in Lowell all the pathos of a great artist struggling against his illness." Chaplin incorporated a reference in one of his talkies to Hart Crane's poem "Chaplinesque"; and on, and on. As Crane laconically observed when Chaplin suggested to him that poetry is a love letter to the world: "A very small world."
Cohen's surprise at discovering how many of these artists knew each other is itself perhaps a mark of her own Americanness. The small world in which her subjects moved is vast compared with ours - vast, disparate and inspiringly incoherent. What is truly startling, at least in her account of these momentous meetings, is how much they sprang from or led to mutual admiration, support, even love. "Later it felt to them, as it often does, entirely by chance that they had met and yet impossible that they could have missed each other."
The atmosphere of the book is one of what one can only call sweetness, despite the sometimes awful behaviour Cohen is forced to report - Mailer writing that Baldwin's work is "sprayed with perfume"; Crane being vile to Katherine Anne Porter and Porter being just as vile back; Chaplin having a cat that scratched him on set killed and stuffed and used as a prop. If the community of writers is, as Michael Longley has said, not so much a back-slapping as a back-stabbing society, one would be hard put to guess it from the evidence of A Chance Meeting .
In her chapter on Walt Whitman meeting and posing for the photographer Mathew Brady, Cohen produces an apt quotation. Whitman wrote: "We had many a talk together; the point was, how much better it would often be, rather than having a lot of contradictory records by witnesses or historians - say of Caesar, Socrates, Epictetus, others - if we could have three or four or half a dozen portraits - very accurate - of the men: that would be history - the best history - a history from which there could be no appeal."
This, or something very like it, would seem to be Cohen's view also. An immense amount of research - that is, reading - went into the making of this book. The portraits, or sketches, which she offers are subtle, intimate and persuasive. The canvas, too, is admirably accommodating: while the eminent ones such as Twain, Chaplin and Lowell are present, there is also a host of less well-known figures. It is fine, for instance, to make the acquaintance at last of Carl van Vechten, critic, author, photographer and much else besides, who for many of us will have been no more than a name but whose many vivid appearances here - he knew everyone - show him to have been not only an enthusiastic promoter of all that was new and daring in modernism, but also the kind of loyal, warm and playful friend that anyone would want to have.
A Chance Meeting is valuable too in the attention it gives to black artists such as the novelist and poet Langston Hughes, the ineffably sad painter Beauford Delaney and the fiction writer and blues collector Zora Neale Hurston (whose work is enjoying something of a renaissance, at least in America), who nursed a hopeless love for the sexually ambiguous Hughes, and who dubbed their Harlem literary circle "the Niggerati". Cohen is refreshingly democratic in her attitude to these and other artists who had to spend their working lives battling into the unrelenting gale of racism and misogyny. She writes with particular tenderness of the long, sometimes tetchy but always loving friendship between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who were as generous to and caring of each other as Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather had been before them.
A Chance Meeting is not only a significant study of a century of American culture, but also a fascinating entertainment, filled with obscure facts - drawing was the only class Grant did well in at West Point - and shrewd insights ("In his worst moments, other people existed for Chaplin as collections of gestures that he could absorb").
It is also wormholed throughout with unexpected cross-references - we learn in the opening pages that Grant was the first American general to have his officers synchronise their watches, a fact echoed hundreds of pages later when we are told that John Cage compelled performers of his work to do the same thing. Cohen brings a poet's, or even a novelist's, imagination to her recreations of these chance meetings, and in many instances admits that her "facts" are free inventions of her own. Risky, perhaps, but the risk pays off, marvellously.
· John Banville's Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City is published by Bloomsbury.
by Rachel Cohen
388pp, Cape, £18.99
私人史料
偶遇. 副标题: 美国作家与艺术家的多维私交 作者: [美] 瑞切尔·科恩 译者: 高伟 出版社: 新星出版社 出版年: 2009-6 页数: 402 . 書本製作不良
從某種意義上來說，《偶遇:美國作家與藝術家的多維私交》又似系列評傳，從亨利？詹姆斯到羅伯特？洛厄爾，以偶遇為線，把一個個孤立的人物和一件件孤立的事件串成了富於生機的鮮活整體。作者觀察這些作者如何對待愛情、孤獨、宗教、自然界、歷史、閱讀以及他們的家庭，尤其是他們如何看待友誼。這部時間跨度長達百年的“私人歷史”為我們編織出19-20世紀西方文藝界的錯綜複雜的立體的社交關係，並以這個獨特的角度展示了一幅氣勢恢弘的逝去不久的黃金時代。
The secret spring of this strange, beautiful and unclassifiable book is revealed in what seems no more than a mild aside buried in the closing pages. Describing an interview Marcel Duchamp gave to Pierre Cabanne towards the end of the old artificer's life, long after he had settled in New York, Rachel Cohen notes that Duchamp, although insisting with approval that America cared nothing for tradition and was therefore "a perfect terrain for new developments", nevertheless admitted that his own work had an American lineage, and compared himself to Gertrude Stein, with whom he had shared important conversations in Paris 50 years before. According to Cohen, however, Cabanne missed the significance of what Duchamp was telling him because he "had made the common mistake of believing that because each American chooses his or her own influences, America lacks tradition".
A Chance Meeting - the title is taken from an essay by Sarah Orne Jewett 此句錯誤 作者自序中說明 - is a sly yet ringing affirmation of the existence of an autonomous American cultural tradition, especially in literature and related arts. Many Europeans, and, indeed, not a few Americans, unthinkingly consider that the culture of the United States is a continuation of, or at best a reaction against, the culture of Europe. America, however, is not a highly coloured and violent imitation of the Old World, but is a wholly new thing (one thinks of Beckett's brisk reply when asked if he was an Englishman: " Au contraire "). The many artists woven into Cohen's intricate tapestry are quintessential Americans, even when they are English, as in the case of Charlie Chaplin, or French, in the case of Duchamp.
Cohen, a teacher and arts journalist, tells us in her introduction that the book originated in a solitary year she spent driving around the United States - alone, but not unaccompanied, for she had with her two crates of books by American authors from Mark Twain and Henry James to James Baldwin and Elizabeth Bishop. She was reading these books, she says, "as I had not before, to know their authors"; and as she became acquainted with the writers - how they do speak, the books, when one is on one's own - she realised that many of them had known each other, either fleetingly, or over many decades. Twain had published Ulysses S Grant's Personal Memoirs , Willa Cather had spent delightful afternoons by the fireside in the house shared by Annie Adams Field and Sarah Orne Jewett, Robert Lowell had almost married Bishop, and Baldwin and Norman Mailer had shared ringside seats at a boxing match and never spoke to each other afterwards.
The 30 people Cohen gathers into her splendid gallimaufry met, she says, in ordinary ways, seeking each other out because of a mutual admiration, being introduced by friends, chancing on each other in the offices of magazines, or because they "just happened to be standing near the drinks". Usually the significance of the encounters was out of all proportion to their duration or their seeming importance at the time they occurred. Twain made a fortune for Grant's widow out of Personal Memoirs ; Lowell incorporated Bishop and Mailer, as he did so many other "real" people, directly into his poetry; Mailer, listening to the manic-depressive Lowell sonorously addressing an anti-war gathering, had a moment of existential self-doubt. "Mailer felt that when he pulled a stunt it was an amusing antic but that people saw in Lowell all the pathos of a great artist struggling against his illness." Chaplin incorporated a reference in one of his talkies to Hart Crane's poem "Chaplinesque"; and on, and on. As Crane laconically observed when Chaplin suggested to him that poetry is a love letter to the world: "A very small world."
Cohen's surprise at discovering how many of these artists knew each other is itself perhaps a mark of her own Americanness. The small world in which her subjects moved is vast compared with ours - vast, disparate and inspiringly incoherent. What is truly startling, at least in her account of these momentous meetings, is how much they sprang from or led to mutual admiration, support, even love. "Later it felt to them, as it often does, entirely by chance that they had met and yet impossible that they could have missed each other."
The atmosphere of the book is one of what one can only call sweetness, despite the sometimes awful behaviour Cohen is forced to report - Mailer writing that Baldwin's work is "sprayed with perfume"; Crane being vile to Katherine Anne Porter and Porter being just as vile back; Chaplin having a cat that scratched him on set killed and stuffed and used as a prop. If the community of writers is, as Michael Longley has said, not so much a back-slapping as a back-stabbing society, one would be hard put to guess it from the evidence of A Chance Meeting .
In her chapter on Walt Whitman meeting and posing for the photographer Mathew Brady, Cohen produces an apt quotation. Whitman wrote: "We had many a talk together; the point was, how much better it would often be, rather than having a lot of contradictory records by witnesses or historians - say of Caesar, Socrates, Epictetus, others - if we could have three or four or half a dozen portraits - very accurate - of the men: that would be history - the best history - a history from which there could be no appeal."
This, or something very like it, would seem to be Cohen's view also. An immense amount of research - that is, reading - went into the making of this book. The portraits, or sketches, which she offers are subtle, intimate and persuasive. The canvas, too, is admirably accommodating: while the eminent ones such as Twain, Chaplin and Lowell are present, there is also a host of less well-known figures. It is fine, for instance, to make the acquaintance at last of Carl van Vechten, critic, author, photographer and much else besides, who for many of us will have been no more than a name but whose many vivid appearances here - he knew everyone - show him to have been not only an enthusiastic promoter of all that was new and daring in modernism, but also the kind of loyal, warm and playful friend that anyone would want to have.
A Chance Meeting is valuable too in the attention it gives to black artists such as the novelist and poet Langston Hughes, the ineffably sad painter Beauford Delaney and the fiction writer and blues collector Zora Neale Hurston (whose work is enjoying something of a renaissance, at least in America), who nursed a hopeless love for the sexually ambiguous Hughes, and who dubbed their Harlem literary circle "the Niggerati". Cohen is refreshingly democratic in her attitude to these and other artists who had to spend their working lives battling into the unrelenting gale of racism and misogyny. She writes with particular tenderness of the long, sometimes tetchy but always loving friendship between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who were as generous to and caring of each other as Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather had been before them.
A Chance Meeting is not only a significant study of a century of American culture, but also a fascinating entertainment, filled with obscure facts - drawing was the only class Grant did well in at West Point - and shrewd insights ("In his worst moments, other people existed for Chaplin as collections of gestures that he could absorb").
It is also wormholed throughout with unexpected cross-references - we learn in the opening pages that Grant was the first American general to have his officers synchronise their watches, a fact echoed hundreds of pages later when we are told that John Cage compelled performers of his work to do the same thing. Cohen brings a poet's, or even a novelist's, imagination to her recreations of these chance meetings, and in many instances admits that her "facts" are free inventions of her own. Risky, perhaps, but the risk pays off, marvellously.
· John Banville's Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City is published by Bloomsbury.
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