The secret history of American literature

Mark Twain, meet Ulysses S. Grant! Hart Crane, meet Charlie Chaplin! Rachel Cohen talks about the most intriguing encounters in U.S. history.

By Suzy Hansen

Jun 3, 2004 | Many of us are fascinated by the personal lives of our favorite artists and writers: their love lives, their bouts with depression, their troubled or (less often, it seems) sunny childhoods. Even the smaller details -- how they dressed or where they took long walks -- seems, to us readers, to say something about their genius. In many ways, we're trying to understand how these singular minds happened to produce important works of art, in between the menial tasks of everyday life. And there's something especially magical about who they spent time with, especially when it's other artists: the crusty glamour of writers and painters sharing drinks at the local bar, exchanging ideas and phone numbers, tumbling into bed together at night. What did they talk about, this painter, that poet? What did that conversation mean to them?

So it makes sense that author Rachel Cohen, in her book "A Chance Meeting" -- in which she chronicles encounters and friendships between American artists from the Civil War to the civil rights era -- makes the risky decision to imagine, here and there, what her subjects were thinking or how their relationships might have affected them. Although Cohen read more than 400 books for her project and most of "A Chance Meeting" is well documented, each chapter also includes a fictionalized paragraph or two. Sometimes Cohen suggests the impact another artist had on one's work; in other cases, she hints at romance or deep personal disappointment. Her writing is comfortably intimate and heartfelt, her respect and passion for each of her subjects almost quiet and assuring in its ease.

She writes not as a fan or critic, but almost as a kind of peer. Reading the book, one feels as though Cohen has managed to land a place in the carriage between W.E.B. DuBois and William James, or snagged a corner in Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, where she sipped a cocktail and eavesdropped on Hart Crane or Edward Steichen. When she writes about Katherine Anne Porter lying out in the Mexican sun, you almost believe Cohen had the spot right next to her.

Salon spoke to Cohen from her home in Brooklyn about Mark Twain's relationship with Ulysses S. Grant, James Baldwin's lifelong friendship with Richard Avedon (they worked on their high school literary magazine together), and how Norman Mailer reacted when she called.

You wrote this book over the course of 10 years. Where did the idea come from?

I was driving around the country and I was trying to figure something out about America and American writers and about myself as a writer, and I wasn't having very much luck. It was a lot harder than I thought; I had a kind of 20-year-old optimism about "Travels With Charley," not realizing that Steinbeck was not 20 when he wrote that book. I was reading a lot and I was trying to make up for various lacks in my education, which everybody feels when they graduate from college. I went to a lot of monuments around the U.S. -- I went to Vicksburg [Miss.] and a lot of other Civil War battlefields. I went to civil rights monuments and Willa Cather's house.

When I was at Vicksburg, I bought Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs and was literally standing in the gift shop and paging through and saw that they'd been published by Mark Twain. I was so surprised. It was such a shock -- I don't know why -- that those two enormous figures, who were so mythic, were friends and had this complex, competitive, generous relationship. It was incredibly engaging for me. It actually took me about three years to write a piece about their relationship.

Next Page: Mark Twain's disastrous three weeks as a Confederate soldier

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