Cohen, Rachel

views updated

COHEN, Rachel

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Harvard University, A.B.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Offıce—Sarah Lawrence College, 1 Mead Way, Bronxville, NY 10708.

CAREER: Writer. Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, nonfiction instructor in M.F.A. program.

AWARDS, HONORS: PEN/Jerard Fund Award, 2003, for manuscript of A Chance Meeting; fellow, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Institute for the Humanities, and MacDowell Colony.

WRITINGS:

A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of AmericanWriters and Artists, 1854-1967, Random House (New York, NY), 2004.

Also author of essays in numerous magazines, including the New Yorker, Threepenny Review, McSweeney's, Double Take, Parnassus, and Modern Painters. Work has also appeared in the anthologies 2003 Best American Essays and 2003 Pushcart Prize.

SIDELIGHTS: In A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967, Rachel Cohen recounts coincidental meetings between thirty writers and artists (primarily photographers). Although not all of the meetings resulted in lasting friendships or collaborations, Cohen uses the encounters to discuss American art and literature through a collection of thirty-six interrelated essays from the Civil War to the civil rights movement. In the process she provides vignettes of such American literary luminaries as Henry James, Mark Twain, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Willa Cather. Cohen chose which artists to include or exclude from the book by limiting the scope of her work to American-born artists who lived in cities and were deemed highly social in terms of visiting and talking with other artists. Primarily, however, as Cohen noted in her book, "Finally, and fundamentally, I wrote about people whose company I felt I had an instinct for."

In addition to the text, Cohen includes thirty portraits in the book, including one from the initial "chance" encounter that opens her work. When Henry James was eleven years old, his father took him to the studio of the photographer Mathew Brady for a portrait. Brady eventually became a celebrated U.S. Civil War photographer who took famous photos of President Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general and future president. James later wrote about the encounter but mostly remembered his father's excitement about getting a photo of the two of them together to present to his wife. Other encounters in the book are filled with more literary meaning and pathos, such as Hart Crane's brief friendship with Katherine Anne Porter in Mexico. Porter eventually broke off their relationship when she learned of Crane's debauchery, and Crane committed suicide while taking a boat back to the United States. Cohen also recounts Willa Cather's first meeting with the older Mark Twain at a cocktail party and the ensuing friendship that developed between the two, with Cather visiting Twain often as he rested in bed during his last years. A more recent encounter described by Cohen focuses on James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, who met at a Paris party and also developed a long friendship.

"I have to confess I do not know what to make of this remarkable book," wrote Raymond Carr in the Spectator. Carr noted that throughout the book Cohen uses her imagination to ponder what might have been in other circumstances, such as if Porter had met Cather. He also commented, "the narrative details of Cohen's vignettes lead into spasms of perceptive literary criticism." Noting that some critics found the book so engrossing that they could not put it down, Carr reflected, "Perhaps dazzled by the erudition displayed in her sometimes baroque prose, I simply could not take it all in. I did sometimes put it down." Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, called the essays "vividly anecdotal and gracefully linked," while Christopher Benfey commented that the book is "cunningly crafted and meticulously written" in a review for the New Republic. A Publishers Weekly contributor found Cohen's use of "imagined conversations" to be a drawback and commented that the author's propensity to focus more on the "gregarious and extroverted" has "the effect of skewing the big picture of American letters into a continuous cocktail party." But a reviewer writing in Kirkus Reviews was fascinated by the encounters, however, even those that were "mere, if sometimes elegant moments." The reviewer added, "These moments add up to a fresh if sidelong look at American letters, and to a work that culturally minded readers will greatly enjoy."