THE THIRTY people gathered here met in ordinary ways: A careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend’s casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. They saw each other first in a photography studio, or a magazine office, and they talked for a few hours or for forty years. 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.
Some of their encounters left a memorable impression, though they never spoke again; on other occasions strong and altering loyalties emerged, permanent conditions of influence were established, and acts of rebellion were set in motion. Writing of their own lives, they very often identified the crucial shifts as having happened in the moment of going through a new door or in the grasp of an unfamiliar hand.
A suggestion of what passed between them was sometimes recorded in a single photograph and other times in the long history of a friendship. As they knew each other better, they wrote encouraging letters, edited each other’s novels, went swimming, fought bitterly, dedicated poems to one another, and played chess.
They came and went over the course of a century—the fruitful, difficult period that held two related struggles, the Civil War and the civil rights movement. Once in a while they met behind the lines or on the field of protest, but war and politics were also in their minds when they sat together in someone’s library or in a taxi.
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Many of these people began keeping me company ten years ago, during a solitary year I spent driving around the United States. I had in my trunk two crates of books, by Henry James, Mark Twain, and Ulysses Grant, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. I was reading books, as I had not before, to know their authors. I watched these writers responding to love, solitude, religion, the natural world, history, reading, and their families, but I cared most to know how they felt about friendship.
I started to read collections of essays and letters and I realized that many of the writers in my trunk had known one another. Mark Twain had been the first to publish Ulysses Grant’s Personal Memoirs. Willa Cather had written beautifully about her debts to other writers in her memoirs of Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett and in the essay from which, after long thought, I borrowed the title, “A Chance Meeting.” It turned out that Katherine Anne Porter had practically thrown Hart Crane out of her house in Mexico; Elizabeth Bishop’s poem for Marianne Moore had hundreds of letters behind it; and James Baldwin had finally stopped speaking to Norman Mailer after a prizefight.
These all seemed to me incidents in what Mark Twain had helpfully called a “private history.” At first I thought of each encounter separately, but this didn’t account for the fact that Twain’s lifelong friend William Dean Howells was also very dear to Henry James; it is in the nature of private history that its pieces overlap. I began arranging the fragments I had found and I saw that, though there were discontinuities, the pattern itself came forward in time and would lay out over decades or centuries. I wondered whether it would be possible to create an experience of reading a longer private history, and what that experience might reveal.
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In the years that followed, new figures joined the original company and lines of influence emerged. Pursuing the effects of presence, I read all I could of what has been published—essays, autobiographies, letters, diaries, notebooks, novels, poems, the memoirs by other people, and biographies—and I studied the galleries of four portrait photographers: Mathew Brady, Edward Steichen, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Avedon.
As I worked, I came across details that stayed with me: Walt Whitman’s skin looked unusually rosy to the soldiers he visited in hospitals; W. E. B. Du Bois loved the movies; Gertrude Stein found her first plane ride thrilling; and Edward Steichen could take someone’s portrait in a few seconds. I read until these figures seemed to me to stand and walk around of their own accord, to have the kind of coherence I would hope to know in my friends. I tried not to shy away when they wrote vituperative letters and were sometimes racist and broke their wives’ noses.
Working to keep their interactions in historically appropriate language, I used “Black” rather than “African-American,” and generally referred to tribes and regions rather than writing “Native American.” I adhered to people’s actual attitudes and choices—readers will notice the fluctuating presence of women and the uneasy relations between races. Perhaps it does not need saying that I was often disappointed in the insularity of these social circles.
The writers and artists I’ve written about either were born in America or did important work here. They lived in cities, spent quite a lot of their time visiting and talking, wrote copious letters when they were away, and were, to their friends, never really lost from view. This was not the right setting for Emily Dickinson, Jean Toomer, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, or Flannery O’Connor. The people in this book were interested in social reality, but by and large they did not document it—a partial explanation for the absence of Henry Adams, Jane Addams, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright. And, if they were visual artists, they were portrait photographers or portraitists who worked in a single sitting, or they made assemblages—I did not choose as central figures John Singer Sargent, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, or Mark Rothko. Finally, and fundamentally, I wrote about people whose company I felt I had an instinct for. I often thought about the way Hart Crane had addressed Walt Whitman in The Bridge: “Not greatest, thou,—not first, nor last,—but near.”
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I wanted to offer the reader the pleasure of moving back and forth between what is known to us and what can only be imagined, and I also wanted to be very clear about the distinction. My guesses are at the beginnings and endings of the chapters; otherwise I have written “perhaps” or “could” to indicate the change in register. I have included endnotes in which I have delineated research from conjecture, and recorded the sources of certain ideas and elements of atmosphere; a large part of my reading is documented in the bibliography.
In writing this kind of imaginative nonfiction I have depended on the fine work of many scholars, writers, and editors who have preceded me and who are working right now. In the notes, bibliography, and acknowledgments I have tried to express my debts to them all, but it gives me pleasure to begin by saying that this book could not have existed without the new biographical worlds conceived by Leon Edel, David Kalstone, Justin Kaplan, David Levering Lewis, Kenneth Lynn, F. O. Matthiessen, Louis Menand, Arnold Rampersad, and Brenda Wineapple, and that I am thankful for the wonderful work of Emily Bernard, Paula Blanchard, Edward Burns, Mary Ann Caws, Bonnie Costello, Mary Dearborn, Nicholas Delbanco, Clive Fisher, Shelby Foote, Paul Fussell, William M. Gibson, Robert Giroux, Joan Givner, Ian Hamilton, Philip Horne, Carla Kaplan, Bruce Kellner, David Leeming, Janet Malcolm, William McFeely, James McPherson, Brett Millier, Mary Panzer, Linda Simon, Henry Nash Smith, Susan Sontag, Jean Strouse, Calvin Tomkins, and Richard Whelan.
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I have felt especially grateful for the way the writers and artists considered here chose, in the work they did and the images they left behind, to offer something of their presence. I have admired in all of them how they held to their open and generous sense of other people and how they remained aware of those who had come before or would come after them.
It has been, throughout, important to me that when James Baldwin was living in Paris and he wrote his essay on what it meant to him to be an American, he began by quoting Henry James. I think he did this because he knew James, whom he never met, so well. Sometimes it makes me a little melancholy that Baldwin and his James are gone from the world, but mostly I am glad he had his James as it helps me to have my own. I have grown a little more used to the idea that we all, as Willa Cather remembered Marcel Proust having written, take our great men and women with us when we go.
2004