NOTES

1. HENRY JAMES AND MATHEW BRADY

Mathew Brady did not leave nearly as much documentation of his own life as he did of other people’s. For his work and the details on daguerreotypes and New York commerce, I relied on Mary Panzer and the other essayists in the catalog for Panzer’s beautiful Smithsonian exhibition, Mathew Brady and the Image of History.

Nearly all the details regarding the James family, with the exception of the invented moment of eating ice cream at the conclusion, are to be found in A Small Boy & Others, the first volume of Henry James’s autobiography. They did come in on the ferry and go down to the studio unexpectedly, and James was wearing a coat that, after his conversation with Thackeray, he felt had too many buttons on it. The James family lived on Fourteenth Street and frequented those stores on Broadway, and they were always talking of going to England. The quotations from James are from this account.

I am particularly grateful to Leon Edel’s foundational biography of Henry James, and for this chapter the initial volume, The Untried Years: 1843–1870. My understanding of Henry James, Sr., and of the whole James family, grew out of F. O. Matthiessen’s The James Family: A Group Biography, Linda Simon’s Genuine Reality: A Life of William James, Jean Strouse’s Alice James, and Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. I worked with both the first volume of Edel’s edition of Henry James’s letters and with the fine Henry James: A Life in Letters, edited by Philip Horne. Finally, much of my thinking about photography began with Susan Sontag’s On Photography.

2. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS AND WALT WHITMAN

The texture and atmosphere of this essay come very directly from William Dean Howells himself and the engaging description of “My First Visit to New England” in his memoir Literary Friends and Acquaintance. All of Howells’s observations about his trip are quoted from this account. Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and his poems from this period were also part of my thinking. Nearly every detail of these scenes, down to the blueberry cake, is a matter of record. Annie Adams Fields sent money to Walt Whitman on at least one occasion; whether she contributed to the fund for the poet’s buggy is a matter of speculation.

My sense of William Dean Howells—his diffidence, his ambition, his feelings about Boston, and his relationship to Whitman—is very much influenced by the portrait of him in Kenneth Lynn’s William Dean Howells: An American Life. Howells’s relationship to Annie Adams Fields, and hers to him, came across to me in reading Rita Gollin’s Annie Adams Fields. Justin Kaplan’s biography, Walt Whitman: A Life, is a wonderful source on Whitman and also gave me a sense of how important Lincoln was to the poet.

3. MATHEW BRADY AND ULYSSES S. GRANT

The look of Grant’s tent and its lack of a map are well documented. The scene in which the photograph is taken is my own. My greatest debt in this chapter is to William S. McFeely’s Grant: A Biography. Much of my understanding of Grant’s character, in particular his desire to be president, comes fairly directly from McFeely’s portrait. Information about the Civil War was largely gleaned from James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Additional information is in Shelby Foote’s The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862–July 1863 and in Grant’s finely wrought Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. The details of Brady’s darkroom wagon enterprise are mostly to be found in Mathew Brady and the Image of History, edited by Mary Panzer, and in Roy Meredith’s Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man, which accepted a few too many of Brady’s own claims but has an interest of its own.

4. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND HENRY JAMES

I am not sure if William Dean Howells and Henry James walked as far as Fresh Pond on the night they had their talk of talks, nor am I sure that they came back to dinner that night, though they often did, and Henry James never ate anything. My sense of the way the Howellses talked to each other comes from the domestic conversations in Howells’s fiction, particularly A Chance Acquaintance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes. Elinor Mead Howells was observant and noticed what situations other people were in—such as young Harry’s straining to get away—but whether she said so in that moment is strictly my own guess. The atmosphere of this piece also draws on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, on Howells’s Italian Journeys, and on Henry James’s Roderick Hudson and Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi.

Kenneth Lynn’s biography of Howells introduced me to the idea that Howells had originated the American girl characters developed by both Howells and James. I am glad to repeat my gratitude to Lynn and to Leon Edel, whose books led me gently through the complexities of the long relationship between Howells and James. I was not, at the time I wrote this chapter, aware of Michael Anesko’s book-length study of the Howells and James relationship, though I wish I had been. My feeling for their sisters came in part from Henry Adams’s description of his own and also from Alice James’s diary and Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James.

5. WALT WHITMAN AND MATHEW BRADY

The entire opening sequence is my invention, based on Walt Whitman’s clothes in the Brady photograph. There is no Mrs. Jennings, though Whitman’s neighbors were fond of him. Whitman was in love with Peter Doyle and Doyle’s route was the length of Pennsylvania Avenue, but I do not know how Whitman got to Brady’s studio that day. The descriptions of how Brady and Whitman felt about each other’s work, except the quotations, also contain a fair amount of my own guesswork, based mostly on reading Whitman’s prose and noting the occasional mention of photographs in his poetry. All the details of the physical interaction between Brady and Whitman—the arranging of Whitman on the sofa, Brady running his hands through his hair until it stands up—are my own way of describing the effect Whitman had on people.

I was deeply influenced by Randall Jarrell’s essay “Some Lines from Whitman,” which so beautifully brings across the immediacy of reading Whitman. My physical sense of Whitman came largely from Justin Kaplan; Kaplan quotes the man who slept next to Whitman and thought the poet looked “good enough to eat.” The long quote from Whitman on his sense of photography and history is in Mary Panzer’s Mathew Brady and the Image of History catalog. I learned a great deal about Walt Whitman’s presence and a great deal about attending to historical figures from Peter Parnell’s play Romance Language.

6. MARK TWAIN AND WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

Mark Twain did go to the offices of the Atlantic Monthly to express his gratitude, and James Fields did call William Dean Howells in from another room. The other incidents are documented as I have reported them here. The wonderful Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872–1910, edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, is the core of my understanding of the relationship between Twain and Howells. Most of the quotes here are taken from the letters, but Howells’s descriptions of Twain are in his memoir My Mark Twain. The domesticity of both men is partly to be found in Howells’s fiction and Twain’s The Autobiography of Mark Twain and in certain stories that have been collected in Twain’s Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches. In addition, my sense of the characters of the two men was heavily influenced by one of the biographies that gave form to this endeavor, Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, as well as by Kenneth Lynn’s William Dean Howells: An American Life. Smith, Gibson, Kaplan, and Lynn all give valuable accounts of the way Howells helped Twain to write the Mississippi sketches and the way Twain helped to liberate Howells from the constraints of his Boston life.

7. MARK TWAIN AND ULYSSES S. GRANT

A thousand men at the Haverley Theater in Chicago really did sing “When we were marching through Georgia”; Twain was the last speaker at the Palmer House banquet and he did toast “The Babies.” Twain’s version of the story is both in his autobiography and in the letter to Howells quoted here. All quoted letters are in Mark Twain-Howells Letters, edited by Smith and Gibson. Some sense of Grant’s cast of mind in the years covered by this chapter can be found in his Personal Memoirs.

My understanding of the tenor of the relationship between Grant and Twain is most indebted to Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, which is where I first learned of the piece Twain originally called “My Campaign Against Grant.” William S. McFeely takes up Kaplan’s analysis of the damage done by the banquet in his own Grant: A Biography, another important source. I was also grateful to have had the chance to read John Guare’s imagining of this relationship in his play A Few Stout Individuals.

8. W. E. B. DU BOIS AND WILLIAM JAMES

William James and his admiring student W. E. B. Du Bois did go to visit Helen Keller together. The carriage ride and conversation are largely extrapolations from reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, Darkwater, and The Souls of Black Folk, and from the tiny suggestive paragraph Du Bois wrote on Helen Keller that was collected by Herbert Aptheker in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Non-Periodical Literature Edited by Others.

David Levering Lewis’s two-volume W. E. B. Du Bois is one of the great achievements in biography and was also a major source of information about American history, providing me with details of race and class relations that I have used throughout. I am also indebted to the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who has illuminated Du Bois’s work. Linda Simon’s Genuine Reality: A Life of William James held important details about the life of William James. I would have liked to report more from Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life. I found helpful Louis Menand’s essay “William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient,” published in The New York Review of Books. Menand’s The Metaphysical Club was a close companion of my thinking for two years while I was working to get hold of the influence and personality of William James.

9. GERTRUDE STEIN AND WILLIAM JAMES

Gertrude Stein did experiments of the kind described here, usually as part of her close working relationship with Leon Solomons, another student in the department. During their junior year Stein and Solomons were both under the supervision of William James. James did charge around and request the company of his students at unlikely times. This particular day, the interruption, and the walk are my own invention.

I tried to stay close in spirit to William James’s Psychology: Briefer Course and his Talks to Teachers on Psychology. Most of the quotes from Stein are in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. As many scholars have noted, Stein explains a good deal about herself in early work such as Fernhurst, Q.E.D., Three Lives, and some of The Making of Americans. I also drew on Alice B. Toklas’s What Is Remembered.

I am happy to have the chance to acknowledge Brenda Wineapple’s brilliant Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, which gave me virtually my entire sense of the sibling relationship between Gertrude and Leo Stein. The works of Leon Edel and F. O. Matthiessen both offered nuanced portraits of the relationship between the James brothers. Linda Simon’s Genuine Reality was particularly helpful in allowing me to grasp James’s relationships with his women students. And, again, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club was invaluable.

10. HENRY JAMES AND ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS AND SARAH ORNE JEWETT

It is my guess that Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett would have made a particular point of visiting their old friend Henry James after his sister Alice died. Fields’s edition of Jewett’s letters and Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, A Country Doctor, The Tory Lover, and The Queen’s Twin were the source for some of the atmosphere of this chapter. Many of the details of the visit are recorded in Annie Adams Fields’s diary, details put to good use in the fourth volume of Leon Edel’s life of Henry James, The Treacherous Years: 1895–1901, and also in Paula Blanchard’s lovely Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work. My sense of Rye at this time draws on Nicholas Delbanco’s Group Portrait. Certain details and, I hope, something of the tone of Henry James’s life in Rye came across to me in conversation with Ben Sonnenberg. I also used Philip Horne’s Henry James: A Life in Letters.

11. EDWARD STEICHEN AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ

This opening sequence is as Steichen and Stieglitz used to tell it. With regard to the closing scene, I do not know for sure that Steichen saw the O’Keeffe photographs at the home of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, but that seemed the most likely, as the gallery was then closed and Steichen was going over to their house regularly. I think Stieglitz would have expected Steichen to come to him to look at new pictures. Stieglitz did use to tell the story that Steichen, when faced with the O’Keeffe images, began to cry.

Richard Whelan is very lucid on Stieglitz, and I learned from his writing a great deal about Stieglitz’s sexuality, affairs, and the convolutions of the relationships with Paul and Beck Strand and with O’Keeffe. Many of the other details come from Penelope Niven’s Steichen: A Biography.

12. WILLA CATHER AND MARK TWAIN

Willa Cather did come into New York for Mark Twain’s seventieth-birthday party in November of 1905, but I don’t know what she wore, whether or not she stayed with Edith Lewis, or if it was the occasion for her realization that Twain had “a style all his own.”

My primary debt here is to Eudora Welty’s essay on Twain and Cather, which helpfully defines one of their similarities: “They stand together in bigness—their sense of it, their authority over it.” In Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, Sharon O’Brien broke new ground with her unhesitating elucidation of the links between Cather’s childhood and her grown-up sense of herself in the world and literature. James Woodress’s Willa Cather: A Literary Life has the record of Cather’s presence at the banquet and of her later visits to Mark Twain. The details of the party itself—the palms, the orchestra, the foot-high statues of Mark Twain—are to be found in Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.

13. WILLA CATHER AND ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS AND SARAH ORNE JEWETT

The essays of Willa Cather collected in Not Under Forty, in particular her pieces “A Chance Meeting,” “148 Charles Street,” and “Miss Jewett,” have remained important to me and are at the heart of my understanding of what Cather was like in a room with an older literary woman. It was Edith Lewis’s memoir, Willa Cather Living, that first drew my attention to the crucial letter from Jewett to Cather. The rest of the letters by Jewett, as edited by Annie Adams Fields, were important to the tone of this chapter. Henry James’s The American Scene and his letters from this period provided further dimensions.

Cather’s book on Mary Baker Eddy—she is now listed as co-author with Georgine Milmine—is of interest for seeing how Cather incorporated certain traits belonging to Eddy into her character Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy. Significant additional sources are Paula Blanchard’s Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work and Leon Edel’s Henry James: The Master (1901–1916).

14. EDWARD STEICHEN AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ AND GERTRUDE STEIN

It is my own conjecture that Stieglitz felt a little abashed in the presence of the Steins. That Steichen was worried by Leo Stein’s comments is a matter of record, as is Stieglitz’s unsympathetic reply. Some of the quotes and quite a bit of the atmosphere come from Alice B. Toklas’s What Is Remembered. Again, I am indebted to Brenda Wineapple, in whose Sister Brother, along with many other discoveries, I found the pleasing detail that all the Steins had been reading Willa Cather’s pieces on Mary Baker Eddy in McClure’s Magazine. Aspects of this meeting are reported in the biographies of all those present—I found the account in Richard Whelan’s Alfred Stieglitz particularly helpful, though I also referred to Penelope Niven’s Steichen: A Biography. Herbert Seligmann’s Alfred Stieglitz Talking is an aid in getting a sense of Stieglitz’s conversational style. The exhibition catalog for Four Americans in Paris, a 1970 Museum of Modern Art show featuring works owned by Gertrude and Leo and Michael and Sarah Stein, was also of interest.

15. CARL VAN VECHTEN AND GERTRUDE STEIN

My own speculations are here complicated by the fabrications of Stein and Van Vechten, but I hope it is clear to the reader that Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas found each other, in a box, at the second night’s performance of The Rite of Spring, having become acquainted some days earlier. The most detailed account of this meeting is in Edward Burns’s note following his edition of The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946. Van Vechten’s executor Bruce Kellner explained to me that Van Vechten had told him that the meeting in the box was a coincidence. I am extremely grateful for this and many other delightful pieces of information that Bruce Kellner graciously shared with me.

Many of the quotes in this chapter are from Ulla E. Dydo’s A Stein Reader or from Bruce Kellner’s Letters of Carl Van Vechten. I am also glad of details I found in Stravinsky in the Theatre, edited by Minna Lederman, and The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten, edited by Paul Padgette. My sense of Van Vechten’s sexuality comes from Kellner’s biography Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades and particularly from Van Vechten’s own under-recognized novel The Tattooed Countess. Stein’s lectures are collected in Lectures in America. I have been helped by the work of Janet Malcolm, particularly in her essay “Gertrude Stein’s War,” published in The New Yorker. Finally, I am moved, every time I read them, by Van Vechten’s introductions to Three Lives, to Last Operas and Plays, and to the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein.

16. MARCEL DUCHAMP AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ

This opening scene is often written about—accounts appear in a number of places. I do not know for sure how much wine they had. The committee did reject the urinal, it did go to Stieglitz’s, and he did photograph it in front of the Hartley painting. The quotes are mostly out of Duchamp’s letters, collected in a bilingual edition under the title Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp and edited by Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk.

Calvin Tomkins’s biography Duchamp: A Biography was of critical importance to me when it came out in 1996. I also worked with Octavio Paz’s book Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare and learned a great deal from Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996. Other details are in Richard Whelan’s Alfred Stieglitz.

17. WILLA CATHER AND EDWARD STEICHEN AND KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

As Cather and Porter did not meet, the reader will have understood that the scene at the end of this essay is imagined. Cather’s walk to the studio is likewise an invention, and the mood of Katherine Anne Porter in writing her essay is guesswork, though based closely on the alternating phases of possessiveness and rejection to be found in the Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Isabel Bayley. I do not know whether Porter had a copy of Cather’s photograph; it was widely circulated in publicity materials. The works of Willa Cather mentioned here—The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, Lucy Gayheart, Shadows on the Rock, and Death Comes for the Archbishop— were important to my thinking, as were the collected stories of both Cather and Porter and particularly Porter’s wonderful Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Finally, the pair of essays—Cather’s “A Chance Meeting” and Porter’s “Reflections on Willa Cather”—were formative.

Edith Lewis’s generous memoir of her longtime companion, Willa Cather, was a constant source. It is from Joan Givner’s fine study Katherine Anne Porter: A Life that I have my understanding of how much of her own life Katherine Anne Porter made up. I got the particulars of Steichen’s studio—and the way he would park his roadster next to the receptionist’s desk—from Penelope Niven’s biography; they were originally reported in a New Yorker profile written by Matthew Josephson, who was, after the time frame of this chapter, Katherine Anne Porter’s lover.

18. ALFRED STIEGLITZ AND HART CRANE

Stieglitz’s cloudscapes and the portraits mentioned were actually on the wall when Hart Crane first went to his gallery; the details of the exhibit are in Richard Whelan’s biography. Stieglitz was standing in the back room when Crane and Gorham Munson walked into the space. The verse of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” quoted at the end, particularly its last line, “Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer,” seems to me close to Stieglitz’s preoccupations and his conversational style.

My information comes primarily from the meticulous work of Clive Fisher in Hart Crane: A Life and Whelan in Alfred Stieglitz, both of whom quote the correspondence between the two men. I also referred to Paul Mariani’s The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane. The letters of Stieglitz and Crane were valuable resources—in the case of Crane, particularly the Letters of Hart Crane and His Family, edited by Thomas S. W. Lewis, and The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932, edited by Brom Weber. I also consulted Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923–1932, by Susan Jenkins Brown.

19. HART CRANE AND CHARLIE CHAPLIN

Hart Crane did read a lot of Elizabethan poetry, but his movements here are my own guesses. They did walk over to Paul Rosenfeld’s, where Waldo Frank was staying, and at the end of the night Chaplin did take Crane home in a cab. Chaplin watched everyone’s gestures, but I don’t know what he thought of Crane’s.

Most of the evidence for this piece resides in Crane’s letter to his mother, sent the day after his encounter with Chaplin, and in the poem “Chaplinesque.” In addition, I was helped by two biographies for each of these men—those of Paul Mariani and Clive Fisher for Hart Crane and those of David Robinson and Kenneth Lynn (also a biographer of William Dean Howells) for Charlie Chaplin. Robinson was particularly helpful on the subject of Chaplin’s London childhood and on the method Chaplin used for making his early comedies. I was pleased in Charlie Chaplin and His Times to come across Lynn’s sense of the long-lasting effect of Crane and Crane’s poetry on Chaplin; he makes a fairly definite assertion of the influence that I have also drawn on in Chapter 31.

20. LANGSTON HUGHES AND ZORA NEALE HURSTON LANGSTON

Hughes’s opening comment is in keeping with many things he said about Zora Neale Hurston, who really did stand on corners in Harlem, calipers in hand. The trip Hughes and Hurston made together is documented in biographies of each figure and in Hughes’s The Big Sea. Hurston’s collecting efforts are in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, and in her collection Mules and Men. The fact that Hughes and Hurston were important to each other is beyond question, but the subtleties of the feelings they had for each other have been a tangle to scholars who have devoted much more time to the question than I have.

I have benefited enormously from renewed academic interest in Zora Neale Hurston. Valerie Boyd’s new biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, Carla Kaplan’s recent and very thoughtful edition of Hurston’s letters, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, and the continued reissuing of Hurston’s lesser-known works are things to be grateful for. The foundations of this work were laid by Robert Hemenway, Alice Walker, and Carl Van Vechten himself.

My sense of the Harlem Renaissance was given dimension by Emily Bernard’s groundbreaking Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. Those letters were my source for many of the perspectives on the fight recorded here. Further details are to be found in Bruce Kellner’s edition of the Letters of Carl Van Vechten and in Arnold Rampersad’s two-volume masterwork The Life of Langston Hughes, particularly volume one: 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America. Rampersad’s work was my guide in much of what I have said here of Hughes. W. E. B. Du Bois’s feelings about the younger generation of artists coming up around him come from my reading of David Levering Lewis’s W. E. B. Du Bois. Bruce Kellner kindly relayed details from Van Vechten’s daybooks, such as the rumor that went around after the publication of Nigger Heaven that Van Vechten was no longer welcome at Small’s Paradise.

21. BEAUFORD DELANEY AND W. E. B. DU BOIS

Beauford Delaney’s walk through Washington Square is a route he often took, though the occasion itself is an invention. In 1941, a friend of Delaney’s actually witnessed almost precisely this interaction, of Du Bois raising his hat to Delaney in Washington Square Park, though Du Bois said, “Good afternoon, Delaney,” instead of “Evening, Delaney.” This is reported in David Leeming’s biography of Delaney, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney. I took the liberty of moving the scene back a decade. The interaction over the sketching session in the office is not well documented and I have added the details of atmosphere.

My sources here are, again, David Levering Lewis’s magisterial W. E. B. Du Bois and also David Leeming’s Amazing Grace, and the exhibition catalog of the recent show Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow, curated by Richard J. Powell at the High Museum of Art.

22. HART CRANE AND KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

This period in Mexico is minutely documented by a number of people: Paul Mariani and Clive Fisher in their biographies of Crane, and Joan Givner in her biography of Porter. Porter’s letters were central, as were her short stories set in Mexico. An essay by Malcolm Cowley, “Hart Crane: A Memoir,” in Cowley’s collection A Second Flowering, had a personal quality that gave me some sense of the attractive and disintegrating poet. The speculation here is mostly toward the end, in guessing what the two writers may have meant to each other. An eye-witness account is the source for the precise set of details included about the last moments in the life of Hart Crane.

23. ELIZABETH BISHOP AND MARIANNE MOORE

Elizabeth Bishop did take the train in from Vassar to meet Marianne Moore, she was often late, she did carry with her notes of questions, which have survived, and the two women really did meet outside the reading room of the New York Public Library on the bench to the right of the door. Many of the most telling details in this chapter come from Bishop’s own essay “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore” and her poem “An Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” Elizabeth Bishop’s collected letters, One Art, edited by Robert Giroux, were a deep influence on this book. The delightful letters of Marianne Moore, edited and carefully contextualized by Bonnie Costello, are quoted liberally here.

The late David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell contains, with great subtlety and thoroughness, the nuances of the intellectual relationship between Bishop and Moore. Brett Millier’s fine biography Elizabeth Bishop was important to my understanding of Bishop’s relationship to her absent mother, her difficulties with alcohol, and her reading. Bishop’s feeling for travel and her homesickness are also thoughtfully addressed in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. The detail of Moore’s two watches is in the first of two essays that George Plimpton wrote about the poet. I also referred to Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, edited by George Monteiro, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, compiled by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, and Charles Molesworth’s biography Marianne Moore: A Literary Life.

24. ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND CARL VAN VECHTEN

Admiring Carl Van Vechten’s commitment to the personal quality of breakfast, explained in “A Note on Breakfasts” in Sacred and Profane Memories, I set this chapter then, though I don’t know what time of day Hurston came to be photographed. The scene at the end, of Van Vechten opening his mail after his second cup of coffee, is based on his description of his own slow waking in the morning. Though he did receive a letter from Hurston, I’m not sure what time it actually arrived. My main speculations here are in the arena of how the two people felt about each other. Hurston did think that it was a shame Van Vechten had given up writing—she says so in her letters—and she did think he was “God’s image of a friend.” Van Vechten did think that Hurston had “a talent, possibly genius” for collecting, but it is only my guess that he understood that Hurston’s lack of resources was an artistic problem for her. Van Vechten was, though, unusually clear about how helpful it is to a struggling artist to have money, and he was unusually generous with his own funds.

Two important resources on Zora Neale Hurston are the recent biography by Valerie Boyd and Hurston’s collected letters, edited by Carla Kaplan. It was from Kaplan’s fine introductory comments that I learned some specific details, such as the fact that Hurston always employed a typist if possible, and it is from the letters themselves that I have gained a sense of Hurston’s own intellectual tradition. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I was also glad of Emily Bernard’s edition of the letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, and of Bruce Kellner’s edition of Van Vechten’s letters.

25. JOSEPH CORNELL AND MARCEL DUCHAMP

One of the pleasures of studying Joseph Cornell is Mary Ann Caws’s edition of his notebooks and letters, Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files. All the opening guesses about how certain days felt to Joseph Cornell are based on Theater of the Mind and my experience of his work. Something of the feeling of being in a room with both Cornell and Duchamp comes from conversations I had the good fortune to have with the curator Walter Hopps, whose own work to rescue the archive of Cornell papers now at the Smithsonian Institution was of the greatest importance to Cornell scholars.

Hopps’s essay on the friendship between the two men, “Gimme Strength: Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp Remembered,” appeared in the catalog for the show mounted at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Joseph Cornell/ Marcel Duchamp. . . in resonance. The show and catalog did a great deal for my understanding of the way Cornell and Duchamp played off each other in their lives and in their work. I used Deborah Solomon’s welcome biography, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, and Calvin Tomkins’s Duchamp: A Biography was helpful here, too. The story of Brancusi battling with the customs officer is reported, among other places, in Penelope Niven’s Steichen: A Biography.

26. BEAUFORD DELANEY AND JAMES BALDWIN

James Baldwin did go to see Beauford Delaney in his Greene Street studio, and he did write that Delaney X-rayed him with a look before letting him in. I do not know whether Delaney was listening to Bessie Smith on the Victrola at that moment, but Baldwin and Delaney did listen to Bessie Smith together fairly often. Delaney knew Alice B. Toklas in Paris, and she told him the story of the intruder, which he used to repeat to his friends. Other details are taken from Baldwin’s many wonderful autobiographical essays, particularly in Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and No Name in the Street, and from the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Baldwin’s childhood, time in Paris, and relationship to Richard Wright are considered in David Leeming’s James Baldwin: A Biography. My knowledge of Baldwin’s dealings with Langston Hughes comes from Arnold Rampersad’s The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 2, 1941–1967, I Dream a World. I also relied on David Leeming’s Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney. The catalog of the recent show Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow was helpful here, too. I also consulted James Branch Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin.

27. JOSEPH CORNELL AND MARIANNE MOORE

Much of this chapter comes right out of the correspondence of the two principals as I found it in Marianne Moore: Selected Letters, edited by Bonnie Costello, and Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws. I also relied on Marianne Moore’s poems and prose as collected in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore and in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, edited by Patricia C. Willis. There are guesses where there are no quotation marks, particularly in my attempt to imagine the relationship of Carlotta Grisi, Marianne Moore, and Coney Island for Joseph Cornell. Deborah Solomon’s Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell has in it Cornell’s relations to his family, the stories of his various romances, and the details, corroborated in conversation by Morton Janklow, of Cornell’s proclivity for giving gifts and then taking them back. Additional sources were Charles Simic’s Dime Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell and Charles Molesworth’s biography Marianne Moore: A Literary Life.

28. JAMES BALDWIN AND NORMAN MAILER

This opening scene draws on Baldwin’s description in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” though I have guessed about Baldwin’s indecision before going to this particular party and his reservations about his host. The closing scene and Mailer’s final comment did transpire at Hugh Hefner’s mansion. I was grateful to Norman Mailer for talking with me about his sense of the relationship and I was glad of Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself and his piece “Ten Thousand Words a Minute.”

James Branch Campbell’s Talking at the Gates has a useful interview with Mailer, and I referred constantly to David Leeming’s James Baldwin: A Biography. Norman Mailer’s biographer Mary Dearborn makes a number of contributions to understanding his relationship with Baldwin. For the sense of the undercurrent in that relationship, I found it extremely helpful to read Adele Mailer’s The Last Party: Scenes from My Life with Norman Mailer. Some of my information about the Liston-Patterson fight and about Mailer’s and Baldwin’s pieces on it comes from David Remnick’s book on Muhammad Ali, King of the World. Some aspects of Mailer’s early essays were elucidated for me by Louis Menand’s essay on Mailer, “Beat the Devil,” published in The New York Review of Books.

29. ROBERT LOWELL AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

There are a variety of opinions about whether or not Robert Lowell actually asked Elizabeth Bishop to marry him; I have tried to stay close to the published record. On the questions of appropriation and forgiveness, I have cited actual textual appropriations, and I have made my best guess about forgiveness based on her letters. The poems from Bishop’s Complete Poems, 1927– 1979, her “In the Village” as it appears in her Collected Prose, and Lowell’s Life Studies, For the Union Dead, History, The Dolphin, and Imitations are all central sources, as are Bishop’s letters in One Art. Saskia Hamilton, whose edition of the letters of Robert Lowell is forthcoming, kindly helped me to clarify complexities of chronology and nuances of the relationship.

The most important secondary source for this chapter is David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet. I’m also grateful to Ian Hamilton, whose fine biography of Robert Lowell was a frequent guide, and to Brett Millier, whose life of Bishop was very helpful. I referred to Rampersad’s Langston Hughes for Hughes’s participation in clearing the name of the Yaddo director whom Lowell persecuted. For Elizabeth Bishop’s stay at Yaddo, I read Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, edited by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, and was delighted to discover information about Beauford Delaney and Katherine Anne Porter in the recollections of Pauline Hanson and Ilse Barker. At the end of my project, I had the pleasure of consulting Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s new edition of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems. I read with attention Randall Jarrell’s essay on Lowell’s early work, “From the Kingdom of Necessity.”

30. JOHN CAGE AND RICHARD AVEDON

Richard Avedon graciously spoke with me about all the scenes in which he appears. He does not himself remember the order in which images were made during the session. Rauschenberg’s lithographic stone did break on at least one occasion. Avedon went and still goes regularly to performances, but whether he had recently seen a Cunningham performance I don’t know.

The atmosphere of this piece was defined in part by Calvin Tomkins’s exuberant Off the Wall, which centers on Rauschenberg. I used Avedon’s books The Sixties, written with Doon Arbus; An Autobiography; Evidence, 1944–1994; and the catalog to his recent show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Richard Avedon Portraits, with an essay by Maria Morris Hambourg. I was greatly helped by the essays in these books by Adam Gopnik and Truman Capote and the interview-essay by Jane Livingston from February of 1993. Gopnik reported the story of Avedon’s intuition for the faces of the Roman emperors. John Cage’s own writing, particularly in the musical piece Indeterminacy and in the books Silence and A Year from Monday, was one of the best sources. I turned to David Revill’s biography, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life for the sense of Cage’s early entrepreneurial spirit.

31. W. E. B. DU BOIS AND CHARLIE CHAPLIN

That W. E. B. Du Bois loved the movies is documented by David Levering Lewis. That Du Bois met Chaplin in Switzerland is mentioned glancingly in the foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to one edition of The Souls of Black Folk and in the chronology in the Library of America edition of Du Bois’s writings. The Du Boises’ viewing of A King in New York and their visit to the Chaplins in Vevey are based on little information but adhere to the descriptions of the gestures and behaviors of the two men given by their acquaintances and, later, by their biographers. Chaplin’s My Autobiography contributed to my sense of the man and his preoccupations, as did both Limelight and A King in New York. [Addendum, 2024: Long after this book’s first publication, I learned that A King in New York was effectively banned from U.S. movie theaters until 1972, so Du Bois could not have seen that film until he was himself able to leave the country.]

My debt to David Levering Lewis continues in this chapter, which again relies heavily on his work for both biographical and historical information. My picture of the Chaplins’ life in Switzerland draws on the work of both Kenneth Lynn and David Robinson. Lynn quotes Marlon Brando on Chaplin’s sadism and tells the story of the stuffed cat’s appearance on the set of Monsieur Verdoux, and believes that Hart Crane’s kitten was still on Chaplin’s mind.

32. LANGSTON HUGHES AND CARL VAN VECHTEN AND RICHARD AVEDON

Langston Hughes often mentioned doctors, but I don’t know what Hughes did on the day before going to Avedon’s. Hughes was sorting through letters in this period. Richard Avedon kindly confirmed that he did invite Hughes in part because of his interest in the civil rights movement in 1963. Avedon did not have much sense of Van Vechten.

For Langston Hughes’s retrospective sense of his life, I was helped by his autobiographical volumes The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander. Arnold Rampersad was the central source for this chapter—most of the biographical information here is to be found in his work, though Du Bois’s reaction to Hughes’s testimony is recorded by David Levering Lewis in the second volume of his Du Bois biography. I was also glad, again, of Emily Bernard’s Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, and I referred to Bruce Kellner’s Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades and to Kellner’s edition of Van Vechten’s letters.

33. RICHARD AVEDON AND JAMES BALDWIN

Richard Avedon’s flight and arrival at the hotel and the drinks in the evening are my own guesses; Baldwin did take a vacation in Puerto Rico. The description of Avedon rushing home to work with the photos of the divided face is also my invention. For many of the rest of the details, I am grateful to Richard Avedon, who spent some time telling me of his relationship with Baldwin. The reminiscences in that interview (the story of Avedon’s mother hitting the doorman, the incident of the two shearling coats in the “down” bar, the photomat image) are quoted here, as is the book Baldwin and Avedon worked on together, Nothing Personal. I would also like to express my admiration for Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, central to my thinking about Baldwin at this time.

Again I depended on David Leeming for information on Baldwin, and on Avedon’s books The Sixties; An Autobiography; Evidence, 1944–1994; and the catalog to Avedon’s 2002 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Richard Avedon Portraits. I drew on the essays by Adam Gopnik and Truman Capote and the interview-essay by Jane Livingston from February of 1993.

34. MARIANNE MOORE AND NORMAN MAILER

Marianne Moore did go to the fights with George Plimpton and the details are quoted from her letter to her brother, John Warner Moore. Whether she had a little feeling of attraction for Mailer is my own speculation. Norman Mailer kindly spoke with me about this scene and it was on that occasion that he said, “one had never met anyone remotely like her.” Of the many comments Muhammad Ali is reported to have made with regard to service in Vietnam, the one that Mailer refers to is the one quoted here.

George Plimpton records some of the most fetching details in this chapter in his two essays on Marianne Moore, collected in The Best of Plimpton. Other quotes are from Moore’s liner notes to I Am the Greatest!, to be found in an appendix of The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, edited by Patricia C. Willis. Mailer’s many records of fights, including his essays on Cassius Clay, his book The Fight, and “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” were also helpful. I referred to the Mary Dearborn biography Mailer particularly for the details of Mailer’s changing political convictions in the moment of this chapter.

35. JOHN CAGE AND MARCEL DUCHAMP

I first learned that John Cage took chess lessons from Marcel Duchamp in Calvin Tomkins’s Duchamp: A Biography. The opening sequence is very much as Cage always told the story, including the fact that Cage was worried about Duchamp. Much of the sense of Cage’s relationship to Duchamp comes from Cage’s own work in Silence and other writings and from the David Revill biography. The late interview in which Duchamp compares himself to Gertrude Stein was with Pierre Cabanne, whose book Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp makes wonderful reading. Tomkins’s book on Rauschenberg, Off the Wall, also provided information. The final chess match is described in the most specific detail by Alice Goldfarb Marquis in her Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare: A Biography, which also gives the details of Teeny and Marcel Duchamp’s work as art dealers.

36. NORMAN MAILER AND ROBERT LOWELL

The main source for this chapter is Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which influenced this whole project. Robert Lowell did go home and write poems about the march and one of these was titled “Norman Mailer.” The only real speculation in this essay is in the final paragraph.

It was from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell that I learned that Lowell felt Mailer’s description of him was one of the best ever written. Mary Dearborn’s biography, Mailer, and other Mailer essays, including those in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, also helped me to situate Mailer’s thinking at this time.