Rachel Cohen Meets with Robert Birnbaum

 

 

A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen

 

Rachel Cohen grew up in an academic family in Ann Arbor, Mich., and went on to graduate from Harvard University. Ten years in the writing, parts of her new and first book, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (1854-1967), have appeared as [complete] essays in Double Take (which has ceased publication) and Omnivore (Lawrence Weschler’s forthcoming magazine project) as well as the Threepenny Review and McSweeney’s. Cohen has written for the New Yorker and other periodicals, and her essays have appeared in Best American Essays 2003 and 2003’s Pushcart Prize XXVII anthology. The manuscript for A Chance Meeting won the 2003 PEN/Jerard Award. Cohen teaches non-fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

The genesis of A Chance Meeting was a solo 19,000-mile automobile trip Cohen took in the early ‘90s—a voyage that did not produce a predictable intellectual travelogue. Instead, based on her reading from the library she kept in her trunk, ‘I ended up spending much more time with the people in my trunk than anyone else. That was when I started to think of these writers as people and they started to come alive. And this is what I made from that trip,’ she says. ‘Those are the things that I read and the way I figured out how to put all the material together.’

Cohen writes vignettes of 30 intertwined lives in 36 chapters, beginning with Henry James and Matthew Brady’s encounter in 1854 and running up to Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell’s in the late ‘60s. In between, we meet William Dean Howells, Annie Adams Fields, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, W.E.B. DuBois, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather and others. Marcus Warren wrote in the Telegraph, ‘The book is a virtuoso intellectual history of the mid-19th to mid-20th century, as chronicled by a series of meetings: Some of the encounters are casual, others the start of lifelong friendships, many the fruit of courtships from afar; a few, as Cohen writes in her introduction, were the result of her subjects both ‘standing near the drinks.’

Here’s my A conversation with author Rachel Cohen about her book of road trips and crossed paths, including many of America’s best writers.

 

All photos copyright © 2016 Robert Birnbaum

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Robert Birnbaum: There are so many directions we can go here, in large part because your book is so original.

Rachel Cohen: Oh, thank you.

RB: I felt liberated by it.

RC: As you should.

RB: How do you feel after having completed this book—now that it’s getting some attention and reviews and you are going out into the big wide world and talking about it?

RC: Well, today is a beautiful day and I feel good, [both laugh] but it varies a lot. Which I think is probably pretty normal, particularly with a first book. It’s all such a new experience. I spent 10 years working on this project. It was incredibly solitary. I was the only one doing it for most of that time. And [pause] it was a very, very personal project, which I think, is maybe slightly different than the experience of lots of non-fiction writers. It’s a little different than writing a book about politics or dinosaurs—

RB:—There are only a couple people who you write about who are still living.

RC: Yeah and I did talk to Norman Mailer and Richard Avedon but not until after I finished the manuscript. So it was a very internal kind of process. And so I have a little bit of the pain that a fiction writer experiences when a book is out in the world—a kind of imaginary world is no longer yours [alone].

RB: Are you prepared for this part of the writer’s work—going out and talking to people like me?

RC: I am getting more used to it. I like talking to people, so that part of it is a pleasure. It’s mostly a shift in conception—of ceasing to think of it as my interior project and starting to think of it as something that’s in the world.

 

 

Cover of Omnivore, published by Ren Weschler

RB: A piece of this book appeared in DoubleTake magazine. And it appeared in Ren Weschler’s prototype issue of Omnivore. Ten years ago, when you started out writing—was it always going to be a book?

RC: I wanted to write a book of essays. There were always going to be some of these essays, in that book. But I didn’t start out to write this book. I didn’t really know what I was doing when I started— it developed over time. And it was taken apart and put back together again. And it was sent out as proposal and rejected. It was changed. [both laugh] You know, it had a long career before it came to its current state.

RB: Might you qualify something about your description of the book as a 10-year interior project because along the way you had other voices chiming in?

RC: Feedback. Absolutely.

RB: Anybody give you good advice?

RC: Many people. One person from whom I got good advice was [Lawrence] Ren Wechsler,[1] who was really supportive of this idea and me, for a long time. One of the things about him that you can see in Omnivore is the openness and capaciousness of his taste and his interest.

RB: Hence the title of the magazine.

RC: Yeah, you definitely get that feeling about him. And that was helpful to me because it’s important when you are starting out not to feel too confined or too restricted to genres that you are already familiar with. Or ways of putting material together that you have seen other people do. That was quite helpful.

RB: It’s interesting that parts of this book would have been in two publications that had very different views of how to present narratives and information. But they both recognized the value of what you were doing. Shall we say that was a kind of paradox?

 

Photo
RC: It is a funny thing in how many different ways there are to approach what I have been doing. I sometimes have that thought—the other two places that published early versions of these pieces were the Threepenny Review and McSweeney’s, which are also not places that one would ordinarily put together. Although I think they overlap every once in a while. So, yeah, partly because of my interest in photography, I think that those are all periodicals that are interested in visual experience in different ways.

RB: McSweeney’s [the website], other than the cutesy line drawings, never uses photography.

RC: That’s true. But they are visually conceived objects. So I think Dave [Eggers] has a pretty strong visual sensibility and is attentive to visual things. That’s that a commonality with these periodicals. But that is basically a strange thing to be in all those places.

RB: I did scan some of the reviews of A Chance Meeting. And I was irritated by the one in Slate by Meghan O’Rourke [2], even though it was positive and complimentary. I felt as if she was trying to upstage your work. One of those reviews that had to say who wasn’t in the book or what the book wasn’t about—

RC: [laughs]

RB: Or a story that should have been in it.

RC: Although, I actually love that story she referred to, it’s one of my favorites.

RB: Sure, which is why her bringing it up is infuriating. [both laugh]

RC: I had considered putting it in. I guess I wasn’t infuriated by that one. I was pleased in general by the way she handled the book and I do think that one thing about the book is that is an occasion for everybody to say what they think about American culture and how it gets passed on. I am most pleased with the reviews that take seriously that that’s what I was doing. And so I am inclined to forgive anything once [laughs] that’s on the table.

RB: What do you think of the notion that it’s only really what is on the page or in the work that the person makes that has meaning and the rest of it is irrelevant?

RC: That kind of book-versus-the-biography question. Obviously, that’s not true for me. I care much more about the lives of the people and that’s what my own work has mostly been about. But I think that’s a perfectly reasonable way to approach literature. Some of my best friends read that way. And there is a way in which a book has a life of its own—that it is meant to exist independently of its writer. But for me I am always reading books thinking about who wrote them and why they wrote them and what it means to the person who wrote it to write it. So I am interested in the intersection.

RB: There is something about these competing views that I find peculiar. The people that feel it’s only about the work of art seem to me to be more zealous and authoritarian about asserting their correctness. Whereas people for whom biography—

RC: [laughs] Are kind of loose about it…

RB: Yeah. Which makes me wonder about the legitimacy of the zealot’s position.

RC: Right, right.

RB: It don’t think either of them are wrong—it’s a matter of taste

RC: Only one seeks to banish the other. There is also a variation among writers. Different writers or artists seem to ask to be treated in different ways. There are writers who really try to hold their private lives private, burn their papers, and hope for no celebrity in one way or another. And so I can see feeling defensive on behalf of these people. Like, ‘Don’t go prying into that life, that person didn’t want anyone prying into that life.’ Then there are other writers who put their lives forward in a huge and open way.

RB: In this era, other than a few well-known holdouts like Salinger and Pynchon and perhaps David Foster Wallace, it would seem that most writers are hungry for attention and it seems like securing that attention is a subsidiary pursuit—

RC: A professional kind of quality—

RB: In 100 years if somebody is doing a retrospective, will there be anything left to discover?

RC: Yeah, just an endless amount of material as long as emails can still be downloaded. It’s true that ideas of a public figure have changed over the last 100 years. And that the things that everybody talks about—the mass media and the quickness with which people are made into celebrities and the necessity of selling lot of copies of books and all of those things that are going on—certainly put pressure on people to be active public figures.

RB: That seems to remove a couple of layers of specialty and special pleading for writers. What I am trying to say is that there is something implicit about artists having a better grasp of the world as we know it, some elevated perspective and moral acuity—but in point of fact—how different are writers and artists?

RC: A lot of one’s perspective or sense of oneself as an outsider comes from childhood and adolescent experience and so that in a way is fixed before the later—

RB: Before the writerly affectations set in?

RC: [both laugh] Maybe one’s memory and style are developing at that time, too. But you are not on book tour when you are 11. There is maybe a way in which people can still lay claim to that ability to conceive of things from the margins. Part of what gets imposed by a lot of national media is a sense of homogeneity and that we are all in agreement and that everything is sort of monolithic and, in fact, it’s complete chaos. And should be.

RB: Had you considered not going on tour?

RC: I thought about it a little bit. But I was glad to go. I thought it would be interesting to get out and see what people were saying, and it is interesting for me to make that shift. The shift to having a book in public was going to happen regardless, so it didn’t seem to me to be—

RB: I may be collapsing the motivational distinctions. Book touring doesn’t mean the same for every author and every book.

RC: It’s a strange ritual—I am mostly reading at independent bookstores, which I really appreciate, and I like knowing where my book is. In a way, there is something straightforwardly—

RB: You mean actually physically knowing its location on the shelves?

RC: Yeah, to see it on the shelves. See the people and meet the people who are running the bookstore. See the people who go to that bookstore and talk to the people who run the radio programs. You get a feeling for the larger literary world. It’s sort of special to have access to that.

RB: Many people who are coming to readings haven’t read your book?

RC: I tend to think of it as an introduction. So I try to explain a little a bit about what I was thinking about, how I was working, and then I read some of it so they can get a feeling for the atmosphere that I am trying to create.

RB: What do you read?

RC: I read different things. It’s nice to read things that have to do with the place you are in.

RB: Will you be in Ohio?

RC: Michigan and Wisconsin, but not Ohio. When I was in Washington, D.C., I read about Walt Whitman and maybe here tonight I will read about Gertrude Stein and Harvard Yard.

RB: I read somewhere you drove around the United States. And drove an amazing amount of mileage—19,000 miles.

RC: It’s mentioned in the introduction but I don’t think the mileage is mentioned.

RB: That number represents numerous crisscrossings.

RC: Yeah, not just one. It was a long trip and really an interesting one. I had a wonderful time. Mostly I drove back roads, which also puts the mileage on.

RB: How long did it take you?

RC: It was almost a year that I was gone. I spent a few months of that in South Carolina. I was working at a rural HIV clinic. Then I was a little bit more based in South Carolina and driving around.

RB: That’s a tough state.

RC: It was a strange thing, actually. I have never lived in the South. You have to really have a lot of confidence in yourself and your perceptions to go into a place briefly—just for a little while and decide that you have understood it and then get it down on the page. And somebody like de Tocqueville or Steinbeck or William Least Heat-Moon has that kind of quality which is a combination of brilliance and ego, that  can actually do that.

RB: I’m surprised more people don’t hit the road. A lot of information, I think, is lost and falls between the crevices of mainstream reporting.

RC: Yeah, it was partly out of the feeling—which was that when I was in college I had studied mostly European writers. And I had done a semester abroad and I hadn’t really traveled through the U.S. since I drove across the country with my parents in the sixth grade. So I felt like I didn’t really know what was going on or how the world was working out there. And what I found was confusing to me. I didn’t come to a clear sense of what the country was about. And the different meetings I had with different people didn’t add up to a clear story.

RB: How about the story is that the country is big and incoherent?

RC: [both laugh] Exactly. I think that’s important because part of what gets imposed by a lot of national media is a sense of homogeneity and that we are all in agreement and that everything is sort of monolithic and, in fact, it’s complete chaos. And should be. That’s what it was always meant to be. I prefer the feeling that it was multiple and chaotic, to the feeling that I also sometimes had that it was bifurcated and oppositional. There was also a feeling I sometimes had that there were two countries and that they were really at odds with each other. And that was more upsetting.

RB: The former interpretation suggests something natural.

RC: Yes. [laughs]

RB: A state of nature as opposed to the contrivance advanced by hucksters.

RC: Which feels politicized and dangerous, in a way.

RB: Richard Reeves [in American Journey] [3]did a follow-up to [Alexis] de Tocqueville’s trip and retraced that original journey and extended his travels to the West coast in 1981 [150 years later]. Why didn’t you write a book based on your own trip?

RC: I think I did. The book I wrote was based on that trip.

RB: Shall I use an overused word, it ‘informed’ this book?

RC: [laughs] Yeah, words like ‘oblique ‘ and ‘tangential’ come to mind.

RB: You were talking to the gas station attendant in South Dakota and he remarked on something about Willa Cather?

RC: Right, exactly, how Annie Adams Field had really contributed to his sense of—I mean, I did try to write a book about that. That’s what I was doing in the year that I was out there. I thought the book was there to be written but I found it very hard to do.

Rachel Cohen [photo Robert Birnbaum]

RB: What does it mean that  road trip books were written by all men? I can’t think of one woman who has written a road book. Is it a men’s genre?

RC: It is. It’s a very masculine genre. Which I realized when I was out there. How do people do this? And then I thought, ‘Oh, they are willing to say, ‘I am right about this based on my one hour of experience.’’

RB: Or perhaps it’s a masculine trait to accept one’s first impressions?

RC: [both laugh] I don’t know about that. And also there are practical considerations. Like it’s safer [for men]. I was traveling alone. And I had one of those huge cell phones my mother had bought me because I needed to be somewhat safe. It made it harder to be out at night. There are all sorts of experiences that you are limited from.

RB: Steinbeck took a dog with him.

RC: That’s the thing to do. I think Charley was a good thing to have for Steinbeck, and I didn’t have a dog. In answer to your earlier question, what I found was that things that I could piece together about American inheritance were in books rather than in diners. But that trip did make me conscious of the wideness of the country and its experience and the variety of personality.

RB: [One might say] it’s a grand categorical error to say that it is one country.

RC: Yeah. It is each person’s invention and that may be, more than other countries, that it prides itself on becoming invented by each of its inhabitants. I did try to keep that in mind in working on the book.

RB: One of the things I enjoyed about the essays in A Chance Meeting were the flights of fancy. Walt Whitman gets on a tram and runs in to a guy he is very enamored of—you recreate his interior response. Clearly, you couldn’t know that but it seems correct and there is no reason to doubt it. Why did you think you had the license to do that?

RC: Chutzpah. [both laugh] Obviously, it has that quality. Also, I did hold myself to a pretty rigorous standard. Part of how I did it was by making guesses and seeing if I found confirmation of them. Like I started to have sense that Marianne Moore cared a lot about whether people were really on time. And so I had Elizabeth Bishop coming to meet her and Elizabeth Bishop was often late. I decided to make that—Bishop was in a hurry because she was afraid she was going to be late. And then I found a letter from Moore to somebody else saying that she was really enjoying knowing Elizabeth Bishop, despite the fact that she was always late. Then I thought, ‘Great, I got it. That’s the right tension.’ Then I found George Plimpton’s essay on Marianne Moore, in which he said she wore two watches because she was so obsessed with being on time. By that point I felt like my position was really a good one—it was very much in character for those two people. And in the example that you brought up, there is so much information about Whitman and Peter Doyle and the fact that Doyle was an omnibus conductor and they used to ride the bus together and that Whitman always liked that kind of transportation, public transportation. He loved the Brooklyn ferry and used to ride the horse cars and help the conductors. That was a kind of being a part of large groups of people that he really loved. I knew it was a good setting for him. A setting that was responsible to his actual preferences. Had I decided to imagine Walt Whitman having tea at an expensive hotel it would have felt like I had taken an unnecessary and hopeless license.

RB: There is another scene where someone is dropped off—Joseph Cornell, and he, Carl Van Vechten is sitting in his car. No, it’s Charlie Chaplin—

RC: Charlie Chaplin drops off Hart Crane.

RB: So I got both people wrong [both laugh]

RC: But the setting, you had [right].

RB: That moment with Chaplin sitting back and ruminating, let me repeat, was a charming scene. Indisputable, but clearly a fiction. And yet nothing to find fault with.

RC: That’s nice, yeah.

RB: The charm of your book, I thought, is the wonderful interweaving also of factual information and conjecture. What do you call this, ‘imaginary non-fiction’?

RC: ‘Imaginative.’

RB: Why do so many fiction writers have such scorn for what they call creative non-fiction?

RC: Most fundamentally, it’s a kind of ethical question. And like all ethical questions, it’s almost impossible to articulate. [laughs] But really it’s sort of like the problem that comes up around an Oliver Stone movie.

RB: There are problems with Oliver Stone’s movies?

RC: [both laugh] There is an uneasiness, maybe.

RB: I thought it was his bombasticity.

RC: [more laughter] He’s not so important to this argument. [laughs] Just that here can be a feeling when you see something which is historical and you feel doesn’t quite represent what you think was the case. And you feel like everyone is going to get that version of the story…

RB: What’s the difference between Oliver Stone, who we have decided is not really important to this argument, and Thomas Mallon’s Henry and Clara? It’s based on the couple who shared Lincoln’s theater box the night of his assassination. They are real people. Is the story real as Mallon tells it? What difference does it make?

RC: That’s a novel. It’s a little bit different. That’s not saying this is a book of history in which you can trust the writer to be telling you what the research has been.

RB: The problem the fiction writer has is the claim made by non-fiction of total factual accuracy. And that it is entirely accurate, certain speculative leaps notwithstanding.

RC: It’s a question of what the reader can trust the writer to have substantiated according to whatever historical standards of research and what is being suggested or elaborated around the edges. All biographers are imagining. A lot of it is guesswork. You are trying to figure out what the character of the person—no matter how much evidence you have, you are still telling a story and you are still shifting the perspective. So, it’s usually a specious kind of distinction between what’s imaginative and what’s not. On the other hand I felt really responsible that people should know—a college student is reading this and they are using it for their paper and they should know what I knew and what I didn’t know. So that there is an ethical question about how you convey to your reader and it can be very subtle, I think, how you convey that this part, you wouldn’t necessarily quote.

RB: Were there pieces that you left out?

RC: There were other attempts that didn’t work out. There were other structures that didn’t give much in the way of a return.

RB: How about people?

RC: Oh yeah. There were things that I was fascinated by—the fact that U.S. Grant and James McNeil Whistler had the same drawing professor at West Point. I couldn’t get over that. I thought that was so great and strange. So, then I tried for a while to build something around that drawing teacher and I tried to get Whistler in but it was hard because he was in England. I read a lot of biographies of Whistler.

RB: Are there a lot?

RC: There are. I read three.

RB: That’s a lot.

RC: Yeah, [especially] for not writing about him. And then there were [additional] pieces between people who were in the book I considered. I wanted to write about W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neal Hurston because I thought they would be really interesting together. They worked on this theater project together called the Krigwa Players. I thought maybe—there would have been a little bit of a gender issue. There would have been a little bit of an age issue. There would have been some tension. She was kind of raucous, in some ways. And sometimes he [DuBois] disapproved of that. So I felt that there was a piece in there but there wasn’t quite enough information and I couldn’t get it to emerge, so I let it go. Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore both had that quality of not breaking with people. They stayed friends with everyone they were friends with for a very long time—complicated people that other people fought with, they really kept knowing.

RB: One character/person who I knew pretty much nothing about was U.S. Grant, other than his reputation as a drunk. When I scanned the list of people you dealt with I couldn’t make out why he was there?

RC: I wanted him for many reasons. I thought he was a very fine writer, so that his memoir belonged with the memoirs of the other people who were in the book. He was a literary influence on Gertrude Stein, so that built him in.

RB: Was Grant originally someone you intended or was he a discovery?

RC: He was an early discovery. I actually went to Vicksburg on that drive around the country and bought his memoirs there and was reading them on that trip. That was how I found out that Mark Twain had published them. That really was the first piece that I started to think about writing—that friendship, which seemed so strange to me. Yeah, so he was there from the beginning, always in the project.

RB: I went to Twain’s grave in Elmira, N.Y., on Memorial Day in 2001 and I was so pissed off by what I found—there were broken beer bottles and garbage, why would anyone do that? So, 10 years in the making, now you are out in the world. Have you even thought about what’s next?

RC: I have thought about it a little bit. I am writing a piece on John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle for the New Yorker which I think is amusing, to me anyway, so far.

RB: Why is it amusing?

RC: They had a tempestuous friendship and a terrible falling out.

RB: Why is the New Yorker interested in a piece on Mill and Carlyle?

RC: [laughs] I’m in the fortunate position of having a little tiny niche at the New Yorker for writer’s nightmares, that’s my—[both laugh] I did a piece for them last fall that was called ‘The Very Bad Review’ [4] which was about a terrible review that Edmund Gosse was given by John Trenton Collins in 1886, a life-destroying review, and this is the story of the time that Stuart Mills’s charlady inadvertently burnt the first draft of Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution.

RB: Whoops. [both laugh] That would cause a storm to ensue.

RC: It’s nice to have a project to be working on. I am thinking more about European writers and painters. Probably really 20th-century ones, although this [New Yorker] piece is early in the 19th century.

RB: Do you have any concerns that the things you are interested in pursuing and writing about are coincident with the tastes of book publishers and magazine editors?

RC: You mean, what I do seems fairly obscure? [laughs]

RB: I didn’t say that.

RC: It seems to be turning out all right.

RB: Has it been a concern of yours?

RC: Oh, I see. Not really, no. I don’t know why that is.

RB: Well, at this point, why would it? You have gotten a book published.

RC: Yeah, but there was a little period when the stuff wasn’t getting published, and when the proposal version of it went out a couple of years ago, [it] was rejected by eight people or something like that.

RB: Your agent, Eric Simonoff is Edward Jones’s agent.

RC: Yeah, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s. He has a very fine eye, I really think. And he has a really nice way of staying with people for a long time as they are working. So I went to his office many years ago, now, and distinctly remember him saying, ‘We take the long view. Just go and do your work.’

RB: One might say that by your credentials that you are essentially an academic popularizing or that your interests are more skewed to the scholarly than mainstream culture. So here you are trying to get your work into print and you go to an agent.

Rachel Cohen [photo Robert Birnbaum]

RC: I was always a creative writer. My materials are historical, but I have no graduate degree. I never considered going to graduate school. I do work that overlaps with scholarly work, but it’s always about structure and language and creating a story and artistic concerns. My conception of my work has always been as creative work even though some of the raw materials are used by academics. Going to an agent was a thing I would obviously have done as a creative writer, yeah. You just never know what’s going to happen. I am surprised at the range of people who have read the book and have been interested in it.

RB: That would be another lesson from the great publishing lottery. Is it books that you are really interested in creating, in writing?

RC: Yeah, it is. I like writing short pieces and their challenges and the formal questions but I was so astonished by the possibilities of writing a book as I was doing it. It was just extraordinary to have that much space and be working on that many levels at once.

RB: Who was your editor?

RC: Eileen Smith, who was also a blessing. She’s a wonderful editor and she was also a very big advocate of the book, which is incredibly important.

RB: Was this book contracted under the [Ann] Godoff regime at Random House?

RC: Just after. Two days after she was fired. It was a tiny risk to go to Random House at that moment when everything was sort of unsettled. But I loved the people that I met there, and I felt like they really took the book seriously.

RB: Despite a natural inclination to vilify the conglomerates and their drones, it’s hard to look at anybody in the book business as totally evil [Peter Olson excepted] and most of the time they are really good people and they are just sort of—

RC: Doing the best they can. Yeah, that’s been my sense also. I really had a wonderful experience there. I had fantastic copy editing and really great design and they were very supportive of making the book a beautiful book—which is a real pleasure. And then I would talk to young publicity assistants who read it and were telling me they were reading the novels of William Dean Howells because of my book. That was so gratifying. It was so nice.

RB: They actually did something with the end papers of A Chance Meeting.

RC: Yeah, they put my drawings there. I don’t know that it’s more important that books be special now than any other time but anything that feels—I love having my drawing there because it has my handwriting in it—it feels a little more handmade and that is a really nice feeling.

RB: Books shouldn’t be less substantial then they were. I read a piece earlier this year in the British press complaining that books weren’t being made very well. Saying they are made of acid-free paper seems to be the major thing.

RC: Right. [laughs] Instead of, ‘It’s a beautiful book.’ On the other hand, there is really good book design being done. If you walk into a bookstore and you look at new releases, it’s astonishing how much more attractive the books are than they were 10 or 15 years ago.

RB: So did we determine what you are doing next?

RC: No, we didn’t. Because I haven’t. But I am, as I hesitatingly suggested, moving toward thinking about European people. I am not sure how many languages I would have to learn in order to do that. I have some of those languages, but not all, that I would want.

RB: The kind of thing that you have done here, though not as obviously, is more like what Europeans do?

RC: I don’t know if it’s exactly close to anything although it might be a little closer to a British tradition of biographical essay. But I am not thinking to do something that is too much like what I have done here. I’d like to make something else. It is true, particularly these kinds of historical continuity, are something self-evident in Europe in a way that it isn’t always here.

RB: Americans are by and large ahistorical.

RC: In some ways—

RB: Except for holidays.

RC: Yeah, which do have a commercial element about them.

RB: My conversations over the years lead to connections within a culture that may be described as frail—do you know what I am trying to say?

RC: ‘Frail’ isn’t a bad word. There is something at least very precious about them and very sustaining, I think, for all of us and it’s been interesting to me—that’s a part of the pleasure of giving interviews. People who do interviews have a feeling, like the photographers in my book did, about what you can accomplish with somebody in a room in an hour or twenty minutes or whatever it is. It is a little like a photo shoot. You are trying to get what’s characteristic of the person in a quick amount of time and you can do that quite well and really feel that you know something pretty profound about a person in that amount of time. So what you are saying doesn’t surprise me. From looking at the [Identitytheory] website I have a sense of your having built a collection of interview subjects. And that is very sustaining and the overlap and interweavings and reoccurrences are a pleasure.

RB: You point to someone as working very hard to maintain their friendships. They didn’t give up on them. And I found that to be so admirable and unusual. My sense of people today is that they are ready to dump their so-called friends—

RC: At any minute. [laughs]” I’m out of here”, that’s it.

RB: It’s a wonder any of these people were friends with anyone.

RC: [laughs] I know, it’s so hard. It’s a challenge to know anybody else in the world. But I think I think that’s part of the reason that I chose the people I did—it is because a lot of them had a talent for friendship, and they also were people who made their families out of their friends. Kind of found families for themselves in that way. People whose own families were difficult or who didn’t marry in a traditional way, didn’t have children. So their friends were very, very central and supported them in their lives and that was important to me because then there was in each of the pieces the little studies of those situations. There was a real vibrancy and there was a lot at stake.

RB: I like that phrase, ‘a talent for friendship.’ Well, I don’t know how long it’s going to take for your next tome,[5] but I hope we are both around to talk about it.

RC: Thank you. I hope so too. That would be great.

 

*****************

 

1 One of my conversations with  Ren Weschler

2. Megan O Rourke’s Slate review of A Chance Meeting

3 My conversation with Richard Reeves

4. “The Very Bad Review’ by Rachel Cohen

5  My most recent chat with Rachel Cohen.

Addendum (to Best Best Books 2014)

Ever wonder about the bench marks for making it on to lists that are part of the annual literary clusterfuck? I don’t—but as you may, have a look at LARGE HEARTED BOY’S good work in building a list of ‘Best Books’ lists to judge whether the clusterfuck rubric fits. I do think it might be worth while for one of those sabermetric types to see how many books on the list have been published before August of the current year.There in may lie the answer to why so many lists have the same seven titles.

Given that by nature lists are exclusive, it would seem a natural consequence of making a list to mentally (as in one’s own mind )continue to enlarge past one’s public cutoff point.

So, is this a new list? A new and improved version of the initial list? Think it matters? Anyway. Here’s they are, more great books

The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

McSweeney’s Issue 46 – Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America edited by Dave Eggers

McSweeney’s Issue 46 Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America by Dave Eggers (Editor)

Shadow Government by Tom Engelhardt and Glenn Greenwald

Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World by Tom Engelhardt and Glenn Greenwald

The Deluge by Adam Tooze

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze

In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen

In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen

Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill

Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

The Divide by Matt Tiabbi

Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse

Take This Man: A Memoir by Brando Skyhorse

Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1970s:

Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1970s: Fifty-Two Pickup / Swag / Unknown Man No. 89 / The Switch: (Library of America #255)by Elmore Leonard, Gregg Sutter (Editor)

Disclaimer

Billy WIlder’s Headstone [photographer unknown]

The Year That was: The Best American Annuals

Fifty Best American Short Stories 1915 1965 edited by Martha Foley

Since 1915 Houghton Mifflin (et al) has maintained the tradition of publishing a yearly anthology of short fiction (ably assembled, for many years, by Martha Foley) entitled not surprisingly Best American Short Stories. Leaving aside the unfortunate American overuse of superlatives, this annual collection is high quality rivaled only by the yearly O Henry Prize stories compendium. Each year a guest editor is presented with about a 100 stories, drawn from a very broad and diverse mix of publications and culled from a much larger group by the current series editor.

As is the practice of Best American annuals, novelist Jennifer Eagan guest edited 2014’s volume. Among the contributors are, CHARLES BAXTER, ANN BEATTIE, T.C. BOYLE, PETER CAMERON, JOSHUA FERRIS, NELL FREUDENBERGER, DAVID GATES, LAUREN GROFF, BENJAMIN NUGENT,JOYCE CAROL OATES, KAREN RUSSELL and Laura Van Den Berg. Worthy reading.

The Best American Short Stories 2014 edited by Jennifer Eagan

 

Sometime in the 1980’s Best American Essays  (and Best American Mystery Stories )was added to the soon to be burgeoning Best American brand under the direction of Robert Atwan. This year’s essays anthology is guest-edited by John Jeremiah Sullivan, he of the celebrated essay collection Pulphead.  Even if you are not familiar with this  all-star cast of writers such as DAVE EGGERS, EMILY FOX GORDON, MARY GORDON, VIVIAN GORNICK, LESLIE JAMISON, ARIEL LEVY, YIYUN LI, BARRY LOPEZ, CHRIS OFFUTT, ZADIE SMITH, ELIZABETH TALLENT,WELLS TOWER, PAUL WEST and JAMES WOOD, be assured that the topics chosen range far and wide with refreshingly original explications.

The Best American Essays 2014 edited by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Baltimore’s talented crime story novelist Laura Lippman hosts this year’s Best American Mystery Stories 2014 and consciously avoids drawing from the usual suspects thus including surprising names for the genre— MEGAN ABBOTT, DANIEL ALARCÓN, RUSSELL BANKS ,JAMES LEE BURKE ,PATRICIA ENGEL, ERNEST FINNEY, ROXANE GAY, CHARLAINE HARRIS,JOSEPH HELLER, ANNIE PROULX and LAURA VAN DEN BERG.

Best American Mystery Stories edited by Laura Lippman

Sometime around the turn of the century, someone over at Houghton Mifflin with a some marketing savvy added all manner of categories to the Best American brand which currently includes—Travel Writing, Science and Nature Writing, American Comics, American Infographics and Non-Required Reading.

Not to draw to fine a point but I am still troubled by the insistence on literary journalists and other wise thoughtful folks can not shed themselves of mania for superlatives. The Best American Stories don’t have to carry that name for me to be interested reading them.

Books, Books and more Books…

Let me reiterate something I have noted in the past—this, to justify my resorting to the creation and promulgation of a list— which I have also said before, is the main trick of lazy journalists.

Uh where was I?

Oh yeah, if you are familiar either with European literary journals or the late lamented Wisława Szymborska’s splendid little tome Non-REquired Reading you are aware that those journals list books that they receive— a number usually far greater than can be reviewed (or that fussy critics would deign to comment on). Seems like a useful thing to list, right?

Since I am exactly in that position I am pleased to occasionally publish an idiosyncratic and arbitrary enumeration of recently received books such as the one that follows.The arbitrary part of this public service ia the links that attach to some of the book noted. Some because i have spoken to the author—some because I have previously commented on something to do with said tome.And some links because, well, it’s the right thing to do.

David Hockney: The Biography by Christopher Simon Sykes (Doubleday)

Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World by Jay Nordlinger (Encounter Books)

The Short American Century: A Postmortem by Andrew Bacevich(Editor) (Harvard University Press)

The Recipe Project: A Delectable Extravaganza of Food and Musicby Leigh Newman (Black Balloon Publishing)

Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson byKevin Avery, Nick Tosches (Foreword) (Fantagraphics)

The Life of Charles Dickens: The Illustrated Edition [Abridged] by John Forster, Dr. Holly Furneaux PhD, Jane Smiley (Foreword) (Sterling Signature)

Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s-2000s by Richard Graham , Sid Jacobson (Foreword)(Abrams ComicArts)

How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends by Mark Derr (Overlook)

A People’s Guide to Los Angeles by Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough , Wendy Cheng (University of California Press)

Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands by Albert L. Hurtado (University of California Press )

No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel (Riverhead)

Jewish Art: A Modern History by Samantha Baskind, Larry Silver(Reaktion Books)

On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.Sby Sean Stewart (Editor)(PM Press)

Richard Benson: North South East West by Peter Galassi,Richard Benson(Author Photographer)(The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives by Elizabeth Benedict (State University Press of New York)

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series by Sarah Bancroft(The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Cindy Sherman by Eva Respini (Author), Johanna Burton (Author), Cindy Sherman (Photographer), John Waters (Contributor)(The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology by John Long (Basic Books)

The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard by Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett (Editor), Paul Auster (Foreword)(Library of America)

The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table by
Tracie McMillan (Scribner)

What Color Is My World?: The Lost History of African-American Inventors by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld (Author), Ben Boos (Illustrator), A.G. Ford (Illustrator) (Candlewick)

Walter De Maria: Trilogies by Josef Helfenstein (Editor), Clare Elliott (Contributor)(Yale University Press)

Graphic Design: A New History, second edition by Stephen J. Eskilson (Yale University Press)

The Hammer Vault by Marcus Hearn (Titan Books)

Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008 by John Leonard, E. L. Doctorow (Introduction) (Viking)

This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s by Helen Molesworth (Yale University Press)

David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s by David Goodis, Robert Polito (Editor)(Library of America)

The Unexpected Guest by Anne Korkeakivi (Little, Brown and Company)

Seeing the Light: Inside the Velvet Underground by Rob Jovanovic(St. Martin’s Press)

Herb Ritts: L.A. Style by Paul Martineau (Author), James Crump (Contributor) (J. Paul Getty Museum)

Grantland Issue 2 by Bill Simmons (Editor), Dan Fierman (Editor) (McSweeney’s)

David Shrigley: Brain Activity by Cliff Lauson , Martin Herbert, Jonathan Monk, David Shrigley, Dave Eggers (Contributor) (Hayward Publishing)

Jeff, One Lonely Guy by Jeff Ragsdale, David Shields, Michael Logan (Amazon Publishing)

Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing by Leonard Koren (Imperfect Publishing)

Strange Flesh: A Novel by Michael Olson (Simon & Schuster)

The Middle Ages by (Penguin)

These Dreams of You by Steve Erickson (Europa Editions)

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau, Damion Searls (Editor), John Stilgoe (Preface) (New York Review Books Classics)

Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland (Yale University Press

Perlaby Carolina De Robertis(Knopf)

Atget by John Szarkowski, Eugène Atget (Photographer) (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

The 50 Funniest American Writers*: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion by Andy Borowitz ( Library of America)

Nixon’s Court: His Challenge to Judicial Liberalism and Its Political Consequences by Kevin J. McMahon (University Of Chicago Press)

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (Knopf)

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel by ( Little, Brown and Company)

The Anatomy of Harpo Marx by Wayne Koestenbaum(University of California Press)

Timebomb:A Thriller by Gerald Seymour (Overlook)

Any Day Now: A Novel by Terry Bisson (Overlook)

Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind by J.-H. Rosny, Daniele Chatelain (Translator, Contributor), George Slusser (Translator, Contributor) (Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction)

Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers from the Team at Baseball Prospectus by Baseball Prospectus The, Steven Goldman (Editor) (Basic Books)

A People’s History of Baseball by Mitchell Nathanson (University of Illinois Press)

MeMyselfandI: Photo Portraits of Picasso by Pierre Daix, Friederike Mayröcker, Katherine Slusher, Kerstin Stremmel (Editor) (Hatje Cantz)

Currently reading The Wet Engine by Brian Doyle (Oregon State University Press)

The King is Dead

Though he was hidden in plain sight (like so many fine authors ) having published a novel and a story collection, David Foster Wallace went unnoticed ( he didn’t make Granta’s 1996 “Best of the Young American Novelists”) until his 1000 page, 100 footnote novel Infinite Jest. I recall when I talked to Foster Wallace in 1995 ( a conversation I will try to unearth at some future date) he was serious, polite, edgy and seemingly uncomfortable. Not the least due to lame publicity like a New York Times Magazine article anointing him the “grunge” novelist. Oy veh!

Well, what could you expect? A pack of puerile cultural scavengers affixing themselves to a rising literary star is the way of the world is it not. Luckily, Dave Eggers arrived on the scene with a penchant for showmanship and an interesting book and a clear evidence that the kids were still reading (at least some were) You may not know anything about David Foster Wallace but you probably know he hung himself (the kind of thing TMZ would report) in 2008. Certainly in the intervening years since the publication of Infinite Jest Wallace secured a place for himself in American letters and no lesser authority than Time Magazine included Infinite Jestin its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list.

Now comes the post-humous publication of Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (Little Brown). You can read about how Micheal Pietsch, Wallace’s editor and Little, Brown publisher,took on the prodigious task of reading the pages Wallace left behind which he lovingly brought The Pale Kinginto a publishable and readable form in Lev Grossman’s faithful recapitulation of Pietsch’s editor’s note.

Grossman does offer this thought though:

The Pale King is complete in one sense: it asks a question and posits an answer. Here and there throughout the book, Wallace alludes to a state of mind, or perhaps a way of being, in which a human being can set aside boredom, or pass through it, to experience reality calmly and openly, appreciating it for its richness without demanding from it anything as easy or satisfying or ready-made as meaning. There’s both a whiff of dorm-room, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance mysticism to this idea and a whiff of truth as well. Not everybody in The Pale King is able to find this state of mind, but everybody is looking for it.

Now, part of my motive for writing this notice is to suggest that you restrain yourself from reading the avalanche of chatter that the Pale King will surely loose—unless we are blessed with Charllie Sheen developing aphasia or some other next big thing. The NY Times has already had two reviews and one article on the faux embargo imposed by Little Brown (book was supposed to go on sale April 15 and reviewers were asked not to review or quote from it, or even mention they had copies in their possession). I say read the book. Or read something by Foster Wallace. Or listen to his Kenyon College commencement speech published as a wonderful little book This is Water.

Okay, you might read one piece on Wallace —which I found in an unlikely place—there being odd pockets of intelligence and insight in world of big commercial media. John Jeremiah Sullivan has some smart things to say about Wallace and his place in a fluid evaporating culture. I like this bit of acuity:

Many of Wallace’s readers (this is apparent now that every single one of them has written an appreciation of him somewhere on the Internet) believed that he was speaking to them in his work—that he was one of the few people alive who could help them navigate a new spiritual wilderness, in which every possible source of consolation had been nullified. And Wallace was speaking to them; his native conscientiousness prevented him from shirking the role of sage altogether. It’s in this way that we can understand his frequent and uncharacteristically Pollyanna statements about the supposed power of fiction against solipsism, i.e., that only in literature do we know for sure we’re having “a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness.”

By the way, I have read about 100 pages of The Pale King. It is hilarious. It is dark. And it is dense.