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This really should have been a Tangents article.
A couple of years ago, Tangents would have been for several reasons the perfect forum in which to rave about Rachel Cohen’s A chance meeting: intertwined lives of American writers and artists (Vintage). The book explores the moments or points at which pairs or trios of artists’ and writers’ lives intersected or gently touched against each other and in so doing it becomes a celebration of literature, art, photography, and cinema, as well as of the common ideas connecting their forms and the lives of their makers. Then there is the felicity – almost certainly unknown on the author’s part – of its echo of (the group) Josef K’s finest moment, and its probably known and knowing nod to a Brief encounter-esque sense of romance; for Rachel Cohen’s book is as much about what is left unsaid as about what history records as having been said. Its acceptance and understanding that writers come in all shapes and sizes, that some write of a life of adventure in snatched moments between one escapade or assignation and the next, and others form adventure from a solitary life of sedentary reflection, is the literary equivalent of the stuff in which Tangents dealt over its ten year history.
In truth, beyond the shared title, there’s not much to link Rachel Cohen’s A chance meeting with Josef K’s ‘Chance meeting’, other than the somewhat deliberate circumstance of individual taste, and the suggestive nature of the song’s lyric, reprising the tone of David Lean’s film and Noel Coward’s screenplay:
‘The red sky behind you
The feeling you’ve been here before
You lived in the past dear
With things we all gave up then
I met you again there
But this time it weren’t for real’
But connections spark and snake in all directions as you read, inevitably going beyond the ones that Cohen herself makes, or gently presents without comment, like Willa Cather meeting Flaubert’s niece, and writing up the encounter in an essay called “A chance meeting”, or the title of the novel written by one of her subjects, W.D. Howells, A chance acquaintance. Mention of Joseph Cornell will necessarily stir the attention of any fan of the Clientele’s music. The story Cohen tells is this:
In 1943, Joseph Cornell wrote to Marianne Moore to thank her for some small amount of praise for a collage of his illustrating a story in an arts magazine. The salutation was held up by an armadillo, armoured animals exerting a fascination for Moore displayed in her poetry, and Cornell wrote that her words were ‘the only concrete reaction I’ve had so far, and they satisfy and affect me profoundly.’ Cornell was voicing the gratitude that a deliberately lonely artist starved of reaction suffers through long years of obscurity. His inclination was to fall in love with anyone who paid him attention, all the more so because it was someone he admired. It led to an exchange of gently romantic letters, and to a meeting, though whether strictly speaking you could call it a chance one is debateable. Of the meeting itself nothing can be said but that Moore saw Cornell’s basement workshop and his boxes-in-progress. But Rachel Cohen gives us the tenor of their almost exclusively epistolary relationship and describes presents Cornell sent by post (a valentine of worm-work paper and an ancient book of rare animals), treading softly through the facts to offer from inside each story telling perspectives such as her notion that ‘people very often sent things to Marianne Moore in the hopes of getting back the language with which to talk about them, almost as if they were sending specimens to a zoological expert in order to find out the precise genus and Latin name.’
Along with three dozen other such encounters between writers, artists, photographers, thinkers, critics (and Charlie Chaplin), the book also narrates the second and third meetings between Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, which rested on Duchamp answering a phone call by chance. Duchamp gives Cornell a present, perfect in its symbolism: ‘He had picked up a red-and-yellow glue carton that said “strength” on one side and, admiring the American phrase, had written “gimme” above it and then signed the whole “Marcel Duchamp,” dated Christmas 1942.’
Cohen’s book is full of such anecdotal gifts, but it is also strong on the way art forms and their purveyors rub off on (and up against) each other, and on the artistic urge which drives their creations, their lives, their relationships with the people to whom they are drawn and the ones from whom they retreat. With its contextualised counsel from one writer or artist to another, it becomes a creative primer, and a caution against the wasting away of talent.
Carefully chosen photographs inform the text. Richard Avedon’s 1960 picture of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and dancer Merce Cunningham is terrific; the laughing trio look like a particularly joyful early 1980s New York indie band. Cohen’s description of the daguerreotype of Henry James Senior and Junior – ‘disturbing in the ghostly aliveness of its subjects’ – also stands for her own book. She makes what must have been painstaking research seem effortless, stitching it into the whole so that you barely notice the thread binding the material together, and all without a footnote in sight. There is empathy with all of her subjects, but not always sympathy – for example, she has little time for the shellac vanity of Katherine Anne Porter.
Neither does she make more of the connections than there is. Beyond the intrinsic pleasure she presents readers, she concentrates on her essential job, which is to make them want to go away and read the books of those of whom they were previously unaware; in my case William Dean Howells and Sarah Orne Jewett, the lesser known works of Mark Twain and Willa Cather, and maybe even Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs. But she still allows me to draw the line at Gertrude Stein, and set me imagining the context of meetings that happened between artists of my own cultural acquaintance. I’ve often wondered whether – as well as serve coffee to Thomas Mann when working in a dining hall – the young Jack Kerouac really did pass Thomas Wolfe on Brooklyn Bridge in a ‘raging blizzard’, as he reports in Vanity of Duluoz, and whether Wolfe might have taken the young football star for a drink if Kerouac had mustered the courage to speak to him.
In White bicycles: making music in the 1960s Joe Boyd writes of playing Nick Drake to John Cale, and of the amazed and excited Cale going round to see the young singer there and then, a seemingly improbable meeting of the confident Welshman and the diffident Englishman which the very next day resulted in the recording of ‘Northern sky’ and ‘Fly’. The fleshed-out story behind an easily missed credit on the sleeve of Bryter later.
These connections, both real in terms of lives touching each other, and imagined, in the sense of the artistic repercussions of such encounters, are made of much the same stuff that informs A chance meeting. And any regular readers of Tangents who have ventured into these obscure parts are guaranteed to enjoy it as much as I did. Or your money back.
Counter-intuitive it may be, but rather than hearing another paean to your favourite group it’s often more rewarding to read about why someone likes music with which you have no familiarity, that you are not interested in, or even actively dislike. It challenges your preconceptions, widens possibilities, enlarges your rationale for listening to music. Do it regularly enough and preconceptions are minimised and maybe even disappear.
When I came across Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, the title I was initially drawn to was Let it be, Colin Meloy’s memoir built on the raw and rugged substance of that album by the Replacements. I’ve never knowingly listened to the Replacements, and have only ever been mildly inclined to seek them out, despite a certain fascination with their fucked-up mystique. I was keen to learn more, and as curious to see how they were important to Meloy, whose group the Decemberists I have listened to as much as any since Alistair first mentioned them in dispatches on Tangents. How great it was to work my way through the songs of a writer whose twin fascinations were historical narrative and life on the ocean, putting these to work against a well-defined musical sensibility to say more about the 21st century than anyone else seemed to care to do.
As it turns out, few of Colin’s pages go into any detail about the actual sound made by the Replacements on Let it be, and nor does he go out of his way to say exactly why he was attracted to the music of the Replacements rather than that of x, y or z, save for a sense of identification; that being from Minnesota, the ‘Placemats’ must have endured the same frozen winters and backwater culture as the young Colin in Helena, Montana. They could be the band making the glorious racket in the garage down the street.
Colin’s story is all about agency and context – cultural, familial and social. He writes about how a love of music arises out of the ashes of childhood, how in adolescence that love becomes so engulfing that it blinds you to everything else, and how slowly but surely you determine that you must become a participant. At some point along the line you establish in your mind a connection with a band that are where you want to be. It doesn’t matter whether this connection is real or illusory; what matters is that it’s conceivable.
Colin might have taken his musical rites of passage further, to the point where he has established a fully-functioning band, rather than end it arbitrarily at the point when he dares to dance aged fourteen with a girl in a bar. But his take on Let it be captures something infrequently documented as well as it is here – the girl- or boyhood dreams, influences and life of the mind of a future musician. And as with the gliding narrative lyricism of his songs, he gives the reader enough to generate the universal from the specific, letting us draw our own conclusions and parallels.
Certainly I’ve a greater curiosity to hear Let it be having read Colin’s memoir, but its immediate effect has been to send me back to the Decemberists first three albums, reflect again on the slight disappointment of the fourth, The crane wife, on which their lightness of touch deserts them from time to time, and hope that this is restored on the fifth. While we await that, there’s the self-explanatory Colin Meloy sings live! to look forward to.
Hurrah! Alistair’s back in action here in a nostalgic, fictional vein and here, where he’s set me a task. As this might to some extent help to unmask the shadowy figure variously known as A jumped-up pantry boy and A wild, slim alien, I accept the challenge. I’ve to set down ‘8 things people don’t know about you’.
1. I dislike, nay abhor, lists in both journalistic and canonical senses and yet I am an obsessive list-maker. The list of the lists I make would be a long one.
2. At the age of twelve I was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter syndrome – dodgy knees, essentially – and was excused from school sports for three years. Bang went my chances of playing for Ipswich Town. Yes, I am a frustrated would-be professional footballer as well as frustrated would-be pop star. Osgood-Schlatter – sounds like a fantasy Chelsea strike force.
I also had a ranula and came very close to being presented as a case study to medical students.
3. My hypochondria is in remission.
4. I was offered the editorship of the jazz section of Venue, Bristol’s listings magazine, one week before I was due to leave the city for good. I left and the saxophone has never loomed quite as large in my life since.
5. The first group I saw live was the Boomtown Rats at the Ipswich Gaumont. I recently bought their Best of for £3 to hear again songs which were staples of my pre-teen listening. They certainly had energy, and Geldof wrote taut, catchy tunes employing relatively intricate arrangements and day-glo lyrical imagery. My retrospective opinion of them artistically is that they are holed beneath the waterline by Bob’s histrionic vocal braying – rodent by name and asinine by nature. The CD has an extensive sleeve note by novelist Joseph O’Connor, brother of Sinead, which articulates nicely how a brash gobshite can become number one in a young boy’s heart.
6. I was one of the hundred or so people injured during the poll tax riots around Trafalgar Square in 1990. Reflexively I headed a brick which had bounced off the side of a police van, still dreaming of playing for Ipswich. The doctor who treated me at University College Hospital had a flat top and wore a bright yellow tie. It hurt my eyes almost as much as the brick hurt my head.
7. The book I would most like to read has not yet been published; there may not yet even be a complete draft. It is the long-awaited third segment of the journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor made across Europe in the 1930s, written from the perspective of age, looking back on a fearless and carefree period of his life with a longing well-disguised by the freshness of the recollection. A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) contain some of the best prose ever written.
‘Memory encircles [Prague] with a wreath, a smoke-ring and the paper lattice of a valentine. I might have been shot out of a gun through all three of them and landed on one of its ancient squares fluttering with the scissor-work and the vapour and the foliage that would have followed me in the slipstream.’
But beware, for when reading PLF you are often set adrift on a doldrum-esque sea of digression. One chapter can maroon you for days. Yet in others you are zipped along with a zephyr behind you.
8. I am both young and old enough to have an ‘O’ level in Computer science. My generation is the one which straddles the jump from manual, predominantly sequential ways of writing to the non-linear facility that word processors offer or promote. Leaving aside form, style, or the knight’s move around an oversize chessboard which determined the chapter sequence in Georges Perec’s Life a user’s manual, we have had to learn about the effect of the physical process on writing twice. I have moved from pasting pieces of typewritten text onto master artwork to copying text from word editors into WYSIWYG blog generators. I am participating in the current, moving into the future, but my brain was hot-wired in the past. There must already be plenty of younger writers who have never written anything substantial longhand. I wonder if, sick at some point of the keyboard, they will pick up a pen to see how it feels, to see what happens.
I believe I’m supposed to tag five or eight people with the task of continuing this meme but as a diffident novice, I don’t feel I know any other blogger well enough to presume this of them. So this branch of a chain dies with me. Not for the first time.
