Richard Howard Los Angeles Times Book Review, 28 March 2004, Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Artists and Writers, 1854-1967, Random House: NY, 2004, 366 pp., 2004,
"It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that a phenomenon of culture, particularly a book, to be properly enjoyed, is best and properly known for what it is (and not for what it is not).
". . . is a series of linked explorations of intimacy and amity (including certain failures of intimacy, certain violations of amity) among American writers and artists . . . something of a new genre . . . a Divination by Affective Nearness . . . And what is being divined is nothing less than . . . the nature of modern literary and artistic tangency in the United States.
". . . has been mistaken for literary criticism, which it is not, although . . .
"Gertrude Stein explained that she had noticed that every American starts over on the project of writing American history or the American novel. She did that. And, at the same time, she had also noticed that each American chooses a tradition, collects, in some sense, his or her own sensibility, and she did that, too."
". . . has also been mistaken for a biographer, which she is not, although . . .
"It is easy as well to mistake the tone . . . for gossip, which it is not, although . . .
"John Cage was worried about Marcel Duchamp. By chance, they had been at the same parties four nights in a row, and he had looked and looked at Duchamp and realized that Duchamp was old. He wanted to be with him; he wondered why he hadn't made an effort to be with him all the time."
"And easier still . . . may be mistaken for literary history, which it is not, although . . .
"I grant there is a good deal of . . . imbrication between gossip and biography and criticism and history on the one hand and on the other the work she has actually written, but that is merely a consequence of its genre-indeed such confusions are in the nature of this genre she has recovered, if not invented.
". . .
". . . she has afforded a vision of lives of the makers that proposes, as she rolls out the links of the chain, a sort of fraternal structure in which her consciousness-and as a result, ours as well-can dwell, as if it were the most natural, the most logical thing in the world these days to regard literature and art and music as affording the soul a lodging, indeed a palace of pleasure.
"For that is the secret sense of the braid of lives she has recounted so affectionately, and why I have insisted on the peculiarity of genre . . . The peculiarity that so often asserts "it would be nice to think that they walked down the street together," or "perhaps he waited for her downstairs," or "it must have been the case that she laughed at his joke."
". . .
"We are not accustomed nowadays to regard such an array of contacts among the makers, especially American makers, as comfortable, as consoling, even as euphoric . . . She has had a vision of what Shaw used to call the sanity of art, and what in reading her I would describe as the felicity of engaging in the intimacy of cultural production, something very rare in our moment of subversion and repudiation, when so many notions of the pleasures of the arts, and of art-making, as a primary spiritual resource have been contested.
"It is an indication of the insecurity and the fragility of such pleasure these days that Cohen chooses the term "chance meeting," . . . to identify her governing structure . . . a visionary author would have call such contacts Fate and revelled in the transcendence of the accidental. It is an evidence of our incomparable modernity that we find it appropriate to attribute the felicities of friendship, and the failures too, to Fortune and no longer to Fate.
"But even under the sign of accident, Rachel Cohen's vision of the life of art in her chosen century . . . is one of an astonishing gladness. Not that she scants misunderstanding or misery, or even the makings of tragedy. But such makings are the kind that compelled Yeats, in his furious old age, to invoke the gaiety of Hamlet and Lear."