To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Uncommon Friendships

From PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Jim Fleming. Friendships of funny thing. You never know when your future best friend will suddenly step into your life. That happened with novelist Ann Patchett. One of the things that Lucy and I had in common is that we were both terrifically friend -oriented girls and so she needed me at that moment and I was there. Today we'll talk about those friendships that change your life. Ann Patchett remembers her friend Lucy Greeley, a poet who died of cancer. Ann will explore the dangerous world of deep water wreck diving which forges a special kind of camaraderie. Also a look back at the 19th century literary scene when the Atlantic magazine was a magnet for friendship and great writing. Mark Twain wrote his first sketches of the Mississippi for William Dean Helles. Henry James wrote all of these early novels for serialization in the Atlantic. It was an incredible flowering of American talent. Novelist Ann Patchett turns away from fiction in her memoir called Truth

and Beauty. The book celebrates her friendship with poet Lucy Greeley, the two women room together at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Ann Patchett remembers those days. We shared our ideas like sweaters with easy exchange and lack of ownership. We gave over excess words a single beautiful sentence that had to be cut but perhaps the other would like to have. As two reasonably intelligent and very serious young writers in a reasonably serious writing program, we didn't so much discuss our work as volley ideas back and forth until neither of us was sure who belonged to what. Not that it mattered. I told her the plot of a story I was working on about a magician's assistant, whose magician is able to create the perfect illusion only in her dreams. But before I could finish it, she wrote a poem called The Magician's Assistance Guilty Dream. I stole it back years later when I wrote a novel called The Magician's Assistant. Today Ann Patchett is best known for her novel Belcanto. Her friend Lucy Greeley became famous as the author of a memoir

called The Autobiography of a Face. That book told the story of Lucy's childhood cancer, the long ordeal of her treatment, and her effort to make a life for herself with a severely deformed face. Ann Patchett told Anne Strange Shamps that she and Lucy actually met while they were still in college. Lucy was just a little rock star on campus. She was incredibly popular. Everybody adored her. She had a million friends. She was a great writer. Everybody was in love with her poetry. And I was a real wall flower. There's a scene near the beginning of the book when you and she have just sort of remit for the first time and you're about to begin your life together as roommates at the Iowa writer's workshop. And she sees you and just jumps into your arms and you write, I don't remember love unfolding. It was just there. Huge and permanent and first. A kind of love at first sight. It was and of course it seemed strange to me because I'd been

looking at her for four years. And yet it was really the first time that she saw me. But I think that had everything to do with the fact that she was in Iowa. She'd gotten there a couple of weeks before me and she was really lonely. She didn't have a million friends, which she always did in New York. So when I came in, I was someone that she knew and she had a connection to and she was so desperate to have a friend there that she completely took me over. One of the things that Lucy and I had in common is that we were both terrifically friend -oriented girls. And so for her to have gone through a kind of period of friend withdrawal, she needed me at that moment and I was there. What do you mean you were both friend -oriented girls? Maybe all girls are friend -oriented and we just stayed that way. But we used to talk about this all the time that for both of us, our friends really were the most important people in our lives. We had our family, we had boyfriends, we always said we could do without a

boyfriend but we couldn't do without our girlfriends. We had to have that person to debrief with, that person to come home to at the end of the evening if it was on the phone or in person and talk about everything that had happened. Talk about our ideas, talk about writing, talk about what we dreamed about, what we wanted. That connection was air and water was just so vital to life. Lucy also needed a lot of reassurance. I mean there's scene after scene in your book, she is a habit of asking you, do you love me? Am I talented? Am I pretty? Where did that come from? Well, she'd had a really rough time. She had cancer when she was nine. She had had five years of radiation in chemotherapy. She'd been in and out of hospitals, her whole life. She was very, very different looking and there were certainly periods of her life that she was teased and ridiculed. She had good cause to be insecure about certain things. She was incredibly secure also about certain things, about her

intellect, about her talent, about her writing, about her sexuality. But there were always holes and she was afraid that she was going to fall through one of these holes. She wasn't pretty enough. She was going to be alone all her life. Those things really terrified her. Were there things you and Lucy could talk about with each other that you wouldn't talk about with anybody else? It wasn't a matter of things that we would talk about because I didn't have secrets and she really didn't have secrets. It was more a matter of how we talked. It was that shorthand of communication that you have with anybody that you've loved for years and years and lived with and been with and know inside and out. She knew the things to say that would make me happy. I knew the things to say that would make her feel good about herself. We could just sort of cut right to the chase. Don't you think there's something sort of mysterious about friendship? Because I'm listening to you talk and I'm thinking, oh it's so hard to put into words sort of the essential

essence of a particular friendship. It grows out of who two people are. It's true. Friendship is almost like a habit and you can look back and say I don't know where this started. I don't know how I became this person. But part of you just intertwines with that other person, especially I think between women and especially when they're young and in high school and in college and in graduate school, we really put our friends first and then we grow up and we get married and we have families and we have jobs and we're incredibly busy and we don't love our friends any less. But there's just no time anymore for that kind of intimacy. I mean Lucy and I used to talk about what we were going to wear and what we were going to eat and we want to go see this movie and had we read this book. We would just any minutia in our life. We went over all of that every day. But I think that the thing that was really different about us as we didn't grow out of it, we really stayed that close all the way through.

Were there currents in your friendship kind of, you know, if you now that you can look back large waxing and waning that took place over the course of years because I think about my friendships and I think that, you know, there are years when certain friends and I have pulled apart of it and then sometimes we find our way back together again and other times we don't. I think that that is where Lucy's health really did play into things because she had surgeries because there were really deep things she struggled with. That kept me much more in her daily life. If she was sick, I would go and take care of her. So there was not a time for us to really drift apart. Certainly in the last year and a half of her life when she was using heroin, we were under that strain. That was very hard for me. It was certainly very hard for her. But I think that when you fall in love with heroin, that becomes your best friend

and I was bumped to the side and I was angry about it. I was angry at her for doing the drug. But still we were always talking about it and talking about it really, really honestly. One of the things that I marvel about with my friendship with Lucy was that we used to fight and I don't fight with my other friends. I don't fight with anybody. I have a very steady, even keel. But if I was mad at Lucy, I felt so deeply connected to her and I so trusted the depth of our friendship that I could always say, you know, don't do this. I'm mad at you. We need to talk about this. How did she become a heroin addict? She came by it very honestly actually. If you read her book autobiography of a face, she talks about being addicted to coding when she was 10. And I think that on and off throughout her entire life, she was often addicted to painkillers. I can remember her going into

the hospital and having a surgery and being on a morphine drip and then they would wean her off the morphine drip and she would go through the DTs and the whole thing. It was really horrible. And part of that had to do with her being a very small person and a person who had taken drugs her whole life because she needed them. One of the surgeries that she had where she had a bone taken out of her leg and put into her jaw, which was about two years before she died, she was given oxy -contin, which was a wonderful pain killer except she started grinding them up and snorting them. And when she ran out of the oxy -contin, she then turned to heroin as a replacement for the oxy -contin. During the summer of those last years, she kept going partly because of you and other friends, but you put an enormous amount of energy into taking care of Lucy. When you spent time with her in multiple hospitals, you moved into her apartment and took care of her, you took her home with you. That must have been hard. It is a really important

point to make though that there were a lot of us. Lucy had several friends who were as devoted to her as I was and then she had a whole second tier level of friends of people who would come by and visit her and bring her food and help her out and take her to the doctor. But if she wasn't at my house, she was at Sophie's house and her friend Lucy Brock Brodo was picking her up. Her friend Ben was taking her to the hospital. There was a night that I remember. She always wanted one of us to be there when she woke up in recovery. She hated waking up after a surgery alone. It's very hard to be there when someone wakes up in recovery because obviously they won't let you stay and you never know when someone's going to come out of anesthesia. But there was a night when I think there were five of us who went to recovery separately, not running into each other and said, I'm her sister. I'm her brother. I'm her sister. I'm her brother. They would let us in for five minutes and then throw us out and then we would circle around and come back. I never got exhausted

by it because when I couldn't keep going, I would step aside and there would be somebody else there who would pick up my slack. When somebody else couldn't keep going, I would come in and pick up their slack. We really worked together in rotation, which was a great, great testament to who Lucy was and how much people loved her. I would think it would be hard to maintain the equilibrium of a friendship in that kind of situation where so much of it is evolving into caretaking into even a mother child kind of relationship. Did that happen? Show me a friendship with perfect equilibrium. Show me a love or a marriage with perfect equilibrium. I mean, I think that to love someone, to make that commitment where you say, I will stand by you no matter what, then things can get incredibly out of whack and you might have to be shouldering much, much more of

the load. But do you look at that person and say, oh, well, you know, my definition of love doesn't include this because now I'm having to carry too much of the weight. And I can certainly list all of the wonderful things that Lucy did for me. Lucy understood me. She made me feel profoundly known and loved and heard. She had a lot of faith in me and it's true. She never had to come to Nashville and clean my wounds and hold my head while I threw up. But that didn't make her any less and equal partner in our friendship. And Patchett is the author of the bestselling novel, Belcanto. Her new book is a memoir of her friendship with poet Lucy Greeley. It's called Truth and Beauty, A Friendship. And Patchett spoke with Anne Strangehems. It's one thing to

vacation in the Bahamas, take a few lessons and jump in the water with a tank on your back. It is quite another to do the kind of deep water diving Robert Kerson describes. His book is called Shadow Divers, tells the story of some intrepid deep water rec divers and their friendships. The rec site at the heart of the book was discovered at a depth of 230 feet by a fisherman who wasn't sure what he'd found. But according to Kerson, he knew who to talk to, veteran wreck diver Bill Nagel. Nagel was already legendary. He was a man built for exploration and he had been the one to take the bell off the Andrea Doria, a feat long thought to be impossible. He was among the greatest of the greats and yet alcohol had ravaged him in the recent years and he was incapable of making a dive to 230 feet. However, his best friend John Chatterton, also a great wreck diver, was more than capable of doing it. So together they put together a plan trip to explore this fisherman's numbers. Now, you said that John Chatterton was Nagel's best friend. But

in fact, at the time that this discovery was made, I get the impression that they weren't really very good friends at all, that instead they were maybe respectful of each other. Is that an honest way to put it? Well, I think they were very good friends. Nagel's alcoholism had consumed him so badly that Chatterton would later say that he missed his friend already. He barely recognized him. But they still did respect and love each other. They had a very long history of going to look for things that nobody else thought possible. And for that reason they still liked each other very much and still respected each other very much and enjoyed each other's company. Nagel, however, had become somewhat ornery and even belligerent toward his customers. And it was that part that was difficult for Chatterton to abide. Tell me about Chatterton then. He's the same kind of diver that Nagel was, but a little younger. There were virtually the same age. Chatterton had started much later in the game, though. Chatterton had only relatively recently come to deep water rec diving, but he had learned at Nagel's foot.

And Nagel knew talent when he saw it and kind of took Chatterton in under his wing. So even though they were roughly the same age, Chatterton was still very much the student to Nagel's old expertise. However, they were both incredibly capable in the water. And Chatterton had already, by this time in 1991, been responsible for some of the most daring and death -defying shipwreck dives on the American East Coast and had found and identified some major shipwrecks. It's diving that they do is not as simple as it sounds. We think you just slap a couple of tanks on your back and down you go, but as you've written in Shadow Divers, it's very dangerous thing and it takes a particular kind of person to do it effectively, right? Yes, in fact, it takes a large measure of a crazy person to do it. Someone who is hard -wired against millions of years of evolutionary instinct. This sport bears almost no resemblance to the resort area scuba with which we're also familiar. You don't simply go into nice, beautiful warm water at 20 or 30 feet and see a seahorse or a starfish and then surface. These men

go into cold, dark, sometimes black waters, and they go so deep and stay so long that they can't simply surface if something goes wrong. They owe what's called a decompression obligation, meaning that they need to come up slowly and stop at predetermined depths to allow the accumulated nitrogen to discharge. If they don't, they are inviting a serious case of the bends and that can cripple them or paralyze them or kill them. That's only the start of the deep water wreck divers problems. He also is dealing with a phenomenon known as Narcosis in which nitrogen build up fogs, his judgment centers and motor skills. It makes him see and hear things. It makes panic turn into a snowball. It can kill him as fast as anything. Then the diver contending with those dangers ventures inside these tangled, furious masses of shipwrecks that have pipe and wire and conduits, splayed everywhere. Any number of which can grab onto his 175 pounds worth of equipment and marry in at him into a wreck until he simply runs out of air and drowns. There are a thousand ways to die in this sport. Many of them needn't be your fault at all

and if you're in the sport for any amount of time whatsoever, you will either see someone die, come close to dying yourself or die yourself. There's a story you tell early in the book about a diver named Joe Draged, who was an experienced diver, I guess, but died with a full tank of air. Yes, many of these divers will die with more than enough air to have gotten themselves out of a problem and to have surfaced properly. It's the snowball of panic, though, that really ends up killing many of these guys. It's often not the first problem. It's that Narcosis and other panics set in and cause them to create overlaying problems. Joe Draged had more than enough air to survive and to help himself. Instead, he not only swam into the deep dark wreck with no air remaining, but he also slashed wildly with his knives. It would be saviors. That's the kind of panic that can set in when you're so far down in the water that you can't simply shoot for the sunshine and seagulls as they say. You know you have to stay down and yet you believe you can't breathe. It's a fundamental problem that

goes against millions of years of human biology and instinct. One of the things I guess that struck me, that made that story so powerful, is that he did attack his friends. This is a sport, as you call it, that attracts people who like each other, who have the same interests, who care about each other and who go down there knowing that they need to depend on their friends to get out. And yet at that moment, the big moment for him, he thought that I guess that they were trying to drown him. Yes, and that's the reason that many of these deep water wreck divers shun the idea of diving with a buddy. When you do resorderous scuba diving, the kind we're all familiar with, you go with the buddy all the time, that buddy can help you in case of a problem or guide you. But down deep, where every problem is potentially fatal, many of these guys don't want the friend nearby. And they don't want a friend nearby because they believe that they might attack that friend or that the friend might attack them if something goes wrong. Or if they go lost, a friend may come inside a shipwreck and go lost also. So dangers

leap from one man to another down deep in the ocean. And for that reason, many of these guys go by themselves. Now, but it was a big team that went down to look at the you buddy. It was what, a dozen divers? Yeah, it was 13 divers plus Nagel. So a total of 14 men went out to look for this set of numbers. Really, most of them, if not all of them believed they would find nothing. But they also believed in the proposition of looking. And when they got there, only Chatterton was truly capable of safely going to a depth of 230 feet. And that's why he alone went in when they got to the site. And he dove that day, not knowing what was going to be down there, thinking it might be, as you said, a barge that had gone down a garbage scow. How big were his expectations, do you think? They were minute. He was more convinced even than the fisherman that they would find nothing. When he got down there, he could tell it was some kind of shipwreck. He could see metal and he could see a big mass. But he was certain even then that he had found a pipe barge by the way the ship looked to be

angled and by the pipes that he saw on the exterior of the wreck. So even when he was down there, he thought, well, it was nothing but at least we came to look. But what changed his mind? Something did. Well, he poked his head into what looked like a room. And inside that room, he saw a shape. It was a shape that had lingered in his imagination since childhood. It was a shape he would later tell me of power. I couldn't quite believe what he was seeing because he was experiencing theirosis, that fogging of judgment that I talked about. So he closed his eyes and opened them again. And the shape was still there. And it was exactly what he thought it was, a full torpedo. And then he knew he had found a submarine. So what happened when he got close enough that other divers could come down and get some news from him? Well, they were clamoring around on top of the seeker, the dive boat that Bill Nagel owned and which had brought these divers to this site. And he wrote on a slate, an underwater slate that he had brought along with them three letters, S -U -B. And as soon as the other divers saw that it was a sub, they rushed the ocean. Many of

them probably didn't have very much business going to 230 feet. But news of a virgin submarine was too much for any of these men to deal with. And they rushed the ocean, went down, and every one of them saw exactly what Chatterton saw. They saw a submarine. All this while, of course, Bill Nagel is up there on the seeker because with his alcoholism, he can't dive anymore. Must have been awful for him, but exciting at the same time. Yes, it might have been the most painful moment of his life. This is the kind of discovery that Bill Nagel lived for and that he was born for. He had waited decades for this. As great as his feet was in taking the bell off the Andrea Doria, everyone knew where the Andrea Doria was. Nobody knew anything about this submarine. And yet here he was, at his moment, the real moment he could have made an incredible discovery and he could not get in the water. All he could do was watch. Do you think Chatterton knew that? I mean, Chatterton had to go back up at that point and tell Bill Nagel about it. Well, all the other divers were jumping in the water and

going down. He must have sensed what his friend was missing. He sensed it very much. And in fact, the two of them were left alone on the seeker while the others were in the water. And Chatterton was very kind to his friend and shared his enthusiasm but didn't hold it over his friend. He shared it. It was a true bonding between them because Chatterton more than anyone knew what this meant to Nagel and that Nagel needed to be part of this. And he included him in that way that if Nagel couldn't be in the water, at least Chatterton would be the first one to tell him about it, and Nagel would be the first one to know the details. Robert Kirsten tells the story of the wreck and the divers in his book Shadow Divers, the true adventure of two Americans who risked everything to solve one of the last mysteries in World War II. We're talking this hour about uncommon friendships, coming up the story of three

friends in Texas who made music together, we'll meet the flatlanders. I'm Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI, Public Radio International. Some 30 years ago, three young friends in Lubbock, Texas used to hang out together and make music. These singer -songwriters called themselves the flatlanders. They made an album which promptly dropped out of sight. Those three guys, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Bochankock, went their separate ways and carved out their own successful careers, but they always stayed in touch. And a few years ago, the

flatlanders reunited to critical acclaim in that original album that no one ever heard. Finally came out two decades after it was made, called Moral Legend Than a Band. It's one of the landmark albums of recent decades. Steve Paulson talked with the flatlanders about their years together, then and now. Well, Dallas is a G -Holo, we are Dallas is a beautiful side. And Dallas is a jungle, but Dallas gets a beautiful mind. If you ever see Dallas, I'm gonna be seen, mine and mine. But it take me back several decades to the early 70s when when you first came out that your original flatlanders album was back in 1972. Why did that album drop out of sight? I think it

never actually appeared in sight in the first place. So we we wound up getting a copy of an eight -track that they theoretically released and we were pretty proud of that for a week or two until Joe finally tracked down an eight -track recorder and we had our pictures on the package of the eight -track, but the sound that came out was Genie C. Ryeway. They had only imagined they had only pretended to release it. Yeah, so it was that was the first of a series of quick letdowns there. We sitting on top of the world one day and and then we started looking at each other nine going, well, we've been welcome to the music industry. My impression is that it just didn't it didn't get played much because Nashville didn't know what to do with you back in the early 70s. Your music was not what the country music establishment wanted. No, it certainly

was not what was being played at the time and it just completely didn't fit in. Now after your original flatlanders album came and went to each of you went on to very successful solo careers as singer -songwriters and I want to ask each of you if you could to describe your own particular musical style. Jimmy Dale Gilmore, how would you describe the kind of music that you've done over the years? You know, there's such a blend of different influences in my background that it's in fact this very process of trying to categorize it has been the bane of my whole career because say for a diehard country fans there was there was too much blues and rock and roll influence in my music and for rock and roll people have sounded to country. I think in lots of ways I got branded as a country singer mainly because of my nasal voice and my Texas accent. Joe Eli, what about you? How would you describe your music? Retro Blues, Hockey Tont Flamenco Billy.

That explains everything. That goes double for me. You know you can hear the blues and lots of our songs, you can hear country and lots of our songs you know but they're not exactly blues they're not exactly country like like Jimmy was saying. We have eternally been cursed and blessed with this position of not really being able to exactly define certainly a category that our music can settle into. I think that it has a lot to do with just the place that we grew up and in Texas there's so many different influences coming in from you know the Mexican music coming up from the border and the you know the East Texas blues and the dusty old windy honky -tonk and country stuff and then you know the rock and roll that's you know been around from the time of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison and we picked up all of those influences and they're all inside of us so whenever we do music it all comes out. Well I

made a few mistakes by pitching pennies and I've struck some matches down some dirty streets and the fires of love I've lived have burned two ashes and now they're only smoldering at my feet. Which Hancock you're often described as a storyteller that's like the first description that's ever attached to the music you do. Is that true? I mean how would you describe your music? Well yeah some of them definitely go into that realm to excess sometimes. You know probably the first songs I started doing were more like little stories and I was writing a lot of songs while driving a tractor from my dad out there and so those first tunes were just kind of what I saw out on those dusty plains here comes the school bus there

goes the cows and the meadows you know yeah I'm pretty simple but the basic you know and I wouldn't exactly put myself in another category either I've you know I've had a pretty loud rock band or two but I've played more of my music probably just as a solo and traveling through Badoria. Yeah baby you love me still I was born under blue skies in the land of the wind there ain't nothing never happened that can happen again you've seen my saving grace and you've seen my sin baby you love me still in your new album Wheel of Fortune you've done something rather unusual each of you sing songs written by someone else well why did you decide to do this?

I don't know if we decided to do it but it just kind of happened in the studio when we got together for several days eight or ten hours a day and just played from morning to night and as the songs came down somebody would just say hey I've got a song and start playing it and then like one of my songs that I'd never recorded I never liked the way that I sang it and I said Jimmy would you try this and Jimmy said you know it sounds like something that I would do. So which song was that that you'd never recorded? Jimmy did a song called Back to My Old Mole Hill and then I did two of Jimmy's one called Midnight Train and go to sleep alone. So interesting to hear you all

talking about this I mean it sounds like there's not a real feeling of ownership over the songs you yourselves write. I think in a sense that's that's kind of true it's I've always looked at the idea that the job of the artist is to stay out of the way of their art and to really allow it to happen. Kind of help it along here in there but to not get in the way. There's only one time that I can think of that there's been a little bit of a problem when butch dreamed Jimmy singing a song and then he wrote it down and they're still having a little debate over who actually owns that song. Copyright is not quite so little to you. I mean it was it was Jimmy on a tape recorder in a dream so you know that's who knows. Is that one of the songs on this album? Yes. Which one? The one's followed by the wind. One's followed by the wind.

One's led astray by strangers in the shadows. Magnetized by cheer drops falling from clear blue eyes. One's forgotten by my friends but remembered well time and again by sweetheart. Revitalized by rain drops falling from clear blue eyes. I was hearing Jimmy singing a little it had like a band playing with him that was like a little cigar box guitars and rubber band you know fiddles and things kind of a Jiminy cricket band but it was this wonderful pretty little melody and I woke up in the middle of it and I actually had to go back go back to sleep and get back into the dream and and then rewind the tape recorder. It was an old reel to reel right there in the dream and then play it forward and get the rest of the song out. You're serious about that. That's how you wrote

this song. I mean they was partly composed in some dream state. There's lots more details to it but that's exactly what happened yeah. Wow. Is that common? Writing a song like that? No I don't think it's common no. Do you? I've never heard of anybody having like actually waking up and then going back to sleep and punching the rewind in order to finish a song. I have to say one touch I love in some of these songs is

the musical saw. What does that sound add to a song? Weirdness. Something kind of like this it goes yeah it's sort of that that that that wind blowing through the west Texas high lines you know. So it's just kind of weirdness that's just sort of well out we didn't do it on purpose it was part of the early process of when we were all living together in this house everybody in the neighborhood had come over and we would sit and play in the living room and and our friends had come over and join in and and Steve was a carpenter and he had bring his saw over and started playing along with us and so it just became part of the flatlander sound and that's the way the whole progression of the way the sound came about was just who whoever was in the neighborhood and who dropped by and chimed in one time he he brought his um his circular saw the electric one and we almost threw him out of the van.

What are you saying? He actually tried to play that. Yeah he tried to play it. Yeah but we weren't ready to go electric yet. We were still unplugged we were unplugged before unplugged it was cool you know. Was it hard to mesh your different musical sensibilities? I mean especially after each of you had spent all of these years doing your own thing I mean you had your solo careers was it hard to come back together then and work together? No now quite the opposite. In certain real important ways butch and joe have been you know my music teachers from for certain real important aspects of the music that I know and that I love and that continues just as much now as it was when we were first getting together when we were real young. All the street lights on main street know my shadow all the stars up in the sky know all of my

wishes and the sun walk on your street knows my footsteps and the stars keep telling me I'm repetitions I keep wishing for you Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hencock the flatlanders the recent albums include wheels of fortune and now again Steve Paulson spoke with them coming up more stories about friends the intertwined lives of writers and artists I'm Jim Fleming it's to the best of our knowledge from the R .I. Public Radio International I don't waste my time with gossip

magazines but I do have to admit I always read those paragraphs or pages of author acknowledgments with I recognize any of the names who's a friend and an influence Rachel Cohen has mined American literary history looking for the same sort of connections and she's found enough of them to fill a fascinating book it's called a chance meeting she read a small sample for Steve Paulson it was just before two in the morning and a hard crane decided to go to bed he hung his clothes neatly over the back of a chair as he took them off and he put on his pajamas he didn't have slippers and the floor was cold though it was only October he closed the notebook on the table set the pen square on top of it and picked up the volume of Elizabethan poetry to take with him to bed there was a knock on the door he looked at the clock frowning to himself as if to disapprove but he was glad that the evening suddenly promised an event he opened the door and his good friend Waldo Frank entered the room behind him came as Crane wrote to his mother the next day a most pleasant looking twinkling little man in a black derby it was Charlie Chaplin

so was this just a totally unexpected visit it was yeah hard crane had no idea he loved Charlie Chaplin he went to see all his movies and he had written a poem for Chaplin and sent it to Chaplin and been gratified to get a letter back but Chaplin didn't particularly have a sense of who Crane was and was friends with his other person Waldo Frank whom Crane knew and they just showed up at his door and he was thrilled it was one of the highlights for him of his it was then a young poet he just moved to New York and he wrote this extravagant letter home to his mother about the whole thing now this seems like such an unlikely pairing and it's really what your book is full of a poet meeting a famous filmmaker and it seems like that's the kind of connection that you love to find yeah I was interested in all those things some of the meetings in the book are two novelists or a writer and an editor kind of relationships that you think of as more traditional long -term friendships but it's always surprised me how often people would be really inspired by or taken with or influenced by somebody unexpected like I had no sense that

heart crane who was such a complex poet influenced by Melville and with this sort of Elizabethan language of his own would also have such a soft spot for Charlie Chaplin where did the idea for this book come from because it's a very unusual book I mean it's not at all a conventional literary biography and there are these kind of little snapshot portraits of various artists and writers and photographers where I was driving around the United States and I was spending a year doing that this was about 10 years ago and I was trying to write a book like travels with Charlie you know a John Steinbeck kind of book and maybe the problem was that I didn't have a dog and maybe the problem was that I wasn't John Steinbeck but anyway I found that book impossible that wasn't my own way of writing and so then in all these books in my trunk I was reading all the time I was trying to get a sense of the relationship of American literature to its landscape I was going to Mark Twain's boyhood home and that kind of thing and I went to Vicksburg and I bought grants memoirs and I saw yeah and I saw that they

had been published by Mark Twain and it really was a sort of epiphany moment where I thought oh these two men who I had no idea knew each other had this profound impact on each other's lives and I started trying to write about that relationship and from that came other relationships and I just I sort of kept on with it for 10 years well tell me about that particular relationship you list his grant and Mark Twain and Mark Twain Mark Twain had fought very briefly for three weeks for the Confederate Army and a kind of Ragtag group of volunteers whereas you list his grant had obviously essentially won the Civil War for the North so they had had these completely different experiences of the formative kind of event of their time and Twain was taken to meet Grant when Grant was president and they didn't make too much of an impression on each other or rather Grant made a huge impression on Twain and Twain made very little on Grant and then they met again later and at that point they were sort of ready for each other and Grant was struggling he was not sure how to make money he couldn't be president again he was getting ill and he was trying to write his memoirs and

Twain was incredibly supportive and helpful and offered to publish them with his publishing company and they set up a good financial deal and it mattered so much to Grant that this writer who was now the famous Mark Twain who's worked he loved and admired cared about his work too and it turned out that these memoirs by Grant were wonderful I mean it was not just another scheme to make money and this is this was one of the great literary artifacts of the 19th century yeah he was he was a major writer or I think he was and you can see the beginnings of it in his communicates you know wrote these beautifully clear directions to the different generals who were following his instructions and he was very brilliantly able to hold the whole war in his mind and kind of write it out and so there's the first beginnings of that sense in reading his correspondence but it's still a surprise that he should be so fully formed as a writer and his memoir should come out with such clarity and such balance of phrase now another man who keeps popping up in your book is the photographer Matthew Brady who who took a famous

photograph I guess it wasn't called a photograph was it it was a photograph of Grant of Grant during the Civil War and I guess this really helped Grant's cause it did yeah because it was a kind of it was an image of his success and his authority and his power in a time when the people in the North were desperate for any sign of that because the war hung in the balance and they were so ready for it to be over so it was an instrumental photograph and Brady was famous photographer at that time and everybody sort of knew his images he'd taken lots of photographs of Lincoln and of other generals and presidents and so it was a sort of symbol of Grant's future success that photograph now your book actually opens with another vignette about Matthew Brady the young Henry James that the future a great novelist happened to be going into New York with his father and they went to have their picture taken by Matthew Brady yeah Henry James was 11 then turning 12 and

and he was very worried when he had that photograph taken because he had a little jacket on and it had nine buttons and he had recently been told by the novelist Zachary that English boys of his age had jackets with fewer buttons and so he felt very self -conscious and like yet too many buttons while he was having his photograph taken and he also started to feel that there was something wrong with him and his family that they were American in some way that was troubling and so it was a really important early moment of self -consciousness for him that he wrote about many years later and it's interesting because you would think who would care about how many buttons you have on your jacket but somehow that detail mattered to it at the time all Americans were very concerned with defining themselves against Europe in some way or with coming up with a new American identity when when Europe had for so long to find culture and taste and style so that any pejorative comment by such a masterful Englishman as Zachary would be taken very much to heart and that was really the great cultural question of the 19th century wasn't it would America be

a pale imitation of Europe or could it do something new of its own yeah and that was really part of the reason that I chose to begin the book around the time of the Civil War because that was such an important moment of self -definition and it was an internal moment which is always when a nation starts to come into its own in a sense and to define itself on its own terms rather than just reacting to other people and so that was that was important to me I felt that the country was in a moment of self -consciousness that was a little bit like Little Henry James's. Now another man who figures prominently in the early part of your book is William Dean Howles who's who's largely a forgotten figure today but he was a novelist himself went on to become editor of the Atlantic Monthly and I guess through that position came to know virtually all the great writers of his day. Yeah and he was himself actually very famous as a writer at that time and and very highly respected but he was he was just a brilliant editor he was one of those people with an incredible talent for seeing the project of other people and trying to figure out

how to help them realize that project which is so different than understanding your own project. He was very close friends with Mark Twain he was very close friends with Henry James he pretty much gave Sarah Ornjou at her start who at the time was one of the major writers of that day and he really around him grew this idea of of an American literary scene of people who wrote about specifically American landscapes specifically American social situations. Mark Twain wrote his first sketches of the Mississippi for William Dean Howles Henry James wrote all of these early novels for serialization in the Atlantic it was an incredible flowering of American talent. Now one of the things that you do in your book a chance meeting is that you you kind of reclaim certain writers who've been pretty much forgotten even though they were very popular in their day one was Sarah Ornjou at tell me about her. Oh yeah she's she's a favorite writer of mine I particularly love her book in the country of the pointed first. She was somebody who at the time was was very widely published was one of the rare women

who made her living by writing and she wrote mostly about the countryside of Maine where she grew up and the sort of little islands and villages along that coast. She wrote very beautiful dialogue of older women who lived there and so there was a real quality of historical preservation about what she was doing she was interested in documenting a kind of older culture that she recognized to be passing so that now the stories have an old sound to them but she was also a wonderful observer of nature and she spent a lot of time looking at trees and plants and birds and all of that is in her work too. And who did she know? Oh she knew a lot of people she was actually very well connected as everybody is. Her kind of intimate companion was this woman Annie Adams Fields and Annie Adams Fields had been married to James Fields who had been the publisher of the Atlantic before William Dean Howell's took it over. So she knew Howell's and she and Annie Adams Fields went to visit Henry James in Rye in England when he was living there and she also was a very important mentor to Willa Cather who kind of

came into her own sense of how to write American landscape partly under the influence of Sarah Warren Jewett. So did Sarah Warren Jewett give Willa Cather some advice? Yeah very particular advice. She wrote a kind of now famous or among Willa Cather scholars famous letter telling her that you need to be solitary as a writer and yet you need to know the whole world and advising Cather to stop doing the magazine work that she was doing which she thought was distracting and really focus on her Virginia childhood and her Nebraska growing up which was in fact exactly what Cather went on to do. Rachel Cohen's book is called A Chance Meeting, intertwined lives of American writers and artists 1854 to 1967. Steve Paulson spoke with her. It's to the best of our knowledge I'm Jim Fleming. To buy this program on cassette just call the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444. Ask for program number

9 -12 -A. Uncommon friendships. To the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio by Steve Paulson, Veronica Rickert, Charles Monroe Kane, and Strange Shamps, Doug Gordon, and Meredith Finnegan with engineering help from Marv Nunn and Carillo One.