Rare conjunctions of the stars

Lawyers meet lawyers, historians and economists meet their colleagues. They have a defined profession. Creative writers have no defined profession: their concern is human nature in all its complexity. Yet they do bump into each other and are often obsessively interested in each other’s works and lives. Rachel Cohen is concerned with the way their lives become intertwined as a result of ‘a chance meeting’.

James Baldwin reluctantly goes to a Paris party of the Marxist writer Jean Malaquais where Norman Mailer, glass in hand, is doing his loud-voiced party piece. It is the point de départ of a friendship based on mutual admiration. Is this first chance meeting significant? They would inevitably have met, since they moved in the same radical circles in New York. But first meetings allow Cohen to indulge her taste for detailed, evocative description. Marianne Moore, whom T. S. Eliot considered one of the few contemporary poets whose works would endure, in her seventies is taken by George Plimpton to the prize fight between Floyd Patterson and George Chuvalo.