By Blake Bailey

May 9, 2004 | 8:00 p.m

A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 , by Rachel Cohen. Random House, 363 pages, $25.95.

Borrowing a phrase from Twain, Rachel Cohen describes her splendid new book as a "private history"-but there are some nice public moments as well. Would you believe that a poet once threw out the opening pitch at Yankee Stadium? Marianne Moore did in 1968. Moore also wrote the liner notes for Muhammad Ali's album, I Am the Greatest!, and even collaborated with the boxer on a snippet of pre-bout verse: "If he criticize this poem by me and Miss Moore, / To prove he is not the champ she will stop him in four," Mr. Ali and the poet warned challenger Ernie Terrell. After a long life sequestered with the muses, Moore seemed to relish her sunset celebrity, and I don't blame her. There are so many unexpected pleasures in Ms. Cohen's book that it's hard to reduce it to any particular formula, but it's mostly a book about the solace of friendship-the ripples of influence that spread among creative people who feel an affinity for one another. A Chance Meeting takes its title from an essay by Willa Cather, in which Cather describes an encounter with Flaubert's niece in Provence: "I took one of her lovely hands and kissed it," Cather wrote, "in homage to a great period." The period evoked in Ms. Cohen's book is "the fruitful, difficult period that held two related struggles, the Civil War and the civil rights movement," and its cast is an odd assortment of writers and thinkers and artists-illustrious and not so illustrious-linked by acquaintance, casual or cultivated, and their desire to make art in America. Writers are lonely people, and perhaps it's safe to say that most great writers have no particular genius for friendship, especially not with other writers. When it happens, though, as Ms. Cohen shows us, it's a beautiful thing. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, who met only occasionally over the course of their long lives, were virtually dependent on each other as epistolary companions. When Twain wrote an admiring essay about his friend's work, Howells replied that he'd rather have Twain's praise than any living man's-with the possible exception of Tolstoy, he added with characteristic frankness, "but I do not love him as I love you." And Twain wrote back that he loved Howells, too. There's a touch of elegy about Ms. Cohen's book-nostalgia for a time when people wrote real letters to be saved and cherished and read over again, when letters were among the finest things in life. For example, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop-while in Brooklyn and Brazil, respectively-"were constantly on the lookout for books and articles and films and art shows and seashells and details of landscape that might be of interest to their friends and particularly to each other." So that's what friendship is, one thinks. Oddlyenough,thefastidious Bishop was also great friends with Robert Lowell,whocouldhardlyhave been more inimical as an artist and a man: "Lowell was someone who consumed," writes Ms. Cohen, "who had no boundaries at all, who made epics, who put everything in. Bishop selected, she made discrete things …. He thought the best you could be was inclusive; she thought the best you could be was exact." And yet the dialectic of an oddball friendship can be even more fruitful than a meeting of like minds. Without Lowell's influence, one wonders if Bishop would have been moved to write one of her greatest, weirdest poems, "The Armadillo," which is dedicated to Lowell and ends in a shriek of italics: "O falling fire and piercing cry / and panic, and a weak mailed fist / clenched ignorant against the sky!" Ms. Cohen likes to remind us of our human tendency to imitate, wistfully, the very people who are most unlike ourselves-hence Henry James' visits with wounded soldiers during the Great War, "in conscious imitation of Whitman's Civil War experience" and perhaps in penance for a bad review he'd written, many years before, of Whitman's Drum-Taps. If A Chance Meeting were simply a random series of biographical vignettes,itwouldbeinteresting enough, but in fact it's an exquisitely wrought work of art. For one thing, Ms. Cohen takes the liberty of making stuff up, though she wants to be "very clear about the distinction" between the imaginary and real, as she notes in her introduction. We are duly alerted, then, that the beginning and ending of each chapter are largely fictional, and that the words "perhaps" and "could" are used in between to suggest "the change in register." Since Ms. Cohen has a novelist's sense of character and detail, this dash of creativity is mostly successful, and even tends to heighten the plausibility of the merely "true" material. We see Whitman preparing to sit for photographer Mathew Brady, "keeping his beard out of the way of the top button" as he pulls his shirt on, or Charlie Chaplin indulging in a bit of compulsive mimicry for the benefit of an elderly W.E.B. Du Bois: "Then Chaplin was standing, still narrow but shoulders back, very dignified, and carefully using a cane that wasn't there. Du Bois, laughing, recognized himself." If such moments didn't happen as described, well, perhaps they should have. Conjectural scenes also serve to bolster the intricate architecture of the book. In a chapter otherwise devoted to a brief meeting between Twain and Cather-at Twain's 70th-birthday gala-Ms. Cohen imagines a nightcap between Twain and Howells, the two friends laughing "at the memory of Twain insulting John Greenleaf Whittier at Whittier's seventieth-birthday party," a scene recounted earlier in the book. Sometimes, too, a particular motif is woven into the narrative with an almost Nabokovian delicacy. In the first chapter, an 11-year-old Henry James poses with his father for Mathew Brady, the little boy wearing a curious jacket with nine buttons; two chapters later, it is noted (without pointing) that General Grant, also posing for Brady, is wearing a jacket with nine buttons; later still, we learn that Henry James, in his autobiography, expressed a subtle "primacy of inheritance" over his brother William "by choosing as illustration the daguerreotype of himself and his father taken so long ago in Mathew Brady's studio"; and finally Ms. Cohen mentions an essay on James by Marianne Moore, who alludes to how "the coat with too many buttons" made the boy feel that he and his family were "somehow queer," an alienation Moore herself knew all too well. What makes A Chance Meeting work, above all, is Ms. Cohen's astonishing sympathy with her characters, an instinct for their company which, she admits, was her main guide in selecting them: "I often thought about the way Hart Crane had addressed Walt Whitman in The Bridge: 'Not greatest, thou,-not first, nor last,-but near.'" The good biographer knows what it is to feel this intuitive grasp of a subject's motives, more reliable than facts, and will recognize it everywhere in Rachel Cohen's work. Often a single aperçu brings a character to life, as when she tells of William James' decision to stay in Massachusetts while his beloved sister Alice was dying of breast cancer in Europe: "instead [he] sent a letter, one that struck the mingled note of sympathy and self-absorption so familiar to Henry and Alice as to be almost reassuring." The faint note of censure in that "almost"-the ironic kindliness of it, too-is something close to genius. Blake Bailey's biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty (Picador), is now available in paperback.