Pleased To Meet You

I enjoy reading accounts of great writers meeting, though such occasions are often comically mundane. Joyce and Proust met at a dinner party in 1922, three months after the publication of Ulysses, and according to William Carlos Williams, the greatest novelists of the 20th century commiserated over hypochondria. Why are we surprised? Genius resides on the page. The rest is mere humanity – children, sore feet, money woes.

Henry James and Edith Wharton met often and remained mutually admiring friends. In a 1905 letter, James told Wharton he thought The House of Mirth “carried off with a high, strong hand & an admirable touch, finding it altogether a superior thing…The book remains one that does you great honour – though it is better written than composed; it is indeed throughout extremely well written, & in places quite `consummately.’ I wish we could talk of it in a motor car.” The last sentence refers to the time Wharton drove James about in her then-novel automobile and both had a whooping good time.

That excursion is my favorite anecdote about the supposedly starchy Master, though James reading Walt Whitman aloud to Wharton rivals it. Here’s how she describes the scene in A Backward Glance:

“James's reading was a thing apart, an emanation of his inmost self, unaffected by fashion or elocutionary artifice. He read from his soul, and no one who never heard him read poetry knows what that soul was. Another day some one spoke of Whitman, and it was a joy to me to discover that James thought him, as I did, the greatest of American poets. `Leaves of Grass’ was put into his hands, and all that evening we sat rapt while he wandered from `The Song of Myself’ to `When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed’ (when he read `Lovely and soothing Death’ his voice filled the hushed room like an organ adagio), and thence let himself be lured on to the mysterious music of `Out of the Cradle’, reading, or rather crooning it in a mood of subdued ecstasy till the fivefold invocation to Death tolled out like the knocks in the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony.

``James's admiration of Whitman, his immediate response to that mighty appeal, was a new proof of the way in which, above a certain level, the most divergent intelligences walk together like gods. We talked long that night of `Leaves of Grass’, tossing back and forth to each other treasure after treasure; but finally James, in one of his sudden humorous drops from the heights, flung up his hands and cried out with the old stammer and twinkle: `Oh, yes, a great genius; undoubtedly a very great genius! Only one cannot help deploring his too-extensive acquaintance with foreign languages.’”

The most sublime meeting of writers I know of occurred serendipitously, on April 11, 1819. John Keats had just returned from Scotland and was reading Dante and starting to write “Hyperion.” His brother Tom had died from tuberculosis four months earlier and Keats himself was suffering early symptoms of the disease. He was walking on the Heath when he encountered Samuel Taylor Coleridge, strolling with J.H. Green, who had been one of Keats’ instructors at Guy’s Hospital and who introduced the poets.

The meeting ought to possess a sense of ceremony, of poetic succession, with one generation handing on the tradition to the next. It does not. Retrospectively, we know Keats will be dead at the age of 25 in less than two years. Coleridge, his finest poetry already written, lived another 15 years.

Richard Holmes, in the second volume of his biography of Coleridge, Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, gives the best account of the meeting. He cites a letter Keats wrote to his brother George, in which the younger poet confirms our impression of Coleridge as a charmingly inspired windbag. He “broached a thousand things,” and Keats renders a comic account of Coleridge’s conversation: “-- let me see if I can give you a list. – Nightingales, Poetry – on Poetical sensation – Metaphysics – Different genera and species of Dreams – Nightmare – a dream accompanied by a sense of Touch – A dream related – First and Second Consciousness,” and so on, for another five lines.

The meeting, in Holmes’ words, “seems to have galvanized [Keats] into life.” The doomed poet wrote a sonnet, “A Dream,” and, more importantly, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” within 10 days of the meeting. “In May and June Keats went on to write his great odes, which have many half-conscious echoes of Coleridge’s Stowey poems,” Holmes writes. Both poets write, famously, of nightingales.

For his part, Coleridge claimed to have told Green, after the poets parted, “There is death in that hand.” Coleridge was an inveterate fabulator, but Holmes is inclined to credit his seeming precognition. He tells us Coleridge later read “Hyperion,” and chillingly cites the last line of the first stanza: “When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.”

My love of both poets, my sympathy for their often difficult lives, is only enhanced by this story. Coleridge could have snubbed Keats, sensing in him an overpowering poetic rival. For his part, Keats could have dismissed Coleridge as a blowhard well past his poetic prime. Instead, both reacted with admirable generosity of spirit.