Passing on the spark of creativity

A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Livesof American Writersand Artists, 1854-1967

By Rachel Cohen

Random House, 363 pp., illustrated, $25.95

The blueprint for Rachel Cohen's ''A Chance Meeting" is so simple it's a wonder no writer has designed a book quite like it before. A study of American cultural history from roughly the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, it is built around the biographies of 30 writers and artists whose paths cross and re-cross over the years, usually in Boston or New York but sometimes only through the mail.

In each chapter figures are paired off -- Henry James, for example, with Mathew Brady, who takes a portrait of the little boy and his father -- so that Cohen can introduce them, disclose pertinent information about their lives and careers, and ponder the basis of their relationship, as well as its consequences, if any. Each figure is then sent off to meet others -- James with William Dean Howells, Brady with Ulysses Grant.

Cohen also creates a half-dozen threesomes. In one chapter the main action describes the elderly James touring by train and motorcar around the south of England while attending to and being fussed over by his American visitors, Sarah Orne Jewett and her companion, Annie Adams Fields, widow of the Boston publisher. To give her characters their due, Cohen has all but a couple of them make at least three appearances. (Alfred Stieglitz makes four.)

The captivating result is like an elaborate fugue. Cohen shifts forward and backward in time, and her subjects change in tone and shading with each encounter, a Proustian approach to biography that views personality as more fluid and contextual than fixed. The 70-year-old Mark Twain is not the same person when reflected in the awestruck eyes of 26-year-old Willa Cather that he is in the company of his old friend Grant.

And Cather, whose essay on meeting Flaubert's niece inspired the title of Cohen's book, has become a revered master when she reappears to have her picture taken by Edward Steichen in 1926. This portrait in turn rests on Katherine Anne Porter's desk as she writes what Cohen calls her ''splendid, if largely inaccurate, memorial essay on" Cather in 1952.

Blending verifiable fact with scholarly guesswork -- and careful to differentiate the two with the words ''maybe" or ''perhaps" -- Cohen has written what she calls ''imaginative nonfiction." But because her prose is elegant yet plain, and her judgments sound and generous -- she seems to look down on no one -- she earns the reader's trust. Here is her poignant scene of Twain after his 70th-birthday gala at Delmonico's in New York:

''Twain loved parties like this. Ordinarily, he got so wrought up that he stayed awake until the morning hours writing letters describing the particulars to people who hadn't been there. On the occasion of his own birthday, though, there were few friends to write to, for they were nearly all present -- William Dean Howells, Henry Rogers, Andrew Carnegie -- the friends of a lifetime."

While carving a set of brilliant miniatures, Cohen is also indirectly telling a story of sex, race, political protest, and celebrity culture in America, from the Victorian era to the 1960s. In so doing she is by no means drawing a progressive arc that ends in a Hegelian ideal. Friendship trumps freedom as the prime motive force. If for Emerson ''all history is biography," for Cohen all biography is about love. The many sorts that these figures express toward one another, admiration and respect above all, bind this collection of extraordinary people together.

As she hopscotches across the Elysian fields, Cohen lands on many unexpected places. She pairs Hart Crane with Charlie Chaplin and finds in the poet's image of ''a famished kitten on the step" traces of the filmmaker's potent sentimentality. Her six-degrees-of-separation strategy at times threatens to trivialize the idea of artistic influence. W.E.B. Dubois meets William James, who was Gertrude Stein's teacher at Johns Hopkins and whose friendship with Carl Van Vechten can be heard as a faint echo in the Harlem Renaissance.

Readers will inevitably name other couples whose lives could as profitably have been braided. Music is neglected, with John Cage as the sole player. There are no dancers and no painters, unless you count the part-timer Marcel Duchamp. But there are six photographers, probably because they allow Cohen to make easy introductions between strangers, while her poets yield all the pathos (Crane, Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell) as well as touching correspondence (Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop) that any biographer could wish for. Two of her characters (Richard Avedon and Norman Mailer) are still alive, leaving the happy impression that the past still flows into the present.

Should her book turn into a bestseller -- and it has the potential to become bedside reading for every PBS subscriber -- some academics whose labor she has cannibalized may be irked. But that resentment would be shortsighted. At the back of the book are sets of notes for each chapter in which she credits those on whom she has relied.

Rather than deaden enthusiasm for more comprehensive tomes, I found that her book only challenged me to pick up those collections of letters and university press biographies, not to mention the unopened novels and poems and essays, in hopes that I might read them as deeply as she has.

Richard B. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.