Coincidence

In about 2004, I moved from London to Houston, Texas. When I told my UK friends about the move, it was like they couldn’t hear what I was saying: they thought I was saying ‘I’m moving to Euston’. I didn’t know much about Houston beyond the Enron Scandal and Destiny’s Child. I moved into a house on Mandell Street, in the Montrose district, opposite the Menil Collection, a gallery featuring many early to mid-20th century works, and the Rothko Chapel, a haunting chapel built to house 14 large works by Mark Rothko.

After about a month, I briefly returned to the UK to attend a conference at the University of Exeter on 17th-century verse libels: short, often outrageous poems that circulated widely and usually anonymously in manuscript, lampooning politicians, sending up hangers-on around the Royal family – that kind of thing. Delighting in scandal. After the first day of the conference, the speakers gathered in a dingy basement bar – this is all a long time ago so my memory is a bit impressionistic – for a drink and conversation about things other than 17th-century verse libels. There was quite a lot of talk about the looming American election: Bush, Kerry, Edwards, Cheney.

I was sitting opposite a young man who introduced himself in a very friendly way: he was finishing a PhD on 17th-century poetry, and he was particularly interested in the ways poems were transmitted in manuscript, changing as they moved between readers. He was over in the UK just for this conference. He asked where I lived and I said, ‘I’ve just moved to America.’ He said, ‘I’m American!’, and he asked where I lived. I said, ‘It’s a bit random, but I’ve just moved to Texas.’ He said, ‘I live in Texas!’ I said, ‘Amazing. Where in Texas?’ He said, ‘Houston.’ I started to speak slower, more tentatively. I said, ‘I live in Houston.’ He said, ‘You’re kidding. Whereabouts?’ I said, ‘Montrose.’ He said, ‘Me too.’ I said, ‘Opposite the Menil Collection.’ He said, ‘Me too. I’m round the corner.’

I never thought he was joking (the obvious response), but for a fraction of a second I did think that he was me, or I was him – that I was meeting myself, somehow both in the present and a couple of years late.

I said, ‘That’s where I live. I’ve been there about a month.’

He said, ‘Me too.’

We both put down our drinks and pondered this information which, among other qualities, seemed extravagantly excessive.

Coincidences often contain within themselves non-coincidences: rational explanations (the Montrose area is full of academics; Rice is a major university) that pull the petals off the flower, one by one. And, of course, statistically (as a certain kind of person will always say), coincidences happen all the time: the probability of two people having the same birthday already exceeds 50% in a group of only 23 persons, etc etc. But still: we lived round the corner (100 yards?) in a very far away place, and only discovered this in a bar in Exeter after a day reflecting on poems about the Duke of Buckingham. Had I sat next to someone else in the bar, and so never asked my new friend where he lived, our far-away neighbourliness would have remained buried forever. Coincidences, as well as being funny and joyful and remarkable, are unsettling because their implausibility spreads a sense of precarity across all experience: a sense that things are only just as they are.

Coincidences are a problem for art, or at least for realist art. As the novel’s plot snaps shut in the closing pages, the reader needs to feel that these things could happen. One of my favourite books of literary criticism is Terence Cave’s Recognitions (1988), a study of recognition scenes in literature. It’s the kind of vast, century-spanning work that rarely gets written now: Aristotle to John Le Carré. Cave has a nice way of characterising recognition scenes: he says they represent ‘improper knowledge’, because their unlikely yoking-together (my daughter, after all these years! my father, who I thought was dead!) is a stumbling block to belief, and disturbs the decorum readers expect. A recognition scene comes as the culminating moment in a work of art, but it is by its nature a problem, not a moment of pleasing resolution or satisfaction. When Shakespeare’s Pericles gazes on the young woman who visits him and realises this is the daughter he thought was long dead, this seems like the healing of a broken story: ‘yet the satisfaction is also somehow excessive,’ Cave writes (of such scenes more generally), ‘the reassurance too easy; the structure … visibly prone to collapse.’ Hence, perhaps, Pericles’ immediate response: he pushes her away; he worries the ‘sweetness’ of recognition will, like waves, ‘O’erbear the shores of my mortality.’