A Loaded Gun (14 page)

But it was Emily's “Blue Peninsula” that appealed to Cornell most, her land of longing, and he must have felt like some Frankenstein monster in relation to her, Emily's malformed modern twin, who stalked Manhattan like some pitiless scavenger, looking for artifacts
and clues to his own existence. Cornell needed Emily's “Blue Peninsula” as much as she ever did.

2

H
E WAS BORN
J
OSEPH
I. C
ORNELL
(the sixth in a line of Cornells with the identical name), on Christmas Eve, 1903, in Nyack, a resort town on the Hudson that was crumbling into ruin, yet had once been famous for its mansions and luxurious hotels. Edward Hopper had come from the same town: Haunted, half-empty hotels, where humans in their isolation barely left a trace, would mark both their work like some terrifying motif—the void of hotel rooms would breathe its own primitive fire in Hopper's paintings and Cornell's collages and shadow boxes; in fact, Hopper's canvases were like mammoth shadow boxes, where the walls were about to collapse. And Cornell's shadow boxes always seemed to carry the crumbling debris of some lost hotel.

His father, Joseph I. Cornell the fifth, a successful textile designer, was a dapper man who dressed in Sulka shirts and took part in local theatrical productions, but didn't have his wife's aristocratic credentials. Helen Ten Broeck Storms Cornell may have lacked her husband's panache, but she could trace her Dutch ancestors back to the American Revolution—her grandfather was one of the richest men in Nyack and had an avenue named after him.

Cornell had two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Helen, and a baby brother, Robert, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy at birth and never learned to walk. A year before her marriage, Helen had studied to become a kindergarten teacher, and though she never taught, she would remain a kind of kindergarten teacher most of her life, taking care of
two
handicapped sons, Robert and Joseph, who could never seem to crawl out from under his mother's control.

He didn't have the least bit of artistic bent.
“I've never called myself an artist,” he would declare, long after he had become famous with his shadow boxes. “I can't draw, paint, sculpt, make lithographs.” But
even as a boy, he loved to collect things and to watch people, as if every gesture of theirs was a private performance for Joseph Cornell, who lived in his very own circus. His favorite
performer
was Harry Houdini, the ultimate escape artist, whom Cornell had seen several times at the Hippodrome in Manhattan. No box or shackles could hold Houdini, who practiced a brand of “white magic” that would enchant Cornell for the rest of his life. Every one of his shadow boxes was an homage to Houdini, where ballerinas or birds and birdlike poets were often escape artists, who were on the point of fleeing, or had already flown.

The boy also liked to think of his father as a magician, who would disappear on a train and suddenly reappear several days later with candy and trinkets in his coat pocket, dime-store merchandise that would become intricate parts of his son's shadow boxes—potions of “white magic.” The magician grew more and more affluent, and by 1912 the family was living in an enormous house on a hill right above the Hudson. But his father developed “pernicious anemia” and died in 1917, when Cornell was thirteen. He was still able to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, perhaps the most prestigious prep school in the nation—Benjamin Spock and Walker Evans were among his schoolmates. The family fell on hard times, but Cornell's tuition and expenses were paid by his father's former employer, who befriended the boy. This would be Joseph's first and last forage away from home. A mediocre student, whose one memorable effort was a term paper on Houdini, he spent three and a half years in Andover but failed to graduate because he couldn't complete requirements in history and mathematics. And while his classmates went on to college, Cornell slipped off to a modest house in Bayside, Queens, where Helen had moved with the rest of her family.

Now eighteen, Cornell went to work as a “sample boy”—a cloth and wool salesman—at a Massachusetts textile wholesaler with an office in Manhattan at 25 Madison Avenue; long and lean, he looked like a wraith with ferocious blue eyes as he carried around his enormous sample trunk
from one menswear manufacturer to the next. He felt an incredible elation on his trips from Bayside to Manhattan, on his wanderings through the city, with or without his sample trunk, and on his lunchtime breaks in Madison Square Park. His shadow boxes were his own miniature sample trunks, and they grew out of his constant treasure hunts for trinkets, his “
trouvailles
,” as he would later call them. He haunted penny arcades, cafeterias, and the secondhand bookshops on Fourth Avenue. He was a scavenger and voyeur, looking to collect a past for himself, not his own past in Nyack, but a reconstructed past of nineteenth-century Europe. It's not clear how much French he knew, but it was the one subject that had excited him at Andover, and most of his favorite writers were French—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and particularly Gérard de Nerval, who despised the material world and believed in his own visionary powers. Nerval would wander the streets of Paris with his pet lobster, Thibault, on a leash of pure blue silk; he suffered several breakdowns after the death of actress Jenny Colon, whom he loved but who couldn't love him back, recorded his own nightmares and hallucinations, and hanged himself from a window grate when he was forty-six.

Cornell must have imagined his own pet lobster on his wanderings through the city, and re-created a thousand Jenny Colons. The most iconic of these women was Fanny Cerrito, a “lost” nineteenth-century ballerina from Naples, whose image he first discovered in a Fourth Avenue bookstall in 1940, and immediately had what he would call an “unfoldment”—an epiphany that was akin to Nerval's hallucinations, where several hidden truths were revealed to him in a flash as Cerrito leapt from the stall and danced in front of his eyes.
“The figure of the young danseuse stepped forth as completely contemporaneous as the skyscrapers surrounding her.” He would have another “sighting” of Cerrito that same year, when he discovered her on the roof of a Manhattan storage warehouse, in the uniform of a male guard. This shift in persona would become a staple of Cornell's work, where one's sexual identity was never reliable or safe.

He burrowed deep into the ballerina's life, collected whatever material he could find about her (it would eventually fill a suitcase), saw himself as her double—he, too, could flit from male to female, like Fanny Cerrito disguised as a guard in the modern city, but he was frightened (and enthralled) by the mature female form; that's why he was obsessed by
fées,
young androgynous girls he would spy on in the streets of Manhattan or Flushing, where his mother had bought a modest Dutch Colonial house in 1929, with white shingles and a blue trim. He would live there for the rest of his life, on a nondescript street in the middle of nowhere. Ballerina Allegra Kent, to whom he would devote a series of boxes, said about her own excursion into that invisible country of Queens:
“His greeting was joyous and happy, although somehow visits were always hard to arrange. . . . It might have been easier to travel to Russia than to Utopia Parkway.”

He set up his own workshop in the kitchen, where he would constantly tangle with his mother over the colossal mess he made; even after he moved his workshop to the cellar, these battle royals would go on and on; he stored his shadow boxes and collages everywhere—in his bedroom, in crannies behind the stairs, in an abandoned fridge, or in random towering piles in the cellar, and in an open garage, where his best work was exposed to wind and rain. His days and nights with Helen would have been intolerable had it not been for Robert.

Robert had a much sweeter temperament than his gloomy brother, who always dressed in gray; like a delicate, hunched-over homunculus, Robert would operate a whole gallery of electric trains with a series of levers beside his wheelchair at the center of the living room—a little god-invalid with magical levers; later he would have epileptic fits, and Cornell had to feed his brother and care for him. Robert
humanized
Joseph, removed him from his nineteenth-century dreamscapes for a little while; whatever gift of real affection he had came from his love for Robert. But Robert was also an entry point into Joseph's art, and would appear in the shadow boxes in many
guises—as a Renaissance prince, a ballerina, or some songbird that could fly in great unbridled leaps.

Still, Cornell was grievously depressed in his workshop-prison on Utopia Parkway, and he would have to “fly” out of there to Manhattan or Main Street, Flushing, where he could sit in his favorite cafeteria, Bickford's, or “Bickie's,” scribble notes on a napkin while he gobbled pistachio ice cream, or wander into Woolworth's and watch a
“frail teener salesgirl,” and perhaps another teener with a “boney frame—emaciated—wan—but real
fée
.” Cornell's diaries are filled with these sightings of wan, androgynous girls, but mostly they are about meals and metaphysics.

They record his insatiable hunger for sweets. When he wasn't wolfing Milky Ways, he was brooding about his own strange art, the
“metaphysics of ephemera,” of recapturing Fanny Cerrito and other lost souls, but always through some perverse, indirect route, where he had
“that curiously plaguing phenomenon of purposely not trying to find desired things.”

He had to happen upon his treasures, or as Charles Simic writes in
Dime Store Alchemy
(1992), perhaps the most penetrating study of Cornell's fragile, elusive art:
“America still waits to be discovered. Its tramps and poets resemble early navigators setting out on journeys of exploration.” Cornell was one such poet-tramp, and the America he discovered couldn't have occurred without his involvement in dime-store debris.

But Cornell's America had a European bent—it harked back to the concert halls and opera houses where Fanny Cerrito performed and the negligible hotel rooms where she stayed as she wandered from engagement to engagement, each hotel room a little seedier than the last, and none of them ever giving us a glimpse of the ballerina. He never “sighted” any other nineteenth-century ballerinas in Manhattan, even though Fanny Elssler, the tall, dark-haired Viennese beauty, was much more voluptuous, and her great Swedish-Italian rival, Marie Taglioni, was far more famous than Cerrito. Neither of them could awaken
Cornell from the near slumber he was often in—only Cerrito, who played a sea goddess in
Ondine
(1843), a siren who falls in love with a young Sicilian fisherman and tries to steal him from his fiancée.

He would devote a series of boxes to Cerrito and her favorite ballet; his construction of these boxes happened to coincide with World War II. Cornell tried to enlist, but was turned down by his draft board. He would work at a defense plant with contemporary
mermaids
—housewives and young unmarried women. He would befriend one of the women, write her notes, but nothing ever came of this little one-sided romance. Actor Tony Curtis, a “disciple” of Cornell's who constructed his own boxes, pinpointed Cornell's dilemma:
“He adored women, but relationships weren't possible for him. He wasn't able to put two and two together, to go from step to step with a woman—from holding hands, to ‘I'll see you later, come back at four, we'll go to the movies,' to sticking your tongue in her mouth.”

He must have seemed like a Martian to most women at the plant, this gray man dressed in gray.
“He looks like Captain Ahab ashore—irritable, absolute, sensitive, obsessed, but shy,” according to artist Robert Motherwell. And cultural impresario
Alexander Liberman once said that Cornell, with his hooded eyes, could have been Joan of Arc's inquisitor.

Yet this morose man, this Ahab ashore, who seemed to frighten women away, was the practitioner of a woman's craft most of his adult life. The Surrealists may have done their own assemblages, their “readymades,” reliquaries of junk in a box, and their art may have coincided with Cornell's—Marcel Duchamp admired his boxes—but Cornell appropriated very little from the Surrealists. Assemblage was a legitimate American craft, relegated to women in the nineteenth century, since most other forms of art were denied to them. It was a “parlor pastime,” a kind of recreation for genteel ladies, who weren't supposed to sculpt or paint, since that might have revealed their ambition to become artists, so in the era right after the Civil War they occupied
themselves with “pseudo-arts,” such as collecting seashells and seaweed, arranging feathers into flowers, where they wouldn't have to compete with men.
Among these pseudo-arts was the shadow box, a three-dimensional, glass-fronted frame lined with black velvet or silk and housing objects that were artfully arranged. These objects often had a sentimental value—they might celebrate the friendship of two women, or record the mementos of a marriage, or remind a mother of a son who had died in the Civil War, with a series of relics from that war.

And Cornell's boxes had much of the same sentiment when he was trying to celebrate Fanny Cerrito, but unlike the assemblages of these Victorian ladies, Cornell's art was about absence rather than presence, about evasion and unconscious desires, bitterness and anger, not against Cerrito, but against himself.

3

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER NINETEENTH
-
CENTURY
ballerina who was as elusive and mystifying as Cerrito—Emily Dickinson, and Joseph saw her as a ballerina-poet. His favorite Dickinson poem was about her own dream dance as a prima ballerina. He reprinted the poem in a special issue of
Dance Index
(Summer 1944), a twenty-two-page album that he devoted to Fanny Cerrito.

       
I cannot dance opon my Toes—