A Loaded Gun (15 page)

       
No Man instructed me—

       
But oftentimes, among my mind

       
A Glee possesseth me,

       
That had I Ballet knowledge—

       
Would put itself abroad

       
In Pirouette to blanch a Troupe—

       
Or lay a Prima—mad . . .
    
[Fr381A]

Actually, he discovered Dickinson long before he found Cerrito and the other queens of classical ballet—Dickinson was his first love.
Whatever we think of the poet, and however we compare her electric language with Cerrito's lyrical leaps, Dickinson does become a Prima in the poem, and it's probably one of the most accurate descriptions of what it must have been like for Cerrito to have danced as Ondine in London or Milan, with “One Claw opon the Air,” her shape “rolled on Wheels of Snow.”

He kept Dickinson's poems beside his monk's cot in his upstairs bedroom on Utopia Parkway and collected whatever he could of her. In 1951, his mother visited Amherst and sent him a postcard with a picture of the Homestead, and now he could conjure up an image of Dickinson's bedroom-workshop. And in Millicent Todd Bingham's introduction to
Bolts of Melody
(1945), he would come across Dickinson's own collection of dime-store debris—poems and fragments written on the backs of discarded paper bags and bills, “
on tiny scraps of stationery pinned together. . . . There are pink scraps, blue and yellow, one of them a wrapper of
Chocolate Meunier
,” a kind of cooking chocolate made in France. Cornell would store that yellow wrapper in his mind and it would later reappear as a totemic signature to a series of shadow boxes devoted to Dickinson, but he wasn't quite ready to begin. Cornell needed two more “sightings,” or “sparks.”

In 1952, during one of his expeditions from Flushing to the Fourth Avenue bookshops, he stumbled upon a picture of Emily in Millicent Todd Bingham's
Ancestors' Brocades
(1945), a “cabinet photo” made from the original daguerreotype; the background is gone, and we don't see the poet's hands, and there's a shadow behind the poet, like a gray mountain. But Cornell was overwhelmed. It was, as David Porter suggests in his essay on Dickinson and Cornell,
“a transcendent moment”—an
unfoldment
—where the poet's “fragile features from an earlier era” were juxtaposed “with the crowded doings of the modern city.” In this
doctored
daguerreotype Cornell had discovered an authentic
fée
from another century—a child-woman looked out at him with the kind of innocence he adored. A strange Renaissance
princess—delicately defiant and androgynous—who was as wan as one of the “teeners” he might have found at Woolworth's (medical doctor, poet, and Dickinson scholar Norbert Hirschorn believes she may have been suffering from tuberculosis at the time the daguerreotype was taken).

And then there was Rebecca Patterson's book, with its notion that Dickinson's “lost” romance was with a woman rather than a man; most of her life, Dickinson feared and longed for that “Blue Peninsula,” where she could “perish—of Delight” in some dreamt-up Italy, with or without Kate. Cornell could see his own complexion in Dickinson's mirror. She'd become his androgynous bride—this gray man and the poet with red hair were suddenly Marco Polos of the imagination, Baedekers without a bone. If Cornell had his vacant hotel rooms where Fanny Cerrito or another Prima might arrive and depart without leaving much of a clue, Dickinson also traveled like a Prima, could sing and tumble in her corner room, while she danced on her toes—toward the Blue Peninsula that never changed with the seasons, and was like a kind of delicious death.

Cornell had his own particular clues: He would devote a series of eight
Chocolat Meunier
boxes [spelled
Menier
by Cornell] to the poet, where she is often absent and present at the same time, appearing as a hummingbird inside a postage stamp from Ecuador, or as an invisible warbler attached to a “warbling string,” a parrot on a perch, or a mouse on a child's block, but we're always trapped with the Prima inside a drab whitewashed room—and the foreign lettering of
Chocolat Menier
invokes Cerrito as much as Dickinson, two ballerinas in the same shadow box.

But the most devastating of all the Dickinson boxes is
Toward the Blue Peninsula (for Emily Dickinson),
ca.1953, which Cornell must have worked on right after seeing the daguerreotype and reading Patterson's book. It is, according to Christopher Benfey,
“the single most trenchant response, in all of American art, to the meaning of her life
and art.” It is also the most disturbing commentary on Dickinson's double, Joseph Cornell.

The box is a minimalist's dream, with Cornell's usual spare effects: drab white walls, a bird perch (without a bird) that extends across the 10¼-inch box, a wire grid with an opening, and a window, partly framed by the opening, that looks out upon a blue sky. For Cornell, the poet had finally escaped her prison-perch. But that window is no promise of paradise; the blue sky could be as mordant and misleading as Cornell's other clues; and that wire home with its prison-perch could be the core of her creativity. What matters is that haunted house of a box helped conjure up a ghostly dialogue between Cornell and Dickinson, and
“their dialogue across a hundred years is yet another Cornell construction: two figures, solitary and unaccountable, brought into correspondence, as he said of the objects he placed in his boxes, to discover what they would say to one another,” according to David Porter.

Porter believed they were both
“artists of aloneness,” who “inhabited self-made realms in which only the fiercely independent can flourish. . . . No generic blueprint sanctioned their art or provided it with coherence. That solitude accounts for the piecemeal, idiosyncratic nature of this singular . . . American genre of small, rickety infinitudes.”

Porter wrote about this dazzling encounter between Dickinson and Cornell over twenty years ago, but now their infinitudes no longer seem quite as
rickety,
or quite as small. Cornell talked about his desire to create “white magic,” yet he and Dickinson were singular magicians of the dark. A sad lyricism pervades their work, almost a death song. Cornell couldn't recapture Cerrito no matter how hard he tried, yet his art ricochets like that swirl of colors in the entombed pencil he sent to Jay Leyda. He was a master of the unnamed, and the unnamable, a storyteller at a time when stories fell out of fashion—his boxes always tell stories, even if they end in riddles that can't be solved. Dickinson may have fled, but
we
are never absent from her room, and we can feel its merciless power. This is where creation begins, in some vast,
solitary confinement, encapsulated in a shadow box that was often not much taller than a hand. Cornell once said that his greatest wish (or
“recurrent obsession”) was to have his objects move—and his wish was answered in a way. His boxes are filled with an invisible flutter. Cornell was involved all his life with performance, from the time he saw Buffalo Bill at Madison Square Garden and Houdini at the Hippodrome, and the wonders he encountered with his family at Lunar Park, to the
fées
who seemed to perform for him at some delicatessen or department store, to Fanny Cerrito and Emily Dickinson, whose boxes are also minuscule stages; we can
feel
Dickinson's traces in
Toward the Blue Peninsula,
and even if she's fled to her own far country, halfway between nightmare and paradise, Cornell still means us to hear her steps, the absent ballerina, who's put her skills abroad—

       
In Pirouette to blanch a Troupe—

       
Or lay a Prima—mad . . .

It's Charles Simic who best articulates the “dime-store alchemy” that binds Dickinson and Cornell. He tells us that somewhere in Cornell's magic city of New York there exist four or five disparate
still-unknown
objects that belong together. And once they're found, they will make a work of art. That's Cornell's metaphysics. And Dickinson's unknown objects are her words that only she can find and place together in that “Whip lash” language of hers. Her poems are like boxes that break the boundaries of conscious thought and lead us toward delusion.

It's almost as if we ourselves have gone with the poet out beyond the furthest reach of language—“opon Circumference”—where every order of coherence, every sequence of words has
ravelled
out of Sound, and dances with some infernal logic, like balls (or objects) bouncing willfully onto a floor with a musical clutter all their own.

Cornell and Dickinson, according to Simic, are both unknowable.
“If her poems are like his boxes, a place where secrets are kept, his boxes are like her poems, the place of unlikely things to happen. . . . Voyagers
and explorers of their own solitudes, they make them vast, make them cosmic.” Neither was a
public
poet, though Dickinson did share her poems, or some version of them, with a few choice recipients, and Cornell did show his work at galleries and museums, though he never traveled to another town whenever his work was shown, nor did he ever keep a clipping related to his work, while he collected mountains of material on Cerrito and his favorite movie stars; Cornell often made boxes for his favorite stars and dismantled them once he discovered that a particular star, such as Greta Garbo, despised the box he had devoted to her. He didn't like to sell his boxes, and would grow angry if a collector revealed too much interest in his work.

Cornell and Dickinson were intensely secretive and private souls. But she wasn't
“the eccentric, quivering, overstrung recluse” that Deborah Solomon writes about in her 1997 biography of Cornell, nor was she trapped in her Amherst prison-house, as Rebecca Patterson would have us believe. And Cornell was even less reclusive than Dickinson.
He would have parties where he served pumpkin seeds and warm pineapple soda, and he entertained Marcel Duchamp, Tony Curtis, John Ashbery, Andy Warhol, Allegra Kent, and a host of others on Utopia Parkway, even had one of his favorite “teeners,” Joyce Hunter, a former cashier at Ripley's Believe It or Not Times Square museum, live with him for several months in 1964, though she was much too sharp for Cornell and sold every “souvenir” collage and box he gave her to collectors she had met through him. Tina, as he called her, had a baby daughter and lived a marginal life of crime; she and two of her boyfriends stole nine shadow boxes from Cornell's garage; they were all arrested, but he refused to press charges against this rather plump and avaricious
fée.
Hunter was as innocent as Robert in his eyes; she would be murdered later that year, stabbed twice in a rickety Harlem hotel room that could have been a replica of a Cornell hotel box. He had her buried in Queens, near his own family plot, and hired detectives to find Hunter's baby girl, while he dreamt of adopting her, but
the little girl was never found. Cornell's relationship with Tina continued after her death; he wrote letters to her, collected certain dime-store gifts, as he would do after his mother and Robert died. Cornell was deeply saddened after Robert's death in 1965 and couldn't stop mourning him. He seldom left the house on Utopia Parkway, and had fewer excursions to Flushing and Manhattan.

Cornell's devotion to his invalid brother wasn't that removed from Dickinson's attachment to her own “baby” sister. Dickinson believed that she and Vinnie had come from very different wells in the ground, like two dissimilar mermaids, and most critics would have us believe that Emily was the
invalid,
and that Vinnie watched over her all their lives. But I suspect it was the other way around. Emily was the only one of the Dickinsons who risked her father's wrath, who challenged Edward when he beat his horse, who smashed a piece of crockery out on the lawn after her father complained that it was chipped, and who stopped going to church. She had her own fierce temper, while Vinnie had once been a voluptuous
fée
—with fat arms—who sat in Joseph Lyman's lap and tied him to her with her own strands of hair, like a mermaid. But that mermaid never went back into the sea. She kept to dry land with her narrow, conventional thoughts. The poems she wrote reflected this mundane imagination.

       
The stars kept winking and blinking,

                   
as if they had secrets to tell;

       
But as nobody asked any questions,

                   
Nobody heard any tales.

Her poems were as childish as the rabbits Robert loved to draw and paint—Robert was the “artist” of the family, and Joseph would incorporate his brother's rabbits into his own collages, but there was nothing of her sister's that Emily could incorporate into her own verse.

Emily “had to think—she was the only one of us who had that to do,” Vinnie noted.
“Father believed; and mother loved; and Austin had
Amherst; and I had the family to keep track of.” And Emily must have felt a kind of tender concern for that foreign mermaid who often slept in the same bed with her. She was Austin's wild sister, after all. Her basket held “just—Firmaments.” [Fr358] And Vinnie's held nothing but banal, everyday fare. So Emily must have taken some measure not to frighten her sister with those thunderous disconnections of hers, those lightning entrechats. Perhaps she pitied Vinnie a little, pitied and loved her and protected her like some forlorn Prima with a pupil who could never have imagined what it was like to dance upon her toes.

Perhaps all great art comes out of a void, and Cornell and Dickinson were the prince and princess of isolation, cosmic dreamers who inhabited some bare space with crumbling whitewashed walls.
“In a secret room in a secret house his secret toys sit listening to their own stillness,” Charles Simic writes of Cornell. Dickinson's toys weren't quite the same, but her words were also found objects that fit together with a frightening stillness.