A Loaded Gun (16 page)

Inside all of us, Simic says, there are the same secret rooms. “They're cluttered and the lights are out. There's a bed in which someone is lying with his face to the wall. In his [or her] head there are more rooms,” and in these rooms are objects that move in and out of visibility—a broken compass, or perhaps a hairbrush, in Emily's case, a watch spring—“each one of these items is a totem of the self.” And orphans that we are, Simic insists,
“we make our sibling kin out of anything we can find.”

This is why
Toward the Blue Peninsula
is such an original portrait of Dickinson and of ourselves—secret poets with our own secret toys in secret rooms—and is so much a part of the appeal that Dickinson and Cornell have for us. We cannot encapsulate their mystery, find formulas and quotients that will resolve their riddles, and yet we ourselves are soothed somehow by that quiet desolation.

4

T
HERE
'
S A THIRD
P
RIMA WHO CONNECTS
Fanny Cerrito with Joseph Cornell and Emily Dickinson: Allegra Kent. And it's not simply because she was Joseph's friend, and that he had devoted several boxes to her, or that she was Fanny Cerrito in the flesh—she wasn't a classical dancer like Cerrito, but she was a twentieth-century Ondine, who came pirouetting out of the water for a little while to delight us in a way that few other Primas have ever done.

She was eleven when she took her first ballet class with Bronislava Nijinska, the younger sister of Vaslav Nijinsky, the greatest male dancer of his time. It was Nijinska who told her,
“We are born originals, we die copies,” and she never forgot that lesson—no amount of technique or training could get in the way of her wildness. She also studied with Carmelita Maracci, who loved to push her students beyond their physical boundaries into some demonic dreamscape of their own. She told Allegra stories about Fanny Cerrito and the other queens of classical ballet, whose costumes of misty tulle helped catch the elusive quality of the sylphs and sirens they portrayed.
“Their beauty was ethereal and unearthly, but their technique was achieved by endless work. . . . Carmelita believed that even if you had never done a step correctly before, if you got excited enough you might just do it in class.” It was Carmelita who sent her off to study at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet. At fifteen, she was the youngest member of Balanchine's company, and would become a Prima of the New York City Ballet at nineteen. Allegra was an autodidact who read and learned on her own and would have a certain shyness about language all her life.
“I wished to speak in a different way, soundlessly,” and ballet permitted her to do so.

Balanchine taught her that greed was important to a dancer, akin to desire, and that her arabesques, in reach and desire, should be like creating
“gold and ice cream.” She was more petite than many modern Primas, but she had long legs and a very long neck. And she was the most acrobatic dancer, male or female, in the company. Allegra had her
own private sense of gravity, where “
the gyroscopic laws of tops took over, stretching the limits. . . . I wanted to have the untiring, springing, elastic muscles of a grasshopper for my leaps, and the pneumatic knees of a swamp mangrove,” and she did.

The ballets Balanchine choreographed for Allegra Kent were unlike anything he had ever choreographed, as if he, too, wanted to defy natural laws for his very own Ondine. In
Bugaku
(1963), he creates a siren in a Japanese ceremonial dance, where Kent portrays the concubine-wife of a young samurai prince (Edward Villella), and they have their own highly stylized mating ceremony in the most erotic pas de deux ever performed at the New York City Ballet.

That was my introduction to Allegra Kent. It was the first time I had ever seen her dance upon her toes. She appears like a wraith in a gossamer kimono with a long transparent white train that seemed to float to the edge of the world—and beyond that, into infinity; underneath the gossamer, she had on a chrysanthemum tutu, tights, and a white-flowered bikini bottom and bra. When her four female attendants “disrobe” her for her pas de deux with the samurai prince, she has an absent, ethereal look that I might have imagined on Cerrito herself.
“I decided that more should happen in the eye and body and less on the face, that a perfectly simple ritualistic movement could be rich with currents under the surface,” Kent noted about her performance.

Villella was a perfect partner, gentle and brutal at the same time, and as Kent weaves her body around his like a woman in a trance, her limbs performing their own ritualistic wonder, I felt that she had an instinctive poetry in these limbs—controlled and abandoned—that no other dancer had. She'd taken us outside the contours and limits of dance, and into another realm, where she was inventing her own trancelike language—her persona was onstage with Villella and with us in the audience, while her limbs were somewhere else, in a wild country of their own. And I thought of Dickinson, of her psychic split, that perverse ability to be elsewhere within her poems:

       
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—

       
The Stillness in the Room

       
Was like the Stillness in the Air—

       
Between the Heaves of Storm
—
    
[Fr591]

We are also “Between the Heaves of Storm” as we watch Kent in her pas de deux, surrounded by the white expanse of the set; lost in her strange agility, she's like a feline
fée,
boyish and feminine, fragile and fierce. I doubt that Joseph Cornell ever saw her in
Bugaku.
He grew more and more claustrophobic, and would have found it difficult to attend a performance all the while Balanchine was creating roles for Allegra Kent. But he did sense that quality of a catlike
fée
in a photograph that appeared in
Newsweek;
it was of the Prima rehearsing her role in “The Unanswered Question,” one of the episodes in
Ivesiana
(1954), where Allegra is held aloft by four men. Cornell was intrigued by the photo and filed it away; he'd been making short films with the help of Stan Brakhage—Cornell himself was utterly unmechanical; he never learned to drive a car or operate any kind of camera, but he wanted to make a short film on the Ondine motif, set in modern-day Manhattan, and he was looking for a
fée
who wandered from thrift shop to thrift shop. And in 1956, he got in touch with Allegra through a friend at the New York City Ballet. She recalled meeting him in the studio apartment she shared with her sister on East Sixty-first Street. “
His hands [from shellacking all his boxes] were kind of yellowish. He looked creepy. . . . And he really seemed to like me, which I found scary. I felt he liked me too much.” He told her about the film he intended to make. “‘I want a girl who haunts thrift shops.'”

Allegra wondered if he were prescient, since she did haunt thrift shops. But she refused to take part in his film, didn't want to be his Ondine.
“He was a little too engaged in his disengaged manner.” After that interview, she began receiving letters from him that entertained Allegra and aroused her interest. He'd included her in his “sendings,” his letter-collages, like captured butterflies.

She looked forward to these letters from Joseph. “
My favorite form of entertainment was receiving letters in a mailbox . . . a kind of little square present,” as it was for Dickinson, who fed like a voracious hawk on the letters she received, and thrived on the “pictorial letters” she herself created, her own constructivist art, which Jay Leyda talked about to Cornell.

“He saw someone,” Allegra recalled in my interview with her, “and created a story about them, put them in a box, a setting. Cornell set little stages. . . . Balanchine did that, too.”

“Maybe he was another box maker,” I said.

Allegra wrinkled her nose. “The stage was his box.”

I wondered if it was a form of entrapment, if Balanchine collected butterflies, like Nabokov (and Cornell), and put his human butterflies inside a box. But Allegra didn't agree. “Mr. B. saw something in you, put you in an ethereal atmosphere,” as if he were looking for some ideal woman.

Balanchine, she said, “could fall in love with the drop of a leotard,” and so could Cornell, who was also a master choreographer in his own way. And in 1969, he saw his favorite living ballerina again. She was in an odd state at the time. “I'd had an operation to get rid of stretch marks on my stomach, so I could do
Bugaku
again [in her white-flowered bikini bottom]. But they cut too much, and I had nerve damage.” And thus she couldn't dance. So she went out to Utopia Parkway as an invalid, like Cornell's brother. He asked her to bring a book of erotic art and a mocha cake, as if she were about to plunge through the looking glass with an androgynous, grown-up Alice who loved
fées
and had a sweet tooth.

“He was very gentle . . . he'd stopped making boxes after his brother died. It was hot in his garden so I made a paper hat,” her own piece of constructivist art. The house was in a great mess, but his cellar workshop had its own internal order. He showed her box after box.

He did quite a few collages for Allegra after that visit. And when he fell ill with prostate cancer in 1972, he wrote her letters from the
hospital. “One I ripped up—it was too sexual [about his nurse]. I don't think he wanted that to exist.”

And then she ruminated about her own career. She's probably the one Prima on the planet who had three children in her twenties and still managed to dance for Balanchine. “I loved being pregnant,” she said, almost as if she were defying Mr. B. and his own mercurial laws as a dancing master. “I was married to a madman, a drug addict [photographer Bert Stern]. And I wasn't the most stable person.”

But I wondered if some of the power she had as a ballerina had come from that same instability. “
The way Mr. B. communicated with me was almost the way a human relates to wildlife. Some people are good with untamed animals. They don't startle the creatures,” Kent declared in her autobiography. She intuited her own raw grip over the audience when she wrote,
“Some excellent technicians were so used to being perfect that they didn't astonish themselves. They might astonish the audience, but it wasn't quite the presentation of the unknown.”

And I realized how much she resembled Dickinson, who also sought to present the unknown.

       
He fumbles at your Soul

       
As players at the Keys

       
Before they drop full Music on—

       
He stuns you by degrees
—
    
[Fr477A]

Dickinson may be addressing the Prince of Death here, but she's also talking about the nature of her art, the “One—imperial—Thunderbolt—/That scalps your naked Soul—” And Allegra danced with the same imperial fire. She's brutally shy, frightened of people, she says, and so was Dickinson, who fled from strangers. Their art, like Cornell's, leaps into the unknown.

SIX

Phantom Lady

1

I
T WAS A RUDE PROCESS THAT FRACTURED
the face, revealed your mirror image, so that your cheeks were reversed on the silvered copper plate, and your left eye was where your right eye ought to be—the daguerreotype, invented by some French lunatic in 1839. And still Emily sat for her
Mold
as she called the making of the image. Emerson had called it a kind of rigor mortis when he was
daguerreotyped
in 1841, keeping
“every finger in place with such energy that your hands became clenched for fight or despair, and in your resolution to keep your face still, did you feel every muscle becoming every moment more rigid, the brows contracted into a Tartarean frown, and the eyes fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death?”

She wasn't enthralled by the tinted ghostly double that stared back at her from the copper plate, and neither was anyone else among the Dickinsons.
“It was too solemn, too heavy. It had none of the play of light and shade in Emily's face,” the future poet's brother and sister believed.
“To capture the flow of movement and grace in a single photograph of the dance” [would be no less impossible] “than it was to produce by any means then known a satisfactory likeness of Emily Dickinson,” according to Millicent Todd Bingham. Dickinson posed for the daguerreotype in 1847; she was sixteen years old, an adolescent with a long neck and beautiful long hands. She looks serious
and slightly cockeyed, and reminds me of Emmeline Grangerford, the graveyard poet in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
“The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there were so many arms it made her look spidery, seemed to me,” Huck tells us in his own sympathetic and bemused portrait of Emmeline.

Dickinson has no extra arms in the daguerreotype, but she does have a spidery design in her dark cotton dress and her ribbon bracelets and the dark ribbon around her neck. We can imagine how uncomfortable she must have been before this “Daguerrian Artist,” whoever he was. Polly Longsworth and most other critics believe he was Otis H. Cooley, who had his own studio in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1844 to 1855, whereas Millicent Todd Bingham informed her loyal readers in
Emily Dickinson's Home
(1955) that the daguerreotype had been taken by some unremembered wisp of an itinerant photographer who visited Mount Holyoke near the end of 1847 and photographed as many seminarians as he could. But Dickinson declined his overtures—
possibly.
“With Dickinson the story is never finished,” writes Polly Longsworth.

And Mary Elizabeth Kromer Bernhard, in “Lost and Found: Emily Dickinson's Unknown Daguerreotypist,” has another story to tell. She's convinced that the two Emilys—the poet and her mother—sat for William C. North, “Daguerrian Artist,” at Amherst House sometime between December 1846 and March 1847. Advertising in the
Hampshire and Franklin Express,
North noted that he had taken rooms at the Amherst House for the sole purpose of executing “Daguerreotype Miniatures” in his superior and substantial style.
“Secure the Shadow ere the substance fades,” he warned his potential clients.

We might never really know the identity of the phantom photographer who posed Dickinson and prepared the silvered copper plate. But it has become one of the most iconic portraits in American history, even though it was despised by the Dickinsons themselves and was later dismissed as
“flat, itinerant work.” The daguerreotype had
a subterranean journey through the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth—misplaced by the poet, who denied it had ever existed, it was “found” by Maggie Maher, returned to Vinnie, who had a Boston miniaturist, Laura C. Hills, repaint a “cabinet photograph” of the original daguerreotype, correcting the poet's astigmatic eye, and giving her a white dress and ruffled collar, so that she was part angel and part circus clown (this is the face we see on the cover of Rebecca Patterson's book); then, in cavalier fashion, she gave the daguerreotype away and it didn't surface again until it fell into Millicent's hands, like some magical quotient.

And now it's
everywhere,
whether it's fastened to the poet's mythic white dress and appears as a giant-size balloon in
Being John Malkovich
(1999), Spike Jonze's zany, surreal film that moves with the “spasmodic gait” Colonel Higginson once saw in the volcanic lines of his half-cracked poet and could almost be an elliptical reconstruction of “I started early—took my dog” [Fr656], where we are all taken on some interior voyage, with mermaids swimming at our feet, and where our waking life is never as memorial as our moments inside the mind of Emily Dickinson (or John Malkovich); or her own image is cleaved in two, with Nefertiti on the left and Dickinson on the right, wearing bold red lipstick, on the cover of Camille Paglia's
Sexual Persona
(1990), or else we can catch her on dozens of other book jackets in the daguerreotype's original chaste form; and she's the first face that appears, in her gussied-up clown's collar, whenever I light up my Kindle.

The daguerreotype can also be seen in some kind of pale Technicolor in Topps 2008 American Heritage Baseball Trading Card # 6, as if her image is as much a piece of American folklore as Babe Ruth's flaring nostrils and Shoeless Joe Jackson's mystical bat, Black Betsy. Dickinson—and her picture as an adolescent—have become
“a cultural palimpsest of our emotions, desires, opinions, and literary histories,” according to scholar Martha Nell Smith, who launched the Dickinson Electronic Archives in 1994. Dickinson's daguerreotype
has entered our world in a way that few images ever have. And, says Polly Longsworth, its tantalizing power “
has played a role in shaping the iconography of and critical thinking about the poet,” as it offers us a glimpse into the poet's almost invisible life.
“Her face is as familiar as a mask and holds the mask's elusive promise that if we knew what she really looked like, underneath it, we could have the key to her enigmatic poetry.”

There is no such key, as we have all come to learn. But one of the most poignant meditations on the daguerreotype and the doll-like power it has provoked is Joyce Carol Oates' futuristic tale, “EDickinsonRepliLuxe,” in
Wild Nights!
(2008), her own brutally etched portraits concerning the last days of Dickinson and four other iconic American writers—Hemingway, Poe, Mark Twain, and Henry James.

The title of the collection comes from one of Dickinson's most enigmatic poems.

       
Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

       
Were I with thee

       
Wild Nights should be

       
Our luxury!

       
Futile—the winds—

       
To a Heart in port—

       
Done with the Compass—

       
Done with the Chart!

       
Rowing in Eden—

       
Ah—the Sea!

       
Might I but moor—tonight—

       
In Thee!
    
[Fr269]

Oates, who came
late
to Dickinson (in her twenties), has turned this “love poem” into a crazy, passionate, and cruel dance with the sirens of love
and
death. And they're often the very same sirens. Harold and
Madelyn Krim are a loveless couple who live in the suburban village of Golders Green, New York, and have been married for what seems to be nineteen years, yet is only nine. Maddie feels as if she'd never been kissed. Harold's a tax accountant and she's a housewife who had once wanted to become a poet. They decide to purchase a pet—not a cat or dog—but a RepliLuxe, a computerized replicant of some fabulous cultural icon. And this quasi-human pet will cost only a fraction of what it would cost to raise a
real
human child. Maddie has her heart set on a poet, but
Sylvia Plath
and
Robert Frost
are not yet in the public domain. And like a sleepwalker she suddenly says, “Emily Dickinson!”

EDickinsonRepliLuxe
has certain restrictions. She's programmed from age thirty to fifty-five (when Dickinson died). But the Krims, who own all rights to the “Emily” mannequin, can accelerate those last twenty-five years of the poet's life however they wish. The RepliLuxe is a brilliant distillation of Dickinson, as if her soul had been sucked out and reinstalled in a replicant without intestines or sexual organs or blood. But the Dickinson doll can talk, write poetry, and bake brown bread with molasses. Yet the Krims are deeply disappointed when the mannequin arrives and is unpacked. She looks like a malnourished girl of ten, rather than the brilliant poet of thirty they had paid for. The RepliLuxe is an almost exact model of the 1847 daguerreotype.

Her eyes were large, dark, and oddly lashless, her skin was ivory-pale, smooth as paper. Her eyebrows were wider than you'd expect, heavier and more defined, like a boy's . . . . Her dark hair had been severely parted in the center of her head and pulled back flatly and tightly into a knot of a bun, covering most of her unusually small ears like a cap. In a dark cotton dress . . .with an impossibly tiny waist,
EDickinsonRepliLuxe
more resembled the wizened corpse of a child-nun than a woman-poet of thirty.

The Krims are woefully disappointed in this mannequin (and they mirror the reaction of some Dickinson devotees to the 1847
daguerreotype, feeling that it offers a very pale glimpse of the future poet and her radiant red hair). Madelyn had raided antique stores to find replicas of the furnishings in the poet's mythic bedroom on Main Street; she comes up with an authentic sleigh bed of the 1850s that looks like a child's crib, a milk-glass kerosene lamp, a maple bureau, and an impossibly small writing desk. Madelyn could be Joseph Cornell, assembling a giant-size shadow box that will serve as a kind of prison for Emily, who is forbidden by law to leave the Krimses' house, since these mannequins might run amuck, and the world could have entire teams of
‘Babe Ruth
' and poetry slams filled with EDickinsonRepliLuxe.

Madelyn is a bit more sympathetic to her Dickinson doll.
“Emily could have no idea where she was, who the Krims were, if she was awake or dreaming or if there was any distinction between wakefulness and dreaming in her transmogrified state.” Curious about the workings of her RepliLuxe, who flutters through the house like a forest animal and scribbles words on scraps of paper, she clicks off
activate
on her remote control and Emily tumbles into the
sleep mode.
Madelyn summons up the courage to touch the mannequin, with its papery skin and metallic smell. She's aroused by Emily, has the urge to kiss her on the lips, and realizes that it's been a very long time since she's kissed anyone or anyone has kissed her. Madelyn resists the urge, but she removes one of the scraps of paper from Emily's pocket and reads the poem written on it, replete with Dickinson's signature dashes.

       
Why am—I—

       
Where am—I—

       
When am—I—

       
And—You?—

It's the lament of an amnesiac, or is it? She shows it to Harold, who's enraged.
“It's some sort of computer printout, words arranged like poetry to tease and to torment.”

Harold has imprisoned the RepliLuxe but feels like a prisoner in
his own house. Meanwhile, the poet begins to wear a white dress
“that looked like a bridal gown, smelling of must, mothballs, melancholy.”

He's even more enraged, with a deluxe doll haunting
his
house in her ghostly gown. And one starry midnight, he burgles his way into her bedroom, with its antique hurricane lamp and candles in wooden holders that flare up like firelight. He looms over the doll like a grotesque swaying bear, kisses Emily on the mouth, rips away her nightgown, pawing at her flattened breasts, fumbles between her legs, sees
“a shallow indentation where a vagina should have been,” and excited and repelled at the same time by a doll woman without a hint of pubic hair, he slaps Emily, and has to flee this room,
“where flames fluttered as in an anteroom of Hell.”

Later, when Madelyn shyly enters the bedroom, it feels as if a tornado had visited it, and she finds the poet all disheveled. The RepliLuxe begs for her own freedom.

       
“
Accelerate,
Mistress. Lift the wand and—there's freedom.”

The
accelerate mode
on the remote control will push her beyond the doll-like look of the daguerreotype and deeper into the wildness of her poetry.