A Loaded Gun

by Jerome Charyn

  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 an
d 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.

  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

  THERE’S A THIRD PRIMA 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—h
er 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.’”