Cornell himself realized the seamless connection between the habit of confessional jottings and art. Writing “to catch moments strongly felt”, he believed the journal to be publishable at least in parts.4 Yet his attempts to connect life events, reflections and art can hardly be called successful. Caws comments that the journal is “a gigantic discouraging mass of heterogeneous elements”, with anything but the finished elegance of one of his assemblages (p. 50). It was beyond him to deal with its massiveness, and even he probably could not say exactly how an entry such as the following underlay any particular piece of art: “fresh wonder endlessly mysterious processes of the mind—workings of the spirit—at 12 midnight” (p. 279).
The model for such journaling is likely to have been that of the nineteenth century French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix with which he was familiar. As a descendant in the paternal line of seventeenth-century French migrants to America, Cornell took that culture as his own. In 1968 he expressed a “spontaneous outgoing admiration for Delacroix”, which may have been present long before. While mentioning that his mother also kept “diaries”, he is reticent about his own compulsive practice and seemingly unconcerned in the midst of it with anything more than moment to moment impressions (p. 395). As he says, “The raison d’etre” of this album-journal evolved in spite of itself, overwhelmingly, completely “accidentally”. Its development has been perfectly natural and not forced esthetically although presented in what might be called “esthetic terms”. He adds that the idea came to him from “impromptu” or “surprise” moments during “bicycle rides through outlying suburbs” on Long Island (p. 107). Given the formlessness of his written products, use of the term esthetic is puzzling, but Cornell was given to such private meanings.
For a time Cornell seriously considered becoming a writer, perhaps in the manner of Marcel Proust seeking to recover a lost past or Walter Pater cultivating esthetic sensations. Yet realizing early that writing was not to be his metier, Cornell concentrated on the visual arts including film. Journal writing was a means of tapping into the unconscious, of disclosing its contents to himself and of recording sensations from the natural world. It seems to have been his primary means of activating the creative imagination, to reanimate repeatedly “this miracle again of life and art” (p. 210). The journal was the first stage in finding and fixing images, capturing their moods, which were then available for reworking by assembling boxes and collages from materials Cornell kept stored in his cellar workroom. It therefore hardly mattered that the journal consisted of disorganized heaps of paper, as long as it held in place his spontaneous affective insights. It was “profuse and overflowing so cluttered in memory received with endless unfolding experience the mecca of a hundred [bicycle] rides (each with their rich ‘cross-indexing’ of varying mood)”, he wrote. Cornell’s Utopia Parkway house stood as “a sanctuary for all my chaotic treasure—a rich celestial repository”, containing a multitude of works in progress, starting with the journal. In a sense Cornell’s boxes made and remade the Utopia Parkway house which was both his place of safety and prison. The journal is termed “the thread” of experience, making it “valid” and connecting to “something deep” (p. 146). If the journal led beyond the house it was seldom far.
It should not simply be assumed, because Cornell’s journal is predominantly melancholic, that he, like artists through the ages, was “born under Saturn”.5 His chronic melancholia with psychosomatic features, his constant need to control fluctuating moods and dysthymia, calls for a psychobiographical accounting. While valuable developmental information has been lost, much can be recovered to help understand Cornell’s balancing of creative achievement against mood disorder. Those who knew him best agreed that his struggle had been life-long. His sister Elizabeth remembered that as a schoolboy at Philips (Andover), Joseph had suffered from panic attacks, and his other sister Helen reported that he had “recurring nightmares and severe stomach attacks”. After 1923, when she worked for the same New York City company as Joseph, Helen “witnessed his unhappiness as he often sat in Madison Square Park moaning with anxiety”.6 As far as is known, no psychiatrist or psychoanalyst was ever consulted, and the disorder went undiagnosed. Today it would be described by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria, with psychoactive drugs used to control symptoms, which might be no better understood now than they were then.7 It was thus left up to Cornell to look after himself as best he could, his means being confessional journaling, art and close adherence to Christian Science discipline. The combination of self-therapies for enhancing and maintaining mood served for a lifetime of sixty-nine years. His obsessive nature perhaps helped to keep up the self-balancing, if confining, regime he needed.
Cornell bore a legacy of unfinished emotional business, shown by a demeanor of sadness and withdrawal—of avoidance which the symbolic means of journal and art were designed to overcome. The main contributing factors are well recorded: his father’s leukemia from which he died when Joseph was 14; loss of economic security requiring moves from opulent to modest housing; Joseph’s separation from the family when sent away to school just after his father’s death; concern for his homebound younger brother Robert who suffered from severe cerebral palsy; and employment far below his talents when a young man. In such a concatenation of events, successful mourning for his father’s loss, and adaptation to new circumstances governed by a difficult mother, were unlikely, so Cornell resorted to whatever avoidant and obsessive means he then possessed, before turning inner conflict to advantage through art.
The journal gives rich evidence of the energy Cornell had to put into self-regulation of unwelcome moods. For instance he writes of escapes from the tedium of life at home with mother and disabled brother Robert by forays into Manhattan book and bric-a-brac shops to forage for diverting objects, some of them useful in constructing shadow boxes. Even at his most active, the past exerted an invincible pull, “a thing from childhood never outgrown”, perhaps the persisting shadow of the shadow boxes. Emotions sometimes surprised him but remain unexplained. He remembers “in Bayside [Long Island] riding in a car feeling an intolerable sadness at passing a blue house ... from West Hampton one house in particular evoked a world of emotion as unexpected as significant” (p. 109). On February 7, 1946 he recorded, “elation leaving home not ‘release’ enough for fully satisfactory intensity but constructive feeling. Touch of old depression—indirect illumination by streetlight—spiritual sense of joy to go with tempests of G. De Nerval during day ....” Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855), a precursor of Symbolism and Surrealism, had caught his attention as a writer who could help him govern moods. Cornell also records counteracting anger as in the entry for September 5, 1946: “Up early (6) not very relaxed or rested. Yesterday worked at anger very tense—afternoon anger relieved in spots” (p. 132). Nature was his surest healer, in the garden or the wild places of Long Island shores. A bike ride along remote roads to the seaside, watching the changing light, could produce “exultation”, the wished-for change. Although Cornell did not develop these reports in prose, they resemble nothing so much as passages in The Story of My Heart (1883) by the pantheistic English nature writer Richard Jeffries, or the American writings of Henry David Thoreau. Cornell never quite owns up to being a nature mystic, but that is his tendency and, were it not for the intervention of Surrealism, his art might have developed along those lines.