By the period of Cornell’s most intensive journaling he had gained the ability to experience and name feelings that had merely plagued him in youth. His school photograph shows an impassive mask-like face, an almost schizoid immobile countenance. Cornell is remarkable for having freed himself of affective imprisonment to the extent he did, yet it cannot be said that risk of dangerous fluctuations in mood was ever removed. Complaints of “nervousness”, “sluggishness”, “heavy stale sleep” (p. 200), recurring fears of depression—“hovering on deep depression” (p. 206), “emptiness” (p. 235), “the vileness of the migraine states” (p. 308), or “that sorry doltish migraine state” (p. 366), “sadness—remoteness” (p. 339), and “head pressure” (p. 446) are the leit-motiv of Cornell’s self-scrutiny throughout the journal. They are more statements of fact than hypochondria or occasions for self-pity; but to gauge their actual frequency, intensity and typical associations would require analysis of the full texts, yet to become available in usable form.
Obsessional Control
Cornell’s greatest obstacle to normal social contact appears to have been the defensive obsessions, those tenaciously repetitive ideas that protected him from succumbing to catastrophic mood shifts. If he presented to the world as avoiding (sometimes dismissing) social contacts, in private life he was subject to controlling obsessions. Crittenden’s A/C defensive classification fits the picture of Cornell as revealed by his journal and the biographical reconstructions following from it. The journal shows a high incidence of occasions when obsessions threatened to dominate his mental life. (The function of writing was to deepen emotions by naming them, dislodging and freeing up obsessions to allow the generalized imagery of box construction. In the best boxes, archetypal associations remove all but traces of personal conflict, giving the resulting objects authority and autonomy.) Nevertheless, Cornell was repeatedly in danger of getting “stuck” on fixed objects and ruminations, mainly having to do with erotic feelings for women. As natural relations with women were severely inhibited, Cornell resorted to obsessive day-dreams and fantasies of the women he could not approach. While having women friends to confide in—the poet Marianne Moore, for example—Cornell gave much ingenuity to boxes both deifying and imprisoning the ideal females he craved but feared. Much as a sexually awakening adolescent might do, dossiers were assembled on such legendary, untouchable ballerinas as Pavlova. There are box tributes to such dancers as Fanny Cerrito and Marie Taglioni, upon whose lives and careers large dossiers were collected. (The obsession with Cerrito reached such intensity that Cornell hallucinated a vision of her in a window on West 52nd Street in New York.) Most haunting is the sultry portrait of the movie star Lauren Bacall, tightly caught in a frame with cross-hairs, central to the surround containing miniature youthful portraits of her. Above her portrait are phallic New York skyscrapers, also framed within a jokey pinball-rolling contraption. (The wire mesh seen through holes above her head corresponds unpleasantly with the cross-hairs over Bacall’s face.) Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) of 1945-6 gives an eerie feeling of entrapped glamour, reminding us of John Fowles’s sadistic fantasy in The Collector. The same troubling ambiguity is found in Untitled (Bebe Marie) of the 1940s with an innocent china doll enmeshed in a mass of under-sea coral, which could also be seen as the glittering tinsel of a window display. Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr received similar treatment, and indeed Cornell could never make a straightforward portrait of any female, however sympathetic she might be to his cause. Further, he was to make a movie, Rose Hobart, consisting of repetitive images edited from other films, described by Deborah Solomon as “an idealized portrait of a female performer”, a “study in androgyny, the first of many boyish girls to surface in Cornell’s work”.8 Sexual anxiety could be reduced by giving idealized girls a masculine tonality yet, as far as is known, he did not similarly feminize males, or idealize them at all. Cornell could not decide what he felt about sexually exciting women, having to maintain the paradox of enchantment along with avoidance masking fear.
According to Caws, “like his mother [Cornell] was proper, tidy and obsessive, preferring things to be laid out in parade formation”.9 Intensely visual from childhood, Cornell was always on the lookout for objects, as would be expected in avoidant adaptation. A compulsive collector of evocative objects, together with books and music, he ordered and classified large numbers of “found objects” thinking of their usefulness in making boxes. Collecting led to over-inclusiveness, as photographs of his workroom testify. There was more of everything than could ever be used, even allowing for variety of choice. As the psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger writes, “Repeated acquisitions serve as a vehicle to cope with inner uncertainty, a way of dealing with the dread of renewed anxiety, with confusing problems of need and longing”.10 Magical properties are attributed to collected objects even when they cannot possibly deliver what is wanted of them. Indeed, collecting masks the anxiety’s origin in interpersonal relations, which the art of box-making transforms and depersonalizes.
The impulse to order and control heterogeneous objects would be harmless were it not for the imagery of entrapped women in his collections and assemblages. cornell was a voyeur who hoarded representations of idealized women he dare not approach. Further, he was in the habit of following girls in the street, “stalking” them as it would now be termed. Obsessive collecting of sensations aroused by women suggests being stalled, or trapped, by adolescent inhibition. More than just puritanism of the sort Hugh Hefner’s playboy revolution would set out to banish, Cornell’s inhibition had specific psychological causes beyond the reach of any such liberation. Before considering causes in detail, it should be said that whatever gratifying esthetic objects were created, the underlying erotic anxiety, though undoubtedly modified, was never removed. There was a structural split between women as attractive/ arousing and aversive/ repelling that could be little affected apart from confrontation in therapy. Imaginative enhancement of glamorous women such as Bacall remained a symptom and could not alleviate the underlying anxiety. There is nothing to show that Cornell recognized that he had collected, trapped and left her and others in an imprisoned or even embalmed state, as typified by Bebe Marie. The most self-awareness about his stalking and fantasizing consists of admissions of depressed disillusion after episodes of “sighting” girls in the streets of Flushing and Manhattan. He seldom went so far as giving them actual unwanted attention but the impulse was certainly present. The same could be said of his obsession with pornography, towards which he was both attracted and filled with guilty aversion.