Fearing disapproval Cornell kept his dossier of siren pictures, such as those of Marilyn Monroe, well out of sight. His mother appears to have taken little interest in Joseph’s box-making, tolerating while not attempting to understand its necessity. Judging by the journal, the enmeshment of Joseph, Robert, and their mother reduced the possibility for open and meaningful communications. Joseph talked freely only to the journal and, occasionally, in long phone conversations with trusted friends. He could not talk to his mother, who comes across as the pre-occupied and over-busy manager of a financially precarious household. The journal’s tentative impressionism, its incomplete and sometimes incoherent statements, may be attributed to Joseph’s having nobody at hand to talk to. He was also looking for a language to say what few before him had so honestly tried to record. While Breton and the Surrealists were ready to adopt Freud’s language of dream analysis, Cornell’s more spiritual quest often left him faltering for words. If his ideas remain cryptic and half-formed it is because they try to convey feelings that had no accepted outlet and for which no language existed in his milieu.
Helen Cornell was less censorious than baffled by her sons’ odd artistic interests and religious alliance to Christian Science, especially Joseph’s which also became Robert’s. Try though he did, Joseph could never persuade his mother to take interest in the church whose teachings undoubtedly reduced his psychological risk and counteracted psychosomatic ills which had troubled him since childhood. At private school he had suffered from “great insecurity” and from stomach complaints which, diligent student though he tried to be, had something to do with inability to complete a diploma.13 At Andover he kept solicitously in touch with his mother, the surviving letters showing uneasiness about finances. Perplexed and unseeing, Helen Cornell could only idealize her sons. In the last year of her life, she tried to sum up in a letter to Tilly Losch: “Sometimes I feel no one Mother deserves two such devoted sons as mine. Never thinking of themselves—only what they should do for me—and needless to say my single aim was what I might do for them. You know it’s not easy to do things for two such spiritually endowed sons as were Robert and Joe” (p. 327). So insistent was she on her sons’ high mindedness that Joseph himself must have been tempted to accept the unreality of such statements.
Helen Cornell
Born into comfortable circumstances, Helen Cornell was unprepared for the hardship of her life. Helen Ten Broeck Storms was an only child born August 21, 1882 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn but moved to Nyack, N.Y. where she attended high school. Intending to teach kindergarten, she entered a training school in New York City, but marriage at age 20 to Joseph I. Cornell prevented it. Joe, from Closter, N.J., was seven years older than his bride and a designer of fabrics. They established their home in Nyack, where Helen’s maternal grandfather Commodore William R. Voorhees was a wealthy social leader. The Cornells were soon recognized for their own stylish upper middle class household complete with servants. Joe Cornell was not only successful in business, he had aspirations as a pianist, singer and actor. He was a social being who needed the stimulus of travel and was frequently away. Cornell’s biographer thinks that Helen was “disappointed by the unmet expectations of her marriage, which would partly explain the intensity of her emotional investment in her sons”.14
Of the children, Joseph I. (the sixth of that name, the “I” having no known meaning) was born December 24, 1903, Elizabeth on February 5, 1905, Helen February 21, 1906 and Robert June 6, 1910. The family was complete before moving to “the big house on the hill”, where Cornell’s memories mainly centre, before the unexpected death of his father from leukemia a year after Robert was diagnosed with incurable muscular degeneration. These tragedies, together with financial losses, completely altered the course of Helen Cornell’s life. Social status was lost as she struggled to find work to support her children, and it became necessary to leave Nyack for a less expensive dwelling. Thrown onto her own, Helen perhaps became more managing than was good for her sons. Looking years ahead, Solomon comments: “Helen Cornell ... would make a piercing impression, at least among her son’s acquaintances, who, in later years were invariably surprised by this short, plump matron living in noticeable discord with her son. Many would see her as a punitive presence, nagging her son about dusting blinds or clearing the table as if he were a slovenly child. A critical woman, Helen bound Joseph to her not only with the attention she lavished on him but with the approval she just as capriciously withheld. While she claimed he had “top place” in her life, she left him feeling more diminished than fortified, leading him to believe that nothing he accomplished was enough to repay her devotion”.15
It is tempting to think that Cornell’s repetitive forms—such as multiple spheres, cubes, watch faces and empty compartments—signify obsessive attempts to fend off feeling of entrapment by mother and brother after his sisters had married and moved away.16 He seems to have felt enmeshment, or inability to disentangle dependencies, with the surest avenue of escape being departure into a higher realm of consciousness. Repetitive forms are like a mesmerizing ritual chant. Many boxes therefore became “dream catchers” of a kind, giving access to alternative worlds where the imagination was free to roam. Pleasurable mood changes were worth the risks of dissociation, and Cornell appears never to have got lost in schizoid oblivion. As he put it in 1958, “Mother too ‘busy’—Robert in disconsolate mood until after supper—radio night for Robert—fine work today on small box (large—window type—new walnut stain over yellow)” (p. 248). Certain boxes resembling Victorian dioramas containing birds, such as Untitled (Forgotten Game) of 1949, convey the paradox of free flight being inhibited by a containing structure. Cornell would never actually portray his mother as captor but repeatedly alluded by symbolic objects to this feeling.
Although infrequently mentioned in the published journal selections, Cornell’s mother pervades it by her exclusion. The confided privacies were not for her eyes, instead invoking an unseen world she could never inhabit and did not wish to know about. Her opinions were made irrelevant to Cornell’s visionary quest and, as noted, he gave up trying to talk to her about anything that mattered. This looks like the outcome of a long-established avoidant attachment style, a way of parlaying anxiety into substitute attachment objects. Cornell did talk to other women, for instance Patricia Jordan, about his mother when she was over eighty and having falls; he also talked about Robert aged fifty-two, whose misfortunes remained poignant. Cornell was looking for a nurse to join the household so that his mother would not have to move in with either of the married sisters in Westhampton (pp. 282-3). Earlier references to her mainly concern whether she was at home or away, she being described as his “neurotic fussing mother” (p. 264). But he could also write: “Robert joy again late afternoon after trying morning—Mother, ‘sweetness’” (p. 304). In view of such inability fully to accept or reject mother, Cornell kept the status quo as long as he could pursue the “white magic” of his art.
When in 1965 Robert died, Joseph wrote: “Friday the 26th at 1:30 in the afternoon my blessed brother looked at his wall of the celestial toy trains, out on the saffron grounds of the ring-necked pheasants, glanced back and without a sign was released from his frail frame which had withstood such cruel pressures and tensions ... The way was already prepared for me; I have had singularly free feelings from any of the grief I would have anticipated” (p. 316). He adds a cryptic memoriaclass="underline" “Remembering the two stars ** two beautiful dealing with dawns! poet’s quest: “that Beauty furled/ Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world.” Shelley, Epipsychidion—love death” (p. 317). This is code language for a shared empathic understanding with Robert. Cornell commented in a letter to Wayne Andrews, “I am emerging from the enervation and have done something towards the memorial”, also noting, “Mother is taking it wonderfully” (p. 317). The next year he wrote to John Ashbury, “I’ll be giving the lion’s share of my time to my dear mother who has sustained remarkably” (p.333). When finally she moved to a sister’s house, Cornell slept peacefully in her bed a few days before her death.