While lastingly saddened and confused by his father’s untimely death, those of his brother and mother were prepared for, accepted and mourned. Writing to Lisa Andrews, Cornell confided, on a Wagnerian theme about Siegfried and the “pearly gates”, that his mother had died in peace after a falclass="underline" “Oh, dear Lisa, what a beautiful child she once was, complexion of an English milkmaid and the silvered tresses ... She was so close, you have no idea. Yesterday in her favorite walking route (to the bay) she revealed the “Waldzscenes (sic)” of Schumann afresh to me” (p. 345). The references to music are significant as we will see that they typify Cornell’s repeated appeals to the healing power of music which became essential to his art.
Solomon sees Cornell as having been dangerously close to his mother, and there is no doubt that he strategized to avoid deepening the entanglement with mother. Evidence is cited that she felt “stirred and excited in Joseph’s presence”, with his mother’s letters revealing her to have been “poignant, comical and frightening”.17 Solomon comments that “Mrs. Cornell emerges from the correspondence as a vivacious but needy woman who yearned for Joseph with an ardor more befitting a lover than a mother”.18 Shades of possessive Mrs. Morel in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers begin to gather around this story, but it seems unlikely that Mrs. Cornell stigmatized her dead husband as weak or denigrated his memory as Lawrence’s mother actually did to his father. Lawrence wrote fiction about his consequent struggles with women whereas Cornell withdrew from them into realms of erotic fantasy. Cornell’s dreamy, somewhat edgy, idealization of women is less the product of a drastic engulfment than of recoil from the “disturbing edge” Solomon finds in his mother’s letters. In other moods, she urged Joseph to “feel free”, despite missing him very much and being well looked after. There was always something of the “double bind” about Mrs. Cornell’s address to her adored elder son. Her most drastic manipulation of Joe was her insistence that he not attend Robert’s funeral because “burial after cremation is emotional—I don’t think I could stand it”. Joe meekly complied, depriving himself of a final good-bye to the brother for whom he had done all he could. There was no resentment: “All children revere you profoundly in this world and in the one to come”, an idealization avoiding the open conflict he could not bear.19
The artist stereotype specifies fierce rebellion and individualism, as indeed was displayed by Surrealists such as Max Ernst, whose fantastic collages first inspired Cornell. Ernst attacked conventional family life, church and traditional art, causing outrage with such paintings as The Virgin Spanking the Child Jesus in Front of Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and Max Ernst (1926). Such attacks were no part of Cornell’s intentions. He had no wish to repudiate cherished childhood memories, nor would he allow himself to admit to feeling anything but submissive gratitude towards his mother. This made him a misfit among Surrealists, and he could be accused of a particularly American sort of complacency. But Cornell’s alliance with his mother in caring for Robert did much to hold him within domestic bounds and to retain inchoate anger as avoidance, which took the form of over-praising her. It was in this hot-house, boxed-in atmosphere that the metaphorical and also very tangible boxes became urgent business. The shadow boxes never editorialize, have no ideological agenda, the point about them being that they invariably rise above interpersonal interpretations and the every-day trivialities of a restricted life. It may be said that the boxes merely walled off ugly feelings which should have turned Cornell into an expressionistic misogynist such as Willem de Kooning in his Woman paintings of the early 1950s. But that would be to miss the point about the boxes being entry-ways into another more spiritual world that Cornell strove to give authenticity. They witness to successful auto-regulation, mood control and self-initiated homeostasis by means of artistic creativity. Cornell’s life was improved because of them. For the most part stalking was maintained within safe bounds and he did not resort to binge drinking or other self-destructive addictions, save perhaps junk food. The boxes and collages are highly resonant for those viewers who are esthetically susceptible. They do not apologize for, or undercut, their often startling beauty, and they hold special rewards for those seeing the emotional survival strategy behind them.
Cornell is said to have paid a heavy price for his sublimations of the loss of normal sexuality. Yet his weirdly erotic asceticism, centering on incarcerated glamour as in the Bacall box, is not as clear-cut as it looks. In 1993 Mary Ann Caws reported that late in life Cornell actually had “intimate relations”, implying intercourse, with Yayoi Kusama, an encounter the biographer Deborah Solomon does not accept.20 Solomon believes Cornell to have been completely impotent, averse to any sexual relations with a female partner or even living with one. The most she allows is that Yayoi “encouraged him to act on his impulses and apparently gave him his first true taste of sexual bliss. He was sixty years old, and finally, at last, he kissed a woman on the mouth and explored a woman’s body with his hands ...”, but nothing more.21 His fantasies were certainly heterosexual rather than homosexual, or even especially bisexual, yet anxiety and inhibitions were so deep as to prevent actual sexual encounter. The avoiding (or dismissing) of attachment transformed into a sort of “spirituality” without shifting objects of desire away from females. Mrs. Cornell is unlikely to have seduced or sexually aroused her son but to have controlled him from a distance. It was she who drove Yayoi Kusama from the house, defending the emotional status quo and, no doubt, she had all along discouraged Joe’s search for a mate. But she did not make him completely fearful and phobic about women, nor could she invade the inner reaches of his imagination where a different process went on. Rationalizing that he saved sexual powers for his art, Cornell felt he used them for otherworldly journeying via the shadow boxes and collages. This is not to say that he altogether avoided risky encounters with women—befriending the waitress Joyce Hunter (“Tina”) proved to be a fiasco when she robbed him. Nevertheless, Cornell channeled his sexual anxiety into an art of esthetic purity atypical of Surrealism.
Christian Science
Cornell may be unique amongst modern artists for affirming, rather than attacking, a Christian church. His art would have been impossible without a belief-system more comprehensive than the rebellious ideology of Surrealism. It would seem that the self-transcending (and self-abnegating) teaching prescribed by his church enabled his artistic products to arise above personal idiosyncrasy. Much in the expressive arts of the modern era is merely ego-bound, self-concerned and solipsistic, leaving viewers trapped inside alien psychological states. Cornell understood this, setting his sights on a more spiritual plane and, paradoxically, he somehow managed to escape via art the strict confines of the religion to which he clung. Christian Science was the starting point for an art that few would guess began with such a religious commitment. Its prophet and founder was Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) whose virtual denial of the body and all its sufferings Cornell accepted, along with much else that today strains credulity. Aged twenty-three he joined the Christian Science church, adhering until death aged sixty-nine. Robert also became a member which helped him accept disability. It was not that Mrs. Eddy was sought out as a surrogate mother, or spiritual rival to mother—in whose life-after-death, along with that of Robert and of Joyce Hunter, Cornell believed. It was that Mrs. Eddy’s teachings spoke directly to Cornell’s psychosomatic sufferings with elevating teachings that could forestall depression and give practical guidance throughout his life.