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Article: Joseph Cornell: Theater of the Mind - Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files.
- Article from:
- American Scholar
- Article date:
- September 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Reviewed by PETER DAILEY
When the ballerina Tamara Toumanova met Joseph Cornell backstage after one of her performances in 1940, she found the artist, although only thirty-seven, "already an elderly man, rarely smiling, never laughing out loud." Photographs of Cornell are even less equivocal; he is unfailingly polite, unsettlingly remote, his inscrutability seems indistinguishable from despair; he looks, the poet Charles Simic suggests, like Melville's Bartleby "the day he gave up his work to stare at the blank wall outside the office window." Almost all recollections of Cornell concur, emphasizing his gaunt, ghostlike appearance and preternatural shyness, perhaps ...