A Chance Meeting, page 23
Sometimes Zora Hurston worried about Van Vechten’s work—he seemed to have made his own writing so secondary to that of all his friends. Van Vechten collected people, in much the same way that Hurston collected folklore, by throwing himself headlong into each one’s project and jubilating at his or her success. Hurston and Van Vechten both thought that it was fine to embroider now and again but that one must never be censorious of the people and stories in one’s collection. The photographer learned something of the courage and integrity required for this from the anthropologist.
Van Vechten must have known from the early days of their friendship that Zora Neale Hurston would be lucky if she lived to an old age; he didn’t save her, but neither did he blame her for not saving herself. For much of her life, Hurston was the only Black woman in the country making her living from writing, and she was always embattled. Late in her life, broke, “blue,” she wrote, “as the inside of a stovepipe,” and proudly refusing to lean on her friends, she took a job cleaning houses to pay her bills. A story about her from a local Florida paper was picked up and run nationally, and her friends finally found out what had happened to her. Van Vechten and his wife, Fania Marinoff, were among the first to send money.
•
In 1936, two years after Van Vechten added her to his gallery, Hurston received her Guggenheim and sailed for Haiti, where she did some of her most important work. In Haiti, she wrote her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in seven weeks. The heroine of this novel, Janie Crawford, drew on Cather’s Ántonia and probably a little on Huck Finn, but basically Zora Neale Hurston invented her. When Carl Van Vechten finished Their Eyes Were Watching God, perhaps he felt that he had had a rare experience, that of reading a great novel and knowing it in the moment of its first appearance. He felt sorry that Hurston would never have the steady income that made Willa Cather’s life so much easier; he might have guessed that Hurston would never write such a good novel again.
Hurston was busy in Haiti. She also collected for a definitive book—Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Van Vechten, and his willingness to go with her in all her pursuits, were much on her mind in the year when she was putting Tell My Horse together. He was deeply pleased by its dedication: “To Carl Van Vechten: God’s image of a friend.”
•
The Chicago visit didn’t last long. The performance of Singing Steel went over beautifully. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, no longer afraid to fly by themselves, proceeded with their lecture tour. Hurston returned to Florida; Van Vechten made his way back to New York.
Carl Van Vechten opened his mail after his second cup of coffee in the morning. A few days after he got home, he was sitting, paper knife in hand, sleepily going through the stacks of letters. He grinned when he saw Hurston’s note asking if he couldn’t please send along her pictures, and that afternoon he went into the darkroom. The photos were soon ready and dispatched. When she received them in the mail, she wrote again. She loved them—the ones where she was laughing and the ones, she said, when she was looking “mean and impressive.”
25. JOSEPH CORNELL AND MARCEL DUCHAMP
IF YOU were Joseph Cornell and you decided to call Peggy Guggenheim and see about sending over the boxes she had bought, it might take you a few weeks to actually call. You would need to be in the right frame of mind. It couldn’t be one of those days when you felt inexplicably anxious and overwhelmed and spent the afternoon alternately cutting pictures of Hedy Lamarr out of a magazine and taking naps. Nor could it be one of those days when you were all day in and out of small, dusty shops, accumulated paper treasures bulging in the pockets of your plain gray suit with a little brown in the weave. And if it was one of those days when you felt a clean, pure joy and looked from the windows of the elevated train seeing everywhere a special kind of radiance, on that day you would not bother with the mundane and the particular. So that it would need to be some other kind of day, the day that you would call Peggy Guggenheim Ernst (for she was then married to Max Ernst). It would need to be a more practical sort of day.
And, when you did call, when the rainy day finally came that was the right day, and you thought, without troubling about it much or feeling inadequate or guilty, you just thought, freely, “I think I’ll call Peggy Guggenheim Ernst today,” and you just picked up the phone, casually, and called, and she didn’t answer, a man did, and it wasn’t Max Ernst, and you weren’t even really that shaken, and you just said, “This is Joseph Cornell,” and the man’s voice got instantly warmer and said, “Ah, this is Marcel Duchamp,” why then you would just float with the unexpected delight of it.
Later, describing the incident, you would write in your notebook, March 26, 1942 (Tuesday)
After rainy and dampest day in cellar I ever remember. Kept working through, straightened things out some, etc. Marcel Duchamp answered the telephone at Peggy Guggenheim Ernst’s during a cloudburst. It was at once one of the most delightful and strangest experiences I ever had. He is coming out Friday which should prove a much needed inspiration to get some of the objects finished. . . . Very warm day but felt pleasantly lifted above routine feeling.
In 1942, to the great joy of Joseph Cornell—who loved surrealism long before most Americans had heard of it—the surrealists, and their friend Marcel Duchamp, who was part of no movement, left the dangers of Paris and arrived in New York. André Breton was living on West Eleventh Street, refusing to speak a word of English, though glad to watch movies on the projector Cornell brought over; Robert Matta was in town; Cornell had seen Yves Tanguy riding the Madison Avenue bus; and Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp were both living at Peggy Guggenheim’s. It was Duchamp, often Guggenheim’s adviser, who had told her to buy the three Cornell boxes she had purchased earlier that month.
Cornell and Duchamp had met for the first time at a Brancusi show that Duchamp had helped to arrange at the Brummer Gallery nine years before, in 1933. (People were still talking about the previous Brancusi show—in 1926—when, shortly before the show was to open, a customs officer had opened the crates, looked in disbelief at the sculptures, and classified Brancusi’s Bird in Space as “a kitchen utensil.” You can’t, this customs officer had said, slapping down an exorbitant import tax, try to tell me that’s a bird. Brancusi, with some help from his friend Edward Steichen, had sued the U.S. government and won his case, facilitating the importing of European art and striking a blow for the avant-garde at the same time. Newspapers had enjoyed the case thoroughly—the New York Mirror’s headline was IF IT’S A BIRD, SHOOT IT.) There was plenty of publicity and a large crowd for the opening of the next Brancusi show in 1933, at which Cornell had threaded his way through all the other people to meet Duchamp, whose work and ideas he had long admired from afar. When they were finally introduced, Cornell was so overcome that, a friend said, “he made for the WC, where he stayed for an hour.”
It had gotten easier for Cornell to talk to Duchamp, but it was lucky to just catch him at Peggy Guggenheim’s house. The week that Cornell called, the Guggenheim-Ernst house was in the usual uproar—people who stayed with her had to get used to her outbursts of violent temper and splendid generosity. Guggenheim, who had somewhat rapaciously acquired many of the best works in her collection from Europeans selling furiously as the Germans advanced, had a houseful of Ernsts and Calders, Tanguys and Duchamps, and she was making plans to open her gallery, the Art of This Century, where, that fall, she would show Duchamp and Cornell side by side. Later, she would begin exhibiting Jackson Pollock, and eventually had the show that made his career. In the spring of 1942, the twenty-nine-year-old John Cage was staying at Guggenheim’s house with his then wife, the artist Xenia Cage. Virgil Thomson was passing through, as was Robert Motherwell. “Somebody famous,” it seemed to John Cage, “was dropping in every two minutes.”
Guggenheim wanted Cage to play a concert at the Art of This Century when it opened and was paying to have his instruments shipped from Chicago, where he had been living. But when she discovered that Cage had also agreed to play a concert at the Museum of Modern Art that would precede the concert he was to play at her gallery, she had one of her tantrums and threw the Cages out. The composer burst into tears. He walked into another room in the apartment, crying, and Marcel Duchamp was there. Cage didn’t remember what Duchamp said exactly, something about not depending too much on the Peggy Guggenheims of the world, but it helped. Duchamp managed never to fight with Peggy Guggenheim; he passed through all of this easily, as if interruption was as peaceful as solitude.
Joseph Cornell was easily upset by ordinary social contact. He sometimes invited people out to his house and then refused to show them his work. Duchamp’s exquisite delicacy, his innate perfection of gesture, must have been a huge relief to Cornell. And then Duchamp’s confidence, his seeming not even really to need confidence to do his work . . . well, it buoyed Cornell up.
•
Joseph Cornell was an archivist visionary. His work was in the collecting and juxtaposing of paper scraps and corks, cutouts of parrots and astrological maps, glass bottles and compasses. He lived in Flushing, Queens, with his mother and his brother, Robert, whose cerebral palsy required attendance. The two brothers were very close. In the basement of their little house, Joseph Cornell had a workshop where he assembled boxes in which, as Octavio Paz said in a poem for Cornell translated by Elizabeth Bishop, “things hurry away from their names.”
As he did for many people and subjects, including Lauren Bacall and floral gardens, Cornell kept a Duchamp dossier, with thousands of notes, gallery programs, and photographs—a kind of disjoint biography. The Duchamp Dossier became a work of art in its own right; it also contained instructions for another similar work, this one of Duchamp’s invention, called, variously, Boîte and by or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy and, in the deluxe edition, Box-in-a-Valise. This was a three-dimensional codex of all of Duchamp’s most famous work; Duchamp may have had the idea for Box-in-a-Valise in part from looking at Cornell’s work. Duchamp’s plan, which never quite came off, was that three hundred boxes would be constructed over a period of years by various of his friends. Joseph Cornell did some of them, though most were built by Xenia Cage.
Cornell collected endlessly; Duchamp rarely, but surprisingly. Many of Duchamp’s major works—The Large Glass, The Green Box, Box-in-a-Valise, and, especially, his posthumous, secret work, on which he labored for years without telling anybody, Etant donnés, or Given—were different kinds of assemblages. Etant donnés, with its life-size nude body among brambles, had some of the uneasiness of Cornell’s boxes of baby dolls and winter trees. Cornell and Duchamp both used glass in a way that reminded viewers of doors and windows to rooms that couldn’t quite be entered. Many of Cornell’s boxes were called “hotels.” Perhaps Joseph Cornell considered going down to Philadelphia to see Etant donnés when it was put on display in 1969. He would have thoroughly appreciated its wooden door and round peephole and the sense that the person who had chosen these objects had just left the room.
Joseph Cornell, circa 1939–40.
Duchamp owned several Cornells and loved them. Walter Hopps, the curator of the Pasadena Art Museum—who found all the dossiers in Cornell’s basement workshop years later, after the artist’s death—saw some Cornell boxes on a visit to Duchamp’s apartment in 1961. While Hopps was there, Duchamp was interviewed by a young reporter who wanted to speak with Duchamp because he was “so far out.” Duchamp pulled on his cigar and tried the phrase a few times. The journalist fumbled, explaining. “No, no,” said Duchamp, “I understand.” He paused for a minute, and then he said, “I want to show you something really far out. Walter, would you go into the bedroom and bring in one of the Cornells to show this young man.”
The reporter looked at the box, titled Pharmacy, a rack of little glass bottles full of colored substances, and tried to take notes. Duchamp said, “Look at this. Look at how marvelous it is. See? He works with things.”
•
When he went to make the promised visit to Cornell’s workshop at the end of the week, Marcel Duchamp looked out the windows of the elevated train with his customary engaged indifference. He was gracious and attractive, inclining over Cornell’s mother’s hand when they were introduced and speaking to Robert Cornell with no trace of condescension. Joseph Cornell, aflutter but less pained than usual, offered doughnuts with lemon filling, one of his favorite foods, always eaten at the kitchen table. Duchamp had one, not uncomfortable at all, perhaps enjoying the contrast with Guggenheim’s house. And then Cornell, determined to plunge, suggested they go down into his basement workshop. Duchamp followed Cornell down the rickety wooden steps; Cornell made little puns in his head about “descending the staircase.” And Cornell, switching on the basement light, would have suddenly been proud. They looked at the boxes, Cornell placing them on the edge of his worktable, and Duchamp, bending to look into them, not touching them, nodding, saying yes, yes, these are marvelous, yes, I see. They stood talking a little longer, each man resting a hand near a hotel box with a blue cockatoo and a cork ball. Then Duchamp nodded, the right moment, and said that he needed to be getting back. Cornell replaced the box.
Nine months later, in December of 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor, with the United States fully entered into the war, Cornell was back in his workshop. He was filing materials in the Duchamp Dossier. He had a prized new addition, given to him the week before by Marcel Duchamp—Cornell had finally managed to reciprocate Duchamp’s visit. It was a readymade, “done on the spot.” Cornell was almost beside himself with pleasure at how cleanly and swiftly Duchamp had made his present. He had picked up a red-and-yellow glue carton that said “strength” on one side and, admiring the American phrase, had written “gimme” above it and then signed the whole “Marcel Duchamp,” dated Christmas 1942.
26. BEAUFORD DELANEY AND JAMES BALDWIN
BEAUFORD Delaney was sitting at the worn Victrola in his Greene Street studio, listening to Bessie Smith. He heard a knock at the door. He was expecting a visit from a high school student, a friend of a young friend. Delaney lifted the needle off the record, stood up, and walked across his bare white studio to open the door. The young man shifted slightly as the door opened, an eager half smile on his face. Delaney thought he was beautiful—narrow and quick, all desire and the hope of love. Beauford Delaney looked long and hard—James Baldwin later wrote that it felt rather like being X-rayed—and invited him in.
In 1940, Baldwin was a senior at De Witt Clinton high school in the Bronx. Until a year or so before he went to meet Delaney, Baldwin had been a prodigy of the church. He had wanted to outdo his father, a lay preacher, but had wisely chosen to preach before a different congregation, which may have been the only reason the senior Baldwin could tolerate his son’s success. Preaching had also been a way of staying out of the hands of men and women on the streets of Harlem who would call out to Jimmy Baldwin, “Whose little boy are you?” Baldwin’s other allegiance was to school: an elementary-school teacher had taken him, at the age of eleven, to see Orson Welles’s all-Black Macbeth, which had helped create in him a passion for the theater comparable in intensity to that felt by Henry James. Baldwin’s junior-high-school French teacher had been Countee Cullen, who recognized his student’s talent and gave Baldwin’s writing serious attention and Baldwin himself the sense that he could grow up to be a writer. At De Witt Clinton, Baldwin and another student, the future photographer Richard Avedon, were editors of The Magpie, the school literary magazine. Baldwin was one of the few Black students at De Witt Clinton, making the trip up from Harlem, but it was a liberal and reasonably integrated school, mostly of Jewish students, and he was at the center of the group of boys who formed around The Magpie. Baldwin used to make his Magpie friends laugh with his impersonations of the saints from his church. His friends suspected somewhat before Baldwin did that the church for him was more a place of hiding than of revelation. The last Sunday Baldwin preached, his friend Emil Capouya, who also became a writer, took him to the movies. It was Capouya who arranged for Baldwin to meet Delaney. By the time he went to Greene Street, Baldwin was trying to edge himself out from under the shadow of his domineering father; he was writing all the time.
Beauford Delaney by Carl Van Vechten, 1953.
Beauford Delaney had a lot of visitors at his apartment; Alfred Stieglitz came, as did Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Miller, who was one of Delaney’s closest friends. Ethel Waters stopped by and so did the actor Canada Lee, and sailors and soldiers and gallery owners. Delaney kept his paintings covered with white sheets. He liked the way Stieglitz’s An American Place looked with its white walls and bare floor, and he had set up his studio the same way. He could usually, although not always, be persuaded to uncover his canvases; in this case, he might have volunteered. People said that the paintings of Delaney’s Greene Street period—the jumble of buildings and fire hydrants, the angular streets, the insistent reds and greens and the yellow—were a bracing surprise in the white studio.
Delaney was one of the first Black people Baldwin could remember encountering who didn’t live in Harlem, and certainly the first artist he’d met who didn’t feel his material was confined to “Black life.” Baldwin always associated this first meeting with the old song “Lord, Open the Unusual Door.” As for Delaney, he was watching Baldwin’s expressive face react to every detail and painting him in his mind. Baldwin eventually sat for more than a half-dozen portraits by Delaney, including a nude called Dark Rapture, one of very few nudes Delaney did and a painting that helped him move toward abstraction. They weren’t lovers, but there were times when Delaney was in love with Baldwin.
