Back Matter: Unpublished Letters from Nellie Cornish’s Autobiography

 

Nellie Cornish’s autobiography, Miss Aunt Nellie, was published in 1964, eight years after her death. It was the work of a loyal group of Cornish School alumni, headed by Mrs. Frederic Ramhorst, the former Ella Lemon, along with alumnus, faculty member, and composer Lockram Johnson.

Ella Ramhorst had been one of the girls Nellie Cornish—Miss A.N.—had sheltered over the years, most notably rooming in the director’s apartment at Cornish with Nellie’s adopted daughter Elena Miramova and near-daughter Louise Soelberg. It was a close bunch at Cornish in Nellie’s day, like a family, and Ramhorst was right at its heart. She graduated from the Cornish School sometime in the late 1920s. Nellie’s lifelong friend and co-founder of the Theater Department, Ellen Van Volkenburg (EVV), and alumni Edward Nordhoff Beck were also involved. Writer Nancy Wilson Ross, also part of this ad hoc family, wrote Van Volkenburg on April 3, 1958, suggesting that writings be gathered to be printed alongside the autobiography:

I was so happy to hear about Lockram Johnson’s interest in A.N.’s [manuscript]. I shall keep my fingers crossed. The whole thing, the important thing, is to have a record kept of this amazing pioneer achievement. I see a combination of A.N.’s story with pieces about her, but only from people who can express themselves with interest—not necessarily in a “literary” way but in a true and original way …

Wilson would indeed go on to be one of the “people who can express themselves with interest,” providing the excellent foreword to the book. Van Volkenburg and Beck emerged as co-editors who would try to whip the manuscript into shape. Ramhorst was a main driver of the effort, and, though there’s no definitive proof, it appears that she was in charge of collecting tributes for the book’s back matter: the material intended for this part of the book are all addressed to her. The following bit from Van Volkenburg referring to her piece displays their relationship where the book was concerned. EVV mentions that she is editing, yet is turning to Ramhorst for approval of her tribute.

Ella dear: Here are notes I made as I went-along in my editings; I have amplified them somewhat and I am not at all sure whether or not they are what you wish. If they aren’t tell me, dear, and I will try again along the lines you will suggest.

“Back matter,” for those not in the know about printing, refers to any appendix, index, afterword, or what-have-you printed after the end of a book main text. This is where all the pieces to be combined with A.N.’s story that Wilson is suggesting (except for her foreword) ended up in the finished product. Back matter is often meant to round out a reader’s experience with a text, and that is how these stories would be intended.

When Miss Aunt Nellie was published in 1964, the back matter included an afterword by Van Volkenburg and Beck, and tributes to Nellie by dance legend Martha Graham and famous painter Mark Tobey. Ramhorst wrote a piece, a bit of which was included in the afterword. It was a charming “day in the life” at the school. But several pieces exist that were not chosen for the printing, including the letter from Van Volkenburg and one each by Louise Soelberg and Elena Miramova.

The loss of their friend and the spiritual glue of their group, Miss A.N., in 1956 was still raw in the memory of everyone. Nellie Cornish had made some attempts to put it all together and find a publisher before she died, and now, a year after that, her friends were determined to bring the book to a conclusion. Ross is right that the material written to augment the autobiography was of great use and pleasure for the reader, but the letters that were exchanged as the group worked through the problems—material the editors did not deem fit for the work—carry their own considerable power.

Of the greatest interest is a letter from Ellen Van Volkenburg to Ella Lemon Ramhorst, who wrote margin notes on it in reply. Van Volkenburg was involved with Cornish from 1918 when she co-founded the Theater Department with Maurice Browne and founded the marionette department. She was Nellie Cornish's lifelong friend. What makes this letter important is its commentary on where matters with the Cornish School stood post-Nellie. Where most materials avoid controversy and attempt to be as diplomatic as possible, this one is a dry-eyed, dark appraisal of what had been Nellie's school. It gives a glimpse of this group's unedited feelings on the subject and is offered by Van Volkenburg for publication in the back matter of the book.

How can it be expressed? The war between creativity and materiality is what the book is about in the abstract, I suppose. There is something of the “cosmic struggle between the needful and the noble in life” in the whole Cornish story. After this period, her school ceased to exist—the body lived but the heart and the soul had withdrawn. And so, in a way, the School’s Story ends in a sad stalemate.

Ramhorst was against printing this. EVV in the quote at the top of the article asks if her letter was what she wished, and it was not. In her margin notes, she replies to EVV:

Is it necessary to say this when so many are presently working to revivify her dream of a school where the arts are studied in a working alliance? Sackett and Murphy have continually carried on Mr. Cady’s work and the teachers in the school are still using his principles.

As postscript to Ramhorst’s reply, “Sackett” that is, Martha Sackett who had been with Nellie from before the get-go, writes three years later in 1967: “Cornish is flourishing. The school has changed as everything has changed. It is not the school of which Nellie dreamed but I believe that she would approve in many ways.”

Yet Van Volkenburg’s assessment that Nellie’s Cornish School had ceased to exist has real merit. But the principals in the publication effort decided, as we can see, on a course of non-confrontation where the post-Nellie Cornish School was concerned. Bitterness exists in the autobiography, but it has been tempered by this agreement. The letter was not edited: it was simply not included in the back matter.

There were other reasons letters did not find their way into the back matter of Miss Aunt Nellie. We can get a sense of Van Volkenburg’s lack of sentimentality from her words reproduced here. She was the editor, so it is not surprising that Louise Soelberg’s emotional letter was not included. Louise Soelberg writes of Nellie Cornish, who was like a mother to her:

From that first day, she became an integral and beloved part of my life as a child, adolescent and adult. It is almost impossible to sum up what she meant to me in my life. It was she who comforted me during many nightmares when I was found climbing up the walls. It was she who discovered me, half delirious with scarlet fever. Miss Aunt Nellie led me to the discovery of the world of music, and made possible the rich years of study in Europe.

Ramhorst, also, resisted Soelberg’s emotionality, striking through with a pencil the parts about the nightmares and scarlet fever delirium. It seems a shame, really, not to have included this passionate and personal letter, but the group obviously felt that it ran counter to the overall tone of the book. It also was sent late, and that, too, may have led to its not being published. Or both of those reasons.

Nellie’s adopted daughter, Elena Miramova, also wrote a letter that was not included in the book. It is a charming piece, punctuated with dialogue—which figures, as Miramova was a playwright. It is also fanciful, self-dramatizing, and lacking in gravitas, and it is these qualities that probably doomed the letter. EVV would not have missed, given her famous memory, that Nellie had written in the book Van Volkenburg had been editing that she was too busy to meet Miramova at the boat when she first arrived in Seattle and sent an assistant. Miramova’s account is quite a bit different:

Two weeks later as I walked down the gangplank onto a Seattle dock and as I was looking around to locate someone, presently I spied a bustling little woman, coming my way. As she came closer, I saw her winsome smile and her blue, blue eyes. She carried two spaniels, one under each arm. But I couldn’t make out whether she was talking to me or to her dogs. But as she came within reach, I heard her say — “Yes, that must be she …” Then raising her voice, she said, “You must be Mr. Hume’s little girl — are you, or are you?”

 

“Mr. Hume’s little girl,” I repeated questioningly. “Well, eh, I suppose I am, in a way. … and, eh, are you Miss Cornish?”

 

“Or Miss Aunt Nellie,” she answered …”whichever you prefer. What is your name? Mr. Hume called you something, but I’m not fluent in Russian, although I can say, ‘Da, Nyet,Otetz, Neechevo —’ and how do you say ‘I love you’?”

 

“Ya vas lyublu.”

 

“Yes, that’s right. ‘Ya vas lyublu.’ What an important sentence that is! One should know it in every language.” Watching my reaction, she said, “Am I right?”

It would have seemed to Van Volkenburg a pretty egregious fabrication, crazily over-embroidered. Although Miramova’s letter is probably a work of fiction for the most part, it is entertaining and carries its own kind of artistic truth, which is well worth the trouble to read it.

Someday, perhaps, Nellie’s autobiography will go into a second printing. When it does, one has to hope that the editor will include the letters that were rejected for the back matter. They give the reader a real sense of the personalities surrounding Nellie Cornish, and provide an emotional impact that was missing from the book.

— MMB