COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018 Copyright © Mark Dery 2018 Mark Dery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Quotations and excerpts from unpublished correspondence with John Ashbery used in this volume are copyright © 2011 John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author. Illustrations and excerpts from the works of Edward Gorey are used by arrangement with the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Information on previously published material appears here. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008329846 Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008329822 Version: 2020-08-28

Praise for Born to Be Posthumous:

‘Edward Gorey has been granted the most remarkable biography, one I believe he could have lived with. What was the likelihood that this singular genius could be restored, with such compassion and grace, within his whole context: Balanchine, surrealism, Frank O’Hara, Lady Murasaki, et al?’

JONATHAN LETHEM

‘Edward Gorey’s ardent admirers have long known there is something about his work one can’t quite pin down. Past all reason, Mark Dery has pinned it down. A genius book about a bookish genius’

DANIEL HANDLER, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events

‘Knowing Gorey’s full story, done sparkling justice by Mark Dery, will only make you adore him more’

CAITLIN DOUGHTY, author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

‘A devoted and highly readable biography of the illustrator who – from The Doubtful Guest to The Curious Sofa – defined and embodied a world of camp, gothic hilarity’

BEN SCHOTT, Guardian Books of the Year

‘An entertaining account of an artist who liked to be coy with anybody who dared to write about him’

New York Times

‘The best biographies are the result of a perfect match between author and subject, and it’s relatively rare when the two align perfectly. But that’s the case with Born to Be Posthumous. Dery’s book is smart, exhaustive and an absolute joy to read. He has given Gorey the biography he has long deserved’

NPR

‘Excellent and deeply researched … Dery makes a convincing case that Gorey was the true godfather of Goth, inspiring a generation of pop culture memento mori, from the IMAX-scale nightmares of Tim Burton to the travails of Lemony Snicket. Dery has set the standard for a comprehensive appraisal of his legacy’

STEVE SILBERMAN, author of Neurotribes

‘A fascinating and very enjoyable biography. Dery does an excellent job in teasing out the origins of Gorey’s style. For Gorey, as this book elegantly delineates, life was to be lived in art’

MATTHEW STURGIS, author of Oscar: A Life

‘Edward Gorey is the doubtful guest in this fine biography: a stubbornly evasive and irreducible essence, now sprawled in a tureen, now chewing on crockery, now standing with his nose to the wall’

The Atlantic

‘Born to Be Posthumous clears the dust bunnies from the shadowy corners of the House of Gorey, revealing a talent that extended far beyond the macabre faux Victoriana we remember best, and a mind unlike any other’

Vogue

For Margot Mifflin, whose wild surmise—“What about a Gorey biography?”—begat this book. Without her unwavering support, generous beyond measure, it would have remained just that: a gleam in her eye. I owe her this—and more than tongue can tell.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Introduction: A Good Mystery

CHAPTER 1: A Suspiciously Normal Childhood: Chicago, 1925–44

CHAPTER 2: Mauve Sunsets: Dugway, 1944–46

CHAPTER 3: “Terribly Intellectual and Avant-Garde and All That Jazz”: Harvard, 1946–50

CHAPTER 4: Sacred Monsters: Cambridge, 1950–53

CHAPTER 5: “Like a Captive Balloon, Motionless Between Sky and Earth”: New York, 1953

CHAPTER 6: Hobbies Odd—Ballet, the Gotham Book Mart, Silent Film, Feuillade: 1953

CHAPTER 7: Épater le Bourgeois: 1954–58

CHAPTER 8: “Working Perversely to Please Himself”: 1959–63

CHAPTER 9: Nursery Crimes— The Gashlycrumb Tinies and Other Outrages: 1963

CHAPTER 10: Worshipping in Balanchine’s Temple: 1964–67

CHAPTER 11: Mail Bonding—Collaborations: 1967–72

CHAPTER 12: Dracula: 1973–78

CHAPTER 13: Mystery!: 1979–85

CHAPTER 14: Strawberry Lane Forever: Cape Cod, 1985–2000

CHAPTER 15: Flapping Ankles, Crazed Teacups, and Other Entertainments

CHAPTER 16: “Awake in the Dark of Night Thinking Gorey Thoughts”

CHAPTER 17: The Curtain Falls

Notes

A Note on Sources

A Gorey Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Mark Dery

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION
A GOOD MYSTERY

Don Bachardy, Portrait of Edward Gorey (1974), graphite on paper. (Don Bachardy and Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California. Image provided by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.)

Edward Gorey was born to be posthumous. After he died, struck down by a heart attack in 2000, a joke made the rounds among his fans: During his lifetime, most people assumed he was British, Victorian, and dead. Finally, at least one of the above was true.

In fact, he was born in Chicago in 1925. And although he was an ardent Anglophile, he never traveled in England, despite passing through the place on his one trip across the pond. He was, however, intrigued by death; it was his enduring theme. He returned to it time and again in his little picture books, deadpan accounts of murder, disaster, and discreet depravity with suitably disquieting titles: The Fatal Lozenge, The Evil Garden, The Hapless Child. Children are victims, more often than not, in Gorey stories: at its christening, a baby is drowned in the baptismal font; one hollow-eyed tyke dies of ennui; another is devoured by mice. The setting is unmistakably British, an atmosphere heightened by Gorey’s insistence on British spelling; the time is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian, and Jazz Age all at once. Cars start with cranks, music squawks out of gramophones, and boater-hatted men in Eton collars knock croquet balls around the lawn while sloe-eyed vamps look on.

Gorey wrote in verse, for the most part, in a style suggestive of a weirder Edward Lear or a curiouser Lewis Carroll. His point of view is comically jaundiced; his tone a kind of high-camp macabre. And those illustrations! Drawn in the six-by-seven-inch format of the published page, they’re a marvel of pen-and-ink draftsmanship: minutely detailed renderings of cobblestoned streets, no two cobbles alike; Victorian wallpaper writhing with serpentine patterns. Gorey’s machinelike cross-hatching would have been the envy of the nineteenth-century printmaker Gustave Doré or John Tenniel, illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Hand-drawn antique engravings is what they are.

Gorey first blipped across the cultural radar in 1959, when the literary critic Edmund Wilson introduced New Yorker readers to his work. “I find that I cannot remember to have seen a single printed word about the books of Edward Gorey,” Wilson wrote, noting that the artist “has been working quite perversely to please himself, and has created a whole little world, equally amusing and somber, nostalgic and claustrophobic, at the same time poetic and poisoned.”¹

That “little world” has won itself a mainstream cult (to put it oxymoronically). Millions know Gorey’s work without knowing it. Whether they noticed his name in the credits or not, Boomers and Gen-Xers who grew up with the PBS series Mystery! remember the dark whimsy of Gorey’s animated intro: the lady fainting dead away with a melodramatic wail; the sleuths tiptoeing through pea-soup fog; cocktail partiers feigning obliviousness while a stiff subsides in a lake. Then, too, every Tim Burton fan is a Gorey fan at heart. Burton owes Gorey a considerable debt, most obviously in his animated movies The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride. Likewise, the millions of kids who devoured A Series of Unfortunate Events, the young-adult mystery novels by Lemony Snicket, were seduced by a narrator whose arch persona was consciously modeled on Gorey’s. Daniel Handler—the man behind the nom de plume—calls it “the flâneur.” “When I was first writing A Series of Unfortunate Events,” he says, “I was wandering around everywhere saying, ‘I am a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey,’ and everyone said, ‘Who’s that?’ ” That was in 1999. “Now, everyone says, ‘That’s right, you are a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey!’”

Neil Gaiman’s dark-fantasy novella Coraline bears Gorey’s stamp, too. A devout fan since childhood, when he fell for Gorey’s illustrations in The Shrinking of Treehorn by Florence Parry Heide, Gaiman has an original Gorey hanging on his bedroom wall, a drawing of “children gathered around a sick bed.”² Gaiman’s wife, the dark-cabaret singer Amanda Palmer, references Gorey’s book The Doubtful Guest in her song “Girl Anachronism”: “I don’t necessarily believe there is a cure for this / So I might join your century but only as a doubtful guest.”³

His influence is percolating out of the goth, neo-Victorian, and dark-fantasy subcultures into pop culture at large. The market for Gorey books, calendars, and gift cards is insatiable, buoying indie publishers like Pomegranate, which is resurrecting his out-of-print titles. Since his death, his work has inspired a half dozen ballets, an avant-garde jazz album, and a loosely biographical play, Gorey: The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey (2016). Of course, there’s no surer sign that you’ve arrived than a Simpsons homage. Narrated in verse, in a toffee-nosed English accent, and rendered in Gorey’s gloomy palette and spidery line, the goofy-creepy playlet “A Simpsons ‘Show’s Too Short’ Story” (2012) indicates just how deeply his work has seeped into the pop unconscious.

But the leading indicator of Gorey’s influence is his transformation into an adjective. Among critics and trend-story reporters, “Goreyesque” has become shorthand for a postmodern twist on the gothic—anything that shakes it up with a shot of black comedy, a jigger of irony, and a dash of high camp to produce something droll, disquieting, and morbidly funny.

But is that all we’re talking about when we talk about Gorey? An aesthetic? A style? The way we wear our bowler hats?

Truth to tell, we hardly know him.

Gorey’s work offers an amusingly ironic, fatalistic way of viewing the human comedy as well as a code for signaling a conscientious objection to the present. Handler attributes Gorey’s enduring appeal to the sophisticated understatement and wit of his hand-cranked world, dark though it may be—a sensibility that stands in sharp contrast to the Trumpian vulgarity of our times. The Gorey “worldview—that a well-timed scathing remark might shame an uncouth person into acting better—seems worthy to me,” says Handler.

Like Handler, the steampunks and goths with Gorey tattoos who flock to the annual Edwardian Ball, “an elegant and whimsical celebration” inspired by Gorey’s work, dream of stepping into the gaslit, sepia-toned world of his stories.⁴ Justin Katz, who cofounded the Ball, believes revelers, many of whom come dressed in Victorian or Edwardian attire, are drawn by the promise of escape from our “Age of Anxiety,” a “chaotic time” of “accelerated media” that is “stressful and rootless” for many.

Gorey, it should be noted, groaned at being typecast as the granddaddy of the goths and would have shrunk from the embrace of neo-Victorians. “I hate being characterized,” he said. “I don’t like to read about the ‘Gorey details’ and that kind of thing.”⁵ There was more—much more—to the man than charming anachronisms and morbid obsessions.

Only now are art critics, scholars of children’s literature, historians of book-cover design and commercial illustration, and chroniclers of the gay experience in postwar America waking up to the fact that Gorey is a critically neglected genius. His consummately original vision—expressed in virtuosic illustrations and poetic texts but articulated with equal verve in book-jacket design, verse plays, puppet shows, and costumes and sets for ballets and Broadway productions—has earned him a place in the history of American art and letters.

Gorey was a seminal figure in the postwar revolution in children’s literature that reshaped American ideas about children and childhood. Author-illustrators such as Maurice Sendak, Tomi Ungerer, and Shel Silverstein spearheaded the movement away from the bland Fun with Dick and Jane fare of the Wonder Bread ’50s toward a more authentic representation of the hopes, anxieties, terrors, and wonders of childhood—childhood as children live it, not as the angelic age of innocence adults imagine it to be, a sentimental chromo handed down from the Victorians. Gorey was never a mass-market children’s author for the simple reason that publishers, despite his urgings, refused to market his books to children. They were squeamish about the darkness of his subject matter, not to mention the absence of anything resembling a moral in his absurdist parables.

Nonetheless, the Wednesday and Pugsley Addamses of America did read Gorey. In a nice twist, Boomer and Gen-X fans raised their children on The Gashlycrumb Tinies, turning a mock-moralistic ABC that plays the deaths of little innocents for laughs (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears …”) into a bona fide children’s book. Some of those kids grew up to be cultural shakers and movers. The graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, whose scarifying tales of her childhood earned her a MacArthur “genius grant,” is a careful student of Gorey’s “illustrated masterpieces,” as she calls them; the Gorey anthology Amphigorey is among her ten favorite books.⁶ Following Gorey’s lead, she and others have turned traditionally juvenile genres—the comic book, the stop-motion animated movie, the young-adult novel—to adult ends, opening the door to a new honesty about the moral complexity of childhood. Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, an unflinching exploration of growing up lesbian in the shadow of her abusive father, is only one of a host of examples.

The contemporary turn toward an aesthetic, in children’s and YA media, that is darker, more ironic, and self-consciously metatextual (that is, aware of, and often parodying, genre conventions and retro styles) would be unthinkable without Gorey. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011), a bestselling YA novel by Ransom Riggs, is typical of the genre. Unsurprisingly, it was inspired by the “Edward Gorey–like Victorian weirdness” of the antique photos Riggs collected, “haunting images of peculiar children.”⁷ He told the Los Angeles Times, “I was thinking maybe they could be a book, like The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Rhyming couplets about kids who had drowned. That kind of thing.”⁸

Gorey’s art—and highly aestheticized persona—foreshadowed some of the most influential trends of his time. His work as a cover designer and illustrator for Anchor Books in the 1950s put him at the forefront of the paperback revolution, a shift in American reading habits that, along with TV, rock ’n’ roll, the transistor radio, and the movies, helped midwife postwar pop culture. Before the Beats, before the hippies, before the Williamsburg hipster with his vest and man bun, Gorey was part of a charmed circle of gay literati at Harvard that included the poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery; O’Hara’s biographer calls Gorey’s college clique “an early and elitist” premonition of countercultures to come, at a time—the late ’40s—when there was no counterculture beyond the gay demimonde.⁹ Though he’d shudder to hear it, Gorey was the original hipster, a truism underscored by the uncannily Goreyesque bohemians swanning around Brooklyn today in their Edwardian beards and close-cropped hairstyles—the very look Gorey sported in the ’50s.

Before retro took up permanent residence in our cultural consciousness; before the embrace, in the ’80s, of irony as a way of viewing the world; before postmodernism made it safe to like high and low culture (and to borrow, as an artist, from both); before the blurring of the distinction between kids’ media and adult media; before the mainstreaming of the gay sensibility (in the pre-Stonewall sense of a Wildean wit crossed with a tendency to treat life as art), Gorey led the way, not only in his art but in his life as well.

Yet during his lifetime the art world and literary mandarins barely deigned to notice him or, when they did, dismissed him as a minor talent. His books are little, about the size of a Pop-Tart, and rarely more than thirty pages—mere trifles, obviously, undeserving of serious scrutiny. He worked in a children’s genre, the picture book, and wrote in nonsense verse. Even more damningly, his books are funny, often wickedly so. (Tastemakers take a dim view of humor.)

But the nail in Gorey’s coffin, as far as high-culture gatekeepers were concerned, was his status as an illustrator. For much of his lifetime, critics and curators patrolled the cordon sanitaire between serious art, epitomized by abstract expressionism, and commercial art, that wasteland of kitsch and schlock. Clement Greenberg, the high priest of postwar art criticism, dismissed all representational art as kitsch; illustration, it went without saying, was beneath contempt. Decades after abstract expressionism’s heyday, the art world was still doubling down on its disdain for the genre: a 1989 article in the Christian Science Monitor noted that prominent museums were “reluctant to display or even collect” illustration art, an observation that holds true to this day.¹⁰ By the same token, graduate programs discourage dissertations on the subject because, as a source quoted in the Monitor informed, “If you choose to get involved in a secondary art form, which is where American illustration fits in, you are regarded as a secondary art historian.”

Gorey didn’t help matters by standing the logic of the critical establishment on its head. He had zero tolerance for intellectual pretension and seemed to regard gravitas as dead weight, a millstone for the mind. Like the baroque music he loved, he had an exquisite lightness of touch, both in his inked line and in his conversation, which sparkled with quips and aperçus. He pooh-poohed the search for meaning in his work (“When people are finding meaning in things—beware,” he warned) and championed as aesthetic virtues (with tongue only partly in cheek) the inconsequential, the inconclusive, and the nonchalant.¹¹

Those virtues, as well as Gorey’s persona—a pose that incorporated elements of the aesthete, the idler, the dandy, the wit, the connoisseur of gossip, and the puckish ironist, wryly amused by life’s absurdities—were steeped in the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and in the ennui-stricken social satire of ’20s and ’30s English novelists such as Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett, both of whom, like Wilde, were gay.

Gorey’s own sexuality was famously inscrutable. He showed little interest in the question, claiming, when interviewers pressed the question, to be asexual, by which he meant “reasonably undersexed or something,” a state of affairs he deemed “fortunate,” though why that should be fortunate only he knew.¹² To nearly everyone who met him, however, his sexuality was a secret hidden in plain sight. There was the bitchy wit. The fluttery hand gestures. The flamboyant dress: floor-sweeping fur coats, pierced ears, beringed fingers, and pendants and necklaces, the more the better, jingling and jangling. And that campy delivery, plunging into sepulchral tones, then swooping into near falsetto. “Gorey’s conversation is speckled with whoops and giggles and noisy, theatrical sighs,” wrote Stephen Schiff in a New Yorker profile. “He can sustain a girlish falsetto for a very long time and then dip into a tone of clogged-sinus skepticism that’s worthy of Eve Arden.”¹³ Many of his intellectual passions—ballet, opera, theater, silent movies, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Gilbert and Sullivan, English novelists like E. F. Benson and Saki—were stereotypically gay. Nearly everyone who met him pegged him as such.

Viewing Gorey’s art through the lens of gay history and queer studies reveals fascinating subtexts in his work and argues persuasively for his place in gay history, situating him in an artistic continuum whose influence on American culture has been profound.

“At the heart of all of Gorey, everything is about something else,” his friend Peter Neumeyer, the literary critic, once observed.¹⁴ In his life as well as his art, he embraced opposites and straddled extremes. His tastes ranged from highbrow (Balthus, Beckett) to middlebrow (Golden Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to lowbrow (true-crime potboilers, Star Trek novelizations, the Friday the 13th franchise). He was equally unpredictable in his critical verdicts, pitilessly skewering dancers in George Balanchine’s ballets yet zealously defending, with a perfectly straight face, William Shatner’s animatronic acting. Allowing that his work might hark back “to the Victorian and Edwardian periods,” he pulled an abrupt about-face, asserting, “Basically I am absolutely contemporary because there is no way not to be. You’ve got to be contemporary.”¹⁵

What you saw wasn’t always what you got. Take his name. It was too perfect. Edward fits like a dream because his neo-Victorian nonsense verse is modeled, unapologetically, on that of Edward Lear (of “The Owl and the Pussycat” fame). His mock-moralistic tales are set, more often than not, in Edwardian times. Moreover, Gorey was an eternal Anglophile, and Edward is one of the most English of English names, a hardy survivor of the Norman Conquest that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, when it was Ēadweard—“Ed Weird” to modern eyes unfamiliar with Old English, an apt sobriquet for a legendary eccentric. (Did I mention that he lived, in his later years, in a ramshackle nineteenth-century house that he shared with a family of raccoons and a poison-ivy vine creeping through a crack in the living-room wall? Gorey was benignly tolerant of both infestations—for a while.)

As for Gorey, well, the thing speaks for itself: his characters often meet messy ends. The novelist and essayist Alexander Theroux, a member of Gorey’s social circle on Cape Cod, thinks “he felt obliged to be gory-esque, G-O-R-Y, because of that name.” “Nominative determinism,” the British writer Will Self calls it.¹⁶ No doubt, the body count is high in Gorey’s oeuvre. In his first published book, The Unstrung Harp, persons unknown may have drowned in the pond at Disshiver Cottage; in The Headless Bust, the last title published during his lifetime, “crocheted gloves and knitted socks” are found on the ominously named Stranglegurgle Rocks, leading the missing person’s relatives to suspect the worst.*

Bookended by this pair of fatalities, the deaths in Gorey’s hundred or so books include homicides, suicides, parricides, the dispatching of a big black bug with an even bigger rock, murder with malice aforethought, vehicular manslaughter, crimes of passion, a pious infant carried off by illness, a witch spirited away by the Devil, at least one instance of serial killing, and a ritual sacrifice (to an insect deity worshipped by man-size mantids, no less). In keeping with the author’s unshakable fatalism, there are Acts of God: in The Hapless Child, a luckless uncle is brained by falling masonry; in The Willowdale Handcar, Wobbling Rock flattens a picnicking family.

And, of course, infanticides abound: children, in Gorey stories, are an endangered species, beaten by drug fiends, catapulted into stagnant ponds, throttled by thugs, fated to die in Dickensian squalor, or swallowed whole by the Wuggly Ump, a galumphing creature with a crocodilian grin.

To relieve the tedium between murders, there are random acts of senseless violence and whimsical mishaps:

There was a young woman named Plunnery

Who rejoiced in the practice of gunnery,

Till one day unobservant,

She blew up a servant,

And was forced to retire to a nunnery.¹⁷

Only rarely, though, does Gorey stoop to slasher-movie clichés, and then only in early works such as The Fatal Lozenge, an abecedarium whose grim limericks cross nonsense verse with the Victorian true-crime gazette. Graphic violence is the exception in Gorey’s stories. He embraced an aesthetic of knowing glances furtively exchanged or of eyes averted altogether; of banal objects that, as clues at the scene of a crime, suddenly phosphoresce with meaning; of empty rooms noisy with psychic echoes, reverberations of things that happened there, which the house remembers even if its residents do not; of rustlings in the corridor late at night and conspiratorial whispers behind cocktail napkins—an aesthetic of the inscrutable, the ambiguous, the evasive, the oblique, the insinuated, the understated, the unspoken.

Gorey believed that the deepest, most mysterious things in life are ineffable, too slippery for the crude snares of word or image. To manage the Zen-like trick of expressing the inexpressible, he suggests, we must use poetry or, better yet, silence (and its visual equivalent, empty space) to step outside language or to allude to a world beyond it. With sinister tact, he leaves the gory details to our imaginations. For Gorey, discretion is the better part of horror.

The gory details: how he detested the phrase, not least because, year after dreary year, editors repurposed that shopworn pun as a headline for profiles but chiefly because it cast his sensibility as splatter-film shtick when in fact it was just the opposite—Victorian in its repression, British in its restraint, surrealist in its dream logic, gay in its arch wit, Asian in its attention to social undercurrents and its understanding of the eloquence of the unsaid.

Gorey was an ardent admirer of Chinese and Japanese aesthetics. “Classical Japanese literature concerns very much what is left out,” he noted, adding elsewhere that he liked “to work in that way, leaving things out, being very brief.”¹⁸ His use of haikulike compression—he thought of his little books as “Victorian novels all scrunched up”¹⁹—had partly to do with a philosophical critique of the limits of language, at once Taoist and Derridean. Taoist because the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching echo his thoughts on language: “The name that can be named / is not the eternal Name. / The unnamable is the eternally real.”²⁰ Derridean because Gorey would have agreed, intuitively, with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s observations on the slipperiness of language and the indeterminacy of meaning.

Gorey believed in the mutability and the inscrutability of things and in the deceptiveness of appearances. “You are a noted macabre, of sorts,” an interviewer observed, prompting Gorey to reply, “It sort of annoys me to be stuck with that. I don’t think that’s what I do exactly. I know I do it, but what I’m really doing is something else entirely. It just looks like I’m doing that.”²¹ Pressed to explain what, exactly, he was doing, Gorey was characteristically evasive: “I don’t know what it is I’m doing; but it’s not that, despite all evidence to the contrary.”²²

It’s the closest thing to a skeleton key he ever gave us. Apply it to his work, and you can hear the tumblers click. Take death, his all-consuming obsession. Or is it? Despite the lugubrious atmosphere and morbid wit of his art and writing, Gorey uses death to talk about its opposite, life. In his determinedly frivolous way, he’s asking deep questions: What’s the meaning of existence? Is there an order to things in a godless cosmos? Do we really have free will? Gorey once observed that his “mission in life” was “to make everybody as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like”—as succinct a definition of the philosopher’s role as ever there was.²³

Gorey inclined naturally toward the Taoist view that philosophical dualisms hang in interdependent, yin-yang balance. And while his innate suspicion of anything resembling cant and pretension would undoubtedly have produced a pained “Oh, gawd!” if he’d dipped into one of Derrida’s notoriously impenetrable books, he had more in common with the French philosopher than he knew. Derrida, too, questioned the notion of hierarchical oppositions, using the analytical method he called deconstruction to expose the fact that, within the closed system of language, the “superior” term in such philosophical pairs exists only in contrast to its “inferior” opposite, not in any absolute sense. Or, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, “When people see some things as beautiful, / other things become ugly. / When people see some things as good, / other things become bad.”²⁴ Better yet, as Gorey put it: “I admire work that is neither one thing nor the other, really.”²⁵

Revealingly, there’s an almost word-for-word echo, here, of the dismissive quip he tossed at the interviewer who asked him, point-blank, what his sexual preference was: “I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.”²⁶ The close harmony of these two answers invites the speculation that his aesthetic preference for things that aren’t either/or but rather both/and—as well as his fondness for ambiguity and indirection, puns and pseudonyms, and, most of all, mysteries—may have had personal roots.

“What I’m trying to say,” he told the journalist who pressed him on the question of his sexuality, “is that I am a person before I am anything else.”²⁷ In the end, isn’t it a hobgoblin of little minds, this attempt to skewer a mercurial intelligence like Gorey’s on the pin of language? “Explaining something makes it go away,” he maintained. “Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable.”²⁸

The paradoxical, yin-yang nature of the man and his art bedeviled critics’ attempts to sum up his sensibility in a glib one-liner, a point underscored by the train of oxymoronic catchphrases that trails behind Gorey. Writers trying to transfix that elusive thing, the Goreyesque, reach instinctively for phrases that conjoin like and unlike, describing his work as embodying “[the] comic macabre,” “morbid whimsy,” “the elusive whimsy of children’s nonsense … with the discreet charm of black comedy,” and “[the] whimsically macabre.”²⁹ (Where would we be without the long-suffering “whimsy”?)

Gorey didn’t fit neatly into philosophical binaries: goth or Golden Girls fan? “Genuine eccentric” or (his words) “a bit of a put-on”?³⁰ Unaffectedly who he was or, as he once confided, “not real at all, just a fake persona”?³¹ Commercial illustrator or fine artist? Children’s book author or confirmed pedophobe who found children “quite frequently not terribly likeable”?³²

We can even see the quintessential Gorey look—Harvard scarf, immense fur coat, sneakers, and jeans, accessorized with a Victorian beard and a profusion of jewelry—as a sly rejoinder to black-or-white binaries, resolving Wildean aesthete and Harvardian, New York balletomane and Cape Cod beachcomber in an unnamable style that one journalist called “half bongo-drum beatnik, half fin-de-siècle dandy.”³³ The effect, as the eye moves from the flowing white beard of a nineteenth-century litterateur to the elegant fur coat to land, anticlimactically, on scuffed white Keds, is a kind of sight gag—a goofy plunge from highbrow to low, with the sneakers as punch line.

Goths who knocked on Gorey’s door, in his semiretired final decade on Cape Cod, were crestfallen to be greeted not by a palely loitering Victorian in a Wildean fur coat but by an avuncular gent in a polo shirt and, during the summer, those mortifying short shorts old guys insist on wearing. Gorey refused to play to type: in his driveway, where you’d expect to find a decommissioned hearse, sat a cheery yellow Volkswagen Beetle and, later, a shockingly suburban Volkswagen Golf (though it was black, at least). Not for him the sinister suavity of Vincent Price or the open-casket affect of Morticia Addams; Gorey alternated between the languorous air of the aesthete, all world-weary sighs and theatrically aghast “Oh, dear”s, and a Midwestern affability born of his Chicago roots, most evident in the bobby-soxer slang that peppered his speech (“zippy,” “zingy,” “goody,” “jeepers”).

For an auteur of crosshatched horrors who collected postmortem photographs of Victorian children, Gorey was disappointingly normal. “His work and his personality [were] enormously separate from one another,” says Ken Morton, his first cousin once removed. “His day-today life was fairly frivolous and lazy and laid-back. It was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a bunch of cats hanging on his shoulders and maybe reading a book at the same time or doing a crossword puzzle.”³⁴

As Morton points out, Gorey’s everyday life wasn’t terribly Goreyesque. When he wasn’t hunched over his drawing board, he was cycling through routines so ritualized they verged on the obsessive. His virtually unbroken record of attendance at the New York City Ballet, from 1956 to 1979, is only the best known of his compulsions. “I’m a terrible creature of habit,” he admitted.³⁵ “I do the same thing over and over and over and over. I tend to go to pieces if my routine is broken.”³⁶

The routines that filled his days added up to an existence that, by his own avowal, was essentially “featureless.”³⁷ Gorey was a bookworm. Waiting in line, killing time before the curtain went up at the ballet, even walking down the street, he went through life with his nose in a book. (His library, at the time of his death, comprised more than twenty-one thousand volumes.) He was a movie junkie, taking in as many as a thousand films a year. Of course, he spent countless hours lost in George Balanchine’s dances.

Not exactly the stuff of pulse-racing biography. This, after all, is the man who, when asked what his favorite journey was, replied, “Looking out the window”; who “never could understand why people always feel they love to climb up Mount Everest when you know it’s quite dangerous getting out of bed.”³⁸ And if his uneventful life makes him an unlikely biographical subject, his tendency to snap shut, oyster-tight, when interviewers probed too deep makes him an especially uncooperative one. An only child, he was solitary by nature and single by choice. He had good friends, but whether he had any close friends is an open question. With rare exception, he was silent as a tomb on personal matters—his childhood, his parents, his love life. Even those who’d known him for decades doubted they truly knew him.

Gorey was inscrutable because he didn’t want to be scruted. He was a master of misdirection, adroit at dodging the direct question (about his art, his sexuality). His theatrical persona was part of that strategy of concealment. (Freddy English, a member of his Harvard circle, always felt that behind the Victorian beard, the flowing coats, and “the millions of rings,” Ted, as Gorey was known to his friends, was “a nice Midwestern boy” who “got himself done up in this drag.”)

In 1983, I came face-to-face with that persona. I was twenty-three, fresh out of college and newly arrived in New York, working as a clerk at the Gotham Book Mart. The store’s owner, Andreas Brown, was the architect of Gorey’s ascent to mainstream-cult status, publishing his books, mounting exhibitions of his illustrations, inking deals for merchandise based on his characters. Now and then, Gorey dropped by, usually to sign a limited edition of a newly published title. I was running down a book for a customer when a tall man with a beard worthy of Walt Whitman swept down the aisle. He was chattering away in a stage voice of almost self-parodic campiness, and his costume was equally outlandish, a traffic-stopping getup of Keds, rings on each finger, and clanking amulets, topped off with a floor-length fur coat dyed the radioactive yellow of Easter Peeps. Taking in this improbable apparition, I wondered who was inside the disguise.

This book is the answer to that question.

Gorey is grist for the biographer’s mill after all, not only because he was an artist of uncommon gifts but because he was a world-class eccentric to boot. If his life looked, from the outside, like an exercise in well-rutted routines, its inner truth recalls the universe as characterized by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane: not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.³⁹ To be sure, he lived much of his life on the page, in the worlds he conjured up with pen and ink, and did most of his adventuring between his ears. In large part, the art is the life. But Gorey’s work also gives us a spyhole into his mind (as does his conversation and his correspondence).

And what a mind: poetic, playful, darkly nonsensical à la Lewis Carroll, exuberantly silly as Edward Lear, generally nonchalant but prone to melancholy in the sleepless watches of insomniac nights, surrealist, Taoist, Dadaist, mysterious, mercurial, giddy with leaps of logic and free-associated connections, rich in spontaneous insights, childlike in the unselfconsciousness of his pet peeves, hilarious in the self-contradicting capriciousness of his likes and dislikes. Gorey charms us by virtue of his inimitable Goreyness—the million little idiosyncrasies that made him who he was. And he was always who he was—utterly, unaffectedly himself; a species of one, like his character Figbash, or the Zote in The Utter Zoo, or better yet the Doubtful Guest, his enigmatic alter ego in the book of the same name, a furry, sneaker-shod enfant terrible who turns an Edwardian household upside down.

That’s as good a personification as any. Gorey was a dubious character, particularly in the eyes of children’s book publishers and Comstockian guardians of childhood innocence. But he was also doubtful in the sense that he was fraught with doubts: about his art (“To take my work seriously would be the height of folly”⁴⁰), his fellow Homo sapiens (“I just don’t think humanity is the ultimate end”⁴¹), free will (“You never really choose anything. It’s all presented to you, and then you have alternatives”⁴²), God, romantic love, language, the Meaning of Life, you name it. On occasion, he even doubted his own existence: “I’ve always had a rather strong sense of unreality. I feel other people exist in a way that I don’t.”⁴³

Then, too, Gorey was a Doubtful Guest in the sense that he seemed as if he’d been born in the wrong time, maybe even on the wrong planet. By all accounts, he regarded the human condition with a kind of wry, anthropologist-from-Mars mixture of amusement and bemusement. “In one way I’ve never related to people or understood why they behave the way they do,” he confessed.⁴⁴

How to get to the bottom of a man whose mind was intricate as Chinese boxes? In the pages to come, we’ll use the tools of psycho-biography to make sense of Gorey’s relationships with his absent father and smothering mother and of the lifelong effects of growing up an only child with a prodigious intellect (as measured by the numerous IQ tests he endured). Gay history, queer theory, and critical analyses of Wildean aestheticism and the sensibility of camp will be indispensable, too, in unraveling his tangled feelings about his sexuality, his stance vis-à-vis gay culture, and the “queerness” (or not) of his work. A familiarity with the ideas underpinning surrealism will help us unpack his art, and a close study of nonsense (as a literary genre) will shed light on his writing. An understanding of Balanchine, Borges, and Beckett will come in handy, as will an appreciation of Asian art and philosophy (especially Taoism), the visual eloquence of silent film, the mind-set of the Anglophile, and the psychology of the obsessive collector (not just of objects but of ideas and images, too).

Yet no matter how carefully we prowl the lawn for footprints or scour the Persian rug for bloodstains, like the sleuths in the Agatha Christie whodunits he loved so much, the Mystery of Edward St. John Gorey is, ultimately, uncrackable. “Each Gorey drawing and each Gorey tale is a mystery that ends—meaningfully—with the absence of meaning,” Thomas Curwen observed in the Los Angeles Times. “He would never presume to know, and if he did, he would never tell.”⁴⁵ “Always be circumspect. Disdain explanation,” wrote Gorey in a postcard to Andreas Brown.⁴⁶ The deeper we go into the hedge maze, the more stealthily we try the doorknobs in the rambling manor’s abandoned west wing, the more elusive he seems. Not that it matters: with Gorey, never getting there is half the fun.

* Publishers, dates of publication, and related details can be found, with a few exceptions, in “A Gorey Bibliography” at the end of this book. Quoted matter isn’t cited in endnotes for the simple reason that nearly all Gorey’s books are unpaginated; even so, readers shouldn’t have much trouble tracking down quotations, since few Gorey titles are longer than thirty pages.

CHAPTER 1
A SUSPICIOUSLY NORMAL CHILDHOOD

Chicago, 1925–44

Ted Gorey, age two, with his mother, Helen Garvey Gorey, 1927. (Elizabeth Morton, private collection)

His was “a perfectly ordinary childhood,” Gorey always insisted.¹ “The facts of my life are so few, tedious, and irrelevant to anything else,” he once told an interviewer—no doubt with one of the full-body sighs he used as a melodramatic flourish—“there is no point in going into them.”²

The facts: Edward St. John Gorey was born on February 22, 1925, at St. Luke’s Hospital, Chicago. Father: Edward Leo Gorey, twenty-seven, newspaperman. Got his start as a police reporter, covering local crime. From 1920 to 1933, worked the politics beat for Hearst’s Chicago Evening American, climbing by ’31 to the position of political editor. Later, publicist; still later, aide to an alderman, as Chicago calls the powerful ward representatives who sit on its city council. Mother: Helen Garvey Gorey, thirty-two, stay-at-home mom. Moneyed, Republican, Episcopalian, and of mostly English stock despite their Irish surname, the WASP-y Garveys were several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder from the working-class Goreys, Democrat, devoutly Catholic, and thoroughly Irish, their family line traceable back to the town of Gorey, south of Dublin. (Disapproving noises were heard, on the Garvey side, when they married—cluckings about Helen marrying beneath her station.) Ted—as the younger Edward was known—was a bright kid, well adjusted, well liked. Bookworm, culture vulture, aspiring artist. Attended high school at Francis W. Parker, a progressive private school founded on Deweyite principles. Drafted into the army in ’44. Off to Harvard in ’46.

Even Gorey seemed regretful that his origins didn’t live up to his myth, lamenting that he “did not grow up in a large Victorian house” and noting, with half joking dismay, that his childhood was “happier than I imagine. I look back and think, ‘Oh poetic me,’ but it simply was not true. I was out playing Kick-the-Can along with everybody else.”³

Of course, he was adroit at throwing sleuths off the scent. When an interviewer sniffed around the subject of his childhood, he led his interlocutor off into the tall grass of a digression or swatted the question aside with a deadpan quip: asked what he was like as a child, Gorey replied, “Small.”⁴ When all else failed, he pled amnesia. “What’s past is past,” he declared, closing the door on the subject.⁵

But the past is never past, not in the dark room of the subconscious, where our childhood memories become more vivid, not less, with age, and certainly not in gothic fiction, where the past we’ve repressed always comes back to haunt us. And much of Gorey’s fiction, whatever else it is—existentialist, absurdist, surrealist—is inescapably gothic. It’s all about the past, from its period settings to its archaic language to the obvious fact that Gorey uses obsolete genres (the Puritan primer, the Dickensian tearjerker, the silent-movie melodrama) to tell his stories.

Gorey’s own story, it turns out, is as full of unsolved riddles and buried secrets as any good mystery, though his childhood looks suspiciously normal at first glance.

It wasn’t.

How normal is teaching yourself to read at the age of three and a half, then cutting your eyeteeth on Victorian novels? Gorey lived up to the myth of the precocious only child, plowing through Dracula and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass—in the same month, even—between the ages of five and seven, with Frankenstein close on their heels. Dracula scared him to death, he said. By the age of eight, he’d read the collected works of Victor Hugo, he claimed, a herculean labor that perplexed even Gorey himself, retrospectively. “Chloroform!” was his adult verdict. “But I can still remember a Hugo being forcefully removed from my tiny hands when I was about eight so I could eat my supper.”⁶

Gorey’s infatuation with Dracula and Frankenstein at an age when most of us are struggling with Charlotte’s Web was an augury: the gothic sensibility is deeply embossed on his work. His encounter with Dracula was especially prophetic, not only because the bat-winged shadow of the gothic would flap across his aesthetic but also because he would owe the sanguinary count his greatest commercial success. Gorey’s costume and set design for the Broadway production of the play based on Bram Stoker’s novel made him the toast of Manhattan theater circles in 1977 and bought him a house on Cape Cod.

No less important for a budding visual intelligence were the illustrations in the books he read as a child. “We [had] a wonderful horrid thing called Child Stories from Dickens, which was illustrated with chromolithographs,” he recalled. “It was all the deaths: Little Nell, [Smike] from Nicholas Nickleby. I remember it with horror.”⁷

He fell in love with Ernest Shepard’s wry, fine-lined drawings for A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and the sharp-nibbed precision of Tenniel’s illustrations for the Alice books. Little wonder, then, that he grew up to be the sort of artist who is all about line. “Line drawing is where my talent lies,” he said in a 1978 interview.⁸ What strikes the eye before anything else, in Gorey’s work, is his mesmerizing pen-and-ink technique. Look close, and you can almost see the pullulation of a million little strokes. You’ve seen this texture somewhere before, the tight mesh of crisscrossed lines. And then it hits you: the man is doing hand-drawn engraving. What you’re looking at, in all that impossibly uniform stippling and cross-hatching, is the fastidious mimicry, by hand, of effects usually achieved with engravers’ tools: gravers, rockers, roulettes, burnishers. Gorey is a counterfeiter of sorts, fooling us into thinking his drawings are engravings, obviously of Victorian or Edwardian vintage, undoubtedly by an Englishman long dead.

According to Gorey, “the Victorian and Edwardian aspect” of his work had its origins in “all those 19th-century novels I’ve read and [in] 19th-century wood engraving and illustration.”⁹ But there was a more elusive quality that seduced him as well, “the strange overtone” nineteenth-century illustrations have taken on over time.¹⁰ The Victorian era bore witness to the birth of the mass media, inundating British society with a flood of mass-produced images. Many of those images are still floating around, in one form or another, and Gorey was drawn to the uncanniness of all those transmissions from a dead world—specifically, to their unsettling combination of coziness and creepiness, which Freud called the unheimlich (literally, “unhomelike”).

It was that same quality, he thought, that seduced the surrealist artist Max Ernst, who with the aid of scissors and paste conjured up dreamlike vignettes from Victorian and Edwardian scientific journals, natural-history magazines, mail-order catalogs, and pulp literature. Gorey was profoundly influenced by Ernst’s wordless, plotless “collage novels,” of which Une Semaine de Bonté (A week of kindness, 1934) is the best known. Seamlessly assembled from black-and-white engravings, Ernst’s images look like scenes from silent movies shot on some back lot of the unconscious: a bat-winged woman weeps on a divan, oblivious to the sea monster beside her; a tiger-headed man brandishes a severed head, fresh from the guillotine. “I was very much taken with [nineteenth-century illustrations], in the same way that I presume Max Ernst was,” said Gorey. “I mean, all those things that Ernst used in his collages can’t have looked that sinister to people in the 19th century who were just leafing through ladies’ magazines and catalogues. And, of course, now they look nothing but sinister, no matter what. Even the most innocuous Christmas annual is filled with the most lugubrious, sinister engravings.”¹¹

Gorey started drawing even earlier than he started reading, at the age of one and a half.¹² “My first drawing was of the trains that used to pass by my grandparents’ house,” he remembered.¹³ Benjamin St. John Garvey and Prue (as Ted’s stepgrandmother, Helen Greene Garvey, was known to the family) lived in Winthrop Harbor, an affluent suburb north of Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan. Their house was on a bluff, overlooking the Chicago and North Western railroad tracks. Describing his infant effort, he recalled, “The composition was of various sausage shapes. There was a sausage for the railway car, sausages for the wheels, and little sausages for the windows.”¹⁴

Gorey, who saw much more of his mother’s side of the family than he did his father’s, seems to have had fond memories of his visits to Winthrop Harbor: family photos show him squatting by an ornamental pond, peering at a flotilla of lily pads; trotting alongside his grandfather as he mows the lawn.

All of which has the makings of what Gorey assured interviewers was a disappointingly “typical sort of Middle-Western childhood.”¹⁵ Before his birth, however, his grandparents starred in a gothic set piece—a messy divorce—that must have scandalized the Garvey clan, especially since the Chicago papers gave it front-page play. (Benjamin was vice president of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company, and his marital melodrama made good copy.) Whether any sense of things hushed up crept into the corners of Gorey’s consciousness, we don’t know, though it’s tempting to locate the sense of things repressed that pervades his work—the furtive glances, the averted gazes—in the grown-ups’ whisperings about scenes played out behind closed doors.

Gorey’s grandmother Mary Ellis Blocksom Garvey had divorced his grandfather in 1915; it was the unhappy denouement of a marriage buffeted by accusations of madness and counteraccusations of forced stays in sanitariums, where Gorey’s grandmother was restrained in a strait-jacket and left to languish in solitary confinement, she claimed. “tried to drive me insane,” wife asserts in suit, the Chicago Examiner blared. phone man kept her in sanitarium until reason fled, she declares.¹⁶

The divorce sowed discord among the Garvey children. Ted’s cousin Elizabeth Morton (known by her nickname Skee*) remembers him talking about his mother and her siblings fighting. Skee’s sister, Eleanor Garvey, thinks “it was a fairly volatile family.”

Asked by an interviewer if he was an only child, Gorey said, “Yes. And in childhood I loved reading 19th-century novels in which the families had 12 kids.”¹⁷ Then, in the next breath: “I think it’s just as well, though, that I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I saw in my own family that my mother and her two brothers and two sisters were always fighting. There were so many ambivalent feelings. And then my grandmother would go insane and disappear for long periods of time.” (Madness and madhouses recur throughout Gorey’s work: an asylum broods on a desolate hill in The Object-Lesson; the protagonists of The Willowdale Handcar spy a mysterious personage who may or may not be the missing Nellie Flim “walking in the grounds of the Weedhaven Laughing Academy”; Madame Trepidovska, the ballet teacher in The Gilded Bat, loses her reason and “must be removed to a private lunatic asylum”; Jasper Ankle, the unhinged opera fan who stalks Madame Caviglia in The Blue Aspic, is “committed to an asylum where no gramophone [is] available”; Miss D. Awdrey-Gore, the reclusive mystery writer memorialized in The Awdrey-Gore Legacy, may or may not have gone to ground in “a private lunatic asylum”; and on and on.)

In later life, Gorey adopted Eleanor and Skee as surrogate siblings. “I felt as if I were his little sister,” says Skee. “Since we never had a brother, and he never had any siblings …” She trails off, the depth of feeling in her voice unmistakable. “I think that’s why he liked being here, ’cause it was like having sisters,” she decides. (By “here,” she means Cape Cod, where Gorey spent summers with his Garvey cousins from 1948 on, moving there for good in 1983.) Cousins are the most frequent familial relations in Gorey’s stories; make of that what you will.

The childhood Gorey insisted was “happier than I imagine” was troubled by tensions in his parents’ marriage, too. Class frictions between the Garveys’ aspirational WASPiness and the Goreys’ cloth-cap Irishness complicated things. Who knows how Ted negotiated the transition from his well-heeled grandparents’ suburban idyll, in Winthrop Harbor, to the corner-pub world of his Gorey relatives?

Unsurprisingly, the group psychology of families—relations between husbands and wives, the interactions of parents and children—is fraught in Goreyland. Parents are absent or hilariously absentminded, like Drusilla’s parents in The Remembered Visit, who, “for some reason or other, went on an excursion without her” one morning and never returned. Of course, neglectful parents are vastly preferable to the heartless type, a more plentiful species in Gorey stories. In The Listing Attic, we meet the “headstrong young woman in Ealing” who “threw her two weeks’ old child at the ceiling … to be rid of a strange, overpowering feeling”; the Duke of Daguerrodargue, who orders the servants to dispose of the puny pink newborn that nearly killed his wife in child-birth; and the “Edwardian father named Udgeon, / whose offspring provoked him to dudgeon,” so much so that he’d “chase them around with a bludgeon.”

Kids growing up in households where adults are inscrutable and unpredictable learn that keeping their mouths shut and their expressions blank is the shortest route to self-preservation. (Burying your nose in a book is another way of making yourself invisible.) Gorey’s people are almost entirely expressionless, their mouths tight-lipped little dashes; they barely make eye contact and shrink from displays of affection. Conversation consists mostly of non sequiturs; awkward silences hang in the air. Alienation and flattened affect are the norm.

The only truly happy relationships in Gorey’s books are between people and animals: Emblus Fingby and his feathered friend in The Osbick Bird, Hamish and his lions in The Lost Lions, Mr. and Mrs. Fibley and the dog they regard as a surrogate child when their infant disappears from her cradle in The Retrieved Locket. None of which is at all surprising: Gorey’s fondness for his cats was at least as deep as his affection for his closest human friends, probably deeper. Asked by Vanity Fair, “What or who is the greatest love of your life?” he replied, “Cats.”¹⁸ Perhaps the warmest bonds are between animals, as in The Bug Book, the only Gorey title with an unequivocally happy ending. In it, a pair of blue bugs who live in a teacup with a chip in the rim are “on the friendliest possible terms” with some red bugs and yellow bugs, calling on each other constantly and throwing delightful parties. They’re all cousins, of course.

In 1931, another not entirely ordinary incident ruffled the placid surface of Gorey’s “perfectly ordinary” childhood. He was six, but his precociousness enabled him to skip first grade and enroll as a second grader. The school in question was a parochial school; Gorey had been baptized Catholic. Saint Whatever-It-Was (no one knows which of Chicago’s parochial schools he attended) was loathe at first sight. “I hated going to church and I do remember I threw up once in church,” he recalled. “I didn’t make my First Communion because I got chicken pox or measles or something and that sort of ended my bout with the Catholic church.”¹⁹

The temptation to see Gorey’s suspiciously well-timed illness as a verdict on the faith is tempting, especially in light of his terse response to the question, “Are you a religious man?”: “No.”²⁰ His brief spell in Catholic school didn’t leave him with the usual psychological stigmata, he claimed—“I’m not a ‘lapsed Catholic’ like so many people I know who apparently were influenced forever by it”—but it does seem to have put him off organized religion for good.²¹

A subtle anticlerical strain runs through Gorey’s work: cocaine-addled curates beat children to death, nuns are possessed by demons, unfortunate things happen to vicars. In Goreyland, immoderate religiosity is soundly punished: Little Henry Clump, the “pious infant” of Gorey’s 1966 book of the same name, is pelted by giant hailstones, succumbs to a fatal cold, and lies moldering in his grave, all of which make the narrator’s assurance that Henry has gone to his reward sound like a laugh line for atheists. Saint Melissa the Mottled, a book Gorey wrote in 1949 but never got around to illustrating (Bloomsbury published it posthumously, with images filched from his other books), is a gothic hagiography about a nun noted not for good works but for Miracles of Destruction. Given to dark designs involving blowgun darts, Melissa graduates, in time, to “supernatural triflings” such as the withering of the Duke of Dimgreen’s arm and a seagull attack on two young girls. In death, she becomes the patron saint of ruinous randomness. She’s just the sort of saint you’d dream up if you believed, as Gorey did, that “life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.”²²

In fact, the floor was always opening up in Gorey’s early years.

For example, after his less-than-successful year in parochial school, his parents sent him to Bradenton, Florida, a small city between Tampa and Sarasota, to live with his Garvey grandparents for the following year.

Why? It is, as they say in Catholic theology, a Mystery.

In the fall of ’32, he entered third grade in Bradenton, at Ballard Elementary. He seems to have landed on his feet, catlike, in alien surroundings: he made new friends, had a dog named Mits, was a devoted reader of the newspaper strips (“I get all the Sunday funnies, but I want you to send down the everyday ones,” he wrote his mother), and earned high marks on his schoolwork.²³

But a December 1932 photo of him with his grandfather Benjamin Garvey tells another story. Sitting in a rocker on what must have been the Garveys’ porch or patio, the old man gazes benignly, through wire-rimmed glasses, at the dog on his lap, petting him; Mits—it must be Mits—arches his back in an excess of contentment. Ted stands behind him, a proprietary hand on his grandfather’s shoulder. He regards us with the same penetrating gaze, the same unsmiling mien we see in his posed photos as an adult. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the only picture of Gorey touching someone in an obvious gesture of affection.

Gorey, age seven, in Bradenton, Florida, with his maternal grandfather, Benjamin S. Garvey, December 1932. (Elizabeth Morton, private collection)

Returning to Chicago in May of ’33, eight-year-old Ted was packed off to something called O-Ki-Hi sleepaway camp, an “awful” experience he managed to survive by spending all his time “on the porch reading the Rover Boys.”²⁴

Clearly there was more than enough unpredictability and inexplicability in his world to inspire his life’s goal, as an artist, of making everybody “as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.” “We moved around a lot—I’ve never understood why,” he told an interviewer when he was sixty-seven. “We moved around Rogers Park, in Chicago, from one street to another, about every year.”²⁵ By June of 1944, when he left Chicago for his army posting to Dugway Proving Ground, outside Salt Lake City, he’d called at least eleven addresses home: two in Hyde Park, five in Rogers Park, two in the North Shore suburb of Wilmette, one in the city’s Old Town neighborhood (in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments), and one in Chicago’s Lakeview community.²⁶ He’d been bundled off to Florida twice, the second time to Miami, where in 1937 he attended Robert E. Lee Junior High, returning to Chicago for the summer of ’38. All told, he’d gone to five grammar schools by the time he enrolled in high school.

In later years, Gorey would structure his everyday life through unvarying routines, some of them so ritualized they bordered on the obsessive-compulsive. It’s hard not to see them as a response to the rootlessness of his early years—existential anchors designed to tether a self he often experienced as unmoored, disconcertingly “unreal,” given to “drift.” Compulsive in the colloquial if not the clinical sense of the word, Gorey’s daily rituals may have provided a reassuring predictability, and thus a sense of stability, to a man marked by the frequent, never-explained disruptions that kept yanking the rug out from under him during his childhood.

Looking back from the age of seventy, he still couldn’t make sense of his family’s apparently arbitrary movements around the city. “I never quite understood that. I mean, at one point I skipped two grades at grammar school, but I went to five different grammar schools, so I was always changing schools … which I didn’t like. I hated moving and we were always doing it. Sometimes we just moved a block away into another apartment; it was all very weird.”²⁷

In 1933, the Great Depression hung on the mental horizon like a thunderhead, darkening American optimism. It was the year the economy hit rock bottom, with one in four workers out of a job. And then there was the waking nightmare of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. A year ago that May, a horrified nation read the news of a truck driver’s accidental discovery of the infant’s badly decomposed body, partly dismembered, his head bashed in. Charles Lindbergh was one of the most famous people in the world; the child’s abduction on March 1, 1932, and the unfolding story of the Lindberghs’ fruitless negotiations with the kidnapper, mesmerized America, as did the manhunt that followed the gruesome discovery of Baby Lindy’s remains.

Ted couldn’t have been oblivious to the crime of the century, as the papers dubbed it. Maybe he followed the unfolding horror story in the Chicago Daily News, as his soon-to-be high school classmate Joan Mitchell did: the baby snatched from his bed in the dead of night; the creepy, barely literate ransom note (“warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Police”).²⁸ Mitchell was sick with fear that bogeymen would spirit her away, too. And not without reason: her family was well-to-do, and Illinois, in the Depression years, was ground zero for kidnappings. Ransom payments from the rich were low-hanging fruit for gangsters, who grabbed more than four hundred victims during 1930 and 1931 alone, more than in any other state in the nation.²⁹ The abductions in Gorey’s little books—Charlotte Sophia carried off by a brute in The Hapless Child, Millicent Frastley snatched up by man-size insects in The Insect God, Eepie Carpetrod lured to her doom by the serial killers in The Loathsome Couple, Alfreda Scumble “abstracted from the veranda by gypsies” in The Haunted Tea-Cosy—may be post-traumatic nightmares reborn as black comedy.

Gorey’s awareness of the horrors of everyday life may have been heightened by his father’s experiences as a crime reporter, too. By the time Ted was born, Ed Gorey was covering politics, but it’s not inconceivable that the younger Gorey overheard his father reminiscing about his days on the police beat, writing stories like the ones Ben Hecht filed at the Chicago Daily Journal—gruesome fare such as the tale of a “Mrs. Ginnis, who ran a nursery for orphans in which she murdered an average of 10 children a year,” and the one about the guy who dispatched his wife, lopped off her head, and “made a tobacco jar of its skull,” as Hecht recalled.³⁰ Then, too, as a newspaperman, Ed Gorey would have been a voracious reader of the dailies; it’s easy to imagine his son riveted by the big black headlines screaming from his father’s morning paper, never mind its lurid front-page photos. Could Ted have acquired his appetite for true crime at the breakfast table? The imperturbable voice in which he narrates his tales of fatal lozenges, deranged cousins, and loathsome couples sounds a lot like a poker-faced parody of police-beat reporting, with its terse, declarative sentences and just-the-facts deadpan.

At the same time, there’s no denying the echoes, in his “Victorian novels all scrunched up,” of nineteenth-century fiction, with its whispered intrigues and buried scandals. His vest-pocket melodramas owe a debt, too, to what were known in Victorian England as penny dreadfuls or shilling shockers—cheap, crudely illustrated booklets featuring serialized treatments of unfolding crime stories. And then there were the detective novels Helen and Ed Gorey read by the bushel. “Both my parents were mystery-story addicts,” Ted remembered, “and I read thousands of them myself.”³¹ Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy L. Sayers left their imprint on Gorey’s imagination—Christie’s books especially, with their characteristically English blend of snug domesticity and penny-dreadful horrors. “Sinister-slash-cozy,” Gorey called it.³²

Christie became the infatuation of a lifetime, and her take on the tea-cozy macabre is a pervasive influence. Gorey’s devotion to the Queen of Crime was absolute, impervious to the passage of time and undeterred by snobbish eye rolling. “Agatha Christie is still my favorite author in all the world,” he said when he was pushing sixty.³³ By the time he’d reached seventy-three, he’d read every one of her books “about five times,” he reckoned.³⁴ Her death left him desolate: “I thought: I can’t go on.”³⁵

On top of all that, he grew up in Prohibition-era Chicago—Murder City, in newsroom patois. For much of Gorey’s childhood, Al Capone and his adversaries made the mental life of Chicagoans look like one of those spinning-headline montages in period movies. The horror of bloodbaths like the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which hit men lined gangsters up against a garage wall and raked them with machine-gun fire, reverberated in the mass imagination.

Given the time and place he grew up in, and his father’s days on the police beat, it’s hardly surprising that Gorey, asked why “stark violence and horror and terror were the uncompromising focus of his work,” replied, “I write about everyday life.”³⁶

Ted with his father, Edward Leo Gorey, in Wilmette, Illinois, circa ’34–36. Gorey is somewhere between nine and eleven.

(Elizabeth Morton, private collection)

Sometime around April 16, 1934, the Goreys moved from 1256 Columbia Avenue, in the North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park, to the snug, tree-shaded North Shore suburb of Wilmette. (Little is known about Ted’s time on Columbia Avenue beyond the fact that he spent fourth grade at Joyce Kilmer Elementary School, a short walk from the Goreys’ red-brick apartment building, and that he received straight Es—for “excellent”—on his progress report.)³⁷

This change of address was weirder than most, since his father had just landed a new job, not in Wilmette but in downtown Chicago. In 1933, he’d reinvented himself as publicity director of two luxury hotels, the Drake and the Blackstone. Both were bywords for elegance, playing host to champagne-by-the-jeroboam high rollers, backroom deal makers, and even presidents. Why Gorey’s father moved his family farther from his workplace, to the suburbs north of the city, is a puzzler.

Maybe he wanted a better life for his family, a piece of the gracious living advertised by North Shore realtors. The Goreys’ rental was “a cube shaped elephant grey stucco house” at 1506 Washington Avenue in West Wilmette, with “an upstairs sunroom that managed to have windows on all four sides,” as Ted recalled it.³⁸ In the fall of ’34, he enrolled in the sixth grade at Arthur H. Howard School, a cross between an elementary and a junior high school that spanned kindergarten through eighth grade. He was nine years old. How he managed the trick of skipping fifth grade we don’t know; presumably, he tested out of it. As in Bradenton, Ted fit right in. “He does very superior work … with apparent ease, and socially he is well adjusted,” his homeroom teacher, Viola Therman, noted on his spring ’35 report card.³⁹ She was, she wrote, “anxious to see what he will accomplish with an activity program in the form of the puppet play [he is] now planning”—a revealing aside in light of the puppetlike nature of Gorey’s characters and his fascination, near the end of his life, with puppet shows, which he staged in Cape Cod theaters with his hand-puppet troupe, Le Théâtricule Stoïque.

As of June ’36, the Goreys had moved across town to the Linden Crest apartments at 506 5th Street, a block from the 4th and Linden El stop.

That September, Ted enrolled in the eighth grade at a nearby junior high, the Byron C. Stolp School, a shorter walk from his new address than Howard. Gorey, famously not a joiner as an adult, was the quintessential joiner in junior high: alongside his photo in the 1936–37 edition of the Stolp yearbook, Shadows, he’s listed as assembly president as well as a member of the typing club, the Shakespeare club, the glee club, and, not least, the art club.

Gorey’s art teacher at Stolp was Everett Saunders, a former WPA painter and dedicated mentor to would-be artists. Saunders oversaw the art club, whose ranks included Warren MacKenzie and, improbably enough, Charlton Heston. MacKenzie would grow up to be a master potter whose Japanese-influenced clayware is prized for its understated beauty. Now ninety, he remembers Heston as “a real poser,” a characterization confirmed by Heston’s Stolp yearbook photo, in which the man who would be Moses, sporting a budding pompadour, gives the camera an eighth grader’s idea of a smoldering gaze. (What can it mean that “Gorey always claimed with a straight face,” according to his friend Alexander Theroux, that “Charlton Heston was ‘the actor of our time’”?)⁴⁰

MacKenzie, who coedited the 1937 Shadows, recalls Gorey’s “really funny” cartoons for the yearbook’s club pages. Ted executed nine full-page line drawings, among them a picture of a cat in an artist’s smock and beret holding a palette and a dripping paintbrush (for the art club); a cat in an eyeshade, sweating bullets, up against a deadline from hell (for the journalism club); and a feline Romeo in a Renaissance cape, tearfully pacing his balcony under a crescent moon (for the Shakespeare club). They’re cute in a Joan Walsh Anglund meets Harold and the Purple Crayon way that clashes with our image of what’s Goreyesque.

At the same time, they do foreshadow the Gorey we know in their careful attention to costume—his fondness for patterns (plaids, checks, stripes) is already in evidence—and in their shading, where there’s no mistaking his preference for neatly parallel lines as opposed to smudged effects or solid blacks. There’s a naive charm to Gorey’s illustrations, off-set by a self-assurance that’s remarkable in a twelve-year-old. “His things all had a common feel about them,” MacKenzie recalls, “and the instructor who was in charge”—Saunders—“said, ‘Well, [his drawings are] going to be the theme of the yearbook this year,’ and they were, and they were wonderful.”

No one seems to know exactly when Helen and Ed Gorey divorced, though just about everyone agrees it happened in 1937. Betty Caldwell, then Betty Burns, a friend Ted had made at the Linden Crest apartments, recalls the “sad day” when she had to tell him, “‘Ted, I can’t see you anymore. We’re going on a vacation; we’re going to be gone for two weeks.’ And he said, ‘Betty, it’s worse than that. My mother’s divorcing my father. We’re moving to Florida.’” On October 7, 1937, having graduated from eighth grade that June, Ted left for Florida with his mother.

Then and ever after, Gorey was silent on the subject of his parents’ divorce. Beyond a passing remark that he saw more of his parents after the divorce than before, he took the Fifth on the whole business, especially on any psychological fallout he experienced as a kid. “I don’t think I had even noticed they parted,” he claimed, preposterously, in a 1991 interview.⁴¹ In four years’ worth of diary entries, he doesn’t so much as mention his father, perhaps because they weren’t in touch, possibly because they’d never been that close, or maybe because Ed Gorey’s departure was clouded by scandal.

Corinna Mura in Casablanca (1942). (Warner Bros./Photofest, Inc.)

When he left Helen, sometime after June ’37, it was for another woman: Corinna Mura, a guitar-strumming singer of Spanish-flavored torch songs. She was thirty-five; Ed was thirty-nine. It seems likely they met at the Blackstone: Mura played the nightclub circuit when she was in town. In addition to her career as a nightclub chanteuse, she was an occasional movie actress. There she is, about a half hour into Casablanca: the raven-haired singer in Rick’s Café, strolling from table to table, troubadour-style, as she gives “Tango Delle Rose” her throbbing, emotion-choked all. And there she is again, a coloratura soprano amid the citoyens in the rousing scene where everyone belts out “La Marseillaise.”

On screen and on recordings such as “Carlotta” (from the original cast album of the 1944 Broadway musical Mexican Hayride), Mura’s persona was that of a glamorous Latina—a “Spanish songstress,” in the showbiz patter of the day, at a time when “Spanish” was a blanket term for anyone we’d now call Latinx.⁴²

Truth to tell, Mura was born Corynne Constance Wall in Brown-wood, Texas, to David and Lillian Wall (née Jones). (Mura is what muro, Spanish for “wall,” would be, presumably, if the noun were feminine.) Her Latina persona satisfied white America’s racial fantasy of a colorful yet unthreatening otherness—“a dignified American girl” who “has the gay manner of a Latin” (as a newspaper profile put it), “cultured” enough to sing opera yet still “Mex” enough to take audiences on a journey down Mexico way.⁴³ That said, her passion for the musical traditions and cultures of Latin America was sincere. She toured South America, where “they absolutely loved her,” according to her daughter Yvonne “Kiki” Reynolds—testimony not only to her virtuosity but to her genuine rapport with her audiences as well, since she didn’t speak a word of Spanish. (She learned her Spanish-language songs phonetically.)

On July 2, 1937, Ed Gorey was in Austin, Texas, “getting married— quietly,” he told a friend in a letter.⁴⁴ By October of that year, Ted and his mother were on their way to Florida. He plotted their road trip in green crayon on the map in his travel diary. As always, he confides next to nothing to his diary, despite being uprooted, yet again, from his home and friends and despite the emotional upheaval of his parents’ divorce and his grandfather’s death. (Benjamin St. John Garvey had died the day after Ted’s birthday in 1936, shortly after speaking to his grandson on the phone.)

Arriving in Miami in November of ’37, Ted and his mother moved in with Helen’s sister Ruth—then Ruth Garvey Reark—and her children, Joyce and John (called Jack). The Rearks were living in the house Gorey’s grandmother Mary Ellis Blocksom Garvey had bought after she and Benjamin divorced. The Goreys lived in the one-bedroom, one-bathroom “independent suite,” which had a screened porch of its own.⁴⁵ (It’s worth noting that, for a boy on the cusp of puberty, sharing a bedroom with his mother may have been more than a little awkward.)

On first impression, Ted struck his Reark cousins as a cosseted creature—Little Lord Fauntleroy, if he’d been “raised in a high-rise in Chicago” and “doted on by females” is how Joyce puts it. “We picked on him some,” she allows, recalling that her aunt Helen was “rather appalled at my brother and me. My mother always thought [Ted’s mother] was overprotective…. Prue and Helen just doted on Ted. She didn’t think it was good—too much feminine influence. He needed to get away from Mama, maybe.” Joyce vividly remembers Aunt Helen solemnly instructing her niece and nephew that her little wonder’s IQ was 165. “I remember being a little resentful when we were told what his IQ was…. My first reaction was, ‘Well, I don’t think he’s that special!’”

Helen’s insistence that the Rearks regard her fair-haired prodigy with appropriate awe notwithstanding, Joyce has fond memories of Ted. “He was fun,” she says. “We played card games and we rode our bikes to school. Ted seemed to fit in [at Robert E. Lee Junior High].” He kept a baby alligator as a pet, which wasn’t unusual in Miami in those days, says Joyce. “They’re relatively harmless when they’re babies. You’d just put it in the canal when you were tired of it.”

Of Ted’s inner life during the five and a half months he lived in Miami we know next to nothing. Entering the hormone-addled years of adolescence, he showed no sign that his thoughts were turning to romance. As always, the objects of his affection were cats. His five-year diary reads like a case history of an obsession, with its “biographical sketch” of his cat Oscar and his breathless daily updates about Mrs. Reid’s newborn kittens.⁴⁶ Cats, like books, were always there for Ted, offering uncomplicated affection and escape from the vexing complexities of human society.

But even cats could be a source of anxiety. The threat of euthanasia is ever present in his diary entries. He never knew if his kitten Goofy would have to be chloroformed because he couldn’t be housebroken or if Susie II, the cute little tiger cat who “would chase [a] ball like [a] dog and bring it back,” would have to be “put out of the way” after just four months because her “nervous system [was] broken down.”⁴⁷ Diary entries solemnize the parade of little deaths. “One year ago today Bingo died,” writes Ted on March 21; a drawing of a cross on what appears to be a burial plot accompanies the entry. A year ago that day, “Bingo’s ear infection spread to brain, paralyzing front legs. Was put out of the way. Pretty broken up!”⁴⁸

On April 18, 1938, having graduated from Robert E. Lee that March, Ted returned to Chicago. Helen rented rooms in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments in the city’s Old Town neighborhood, then moved, in the fall of ’39, to a high-rise apartment at 2620 North Lake-view.

This time they would stay put: apart from his time in the army, Ted lived there until he packed his bags for Harvard in September of ’46; Helen would call 2620 North Lakeview home until she moved to the Cape in the mid-’70s.

Chances are she picked that address because it was convenient—a walk of about a half dozen blocks—to the Francis W. Parker School, where, a year earlier, thirteen-year-old Ted had entered the ninth grade. It was there that Gorey’s sense of himself as an artist would take shape. At Parker, the outlines of the Gorey persona—eccentrically brilliant, quick with the offhand quip, charismatic and sociable yet unselfconsciously himself—would come into focus.

The Parker Gorey attended was housed in a picturesque pile in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. “The building looked like a Gorey,” says Paul Richard, a Parker alumnus (class of ’57) and, from 1967 to 2009, art critic for the Washington Post. There were “little secret compartments where you could hide in the different rooms,” he recalls, “and every classroom [was] a different shape and size. It had a kind of spooky quality, especially if you had an imagination.” It’s unthinkable, says Richard, that a kid like Gorey—fond of mysteries, drawn to the gothic—didn’t soak up the building’s cozy spookiness.

A private institution, the school was founded in 1901 by Colonel Francis Wayland Parker, an enlightened educator who was staunchly opposed to the notion of the K–12 system as an assembly line for mass-producing standardized minds. Happily for Gorey, the arts were central to the Parker curriculum, a by-product of the colonel’s belief that education must serve the whole child, fostering not only intellectual growth but civic engagement, aesthetic appreciation, and self-expression, too.

Gorey would have been Gorey even without Parker’s influence, but the school’s celebration of creativity, its embrace of interdisciplinary thinking, its foundational faith in the importance of making room for every style of mind to bloom—“Everything to help and nothing to hinder” was the colonel’s maxim—undoubtedly played a part in making Gorey the artist he was, encouraging his restless intelligence, emboldening him in his intellectual idiosyncrasies, nurturing his growing sense of himself as an artist.⁴⁹

The teacher who, more than any other, brought out the nascent artist in students like Gorey was Parker’s self-appointed liaison to bohemia, Malcolm Hackett. A big man whose “strong, handsome face” was dominated, as a worshipful student recalled, by “deep-set eyes” and a bushy mustache, Hackett worked the van-Gogh-of-the-WPA shtick to the hilt, wearing lumberjack shirts and loose-fitting cotton pants and sandals at a time when teachers, even art teachers, wore suits and ties.⁵⁰

Gorey’s signature getup, in his New York years, recalls Hackett’s insistence that “artist” isn’t just a job description but an all-consuming identity, too, reflected in the way you dress. Playfully quirky (as opposed to calculatedly shocking), the classic Gorey look was every bit as self-consciously “artistic” as Oscar Wilde’s famous “aesthetic lecturing costume” of velvet jacket and knee breeches. In fact, Gorey’s New York persona is a textbook illustration of the Wildean truism “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”⁵¹ (This holds true, in spades, for Gorey’s art.) Hackett urged his students to stretch their minds by seeking out the work of timeless masters like Titian, Goya, and Manet at the Art Institute and, at showcases for vanguard art such as the Arts Club of Chicago, the work of modernists like the Viennese expressionist Oskar Kokoschka and the morbid magical realist Ivan Albright. But no less important, he preached, was the gospel truth that art isn’t just something you do but, equally, something you are; the true artist is an artist in every fiber of his being, looking at the world with an aesthetic eye, using personal style to make an artistic statement.

Hackett was the only Parker teacher Gorey ever mentioned—“I had a good art teacher in high school,” he said when his friend Clifford Ross, himself an artist, asked about his formal training—so he must’ve made some impression.⁵² Certainly Hackett’s emphasis on oil painting may have had the unintended consequence of disabusing Gorey of the notion that he was destined to take his place alongside the Old Masters. “I was going to be a painter,” he told Ross. “The fact that I couldn’t paint for beans had very little to do with it. I found out quite early in the proceedings that I really wasn’t a painter at all. Whatever else I was, I was not a painter.”⁵³

Hackett himself was a painter of modest gifts. “You didn’t really learn anything except his attitude,” Paul Richard recalls. Then again, “if he didn’t teach you how to cast shadows or render, he did teach you something: scorn for the proprieties,” he says. “What he taught Joan [Mitchell] and Gorey was not a history or a discipline or a skill set but a subversion: Be an artist. Show it. Do anything you want.”

But épater-ing the bourgeoisie in the Chicago of Gorey’s youth was more complicated than it sounds. On one hand, the city was easily caricatured as the Vatican of Babbittry. The city’s reigning art critic, Eleanor Jewett of the Tribune, was a former agriculture major who was implacably hostile to everything but academic kitsch. Josephine Hancock Logan, whose stockbroker husband sat on the board of the Art Institute, raised the alarm about cubism, futurism, and other horrors by founding the Society for Sanity in Art in 1936. Chicagoans fell hard for the fanfare-for-the-common-man hokum of regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood (whose American Gothic the Art Institute had acquired in 1930). On the other hand, the city was home to the black Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s and the New Bauhaus, founded in 1937 by László Moholy-Nagy and other Bauhausians who’d fled the Nazis.

So you’re teenage Ted Gorey, under the spell of the first artist you’ve ever known up close, a “wholeheartedly, authentically, continually subversive” bohemian (in Paul Richard’s words) with the untamed mustache to prove it.⁵⁴ How do you put into practice his credo that an artist must be free, break the rules?

The answer, if you’re Gorey, is: by turning your back on the future and forging boldly into the past. At a moment when everyone’s talking about the Shock of the New, jolt them with the Shock of the Old: proclaim your love of silent film, insisting, “I really do believe that movies got worse once they started to talk.”⁵⁵ Provoke the provocateurs by announcing that although you’re “perfectly willing to admit that Cézanne is a great, great painter … anybody who followed him is a lot of hogwash,” then watch jaws drop when you add, “And Picasso I detest more than I can tell you.”⁵⁶

While we’re on the subject of subversion, it’s fascinating to speculate about Gorey’s aesthetic as a witty riposte to another aspect of the town, and time, he grew up in: the “stormy, husky, brawling” manliness Carl Sandburg extolled in his poem “Chicago” (1914), a concept defined, in the City of the Big Shoulders, in corner-bar, working-class, Polish-Irish-Italian terms.⁵⁷ Stanley Kowalski notions of masculinity, in the Midwest of the late ’30s and early ’40s, were more frankly homophobic than they are now, and an odd bird like Gorey would’ve found them oppressive.

Hackett, for instance, had no great love for gays; his plaid shirts, he-man mustache, and rough-and-ready aesthetic were a reaction, writes Patricia Albers, in Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, “to the American stereotype of the artist as clubwoman’s lapdog.”⁵⁸ In The Boardinghouse, a chronicle of life in a house full of Art Institute students den-mothered by Hackett, Donald S. Vogel recalls the time the art teacher was “really mad, shouting mad,” after catching a guy named Jules in flagrante with a male friend.⁵⁹ “Hackett’s roar was heard throughout the house,” and by day’s end Jules’s room was for rent.

What did Hackett make of Gorey? No one from his Parker days remembers Ted being anywhere near as flamboyant as he would later become, at Harvard. He wasn’t openly regarded as gay by the Parker community, and whether he was or wasn’t, says Robert McCormick Adams, who was a year behind him at Parker, was “insignificant in comparison to the fact that we were looking at a different aesthetic.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine that Hackett wouldn’t have picked up on the cultural subtext of Gorey’s emerging aesthetic, which Adams characterizes as “implicitly homosexual … concentrating on matters of style and presentation, and literature that was not common in our parents’ homes at that time.” As for Gorey, what would he have made of Hackett’s boho macho? Would he have pushed back against it, following his teacher’s admonition to reject received truths? Maybe that’s the impulse behind Gorey’s earliest recorded act of eccentricity: sometime during his Parker years, he painted his toenails green and went for a walk, barefoot, down Michigan Avenue.⁶⁰

At Parker, Gorey’s dawning awareness that his knack for drawing just might lead to something, maybe even a career, kept pace with his deepening interest in art. He soon fell in with the art clique: Joan Mitchell, who would go on to international fame as an abstract expressionist painter; Mitchell’s close friend Lucia Hathaway; and Connie Joerns, all of whom were smitten, to varying degrees, with the Hackett mystique. “There were four of us … whom [Hackett] inspired, and who existed as a group in the art studio,” remembered Joerns. (A close friend of Gorey’s for life, she would work alongside him in the art department at Doubleday and, like Ted, pursue a career as a freelance illustrator, authoring several children’s books along the way.) “We referred to him as ‘Mr. H’ and the four of us quite frankly adored him.”⁶¹

Fiercely intelligent and inimitably idiosyncratic, Gorey and Mitchell were drawn to each other; they “frequently ‘did stuff’ together,” writes Albers, sowing the seeds of a casual friendship that was rekindled after Parker whenever both were back in town for the holidays.⁶² Unsurprisingly, their pointed opinions and what was very likely a repressed rivalry gave their friendship “a mutually undercutting edge,” Albers notes. Ted “was intrigued by Joan,” recalled Joerns, but “thought her paintings were absolute garbage,” an appraisal that remained unaltered over the years, despite Mitchell’s ascent to art-world stardom.⁶³ According to Mitchell’s first husband, Barney Rosset, who was two years ahead of Joan and Ted at Parker, the feeling was entirely mutual. “He wouldn’t have even been an artist to her,” said Rosset. (Rosset was another Parkerite who rattled the bourgeois complacency of postwar America: as head of Grove Press, he carried the battle standard for free speech, winning legal campaigns to publish such “pornographic” novels as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.)

When he wasn’t hanging out with the art pack, Gorey was studying art or making it, more often than not. Lloyd Lewis, sports editor for the Chicago Daily News, published one of Ted’s cartoons in his May 22, 1939, Voice from the Grandstand column, a weekly collection of sports-related cornpone.

More interesting than Gorey’s cartooning—single-panel gags drawn in a style reminiscent of Chic Young’s Blondie—is his pen name. (“I wanted to publish everything under a pseudonym from the very beginning,” he told an interviewer in 1977, “but everybody said, ‘What for?’ And I couldn’t really explain why I wanted to. I still don’t know exactly, except that I think what you publish and who you are are two different things. I don’t really see that much connection.”)⁶⁴ All but a few of Gorey’s thirty-one noms de plume—memorialized on the dedication page of his last, posthumously published collection, Amphigorey Again—are anagrams of “Edward Gorey,” but this, his first, is not: Sin-jun is a phonetic rendering of the British pronunciation of Gorey’s middle name, St. John—and a premonition of the Anglophilia that suffused much of his later work.

There’s a gag-book facility to Gorey’s stuff at this point, but if we look past the generic single-panel-cartoon style, we can see hints of originality. He’s got an illustrator’s knack for storytelling and a cartoonist’s gift for visual humor. Consider the wall-size mural he painted for a dance celebrating Parker’s athletic victories.

Gorey at work on a mural for a high-school social event, Parker Record yearbook (1942). (Francis W. Parker School, Chicago)

Described by the January 22, 1940, Parker Weekly as “a combination of Diego Rivero [sic], Salvadore [sic] Dali, and Botticelli,” it depicted “the audience as a player views it after just having missed the basket.”⁶⁵ Just look at that poor sap pulling his fedora down over his ears to drown out the guy nearby, snoring away, and the goofball in the front row, sipping two Cokes at once, a straw in each corner of his mouth. Already Gorey is attentive to the signals our clothes send about who we are: the Coke guzzler is wearing appropriately nutty trousers, loud slacks crawling with serpentine squiggles.

Intriguingly, Gorey’s women—for example, the two cheerleaders sitting, knees bent at the same coquettish angle—are characterless mannequins, the same pert pinup babes that, right about then, were flaunting their painted curves in tattoos or on fighter planes. Betty Grable–esque cuties with upthrusting busts, they’re jarringly unlike the women in his little books, tightly corseted Victorians or monobosomed Edwardians or Jazz Age flappers with boyish figures.

Ted had girls on the brain in those days, apparently: in a December 1940 column, the Parker Weekly’s inquiring reporter quotes Gorey’s response to the question, “What do you look forward to in 1941?”

Ted Gorey:

Better marks in school.

More pretty girls.

An increase in allowance. More pretty girls.

Better food in the lunchroom. More pretty girls.⁶⁶

Nothing odd in that for a heteronormative, hormone-fueled fifteen-year-old boy, but a bit difficult to reconcile with the Gorey we know, who claimed to be “reasonably undersexed or something.”⁶⁷

His insistent interest in pretty girls notwithstanding, Gorey was consumed, in school and out of it, by his passion for the arts. He’s clear on that point in his application for a Harvard College National Scholarship, submitted in January of his senior year at Parker: “My main interests lie in the field of Art.”

I do a great deal of drawing and painting myself and I am very much interested in Art. I attend exhibits at the Chicago Art Institute and other galleries regularly. Music interests me a great deal also. I go to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts fairly often during the year. I like the Ballet very much and try to see it as many times as I can when there is a company in Chicago. The legitimate theater is one of the things I enjoy and I see most of the plays which come to Chicago. I go to the movies a lot and try to see all of the foreign movies which come here.⁶⁸

To that wide-ranging cultural diet add books devoured by the shelfload. A good number of the titles he listed on his scholarship application were mysteries (“my favorite form of reading”): The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, books by Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, and of course Agatha Christie—and true-crime anthologies, too, such as William Roughead’s Murderer’s Companion, a collection of deliciously macabre retellings of nineteenth-century crimes, and Edmund Pearson’s Studies in Murder.

Not that Gorey subsisted on pulp alone. When the application asks him to list “all the books which you have read during the past twelve months,” he’s only too happy to inventory his prodigious intake of highbrow lit. “I am attaching an extra sheet for this purpose,” he notes, matter-of-factly, “as this space is not large enough.” The epic catalog that follows includes Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, works by Herodotus and Thucydides, Aristotle’s Poetics, Complete Greek Drama, the Oxford Book of English Verse, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, along with fizzier fare such as S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, P. G. Wodehouse, and Robert Benchley. This is just a smattering of the sixty-nine titles he reels off, apart from the scads of mysteries he mentions by author only, too many to list. Sensing, perhaps, that the sheer number of books he claims to have read in a year, let alone their intellectual heft, might raise a skeptical eyebrow, he hastens to add, “I would be willing to be asked general questions on any of these books.”

Reading insatiably, exploring Chicago’s cultural offerings with gusto, Gorey was refining the approach that would make him a species of one as an artist. Consciously or not, he was stuffing the curiosity cabinet of his mind with ideas and images (“I keep thinking, how can I use that?”) that would one day reappear, reimagined, in his art or writing.⁶⁹

His forays into Chicago’s art scene undoubtedly acquainted him with what would turn out to be another of his great passions, surrealism. At her eponymous gallery, the pioneering dealer and curator Katharine Kuh showed Miró, Man Ray, and the surrealist-influenced Mexican modernist Rufino Tamayo, all in ’38, Gorey’s first year at Parker. Improbably enough, the town that loathed modernism—the Tribune poured scorn on Kuh, and Sanity in Art protested her shows—proved surprisingly congenial to surrealism. The Arts Club, a private sanctum for the city’s moneyed elite whose exhibitions were nonetheless open to the public, introduced Chicagoans to Salvador Dalí in a 1941 show and, in ’42, to André Masson and Max Ernst; Gorey could easily have seen these shows.

Truth be known, though, he never had much use for surrealist art, beyond Ernst’s collage novels and Magritte, who he once claimed was one of his three favorite painters. (Francis Bacon and Balthus were the other two.) Nonetheless, he was profoundly influenced by surrealist ideas. Asked, “Do you view yourself in the Surrealist tradition?” he said, “Yes. That philosophy appeals to me. I mean that is my philosophy if I have one, certainly in the literary way.”⁷⁰

In his books, he often employs surrealism’s dream logic, as in the non sequitur causality of The Object-Lesson, in which an umbrella disengages itself “from the shrubbery, causing those nearby to recollect the miseries of childhood” and it becomes apparent, “despite the lack of library paste,” that something has happened to the vicar. Sometimes he makes use of Magritte’s hallucinatory conjunctions, as in The Prune People, in which prim, proper Edwardians with prunes for heads go matter-of-factly about their affairs. Or he imagines the inner lives of objects—a very surrealist thing to do—as in Les Passementeries Horribles, in which hapless Edwardians are menaced by ornamental tassels grown to monstrous size.

But even when he isn’t drawing on surrealism so obviously, his stories are often thick with that atmosphere of somnambulistic strangeness that is a surrealist trademark, as in the eerie, wordless The West Wing, a procession of frozen moments set in the usual Victorian-Edwardian mansion, in the usual crepuscular gloom, where everything—the enigmatic package tightly tied with twine in one room, the wave-ruffled water rising halfway up the walls in another, the nude man standing with his back to us on a balcony—manages to seem simultaneously like a clue in an Agatha Christie mystery and a symbol from Magritte’s The Key to Dreams.

Gorey was a surrealist’s surrealist: he understood that surrealism wasn’t just the bourgeoisie’s idea of dream imagery—limp watches, lobster telephones, the guy with the floating apple obscuring his face. It was meant to be an applied philosophy—a way of looking at everyday life, a way of being in the world. “What appeals to me most is an idea expressed by [the surrealist poet Paul] Éluard,” said Gorey. “He has a line about there being another world, but it’s in this one. And [the surrealist turned experimental novelist] Raymond Queneau said the world is not what it seems—but it isn’t anything else, either. Those two ideas are the bedrock of my approach.”⁷¹

He even went so far as to suggest that life, with its random juxtapositions and meaningless events, could be seen as a surrealist collage. “I tend to think life is pastiche,” he said, adding drolly, “I’m not sure what it’s a pastiche of—we haven’t found out yet.”

It was surrealism that led Gorey to what would become an overmastering passion: the ballet. In January of 1940, “I went off by myself to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo do Bacchanale,” he recalled, “because of its sets and costumes designed by Salvador Dalí, who had been sprung on me by Life magazine.”⁷² (At the age of fourteen, Gorey thought Dalí “was the cat’s ass.”)⁷³

Bacchanale, unfortunately, was a letdown. But if Ted wasn’t swooning over Dalí’s decor—the dancers emerged from a ragged hole in the breast of the gargantuan swan in the backdrop—or his strenuously outrageous costumes (one dancer wore a fish head), he was bowled over by the ballerina who danced the role of Lola Montez in “enormous gold lamé bloomers encircled at their widest part by two rows of white teeth,” an appropriately surrealist getup that was the handiwork of the renowned costume maker Karinska.⁷⁴ Gorey was entranced by Karinska’s creations; fifty-five years later, in his foreword to Costumes by Karinska, a book about her work, he rhapsodized about costumes “I have fondly remembered, some for over half a century,” such as “the satin and ruffled dresses for the cancan dancers in Gaîté Parisienne, whose combinations of colors I still think were the most gorgeous I ever saw.”⁷⁵

As well, he liked Matisse’s brightly colored sets and abstract-patterned costumes for another ballet on the program, Rouge et Noir. As knots of dancers “formed and came apart” against the backdrop, a critic wrote, they created “wonderful blocks of color like an abstract painting set in motion.”⁷⁶

Already Gorey’s omnivorous eye was drawn to set design, which he would dabble in for much of his artistic life, and to costumes, a fascination evident in the attention he lavished on his characters’ dress, poring over Dover books such as Everyday Fashions of the Twenties and Victorian Fashions and Costumes from Harper’s Bazaar to ensure they were period-perfect. In a sense, Gorey lived out his Karinska fantasy in his books, playing costumier to the casts of his stories (and, later, to the actors in his theatrical entertainments). On the page, where his imagination was unbounded by budget or tailoring skills, he conjured up outfits so dazzling they beg for the stage or the fashion runway.

His appetite whetted, he began going to the ballet off and on, though he wouldn’t become the obsessive balletomane we know until his conversion, sometime in the early ’50s, to the cult of Balanchine and the New York City Ballet (whose principal costumier, from 1963 to ’77, was Karinska).

By his senior year at Parker, Gorey had matured from a kid who liked to draw into the budding artist who would bloom at Harvard. Along with Mitchell and her friend Lucia Hathaway, he juried the school’s Annual Exhibit of Students’ Work (a more heroic undertaking than it sounds, since the show included 856 pieces of art, 22 of which were Gorey’s). He did the sets and costumes for the senior play and, as a member of the social committee, handled the posters and decorations for extracurricular events. Somehow he found time, on top of all this, to art-direct the 1942 yearbook.

Yet despite this whirlwind of artistic activity, Gorey was far from an eccentric loner, hunched over his drawing board on prom night. “Though a newcomer to Joan’s Class of ’42, Ted had claimed a central position in that class, owing to a jaunty individualism,” Patricia Albers asserts.⁷⁷ What made Gorey stand out, Robert McCormick Adams recalls, was “a conscious point of view that was not so much critical as it was independent, and somehow coherent.” Central to that perspective was a wryly detached take on human affairs. “He was always putting his finger on ironies or absurdities,” says Adams. His wit and easygoing self-assurance won him invitations to parties and dances at places with names like the Columbia Yacht Club, and he was part of the gang that hung out at the Belden, a drugstore just down Clark Street where Parkerites yakked and swigged chocolate Cokes and showed off their newly acquired vice, smoking.

Yet among the class photos in the 1942 yearbook, we find a blank spot on the page where Gorey’s thumbnail should be. Apparently he managed (accidentally on purpose?) to miss picture day. Alongside his name is the obligatory jokey biography, which in this case is surprisingly prescient: “Brilliant student … Art addict … Romanticist … Little men in raccoon coats.”

The seventeen-year-old Ted who graduated from Parker on June 5, 1942, was more than just an art addict who doodled little men in raccoon coats. He’d already settled on a career in the arts, though he was sufficiently a child of the Depression to hedge his bohemianism with pragmatism, betting that commercial illustration was more likely to fatten his wallet than art for art’s sake. To that end, he’d taken several courses in commercial art and cartooning at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago while still at Parker and had spent two summers, and a few terms’ worth of Saturday sessions, studying at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. (Walt Disney was its most famous alum.)

Yet despite such preparations, Gorey set his sights not on art school but on Harvard. When asked, on the application, what he expected to get out of Harvard, he said, “I expect to get a good Fine Arts education so that I may enter the field of Fine Art or more probably, use it as a basis for entering the field of Commercial Art.”⁷⁸

The “historical and cultural advantages in Boston” were a draw, too, he noted. “I have lived all of my life in the Middle West and after I graduated from eighth grade I took a trip East,” wrote Gorey. “I like New England better than any place I have ever been.”⁷⁹ It’s no surprise that Gorey felt right at home amid the death’s heads grinning from the gravestones in Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground, the crypts and obelisks in Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, and the brooding Victorians of Boston’s Back Bay, whose windows reminded Henry James of “candid inevitable eyes” watching each other “for revelations, indiscretions … or explosive breakages of the pane from within.”⁸⁰

Herbert W. Smith, Parker’s principal, recommended Ted for the Harvard College National Scholarship. In his letter to the college, Smith judges him “a boy of real brilliance,” “highly gifted in art,” a front-runner “in any academic subjects in which swift reading and quick comprehension bring success,” though he tempers his praise with the observation that Gorey’s gifts can sometimes get the better of him: “He is the swiftest reader but not the most reflective,” says Smith, and “sometimes sacrifices accuracy to speed.” Still, there’s no denying his raw IQ: “He scores highest on such tests as the American Council of Psychological Examinations (100th percentile year after year).”⁸¹

Fascinatingly, the Harvard form includes a question about the applicant’s limitations (“physical, social, mental”), to which Smith replies that Gorey, as “the only child of a highly intelligent but divorced couple,” is prey to “social and financial insecurity.” He’s plagued, too, by occasional migraine headaches, an affliction that will bother him, on and off, for the rest of his life. These minor defects duly noted, Smith recommends him unreservedly; he is “an original and independent thinker” whose “boundless ambition and the direction of his development, quite as much as his high initial ability, make a career of unusual distinction seem likely.” Gorey was awarded a scholarship to Harvard.*

He was accepted by Harvard in May, but with the draft hanging over his head—America was at war, and Congress was considering lowering the age of eligibility from twenty-one to eighteen—he decided to postpone his matriculation. As his mother later explained in a letter to the Harvard Committee on Admission, “By fall we knew that the chances of going through college before he would be in the Army were very slight, and he decided to attend the Art Institute for the fall term until Congress should decide about drafting the 18 year old boys.”⁸² That November, Congress approved the lowering of the age of eligibility to eighteen; on December 5, FDR signed that decision into law. “When that was decided,” Helen wrote, “we felt that it would be wise for him to enter the University of Chicago, where he had also been awarded a scholarship, as there was just a chance that he might be able to get a year’s credit under the accelerated program.” Gorey began classes at U of C in February of 1943, the month he would turn eighteen.

Four months into his studies, his number came up in the national lottery run by the Selective Service. On May 27, Gorey was inducted into the US Army at Camp Grant, near Rockford, Illinois. In June, he was sent to Camp Roberts, in central California, just north of San Miguel, for four months of basic training. IQ tests were part of the induction process, and as Helen Gorey—never one to hide her son’s light under a bushel—recalled, “His grade in the Army intelligence test was 157, which was the highest mark they had ever had at Camp Grant at that time.”⁸³ On completing his basic training, he underwent another round of examinations, after which he learned from the Board of Examiners, according to Helen, “that he had the highest marks they had seen.”

Army life, Gorey wrote to his friend and former Parker schoolmate Bea Rosen, was dull to the point of deadliness.⁸⁴ At one point, he and his company were marched out into the wastelands around Camp Roberts and bivouacked there, God knows why, a state of affairs Gorey found “too, too feeble-making.”⁸⁵ He and his fellow grunts were sleeping on brick-hard ground, he told Rosen, and subsisting on canned rations eaten cold. Dessert consisted of chocolate bars that tasted suspiciously like Ex-Lax and had “practically the same effect, if not more so.” His mood was not improved when he managed to drop a rifle on his foot. The army routine alternated between torment and tedium; that, along with the infernal heat and lunar desolation of the place, was driving him out of his gourd, he claimed.

Gorey’s voice on the page is something to hear, as far from the average GI writing home as Oscar Wilde’s arch quips are from Hemingway’s tough-guy bluster. He opens his letters to Rosen with stage-entrance salutations like “Darling,” closes them with high-flown effusions (“tidal waves of passion” is a typical sign-off), and adopts pet names (he’s “Theo”; Rosen is “Beatrix the light of my life”). He affects a knowingness, a world-weariness; he indulges in high-opera histrionics and flights of fancy. It’s the put-on persona of a teenage aesthete who has lived much of his young life between the covers of a book. Life, he insists, is a tear-sodden handkerchief, a crumpled straw in a soda glass sucked dry, a foot-draggingly gloomy procession of “frustrated desires” and “sex entanglements from what they tell me—I wouldn’t know … ”⁸⁶ (Interesting to note that at eighteen—an age when most young men are feeling their oats—he’s already holding the subject of “sex entanglements” at arm’s length.)

Gorey’s letters are a study in camp. His tone is equal parts Sebastian Flyte, the charmingly unworldly idler from Brideshead Revisited, and the impulsive, outspoken Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, down to Holly’s precious use of French to signal her cosmopolitan chic. In a letter to Rosen, Gorey sighs, “The ancient esprit d’aventure still lives but what can it do?”⁸⁷

Gorey’s summer in “God’s garbage pit,” as he called it, wasn’t all cold canned rations and damp rot of the soul. Rummaging through the camp library in his never-ending search for something new to read, he happened on E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels. “I first discovered them during World War II—quite by accident, although I prefer to think of it as Fate—in the library of Camp Roberts, California, where I took my basic training in the summer of 1943,” he remembered in “I Love Lucia,” an appreciation he wrote for the May 1986 issue of Vogue.⁸⁸

Fate indeed: Benson’s comedies of manners arrived at just the right moment to influence Gorey’s emerging persona, that of an arch, Anglophilic aesthete. Wickedly witty and unimprovably English in their attention to small-town gossip and social jockeying, the Mapp and Lucia novels delight in the snobbery and pretensions of two smilingly vicious doyennes who elevate social climbing to a blood sport. As it happens, Benson (1867–1940) was gay, and the Mapp and Lucia novels are “cult classics … among gay readers,” according to the literary critic David Leon Higdon, beloved for “their campy exaggerations, social jealousies, and gentle but not altogether affectionate social satire.”⁸⁹ Was Gorey drawn to Benson’s novels because he recognized in Benson’s voice a kindred style of mind, a covert consciousness that wore its wit as an invisibility cloak?

Whatever the reason, the books made a lasting impression on him: when asked about his favorite authors, he often mentioned Benson. “If I were driven to decide what to take along to a desert island,” he said in 1978, “it would be a toss-up among Jane Austen’s complete works, [the eleventh-century Japanese novel] The Tale of Genji, the ‘Lucia’ books, or one of the Trollope series,” adding, “I’ve read the ‘Lucia’ books so often I almost know them by heart.”⁹⁰

Four months after his arrival at Camp Roberts, Gorey completed his basic training, in the course of which he, the overwrought aesthete, last seen dropping his rifle on his foot, managed to earn expert badges in pistol and rifle marksmanship.

Then the army had new marching orders for Private Gorey: he was to enroll in college under the auspices of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). “Note well the utterly hysterical fact that the Army is sending me to college to study languages under ASTP,” he wrote Rosen.⁹¹ Launched in 1943, the ASTP was intended “to provide the continuous and accelerated flow of high grade technicians and specialists needed by the Army.”⁹² Soldiers who scored high on military IQ tests were sent to select universities—in uniform, on active duty, and still subject to military discipline—for fast-tracked courses in engineering, medicine, and any of thirty-four foreign languages. Gorey was assigned to study Japanese, perhaps in advance of the anticipated occupation of Japan, where US administrators would be needed.

He entered the University of Chicago in the winter quarter of 1943. On November 8, he began courses. Two days later, he was diagnosed with scarlet fever and hospitalized for six weeks. Back on his feet, he reentered the program and was transferred, on February 7, 1944, to something called Curriculum 71, which entailed studying conversational Japanese along with contemporary history and geography. Then, on March 22, the army, with its usual sagacity, shut down the program in mid-term, around five weeks before it would have ended. By Gorey’s tally, he’d had “only two months” of study.⁹³

In June, or thereabouts, the army, again demonstrating the discernment for which it is universally admired, put PFC Gorey’s record-breaking IQ to good use: he was dispatched to Dugway Proving Ground, an army base in the Great Salt Lake Desert, to sit out the rest of the war as a company clerk.

* After Skeezix, the foundling left on a doorstep in the long-running newspaper strip Gasoline Alley.

* According to Elizabeth M. Tamny in an unedited early draft of her November 10, 2005, Chicago Reader feature, “What’s Gorey’s Story? The Formative Years of a Very Peculiar Man,” Gorey was awarded scholarships to the University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon as well. Reportedly his was the highest score in the Midwest the year he took the college boards. Tamny cites her phone interview with Andreas Brown as the source of these details.

CHAPTER 2
MAUVE SUNSETS

Dugway, 1944–46

Private Gorey, US Army, circa 1943. (Elizabeth Morton, private collection)

Dugway sits about seventy-five miles southwest of Salt Lake City in a no-man’s-land the size of Rhode Island. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the army had gone looking for a suitably godforsaken patch of land where its Chemical Warfare Service could test chemical, biological, and incendiary weapons. It found it in Dugway Valley, as far from human habitation as any place in the Lower Forty-Eight and cordoned off by mountain ranges, helpful in shielding top-secret experiments from prying eyes.

Dugway Proving Ground was “activated”—officially opened—on March 1, 1942; when Gorey arrived, a little more than two years later, it still had a ramshackle, frontier feel. The high-security areas devoted to top-secret research and testing would’ve been off-limits to Gorey, restricting him to a cluster of buildings about the size of a large city block, maybe two blocks at best.

All around lay wastelands: salt flats, sand dunes, and, from the base to the jagged mountains rearing up to the north and south, the never-ending desert, tufted with saltbush and sagebrush. The stillness was profound, a ringing in the mind. The sky was painfully clear, by day a vaulted blue vastness, at night a black dome powdered with stars.

Not for nothing was the base’s mimeographed newspaper called The Sandblast. “Dust from the local sand dunes, augmented by ancient lake-bed deposits (Lake Bonneville) and volcanic ash beds, pervaded everything each time the wind blew, which was most of the time,” a former Dugwayite recalled.¹ New arrivals were greeted with the cheerful salutation, scrawled on the MP gatehouse, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” until top brass caught wind of the offending phrase and ordered it removed.²

Gorey was not enamored of Dugway. “It was a ghastly place, with the desert looming in every direction, so we kept ourselves sloshed on tequila, which wasn’t rationed,” he recalled in 1984. “The only thing the Army did for me was delay my going to college until I was twenty-one, and that I am grateful for.”³ His daily routine, as company clerk—technician fourth grade in the 9770th Technical Service Unit, in armyspeak—didn’t exactly challenge Camp Grant’s all-time high scorer on the army IQ test. He typed military correspondence, sorted mail, and kept the company’s books. “There was this one company: it had all of three people,” he remembered. “One man was in jail, one was in the hospital and one was AWOL for the entire time I was there. But every morning I had to type out this idiot report on the company’s progress.”⁴

It seems not to have occurred to Gorey, at the time, that swilling tequila and filing absurdist reports was preferable to crawling on your belly through the malarial swamps of some Pacific atoll under withering fire from the Japanese or rotting in a German POW camp. You had hot chow, cold beer—hell, even a bowling alley—and weekend passes to Salt Lake City. Best of all, your chances of dying were next to nil.

Of course, Ted had to grouse. His image, well defined by the time he arrived at Dugway, required that he do his best impression of Algernon Moncrieff from The Importance of Being Earnest, distraught at the impossibility of finding cucumber sandwiches in the middle of the desert. There’s no way of knowing how much of his horror was genuine and how much of it was part of a studied pose.

Gorey’s time at Dugway wasn’t all lugubrious attitudinizing. Relief arrived in the form of a dark-haired, bespectacled Spokane native named Bill Brandt. A gifted pianist and aspiring composer, Brandt was Dug-way’s librarian of classified materials, an assignment that freed him, on weekends, to work on his composing and counterpoint studies. (He would go on to a distinguished career as a professor of music at Washington State University.) “Bill was assigned to the Chemical Warfare Division and Gorey was assigned as company clerk,” Brandt’s wife, Jan, recalled. “Bill had to go to him to order supplies and one day found him reading an avant-garde book. Bill said, ‘Oh! You’re reading one of my favorite books.’ A conversation started and they found they had many interests in common.”⁵

Five years younger than Brandt, Gorey impressed the older man “as a spare, gawky … boy who played with words,” Jan remembers. Brandt, too, had a quick wit and a knack for wordplay—specifically, puns. Brandt’s own recollection, in an unpublished memoir, of his first encounter with the “new company clerk” portrays Gorey as “a slim, blond man, younger than I, who, I discovered, was literate, in contrast to the professional chemists or old Army types that made up the rest of the outfit. He had actually read the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and Somerset Maugham’s novels!”⁶

Ted and Bill bonded over their shared interest in Eliot, classical music, and the movies. When Gorey came back from furlough in Chicago with Adolf Busch’s four-record set of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, he and Brandt commandeered the phonograph in the post library and listened to it “a couple of times late in the evening, when the others in the place had gone.”⁷

Often, they’d work on creative projects. “I copied music, read, and composed while Gorey wrote the too, too decadent little plays,” remembers Brandt, “or drew the equally decadent Victorians that he later became famous for.” At some point, Gorey painted a cover illustration for Brandt’s unpublished Quintet for Piano and String Quartet, op. 11 (1943), a whimsical depiction of Harlequin in a piebald body stocking, lounging in a lunar emptiness that suggests Gorey’s idea of Dugway Valley. Overhead, fireworks whizbang against the night sky, a white-on-black fantasia of streaks and curlicues and chrysanthemum bursts. From Harlequin’s rainbow-colored costume to the naïf, Chagall-ish looseness of the rendering, it’s poles apart from the precise, sharp-nibbed aesthetic of Gorey’s little books.

In time, their peas-in-a-pod rapport, artsiness, and manifest lack of interest in barhopping and skirt chasing in Salt Lake City invited the suspicion that Gorey and Brandt were more than good buddies. “Most of the other servicemen thought they were both gay,” says Jan, “but Gorey never put his foot under the bathroom partition,” so to speak. Brandt took Gorey’s sexuality, or what he perceived to be Gorey’s sexuality, in stride: “He was gay, but at that time, naive as I was, I had no idea what that meant and treated him just like anyone else, and his relationship to me was equally straight.”

At Dugway, Gorey tried his hand at writing, hammering out a full-length play and a handful of one-acts. “The first things that I wrote seriously, for some unknown reason, were plays,” he recalled. “I suppose there must have been some strong dramatic urge at the time. I never tried to get them put on or anything. [T]hey were all very, very exotic and … pretentious, in a way. In another way, I don’t think they were as pretentious as they might have been. I mean, I didn’t go in for endless, dopey, poetic monologues for people; they moved right along. They were rather bizarre, I think, and were rather overwritten …”⁸ Elsewhere, he added, “I always wonder what I thought I was doing then, because what I was writing was clearly unpresentable—closet dramas, for instance. I had very little sense of purpose, which was just as well, because then I wasn’t disappointed about the outcome.”⁹

Gorey’s Dugway plays are indeed overwrought. All but one of their titles—typical Gorey kookiness such as Une Lettre des Lutins (a letter from the elves) and Les Serpents de Papier de Soie (the tissue-paper snakes)—are in French, though the plays themselves are in English, with the exception of a five-page effort untranslatably titled Les Scaphandreurs. The dialogue is sprinkled with French phrases, in the manner of Gorey’s correspondence at the time. The characters have names like Piglet Rossetti and Basil Prawn and dress more or less the way you’d imagine people named Piglet Rossetti and Basil Prawn would dress—in purple espadrilles and “mauve satin ribbons [that] cling like bedraggled birds to bosom, thigh, and wrist.”¹⁰ They exclaim—there’s a lot of exclaiming—things like “How unutterably mad!” and “How hideously un-chic,” and, of course, “Divine!”¹¹ When they’re not exclaiming, they’re declaiming, in prose so purple it would bring a blush to Walter Pater’s cheek: “Have you ever danced naked before a lesbian sodden with absinthe?”¹²

Yet despite dialogue so over the top it sounds, at times, like a John Waters remake of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Gorey’s Dugway plays are remarkable if we remember that the author was only nineteen or twenty.¹³ Too clever by half and too obviously derivative, they’re self-indulgent juvenilia. But the dialogue does move right along: the characters riff off each other, volleying surrealist non sequiturs. A glimmer, at least, of the Gorey we know is recognizable in his first attempts at translating his sensibility onto the page.

The Victorian, Edwardian, and Jazz Age settings he’ll revisit endlessly in his little books are already in place. He’s resurrecting nineteenth-century words long ago fallen into disuse, such as distrait and fantods, words that will become Gorey trademarks. His Anglophilia is in full flower, down to the use of British spellings. The love of nonsensical titles, preposterous names (Centaurea Teep, Mrs. Firedamp), even more preposterous place names (Galloping Fronds, Crumbling Outset), and absurd deaths (suicide by eating live coals, homicide by defenestration from a railway carriage) is amply in evidence. Speaking of names, he’s already indulging his love of pseudonyms: all the plays are penned by “Stephen Crest.”

As well, he’s exploring what will become recurrent themes: the melancholy of lost time (“THE SCENE: An antique room, obscurely decaying”); the stealthy tiptoe of our approaching mortality (symbolized for Gorey by crepuscular or autumnal or wintry light); and, of course, angst, ennui, the banal horrors of everyday life, arbitrary and unpredictable turns of events, cruelty to children (a governess kills her charge’s pet canary), the cruelty of children (a little girl bashes her big sister’s head in with a silver salver), and murder most foul (a woman shoves her friend over a balustrade).¹⁴

His instinctive aversion to religion—specifically, Roman Catholicism—makes itself known, too. In Les Aztèques, a character jokes about painting a Crucifixion “with Christ nailed facing the cross instead of with his back to it,” which would have the happy effect of making believers “hideously embarrassed”; in the untranslatably titled L’Aüs et L’Auscultatrice,¹⁵ a man is fatally brained by a falling crucifix: an Act of God, played for laughs.

This is a far gothier, more calculatedly outrageous Gorey than we’ll ever meet in his books. He’s clearly in thrall to the Decadent movement associated with Dorian Gray, Baudelaire, and the perverse, pornographic drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Already he knows that aestheticism, not naturalism, is the stylistic language he’ll speak for the rest of his artistic life.

Yet in one startling way, the Gorey who speaks to us in the Dugway plays is utterly unlike the Gorey we know from his little books. The plays touch repeatedly on homosexuality and gay culture, and their treatment of these subjects is startlingly frank, given his later reticence on the subject of sexuality—his or anyone’s. While obviously gay characters do have walk-on roles in his little books (and in his freelance illustration work, such as his cartoons for National Lampoon), their sexuality is usually treated lightly, with knowing, deadpan wit. With rare exception, Gorey’s gays are Victorians or Edwardians or Jazz Age sophisticates, at a safe historical remove from the controversies of his historical moment (not to mention his private life).

In the Dugway plays, he takes us inside gay bars, something he never does in his books. There is talk, in Les Aztèques, of “chic dykes” and “violet eyed castrati” and boys dancing with boys, lilacs tucked coquettishly behind their ears.¹⁶ In one scene, we’re introduced to a guy who’s “just broken up with some boy” who owns “an enormous mauve teddy bear named Terence,” an image rich in gay symbolism. The teddy bear is borrowed from Evelyn Waugh’s eccentric gay aristocrat Sebastian Flyte, who is never without his beloved childhood companion. And mauve was synonymous in the Victorian mind with aestheticism and gay bohemia, thanks to Wilde’s signature mauve gloves; the association persists to this day in our linkage of lavender with gay culture. Gorey, who by Dugway was already well versed in Victorian literature and culture, was undoubtedly aware of the color’s symbolism. When a character in Les Aztèques observes, “Incredibly mauve sunset,” it’s hard not to imagine that Gorey isn’t sending up the Catholic conservative critic G. K. Chesterton’s famous swipe at the dandified—and, by implication, gay—aesthete who, “if his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing,…hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve.”¹⁷

In the Dugway plays, Gorey is attempting to resolve the fuzzy outline of his creative consciousness—a welter of inspirations and affinities—into a sharply defined artistic voice all his own. At the same time, like everyone crossing the threshold between adolescence and adulthood, he’s struggling toward self-definition as a person, questioning the parental wisdom and societal verities he’s grown up with. Deciding who he wants to be includes coming to terms with his sexuality, however he defines it—or doesn’t.

On the title page of Les Aztèques, Gorey uses an unattributed quotation for an epigraph. Each of us is given a theme all our own at birth, the anonymous author observes. The best we can hope for, in this life, is to “play variations on it.” Fatalistic sentiments for a twenty-year-old. Is he resignedly accepting some aspect of himself he hadn’t fully confronted until that moment, something he thought might be part of a passing phase but has come to realize is innate, irrevocable? On the cover sheet of A Scene from a Play, we read an even more enigmatic comment, an inscription to Brandt written in Gorey’s flowing script: “For Bill—Because my friendship is inarticulate and indirection is the only alternative.” He signs his inscription with the campy nom de plume he’ll use, at Harvard, in all his letters to Brandt: “Pixie.”

Gorey was formally discharged from the army on February 2, 1946, at the Separation Center at Fort Douglas, near Salt Lake City. He and Brandt maintained an affectionate, if fitful, correspondence afterward, but it seems to have trailed off after Gorey graduated from Harvard.

In later life, Gorey rarely mentioned his army years. “After more than twenty-five years of knowing him,” says Alexander Theroux in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, his memoir of his friendship with Gorey, “I had never once heard a single reference, never mind anecdote, of his Army life, or for that matter, of the state of Utah.”¹⁸ When the subject did come up in interviews, Gorey inevitably deflected it with a quip about the mysterious incident of the dead sheep, an event straight out of The X-Files.

In March of 1968, upwards of 3,800 sheep grazing in the aptly named Skull Valley, near Dugway, died from unknown causes. Although an internal investigation conceded, in the words of one Dugway commander, “that an open-air test of a lethal chemical agent at Dugway on 13 March 1968 may have contributed to the deaths of the sheep,” the army did not, and does not, accept responsibility for the event, contending that the evidence is inconclusive.¹⁹ Whatever the cause, the incident became a flash point for outrage among antiwar activists and environmentalists—and a punch line for Gorey, who found a kind of black humor in the event.

When Dick Cavett asked him, in a 1977 interview, about his time in the army, he said, “Every time I pick up a paper and see, you know, that 12,000 more sheep died mysteriously out in Utah, I think, ‘Oh, they’re at it again.’”²⁰ Still, his memories of Dugway can’t have been all that grim, given his tossed-off remark in a 1947 letter to Brandt: “If you ever get this, slob, write, and let me know what’s been what since we parted at Dugway (do you ever think about the place?—Rosebud [a pet name for a mutual friend at Dugway] and I find ourselves getting sentimental about it every now and then).”²¹

Returning to Chicago, Gorey landed an afternoon job at an antiquarian bookshop specializing in railroadiana and a morning job at another bookstore. “I worked in a couple of bookstores, and as a consequence, spent all my salary on books; saw no one at all, and mentally stagnated on the beach on Sundays,” he wrote Brandt. “I did manage to drag myself to hear a lot of chamber music (your influence), usually on stifling hot evenings when one was flooded in one’s own perspiration. However, it all added to the intensity of the experience, or something.”²²

In May, Gorey notified Harvard of his intent to register that fall, taking the college up on its long-deferred offer and the scholarship that went with it, supplemented by the GI Bill of Rights. The flood of veterans swelled the class of 1950 to 1,645, the biggest in Harvard’s history; more than half the incoming students were former servicemen, their entrée to one of the nation’s most prestigious Ivies made possible by the GI Bill.

Asked, on his Veteran Application for Rooms, about his preference in roommates, Gorey said he’d rather share a room with “someone from New England or New York, not any younger than I am, the same religion if possible”—Episcopal, he says, elsewhere on the questionnaire—and “with interests along the lines I have indicated,” namely, art and symphonic music and of course reading (“Mostly French and English moderns, both poetry and fiction”).²³

Setting aside his uncharacteristic (and unconvincing) partiality for a fellow Episcopalian—irreligious Ted doing his best to sound like a Harvard man rather than the bohemian weirdo he was?—his response is revealing. His bias in favor of East Coasters invites the perception that he wants to put some distance between himself and the Grant Wood provincialism of the Midwest. He’s embarking on that quintessentially American rite of passage: pulling up stakes and moving far from home, where nobody knows you and you’re free to flaunt your true self or, for that matter, try on new selves.

But if Gorey’s departure for Harvard, at twenty-one, turned the page on his hometown days—he would spend the rest of his life on the East Coast, returning to Chicago for holidays, then infrequently, then hardly ever—the character, culture, and landscape of the city he grew up in left their stamp on him, if you knew where to look. Most obviously, there’s his accent, softened by long years on the East Coast and crossed with the theatrical, ironizing lilt of stereotypical gay speech, but still a dead giveaway. We hear Chicago in Gorey’s elongated vowels, especially in his long, flat a, which sounds like the ea in yeah: in recorded interviews, when he says “back” and “bad” and “happened,” they come out “be-yeah-k” and “be-yeah-d” and “he-yeah-pened.”

More profoundly, there’s his impatience with phoniness and pomposity, a trait native to the industrious, pragmatic city of immigrants he grew up in. Chicago is famously a working-class, beer-and-kielbasa town, staccato in speech, blunt in expression, unpretentious to the point of pugnacity—“perhaps the most typically American place in America,” thought the historian James Bryce.²⁴ Being “regular” is a cardinal virtue.

Of course, Gorey was the least regular guy imaginable, an unapologetic oddity who thought of himself as “a category of one.”²⁵ Still, Larry Osgood, who was in Gorey’s class at Harvard, recalls their classmate George Montgomery saying something about Ted that Osgood “took as really odd at the time, but was really very, very insightful. He said, ‘Ted’s much more normal than the rest of you guys.’” The clique in question was largely gay, and some of its members were, in the parlance of the time, flamboyant in the extreme. “I thought, That’s odd. But there was a level in Ted’s personality, as outrageous as it was, of solid, middle-class values.” Osgood agrees with Freddy English’s characterization of Gorey as “a nice Midwestern boy” in bohemian drag. “The curious thing about Ted in those days, and probably always,” he says, “was that his behavior, tone of voice, gestures, were characteristically queeny, no question about it, but at the core of his personality, he wasn’t a queeny person at all. So except for this bizarre direction he went in in his work, he was a very middle-class, moralistic person.”

Gorey once claimed, with his usual flair for the dramatic, that he was “probably fully formed” by the time he arrived at Harvard.²⁶ No doubt the essential elements of his style and sensibility were intact, many of them already jigsawed into place, but the Ted we know wasn’t quite complete when he walked through the gates of Harvard Yard the week of September 16, 1946.

He would prove a lackadaisical French major, later recalling, “I bounced from the dean’s list to probation and back again.”²⁷ When it came to his extracurricular passions, however, he was an avid student, devouring everything by his latest literary infatuations, going to art films and the ballet, trying his hand at limericks and stories, and drawing constantly (little men in raccoon coats proliferate in the margins of his study notes). For the next four years, he’d be zealous in his true course of study: Becoming Gorey.

CHAPTER 3
“TERRIBLY INTELLECTUAL AND AVANT-GARDE AND ALL THAT JAZZ”

Harvard, 1946–50

Gorey, like all incoming freshmen, had been assigned to one of the residence halls around Harvard Yard. Mower,* a small red-brick building completed in 1925, has its own courtyard, a patch of tree-shaded green that gives it a secluded feel. Gorey’s new home was suite B-12, on the ground floor, a no-frills affair with two bedrooms giving onto a common study room with three desks and a fireplace. His roommates were Alan Lindsay and Bruce Martin McIntyre, about whom we know zilch, as he would say.

In his first month at Harvard, Gorey met a fellow veteran and fledgling poet with whom he soon formed a two-man counterculture. Frank O’Hara, his upstairs neighbor in Mower B-21, would go on to fame as a leading light in the New York School of poets (which included John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, both Harvardians as well). Brilliant, intellectually combative, lightning quick with a witty comeback, O’Hara was a virtuoso conversationalist who turned cocktail-party repartee into an improvisatory art.

Like Gorey, he’d come to Harvard on the GI Bill. He, too, was Irish Catholic, but whereas Ted had slipped the traces of a Catholic upbringing early on, O’Hara had all the post-traumatic baggage of the lapsed Catholic: “It’s well known that God and I don’t get along together,” he wisecracked in one of his poems.¹ But the most obvious evidence that he and Gorey were cast in the same mold was O’Hara’s “drive for knowing about all the arts,” an impulse that “was as tireless as it was unfocused,” according to his biographer Brad Gooch, who adds that “he showed a genius, early on, for being in the know”—another Goreyan quality.² By 1944, when he enlisted in the navy, he’d become “something of an expert on the latest developments in twentieth-century avant-garde music, art, and literature,” mostly by way of his own auto-didactic curriculum, Gooch writes.³ Like Gorey, O’Hara was fluent in modern art, bristling with opinions on Picasso, Klee, Calder, and Kandinsky. At the same time, he shared Ted’s passion for pop culture, which for O’Hara meant the comic strip Blondie, hit songs by Sinatra and the big-band trumpeter Harry James, and, most of all, film: he was an ardent moviegoer, papering his bedroom walls with pictures of popcorn Venuses like Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth. Insatiable in his cultural cravings, all-embracing in his tastes, unreserved in his opinions, O’Hara was in many ways Gorey’s intellectual double, down to the fanatical balletomania.

The two were soon inseparable. They made a Mutt-and-Jeff pair on campus, O’Hara with his domed forehead and bent, aquiline nose, broken by a childhood bully, walking on his toes and stretching his neck to add an inch or two to his five-foot-seven height, Gorey towering over him at six two, “tall and spooky looking,” in the words of a schoolmate.⁴

Swanning around campus in his signature getup of sneakers and a long canvas coat with a sheepskin collar, fingers heavy with rings, Gorey was the odds-on favorite for campus bohemian, with the emphasis on odd. “I remember the first day Ted Gorey came into the dining hall I thought he was the oddest person I’d ever seen,” said George Montgomery. “He seemed very, very tall, with his hair plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor. He was wearing rings on his fingers.”⁵ Larry Osgood, a year behind Ted, shared Montgomery’s double-take reaction the first time he saw Gorey. He was standing in line to buy a ticket to a performance by the Martha Graham Company when he noticed a “tall, willowy man” with his nose in a little book.⁶ “Ted never stood in line for anything without a book in his hands,” says Osgood. “One of the things that struck me about him and made me, in my philistine way, sort of giggle at him was [that] one of his little fingernails was about three inches long. He’d let it grow and grow and grow.”

Gorey struck an effete pose. He affected a world-weariness and tossed off deadpan pronouncements with a knowing tone, an irony he underscored with broad, be-still-my-heart gestures—“all the flapping around he did,” a fellow dorm resident called it.⁷ Even so, he wasn’t some shrieking caricature of pre-Stonewall queerness. “He was flamboyant in a much more witty and bizarre way that normal queens weren’t,” says Osgood. “Giving big parties and carrying on, listening to records of musicals and singing along to them” wasn’t Gorey’s style.

As always, Gorey defied binaries. His eccentric appearance belied a shy, reserved nature. His speech, body language, and cultural passions—theater, ballet, the novels of gay satirists of mores and manners such as Saki, Ronald Firbank, E. F. Benson, and Ivy Compton-Burnett—were a catalog of stereotypically gay traits and affinities. Yet no one in the almost exclusively gay crowd he traveled with ever saw him at gay bars such as the Napoleon Club or the Silver Dollar. He was either so discreet that he eluded detection or, as he later maintained, so yawningly uninterested in sex that there was nothing to detect.

O’Hara was impressed by Gorey’s assured sense of himself, his refusal to apologize for his deviations from the norm, especially his blithe disregard for conventional notions of masculinity. O’Hara, who’d had his first same-sex experience when he was sixteen, was conflicted about his sexual identity—all too aware of his attraction to men but gnawed by the suspicion that gay men were sissies and haunted by fears of what would happen if his secret got out in the conservative Irish Catholic community where he’d grown up, in Grafton, Massachusetts. Posthumously, O’Hara would take his place on the Mount Rushmore of gay letters, but during his Harvard years he was torn between the closeted life he was forced to live whenever he returned home and the more liberated life he lived at Harvard and in Boston’s gay underground.

Gorey’s comparatively over-the-top persona was a revelation to O’Hara. “As his life in [his hometown] became more weighted and conflicted, O’Hara compensated by growing increasingly flamboyant at Harvard,” writes Gooch. “His main accomplice in this flowering was Edward St. John Gorey,” who constituted O’Hara’s “first serious brush with a high style and an offbeat elegance to which he quickly succumbed.”⁸

Style is key here: consciously or not, Gorey was acting out a “revolt through style,” a phrase coined by cultural critics to describe the symbolic rebellion, staged in music, slang, and fashion, by postwar subcultures—mods, punks, goths, and all the rest of them. Gorey wasn’t so much rebelling against the conformist, compulsorily straight America of the late ’40s as he was airily disregarding it, decamping to a place more congenial to his sensibility, a world concocted from his far-flung fascinations and conjured up in India ink.

Growing up, Gorey and O’Hara had always been the smartest kids in any room they walked into. Now each had met his match, not just in IQ points but in cultural omnivorousness, creativity, and oblique wit. They fed off each other’s enthusiasms, seeing foreign films at the Kenmore, near Boston University; sneaking into the ballet during intermission at the old Boston Opera House, on Huntington Avenue; and attending poetry readings on campus given by Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Edith Sitwell, and Dylan Thomas. Poking around in bookstores near Harvard Square, they initiated one another into the esoteric charms of writers sunk in obscurity.

Ronald Firbank (1886–1926), a little-known English novelist of the ’20s, was typical of their rarefied tastes. If Gorey and O’Hara’s aesthetic cult had a patron saint, it was Firbank, whose influence on both men lasted long after Harvard. O’Hara’s wordplay, his ironic humor, and his witty interpolation, in his poems, of snippets of overheard dialogue owe much to Firbank. As for Gorey, he once cited the author as “the greatest influence on me … because he is so concise and so madly oblique,” though he later qualified his admiration, conceding that he was “reluctant to admit” his debt to Firbank “because I’ve outgrown him in one way, though in another I don’t suppose I ever will. Firbank’s subject matter isn’t very congenial to me—the ecclesiastical frou-frou, the adolescent sexual innuendo. But the way he wrote things, the very elliptical structure, influenced me a great deal.”⁹ (Gorey repaid the debt in 1971 when he illustrated a limited edition of Two Early Stories by Firbank.)¹⁰ He also took from Firbank what he took from Japanese and Chinese literature, namely, the aesthetic of “leaving things out, being very brief,” to achieve an almost haikulike narrative compression.¹¹ (“I think nothing,” Firbank declared, “of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.”)¹²

Gorey admired Firbank’s exquisitely light touch, his mastery of an irony so subtle it was barely there; we hear echoes of Firbank’s drily hilarious style in Gorey’s prose and in his conversational bon mots. To the Goreyphile, Firbank sounds startlingly Goreyesque: “The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.”¹³ In Vainglory (1915), Lady Georgia Blueharnis thinks the view of the hills near her estate would be improved “if some sorrowful creature could be induced to take to them. I often long for a bent, slim figure to trail slowly along the ridge, at sundown, in an agony of regret.”¹⁴ Can’t you just see that bent, slim figure trailing slowly through the twilight of a Gorey drawing?

A writer’s style is inextricable from his way of looking at the world, and Gorey absorbed Firbank’s sensibility along with his style. His habit of treating serious subjects frivolously and frivolous matters seriously, his love of the inconsequential and the nonchalant, his carefully cultivated ennui, his puckish perspective on the human comedy: all these Goreyesque traits bear the stamp of Firbank’s influence.

Even Gorey’s stifled-yawn lack of interest in the subject of sex—“Such excess of passion / Is quite out of fashion,” a young lady observes in The Listing Attic—has its parallel in the can’t-be-bothered languor that was part of the Firbank pose. “My husband had no amorous energy whatsoever,” one of his characters confides, “which just suited me, of course.”¹⁵

Gorey’s most obviously Firbankian attribute is his immersion in the nineteenth century. Firbank was besotted by the same fin-de-siècle literature and aesthetic posturing whose influence wafts off the pages of Gorey’s Dugway plays. A throwback to the Mauve Decade, he was “1890 in 1922,” to quote the critic Carl Van Vechten.¹⁶ (“I adore all that mauvishness about him!” a Firbank character cries.)¹⁷ Yet, like Gorey, he was very much of his moment: his compressed plots and collagelike rendering of cocktail-party chatter were as modern in their own way as Gorey’s Balanchinian economy of line, absurdist plots, and pared-down texts were in theirs.

Firbank, it should go without saying, was gay. He looms large in the prehistory of camp, the coded sensibility that enabled gays, in pre-Stonewall times, to signal their sexuality under the radar of mainstream (read: straight) culture and, simultaneously, to mock that culture with tongue firmly in cheek. To gay readers who could read the subtext in Firbank’s pricking wit and “orchidaceous” style, as detractors called it, his prose hid his queerness in plain sight.

The content of his novels, which poked fun at bourgeois institutions such as marriage, had special meaning for gay readers, too. “One can imagine how such a flagrant parody of heterosexual mores might function within the gay subculture—reinforcing the self-esteem of those who thought their nontraditional sexuality a rebellion against the conventionalism of late Victorianism,” writes David Van Leer in The Queening of America.¹⁸ “An appreciation of [Firbank] became the litmus test of one’s sexuality and of one’s allegiance to the dandyism of post-Wildean homosexuality. When gay poet W. H. Auden announced that ‘a person who dislikes Ronald Firbank may, for all I know, possess some admirable quality, but I do not wish ever to see him again,’ his statement was not an aesthetic judgment. It was a declaration of community solidarity.”

It’s hard to imagine Gorey rejoicing in the gay “community solidarity” signaled by a fondness for Firbank. A nonjoiner if ever there was one, Gorey distanced himself from those, like the “very militant” museum curator he knew in later years, who insisted that their queerness was central to their identity.¹⁹ “I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is—but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too,” he said. “And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.”

Too true. But being a homosexual in 1946, or facing up to the fact that you might be, was surely just a little bit more serious, as problems go, than being heterosexual. When Gorey arrived on campus, the Harvard Advocate was defunct, closed in the early ’40s by outraged trustees who’d discovered that its editorial board was, for all purposes, a gays-only club. When the magazine resumed publication in 1947, it did so with the understanding that gays were banned from the board (a prohibition everyone disregarded but that was nervous-making nonetheless). During Gorey’s Harvard days, a student caught making out with another young man was expelled. Shortly after he graduated, in the spring of 1951, two Harvard men who’d engaged in what O’Hara’s biographer calls “illicit activities” got the axe as well—a regrettable affair that turned into a “horrible tragedy,” says Gorey’s schoolmate Freddy English, when one of the young men committed suicide.

Whether Gorey thought of himself as gay at Harvard and whether his emerging style and sensibility represented a coming to terms with his sexuality he never said. Still, as noted earlier, nearly all his influences during those formative four years, from Firbank to Compton-Burnett to E. F. Benson, were gay. Then, too, the fact that he was surrounded, for the first time in his life, by unmistakably gay men—one of whom, Frank O’Hara, had become a close friend (though not, it should be emphasized, a lover)—must have pressed the question of his own sexuality.

If he, like O’Hara and others in their clique, was struggling with his identity, the pervasive homophobia of the times must have affected him in some way. With the coming of the Cold War, right-wing opportunists whipped up fears of communist infiltration at the highest levels of government. Gays, they maintained, were an especially worrisome threat to national security, since their “perversion” rendered them vulnerable to being blackmailed into spying for the Russkies. Harvard’s expulsions of gay students made the mood of the moment impossible to ignore.

A report by Gorey’s freshman adviser, Alfred Hower, hints at shadows moving beneath the witty insouciance he showed the world. “Gorey seems a rather nervous type and not particularly well adjusted,” Hower writes, adding, hilariously, “He started to grow a beard, which may or may not be an indication of some eccentricity.”²⁰

When his frequent absences from Harvard’s required “physical training” course landed him on academic probation, his mother pled his case with Judson Shaplin, the assistant dean of the college. In a revealing letter, she laments the difficulty Ted is having adjusting to the demands of college life, noting that he coasted through grade school and as a result “just never learned how to study,” a weakness compounded, in her eyes, by Parker’s unorthodox, no-grades approach to academics.²¹ But the roots of her son’s fecklessness lie, she suggests, in the fact that Ted, “as the only child of divorced parents … has been handicapped by a combination of too much mother and too little masculine influence.”²²

To our ears, Helen Gorey’s pat analysis of her son as a mama’s boy, infantilized (and, presumably, sissified) by a smothering mother, sounds like an outtake from the script for Hitchcock’s Psycho. But she was only echoing the Freudian wisdom of her day. “From the 1940s until the early 1970s, sociologists and psychiatrists advanced the idea that an overaffectionate or too-distant mother … hampers the social and psychosexual development of her son,” Roel van den Oever asserts in Mama’s Boy: Momism and Homophobia in Postwar American Culture.²³

It seems likely that this mounting intolerance toward gays—or, for that matter, any weirdo who came off as “very, very faggoty”²⁴ (George Montgomery’s first impression of Gorey)—would have unsettled a college student trying to make sense of who he was. A nightmarish little vignette in Gorey’s collection of limericks, The Listing Attic (most of which he wrote “all at once” in ’48 or ’49), suggests something was troubling him.²⁵

At night, in a scene straight out of Hawthorne or Poe but perfect for the lynch-mob mentality of the McCarthy era, capering men encircle a statue, brandishing torches. On top of the statue—the famous bronze likeness of John Harvard in Harvard Yard—a terrified figure cowers as one of the revelers strains with outstretched torch to set him on fire. In the foreground, black trees shrink back in horror; even their shadows recoil, stretching toward us in the firelight. Gorey writes,

Some Harvard men, stalwart and hairy,

Drank up several bottles of sherry;

In the Yard around three

They were shrieking with glee:

“Come on out, we are burning a fairy!”

Within a month of meeting, Gorey and O’Hara had decided to room together. On a November 21, 1946, application for a change of residence, Gorey says he’d like to move to Eliot House, a residential house for upperclassmen whose invigorating mixture of aesthetes, athletes, scholars, and “Eliot gentlemen” (young men with Brahmin surnames like Cabot and Lodge) was handpicked by the housemaster and eminent classicist John Finley.²⁶ A devout believer in Harvard’s house system, which was modeled on Oxford’s residential colleges, Finley fostered the life of the mind over tea parties and at more formal symposia featuring luminaries such as the poet Archibald MacLeish and I. A. Richards, a founding father of New Criticism.

It wasn’t until the beginning of Gorey’s sophomore year, in the fall of ’47, that Harvard approved his move to Eliot, where he and O’Hara ended up in suite F-13, a triple. O’Hara took one of the two little bedrooms; the third man, Vito Sinisi—a philosophy major who, in a zillion-to-one coincidence, had studied Japanese with Gorey in the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of Chicago—called dibs on the other; and Gorey slept in the suite’s common room. By day, he could often be found there, at a big table near a window, drawing his little men in raccoon coats.

Gorey and O’Hara transformed their suite into a salon, furnishing it, in suitably bohemian fashion, with white modernist garden furniture rented from one of the shops in Harvard Square. A tombstone, pilfered from Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground or perhaps from Mount Auburn Cemetery and repurposed as a coffee table, added just the right touch of macabre whimsy. (Founded in 1831, Mount Auburn is a bucolic necropolis in Cambridge, not far from Harvard. It’s inconceivable that Gorey didn’t frequent its winding paths; judging by his books, the prop room of his imagination was well stocked with Auburn’s gothic tombs, Egyptian revival obelisks, and sepulchres adorned with urns and angels.)

Gorey and O’Hara decorated F-13 with soirees in mind; it was just the sort of place for standing contrapposto, cocktail in one hand, cigarette in the other, making witty chitchat. “The idea,” said O’Hara’s friend Genevieve Kennedy, “was to lie down on a chaise longue, get mellow with a few drinks, and listen to Marlene Dietrich records. They loved her whisky voice.”²⁷ (Dietrich was to gay culture in the ’40s what Judy Garland would be to later generations of gay men. Gorey carried a torch for her long after Harvard.*)

Gorey and O’Hara continued to swap newly discovered enthusiasms and kindle each other’s obsessions. The ’50s would witness the birth pangs of what the ’60s would call the counterculture. As youth culture pushed back against the father-knows-best authoritarianism and mind-cramping conformity of postwar America, Hollywood and the news media provided teenagers with templates for rebellion: the brooding, alienated rebel without a cause role-modeled by James Dean; the beatniks in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). At Harvard in 1947, though, countercultures were strictly do-it-yourself affairs. Gorey and O’Hara were a subculture unto themselves within a larger subculture, the gay underground. At a moment when T. S. Eliot’s high-modernist formalism held sway in literature classes and little magazines, its brow-knitting seriousness and self-conscious symbolism the order of the day, Gorey and O’Hara embraced the satirical, knowingly frivolous novels of writers like Firbank, Compton-Burnett, and Evelyn Waugh.

Gorey and O’Hara and their clique weren’t defiantly nonconformist (although they were obliquely so) or overtly political (though there was a politics to their pose). Nor were they populist in the Whitmanesque way the Beats were or in the communitarian way the hippies were. Even so, says Gooch, “they were a counterculture,” albeit “an early and élitist form of it”—textbook examples of what the cultural critic Susan Son-tag called the “improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves aristocrats of taste.”²⁸

Joined, over time, by kindred spirit John Ashbery—a class ahead of them at Harvard and destined to win acclaim as a major voice in American poetry—Gorey and O’Hara defined themselves through their tastes, sense of style, and aesthetic way of looking at the world.

“Nobody was organized; there was just style, so to speak, rather than movements,” says the critic and novelist Alison Lurie, a close friend of Gorey’s at Harvard and afterward, during his Cambridge period. To Lurie, Gorey and his friends “represented an alternative reality” to the blustering machismo of iconic he-men like Norman Mailer (who impressed her as “a noisy, bullying kind of person” when she met him through his sister, Barbara, her classmate at Radcliffe).

Gorey, O’Hara, and their circle recoiled from the strutting, pugnacious masculinity epitomized by Mailer, but they staked out their position through taste, not the sort of polemical tantrums he staged. Ted “loved Victorian novels and Edwardian novels,” Lurie recalls. “He would never have read with much pleasure The Naked and the Dead. This macho thing was very irritating to Ted and his friends…. So if you were tired of men behaving this way, these writers were very encouraging to you.” Vets who’d seen combat, as Mailer had, looked down on men who hadn’t, like Gorey, Lurie notes, “and sometimes they would show this, you know? So I suppose there was this kind of reaction to this violent masculine mystique that some of these guys came back with.”

Gorey, O’Hara, and their inner circle shared an affection for the self-consciously artificial, the over-the-top, and the recherché. Their ironic, outsider’s-eye view of society often expressed itself in the parodic, highly stylized language of camp. In her essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag defines that elusive sensibility as a “way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon … not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization”—a definition that harmonizes with Gorey’s remark, “My life has been concerned completely with aesthetics. My responses to things are almost completely aesthetic.”²⁹ His work isn’t campy in the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? sense, but there’s undeniably an element of camp in his poker-faced parodies of Victorian sentimentality and Puritan sermonizing.

With predictable perversity, Gorey decided to major not in art, despite his declaration in his application that he’d set his career sights on “some field of Commercial Art,” or in English, a natural fit given his insatiable appetite for literature, but in French. “With hysterical disregard for practicality I decided to major in French,” he told his army buddy Bill Brandt in a letter dated April 17, 1947. “As you well know for the simple reason of being able to write in the language.”³⁰ (Brandt would “well know” this through his familiarity with Gorey’s habit of giving the plays he wrote at Dugway French titles and of sprinkling them, and his correspondence, with French phrases.) “One and all, including my advisor, are just a teeny bit baffled by such an attitude,” he admitted, “but then so am I.”

In 1977, with the advantages of hindsight, he offered a more plausible explanation: “I figured I’d read anything I wanted to read in English, but I would have to force myself to read all of French literature. And I thought I would like to read all of French literature.”³¹ Unfortunately, Harvard turned out to have “a perfectly god-awful French department,” in Gorey’s estimation. His French classes were “dim proceedings,” especially the survey courses, which were scheduled right after lunch, with the predictable result that he “would have a nice nap,” but his French, he later claimed, was “absolutely atrocious.”³²

From his class notes, we see that Gorey’s French courses force-marched him through Hugo, Rousseau, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Proust, Perrault, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld, none of whom, with the exception of Perrault and La Rochefoucauld, seems to have made much of an impression. Perrault he liked because he was taken with “the funny, irrational quality of fairy tales” (although he also said they disturbed him).³³ As for La Rochefoucauld, Gorey seems to have found the witty, cynical Frenchman’s way of looking at the world congenial to his own. Gorey shared La Rochefoucauld’s perspective on la comédie humaine, expressed in tart truisms such as “We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others” and “We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire.”³⁴ In an undergraduate essay on his maxims, Gorey writes, “I myself happen to agree with La Rochefoucauld’s estimate of Man almost completely.”³⁵

The French phrasemaker’s deft way with the short, sharp zinger was a model of the pithiness and clarity Gorey would strive for in his writing. In his essay on the Maximes—which is brilliant, by the way; cogent and clear and startlingly assured in its critical judgments—he admires the lucidity of a style so transparent that it performs a kind of vanishing act in the reader’s mind. “Personality and everything else which is in the slightest degree superfluous to his thought have been stripped away,” writes Gorey.³⁶ This is fascinating on two counts: it reveals the scope of Gorey’s artistic intellect, broad enough to appreciate an aesthetic poles apart from the effete, hothouse-orchid style epitomized by Firbank, and it foreshadows his use of stripped-down, prosy language to ironic, often comic effect.

Gorey’s uncharacteristically self-reflective thoughts on La Rochefou-cauld’s ideas about morality and human nature speak volumes about his own philosophical views. “I think to myself: ‘This is the way people are, their every action is explained once and for all.’”³⁷ La Rochefoucauld “sees Man as being motivated by one thing alone: amour-propre, or the love of self, all other motives being merely masks which more or less effectively conceal the same face beneath. Thus all actions have the same moral value, which is to say none at all.”³⁸

This is strong stuff, a premonition of the existentialism that will resurface in some of Gorey’s more confessional letters to his friend and literary collaborator Peter Neumeyer. When he writes about La Rochefoucauld’s “incurable pessimism” regarding human society, and of the “passion and suffering” beneath the “polite glaciality of his writing’s surface,” we’re reminded of the Gorey who once confided to an interviewer, “I read books about crazed mass murderers, and say to myself, ‘There but for the grace of God.’ … In one way I’ve never related to people or understood why they behave the way they do…. I think life is the pits.”³⁹

In light of such remarks, it’s tempting to hear Gorey speaking through Theodore Pinkfoot, one of the characters in Paint Me Black

Angels, a novel he produced some fifty-odd pages of at Harvard before abandoning it:

I dislike people, I am incapable of hate, but they terrify me. Though I am always analyzing it, human nature bores me, really. I do not believe there are such things as goodness, loyalty, courage, nobility, and their opposites. There is no need for them…. Motives, for the most part, are fatuous and unexplainable; those of which people speak are at best irrelevant.⁴⁰

Not that Gorey, at Harvard, was a mass murderer manqué or a mis-anthrope sunk in gloom. To be sure, he’d always felt a little alienated: he confided to Bill Brandt, in a typically histrionic letter written in the spring term of his freshman year, that he’d been going slowly insane since September, at a loss as to why he was there and what purpose the whole business served (although he was accumulating a wealth of “idiotic but fascinating isolated bits,” he allowed). He spent the better part of his study hours procrastinating or, paradoxically, “wondering in an obscure sort of way why my grades aren’t brilliant.”⁴¹

But if his attitude toward his classes was lackadaisical, Gorey’s appetite for culture-bingeing outside the classroom was undiminished. He regrets, in his letter to Brandt, that he hasn’t made it to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, “what with going to see every play, after the great hiatus in my theatre-going days occasioned by the army, and the ballet, every performance needless to say, whenever there’s a company in town …”⁴² And even if he has been remiss in his symphony-going, he’s been filling in the more obscure gaps in his record collection: “I have developed an unholy passion for everything pre-Bach of late, regardless of what it is.”

He was drawing constantly, too. Visitors to Eliot F-13 sometimes found him scratching away imperturbably amid the social whirl. “They had the best parties going at Harvard,” Donald Hall recalls. “They were jolly, funny, lively, with a mix of people, many strangers to each other, that mixed well.”⁴³ He remembers Gorey as a man of few words, able to focus on his work amid the hubbub. “You’d go into the room to talk with Frank and there would be Ted sitting at the desk drawing one of his Christmas cards.”⁴⁴

The academic paper trail that chronicles Gorey’s Harvard years is a fossil record of his evolution as an artist: drawings crowd the margins and cover the flip sides of many of his class notes, creative-writing assignments, research papers, even memos to roomies. Gorey drew women in ball gowns, their plunging décolletages ostentatiously on display, their spiky-lashed, almond-shaped eyes strikingly reminiscent of Picasso’s cubist muses. He drew nuns in wimples and claw-fingered crones hunched over cauldrons and elegant, loose-lined studies of society ladies who look as if they’ve stepped out of the pages of Vogue. He drew free-associated doodles—polymorphous whatnots melting into undulating something-or-others whose dream logic is reminiscent of the surrealist parlor game the exquisite corpse. Here, there, and everywhere, he drew his little men in raccoon coats, variations on an archetype that would soon have a name: Clavius Frederick Earbrass, the “well-known novelist” whose agonizing struggle with his book in progress—“He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel”—is chronicled in Gorey’s first published book, The Unstrung Harp.

All along, he was writing, too. He wrote short stories, dozens of them, and reams of poetry (in French as well as English), trying his hand at everything from Petrarchan sonnets to limericks, working out problems in rhyme and scansion on the backs of old assignments. In a letter to Brandt written in the fall of ’47, the first term of his sophomore year, he mentions having written, to date, “some seventy five limericks (projected number: 110), many of them sordid,” which pegs them as early versions, most likely, of the grimly funny limericks in The Listing Attic.⁴⁵

That fall, Gorey was at work on Paint Me Black Angels, too, or rather its fraught beginnings: “It has now reached the point where every time I sit down to start it again, psychological blocks of various nasty sorts start sitting on my head,” he told Brandt. “I have the vague suspicion that I shall still be working on the first chapter on my deathbed …”⁴⁶ This, of course, is Mr. Earbrass’s plight in The Unstrung Harp, a comic-gothic meditation on the horrors of the blank page. Could Gorey’s abortive attempt at a novel have been the midwife of the first of his little books? The Unstrung Harp is a novel writ small that showed him a way out of his impasse: rather than beat your brains out trying to make a masterpiece, write an unsmilingly unserious little book, a mere bagatelle, about writer’s block. If The Unstrung Harp was the brainchild of the novel that never was, it may have confirmed Gorey in his belief that “the perfect works of art of this world … are almost invariably on a small scale.”⁴⁷

Most of Gorey’s poems and fictions had their origins as assignments for the creative-writing classes he took in his sophomore year with the young poet John Ciardi. Boston born and bred from working-class Italian-American stock, Ciardi was a firm believer in poetry that spoke to a mass audience. Donald Hall, who took the course with Gorey and O’Hara, remembers him as “a superb teacher” who “took our writing seriously enough to give us a bad time.”⁴⁸

Intriguingly, it was Ciardi who fanned Gorey’s interest in the mock moralistic, encouraging him to parody the sermonizing voice of traditional children’s literature. Like Gorey, he recalled childhood as fraught with “intensities and losses,” a time of “enormous violence,” figuratively and literally.⁴⁹ He scorned the “sugar-coated moralities” of most poetry intended for kids, which he thought sounded as if it were “written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar”; his children’s verse, he said, was written “in the happy conviction that children were small savages with a glad flair for violence.”

Gorey got to know Ciardi “fairly well”; he, O’Hara, and George Rinehart, son of the Rinehart who founded the New York publisher Holt, Rinehart & Winston (and grandson of the mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart), would often join their professor after class for caffeine-fueled bull sessions at a nearby coffee shop.⁵⁰ When Ciardi and his wife needed some wallpaper steamed from the walls of the apartment they were renovating, they recruited Gorey, O’Hara, and Rinehart for the job. “They were at it for days as they played a game of killing insults,” Ciardi recalled. “They were beautiful and bright and I have never come on three students as a group who seemed to have such unlimited prospects.”⁵¹ After a day’s hard work peeling wallpaper while Rossini overtures blared from the record player, the trio would join Ciardi and his wife, Judith, for spaghetti washed down with wine. Judith thought the three young men were “the funniest people in the world, with tongues like scalpels.”⁵²

Ciardi had no doubt that O’Hara was a prodigious talent, writing “like a young Mozart,” although the young poet’s worship of style over sincerity led his professor to observe that he “showed his brilliance rather than his feelings.”⁵³ As for Gorey, who shared O’Hara’s fascination with irony, parody, artifice, and nonsense, along with his aversion to the earnest, confessional voice, Ciardi’s comments on his papers are keenly insightful. Ciardi could be as pitiless in his written remarks as he was solicitous in class, and his analysis of Gorey’s cultivated artificiality and ironic distance from his subject matter is both penetrating and prophetic, foreshadowing charges leveled at Gorey’s work in later years.

Ciardi’s response to a ten-page short story Ted submitted on October 27, 1947, for his English A-1a course is illuminating. “The Colours of Disillusion” (note Gorey’s Anglophilic insistence on British spelling) is a Firbank knockoff, from its gossipy cocktail-party setting to the near-fatal preciosity of the writing. But it’s not all Firbank; already Gorey’s comic-macabre aesthetic is spreading its dark wings. The setting is vaguely Victorian-Edwardian, as is the language (“‘How too frightening,’ said a young man with a soigné moustache”); “the eldest lady of the party” is addicted to shilling shockers; a child is in peril; “great black beards” are fetishized, cathected with infantile notions of “all that was good and kind and moral and strong”; a young woman pours vitriol—literally—on her sleeping husband’s face.⁵⁴

Ciardi gives Gorey an A, then renders judgment in full: “It begins to appear inevitable that I can never do more than pass your stories back with a question mark. Actually I think it’s your question mark. Everything you’re writing is flawless and unfinished. Unfinished in the sense that you’re following your own instinct but haven’t found it completely. When you do, it—your writing—will, I suspect, be either transcendent or simply pointless, depending on whether you follow it into some idea of order, or merely into the bric-a-brac of amusing reverie.”⁵⁵ Ciardi is prescient in his observation that Gorey is guided by a lodestar all his own, as he will be for the rest of his creative life. And he’s right to point out that Ted’s sensibility is taking shape but hasn’t yet coalesced.

But he misses the mark when he says that Gorey must choose between transcendence and pointlessness. Gorey, who straddled Taoism and Dadaism, irony and existentialist angst, made a career of defying dualisms, in the course of which he produced works that managed to be both marvelous and pointless, serious and frivolous. Again, Sontag is helpful: “There are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high culture,” she writes in “Notes on ‘Camp.’” “Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”⁵⁶

Ciardi’s critiques were love notes compared to Professor Kenneth P. Kempton’s comments on a story submitted for his English 1b course, which Gorey took in the spring of ’49. “Your rococo manner, derived from self-consciousness and reading, is here made more than usually irritating by meager content spread very thin,” he wrote in a critique that can be fairly described as withering.⁵⁷ He gave it a C.

Undeniably, Gorey’s undergraduate efforts earn his professors’ criticisms—and then some. The brittle artificiality of his drawing-room comedies, his thinly drawn characters, his inability to resist overegging the pudding of his prose style: the Firbankian posturing quickly grows tiresome. Then again, shameless imitation is part of any young writer’s apprenticeship. “That’s what happens to young people in college,” said a friend of O’Hara’s, commenting on Frank’s Wildean affectations at Harvard. “They decide on their mentor and they go all the way trying to be like him.”⁵⁸

At the same time, there’s a culture war going on here between naturalism and what I’ll call unnaturalism: between the novel as an exercise in depth psychology, plumbing the neuroses of realistic characters, and the novel as a puppet show where we see the human comedy—the masks we wear, the little dramas we act out—from a wry, ironic remove. It’s naturalism versus aestheticism, Hemingway in A Moveable Feast exhorting himself to “write the truest sentence that you know” versus Wilde in “The Decay of Lying” lamenting the “morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling.”⁵⁹ But we can also see this clash of artistic philosophies as a proxy war for the conflict between masculinity American-style (whose literary correlative is the “lean” and “muscular” style of tough-guy modernists like Hemingway and Mailer, with their terse sentences and their commitment to fiction as hard truth, straight up, no chaser) and its mauvish discontents.

In his little books, Gorey would, like the surrealists, the French avant-gardists known as the Oulipo group, and Victorian writers of nonsense verse such as Lear and Lewis Carroll, privilege formal experimentation over conventional storytelling (although he did believe in the importance of plot). Rather than the psychologically three-dimensional characters we meet in mainstream fiction, he preferred the stock types and mythic archetypes familiar from silent films and ballets, folktales and fairy tales, Kabuki and Noh theater, whodunits and penny dreadfuls.

This doesn’t mean his work was divorced from lived experience: surrealism, aestheticism, and nonsense are no less capable than realism of accessing the deeper truths of the human condition. Brad Gooch’s analysis of O’Hara applies equally to Gorey: “He didn’t want to be a Hemingway, the sort of popular writer who reduced the complexities of felt life to an ‘elegant machinery’ while his characters pretended to a deceptive lifelikeness.” Instead, as O’Hara put it, he wanted “to move towards a complexity which makes life within the work and which does not (necessarily, although it may) resemble life as much as most people think it is lived.”⁶⁰

After Harvard, Gorey would never again attempt long-form fiction. He would invent a genre all his own, one that partook of the illustrated children’s book, the mystery story, the graphic novel (Gorey anticipated the genre decades before Art Spiegelman’s Maus popularized it, in 1986), the artist’s book (conceptual artwork in book form), and tongue-in-cheek treatments of moralizing nursery rhymes (Heinrich Hoff-mann’s grisly-funny Struwwelpeter and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children are the most obvious influences). His little books don’t fit neatly into any category but Gorey, really. Yet they’re inarguably a species of fiction, however uncategorizable, and Gorey would always think of himself as “first a writer, then an artist.”⁶¹

By the spring of ’49, O’Hara had gotten so tight with another Eliot House resident, Hal Fondren, that he was spending much of his time in O-22, Fondren’s suite, which looked out on the housemaster’s garden. A fellow vet who’d served as an air force gunner in England, Fondren was witty and cultured in the usual Anglophilic way: he liked to show off his collection of the early pamphlet editions of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which he’d purchased as they came out, one by one.

Speaking of quartets, Gorey struck up a friendship with Fondren’s roommate, Tony Smith. Smith, the scion of a wealthy Republican family, was an econ major who’d prepared at ultraexclusive Exeter. He doesn’t seem like Gorey’s type, but, against all odds, they began palling around.

Gorey and O’Hara were growing apart, partly as a result of O’Hara’s absorption in Fondren and partly because their diverging creative trajectories and social styles were accentuating their differences. O’Hara’s appetite for intellectual blood sports—cocktail-party games of oneupmanship—and his hard-partying, hard-drinking gregariousness contrasted sharply with Gorey’s reclusiveness and dry, ironic style. “Gorey’s style was never entirely appropriate for O’Hara,” notes Gooch.⁶² “As a schoolmate put it, Gorey’s style was ‘cool, English. Nothing could get to you. But then Frank was someone who everything got to.’”⁶³ Even so, Gorey continued to serve as a model of unapologetic individuality for O’Hara, especially in his flamboyant manner and dress, a style later characterized by an obituary writer as “dandy nerd.”⁶⁴

The Gorey beard made its first appearance around this time.* Gorey later claimed, in an unpublished interview with a young fan named Faith Elliott, that he let his whiskers grow long to conceal the fact that he had a receding chin, “which is one of the things that’s a deep, dark secret.”⁶⁵ “If you pushed his beard, for a long face he had a very small chin,” Mel Schierman, his friend from the New York City Ballet scene, confirms. “He made me do it one time.” (In one of her letters to Ted at Harvard, Helen Gorey, ever helpful, enclosed a clipping of a magazine humor column quoting a “physiologist” who reassures weak-chinned readers that “a receding chin does not indicate weakness—either mental or physical.”)⁶⁶

Of course, if Ted’s beard was a disguise for the shameful secret that he was a chinless wonder, it did double duty as a token of his affection for Wildean aestheticism, Edwardian dandyism, and nineteenth-century litterateurs like Edward Lear, who sported a majestic beard that’s a dead ringer for Gorey’s. An attraction to the beard as an emblem of Victorian manliness may be somewhere in there, too: Gorey’s fiction, as far back as Harvard, is full of strapping chaps with luxuriant facial hair. Then, too, beards are masks, tailor-made for concealing your true self if you’re the shy, reserved type.

The sneakers and the flowing coat, both as much a part of the Gorey look as his beard, were de rigueur by this time as well, though the coat wasn’t yet the floor-length fur version that would later inspire dropped jaws on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. “Tony [Smith] and Ted would go shopping every week at [the Boston department store] Filene’s Basement,” Fondren recalled. “It was just at the time when those long canvas coats with sheepskin collars became very fashionable and they both wore them.”⁶⁷

Gorey may have borrowed the idea for his famous fur coat from the poet John Wheelwright (Harvard class of ’20), an improbable mix of bohemian and Boston Brahmin who flew the flag of his nonconformity in the form of a floor-sweeping raccoon coat. But it’s just as likely that he lifted the idea from Oscar Wilde, who in some portraits cuts a glamorous figure in his beloved fur coat. Certainly Gorey’s habit, as a freshman, of wearing his hair “plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor,” as George Montgomery described it, sounds an awful lot like Wilde in the 1883 Sarony picture of him wearing his hair cut short, with a little fringe of a bang.⁶⁸

As for the three-inch-long fingernail that caught Larry Osgood’s eye, it’s useful to know that Firbank wore his nails “long and polished,” according to one of his biographers, “and what was unusual in a man is that they were stained a deep carmine.”⁶⁹ When we learn that Firbank wore exotic rings on his pale fingers—jade rings from China, Egyptian rings made of blue ceramic—we can’t help wondering if Gorey’s signature rings were, in a sense, Firbank’s.

Gorey’s own explanation, when asked about the origins of his image in a 1978 interview, was predictably scattershot. “The thing is, my drawing tends to be rather Victorian and everything,” he said, and “when I first got [fur] coats, they looked like … they were Victorian, you know, period pieces. (Now they don’t, because other people are going for them.) … I’ve always worn a lot of jewelry, which nobody ever did … and I’ve had a beard for twenty-eight years … and when I first had it everybody said, ‘Do you belong to the House of David or something?’”⁷⁰

O’Hara would never be the screwball dandy Gorey was; still, he was taken with Gorey’s independence of mind, manifest not only in his flamboyant dress but also in an intellectual curiosity that followed its own inscrutable logic and in a literary voice that was immune to prevailing trends and critical orthodoxies. In their sophomore year, Gorey and O’Hara favored the Grolier Book Shop on Plympton Street, rummaging through tall shelves stuffed mostly with literary fiction and poetry or reading on the comfily dilapidated sofa that dominated the small but high-ceilinged shop. O’Hara was on a C. Day-Lewis jag, collecting all his novels, which to Gorey’s mind were “sort of elegant, a little dull, concerning sensitive young English men in the early thirties.”⁷¹ Gorey was smitten with Ivy Compton-Burnett and was collecting the Penguin editions of her novels.

In the spring term of their junior year, however, the Mandrake Book Store on Boylston, near Harvard Square, was their preferred haunt. Unlike the cramped, dusty Grolier, the Mandrake had the feel of a comfortably appointed sitting room, with customers reading in chairs among the well-ordered shelves. Hal Fondren recalled, “I had an account there because I wanted every Henry Green novel…. Ivy Compton-Burnett, of course, was the patron saint of the group with Ted Gorey as her chief acolyte. We were all dying over the latest Ivy Compton-Burnett. You can’t imagine the excitement it created.”⁷²

Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) was a bloodless anatomist of English society. Like Firbank’s, her novels consist mostly of dialogue, much of it Wildean epigrams. They read like plays, which may go far in explaining Gorey’s attraction to her work (and to Firbank’s). A philosophical dialogue with the butler, Deakin, from A Heritage and Its History is worth reprinting in full:

“And we cannot depend on the silver lining, sir,” said Deakin. “I have seen many clouds without it.”

“I have never seen one with it,” said Walter. “My clouds have been so very black.”

“Well, the lighter the lining, sir, the darker the cloud may seem.”

“You pride yourself on pessimism, Deakin,” said Julia.

“Well, ma’am, when we are told to look on the bright side of things, it is not generally at a happy time.”

“But it is good advice for daily life.”

“Daily life harbors everything, ma’am. All our troubles come into it.”⁷³

A very Goreyesque sentiment.

Near the end of the spring term, in May of ’49, Ted exhibited his watercolors at the Mandrake. The show was a success: “The tiny store was overflowing with an animated crowd of young students smoking, drinking, and, above all, uttering sharp, fast comments,” Gooch reports.⁷⁴ Behind the scenes, however, Ted was coming unstrung, as he would say. O’Hara had announced his decision to move in with Fondren that fall, at the beginning of their senior year, a turn of events that left Gorey feeling “mildly abandoned,” he later confessed.⁷⁵ Ted saw Frank as “moving onward and upward” in the spring of ’49.⁷⁶ “I felt that after we stopped rooming together that he sort of expanded,” said Gorey.⁷⁷

Ted may be referring to O’Hara’s forays into artistic territory outside the sharply defined borders of their shared style; beyond Firbank and Compton-Burnett into Beckett, Camus, and, soon enough, in New York, de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Alice Neel. But Gorey’s reference to O’Hara having “expanded” may have had a hidden meaning. According to Gooch, “O’Hara began to flirt during the spring term with some of the homosexual implications of the high style he had so cleverly absorbed” from Gorey.⁷⁸

He’d started fooling around with various gentlemen in Eliot House. “There was some carrying on towards the end” of their two years as roommates, Gorey recalled. “He would occasionally come back bombed out of his wits.”⁷⁹ It’s ironic that Gorey’s Anglophilic, inescapably gay “high style” beckoned O’Hara out of the closet, since Ted himself was securely closeted at Harvard, his outrageousness notwithstanding. Nonetheless, Gooch suggests, he was instrumental in O’Hara’s acceptance of his homosexuality. “He had friends in the Music Department who actually accused me of having corrupted Frank,” Gorey said, “like in some turn-of-the-century novel.”⁸⁰

Many of O’Hara’s Harvard conquests were men who thought of themselves as straight despite their willingness to bat for the other team in a pinch. In yet another irony, Gorey himself was involved, at that very moment, in a relationship with just such a man: Tony Smith.

The word relationship, in this case, means “all-consuming crush.” Just how far things went we don’t know, though Larry Osgood doubts the relationship got physical for the simple reason that Ted, he firmly believes, “did not then and never had a sex life.”⁸¹ That said, it’s clear from a letter Gorey wrote to Connie Joerns that he made a clean breast of his feelings to Smith and that while Smith’s response wasn’t what Ted had hoped, the two did have an emotionally charged friendship, fraught with the soap-opera drama that would characterize all Ted’s crushes to come. By the fall of ’49, Smith had moved into F-13, leaving O-22 to Fondren and O’Hara, which suggests he was close to Gorey—either that or unusually accommodating to Fondren. (What F-13’s third inhabitant, the apparently unflappable Vito Sinisi, made of this round of musical chairs is anyone’s guess.)

“This was typical of Ted’s crushes and attachments,” says Osgood, who recalls Smith as “Ted’s very straight roommate who never went out drinking or mixed at all with the gay group”—which included Osgood, his Eliot House roommate Lyon Phelps, O’Hara, Fondren, Freddy English, George Montgomery, and, less frequently, Gorey—who met for beers two or three times a week at Cronin’s, a saloon whose ten-cent Ballantine on tap and close proximity to the Yard made it an ideal watering hole.⁸² Smith was “perhaps a little boring,” in Osgood’s judgment.⁸³ Nonetheless, Ted fell for him. “I had the impression then, as now, that Ted was in love with him—unrequitedly,” says Osgood. “The rest of us respected and sympathized with Ted’s frustration, although I think we never discussed it within his hearing and found the object of his affections a little odd.”

Gorey’s feelings for Smith blossomed in the fall of ’48. By that December, however, the bloom was off the rose. In a long confessional letter to Connie Joerns written during Christmas break, he bemoans the dire state of his love life. Tony is in Fall River, he confides, and their relationship, such as it is, alternates between “utterly cloying and grim and addled”⁸⁴ but is never less than “peculiar,” even at the best of times.⁸⁵ Tony, it seems, is the manly, closemouthed type, hopeless at self-analysis and all thumbs when it comes to teasing out the knots in romantic entanglements, whereas Ted tends toward the “hysterical,” which makes for soap-operatic scenes, he tells Joerns.⁸⁶

Gorey being Gorey, he manages to see the existential punch line in his predicament. It’s ironic, he tells Joerns, that he, whose heart’s delight is getting involved with someone, then spending “all my free time in mutual analysis of the situation,” should end up with a lover who blanches in terror at the thought of baring his soul.⁸⁷ But this is playacting. Two sentences later, the wry, self-mocking detachment gives way to anguish: he just might lose his mind, he says, if this “subterranean torture” goes on much longer.

Ted’s claim that he was teetering on the brink of a nervous collapse wasn’t just the usual fainting-couch histrionics. Shortly after he returned to Harvard for the spring term of his junior year, in ’49, he was interviewed by assistant dean Norman Harrower Jr., presumably about his grades, which were slipping. “Says he has been having personal troubles all fall,” Harrower writes in a January 29 note scribbled on Gorey’s grade card. “Seemed extremely nervous and jittery. Smoked a cig. In short nervous puffs. His eyelids fluttered and he was very jumpy. Tried to get him to psych. But he feels that this is something that he ought to be able to force himself to control. He seemed to consider the possibility of a psych. and it may work. Queer looking egg.”⁸⁸

Whether Gorey saw a psychologist we don’t know. But there’s grist for the Freudian mill in the poems and stories he wrote in the spring and fall of ’49, some of which can be read as oblique allusions to his “personal troubles” with Smith or as veiled references to his feelings about his sexuality. In one poem, a lighthearted apologia for asexuality, he eschews the emotional (and literal) messiness of romantic entanglements and sexual passion for the solitary pleasures of Just Saying No:

I’ve never been one for a messy clinch a thigh to pinch let’s keep calm.⁸⁹

By the end of January in ’51, seven months after he graduated, Gorey was over his infatuation with Tony Smith, judging by his comments in a letter to Bill Brandt. His love life, fortunately, was “being nil,” he wrote, now that the “little tin god” he’d worshipped for two years was more or less history, barring the occasional visit to spend the night.⁹⁰

Being nil, Gorey decided, was the safest policy. “I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something,” he said twenty-nine years later when asked about his sexuality. “I’ve never said that I was gay and I’ve never said that I wasn’t. A lot of people would say that I wasn’t because I never do anything about it.”⁹¹ Would they? Is having desires yet not acting on them really the same as not having any desires to act on?

Gorey, ever paradoxical, is saying two contradictory things simultaneously: that he’s asexual (“undersexed”) and that he might be gay but since he never does anything about it, he’s as good as “neutral,” as Compton-Burnett would say.* He’s “fortunate” to be “undersexed,” he says, implying that Fate decreed it. But doesn’t his admission “I am probably terribly repressed” direct our attention to what, exactly, he’s repressing?⁹² “Every now and then someone will say my books are seething with repressed sexuality,” he conceded.⁹³

In later life, when Gorey talked about sex, it was either with Swiftian disdain for its panting, grunting preposterousness—“No one takes pornography seriously,” he scoffed—or with Victorian mortification at the very mention of the unmentionable.⁹⁴ When he talked about love, it was always in the past tense, as a farcical calamity that had befallen him, the sort of thing insurance claims adjusters file under Acts of God, like the flattening of the picnickers by the Wobbling Rock in The Willowdale Handcar. “You don’t choose the people you fall in love with,” he told an interviewer in 1980.⁹⁵

In any event, his romantic imbroglios weren’t true love, he implied, but mere “infatuations.” Infatuations are a distinguishing characteristic of sexual immaturity—the stuff of adolescent crushes and teen-idol worship. Narcissistic at heart, they offer romance without the grunt work of relationship building, love without the hairy horrors of sex. “When I look back on my furious, ill-considered infatuations for people,” said Gorey, “they were really all the same person.”⁹⁶ Of course they were: the objects of our obsessions are ideal types, spun from fantasy. “I thought I was in love a couple of times, but I rather think it was only infatuation,” said Gorey in 1992. “It bothered me briefly, but I always got over it. I mean, for a while I’d think, after some perfectly pointless involvement that was far more trouble than it was worth—I’d think, ‘Oh God, I hope I don’t get infatuated with anybody ever again.’ … I realized I was accident-prone in that direction anyway, so the hell with it.”⁹⁷

Was it his traumatic two years of worshipping Tony Smith that made Ted say to hell with love, and even sex, forever? Larry Osgood thinks Gorey swore off sex long before he got to Harvard. “He did tell me—because we were close friends, and we would talk about these things—that he once had a sexual experience in his late teens, I think. And he hadn’t liked it. And that was that. He wasn’t going to do that again.” Gorey didn’t offer any details about the incident, but Osgood is convinced, from his intimate knowledge of Ted’s emotional life, that it must have been a same-sex experience.

But whether it was a traumatic sexual encounter in his teens or his tempestuous affair with Tony Smith at Harvard that put Ted off sex, Osgood is convinced “there was more choice in his abstinence than biology.” Gorey “didn’t want the distractions of emotional engagements,” he says, “which would be messy, and he might get hurt, and in fact he had been hurt.” John Ashbery said something strikingly similar when I asked him for his recollections of Gorey at Harvard. “There was something very endearing about him, almost childlike,” Ashbery recalled. “At the same time, I feel that he was somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, fun-loving level…. I had the impression that he had constructed defenses against real intimacy, maybe as a result of early disappointments in friendship/affection.”⁹⁸

At the same time, Osgood thinks Gorey was being honest when he said that relationships are a distraction from the writing desk and the drawing board. An aesthete to the end, Gorey lived for Art, in the opinion of the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff, who described him as someone who “cultivated the life of a vestal, the anchoritic handmaiden of his art.”⁹⁹ “It’s hard enough to sit down to work every day, God knows, even if you are not emotionally involved,” Gorey told an interviewer. “Whole stretches of your life go kerplunk when that happens.”¹⁰⁰

Unsurprisingly, Gorey’s grades had gone kerplunk during his “furious, ill-considered infatuation” with Tony Smith. Assistant dean Harrower notified him, on March 4 of ’49, that he was on academic probation. As always, he managed to pull himself out of his death spiral: by July, he’d been relieved from warning, as the official notification put it.

He rallied his creative energies, too. Sometime between 1948 and ’50, he created three little gems of commercial illustration, flawlessly executed cover designs for Lilliput, a British men’s monthly that offered a pre-Playboy potpourri of humor, short stories, arts coverage, cartoons, and, daringly, soft-core “art nudes” depicting female models cavorting— aesthetically, mind you—on beaches or in bohemian artists’ studios. Whether his covers ever appeared in print or were just fodder for his commercial-illustration portfolio isn’t known. The looming threat of graduation had concentrated his mind on the necessity of making a living, someday soon.

Gorey did submit his work to at least one publication outside Harvard. A rejection letter from the New Yorker, dated May 8, 1950, and signed “Franklyn B. Modell,” thanks him, in the usual perfunctory way, for letting the magazine see his drawings. Pleasantries out of the way, Mr. Modell gets down to business: “While I readily recognize their merit, I’m afraid they are not suitable for The New Yorker. The people in your pictures are too strange and the ideas, we think, are not funny…. By way of suggestion may I say that drawings of a less eccentric nature might find a more enthusiastic audience here.”¹⁰¹

This was the New Yorker of Harold Ross, the founding editor, who scolded E. B. White about his use of the unthinkably vulgar phrase “toilet paper,” so “sickening” it “might easily cause vomiting”; home to cartoonists such as Peter Arno, an upper-crust East Coaster whose covers and single-panel gags took little notice of the Depression, the war, or other unpleasantries, except as punch lines.¹⁰² Arno went down well with a dry martini at the Stork Club; Gorey’s camp-gothic eccentricities, not so much.

(Happily, Gorey followed his instincts and had the satisfaction, forty-three years later, of seeing his work appear in the pages, and ultimately on the cover, of a New Yorker that was ready, at last, for the amusingly unfunny. Shortly after his death, the magazine dedicated its end page, by way of an elegy, to a Gorey illustration.)

Gorey graduated from Harvard on June 22, 1950, with an AB in Romance languages and literatures. His final report card records an A in English, a C in French, and a B in history, an appropriately erratic ending to an academic career that had zigzagged all over the place.

Outside the classroom, however, he floored the accelerator. Harvard is where Gorey perfected his image, stylizing his zany fashion sense and theatrical mannerisms into the persona that, with a few last tweaks (pierced ears, copious necklaces, sidewalk-sweeping fur coats dyed heart-attack green or yellow), would turn heads in Manhattan. More important, Harvard is where he sketched in the intellectual substance of his eccentric persona, drawing inspiration from writers like Firbank and Compton-Burnett. From Lear, he took the limerick form. Encouraged by Ciardi, he put to drily amusing use a mock-moralistic tone that parodied Victorian writing for children. Even the melancholy epitaphs at Mount Auburn Cemetery, mementos of the Victorian cult of mourning, and the Puritan reproaches to mortal vanity in the Old Burying Ground near Harvard Square had something to teach him: their lugubrious cadences and morbid sentiments, so melodramatic they verge on black comedy, echo in Gorey’s verse.

He learned as much from his antipathies as he did from his sympathies: in several interviews, he returned to a subject dear to his heart, his adamantine hatred of Henry James, whose tendency to explain things to death he found wearisome, whose labyrinthine sentences maddened him, and whose characters he found morally repugnant, motivated by “utterly unpleasant arid curiosity.”¹⁰³ In an essay for a comp lit class, he wrote, “James’s favoured method of unfolding an action is to have it revealed, slowly, bit by bit, through inexhaustible questionings, probings, pryings, comparings on the part of onlookers of the main action…. If anyone ever literally died of curiosity I am certain it must have been a Jamesian character.”

Crucially, he discovered that he wasn’t a novelist but that he might, by combining his gifts for narrative compression and epigrammatic wit with his meticulous, hand-drawn engravings, produce masterpieces of miniaturism that defy categorization. All the while, he was evolving as an artist, polishing his draftsmanship and, through his exploration of watercolor, developing a taste for subtle color harmonies and deliciously queasy hues.

But when it came to Gorey’s maturation as an artist and a thinker, nothing in his four years at Harvard affected him more profoundly than his relationship with Frank O’Hara. Their friendship introduced both men to new interests and influences; each sharpened his ideas about art, literature, music, film, theater, and ballet on the whetstone of the other’s equally nimble, wide-ranging mind. Postmodernists avant la lettre, they embraced lowbrow, highbrow, and middlebrow tastes with gusto and without apology.

As important, each was present at the birth of the other’s self-creation and, consciously or not, lent a hand. “All of us were obsessed,” Gorey later recalled, characterizing the mood of their Harvard years. “Obsessed by what? Ourselves, I expect.”¹⁰⁴ The bearded dandy nerd in Keds and fur coat, fingers dripping rings, was “a kind of this-is-me-but-it’s-not-me thing,” Gorey later confided.¹⁰⁵ Meaning: “Part of me is genuinely eccentric, part of me is a bit of a put-on.”¹⁰⁶ He added, slyly, “But I know what I’m doing.” (Another time, he struck a more poignant note, seeming almost trapped by his eccentric image: “I look like a real person, but underneath I am not real at all. It’s just a fake persona.”)¹⁰⁷

Though Gorey and O’Hara crossed paths briefly after graduation through their involvement with the Poets’ Theatre, in Cambridge, their friendship wouldn’t survive long. After both men moved to Manhattan—O’Hara in ’51, Gorey in ’53—their lives intersected only occasionally, though they frequented the New York City Ballet, had friends in common, and lived just a subway stop apart.

Their diverging trajectories had something to do with it. In New York, O’Hara’s engagement with contemporary art would draw him into the orbit of the abstract expressionists, whose frenetic socializing and improvisatory aesthetic would show him the way out of naturalism’s imitation of life and into a poetry collaged out of scraps of life itself—snatches of conversation, things seen and freeze-framed by his camera eye, quotations from his encyclopedic reading and movie watching and gallery going. O’Hara was addicted to the Now—to art forms such as action painting, which captured “the present rather than the past, the present in all its chaotic splendor,” writes Marjorie Perloff in Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters.¹⁰⁸

Gorey, by contrast, immersed himself ever deeper in things past—silent movies, Victorian novels, Edward Lear, the Ballets Russes. Pursuing his solitary obsessions, he chased a vision all his own, wholly new yet sepia-tinted with a sense of lost time.* O’Hara was avant-garde; Gorey was avant-retro. At Harvard, Gorey distilled his influences into a concentrated essence that would nourish his art for the rest of his life. O’Hara, by the summer of ’49, was shaking off his Firbankian affectations. Critiquing a friend’s poem, he wrote, with mock condescension, “I can see certain tendencies in you which we all have to get rid of. With me it was Ronald Firbank, with you it looks a bit like the divine Oscar …”¹⁰⁹

Their friendship came to grief over one of O’Hara’s pointed wisecracks. Maybe there had always been a little rivalry beneath their sharp-witted jousting—who knows? But O’Hara’s hipster derision at Gorey’s Firbankian sensibility—so arch, so preciously aesthetic, so aloof from the cultural ferment of the moment—emerged undisguised in a jab that cut too close to the bone. “Ted told me that he’d seen Frank at some point shortly after he’d moved to New York,” Larry Osgood remembers, “and Frank’s opening remark, practically, was, ‘So, are you still drawing those funny little men?’ And Ted took great offense at that, and that was that for that relationship.”

Years later, Gorey settled the score. Rolling his eyes at the idea that his former roommate, who banged out his poems on the fly, was some kind of genius, he told an interviewer, “I was astonished after his death, and even before, when he became a kind of icon for a whole generation. If you know somebody really well, you can never really believe how talented they are. I know how he wrote some of those poems, so I can’t take them all that seriously.”¹¹⁰

O’Hara died in 1966, at the age of forty, killed by a teenager joyriding at night in a Jeep on the beach at Fire Island. At Harvard, in the first flush of their friendship, he’d written a poem for Ted that was later included in his posthumous collection, Early Writing. Titled, simply, “For Edward Gorey,” it evokes not only the Victorian-Edwardian setting of Gorey’s work and its insular, dollhouse psychology but also the sense of the Freudian repressed that haunts it. Referring to the “anger” underlying Gorey’s “fight for order,” he notes, “you people this heatless square / with your elegant indifferent / and your busy leisured / characters who yet refuse despite surrounding flames / to be demons.”¹¹¹ He evokes the taxidermy stillness of Gorey’s vitrine worlds (“You arrange on paper life stiller than / oiled fruits or wired twigs”) and the obsessive cross-hatching that is a Gorey signature (“See how upon the virgin grain / a crosshatch claws a patch / of black blood …”).

Strangely, in O’Hara’s spyhole view of Ted’s world, Gorey’s funny little men are female: “You transfigure hens, your men cluck tremulous, detached …” Is this a coded reference to their gay circle at a time when it was common for gay men, among themselves, to jokingly adopt women’s names? The poem ends on a moody, crepuscular note, wonderfully evocative of the perpetual twilight in which Gorey’s stories always seem to take place: “And when the sun goes down,” O’Hara writes, the hen-men’s “eyes glow gas jets / and the gramophone supplies them, / resting, soft-tuned squawks.”

Looking back in 1989, Gorey took stock of his time at Harvard and his friendship with O’Hara. “We were giddy and aimless and wanting to have a good time and to be artists,” he said. “We were just terribly intellectual and avant-garde and all that jazz.”¹¹²

* Rhymes with glower.

* In a 1968 letter to his friend and children’s book collaborator Peter Neumeyer, Gorey, having just seen Dietrich at a matinee, describes her as not so much “fantastically well-preserved, but like a younger, not so well-preserved second-rate version of the genre she herself created. Heaven knows she went through innumerable versions of herself, all equally artificial, but one was always aware of the person behind them, but that is scarcely in evidence at all now … ” That said, her shtick is ageless, he concedes, admitting that a decade earlier he would have “swooned away with rapture.” See Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 126.

* It came and went, apparently: a photo of him in New York in the early ’50s shows him beardless. In 1953 it comes to stay and soon attains an imposing Old Testament glory. “We heard through some family … that he has grown a beard,” his father wrote a friend that year. “I wonder what he’s trying to look like—a cross between Sir Thomas Beecham, Lennie Hayton, and Boris Karloff ?” See Edward Leo Gorey’s letter to Merrill Moore, April 24, 1953, Merrill Moore Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

* Compton-Burnett lived for many years with Margaret Jourdain, a noted writer on interior decor and furniture, in what the Victorians would have called a Boston marriage—two women living together in a mutually supportive, though not necessarily romantic, arrangement. Whether their relationship was sapphic or merely sororal isn’t known; Compton-Burnett referred to herself and Margaret as “neutrals.”

* In that respect, he had much in common with the artist Joseph Cornell. Like Gorey, Cornell was a species of one whose work is essentially uncategorizable. Also like Gorey, he was deeply indebted to surrealism. He worked on a dollhouse scale (another Gorey parallel), fastidiously arranging found objects and images in wooden boxes. Masterpieces of lyrical nostalgia and surrealist free association, his works are collaged from vintage photos, old toys, antique scientific illustrations, rusty scissors and skeleton keys, and other Goreyesque oddments.

Cornell was likewise a fervent worshipper at the temple of Balanchine. Surely he and Gorey passed each other in the lobby of the New York State Theater, at Lincoln Center, during intermission. Yet there’s no evidence they ever met, and neither, to the best of my knowledge, ever mentioned the other.

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