Читать книгу Born to Be Posthumous - Mark Dery - Страница 10

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.