Читать книгу Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey - Mark Dery, Mark Dery - Страница 9

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. Both parents were of Irish descent, though the Garveys—moneyed, Republican, Episcopalian—were the lace-curtain variety, several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder from the working-class, Democrat, devoutly Catholic Goreys. (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 straitjacket 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 Skeea) 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 childbirth; 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. He’s 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, offset 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 Brownwood, 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 Lakeview.

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: Sinjun 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.b

* * *

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.

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

b 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.