Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  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

  a Rhymes with glower.

  b 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.

  c 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.

  d 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.”

  e 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.

  Chapter 4

  Sacred Monsters

  Cambridge, 1950–53

  Edward Gorey, poster for “An Entertainment Somewhat in the Victorian Manner” by the Poets’ Theatre. (Larry Osgood, private collection)

  THE WAY GOREY TOLD IT, he kicked around Boston two and a half years after Harvard, drifting and dithering in the usual fashion. He was twenty-five and not exactly taking the world by storm.

  “I worked for a man who imported British books,” he recalled, “and I worked in various bookstores and starved, more or less, though my family was helping to support me.”1 He entertained vague ideas about pursuing a career in publishing. Or maybe he’d open a bookshop. His pipe dreams vaporized on contact with the unglamorous reality of bookselling. “I wanted to have my own bookstore until I worked in one,” he reflected in 1998. “Then I thought I’d be a librarian until I met some crazy ones.”2 In later, more successful days, he liked to say he was “starving to death” in his Cambridge years, although given his penchant for Dickensian melodrama, who knows if things were quite that dire?3 “I never had to live on peanut butter and bananas, but close,” he claimed in 1978.4

  Shortly before graduating, he mentioned, over dinner at the Ciardis’, that he planned to stay in Boston but hadn’t yet found a place. On the spot, John and Judy offered him a room, rent free, in the house they shared with John’s mother in the Boston suburb of Medford. All he had to do in return was feed their cat, Octavius, when they were away that summer.

  Installed at the Ciardis’, Gorey pounded the pavement hunting for jobs in publishing, then in advertising, but couldn’t find a berth in either field, he told Bill Brandt in a letter.5 He was writing, desultorily, mostly limericks in his penny-dreadful style. Four years later, he’d collect the best of them in The Listing Attic. According to Alexander Theroux, he “started ‘an endless number of novels,’ now, alas, all jettisoned.”6 “Having nothing to do,” he wrote Brandt, “is the most demoralizing thing known to man.”7 Still, there were always scads of movies he was eager to see and a book, if not “several hundred,” he couldn’t wait to devour.

  Jobless and footloose, Gorey started visiting his uncle Ben and aunt Betty Garvey and their daughters, Skee and Eleanor, at their summer house in Barnstable, on the Cape. The Garveys lived in suburban Philadelphia, but Betty, née Elizabeth Hinckley, came from old Cape stock. “Hinckleys have been on the Cape, in one way or another, from the Mayflower,” notes Ken Morton, Skee’s son. The Garveys’ first summer house, near the water on Freezer Road, was the standard beach cottage—“very tiny,” with “ratty cottage furniture,” in Skee’s recollection. It was so overstuffed with Garveys that Ted had to sleep on the porch, which didn’t seem to bother him in the least.

  The cramped confines were a goad to get up and go. Gorey and the gang were keen yard-salers and moviegoers and beachcombers and picnickers. “We drove all over the Cape, and you could swim at any beach you happened to arrive at,” Skee remembers. Sometimes they’d take their little motorboat, or a sailboat borrowed from relatives, out to Sandy Neck, an arm of barrier beach embracing Barnstable Harbor. It’s a place of desolate beauty. The shoreline is littered with pebbles, spent ammo in the ocean’s ceaseless bombardment of the land. The dunes are carpeted with bayberry, beach plum, sandwort, and spurge. Some are “walking” dunes, their wind-whipped sands slowly but inexorably engulfing stands of pitch pine and scrub oak. With their clawing branches and bony boughs, these skeletal forests look as if Gorey drew them. Little wonder, then, that he was drawn to them, and kept an eye peeled for fallen limbs beaten by the weather into suggestive shapes—driftwood that “never actually drifted,” Ken calls it.

  Shedding his Firbankian persona, Gorey slipped effortlessly into the new role of Cousin Ted, happy to be swept along in the currents of his relatives’ daily routines and social rituals. He was spending his summer days on the Cape “being unlike my usual exotic self,” he told Brandt, “messing about in boats (vide The Wind in the Willows) and having great fun observing Old New England in the person of my aunt’s fantastically typical relatives.”8

  The Cape, in the late ’40s and early ’50s, was a world away from Ted’s urbane, killingly witty Harvard clique. Often the Garveys would drop in on Betty’s aunt and uncle, who also spent their summers on the Cape. “They had an open house almost every evening,” says Skee, “with friends and relatives sitting around the living room, talking. It was a lot of gossip and a lot of family stories and he seemed to really enjoy that a lot.” The Garveys and their “fantastically typical relatives” were only the first of a number of loose-knit groups that offered Ted a sense of belonging without the demands—or risks—of emotional intimacy. In years to come, the Balanchinians who orbited around the New York City Ballet, especially Mel and Alex Schierman; C
ape Codders such as Rick Jones, Jack Braginton-Smith, Helen Pond, and Herbert Senn; and the actors in his nonsense plays and puppet shows would play that role in Gorey’s life, blurring the line between social circle and surrogate family.

  * * *

  “I have almost no friends, but the few I do I like very much,” Gorey confided in a January 1951 letter to Brandt.9 Chief among them was Alison Lurie. In later days, she would earn a reputation (and a Pulitzer) as a writer of social satires—sharply observed, subtly feminist comedies of manners, most of them drily amusing in the English way. Barbara Epstein, her Radcliffe schoolmate (and, later, editor of her essays for the New York Review of Books), thought she was “witty, skeptical and articulate” and, even as an undergraduate, a supremely gifted writer.10

  But when Lurie met Gorey, she was Alison Bishop, recent Radcliffe grad and newlywed. “After Ted finished Harvard he got a job working for a book publisher in Boston, in Copley Square,” she recalled in 2008. “I was working there, too, at the Boston Public Library, and we used to have lunch together in a cheap cafeteria on Marlborough Street. Neither of us liked our jobs very much, but they had compensations—we got first look at a lot of books, and we could meet regularly.”11 Until Gorey moved to New York, in ’53, she remembered, “we saw more of each other than of anyone else—we were best friends.”

  They’d met in ’49, at the Mandrake, she thinks. They clicked instantly, bonding over their shared tastes in literature—“mostly literary classics and the poetry that people were beginning to read then.”12 Naturally, Gorey pressed Firbank and Compton-Burnett on Lurie, who liked Compton-Burnett but “couldn’t stand Firbank; it didn’t seem like literature, it was just posing. [Ted] liked the artificiality, the idea of an imagined world with artificial rules and a kind of old-fashioned overtone.” They went to the ballet and museums and the movies, taking in foreign films and the old movies Gorey was especially fond of. The Gorey Lurie knew was, in all the essentials, the Gorey we know. “Ted then was much like he was always—immensely intelligent, perceptive, amusing, inventive, and skeptical, though he was completely unknown,” she recalled.13 “He saw through anyone who was phony, or pretentious, or out for personal gain, very fast. As he said very early in our friendship,…‘I pity any opportunist who thinks I’m an opportunity.’”

  She and Gorey were a matched pair. “We gossiped, we talked about books and movies, I saw his drawings, he looked at what I was writing,” she says.14 “We were both Anglophiles, definitely. [We shared] a love of British literature and poetry and films and all that. We’d both been brought up on British children’s books, so this was a world that was romantic and interesting to us.…Back then, when neither of us had been abroad, it was a kind of fantasy world.”

  The Gorey Lurie knew in Cambridge was “strikingly tall and strikingly thin,” a head-turning apparition in his unvarying costume of black turtleneck sweater, chinos, and white sneakers—the standard-issue uniform of that late-’40s hipster, the literary bohemian.15 (By then, he’d shed the long canvas coats with sheepskin collars that he sported at Harvard but hadn’t yet replaced them with the floor-sweeping fur coats of his Victorian beatnik phase. They’d come later, when he moved to Manhattan.)

  Gorey “was already eccentric and individual when I first knew him,” said Lurie in 2008.16 One of his distinguishing quirks, she remembers, was that enigmatic combination of sociability and reserve John Ashbery had in mind when he described Gorey as “somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, fun-loving level.” “He had a lot of friends,” she notes, and could be gregarious in the right setting—she recalls him chatting with “a lot of people” who came into the Mandrake—but “was solitary in the sense that he didn’t form a partnership with anybody.”17

  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, she says. “Not everybody wants to wake up in the morning and there’s somebody in bed with them, you know? Some people value their solitude, and I think Ted was like that. He wanted to live alone; he wasn’t looking for somebody to be with for the rest of his life. He would have romantic feelings about people, but he wouldn’t really have wanted it to turn into a full-blown relationship, and that’s why it never did.”18 He wasn’t a recluse, she emphasizes, just solitary by nature. “It was important to him to have a place where he could do, and be, by himself.”

  Some of Lurie’s most sharply etched memories of Ted are recollections of their rambles in cemeteries, fittingly. In the Old Burying Ground, near Harvard Square, they made rubbings of the “really strange and wonderful” headstones—impressions created by taping a sheet of paper onto a stone, then rubbing it with a crayon.19 Visual echoes of the images they collected—urns and weeping willows from the nineteenth-century tombstones, grinning death’s heads and skull-and-crossbones motifs and “circular patterns that looked like Celtic crosses or magical symbols” from the colonial grave markers—reverberate in Gorey’s books and in the animated title sequence he created for the Masterpiece Theatre spin-off series Mystery! Unsurprisingly, Ted was much taken with “the older tombstones with strange inscriptions and scary verses,” says Lurie. A particular favorite read:

  Behold and think as you pass by,

  As you are now, so once was I.

  As I am now, so you will be.

  Prepare to die and follow me.

  “It was on one of these trips that I realized for the first time that I was not going to live forever,” Lurie recalled. “Of course I knew this theoretically, but I hadn’t taken it personally. We were in a beautiful graveyard in Concord”—Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, most likely, where Hawthorne, Thoreau, and all the Alcotts sleep on Authors Ridge—“and I said to Ted, ‘If I die, I want to be buried somewhere like this.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean, if you die?’…He was more aware of mortality than I was,” she reflects. “He’d been in the army, and even though he hadn’t been overseas, he’d seen people come back from overseas. Or not come back.”

  At the same time, Gorey’s susceptibility to the morose charms of Puritan memento mori had as much to do with his desire to escape the stultifying ’50s, Lurie suggests, as it did any sense that we’ll all end up moldering in the ground. “One of the things you want to remember is what the 1950s were like,” she says. “All of a sudden everybody was sort of square and serious, and the whole idea was that America was this wonderful country and everybody was smiling and eating cornflakes and playing with puppies.” Gorey’s ironic appropriation, in his art, of Puritan gloom and the Victorian cult of death and mourning “was sort of in reaction to this 1950s mystique…that everything was just wonderful and we lived forever and the sun was shining,” she believes.

  * * *

  That fall, the Ciardis set off for a year in Europe on John’s sabbatical, leaving their “quite huge” apartment to Gorey “for a ridiculously low rental,” he recalled.20 In letters, he played the role he’d perfected by then, equal parts world-weary idler and hopeless flibbertigibbet, buffeted by life’s squalls one minute, becalmed in the doldrums the next. “My life,” he lamented in a letter to Brandt, “is as near not being one as is possible I think. However.”21 There’s a world of meaning in that “however.” It’s the written equivalent of one of Gorey’s melodramatic sighs, signifying something between ennui, weltschmerz, and the shrugging resignation summed up in the Yiddish utterance meh.

  Of course, this business about his nearly nonexistent existence was mostly posing. Gorey wasn’t half as indolent as his letters suggested. For example, he illustrated two covers for the Harvard Advocate, the 1950 commencement issue and that fall’s registration issue.22 Credited to “Edward St. J. Gorey,” Ted’s black-and-white cover for the commencement issue depicts two identical little men standing, in balletic attitudes, on a bleak beach—or is it an ice floe? “L’adieu,” says the caption. His deft use of highly stylized blocks of black against a white background recalls Beardsley’s tour-de-force use of a monochromatic palette as well as the Ja
panese wood-block prints Gorey loved.

  The registration issue made an indelible impression on John Updike, whose Twelve Terrors of Christmas Gorey would one day illustrate. “Gorey came to my attention when I entered Harvard in the fall of 1950,” he remembered in 2003. “The Registration issue of The Harvard Advocate, the college literary magazine, sported a cover drawn by ‘Edward St. J. Gorey’ that showed, startlingly, two browless, mustachioed, high-collared, seemingly Edwardian gentlemen tossing sticks at two smiling though disembodied jesters’ heads. The style was eccentric but consummately mature; it hardly changed during the next fifty years…”23

  Shortly before the Ciardis left for Europe, Dr. Merrill Moore dropped by to confer with John about his forthcoming book of poems. Ciardi moonlighted as editor of the Twayne Library of Modern Poetry, which was slated to bring out Moore’s Illegitimate Sonnets. Moore was a psychiatrist—shrink to the Hollywood director Joshua Logan, the poet Robert Lowell, and about “half of Beacon Hill,” Gorey cracked—and, incongruously, a prolific writer of sonnets.24 During his visit, he happened to see some drawings Ted had given the Ciardis and “was much taken with them,” Gorey told Brandt, “and the upshot, and very frazzling to my already tattered nerves, was that ever since I have been doing drawings for him of an indescribable nature (I do not mean obscene—he has even suggested some semi-o ones, but my Victorian soul shrieked ‘Never!’) at $10 per.”