Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Gorey’s six cartoons for the endpapers of Illegitimate Sonnets mark his first appearance, in the fall of 1950, in a commercially published book. Meticulously rendered in the style of his most polished work, they depict Gorey’s signature little men acting out single-panel gags that riff on the notion of a sonnet-writing shrink. In “Dr. Merrill Moore Psychoanalyzes the Sonnet,” for example, we see the neurotic Sonnet—personified as one of Gorey’s Earbrass types—on the Freudian couch, free-associating a vision of himself huddled in a bell jar, about to be liberated by a hand brandishing a hammer.

  All Gorey had to say about his professional debut as a book illustrator was, “The drawings are neither bad nor excellent, but the reproduction makes them look as if I’d done them with a hang nail on pitted granite.”25 Illegitimate Sonnets marked the beginning of a fruitful, if frazzling, relationship that would see Gorey providing endpaper cartoons for the third printing of Clinical Sonnets (which rolled off the presses in October of 1950, around the same time Illegitimate Sonnets came out); fifty-one drawings of his little men acting out sonnet-related gags plus the front-cover illustration for Case Record from a Sonnetorium in ’51; and sixty-five illustrations for More Clinical Sonnets in ’53, all of which were published by Twayne.

  There’s an unsettling quality to some of Moore’s verse—a darkness behind the drollery. Take More Clinical Sonnets: most of the book’s entries are sardonic portraits of neurotics and depressives; we can’t shake the nasty suspicion that the objects of Moore’s contempt are his own patients. Cartoonish but bleak, Gorey’s drawings accentuate the underlying creepiness of Moore’s blend of jocularity and cruelty.

  Still, the exposure could only help Gorey’s nascent career. Moore was well connected in the literary world and, over the course of their four-book collaboration, a tireless drummer for their cause. He even recruited Ed Gorey to target Chicago media. Gorey senior obliged, playing up the hometown-boy-makes-good angle with his PR connections; soon enough, the chitchat columns in Chicago papers started to take notice of Moore’s books—and Ted’s art. By Case Record, he merited a title-page credit: “Cartoons by Edward St. John Gorey.”

  “I’m delighted that all goes so well,” Ciardi, on sabbatical, wrote Moore from Rome. “I’m especially delighted that Gorey is getting this chance to launch himself: I have great faith in the final success of his little men. I think they will have to create and educate an audience for themselves, but I see no reason why they shouldn’t…”26

  Moore was unquestionably an ardent fan, telling Helen Gorey that he considered Ted “a finer illustrator than Tenniel,” possessed of a rare combination of “satire, social reality, and general artistic integrity,” though the shrink in him couldn’t resist adding, “Much of this has been developed at the expense of a balanced personality…”27 He sang Ted’s praises to prospective publishers, most fortuitously Charles “Cap” Pearce of the New York publishing house Duell, Sloan and Pearce, a bit of matchmaking that secured Gorey a meeting with some of the company’s decision makers to discuss the possibility of a book of his own. (That book, when it came to pass, would be the first title published under his own name, The Unstrung Harp.)

  “You were a tremendous success last night,” Moore enthused in a celebratory telegram on December 2, 1951, the day after the meeting.28 “The entire company was captivated by your scrapbook your talents and yourself I am sure something good will come of it Cap Pearce called me this morning to tell me how delighted he was…Good luck you are launched now chum vous sera un succes fou goodbye Arno Cobean and Steig here comes…Gorey.”a

  * * *

  Even as Ted was making his professional debut in Illegitimate Sonnets, he was being drawn into the creative ferment of the Poets’ Theatre.

  In 1950, verse drama was having its moment, and Cambridge was ground zero for American experiments in the form. The trend was fanned by resurgent interest in the verse plays of Stephen Spender, Yeats, Auden, and, most of all, T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s thoughts on the poet as playwright struck a responsive chord in the pre-Beat literary bohemia of early ’50s Cambridge. “Every poet…would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively,” he had said in 1933, during a lecture at Harvard, “and the theatre is the best place in which to do it.”29 Putting theory into practice, he’d tried his hand at verse drama in Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170. It was an unqualified success. In his later years, he’d turned his creative attentions increasingly to the stage, whether in verse plays such as The Cocktail Party, which won the 1950 Tony Award for best play, or in critical essays such as Poetry and Drama, delivered as a lecture at Harvard in November of 1950, just as the Poets’ Theatre was getting under way.

  The Theatre came together one hot June evening in 1950 at the poet Richard Eberhart’s house, near Brattle Street, when, as the group’s prospectus later put it, “several of New England’s outstanding poets joined forces with a group of younger writers in an effort to encourage poetic drama.”30 Lyon Phelps, Gorey’s former housemate at Eliot House and an aspiring poet, floated the idea of a theater devoted to plays by poets. Eberhart and the Dublin-born actress and playwright Mary Manning Howe (Molly to everyone who knew her) were quick to embrace the concept, and others soon rallied to the cause: George Montgomery, in the capacity of photographer and set designer; Lurie, in the role of costumer and makeup artist; Gorey as set designer and graphic artist. A who’s who of prominent poets and playwrights took their seats on the board of directors, among them Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur, Thornton Wilder, William Carlos Williams, and Ciardi.

  The fledgling group took its first bow on February 26, 1951, when it performed an evening of one-act plays—Everyman by John Ashbery, The Apparition by Eberhart, Three Words in No Time by Phelps, and Try! Try! by Frank O’Hara—in the basement auditorium of the Christ Church parish house, on Garden Street. In its early days, the company had no permanent home and performed wherever it could. In 1954, it took up residence at 24 Palmer Street, an alley behind the Harvard student co-op, or Coop, as it’s known. Up a ramshackle flight of stairs, the performance space was a cramped loft behind an art gallery, accommodating seating for forty-nine, give or take a folding chair. The stage lights were jury-rigged from pineapple-juice cans. At sold-out shows, late arrivals perched on the perpetually drippy sink at the back of the room; their soggy backsides proclaimed their devotion to Art.

  On Try! Try!’s opening night, the standing-room-only crowd of more than two hundred was packed four deep at the back of the room. Thornton Wilder was there. So were Archibald MacLeish and Richard Wilbur as well as up-and-coming young poets such as Robert Bly. Gusts of applausive laughter punctuated O’Hara’s witty dialogue, volleyed between Violet, the disconsolate wife of a GI away at war (played by O’Hara’s bohemian-debutante friend Violet Lang), and John, with whom she’s having an affair (played by John Ashbery). Satirizing postwar melodramas like The Best Years of Our Lives, O’Hara waggishly transposed the clichés of Hollywood tearjerkers about traumatized vets into the idiom of the Noh play, an ancient Japanese form then popular among the literary vanguard, who’d discovered it through Ezra Pound’s anthology Certain Noble Plays of Japan. The set, by Gorey, was austere: an ironing board in a pool of light, an antique gramophone, and, painted on a pull-down shade, a window with a Goreyesque spider (also painted) dangling from one corner.

  To Nora Sayre, a film critic and essayist, the group gave off the “exciting aura of a counterculture, which was very hard to locate in the Fifties.”31 Dylan Thomas gave his first American reading of Under Milk Wood at the Poets’ Theatre. Their production of All That Fall, by Samuel Beckett, was the first in the States. The Beat poet Gregory Corso hung around, teaching the Harvard-educated poets hustler slang and driving Sayre half mad with his moocher’s come-on: “Can I have the bacon out of your BLT?”32 She remembers the company as “a home for poets and performers when artists
were often classified as freaks, when academia was repressive, when homosexuality was regarded with horrified fascination,” adding that “there were a number of openly gay men in the group, and some of the heterosexuals savored the audacity that mocked the conventional world.”33 Members drew inspiration from surrealism, Jacobean drama, Yeats’s vision of a literary theater, and the lyrical, dreamlike cinema of Jean Cocteau—artistic lodestars that, to varying degrees, would guide Gorey’s verse dramas and puppet shows on the Cape in later life. Sayre recalls him reading the Djuna Barnes novel Nightwood, a radical experiment in modernist prose as well a shockingly early instance of explicitly gay fiction.

  Lurie’s most vivid recollections of the group have less to do with its experiments in poetic drama and more to do with offstage histrionics. “There were secrets, confidences, collaborations, poems, and dramas à clef passed from hand to hand, public quarrels and reconciliations,” she later wrote, “and the best scenes were not always played on stage.”34

  The inner life of the Poets’ Theatre was dominated by Violet Ranney Lang—V. R. Lang in her life as a poet and playwright and Bunny to her friends, of whom Gorey, Lurie, O’Hara, and Larry Osgood were among the closest. Living according to the Wildean principle “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works,” she was one of those people who are never offstage.35 Her poetry showed promise, but her compulsive inability to let the thing be, rewriting her poems until she’d written the life out of them, was fatal. (In some cases, she revised a poem as many as forty times.) As for her acting, the unlikely juxtaposition of what Ashbery called her “mournful clown’s face,” dominated by large, doleful eyes, and her impeccable comic timing made her wonderful to watch onstage, but her range was limited to one role, the role she was born to play: Bunny Lang.36

  Quick-witted and fiercely opinionated, she was charismatic, manipulative, mercurial, and, depending on your perspective, charmingly or exasperatingly eccentric. She had a genius for score settling. When a man named Parker wronged her, she ordered up a thousand stickers whose black lettering announced, against a background pink as boiled ham, “My name is Parker and I am a pig.” She stuck them everywhere the luckless wretch was sure to pass, from his apartment-house door to his subway station to the bathroom in his office building to his favorite bar, leaving the man “in a state of continual nervous rage,” Lurie recalls.37 “Bunny was definitely one of the great sacred monsters,” Gorey agreed.38 Ted and Bunny were “very close,” says Osgood. “Anecdotes about Bunny, they would please Ted enormously, just the strangeness and funniness and mischievousness of them.” She shared his ironic, opera-box view of the human comedy, a gently mocking perspective that recalls the Wilde quotation “To become a spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.”39

  When she died at the age of thirty-two, on July 29, 1956, of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she left behind a slim—some would say slight—body of work, collected in V. R. Lang: Poems & Plays with a Memoir by Alison Lurie. But everyone who knew her agrees that her most memorable creation was her offstage persona. Even her funeral had a theatrical quality to it. Mount Auburn Cemetery, where she was laid to rest on a midsummer afternoon, provided the perfect backdrop for her last bow. With its Greek temples and Egyptian monoliths and “marble Victorian nymphs wiping away marble tears under weeping willows,” it “was like a painting,” Lurie thought, “some crazy half-classical, half-romantic Arcadia.”40

  * * *

  Amid the backstage dramas of the Poets’ Theatre, Gorey was his wittily ironic self, aloof from the emotional maelstrom, although he savored the morsels of gossip he swapped with Lurie and Lang. Lurie thought he was “one of the sanest and calmest people in the whole organization.”41 He was unquestionably one of the most industrious. In his time with the Poets’ Theatre, Gorey designed stage sets for Try! Try! and Three Words in No Time and, as important, a blizzard of posters and handbills, most of them drawn in a loose-lined, quick-sketch style. For Lang’s Fire Exit (Vaudeville for Eurydice) (1952), he dashed off an evocative sketch of a downcast burlesque dancer in fishnet stockings, slumped in a chair. He also designed the group’s logo, a classical Greek poet contemplating an actor’s mask while a cherub drapes him in a toga bearing the group’s name. And he came up with the arresting salmon-and-yellow-striped motif that embellished the theater curtain and the group’s mailings. Even the tickets, with their antique typography (hand-drawn, naturally), were the product of his pen. Sayre recalled, “Gorey’s late Victorian taste dominated the visual aspects of the first productions: he designed most of the sets, and his frowning cherubs and somber fantasies recurred in the Poets’ backdrops and posters.”42 His aesthetic—the Victorian-Edwardian references, the gloomy-cartoony drawings, the hand lettering, the deliciously icky color schemes—defined what we’d now call the group’s visual branding.

  Not satisfied with designing stage sets and turning out a flurry of posters and other promotional materials, Gorey wrote two plays for the group, The Teddy Bear, a Sinister Play (credited, on the program, to a Mr. Egmont Glebe) and Amabel, or The Partition of Poland (attributed to Timothy Carapace). Teddy Bear premiered on February 20, 1952, as part of an evening of entertainments “Somewhat in the Victorian Manner” whose divertissements also included something called “The Children’s Hour” by Molly Howe and Gorey (writing under the name Mr. Edmund Godelpus); “Undine” by Mr. Eldritch Gorm (another Gorey pseudonym); and “The Entertainment,” directed by Mr. Ector Gasmantle (Gorey again, behind an unimprovably Goreyesque nom de plume).

  Sayre remembers Teddy Bear as “the kind of short nonplay that they [the Poets’ Theatre people] esteemed.”43 As she recalls it, “a murderous Teddy bear was attached to a string on which it was slowly pulled offstage while a husband and wife argued with each other. (They didn’t know that the bear was on its way to strangle their baby in the nursery).” In the bickering parents, we hear echoes of Gorey’s childhood. Amabel, which premiered on May 22, 1952, in the Fogg Museum court, was a bit of Firbankian whimsy, buffeted by paroxysms of (tongue-in-cheek) angst. “The world’s a garden full of bears,” Amabel soliloquizes,

  A pool of noisome balderdash,

  A closet choked with rotting trash.

  …A fearful trick, a frightful hoax,

  An endless string of pointless jokes

  —And all on me.

  One day I’ll die.44

  It was “very amusing,” Lurie thought, “very much like the work he became famous for; kind of Victorian, kind of Edwardian. It had the kind of way-out characters and costumes that he had fun creating.”45

  The allure of the Poets’ Theatre, for Gorey, had partly to do with its intellectual effervescence, partly to do with the personalities orbiting around the scene. “It was the most fun I had in the early days because of the variety of people who were involved,” Ted recalled in 1984.46 Theater is social by definition, of course, and he relished the opportunity to escape the isolation of the drawing board for a more collaborative art form and to be part of a collective that also served as a surrogate family of sorts. “It was goofy amateur theater where we all did very arty plays and came up with all sorts of ideas and projects,” he remembered. “‘Ooo, goody,’ we’d say, devising something or other. And then ‘Oh, God, what was that all about?’ as we watched it sink without a trace.”47

  * * *

  Gorey’s artistic activities—his involvement in the Poets’ Theatre and his never-ending labors for Moore, who pelted him with letters suggesting cringeworthy ideas for illustrations such as “The sonnet’s warts are removed by electric needle”—took place against the backdrop of everyday life, which went on in the usual uneventful way, enlivened now and then by minor dramas.48

  In September of ’51 he moved to a basement apartment at 70 Marlborough Street—a brownstone Victorian row house in Boston’s Back Bay, a neighborhood that was an architectural mausoleum of well-preserved Victorians. Given the chance, he’d begun living with cats again. “The cats a
re…dismembering pigeons all over everywhere,” he wrote in a letter to Alison Lurie, “and leaving snacks for later on in the evening lying about.”49 From then on, he’d never be catless.

  That same year, he enlisted as a foot soldier in Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson’s presidential run, mailing campaign literature—an eyebrow-raising spasm of activism in light of Gorey’s later attitude toward politics, which alternated between disdain and apathy. Stevenson’s opponent, the former general and World War II war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, tapped into the commie-hunting mood of Cold War America to hand the witty liberal Democrat a crushing defeat. Deeply dispirited, Gorey washed his hands of politics forever. “I voted one time, for Stevenson in 1952,” was his final word on the subject.50

  Shortly before the election, there was another plot twist in Gorey’s story, this one so farcical it seems like something out of his nonsense plays. On September 20, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune’s Society Notebook column, Edward L. Gorey and Mrs. Helen G. Gorey were remarried in the rectory of Chicago’s venerable Holy Name Cathedral.51

  Was the Goreys’ late-life remarriage a tale of lovers fated to remain together? Or was it an act of Good Samaritanism on Helen’s part? Ed was not in robust good health; his years as a newsman and a flack—decades of late nights, boozing, and smoking—were catching up with him. Did she take him in for old times’ sake, so he wouldn’t die alone?

  During his brief marriage to Corinna Mura, Ed Gorey had worked, from ’39 to ’41, as the director of publicity at the Chicago office of the Illinois State Council of Defense, which organized civil-defense teams—wardens who oversaw air-raid drills, volunteer spotters who scanned the skies for enemy planes. Mura, meanwhile, was bouncing between Chicago and New York, performing on the radio and playing nightclubs. In ’41, Ed moved to Washington, DC, where, still in the employ of the defense council, he served as PR director of an office dedicated to securing armaments contracts and war-industry plants for Illinois. That same year, Mura left for Hollywood, where she signed with RKO. Sometime in the early ’40s, they divorced. Mura’s constant touring and the warring demands of DC and Hollywood must have taken their toll. (Their breakup seems to have been amicable; Ed corresponded with Corinna until his death, and his surviving letters are warmly affectionate.) After the war, Ed returned to Chicago, where by the late ’40s he’d landed a job as public relations director for P. J. “Parky” Cullerton, the powerful, deep-pocketed alderman of the city’s Thirty-Eighth Ward and chairman of the city council’s finance committee.