Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  From ’53 until he left Doubleday, in 1960, he did the cover art on something like fifty books and handled the pasteup, lettering, or design of many others. If Jason Epstein had had his way, “the whole line” would’ve been “Edward Gorey,” says Klemin, but she put her foot down, pointing out that at Vintage and Knopf the “sales department hated their paperbacks because they were all one design.”

  Epstein relented, and Klemin branched out, using illustrators such as Leonard Baskin, Ben Shahn, Robin Jacques, Ivan Chermayeff, and, in his hardscrabble, pre-Pop days, a young Andy Warhol, whom Gorey may have known passingly.17 Even so, Gorey’s work embodied the Anchor aesthetic as far as the Epsteins were concerned, and they continued to cherry-pick titles they wanted him to illustrate, discussing the details with Ted in their apartment after work. “They were beautiful, ravishing,” said Barbara in 1992, talking about Gorey’s cover illustrations. “He worked very slowly, with a tremendous perfectionism, and he would never let a drawing out of his hands if it was less than perfect.”18

  * * *

  Anchor Books, founded in 1953 by twenty-four-year-old Jason Epstein, was in the vanguard of the paperback revolution. Robert de Graff fired the first salvo in 1939 when he launched the first mass-market paperback line in America, Pocket Books. Publishing’s old guard had pooh-poohed de Graff’s assumption that consumers would buy cheap paperbound reprints of classics and bestsellers. Book buying was an elite pastime, the exclusive province of those with the income and education to indulge in expensive status symbols like hardbound books.

  What they couldn’t foresee was a mass audience swollen by the millions of veterans who’d acquired the reading habit overseas, thanks to Armed Services Editions of popular paperbacks distributed free to the troops. After the war, many of them would go to college on the GI Bill, as Gorey and O’Hara had. Vets made up a sizable part of the new book-hungry audience that gobbled up 2,862,792 copies of Pocket’s Five Great Tragedies by Shakespeare the year it was published. Pocket Books were cheap—a quarter apiece—and they were everywhere, not just in tony big-city bookshops: de Graff distributed them to newsstands, drugstores, lunch counters, and bus and train stations. They flew off the racks.

  A gold rush was on: competing imprints such as Avon, Dell, and Bantam sprang up throughout the ’40s. Lurid covers by hack illustrators accosted the browser with all the subtlety of a peep-show barker. “Paperback publishers made no effort to distinguish classics from kitsch,” writes the cultural critic Louis Menand.19 “On the contrary, they commissioned covers for books like Brave New World and The Catcher in the Rye from the same artists who did the covers for books like Strangler’s Serenade and The Case of the Careless Kitten.” “Horrible,” says Epstein. “They came out of the magazine business, the illustrators.”

  Anchor’s covers were an indispensable part of his strategy, conveying at a glance the difference between serious literature for the educated millions, published in a “quality paperback” format, and books born to be pulped, like My Gun Is Quick by Mickey Spillane. While Gorey’s visual rhetoric was sophisticated, speaking to “those in college and just after college,” as Klemin put it, his work was illustrative in the time-honored sense, deftly conveying the mood of a novel or the subject of a scholarly work. “Ted was inimitable and gave the series its cachet; he gave it the look,” says Epstein. “The covers made a huge difference. They said what we were trying to do.”

  “Within a year or so, Anchor Books was well-established and very profitable,” Epstein recalls. “Since the titles belonged to the postwar intellectual zeitgeist, they all sold well, especially those with Gorey’s covers.”20 By 1958, Print magazine, an influential voice in the fields of design and illustration, had taken notice of Gorey’s innovative cover art. “There have been a group of Anchor Book covers that have a quality all their own,” the unnamed editorial staffer proclaimed. “Print has discovered that these are the work of one man, Edward Gorey. Gorey designs the covers, letters the titles, and very often the rest of the cover. He also does the final illustrations. This versatility has resulted in a unity of feeling…a quality that is highly distinctive.”21

  Just as Anchor blazed the trail for what would soon be known as the trade paperback, a format that would help democratize highbrow culture by bringing classics of world literature and philosophy to the masses, Gorey was part of a wave of designers and illustrators who used the four-by-seven cover as a canvas, transforming the book cover into a popular art form. Heller, who during his thirty-three years as an art director at the New York Times often used Gorey for freelance illustration work, groups him together with boundary-pushing designer-illustrators such as Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Leo Lionni. “What he created was an environment of original art for paperback books that had a personality, a character,” says Heller.

  At first glance, Gorey’s work for Anchor looks reactionary next to the swinging, sophisticated modernism epitomized by Paul Rand’s covers for Knopf and Alvin and Elaine Lustig’s covers for Noonday and Meridian. But by asserting the virtues of anachronism—hand-drawn antique fonts as opposed to machine-produced type, Victorian and Edwardian imagery instead of jazzy abstraction—at a moment when postwar America was giddy with visions of a shiny new world of suburban dream homes and laborsaving gadgets, Gorey was postmodern avant la lettre. Like Frank O’Hara’s poetry, his Anchor covers sampled and remixed high and low culture, referencing period styles as well as contemporary British illustration.

  At the same time, he was unquestionably part of the paperback revolution, which, along with cultural forces such as television, rock ’n’ roll, and the movies, gave rise to pop culture as we know it. “Paperbacks changed the book business in the same way that 45-r.p.m. vinyl records (‘singles’), introduced in 1949, and transistor radios, which went on sale in 1954, changed the music industry,” writes Menand.22 Gorey’s Anchor covers were part of that social transformation.

  * * *

  Yet they had things to say about Gorey’s inner life, too. His Anchor covers introduce what will become psychological motifs in his work. The lone figure recurs, making his way through city streets, as on The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (1953), or lost in reverie on a railway platform, as on The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling (1957). Gorey insisted that such motifs had more to do with his limitations as a draftsman than anything else. “There were certain kinds of books where I followed a routine, such as my famous landscape which was mostly sky so I could fit in a title,” he said. “Things like…Victory [Joseph Conrad, 1957] and The Wanderer tend to have low-lying landscapes, a lot of sky, sort of odd colors, and tiny figures that I didn’t have to draw very hard.”23

  Still, his solitary nature, his habit of viewing the human comedy with a Beckettian black humor, and his childhood memories of family strife and whispered tales of his grandmother Garvey locked away in a sanitarium make us think there’s more here than meets the eye. Moody figures cluster in small groups. Often one person stands apart, regarded with a cold eye by the others. Furtive, sidelong glances are exchanged or gazes are averted altogether. Faces are expressionless masks, revealing nothing.

  His covers for Anchor’s reprints of Henry James novels are case studies in group psychology. Here Gorey psychoanalyzes with pen and ink, exposing the duels and subterfuges just beneath the drawing-room propriety of the Victorian and Edwardian ages in which James wrote. On The Ambassadors, a top-hatted man and a woman in dark blue formal dress stand marooned in a gray infinity, close in proximity but alone in their heads. On What Maisie Knew (1954), a little girl looks on anxiously while her parents hold what seems to be a heated conference in one corner of the room. The man holds his wife by one arm; he looms over her menacingly, and she shrinks away.24

  Speaking of psychoanalysis, Gorey’s assignments for Anchor inspired some of the most obviously gay imagery in his oeuvre. His cover illustration for Herman Melville’s Redburn (1957), a novel famous for its rampant homoeroticism, is so winkingly gay it teeters on
the brink of self-parody. Many scholars now believe Melville was gay, or at least bisexual. In Redburn, a semiautobiographical bildungsroman about a young New Englander’s first voyage on a merchant ship, Melville draws back the curtain on nineteenth-century shipboard life, where the line between homosocial fraternizing and love between men was a blurry one.

  Redburn by Herman Melville, cover design and illustration by Edward Gorey. (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957)

  Gorey’s campy cover depicts a young sailor in a bright red shirt—Redburn, we guess—trading suggestive looks with a trio of seafarers, one of whom is sitting spraddle-legged, another of whom is standing with his firmly packed rump toward the young, er, seaman peering at him over his shoulder. There’s a suspicious bulge in Redburn’s crotch, and his hands are thrust into his pockets (for a round of “thumbfumble,” perhaps, the diverting game played by the swingers in Gorey’s parody of Victorian porn, The Curious Sofa). In case we didn’t get the Freudian hint, Gorey draws our attention to the upthrusting belaying pin, its phallic symbolism unmissable. (A gay friend of mine, on seeing this illustration, quipped, “Provincetown meat market.”)

  If this seems like a Freudian scavenger hunt run amok, finding phallic symbols everywhere, consider the critic Thomas Garvey’s essay “Edward Gorey and the Glass Closet: A Moral Fable.” Arguing that Gorey’s imagery “was obviously coded as queer,” Garvey chooses his Redburn cover as exhibit A in the case for a queer-theory reading of his work. “Gorey’s design [for Redburn] is hilariously deadpan,” he writes. “All it lacks is a word balloon with ‘Yoo hoo, Sailor!’ to make its come-hither subtext clear: the buttoned-up Redburn’s hands frame his pubes, even as he gazes at the open crotch of a swarthy sailor (while his twin offers up his bum).”25

  But behind Garvey’s knowing tone is a searching analysis of mainstream culture’s insistence on turning a blind eye to queer subtexts in Gorey’s work and persona. Garvey isn’t out to “prove” that Gorey is gay: “I never personally knew the talented Mr. Gorey,” he says, “so I don’t ‘know’ if he was gay or not.” His point is that the gay imagery in Gorey’s work, and the gay sensibility encoded in his ironic wit, his flamboyant style, and his pantheon of canonically gay tastes (ballet, Dietrich, silent film, Firbank, Compton-Burnett), urge us to consider his art and life in relation to gay culture and history.

  Yet media coverage of Gorey is consistently—and a little too insistently—oblivious to the gay themes in his art, the gay influences on his aesthetic, the gay origins of his persona. The Gorey we meet in perfunctory newspaper profiles is a Dr. Seuss for Tim Burton fans; little is made of the gay subtext of his art and life, presumably because mentioning children’s literature and homosexuality in the same breath stirs dark suspicions in the American mind, especially when the subject is an eccentric old gent who seems to enjoy killing off children (in his stories, at least). If such articles are to be believed, then “Gorey wasn’t necessarily gay, even though he was a life-long bachelor who dressed in necklaces and furs,” Garvey writes. “He was just asexual, a kind of lovable eunuch who spent his spare time petting his cats down on the Cape when he wasn’t drawing his funny little books.”

  Moving beyond Redburn, Garvey finds queer-coded images elsewhere in Gorey’s work: a bearded Gorey alter ego standing naked on a “cold, lonely” balcony in The West Wing (1963), “his hands covering his…bum”; the dandyish Victorian uncle in The Hapless Child, staring “furtively at the tush of a male statue just before meeting his doom.” It bears noting that the “eccentric” uncle, inevitably a lifelong bachelor who lived with a male friend, was a stock character in Victorian society, the secret of his sexuality hidden in plain sight. “Who was it who said most gay history lies buried in bachelor graves?” asks Douglass Shand-Tucci, a historian of gay culture.26

  It’s also worth pointing out that the image of a man with a well-rounded rear seen from behind is something of a motif in Gorey’s work; it crops up not only in the instances Garvey records but also in the gold statuette of a male nude flexing his buttocks on the back cover of another Anchor title, Michael Nelson’s A Room in Chelsea Square, a bitchy, high-camp comedy of manners about a young man who takes up with a sugar daddy in London. And there it is again in the fastidiously rendered bottoms of the gay young things (Herbert, Albert, and the “exceptionally well-made” Harold) “disporting themselves on the lawn” in The Curious Sofa, and in The Other Statue, where two foppish gents are staring intently at the backside of a well-muscled male statue whose crotch, covered by one of those fig leaves that only draws attention to what it pretends to conceal, is thrust toward us. In the near distance stands another beefy male statue, buttocks rampant. “On the roof a curious discovery was made,” Gorey tells us in what is surely one of his most obliquely revealing lines.

  Garvey singles out the image of the naked male figure seen “hind-side-to,” as Gorey would say, in The West Wing. It’s a poignant image in a somber, surrealist poem of a book, free from the camp-gothic whimsy of Gorey’s better-known works. Drawn in what for Gorey is a highly realistic style, the man resembles him in beard and pose; it’s hard not to see the picture as a self-portrait: the artist as a solitary, surrounded on all sides by limitless gloom. A balustrade fences him off from the world. Clasping his hands, childlike, over his buttocks, he conceals the seat of his desire (so to speak). The sense of vulnerability and loneliness—of unrequited love; of never venturing beyond the adolescent crush, even in middle age—is palpable.

  “Such an image, it goes without saying, could be troubling to gays and straights alike,” Garvey argues.

  To straights, it means pondering the artist’s identity not as some emasculated entertainer but as an actual sexual outsider, expertly manipulating their responses; to gays, it means facing the author’s estrangement from that identity, and his horror of it. And isn’t being gay supposed to be wonderful now? Well, when you look over the oeuvre of Edward Gorey, you get the distinct impression that he didn’t think so. Which makes him a tricky subject for gay critics. For can you have a gay cultural hero who was alienated from gay sex?

  Garvey coins the useful term glass closet to describe “that strange cultural zone” inhabited by people in the public eye who “simultaneously operate as both gay and straight.” By dodging interviewers’ questions about his sexuality with evasive or inscrutable replies while sublimating his homosexuality into his art and aesthetics, Gorey had it both ways, Garvey contends. “Gorey kept perfectly mum about his true nature to the press; he only spoke about it in his art. And in a way, to be honest, the glass closet was appropriate to his artistic persona, which was itself neither here nor there, but locked in a kind of alienated stasis. And as his books and designs became more popular with the mass audience, Gorey probably found the glass closet a commercially convenient place to reside as well.”

  Garvey thinks it’s our duty to take a sledgehammer to Gorey’s glass closet, especially now that he’s dead. “We’d look down at a Jewish performer who concealed his or her religion, and we’d never tolerate a black performer who worked in whiteface,” he contends. “Why is the glass closet so different?” He exhorts anyone who takes Gorey’s work seriously neither to “emasculate his gayness” nor to “deny his alienation from it. Both aspects of his personality enrich his art—which of course makes it less marketable but more moving.”

  Garvey resists the conventional reading of Gorey as a campier Charles Addams whose ironic perversity “allows his art to be re-purposed by heterosexuals into a tonic for the pressures of wholesomeness.” For Garvey, there’s a river of melancholy beneath the surface of Gorey’s camp-macabre diversions. He reads Gorey’s recurrent motif, the death of a child, as a metaphor for the death of innocence that comes with childhood’s end. “And it’s hard not to equate this ‘death,’” he says, “with a similar childish ‘death’—the onset of sexual experience.” He cuts deep here, because one of the great unsolved mysteries of Gorey’s life is what, exactly, happened at that first (and, by all
accounts, last) attempt at sex, which put him off the idea forever. It’s Gorey’s Rosebud moment, the experience that made him who he was.

  * * *

  In New York, Gorey came closer to self-identifying as gay—if only in his mind and to a few close friends—than at any other time in his life, succumbing to crushes on several men, meeting friends for drinks in gay bars, moving in mostly gay circles. He was as cloaked as ever, maintaining the pose of an aloof asexual who finds the whole bothersome business of sex a matter of world-weary indifference. But his letters to Alison Lurie tell a different story.

  He refers, now and then, to Third Avenue bars, shorthand for the string of gay gentlemen’s bars on Third Avenue, where the unofficial dress code was conservative and the crowd was well turned out. (In a December 1953 letter to Lurie, Gorey announces that he can’t bear looking so “tatty” a minute longer and is therefore opening a charge account at Chipp—a New York clothier known for its Ivy League style—and is having bespoke suit jackets made and is stocking up on cashmere sweaters and whipcord trousers. He is, he announces, perilously close to chic but hopes he’ll achieve a newfound elegance “in my own manner rather than the Madison Avenue-cum-Third Avenue gay bar one.”)27