Born to Be Posthumous
Page 21
The Object-Lesson is only thirty pages long, and its text totals just 224 words, but its depth of feeling, and its ability to provoke reveries, make it feel like a philosophical novel in miniature. The lesson hidden in plain sight, in this bit of gothic-surrealist-absurdist nonsense, is that “the cause-and-effect, rational world in which we normally try to function,” as Gorey called it, is only part of the story. “I’m not a firm believer in cause and effect,” he told an interviewer.37 Life, in Goreyland, is a random walk, full of mystery and melancholy, punctuated by the unpredictable and the inexplicable. Our earliest memories begin in the middle of things (“It was already Thursday…”); the slow fade to black, at the end of our lives, is similarly Shrouded in Mystery, “the tea-urn empty save for a card on which was written the single word: Farewell.” Asking what it all means misses the point: namely, its pointlessness. That, perhaps, is the object lesson The Object-Lesson teaches.
The relationship between cause and effect hasn’t been abolished in the world of The Object-Lesson; it’s been rendered absurd. Gorey’s use of conventional narrative structure, in which events proceed in chronological order, implies causality—logical causality. In fact, Gorey’s story is an object lesson in what philosophers call the post hoc, ergo propter hoc error, a type of logical fallacy that results from the erroneous assumption that because one event follows another, it must be the result of the event that preceded it. (The Latin phrase means “after this, therefore because of this.”) Of course, The Object-Lesson’s surrealist-absurdist view of the world is a more psychologically accurate reflection of the way we experience our lives than the logician’s “cause-and-effect, rational world.”
The Object-Lesson was Gorey’s attempt to write “a novel about nothing,” he said. “I have always been sort of fascinated by that; you know, Flaubert’s idea of writing a novel about nothing.…[T]hat’s one of those tag lines that has always stuck in my head.”38
His immediate inspiration, however, was Samuel Foote’s prose poem “The Grand Panjandrum,” a delightful bit of nonsense that gave us the titular phrase. Foote (1720–77) was an English comic actor known for his wicked satires of British society. When the actor Charles Macklin boasted that he could memorize any text upon a single hearing, Foote rose to the challenge by improvising, on the spot, a nonsense monologue calculated to strain the faculties of the most accomplished mnemonist: “So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming down the street, pops its head into the shop—What! No soap? So he died; and she very imprudently married the Barber: and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the great Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top; and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.”39
Of his books, The Object-Lesson was one of Gorey’s favorites, he said, precisely because it didn’t make any sense, and “those kinds of things are harder to do than almost anything else.”40 Following the lead of literary experimentalists such as Georges Perec, the Oulipoc writer who set himself the task of writing a novel without using the letter e, Gorey often used formal constraints—the limerick form, nonsense verse, the abecedarian poem, the wordless narrative—as a conceptual goad to spur himself into unexplored creative territory. He seemed to thrive under such self-imposed restrictions.
Of course, it’s his flawless marriage of text and image that makes The Object-Lesson such a feast for the imagination. Gorey counterpoints the playful perversity of surrealist word games and the cartwheeling nuttiness of Victorian nonsense with a melancholy atmosphere, “very despairing emotionally” in its oncoming autumn, descending twilight, letters destroyed unread, and cryptic messages on calling cards. Here and there, we catch glimpses of the shadows circling in the deeper waters of Gorey’s subconscious: the father figure, loveless and unlovable; “the miseries of childhood”; his grandmother packed off to the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane in Kankakee, Illinois (“At twilight, however, no message had come from the asylum”).
The illustrations, which are among Gorey’s finest, enhance the autumnal mood, especially the indescribably beautiful drawing of the bat, or battered umbrella, swooping over the leafless trees. Gorey’s loving attention to the intricate, fractal branchings of each twig, and their plaintive grasping after the airborne thing beyond their reach, betrays his close study of Japanese wood-block prints, in which nature has an animistic part to play. Then, too, they suggest a fondness for the uncanny, clawing forests of English illustrators such as Arthur Rackham.
A bat, or possibly an umbrella, disengages itself from the shrubbery in The Object-Lesson. (Doubleday, 1958)
“These seem to me the very best drawings that Gorey so far has done; he is really becoming a master,” enthused Wilson, marveling at Gorey’s mastery of composition, both at the level of individual panels and in the arc of the book. The “anxious-faced” woman in the opening scene, “lightly balanced at the right by a potted plant” and “thrown into rigid and sharp relief by a long expanse of curly-patterned wallpaper,” is bookended on the book’s last page, he points out, by the “three silent figures” facing “a long expanse of darkening sky, a background like the wallpaper in the first of the pictures, balanced by a remote little moon, which, in its place in the composition, has the value of the potted plant.”41
* * *
Gorey’s emotional life had, since his ill-fated crush on Ed from Buffalo in 1953, been “nil,” as he liked to say. Then, in January of ’58, at the age of thirty-two, he found himself confronting the worrisome possibility that he was “about to become Emotionally Entangled,” as he told Lurie, with a “middle-aged Mexican of extremely bizarre appearance and character.”42 From the outset, he was buffeted by doubts about the object of his latest crush, who was as unlike him as unlike could be. Of course, discomfort was Gorey’s comfort zone. At least, that’s the impression he liked to give in his letters and interviews, where he often played the role of angsty, ennui-ridden neurotic (though with such be-still-my-heart histrionics—the full-body sighs, the woebegone declamations—that he let his irony show, revealing the whole thing for the pose it was). It’s hard to make out, through the overgrowth of Gorey’s Edwardian-Victorian verbiage and campy style, just how deep his feelings for the Mexican—whose name, by the way, was Victor—ran, but he seems to have been in the throes of one of his periodic infatuations, if not in love.
As was inevitably the case with Gorey’s love life, things were fraught. It soon emerged that Victor, having been unlucky in love, was skittish about sex, which he seemed to regard as a recipe for romantic self-destruction. As a result, Gorey confided to Lurie in a letter that is startling in its candor, Victor issued a strict prohibition on hanky-panky, which Ted found odd, since it was Victor who’d initiated “the moderate erotic goings-on” during their first “encounter,” at Victor’s apartment.43
However moderate they were, the erotic goings-on suggest that Gorey, behind his public pose as a thirty-two-year-old virgin with a Victorian aversion to sex, wasn’t entirely asexual.
Sadly, this, like Gorey’s other abortive romances, was not to be. Victor, despite his “muscularity,” boyish charm, and beguiling way of wearing heavy sweaters, was too busy to see Gorey with any frequency, dividing his time between illustrating fashion ads for Bonwit Teller and serving as arm candy for rich women. Then, too, he had a hair-raising habit of making “rather creepy little remarks delivered in bubbly tones,” such as, “Would you kill the cats if I asked you to?”44
In a letter dated April 1, Gorey tells Lurie that he’s relegating Victor, like all his predecessors, to the dustbin of history. “Sinister Victor never turned up again after I last wrote you,” he writes, “which is obviously Just as Well.” You can almost hear the sigh.45
a Gorey’s use of a meter that makes visions of sugarplums dance in most readers’ heads makes us wonder if The Doubtful Guest is a paro
dy of Moore’s moldy chestnut. Both tales are set on winter nights in snowbound houses; both involve home invasions by bizarre beings, each “dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot.” In both books, it’s the man of the house who’s most alarmed by the intruder. And both trespassers have a thing for chimneys: Saint Nick disappears up one at the end of Moore’s poem; the Doubtful Guest betrays “a great liking for peering up flues.”
It makes sense that Gorey, a confirmed Christmas loather, would satirize Moore’s yuletide classic. Yet when Faith Elliott, a young fan interviewing him in his apartment on November 30, 1976, asked, “I might be wrong about this, but since The Doubtful Guest is done in the same meter as ‘A Visit from Saint Nick,’ is there any correlation?” he was quick to dismiss the idea. “Not that I know of,” he said. “I didn’t even know that it was.” Still, the parallels, even if unconscious, are provocative. (Elliott hoped to publish her interview, but never found a home for it. All quotes from her conversation with Gorey are taken from the original cassette tape.)
b String was an enduring Gorey obsession. “Do you think it is too late for me to devote my life to something to do with String?” he wondered in a 1968 letter to Peter Neumeyer. (See Floating Worlds, 91.) The capitalization is his—an indication, perhaps, of the gravity of the subject.
c Sometimes spelled OuLiPo, Oulipo is an acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), an avant-garde literary collective founded in France in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, a mathematician, tellingly. Tellingly because the Oulipo writers use rule-based generative devices such as “n + 7,” which stipulates that the author must replace every noun in his or her text with the noun that follows it, seven entries later, in the dictionary. It’s literature as word game, an approach heavily influenced by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Oulipians, in Queneau’s unforgettable formulation, are “rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape.” (See Mónica de la Torre, “Into the Maze: OULIPO,” Poets.org, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/maze-oulipo.) Texts generated through the use of Oulipo techniques have something of the quality of surrealist literature or, more accurately, of a surrealist literature written by mathematicians, one that eschews the subconscious altogether.
Chapter 8
“Working Perversely to Please Himself”
1959–63
UNEXPECTED TURBULENCE HIT Gorey’s work life, too. In the fall of ’58, Jason Epstein left Doubleday. There had been considerable backroom intrigue leading up to his departure; where book publishing’s golden boy would end up next was “rather a secret of sorts,” Gorey told Lurie, though he was confident Epstein would offer him a job “whenever the new whatever it is gets set up.”1
By 1959, Epstein was ensconced at Random House, and his new sideline—a “children’s book thing” called the Looking Glass Library—was up and running, with Gorey on staff, after a fashion. He still had one foot in the art department at Doubleday and was juggling his nine-to-five workload while doing illustrations for Epstein’s fledgling company, all of which left him “in a state of total frazzle.”2 He hoped to jump ship to Looking Glass, he told Lurie, because it “would mean more money and prestige and time to work on my own things.”3
On February 1, 1960, just shy of his thirty-fifth birthday, Gorey moved to Epstein’s new venture after seven years at Doubleday. Founded by Epstein and Clelia Carroll, who had been Epstein’s assistant at Anchor, the Looking Glass Library was a line of classic children’s books in hardcover. “Modern educational theory has underestimated the old children’s books, and the trend has been to have books no more complicated than the experience of the children who read them,” Epstein told Newsweek in a clear jab at Seuss’s use of vocabulary lists approved by early-learning experts. “We want to get away from categorization, and treat children as human beings.”4 (No mention was made of the happy coincidence that old children’s books, especially the Victorian titles Epstein and Carroll had in mind, are often in the public domain, which lowers a publisher’s overhead substantially. Dead Victorians tend not to demand royalties.) “The idea was that it was going to do for children’s books what Anchor had done for the parents,” Gorey recalled. “The books were not paperbacks, but rather paper over boards.…It was really a neat batch of sometimes quite forgotten 19th-century stories. We tended to pick up stuff from England.”5
Looking Glass, with its skeleton crew of four (secretary included) and its unconventional offices—away from “the garrets of Random House,” as Gorey put it, in a “rather posh” apartment with a terrace on 69th Street, across from Hunter College—was congenial to Gorey’s eccentricities in a way that the more buttoned-down Doubleday had never been. Epstein, who was up to his eyebrows in Random House affairs while worrying “frantically about [Looking Glass’s] sales and whatnot,” didn’t meddle in the imprint’s day-to-day operations, which suited Gorey just fine.6
His job title was art director, but he was happy to lend an editorial hand when a book played to his strengths: The Haunted Looking Glass (1959), an anthology of spooky stories, is both illustrated and edited by Gorey, with the predictable result that its table of contents is heavily weighted toward nineteenth-century English writers such as Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Wilkie Collins.
Of course the design of the Looking Glass line, like Gorey’s work for Anchor, was eye-catchingly fresh. Putting the traditionally unexploited real estate of the books’ spines to shrewd use, Gorey designed titles to look “chic,” as he put it, in a row on a shelf.7 Volumes 1 through 10 were available as a boxed set; his distinctive hand-drawn typography, done in a wide variety of typefaces and colors, adorns all ten spines. The visual rhythms of the quirky lettering and disparate yet harmonious color schemes tickle the eye. Side by side, the books assume a collective identity—catnip to the collector, as Gorey, a case study in bibliomania, knew all too well.
He art-directed the twenty-eight titles published by Looking Glass between 1959 and 1961, when the imprint closed up shop.
Not all of Gorey’s designs hit the mark. In a real-life plot twist that’s stranger than fiction, he designed an Epstein and Carroll title destined to become a classic of Baby-Boom kid lit: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. At least, he tried to. When Juster saw Gorey’s page layouts, “the placement of the illustrations in relation to the text struck [him] as needlessly complex and fussy,” writes Leonard S. Marcus, in his introduction to The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth.8 Juster scrapped Gorey’s work and redesigned the book himself.
The War of the Worlds. (Epstein and Carroll/Looking Glass, 1960)
On top of his design duties, Gorey did the cover art, and in some cases the illustrations, for The Comic Looking Glass (1961), The Looking Glass Book of Stories (1960), The War of the Worlds (1960), Men and Gods (1959), and The Haunted Looking Glass, mentioned earlier. Some of his illustrations, such as those for Men and Gods, a collection of Greek myths, have the perfunctory feel of work dashed off under deadline pressure. By contrast, his interior art for H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds is superlative. The cover, too, is a stunner, its impact maximized by the clever strategy of wrapping the illustration around the front, back, and spine of the book. A nightmare panorama unfolds: lashing the air with their whiplike antennae, Martian war machines stalk fleeing humans across the hills, zapping them to ashes with their death rays. Gorey’s lurid palette of purple, orange, and grass green gives the scene a nightmarish unreality.
Compared to Doubleday, the production schedule at Looking Glass was considerably less demanding, which gave Gorey the time he dreamed of—time to crosshatch away at his own books, time to take on some of the growing number of requests for freelance work he was getting.
Gorey’s freelance boomlet was partly the result of Edmund Wilson’s groundbreaking essay on his work, which had appeared in the December 26, 1959, issue of the New Yorker. Wilson was unquestionably the preeminent critic of his day, a li
on of letters whose pronouncements were taken as holy writ by the cultural elite. In “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” he let New Yorker readers in on the Gorey secret. “I find that I cannot remember to have seen a single printed word about the books of Edward Gorey,” he began, “but it is not, I suppose, surprising that his work should have received no attention.”9 Admittedly, Gorey’s body of work was slim, but Wilson attributed his obscurity to the fact that “he has been working perversely to please himself and has created a whole personal world, amusing and somber, nostalgic and claustrophobic, at the same time poetic and poisoned.”
Wilson’s essay is full of such insights. He notes the supreme importance of “costume and furnishings” in Gorey’s world, which is “sometimes late Victorian,” “sometimes of the early nineteen-hundreds,” and “sometimes, though more rarely, of the twenties”; he is quick to notice that the bearded patriarch, “evidently domineering, probably a little cruel,” is “the most impressive figure in Mr. Gorey’s world”; and he is thoughtful on the point of Gorey’s relationship to surrealism and to contemporary English illustrators such as Ronald Searle.10 With an almighty whack, he drives straight down the fairway, establishing some of the major themes of Gorey criticism. Yet he ends on an affectingly personal note: “These albums give me something of the same sort of pleasure that I get from Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm, and I find that I like to return to them.”11