Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Attitudes about childhood have changed, she points out, as have children themselves. “There are many very ironic books and scary books; there’s a more sophisticated child audience than there was then.” These days, she notes, “there are many books that are parodies of the classic tales, and children love that; they love being so sophisticated that they can see how foolish these things are. I think Ted Gorey was onto it before the rest of them; he really opened the gate. Children like roller coasters, as long as they’re well strapped in, and I think there’s some of the same feeling in Ted’s books—a feeling of dread that has a smile at the end.”

  a Ah, but that desk belongs to the renowned poet Mrs. Regera Dowdy, whose name is an anagram for “Edward Gorey.” Is Gorey saying that the Black Doll is his muse, a symbol of the mysterious impulses that inspire his work?

  b According to the Gorey collector Irwin Terry, “The dates on the back of the drawings show that the art was created in no particular order over a two year period.” See Irwin Terry, “Beautiful Remains: The Vinegar Works on Display,” Goreyana, March 27, 2013, http://goreyana.blogspot.com/2013/03/beautiful-remains-vinegar-works-on.html.

  c Of course Gorey owned a copy.

  d Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) was a German poet and writer of satirical, Lear-inspired nonsense verse, of which the best known is his darkly funny Gallows Songs (1905). The Easter-themed book Gorey mentions is probably his children’s book Ostermärchen (Easter fairy tale).

  Chapter 10

  Worshipping in Balanchine’s Temple

  1964–67

  Gorey near one of the Nadelman sculptures on the promenade at the New York State Theater, 1973. (Photograph by Bruce Chernin. Image provided by the Alpern Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.)

  ON THE EVENING OF April 23, 1964, the New York City Ballet opened the doors to its new home, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center,a with a gala performance of Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante and Stars and Stripes. It was, for all practical purposes, Gorey’s new home, too, five months out of the year.

  As in all the rituals that governed his life, he was compulsive in his devotion to routine, arriving for 8:00 p.m. performances at 7:30, when the doors opened. Yet he sometimes spent long stretches in the lobby if he didn’t like one of the evening’s offerings. Gorey “had to be there on time, partly (he would say) because maybe they would change the order of the program, but I think it was just his compulsion—he had to be there,” says Peter Wolff, a ballet friend of Gorey’s who now sits on the board of the George Balanchine Foundation. “It was all part of his insane routine.”

  During intermissions, Gorey could be found in the theater’s main lobby, the Grand Promenade, located above the orchestra level. Three tiers of undulating balconies overhang the room; Elie Nadelman’s massive, generously proportioned female nudes, sculpted in white marble, bookend it. Inevitably, Gorey was near a bench by the east stairs, at the center of a circle of gossipy, inexhaustibly opinionated ballet obsessives. Toni Bentley, a Balanchine dancer turned author whose Costumes by Karinska features a foreword by Gorey, recalls him “leaning in his full-length fur coat, in his full-length beard, against the left-side Nadelman statue at intermission every single night.”1

  Gorey “was very breezy about his opinions,” tossing them off in an artless manner, says Peter Anastos. “He just sat back and proclaimed evident truths about the company from a lofty cloud.”2 He had a flair for the bitchy bon mot, dubbing Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, neither of whom he could abide, “the world’s tallest albino asparagus.”3 Asked about the moldy chestnuts of the classical repertoire, he sniffed, “Les Sylphides? Where they’re all looking for their contact lenses?”4 That said, his pronouncements were never mean-spirited. “Even if Ted hated something or somebody or some costume or set, and covered it with abuse, it was never really very fearsome,” Anastos emphasizes. (“You can often hear me bitching about somebody’s performance, but I’m bitching on a terribly high level,” said Gorey.)5

  Behind the bitchy witticisms, however, was a profound appreciation of Balanchine’s genius, says Anastos—“a knowledge and a familiarity with every arcane aspect of life at the NYCB going back to City Center days” coupled with a fluency in the vocabulary of ballet (arabesques and grand jetés and penchés and all the rest of it) that enabled Gorey to pick apart a dancer’s performance on a technical level and compare it to another ballerina’s interpretation of the same steps, way back when. He tossed off his aperçus in a nonchalant manner that dared the listener to take them seriously, although dance critics such as Arlene Croce, of the New Yorker, and intellectuals such as Susan Sontag, who knew Gorey from Bill Everson’s screenings, knew better. “They’d want to know what he thought of things,” Peter Wolff recalls. “He was experiencing it on a different level.” People who didn’t know Gorey may have thought he was “a campy character because of the way he dressed and spoke and all that,” says Croce, but he impressed her as “utterly serious…a thoughtful man who made penetrating remarks” yet was “genuinely witty.”

  To those who weren’t admitted into his charmed circle, however, Gorey could exude an in-crowd snootiness. Even old friends such as Larry Osgood and Freddy English got the freeze-out, since they were mere balletgoers, not acolytes of the Balanchine cult. “Ted would be holding court with his admirers and his fellow aficionados and you couldn’t get near him,” says Osgood. “He wouldn’t even recognize old friends who might try to approach him during the intermission.”

  Some of this may have been high-school-cafeteria cliquishness, but it might have had something to do with Gorey’s secretiveness, too. He lived a compartmentalized life, maintaining strict boundaries between his social lives: between his Harvard friends and his ballet coterie, between his New York circle and his Cape Cod crowd, and so on. For the nearly three decades he went to the ballet, the Promenade crowd was his social life when the NYCB was in residence. “I have very little social life, because the only people I have time to see are the ones I’m going to the ballet with,” he said.6

  New York City in the ’60s and ’70s was the dance capital of the world. Balanchine was producing works of genius; the NYCB was a serious contender for the most dazzling collection of dance talent on the planet; avant-garde choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, and Paul Taylor were blazing trails for modern dance. The fever-pitch anticipation that greeted the premiere of a new work by Balanchine is unimaginable today, when the New York City Ballet no longer dominates New York’s cultural consciousness. “Being in New York in the ’70s with Balanchine working was like being in Salzburg when Mozart was working,” Wolff recalls. “It was like abstract expressionism: it was of its time; it was wildly earth-shattering.”

  Seeing a Balanchine premiere was an indispensable part of being culturally au courant, of understanding the zeitgeist. “The lobby of the State Theater was the one place where you could see, night after night, literary intellectuals like Susan Sontag, the poetry critic David Kalstone, the essayist Richard Poirier, the cartoonist Edward Gorey, the music and dance critic Dale Harris, the editor of Knopf, Robert Gottlieb—and dozens of others,” recalled Edmund White, the novelist and memoirist, in his essay “The Man Who Understood Balanchine.”7 “We were all enjoying a rare privilege—the unfolding of genius. Balanchine had started out in imperial Russia, reached his first apogee under Diaghilev in France and, in the 1930’s, moved to the United States, where he led dance to summits it had never known before.”

  Gorey’s sentiments exactly. “I feel absolutely and unequivocally,” he said in 1974, “that Balanchine is the great genius in the arts today.…My nightmare is picking up the newspaper some day and finding out George has dropped dead.”8

  * * *

  When Gorey wasn’t worshipping in Balanchine’s temple, he was hard at work at the drawing board (if he wasn’t at the movies). Nineteen sixty-four saw the release of a spoken-word record, The Dream World of Dion McGregor,
a collection of monologues by the “sleep talker” Dion McGregor, along with a companion book of McGregor’s somniloquies. Gorey illustrated both, employing the laborious fine-line technique he reserved for his own work and projects that caught his fancy, as McGregor’s voice-overs for his zany dreams apparently did.

  An aspiring songwriter, McGregor suffered, supposedly, from a sleep disorder that caused him to narrate his dreams aloud. His roommate tape-recorded these nightly sessions, and Decca Records released the results. Shot through with macabre humor and brimming with bizarre imagery, McGregor’s babblings sound like a cross between sketch comedy and the trance poems spouted by Robert Desnos at surrealist séances. His nocturnal emissions, as one wag called them, told of cemeteries for midgets, “food roulette” played with a poisoned éclair, and a cottage whose closets were fitted with meat hooks, handy for hanging overnight guests (“See that they swing properly. Yes, on their meathooks. Gorgeous meathooks”).9 The record flopped, but it’s easy to see why Gorey would have gotten a bang out of it.

  Meanwhile, the little books kept coming. In 1964, Gorey published The Nursery Frieze, another Fantod Press production. It was, he later wrote Peter Neumeyer, “perhaps my favourite work of mine.”10 In an interview, he said, “I tend to like the ones that make the least obvious sense,” ticking off The Nursery Frieze, [The Untitled Book], and The Object-Lesson as examples.11

  When Gorey says The Nursery Frieze makes less “obvious” sense than most of his books, we have to wonder if he’s putting us on. To most readers, the question is whether it makes any sense. True to its name, the book consists of a long friezelike procession of squat, dark creatures—or, very possibly, a single creature caught in successive instants, like the galloping horse in Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion studies of animal locomotion. Judging from the rough sketches included in the exhibition catalog for Karen Wilkin’s Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey, the beast began as a hippopotamus; by the time it made its debut in print, it had morphed into an anxious-looking capybara, or maybe a tapir, or something in between. Marching fretfully through cartoon-lunar terrain reminiscent of the sublimely empty landscapes of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, it utters, in rhyming couplets, a series of non sequiturs: “Archipelago, [cardamom], obloquy, tacks / Ignavia, samisen, bandages, wax,” and so on, through “Corposant, madrepore, ophicleide, paste / Jequirity, tombola, sphagnum, distaste,” all the way to “Wapentake, orrery, aspic, mistrust / Ichor, ganosis, velleity, dust.”

  The Nursery Frieze. (Fantod Press, 1964)

  As Gorey would groan, in the middle of movies that drove him bonkers, “Can someone please tell me what this is in aid of?”12

  We can try. First, that worried, capybaralike creature is a nonsense-verse staple, the imaginary beast, like Carroll’s Bandersnatch, Lear’s Pobble Who Has No Toes, and Sendak’s Wild Things. It takes its place in the Gorey bestiary alongside the Doubtful Guest, the Wuggly Ump, Figbash, and the Bahhum Bug (from The Haunted Tea-Cosy), to name a few. It tells us that we’re in nonsense territory, as does Gorey’s list of heterogeneous things, which, as mentioned earlier, is an essential nonsense trope. By rattling off a catalog of weird words that tickle his fancy and roll trippingly off the tongue, Gorey is also giving us an inventory of the arbitrary. Such nonsense lists mock taxonomy’s attempts to impose order on a disorderly world in the same way that Borges does in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” the essay that inspired Gorey’s unfinished book, The Interesting List.

  Speaking of categories, Gorey was that specific species of eccentric, the collector. Like Zeph Clagg in The Willowdale Handcar with his prized collection of more than seven thousand telephone-pole insulators, he amassed all sorts of things: cats, of course, and books by the ton, but also finials and antique potato mashers and pewter salt and pepper shakers and countless other curiosa. Yet he hoarded immaterial things, too: ideas and images (he could see the entire NYCB repertory “like a movie in my head,” he claimed) and, of course, words, which he jotted down in his ever-present notebook with the satisfaction of a lepidopterist snaring a butterfly.13 Newspaper puzzle pages were an inexhaustible trove of obscure, archaic, and sesquipedalian words, too. When the Cape Cod gang was having dinner, Ted would “quickly finish and then start doing the [New York Times] crossword puzzle or the acrostic,” says Ken Morton. “He just found it joyful to manipulate words and letters.” In The Nursery Frieze, as in later books such as The Glorious Nosebleed (1975), in which every sentence ends with an adverb, and [The Untitled Book], whose text consists entirely of gibberish, Gorey gives himself over to the unalloyed pleasures of wordplay.

  That said, the words spoken by Gorey’s capybara-whatsit weren’t just plucked out of a hat. Gorey chose them—after coming across them in his battles with the crossword or his peripatetic reading—and because he chose them, they, like the odd bits of driftwood he picked up in his beachcombings, have things to tell us about his interests and outlook. Some are predictably Goreyesque: dismemberment, exequies (funeral rites), catafalque (a raised bier for a coffin), Gehenna (in the Old Testament, a fiery place where the souls of the wicked are tormented, or, if you prefer, a valley near Jerusalem where the followers of Moloch sacrificed children). In keeping with his interest in old-fashioned things, many of the words in The Nursery Frieze are nineteenth-century relics such as gibus (“a collapsible top hat operated by a spring,” according to the Collins English Dictionary).14 A surprisingly high percentage have religious associations, such as epistle, hymn, thurible (a censer used in ecclesiastical rituals), and purlicue (the reviewing, in Presbyterianism, of a previous sermon)—evidence of Gorey’s abiding interest, however sublimated, in religion. A few of the words evoke the idler persona Gorey liked to affect: ignavia (indolence) and velleity (“1. volition in its weakest form. 2. a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it”—was there ever a more Goreyesque sentiment?).15

  The oddest thing about The Nursery Frieze is its ostensible purpose: to act as a decorative band around a tot’s room and, presumably, promote the notion that reading is “fun-damental,” as the literacy campaign has it. Gorey’s matter-of-fact presentation of preposterous words such as febrifuge and jequirity as age-appropriate vocabulary is funny on its face. And what sort of parent would adorn his or her child’s nursery with a frieze whose subtext seems to be morbid religiosity and death? Imagine laying yourself down to sleep, after praying the Lord your soul to keep, with thoughts of dismemberment and Gehenna in your little head! Doomfully, the last word in the frieze is dust, to which we all return, a gloomy sentiment perfect for the Puritan nursery. Sweet dreams.

  * * *

  In 1965, Gorey brought out The Sinking Spell, his fourth and last title with Ivan Obolensky, and The Remembered Visit, published by Simon and Schuster.16

  An amusing, bemusing little Victorian-surrealist mystery without a solution, or, better yet, an absurdist joke without a punch line, The Sinking Spell has the feel of Charles Fort’s matter-of-fact retellings of those mind-boggling freak occurrences now called Fortean phenomena. Fort was especially fascinated by weird weather, specifically, what he called falls—red rain, black snow, showers of frogs or fish, “thunderstones,” “the fall of a thousand tons of butter,” and so forth.17 The tale of a mysterious presence that descends, by degrees, through an Edwardian household, unsettling everything it touches, The Sinking Spell would be right at home in a Fort collection like The Book of the Damned.

  Told in couplets, Gorey’s story begins with the arrival, in the middle of an Edwardian family’s croquet game, of a “creature floating in the sky.” Gorey never describes it, and it remains invisible to us throughout the story, though it’s plainly visible to the family. Closer and closer it comes, until, “morose, inflexible, aloof,” it hovers just above their house. It moves ever downward, floor by floor. It frightens the maid, “declines in fretful curves / Among the pickles and preserves,” and finally disappears forever into the cellar floor.

  No one in the unflappable,
well-starched family has any idea “just what can be meant / By this implacable descent,” nor do we. Gorey hazarded the theory, in a letter to Peter Neumeyer, that the book had something to do with crossing borders, passing into realms from which there is no return. A “sinking spell,” in the nineteenth century, was a sudden collapse, from illness, into a dead faint or deathlike sleep. The title is a pun: Gorey’s sinking spell is a literal one, a diabolical enchantment that causes something to descend from the heavens, passing wraithlike through anything in its path, en route, we assume, to the underworld. Once again, Gorey’s subject is death. Ultimately, though, he seemed as baffled as the family in the story by the dreamlike events that bubbled up from his unconscious.

  * * *

  Tinged with a sense of lost time and suffused with regret, The Remembered Visit is one of Gorey’s serious works, though he undercuts that seriousness, as always, with his light touch. The writing is inimitably Goreyesque—“Tea was brought: it was nearly colourless, and there was a plate of crystallized ginger”—and the drawing is superb: in the opening scene, in which we see Drusilla on an ocean liner, the overlapping patterns of the stylized waves recall the seas in prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige.

  When Drusilla’s parents go on an excursion and never return, she takes their disappearance (or is it her abandonment?) in stride. A family friend, Miss Skrim-Pshaw, takes her to meet Mr. Crague, “a wonderful old man who had been or done something lofty and cultured in the dim past.” They take tea in a garden “where the topiary was being neglected.” Mr. Crague can’t show Drusilla his albums filled with beautiful pieces of paper, he regrets, because they’re upstairs in his room; she promises to mail the old gent “some insides of envelopes she had saved” when she gets home.