Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  The book recounts, in rhyming couplets, an Edwardian family’s ramble through a botanical garden. The park looks Edenic but soon reveals itself to be one big booby trap, a turnabout foreshadowed by the eerie sound, as they enter the garden, of “falling tears” that “comes from nowhere to the ears.” Great-Uncle Franz has the life wrung out of him by a constrictor; a carnivorous plant swallows an aunt feetfirst; “A hissing swarm of hairy bugs / Has got the baby and its rugs.” As night descends on the doomed family, Gorey brilliantly reverses his polarities, switching for the last two scenes from nearly all-white backgrounds with black accents to pitch-black backdrops with white elements floating here and there. The effect is that of a shivering minor chord, sustained by the orchestra’s string section, as the curtain falls.

  * * *

  Rounding out Gorey’s bibliography for 1966 was The Gilded Bat, a gothic valentine to the Diaghilev era, when the Romantic ballet of the nineteenth century was giving way to the modernism pioneered by choreographers such as Balanchine. It’s also an affectionately humorous tribute to Gorey’s first, unforgettable encounter with the ballet, in January of 1940, when he saw the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre.

  Drawn in a fine-grained, almost pointillist style, The Gilded Bat begins in the Edwardian era and ends in the ’20s, paralleling the life span of the Ballets Russes. Young Maudie Splaytoe’s ascent from toiling ballet student to anonymous trouper in the Ballet Hochepot’s corps de ballet to “the reigning ballerina of the age, and one of its symbols,” mirrors the rise of modernism, which Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes helped midwife.

  Simon and Schuster published The Gilded Bat in book form, but it had been serialized earlier that year in Ballet Review, whose readers had fun sleuthing out Gorey’s obscure references and inside jokes. Yet The Gilded Bat is more than Trivial Pursuit for balletomanes. As Selma G. Lanes points out in her essay “Edward Gorey’s Tantalizing Turns of the Screw,” “It is, at once, a work of grim satire and deep seriousness. Nowhere does Gorey’s melancholy grasp of the realities of the artist’s daily existence get hammered home more insistently.”30 The Gilded Bat counterpoints the gauzy fantasies the audience sees with the bleak reality of an artist’s life. We see Maud in her cheerless room, washing her leotards in the sink: “Her life went on being fairly tedious.” Even after she becomes “the reigning ballerina of the age,” her life is “really no different from what it had ever been”: we see her, alone as always, working out at the barre; she’s such a washed-out soul that she’s on the verge of disappearing into the enveloping gloom, a grayness created by a blizzard of minute pen strokes.

  It’s those innumerable dots and dashes, as much as the scene itself, that tell us something about the solitary, laborious hours Gorey invested in his art—at the expense, perhaps, of intimate relationships. When he shows us Maud monkishly devoted to her art, untouched by the passion seething all around her, it occurs to us that he’s confiding something about himself. (Most of that passion, intriguingly, is same-sex desire: Miss Marshgrass, the mannishly lesbian backer of Madame Trepidovska’s ballet school, becomes jealous of Madame’s attentions to Maud; in another scene, a pair of epicene, limp-wristed male dancers flirts backstage while Maud’s father looks on with distaste.)

  When Serge, a member of the company, develops “an unlikely infatuation with her”—the adverb is instructive—the disconcerted Maud has a heart-to-heart with the Hochepot’s manager, the Baron de Zabrus, who assures her that “only art [means] anything.” He echoes the thoughts of the Diaghilevian impresario Boris Lermontov in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ballet film The Red Shoes (1948), a movie Gorey would not have missed and that may well have influenced The Gilded Bat. Denouncing a ballerina “who is imbecile enough to get married,” Lermontov warns his protégée, the young ballerina Vicky, “You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer—never!” “That’s all very fine, Boris, very pure and fine, but you can’t alter human nature,” says the choreographer Ljubov. Lermontov replies, “No, I think you can do better than that—you can ignore it.”31

  That, in a nutshell, was the Gorey strategy for avoiding romantic distractions: ignore your nature, and it’ll go away. He saved his passion for his art and sublimated any desires he might have had into a kind of cultural eros—his love of books, his cinephilia, and most of all his balletomania. “It was to ballet that Edward Gorey gave, I think, most of his adult passion,” writes Alexander Theroux in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey.32 “He was capable of great adoration, truly Stendhalian in power, and over the years he was explicitly devoted to such great ballerinas as Patricia McBride, Maria Calegari…and…Diana Adams.”33

  The Gilded Bat is dedicated to Adams, one of Balanchine’s “muses” and Gorey’s “favorite dancer of all time.”34 She was “crystal clear, absolutely without mannerisms, and she had one of the most beautiful bodies I ever saw in a ballet dancer—flawless proportions, those ravishing legs,” he recalled. “If I had to name the single greatest performance I ever saw, I’d say it was Diana rehearsing Swan Lake. She had no make-up on and a ratty old whatever dancers rehearse in, and she was chewing gum, and she walked through half of it, but it suddenly had all the qualities…”

  Prima-ballerina worship, like its close cousin opera-diva adulation, is a gay cliché, like a fondness for show tunes or a fanatical devotion to Streisand. Peter Stoneley argues, in A Queer History of the Ballet, that gay men in the “mid-twentieth-century”—that is, pre-Stonewall—“tended to identify with [female] stars who gave ‘an excessive or parodic performance of femininity,’ such as Joan Crawford, Mae West, and Marlene Dietrich.”35 The cartoonish femininity of such stars was so obviously a put-on that rather than reinforcing gender norms, it undermined them by underscoring the point that femininity and masculinity are roles we perform, a kind of drag. In like fashion, ballet struck a subconscious chord with gay men because it, too, makes “visible an ‘excessive’ and obviously ‘worked’ version of gender,” Stoneley asserts, “whereby the woman produces, through much labor, an extreme version of lightness and delicacy.”

  Gorey’s passion for the ballet is too aesthetically complex, his appreciation of Balanchine’s genius and the artistry of dancers like Diana Adams too profound, to be squeezed into a queer-theory pigeonhole. Still, the gay veneration of prima ballerinas such as Dame Margot Fonteyn is so well established, and ballet’s association with gay culture such a commonplace, that ignoring those connections would amount to willful blindness. The Gilded Bat isn’t just a book about the ballet; it’s also a profoundly gay book about the ballet: slyly coded references to same-sex desire keep popping up, and Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes are central to the story. “In the decades following Diaghilev’s death, the legends of the Ballets Russes served as touchstones that revealed the presence of queerness,” Stoneley writes. “One need not admit one’s own sexual preferences, nor inquire into another person’s, when one could more cautiously discover a mutual enthusiasm for and knowledge of Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes.”36

  At the same time, Gorey’s balletomania was an aesthetic religion. “The more I go on, the more I feel Balanchine was the great, important figure in my life,” he told his friend Clifford Ross. “In what way?” Ross wanted to know. “Well, sort of like God,” said Gorey, in all seriousness.37 Both Christianity and the ballet are about transcendence: ascending to heaven, grand jetés, the Rapture, the Black Swan’s never-ending fouetté in Swan Lake. Both conjure visions of gravity defied, dreams of weightlessness that are really about a leap out of the mundane into the sublime.

  Gorey’s light touch and understated wit give The Gilded Bat a somber frivolity, but the image he leaves us with—Mirella’s gilded bat wings floating against the darkness—is truly affecting. “At the gala her costume was suspended from the centre of the stage while the music for her most famous variation was played in her memory.” (She’d met her end a pag
e earlier when “a great dark bird” flew into the propeller of her plane.) Gorey evokes one of the most poignant moments in ballet history: shortly after Pavlova died of pneumonia, having refused the surgery that might have saved her life but would have ended her career as a dancer, her company performed as scheduled, but her solo was danced by a spotlight on the empty stage.

  Ballet’s evanescent illusions of beauty and transcendence are purchased at the cost of isolation and the grinding monotony of practice, four or five hours a day, year in, year out—an ascetic regimen Gorey, who scratched away a good part of his life alone in little rooms, knew all too well. For some, though, “only art means anything.” Pavlova’s last words, according to legend, were “Get my ‘Swan’ costume ready.”38

  * * *

  In December of ’67, on the eve of her eightieth birthday, Frances Steloff sold the Gotham Book Mart to Andreas Brown. Anxious about what would happen to the legendary store when she went to the great remainder bin in the sky, her most devoted customers had urged her to appoint an heir. For $125,000, Brown got a renowned literary mecca, a stock of some five hundred thousand volumes, a fifth-floor walk-up above the shop, and Steloff as “consultant.” (She “fooled them all by living to be 101,” he later joked.)39 He must never think of himself as the Gotham’s owner, she gravely informed him, only its caretaker. Oh, and she would continue to reign supreme over the alcove where books on Eastern mysticism and New Age spirituality were shelved. And her overfed cats would still have the run of the store.

  Brown had made a name for himself in the book trade as an appraiser of rare books and manuscripts. En route to Europe from the West Coast in 1959, he’d made a pilgrimage to the shop. He was standing near the register when an assortment of diminutive volumes, priced from fifty cents to a buck, caught his eye. Intrigued, he had a half dozen or so of the “funny little books” shipped to his home, in San Francisco. “Well, when I got home from Europe and I read them, I said, ‘We’ve got another extraordinary human being that’s doing something no one’s ever done before,’” he recalled decades later.40

  Frances Steloff and Andreas Brown in the Gotham Book Mart, 1975. (Photograph by Larry C. Morris. Used by permission of Larry C. Morris/The New York Times/Redux.)

  Soon after moving to Manhattan to oversee the running of the Gotham, he met Gorey, a frequent visitor to the store. “When I told him how much I admired his work, he got a little nervous,” Brown remembered. “He was a little shy about that kind of thing.”41

  Under Brown’s guidance, the Gotham promoted new waves of literary avant-gardists while staying true to the modernist icons in Steloff’s personal pantheon. As the Gotham’s sales of Gorey’s deliciously “biscuity” little books (Theroux) outstripped those of any other store, Gorey’s relationship with the Gotham’s new owner deepened.42 In 1970, the Gotham brought out The Sopping Thursday under its own imprint. It was the first of eight Gorey titles Brown would publish. Publishing Gorey meant that the store had ready access to first editions of those titles, which would in time command stratospheric sums among collectors. Shrewdly, Brown double-dipped, wooing collectors with pricey limited editions, signed and numbered, then striking a deal with a corporate publisher to produce a more affordable version for the trade market. To promote the release of The Sopping Thursday, he mounted an exhibition of Gorey originals in the Gotham’s upstairs gallery, initiating what would become an annual trend.

  Ahead of the marketing curve, he had the bright idea of launching a line of merchandise. In ’77, the Gotham began selling Gorey-branded products, an ever-expanding category that at one time or another included Gorey bookmarks, Gorey calendars, Gorey posters, Gorey postcards, Gorey stationery, Gorey mugs, Gorey stickers, rubber stamps of Gorey illustrations, beanbag dolls of Gorey characters, Doubtful Guest pins (and other “high quality Gorey sterling silver jewelry items”), Gashlycrumb Tinies watches, “small plush cats in Gorey striped sweaters (by Gund),” and on and on.43

  Thus was Gorey turned into a “cottage industry,” as the man himself put it with his usual good-natured resignation.44 In a 1986 interview, he was less flippant, admitting, “Frankly, I’d be lost without the Gotham Book Mart. I feel my reputation to date depends to such a great extent on them.”45

  Brown’s masterstroke was the Amphigoreys, a series of anthologies that brought Gorey’s out-of-print titles back into print. Noting that most of Gorey’s little books were scarcer than unicorn horns, Brown negotiated a deal with the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons to reprint fifteen of them in omnibus form. Published in ’72, Amphigorey was the first of three such collections produced in Gorey’s lifetime. (The others were Amphigorey Too in ’75 and Amphigorey Also in ’83. A fourth, Amphigorey Again, was published posthumously, in 2006.) It was a smashing success and did much to make him an unmissable landmark on the literary map.

  a Renamed in 2008, the New York State Theater is now the David H. Koch Theater, after the philanthropist and archconservative political donor—a name many New Yorkers of the liberal persuasion refuse to use.

  b David Hough, who as the production director for adult books at Harcourt Brace and Company worked with Gorey on The Haunted Tea-Cosy and The Headless Bust, offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at just how attentive Gorey was to every detail of the production of his books. “Edward understood and was meticulous about the production of his books (the paper, the binding, the trim size, the printing),” Hough told me in a September 6, 2012, e-mail. “Edward’s art boards were meticulous. There was only a rare boo-boo that he had to correct. He certainly didn’t need editing—though I remember a bit of ruckus over that hyphen in The Haunted Tea-Cosy. His art came self-contained and perfect.…I think people should be reminded that he was a meticulous and hardworking craftsman as well as an artist of genius.”

  c The Fantod Pack has been published as an actual pack of cards in various versions. It first appeared in 1969, in pirated form, as a cheaply produced deck released by the Owl Press. In 1995, the Gotham Book Mart published a quality edition. The most recent version is the laminated, crisply printed set produced by Pomegranate in 2007.

  d Really, the Comte de Lautréamont’s line, since Ducasse wrote his 1868 protosurrealist novel under that pen name.

  Chapter 11

  Mail Bonding—Collaborations

  1967–72

  Gorey and Peter Neumeyer on the buoy in Barnstable Harbor, sometime between September ’68 and October ’69. (Photograph by Harry Stanton. Used by permission of Peter Neumeyer. This photograph first appeared in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter Neumeyer, Pomegranate, 2011.)

  NURTURED BY BROWN’S TIRELESS PROMOTION, the Gorey cult grew steadily in the ’60s and ’70s. His little books helped spread the gospel, as did his freelance illustrations, which never stopped rolling off his one-man assembly line. In 1967 alone, while teaching “Children’s Picture Books” at the School of Visual Arts, he turned out covers and interior illustrations for The Christmas Bower by Polly Redford, an anticonsumerism parable that required a flock of exotic birds, handled with painstaking ornithological exactitude; Son of the Martini Cookbook by Jane Trahey and Daren Pierce, a boozy humor title that found the usual Gorey characters getting blotto at chic ’60s cocktail parties; and Brer Rabbit and His Tricks, Ennis Rees’s retelling of the classic folktales accompanied by Gorey drawings done with an uncharacteristically frisky line and fleshed out, in watercolor, with an equally out-of-character palette of goldenrod and terra-cotta.

  That year Gorey published just one title of his own, The Utter Zoo. The third of his five abecedaria, it is a descendant of the medieval bestiary (fantastical compendia of beasts—real, rumored, and mythological—that crossed natural history with Christian allegory). As well, it owes a debt to poetic bestiaries such as Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, Lear’s alphabet books, and maybe even Dr. Seuss’s zany If I Ran the Zoo (1950), with its Tizzle-Topped Tufted Mazurkas and Wild Bippo-No-Bunguses.

  There ar
e parallels to modern art, too: looked at from the right angle, Gorey’s arrangements of spiderwebby line, white space, and stippled or crosshatched solids are reminiscent of abstract compositions by Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. If the comparison seems strained, consider this aperçu from a review of Amphigorey: “Developmentally, Gorey has been moving away from the more overt (though not unsubtle) humor of the first book collected here, The Unstrung Harp, toward the sort of white-on-white, black-on-black statements of minimal art.”1

  As for the text, The Utter Zoo is wordplay for wordplay’s sake at its whimsical best. We meet all manner of Goreyesque beasts whose names roll around on the tongue as satisfyingly as gobstoppers: the fitful Epitwee; the Ippagoggy, which subsists on paste and glue; the Yawfle, a heap of hair with beady eyes that stares unblinkingly at nothing.a

  Beneath the Learian nonsense, there’s a psychological subtext to The Utter Zoo. Many of the chimerical creatures share personality traits with the author: some are shy and reclusive (“The Boggerslosh conceals itself / In back of bottles on a shelf”; the Dawbis “shuns the gaze of passers-by”); some face the world with the same inscrutable affect Gorey wore in journalistic photos (“The Fidknop is devoid of feeling”; the Mork has “no expression on its face”); some stuff their homes full of hoarded curios (“The Gawdge is understood to save / All sorts of objects in its cave”). One, the euphoniously named Ombledroom, sports a Goreyesque earring in one ear and is “vast and…visible by night,” like our large, attention-getting friend in fur coat and Keds at ballet intermissions. Most affecting of all is the Zote, the only one of its kind, as Gorey surely was. And then there’s the title, with its echoes of “too utterly utter,” the phrase used to mock Wildean aesthetes; it makes us wonder if this book about weird beings is also about those who see themselves as Other.