by Mark Dery
Fascinatingly, Gorey wrote a review that same year, for the Chicago Tribune, of a book called Animal Gardens, Emily Hahn’s study of the cultural politics of zoos. The only book review he ever published, it offers convincing evidence that he would have made an able critic if he’d turned his hand to reviewing books instead of writing them. His review goes straight to the heart of the matter: animal rights. Zoos, he argues, are a cruel kindness. Boredom takes its toll on wild things in captivity; forcing them to perform makes them anxious; permitting the public to feed them can be fatal, since, “innocently or not,” animals are sometimes poisoned.2 Yet for all their faults, zoos may be many species’ last, best hope for survival, Gorey concedes. “Human greed, cruelty and stupidity have wiped out numerous species in the past,” he writes. “As the world’s human population grows, more and more of the animals’ natural habitats will be polluted and destroyed, and they will be able to survive only in zoos.”3
The idea of animal rights wouldn’t enter the public conversation until 1975, when the philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. Well in advance of social trends, Gorey reveals a deep sympathy for nonhuman beings.
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Actually, Gorey did produce another book in ’67, though it was a collaborative effort. Published, like The Utter Zoo, by Meredith Press, Fletcher and Zenobia was Gorey’s rewrite of a story by the illustrator Victoria Chess. She “had written a version expressly so that she could illustrate it,” Gorey recalled. The publisher “loved the drawings but felt the text was unsatisfactory. So they asked me to write her a text. I kept the plot but transformed Zenobia from a human being into a doll. It was too spooky having a real live person hatched from an egg.”4
Fletcher and Zenobia is the magical-realist tale of a cat named Fletcher who finds himself stranded in a skyscrapingly tall tree, which he’d scrambled up “in a moment of thoughtless abandon.”5 (A very Gorey phrase.) A quirky, headstrong antique doll named Zenobia hatches out of a papier-mâché egg, they dance the night away in the treetops, and the two friends fly away “to the great world” astride a giant moth. Mirroring Chess’s art, with its riotous detail and eye-popping palette, Gorey’s text is richly descriptive, almost hallucinatory in its supersaturated colors and gustatory delights: “Zenobia had baked a lemon cake with five layers, which she covered with raspberry icing and walnuts and decorated with green and blue candles.”
With its lyrical, dreamy air, the book is unlike anything in Gorey’s oeuvre, not only because it, like its 1971 sequel, Fletcher and Zenobia Save the Circus, was illustrated by another artist but also because the narrative scaffolding isn’t his. Still, his voice seeps into the story. When we hear echoes of an unhappy childhood—Zenobia was traumatized by her former owner, “an unfeeling child” named Mabel, who, “you will not be surprised to learn[,]…had fat wrists”—we know we’re hearing Gorey.
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“On the whole, I enjoy collaborating with people,” Gorey told an interviewer who asked about the Fletcher and Zenobia books. “They usually produce the text, and I do the drawings without consulting them.”6
In the summer of ’68, he met the collaborator of a lifetime, Peter Neumeyer, with whom he would consult—intensely. The two men crammed the creation of three children’s books into thirteen months, from September ’68 to October ’69: Donald and the…, Donald Has a Difficulty, and Why We Have Day and Night (published, respectively, in 1969, ’70, and ’70 by Addison-Wesley, Gorey’s own Fantod Press, and Young Scott Books). Gorey found Neumeyer more congenial to his mind than anyone he’d ever met; an intellectual intimacy sprang up between the two almost instantly, fueled by postcards and letters that flew thick and fast.b
Neumeyer, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was writing a textbook for freshman English classes. Harry Stanton, his editor at Addison-Wesley, visited him at home to discuss the book. Returning from the kitchen with glasses of bourbon, Neumeyer found Stanton brandishing a spiral-bound watercolor pad he’d noticed on his desk. “Peter, forget about the textbook. Let’s do children’s books.”7
The pad in Stanton’s hand was a picture book Neumeyer had written and illustrated to amuse his three young sons: Donald and the…, a deadpan account of a little boy captivated by a white worm that turns out to be a maggot, which metamorphoses, as maggots will, into a housefly with “beautiful luminous wings.”8 Not exactly your average bedtime story, but Stanton’s superiors signed off on the idea, with the caveat that Neumeyer’s amateur watercolors should be replaced by the work of a professional illustrator. Someone recalled Gorey’s unforgettable covers for Anchor, and the deal was done.
Stanton thought writer and illustrator should meet, so he took them sailing on the Cape, off Barnstable, in his little boat. “For the most part, Ted and I sat stone-cold silent, bow and stern, stumped for easy banter,” Neumeyer recalled.9 He broke the ice—inadvertently—by dislocating Gorey’s shoulder. They were stepping off the dinghy onto the pier when the boat shot out from under Gorey and Neumeyer grabbed him, saving him from a dunk in the bay but leaving him with “his left shoulder protruding from his back like the broken wing of a bird.” Waiting in the emergency room at the Hyannis hospital, they struck up a lively conversation over the first drafts of Gorey’s illustrations, which Stanton happened to have in his car. That conversation lasted thirteen months.
Neumeyer, who had a PhD in English, was widely and deeply read but wore his learning lightly. (Donald and the…was inspired partly by John Clare’s benign tolerance of flies, which the eighteenth-century writer regarded as “the small or dwarfish portion of our own family,” and partly by Uncle Toby in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, who shoos a fly out a window with the benediction, “Go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”)10 Intellectually curious, with a discursive style of mind, he was the perfect dance partner for Gorey. Their two-hundred-something-page correspondence—seventy-five letters and more than sixty postcards, stretching over thirteen months—records “the rapid growth of a deep and mutual friendship,” says Neumeyer.11 As well, it chronicles a collaboration of uncommon inventiveness kindled by a shared delight in each other’s wide-ranging, playful intellects. Gorey’s exuberance expressed itself not only in lengthy missives but also in charmingly illustrated envelopes—works of art in which finely drawn, delicately painted bats, slugs, and lizardlike creatures disport themselves, clutching banners emblazoned with Neumeyer’s Medford, Massachusetts, address.
The letters double back, always, to the books they’re working on, punctuated, for comic relief, by mutual expressions of annoyance at the vexations of their editor, Harry Stanton. (His “fatal defect,” Gorey thought, was his “mad urge to think all the time, and roll things around in his mind, until they disintegrate into crumbs.”)12 But their intellectual curiosity—the joy of poking around in the magpie nests of each other’s minds—leads them, inevitably, down fascinating conversational byways, such as their shared fondness for Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk, an eccentric omnium-gatherum about everything and nothing by the seventeenth-century English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne.
Gorey treats his letters as comic monologues, diary entries, philosophical dialogues, commonplace books. He’s frequently funny: “It slipped my mind, the surface of which is notoriously smooth and unmarked, like a blancmange.”13 But prone to the blues: “Early or rather earlier in the day I was feeling madly euphoric with the absolutely splendid futility of everything, but now I am depressed, and want to have a good cry. Perhaps I am hungry.”14 Angst is his constant companion: “I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.”15 Yet he manages to take “life in stride and with good cheer,” in Neumeyer’s words.16 He has a surrealist’s eye f
or the strangeness of the everyday: “When you see a glove lying in the street do you think that, somewhere, someone has lost a hand?”17 And the weirdness of the body, regarded with an alienated eye: “But is one familiar with one’s thumbs? I mean if one were suddenly confronted with them, detached as it were, would one recognize them? In looking at my own, they do not somehow seem terribly identifiable.”18
He’s deeply moved by art and literature and has the analytical powers of a gifted critic. An exhibition of Francis Bacon’s work leaves him “swooning at the sheer beauty of the painting in them,” so much so that he can imagine “being able to live with the triptych where something horrid has taken place in the middle panel; all that gore and even the zipper on the bag are superbly painted.”19 He abhors the “ghastly self-indulgence” and “slimy soul-searching” of The Catcher in the Rye but is powerfully affected by the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, perhaps too much so: “I must say the more doom-and-gloom ones strike all too many chords in my tiny head, and I get overcome.”20
One of the biggest revelations in the Gorey-Neumeyer letters is what Gorey called “E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art,” as revealing a statement of his aesthetic philosophy as we’re ever going to get.21 Simply put, it’s “the theory…that anything that is art…is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”22 Then, too, things “that on the surface…are so obviously” about one thing make it “very difficult to see that they are really about something else entirely.”23 He finds a helpful passage in an anthology of Japanese court poetry, “something to the effect that there must be a something which is above and beyond…what the poem says and the words that say it if the poem is to be a good one…”24
E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art isn’t so simple. It owes something to his Taoist rejection of the either/or epistemology of Western philosophy. And to his Derridean-Beckettian awareness of the limits of language. And to his Asian-Barthesian belief in the importance of ambiguity and paradox as spaces where readers can play with a text, making their own meanings. And to his surrealist sense that “there is another world, but it is in this one” (Paul Éluard). Yet above and beyond all that, there’s still something mysterious in his Great Simple Theory, an elusive idea or maybe just an inexpressible quality that’s more than the sum of these philosophical parts. In a postcard to Neumeyer, Gorey quotes Plato’s Gorgias: “There is no truth; if there were, it could not be known; if known, it could not be communicated.”25
Another striking thing about the Gorey we meet in the Neumeyer letters is just how deeply, searchingly spiritual and metaphysical he is. He quotes from the philosopher George Santayana and the Bhagavad Gita; is thoughtful about Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose writings on Eastern religion and philosophy were popular in the ’60s; and tells a lovely story about kite flying that perfectly captures the dogma-free lightness of his thought:
And then today, when the wind was more fitful, at the risk of sounding remarkably silly, though I don’t think to you, the kite at the end of the string was all sorts of things: a marvelous metaphor (not the right word but…) for art (?) in that from the movements of the visible object one can deduce the invisible ones of the wind, a remark that could hardly be phrased less elegantly; then obviously, but nonetheless touchingly on that account I felt, the kite as a bird, and from that the bird as a soul…with confused bits of the Chuang-Tzu/butterfly notion,c to the point of wondering who is the flyer, who the flown (dear me, I am getting tackier and tackier in my expression).26
Most startling of all, the Gorey of the Neumeyer letters is acutely self-analytical and, at times, nakedly vulnerable. “Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person,” he confides.27 (Why, he doesn’t say.) This is a Gorey we’ve barely glimpsed until now—except in a few of the Lurie letters, and then only through the veil of the ironic, Wildean persona he often affected.
The Gorey-Neumeyer friendship was one of almost telepathic creative rapport and, atypically for men of that era, emotional openness. Of the two men, Gorey emerges as the more confessional—a shockingly out-of-character turn for someone who describes himself in one letter as one of those “emotionally impoverished types.”28 In another, he admits, “I find any direct expression of my feelings not difficult, but impossible, so you will have to know without one [that] they are about our having met and our working together now and in the future.”29 Of course what he did right there was express his feelings by leaving blanks for Neumeyer to fill in. Soon enough, though, he drops his guard, confiding, “You know far more about me than anyone else in the world,” and adding elsewhere, “I guess that even more than I think of you as a friend, I think of you as my brother.”30
As for Neumeyer, he was “too congested in spirit,” he confessed, “to answer with the freeness” Gorey’s profession of “kinship” required, but he assured his friend, “Your existence has made something of this world that [it] hadn’t the possibility of before.”31 Decades later, he was less reserved, freely admitting in a 2010 interview that his friendship with Gorey “was irreplaceable, in my estimation, and was very warm and very loving, and will always mean a great deal to me.”32
For a little over a year, the two men inhabited a bubble of reciprocal inspiration—the shared consciousness of creative collaborators that the novelist William S. Burroughs and the painter Brion Gysin called “the third mind.”33 Gorey is convinced that “us is more exciting and worthwhile than anything I might be doing on my own.”34 In a later letter, he says, “I can’t think of a word to identify what we seem to have spontaneously created between us; the temptation to visualize a creepy but lovable monster must be resisted.”35
In the end, it couldn’t be resisted: as the friendship deepens, a mythical beast called the Stoej-gnpf takes center stage in Gorey’s envelope art. It’s a close relative of the creature from The Nursery Frieze. Hippo-shaped yet sleekly froglike in its more acrobatic moments, with a black pelt and the usual beady Gorey eyes, it lumbers along on all fours or swings from a trapeze or scoots along on roller skates or gazes dolefully, like Hamlet, at a skull. The name is an anagram of the two men’s initials (Edward St. John Gorey and Peter Florian Olivier Neumeyer), and, as its name suggests, the creature is a totem—the droll embodiment of a rare friendship, sometimes moody, often high-spirited, always mysterious. It puts a “creepy but lovable” face on their shared creative unconscious.
For those with a tendency toward shyness or reserve, the epistolary form can be liberating. Letter writing, with its combination of distance and intimacy, the solitary and the social, had a disinhibiting effect on Gorey, eliciting analyses of himself and his art that cut far closer to the bone than anything he said in his interviews. He confides his anxieties, his insecurities, his enduring passions, his everyday pleasures, his philosophies of life and art. And he does so in a way that suggests another, truer Ted behind the Wildean aesthete, the eccentric litterateur, the Puckish observer of the human comedy. Is this the Real Gorey? Or just one more aspect of a man who contained multitudes?
“Much of what I know of Ted, I learned from these letters,” says Neumeyer. “However, to suggest that Gorey ‘revealed’ his inner self in these letters would be an overstatement. Just who Edward Gorey’s inner self might have been remains highly conjectural.”36 He wonders if even the man himself unriddled that riddle. “Quotidian ‘reality’ was problematic for Ted,” he notes, “so he was not entirely joking when he signed one letter ‘Ted (I think)’ and wrote in another, ‘There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe I do.’” Neumeyer, for his part, “never doubted Ted’s presence.”37 Reading Gorey’s letters forty-plus years later brings back “his generosity, his humor, and—yes—his genius.” Brief though it was, the
ir friendship ran deep, he believes. “I still insist that we each found the other necessary, and we each spoke as true to his own heart as he was able at the time.”38
“After little more than a year, the correspondence dwindled as abruptly as it began,” Neumeyer recalls.39 Perhaps they simply couldn’t sustain the pace and intensity of their correspondence. Gorey was overwhelmed by his many freelance-illustration deadlines; Neumeyer had taken a job at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and was juggling family responsibilities and a heavy course load. Whatever the reason, the two men drifted apart. “We talked by phone, but then after a time, we completely lost touch,” remembers Neumeyer, who was eighty-seven at the time of this writing. “I’m sorry about that. Was then; am now. I truly can’t assign or even guess at a ‘reason.’ Some things appear without reason, and that’s how it went.”40
Just as suddenly as it had appeared on that late-summer day in 1968, the Stoej-gnpf vanished, as rare things will.
* * *
The books that came out of the Gorey-Neumeyer collaboration have an indescribable something about them—a whiff of metaphysical mystery, maybe—despite story lines that seem almost nonexistent if you synopsize them: Donald befriends a “white worm” that turns out to be a fly larva; Donald gets a splinter in his calf, and his mother removes it; four kids grope around in the dark, wondering why night falls, until their big brother explains it to them.
Still, there’s an enchanting oddness to the books that derives, in large part, from the fact that they’re children’s books by two men who weren’t entirely sure what a children’s book was and didn’t much care. “I truly can’t recall Ted ever once having used the word ‘child,’” Neumeyer recalled, “let alone the words ‘children’s book.’…Of all the people I’ve known, nobody has been less interested in children.…[H]e didn’t talk or think about ‘creating books for children,’ as I recall.”41
