Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Gorey’s illustrations for Heide’s books are virtuoso improvisations on the theme of pattern on pattern. In one eye-jangling scene in Treehorn’s Wish, Gorey plays syncopated visual rhythms on the competing plaids of the kitchen tablecloth and Dad’s slacks and jacket, Treehorn’s pin-striped pants and rugby shirt, Mom’s argyle skirt, the parallel lines of the spindles in the chair backs, and the carpet’s mod, orb-weaver-on-LSD motif.

  Treehorn’s Wish. (Holiday House, 1984)

  Speaking of mod, Gorey is at ease in Treehorn’s swinging ’70s in a way that he wasn’t in He Was There from the Day We Moved In. Jarring as it is to see Gorey characters in go-go boots and flares, he’s clearly having fun with the contemporary fashion and decor. When Treehorn’s teacher sends him to the principal, we note the mass-produced abstract painting near the secretary’s desk, a black curlicue on a white background. Naturally, the principal, a strenuously groovy dude in a double-breasted suit who spouts power-of-positive-thinking platitudes, has a bigger painting of a bigger black curlicue on his office wall.

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  With its mod ascots, TVs (TVs! In a Gorey drawing!), and suit-coat lapels so wide they could double as ailerons, The Shrinking of Treehorn reminds us, with a jolt, that outside the bell-jar world where Gorey lived most of his imaginative life, the ’70s were in full swing.

  In New York City, that meant white flight, rising crime, urban decay, and a budget crisis that in 1975 would push the city to the brink of bankruptcy. New York in the ’70s meant open-air drug bazaars; subway cars whose interiors were tattooed, floor to ceiling, with graffiti; backstreets riddled with abandoned cars, their carcasses picked clean and left to rust. It meant walking down the middle of the street because you didn’t want to make it easy for the muggers lurking in doorways. If you were female, it meant asking cabbies to wait until you were safely inside your apartment building, even if it was only a fifteen-foot walk from the curb. The heroin trade flourished. Sanitation strikes made the city an all-you-can-eat buffet for vermin. “In the 1970s New York was so shoddy, so dangerous, so black and Puerto Rican, that the rest of white America pulled up its skirts and ran off in the opposite direction,” says Edmund White in City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s.67

  Which was just fine by the aspiring Jackson Pollocks, wannabe Lou Reeds, William S. Burroughs epigones, freaks, gays, and hustlers who had moved to the city to get away from Middle America. Rents were low, especially in the disused industrial lofts of SoHo—an essential prerequisite for a thriving bohemia. And thrive it did, giving rise to the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, the performance art showcased at the Kitchen, the experimental theater staged at La MaMa, the underground movies shown at art houses such as the Thalia, the emerging punk scene at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, and the hip-hop culture taking root in the South Bronx.

  Gay New York was flourishing, too. Having burst out of the closet in ’69 with the Stonewall riots and successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in ’73, gays exulted in their newfound pride and sense of community at Christopher Street bars, on the dance floor at Studio 54, and, more covertly, in leather bars, bathhouses, and the derelict, decaying West Side Piers. David Bowie, bisexual chic, Cabaret (1972), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), disco, the Village People, and The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), coauthored by White, helped hoist queer culture into mainstream visibility (if not acceptance, as Anita Bryant’s antigay Save Our Children campaign made clear). At last, the young gay men who came of age in the ’70s, and who had spent their childhoods in the shadow of the Lavender Scare, being bullied on schoolyards and reviled in the media, were free to be out and proud.

  Did Gorey, who had made the rounds on the Third Avenue bird circuit and visited the odd gay bar in the Village in the early ’50s, ever wander down to Christopher Street? It’s hard to imagine him in the louche milieu of the Stonewall Inn. Although TV would later initiate him into the delights of disposable culture, Gorey was resolutely a creature of high culture in his New York years, steeped in Balanchine’s ballets, silent movies, nineteenth-century novels, and his own Victorian-Edwardian, gothic-surrealist fantasies. He moved, wraithlike, through the ’70s as he had the ’60s, seemingly untouched by the social turbulence and cultural frisson of the times. Vietnam, Kent State, Stonewall, Watergate, gay lib, disco, feminism, Son of Sam, the New York Dolls, punk rock, the black and Latino culture all around him in New York: none of these pivotal events, social phenomena, or tabloid names receives so much as a mention in any of Gorey’s letters or interviews.68 As always, he went his own catlike way, unperturbed by current events, impervious to prevailing attitudes. (He did, however, get both his ears pierced in ’77 or thereabouts—a daring move made possible by the mainstreaming of gay fashion statements, although even gay men drew the line at one pierced ear. “I’ve been meaning to do it for about 25 years and never got up the nerve till now,” he told an interviewer from People magazine.)69

  There are a few sidelong glances at the ’70s—specifically, the gay culture of the era—in Gorey’s work from that time. National Lampoon, the wildly irreverent humor magazine dedicated to the principle that nothing is sacred, let Gorey run long on his tether; he exercised his editorial freedom by submitting out-of-character cartoons like the gags published under the title “The Happy Ending” in the magazine’s March 1973 issue. Two of the twelve single-panel cartoons are gay-themed; neither, curiously, was chosen for inclusion in the Amphigorey collections.

  One shows a long-haired, epicene young man with bedroom eyes standing behind a mailbox; he’s getting the eyeball from a foppish older gent with a man purse slung over his shoulder. “New York at last,” the caption reads, “with a face that made long-distance trucks grind to a screaming halt, and what had been, until forty-three hours ago, the biggest basket in North Dakota.” The slang and insider references require some unpacking: “long-distance trucks” may be a winking reference to “the trucks,” as they were known—the big rigs parked under the elevated highway on the city’s West Side. Before AIDS swung its scythe, gay men would meet for anonymous sex in the dark, cavernous interiors of the Mack trucks’ unlocked trailers. As for “the biggest basket in North Dakota,” a “basket,” in the gay slang of the day, was a man’s genitalia, clearly outlined in tight-fitting pants. The well-endowed young hustler may have been the pride of North Dakota, Gorey suggests, but he’s got plenty of competition in the Big Apple. It’s amazingly knowing stuff for a man who gave—or appeared to give—the gay lifestyle a wide berth.

  Gorey’s work intersected with the gay underground of the ’70s more dramatically in The Story of Harold (1975), for which he provided the cover and six interior illustrations. A novel of “sadism and bisexuality, tenderness and human love” (in the words of its cover blurb), it’s by “the famous children’s book author you all know,” Terry Andrews. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s because “Terry Andrews” was really George Selden, author of the much-loved children’s classic The Cricket in Times Square. The novel is a semiautobiographical account of Andrews’s bouts of S&M sex with a married man, his bizarre liaisons with a masochist, and his friendship with an emotionally disturbed little boy.

  Edmund White believes Harold is “the earliest document that renders the feel of Downtown Village gay life in the 1970s—the mix of high culture and perverse sex, the sudden transformation, say, from a night at the opera to an early morning at the baths,” shot through with “the Sade-like conviction that sexual urges are to be elaborated rather than psychoanalyzed…”70

  What Gorey made of a novel whose narrator rhapsodizes about the delights of fisting (inserting his fist up his partner’s anus), rimming (tonguing someone’s anus), and the “endless love-making” that turns him into a “phallic Frankenstein…pure cock from head to toe,” we’ll never know.71 At a cursory glance, his illustrations look innocuous; they seem to sidestep the book’s X-rated passages,
focusing entirely on the harmless antics of the little boy, whom Gorey depicts as a pint-size Edwardian gentleman, derby, waistcoat, and all. Look closer, though, and you’ll see Gorey’s salacious sight gags everywhere: in the phalluses hiding in the decorative motif garlanding the planter beside Harold (not to mention the tubes of K-Y Jelly on the nearby coffee table) to the minuscule but still unmistakable penises lurking in the crown molding in another illustration to the nudge, nudge-wink, wink resemblance, in a scene set in a gym, of the free weights to upthrusting members with bulging testicles. The cultural historian M. G. Lord, who was friends with Selden, says the author got a kick out of spotting the hidden penises in Gorey’s illustrations. “To him,” she says, “they were like the ‘Nina’s in a Hirschfeld.”72

  It’s interesting to note that the man who once claimed to “blush crimson at the other end of the phone” when people who’d read The Curious Sofa tried to inveigle him into illustrating pornographic novels had no qualms, when a gay publisher approached him about reprinting The Story of Harold, about being associated with the book.73

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  Gorey’s career gathered speed in ’72 with the release of Amphigorey. The collection was one of Andreas Brown’s brainstorms. He’d been plying William Targ, an editor at Putnam, with first editions of Gorey titles in a scheme to “get him hooked,” he later admitted.74 Reeling in his catch, Brown proposed an anthology of Gorey’s increasingly scarce little books, whetting the editor’s appetite with talk of windfall profits. Seduced, Targ offered Gorey a $5,000 advance, and the deal was done. Amphigorey “grew out of a genuine need,” Brown recalled in 2003. “His audience, primarily, back in the ’60s and ’70s, was young people, college and university students, and as his early books became rarer and rarer—they would sell for 50 or a hundred dollars apiece, even then—the students simply couldn’t afford them. So I went to Edward, very cautiously, and explained [that the anthology Brown had in mind] would make all these books more readily available to his younger clientele.”75 It took all his wiles to convince Gorey, who was allergic to self-promotion, that an affordable omnibus of his hard-to-find books would be a gift to his growing fandom, not to mention rocket fuel for his career.j

  Once convinced, however, Gorey took the bit in his mouth, designing every aspect of the book, from its hand-lettered text (including the copyright page) to its layout to its whimsical covers, where fat, sassy Gorey cats gambol in, on, under, and around the letters of the title (a pun, by the way, on amphigory, a piece of nonsense writing, typically in verse). Out in time for the Christmas season, the book was a runaway success. The New York Times chose it as one of the year’s five noteworthy art books, hailing “the macabre drolleries of one of the finest illustrators around,” and the American Institute of Graphic Arts designated it one of the year’s fifty best-designed volumes.76 By the following October, the book had sold forty thousand copies, “largely through college bookstores,” the New York Times reported, and had “just gone back to press for 50,000 more.”77 “It looks as if the Gorey cult might soon become a small mob,” the Times writer thought. By ’75, the book was in its eighth printing.

  “The book has never gone out of print since 1972,” says Brown. “I imagine there are a quarter of a million copies that have been put into print, maybe more, and it dramatically changed Edward’s life in the sense that, for the first time, the mainstream retail book industry carried Edward Gorey in their stores. They were no longer these peculiar…little books that didn’t fit on the regular shelf and you didn’t know whether to put it in the children’s department or adult literature or humor.”78 In Brown’s educated guess, “millions became addicted as a result of that book.”

  a Gorey’s whimsical, often comic-grotesque names, most of them preposterously British-sounding, owe an obvious debt to Lear. But do they also take a page from Dickens, the unchallenged master of allegorical, allusive, and deliciously onomatopoetic names? Gorey liked the darker Dickens—Our Mutual Friend (“because it’s so scary”), Bleak House, Great Expectations (“with Miss Havisham brooding in the cobwebbed room”)—and must have savored names like Melvin Twemlow (Our Mutual Friend), Woolwich Bagnet (Bleak House), and Uncle Pumblechook (Great Expectations). (See Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin [New York: Harcourt, 2001], 83.) It’s interesting to note, in light of Gorey’s fondness for Victorian epitaphs, that Dickens, who shared Gorey’s habit of strolling in graveyards, wasn’t above borrowing a juicy name from a headstone.

  b Edited by Neumeyer and published by Pomegranate in 2011, their correspondence is collected in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer.

  c Chuang Tzu was a Taoist sage who lived circa 399–295 BCE. Gorey is referring to his famous philosophical tale of waking after dreaming he was a butterfly only to wonder if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

  d Tenkoku seals, hand-carved stone seals inscribed with pictographs representing the user’s identity, are a time-honored tradition in Japan.

  e The flap copy for the 1968 Young Scott edition of The Jumblies quotes Gorey: “‘The Jumblies’…was taught to me by my grandfather when I was four or five, and it has always been one of my favorites.”

  f Fascinatingly, Gorey’s rendering of the “grey hotel” on the book’s first page bears a strong resemblance to the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane, in Kankakee, Illinois, as it appears in postcard photos circa 1906–9, when Gorey’s grandmother Mary Garvey was institutionalized there.

  g The book is dedicated, interestingly, “to the memory of Helen St. John Garvey”—the great-grandmother (1834–1907) from whom he got his artistic talent, according to family lore. She specialized in landscapes.

  h Though he appears to have mentioned her in only one interview, the legendary—and legendarily hard-driving—Candida Donadio of Donadio & Olson was from around 1961 on Gorey’s literary agent. Known as a tough negotiator with a keen eye for literary game-changers, Donadio sold Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. Her client roster included those authors as well as Thomas Pynchon, Nelson Algren, John Cheever, Jessica Mitford, and Mario Puzo, among other marquee names. In the 1991 article in which Gorey mentions Donadio, the author ticks off the other professional relationships in Gorey’s life: “For almost thirty years, he has had the same editor (Peter Weed [at various publishing houses, it bears noting]), the same agent (Canada [sic] Donadio), the same artist’s rep (John Locke), and for over twenty years, ever since Andreas Brown acquired the Gotham Book Mart, the same co-publisher and gallery.…Clifford Ross…handles Gorey’s film, television, and subsidiary rights.” Cliff Henderson, “E Is for Edward Who Draws in His Room,” Arts and Entertainment, October 1991, 20.

  i What are we to make of the fact that The Loathsome Couple is also Gorey’s only romance novel, a tale of star-crossed lovers? The term lover probably overstates the case; Harold and Mona meet at “a Self-Institute lecture on the Evils of the Decimal System,” where they “immediately [recognize] their affinity.” Their bond, as with many partners in serial murder, is an unwholesome symbiosis that has little to do with genuine affection. Still, it’s the only Gorey story with an adult relationship at the center of it, and, as with his own short-lived affairs, it’s a dismal failure.

  j Interviewed for a Gorey profile in the British newspaper the Independent, Brown talked about Gorey’s resistance to the Amphigorey format. “Edward’s concern was that in making an anthology, the little books would be transposed into a larger format, putting several pictures on a page. And that would destroy the rhythm—which he’d very carefully constructed—of moving through the story, page by page, frame by frame, caption by caption, so it was almost like looking at a silent film. Well, we finally persuaded him, much against his better judgment…” See Philip Glassborow and Susan Ragan, “A Life in Full: All the Gorey Details,” Independent on Sunday, March 23, 20
03, 26–32.

  The books were indeed a commercial success, as Brown predicted, but Gorey was right: the format doesn’t do justice to his intent and seriously diminishes the impact of his little books. Moreover, the quality of the reproductions is notably inferior to that of the originals (a state of affairs put right in recent years by Pomegranate’s fine reprints of some of the titles included in the Amphigoreys). Readers who only know Gorey from the omnibuses will be struck, on reading him in the format he intended, by his pacing—the filmlike visual rhythms Brown mentions—and by the rich illustrative detail, much diminished in the Amphigorey collections.

  Chapter 12

  Dracula

  1973–78

  Gorey poster for the Broadway revival of Dracula, 1978.

  IN 1973, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, which Gorey had first encountered when he was five years old, cast its bat-winged shadow across his life again.

  John Wulp, a director, producer, and playwright, was planning to launch his Nantucket Stage Company with a production, that summer, of the stage play based on Stoker’s novel. Dracula had premiered on Broadway in 1927 with the unknown Bela Lugosi as the count, his first major English-speaking role. Wulp’s version would open, somewhat less auspiciously, on the “minuscule stage at one end of a large assembly room” in Nantucket’s Cyrus Peirce Middle School.1 At a cocktail party, an “old drunk stumbled up” and buttonholed Wulp, telling him he really ought to get Edward Gorey to design the production. Wulp knew Gorey, though not well; Frank O’Hara had introduced the two men at the New York City Ballet. Still, he hazarded a call. “Sure, why not?” was Gorey’s game reply.

  Gorey met with the director, Dennis Rosa, and they sketched out what Wulp calls “a grand plan” for the set design, after which Ted “just went home and did his drawings and sent them to me.” Brilliantly, he conceived the drop curtain, proscenium, and backdrops as blown-up illustrations. By doing so, he put the scenery in knowing quotation marks, renouncing realism for an aestheticism that emphasized the play’s affinities with the gothic novel and Victorian melodrama. (He also made a virtue of inexperience: “I can no more design three-dimensional stage settings than I can fly,” he insisted.)2