by Mark Dery
Gorey’s stage design made theatergoers feel as if they’d stepped into one of his books. The proscenium was flanked on either side by sinister pansies springing from skull-shaped planters; their little “faces”—the characteristic blotches of dark color on a pansy’s petals—revealed themselves, on closer inspection, to be death’s heads. A winged skull, borrowed from Puritan graveyard iconography and reimagined with bat wings and vampire fangs, spanned the top of the arch. The drop curtain portrayed Lucy, the vampire’s victim, menaced by the count in the light of a skull-faced moon.
Dracula was a thumping success, according to Stephen Fife, who understudied the part of Renfield, the abject wretch enslaved by the vampire’s mesmeric powers. When the play opened, “the audience went nuts,” he recalled, “stamping their feet, screaming, exceeding what anyone had expected.”3 For playgoers and critics alike, the sets were the star of the show. “Everything is cross-hatched—the proscenium arch, dropped curtain, scenery (out of a window of a cross-hatched room, to a cross-hatched landscape),” marveled the New York Times drama critic Mel Gussow, a Gorey devotee who would prove, over the course of his long life at the paper, to be a tireless advocate for the Gorey cause. “Stylized like a thirties movie, everything is in black and white (even the emotions), except for occasional, ominous drops of red.”4
Emboldened by the rave reviews, Wulp set his sights on Broadway, only to discover that a producer named Harry Rigby, another “great Edward Gorey fan,” had snapped up the professional rights. (Wulp had only secured the summer-stock rights.) Rigby was trying to wheedle Ricardo Montalban into the title role. It would take Wulp three years’ worth of maneuvering to get the Broadway rights. In the meantime, he pressed Gorey to swear an oath of loyalty to his vision of the play, telling him, “Edward, you know this was really all my idea; you must give me a letter saying that you will not design the show for anybody else.” Gorey signed on the line.
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Gorey amused himself, in ’74, by writing movie reviews for the SoHo Weekly News under the anagrammatic pseudonym Wardore Edgy. Founded in 1973, the News was an alternative newsweekly, like the Village Voice. Gorey’s weekly column, ingeniously titled Movies, consisted almost entirely of deliciously bitchy eviscerations, written in a dishy, just-between-you-and-me voice that crossed Ronald Firbank with John Waters. His description of Gene Hackman as “exerting all the fascination of a water stain”5 will live in infamy; so, too, his observation that Regina Baff in Road Movie resembled “a disemboweled mattress”6 and that Elizabeth Wilson’s “facial contortions” in Man on a Swing “would be excessive on Daffy Duck.”7
Informed by an autodidact’s quirky knowledge of the medium and its history, Gorey’s verdicts are guided by the unwavering compass needle of his idiosyncratic tastes. Passing judgment on Robert Altman’s movies, he was happy to admit he didn’t have “the faintest clue to what they are meant to be in aid of.”8 (The phrase is a patented Goreyism. Alexander Theroux remembers Gorey’s mental torment during Bobby Deerfield, a 1977 tearjerker about a race-car driver in love with a terminally ill woman. “Gorey literally moaned through the entire movie,” Theroux recalls, “squawking, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ and snapping several times out loud, ‘Can someone please tell me what this is in aid of?’”)
Yet the more he detests a film, the more fun he has with it. Gorey’s reviews, like Gore Vidal’s talk-show banter, are vehicles for bon mots, the wickeder the better. He finds The Great Gatsby (1974), with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, “boring, boring, boring” to watch but great fun to hate: “Bruce Dern’s splendidly bushy mustache, which so effortlessly stole The Laughing Policeman from Walter Matthau’s lower lip, has here been reduced to a Twenties’ lower-half-of-the-upper-lip affair, and its semi-loss seems to have reduced him to a glassy eyed querulousness.”9 Sam Waterston looks like “the offspring of Roddy [McDowall] and Tony Perkins.” Al Pacino is “the name of a local hole in space.”10
The paper soldiered on ’til ’82, but Gorey stopped writing for it in late ’74 or early ’75; why he called it quits, Michael Goldstein, the News’s publisher, can’t recall. At their best, Gorey’s reviews combine a playful cattiness with an appreciation of the fan mentality as against the mind-set of the professional critic. Gorey was unabashedly an amateur in the Barthesian sense of the word, meaning a critic who hasn’t forgotten how to love the thing he’s writing about (cinema), even if he hates the example at hand (The Great Gatsby).
The important thing was to have a heated opinion, the more self-parodically melodramatic the better. Gorey’s most poisonously witty quips are so over the top we know they’re at least part put-on, which is the lion’s share of the fun, as is his unrestrained glee in hating what our social betters—the critics—tell us we’re supposed to like and liking what we’re told is beneath contempt. I defy you to read his verdict on the state of the Hollywood movie in the ’70s and not guffaw: “Young man overheard saying to his girlfriend around NYU: ‘Make a movie of it, Roseanne, and shove it up your ass.’ It is this sensibility, I feel, that accounts for so much of the filmmaking today.”11
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Gorey may have dropped his SoHo Weekly News column simply because he was stretched thin. On top of his freelance work, there were exhibitions, such as his show Plain and Coloured Drawings, at the Graham Gallery in Manhattan, and Phantasmagorey: The Work of Edward Gorey, at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale. Organized by his friend Clifford Ross, Phantasmagorey was Gorey’s first major retrospective; it traveled around the country for three years. (The artist did his best to pooh-pooh the conclusion that he had “arrived,” saying, “Usually my work is exhibited as part of a cookie festival with tennis.”)12
Then, too, he may have been distracted by his personal affairs, most consumingly his last, great crush.a In July of 1974, Gorey began sending lavishly illuminated envelopes to Tom Fitzharris, a darkly handsome young man who was twenty-one years his junior. (Gorey was forty-nine; Fitzharris, twenty-eight. Where and when they met we don’t know.) According to Glen Emil, the Gorey collector and scholar, each letter “contained a single card, with a hand-lettered literary quotation drawn upon one side, of significance known only to the sender and its recipient.”13 Susan Sheehan, writing in the New Yorker about an exhibition of the envelopes, notes that the “ideas seemed to play off conversations between the two friends, things mentioned in passing.”14
As he did in his correspondence with Peter Neumeyer, Gorey used his letters to share gleanings from his encyclopedic reading—quotations from his commonplace book that resonated with his philosophical outlook or struck sparks in his imagination: “Inspiration is the moment when one knows what is happening. In general, we do not know what is happening”—Magritte. “Everything we come across is to the point”—John Cage. “Our own journey is entirely imaginative. Therein lies its strength”—Céline. And on a lighter note: “Life is too short not to travel first class”—Wyndham Lewis.
Gorey created these works of art, intended for an audience of one, at the very moment when mail art was going full tilt. Loosely associated with the neo-Dada movement called Fluxus, mail art used the letter and its envelope as artistic mediums and the postal service as a democratic alternative to the elitist art world. Mail artists sent their friends cryptic, high-concept, or goofy messages in envelopes decorated with collages, found objects, or images created with rubber stamps; the letter became art as soon as it was mailed. It was very much a New York phenomenon; Ray Johnson, who founded the network of mail artists known as the New York Correspondance [sic] School, was perhaps its best-known practitioner.
While Gorey was undoubtedly driven to decorate his envelopes out of a compulsive aestheticism, not to mention horror vacui, it’s unlikely that he was unaware of the mail art phenomenon, given his insatiable appetite for culture. Whether or not Gorey thought of the Fitzharris letters as mail art, he seemed to view them as an aesthetic expression of some sort. Fitzharris soon “noticed that the envelopes were numbered�
�a series,” writes Sheehan. “He was not surprised to see the calculation behind the whimsy; Gorey’s genius was as organized as it was prolific.”15
But regardless of whether he thought of them as avant-garde art, Gorey’s illustrated envelopes for the Fitzharris letters are spectacular—among the “finest examples of [his] artistry, rivaling any of his book illustrations,” in Emil’s judgment. “Their sheer entertainment—the character development and lightness of delivery—[is] very appealing.…Gorey’s draftsmanship seems especially precise and crisp, unlabored and free.”16
Gorey’s letters—fifty of them, all told—kept coming at the rate of one a week for a little less than a year.17 A good number of the envelopes feature the pair of bandit-masked dogs who star in L’Heure Bleue (1975). As in the book, each member of the couple wears a letterman’s sweater adorned with the letter T, one for Tom, one for Ted. Clearly a close friendship was taking root, at least in Gorey’s mind. Peter Wolff remembers a quiet, clean-cut, “nice-looking Middle American–type younger guy” materializing out of nowhere in Gorey’s intermission crowd, sometime in ’74. Wolff recalls talk among the lobby clique of Ted’s latest crush.
Then, in the late summer of ’75, Gorey and Fitzharris went abroad. From August 28 through September 23, Gorey made a circuit of the starkly beautiful islands off Scotland’s west coast—the Outer Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, Fair Isle—with Fitzharris as a companion for part of the trip. At some point, Gorey made a pilgrimage to Loch Ness. (“I did not see the monster,” he later quipped, “to my great regret—the great disappointment of my life, probably.”)18
We don’t know whose idea the trip was, though given Gorey’s romantic attachment to the islands it was almost certainly his. It was inspired, he always claimed, by an irresistible desire to experience in person the landscapes he’d seen in the Powell and Pressburger movie I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), starring Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey. A romance set in the Hebrides, rich in local color, the film has attracted a cult following. The noir novelist Raymond Chandler fell under its spell, telling a friend, “I’ve never seen a picture which smelled of the wind and rain in quite this way nor one which so beautifully exploited the kind of scenery people actually live with, rather than the kind which is commercialized as a show place. The shots of Corryvreckan alone are enough to make your hair stand on end (Corryvreckan, in case you don’t know, is a whirlpool which, in certain conditions of the tide, is formed between two of the islands of the Hebrides).”19
“I saw the movie,” said Gorey, “and fell in love with the scenery and knew I wanted to go there.” It was the only time that he ventured outside the United States (other than a brief trip with his Garvey grandparents, at the age of seven, to Cuba and Key West). Unbelievably, Gorey, whose imaginative life was steeped in England and Englishness, flew into Prestwick airport, in Glasgow, and out of Heathrow airport, in London, without setting foot in England, beyond Heathrow and maybe the odd railway platform.20 Alison Lurie thinks he knew on some level that the England of his imagination—the Anglophile’s England, not to be found on any map—wouldn’t survive a collision with the real thing. “England before, let us say, 1930 or ’40—that was the period that he liked,” she says, “and he didn’t want to see the England of supermarkets and shopping carts—the Americanized, commercialized England that developed after World War II.”
Gorey’s explanation, in an interview years after the fact, was, “I’m not interested in places from a cultural point of view, thank you. I went for the scenery more than anything else.”21 It could have sprung from his pen: gloomily beautiful peatlands, ancient tors jutting out of the landscape, standing stones like the megaliths at Callanish in the Hebrides, sheer cliffs plunging into boiling foam.
Something in the severe beauty of these remote hunks of rock spoke to him, but what did it say? Did it bring on the Celtic twilight, as he liked to call the romantic melancholy that was his Irish birthright? Gorey turned fifty that year; maybe the movie’s heartbreaking love story, set against the desolate beauty of the landscape, stirred something in him at a moment when he was wondering, possibly, if he was going to spend the rest of his life alone. “I know where I’m going / And I know who’s going with me,” goes the movie’s theme song, a haunting, centuries-old Scottish-Irish ballad. “I know who I love / And the devil knows who I’ll marry.”
Sometime during the trip, Fitzharris and Gorey parted company. “When I asked him about the trip, he said [that] after two weeks or something Tom had gone off with a nurse,” Skee Morton recalls. “And so Ted went on alone.” (A female nurse, it should probably be added; there wasn’t any doubt in the minds of Wolff and the others who met him that Fitzharris was straight.) Gorey headed off for “the most remote islands he could get to,” as Skee remembers it. “I know he was much taken by the west of Scotland; I think he liked it being so remote and desolate. He even talked, but not very seriously, about moving there, but he wouldn’t have been able to take the cats because of the quarantine they had then.”22 It was Gorey’s last trip abroad.
Back in New York, he reassumed his place among the chatty Balanchinians in the State Theater; Fitzharris, like all painful memories, was consigned to Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, never to be mentioned again. “Ted never said anything about anything,” Wolff recalls. “But there was a sense that [he] was sad about something.” In retrospect, some of the quotations from his letters to Fitzharris take on a bittersweet, sometimes even Beckettian subtext: “I’ve always thought of friendship as where two people really tear one another apart and perhaps in that way really learn something from one another”—Francis Bacon. And: “I often think I am possessed with things I really want, but when I come to search find it only a shadow”—diary of a Dutch sailor put ashore on the island of Ascension.
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L’Heure Bleue assumes a melancholy air, too, if we read it as a bittersweet memento of what was almost certainly the last of Gorey’s unrequited crushes. Published under his Fantod Press imprint the year he and Fitzharris took their trip, it’s a gorgeous book, the only Fantod printed in two colors, black and a lush cerulean blue. The title derives from the French term for that fleeting period in early dawn or late dusk when the indirect light of the sun paints the sky a shimmering blue. It’s a time of day rich in poetic associations: ambiguity, ambivalence, wistfulness, time slipping away. (In English, it’s the “magic hour.”)
Was Gorey in a blue mood, reflecting on love, loneliness, and passing time? L’Heure Bleue is cryptic—an extension, perhaps, of his correspondence with Fitzharris. We feel as if we’re overhearing a conversation between intimates, full of in-jokes, oblique references, coded allusions. In each panel, the dogs exchange enigmatic snatches of dialogue, surrealist non sequiturs that recall the hermetic languages couples and close friends slip into. Here they are, strolling alongside topiary versions of themselves. “It seems to me wine warms up very quickly.” “I never know what you think is important.” In another panel, they’re standing in front of a wrought-iron fence on which the ivy is making arabesques. “I never insult you in front of others.” “I keep forgetting that everything you say is connected.”
“I never know what you think is important.” L’Heure Bleue. (Fantod Press, 1975)
L’Heure Bleue is somber nonsense. The inadequacy of language and the impossibility of communication is a theme, as it was in Gorey’s correspondence with Fitzharris. In one of his letters, he quoted George Gissing’s 1889 novel, The Nether World: “Is there such a thing in this world as speech that has but one simple interpretation, one for him who utters it and one for him who hears?”
The book opens with the two dogs, in the Ted and Tom sweaters they wear throughout the book, contemplating a half finished phrase hanging in the air against the silhouette of darkened trees under a luminous blue sky—a subtly surrealist conjunction of night and day that calls to mind Magritte’s Empire of Light paintings. “Ove one anoth,” the ornate antique typography spells out.
It wants to be “Love one another,” but the letters the dogs hold—R and O in one dog’s paw, ZDEM in the other’s—ensure that phrase will never be completed. “Move one another” is the best they can hope for, though whether that means moving in the romantic sense of affecting someone emotionally or in the adversarial sense of budging another solitary from his set ways in a contest of wills is a mystery.
In the last panel, we see them sitting on top of a Ford Model T–type car, riding away from us into the blue. A tiny inscription beneath the back window tells us, in French, that the drawing is based on a photograph by “T.J.F. III”—Thomas J. Fitzharris III by any other name. Knowing what we know, the book’s ending feels like a nocturne for Gorey’s hapless attempts at relationships over the years. In 1992, he told Stephen Schiff of the New Yorker that he’d more or less given up on love. “I mean, for a while I’d think, after some perfectly pointless involvement that was far more trouble than it was worth—I’d think, ‘Oh God, I hope I don’t get infatuated with anybody ever again.’ And it’s been sixteen, seventeen years, so I think I’m safe.”23 Seventeen years was exactly the span between that interview and his ill-fated trip with Fitzharris.
In 1975, Putnam capitalized on the success of Amphigorey by publishing Amphigorey Too, which collected twenty of Gorey’s little books. It was dedicated, “For Tom Fitzharris.”
