Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Gorey’s through-the-looking-glass view of things makes his pronouncements on even the most forgettable shows entertaining. “I’m also very partial to surrealist sitcoms,” he told an interviewer. “There was one called Stat, a medical one. It had—oh dear. One of those actors whose name is Ron.”54 Trawling the depths of public-access cable TV one Sunday morning, he was smitten with a morbidly obese woman who sang Seventh-day Adventist hymns of her own composition written in what Gorey called a country-gospel style. She was a “genius,” he thought—“in a curious way.”55 He genuinely liked her, he maintained, insisting that she had “quite a nice voice, actually.” Then again, she did remind him of the inimitable Florence Foster Jenkins, a socialite and would-be coloratura soprano whose tin ear and pitiless mangling of opera lyrics reduced audiences to helpless mirth in ’40s New York.

  Sitting on a couch, flanked by a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that ran much of the length of the house, with more books in piles all around, he watched his shows and movies while hand-sewing the beanbag creatures he sold at his theatrical performances to raise money for his troupe. Using richly colored, ornately patterned fabrics, Gorey made dolls of every conceivable species, from Figbash, his vaguely avian answer to Max Ernst’s bird-headed totem, Loplop, to iconic members of the Gorey bestiary such as cats, bats, elephants, frogs, and rabbits. Truth to tell, they weren’t beanbag animals in the strict sense, since he stuffed them with rice. (Which is why he stored them in the fridge: mice like rice.)

  Gorey’s stitching, like his cross-hatching, was machinelike in its precision—“precise and perfect and very close,” Ken Morton says. “He was very dexterous, very good at doing small, detailed things.” His nimble fingers seemed to have a mind of their own; eager to be occupied, they’d fiddle with his rings if nothing more absorbing was at hand. “Throughout the conversation, Gorey’s hands never come to rest,” an interviewer from the Providence Sunday Journal observed. “They are molding a rubber band one minute, twisting it into a variety of shapes, testing its elasticity, feeling its texture. A few minutes later, the hands are tearing pieces of cellophane tape, sticking them at random onto the cover of the black sketch book that Gorey always has with him. The tape strips form an abstract design.”56 He was, as Morton puts it, “very…gesture-ful,” yet as the Journal vignette suggests, his fiddling wasn’t just a nervous tic; it had as much, or more, to do with Gorey’s irrepressible impulse to create.57

  Anthony Schierman was struck by Gorey’s effortless mastery—in his sixties, mind you—of multitasking. In the mid-’80s, Schierman spent a high-school summer living with Gorey at Strawberry Lane while working as a dishwasher at a nearby restaurant. “He’d read a novel a day while watching five TV shows, sitting there knitting stuff, making these beanbag things, going to the movies at night, eating out twice a day,” he recalls, “and then still [find] time to do the drawings that he did. I don’t remember him sleeping very much.”

  * * *

  At a glance, the life of a man who lived alone with a clowder of cats, ate at the same short-order joint twice a day, and proclaimed himself “passionately devoted to reruns” of sitcoms like Golden Girls is, by any objective standard, “featureless.”58 But as in Gorey’s little tragicomedies, in which the most Grand Guignol events occur offstage or in the padlocked vaults of the psyche, the quirky, revealing goings-on in his everyday life took place between his ears, or behind closed doors.

  Consider his house. Inside, it was a yard-saler’s idea of a wunderkammer—a cabinet of wonders, one of those private museums that emerged in the sixteenth century as the Enlightenment was gathering steam. Progenitors of the natural history museum, they were crammed full of all manner of fossils, freaks of nature, archaeological artifacts, clockwork automata, unicorn horns, mermaid hands, mummies, pieces of the True Cross, skeletal deformities, bezoars, zoological specimens, and, foreshadowing the surrealists, curiously shaped things (stones, deformed vegetables) that resembled other things, all promiscuously jumbled together with the zany taxonomic logic of the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, the make-believe taxonomy Borges cites in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.”

  Gorey tended to socialize outside his home. Friends who were allowed entrée rarely saw more than his kitchen, which served as Gorey’s parlor. (“It is the only bearable room,” he claimed.)59 “Few were invited to venture past this room,” confirms Kevin McDermott. “Edward usually met guests outside on the porch, or he waited with a book on a bench in the common across the way. He and his company would then depart for their destination. Elephant House remained for the most part Edward’s private world.”60 (Elephant House, according to McDermott, was the “special name, known only to a few people,” that Gorey gave his “great bulky home,” possibly because its shaggy gray hide of splintering shingles resembled elephant skin or, more likely, because the antique white porcelain toilet he’d removed from an upstairs bathroom reminded him of an elephant’s head.61 He was so taken with it he repurposed it into an end table.)

  The inner sanctum of that world, just off the TV room, was Gorey’s studio, a closet-size workspace barely big enough to swing a cat in. In keeping with his preference for rooms without a view in order to minimize distractions, his studio’s single window was all but obscured by the tangled branches of a majestic southern magnolia—“brought back from Mount Vernon in a small pot,” according to a plaque at the Gorey museum, “by the sisters who owned and resided in this house, Louise and Olive Simkins, during one of their ‘motoring trips’ from 1928 (or perhaps 1929).”

  Dominating the little room was his drawing board, smeared and splotched with black ink and the white tempera he used to correct mistakes. (“I correct drawings only in a very minor way—with white tempera and/or a razor blade,” he said, meaning that he would either white out a mistake or cut it out with a knife, in his case a vintage matte knife. “In desperation I may redraw a segment and paste it over if I feel unable to redo the rest of the drawing as well a second time.”)62 Tools of the trade littered his desk: a metal ruler, a draftsman’s triangle, an old rotary phone (whose on/off buttons the cats liked to step on, disconnecting Gorey midconversation), and of course his pens and ink bottles.

  Gorey’s desk, Strawberry Lane. (Photograph by Christopher Seufert)

  Gorey had, for many years, scratched away on Strathmore two-ply matte-finish paper with Hunt 204 pen points dipped in Higgins India ink. When he discovered Pelikan ink and Gillott’s exquisitely fine-nibbed tit-quill pen points, he switched allegiances. The tit quill, he told Clifford Ross, was “very small and, by a brilliant bit of packaging,” could only be bought “a dozen at a time on a little card that was wrapped in cellophane. And of course, by the time you got them home, at least three of the 12 were totally useless. One of them would usually last for about a year. Some of them were split in the first place and others you couldn’t use for more than about three lines. They cost 20 times as much as any other penpoint and then they stopped making them. I had a real crise.”63 He went—“with reluctance”—back to the Hunt 204. “None of these—paper, pen, and ink—seem to be what they once were,” he lamented in 1980, “so I expect I am getting old.”64

  By his Cape Cod days, Gorey was using an ergonomically correct kneeling chair; the sight of his six-foot-plus frame hunched over his drawing board, in his tiny studio, must’ve been something to see. As he drew, a few familiars looked on: squatting on his desk were some metal frogs; nearby sat a framed photo of a bull terrier, the breed he would’ve owned if he owned a dog. (“I think they’re so wonderful,” he told a reporter from CBS News. “I just love their looks.”)65 Over his desk were postcards of paintings by Goya and Matisse, along with a framed award for “Very Superior Pencil Sketches,” bestowed in 1849 on his great-grandmother Helen Amelia St. John Garvey, from whom, according to family lore, he got his talent. The room’s decor also included one of Helen Amelia’s small botanical studies, some Japanese wood-block prints, and, on a more Gore
yan note, what Mel Gussow described as “an Indian sculpture of a tiger devouring a missionary.”66

  An ink stain down the wall behind his desk testified to the truth of Gorey’s remark, to an interviewer, that “anywhere from one to six cats are almost always sitting on wherever I am working.”67 The cats’ antics sometimes cost him dearly when they bounded across his drawing board. According to Kevin McDermott, “His archives contain more than one example of a dried puddle of spilled ink destroying a large, complex crosshatched drawing.”68 Ever the Taoist, Gorey simply refilled his inkwell and started over.

  * * *

  Christopher Seufert, a filmmaker who from August of ’96 until Gorey’s death, in 2000, shot footage of him for a documentary he hoped to make, was one of a very few visitors who were allowed to explore beyond the kitchen. He was fascinated to discover installationlike arrangements of curiosa amid the clutter. “He seemed to treat his house almost like a gallery, because things would change,” Seufert recalls. “You’d be in there one day and you could tell everything was set up very deliberately, and the next day there would be, like, a new display.”69 The house on Strawberry Lane was an evolving work of installation art, frequently rearranged and ever expanding, all for an audience of one.

  It was also a case study in the eros of collecting. Gorey’s irresistible urge to collect, like his obsessive devotion to Balanchine’s art, afforded a rare opportunity for a man who claimed to be “reasonably undersexed” to give himself over to desire—the desire to have and to hold, to possess. Collecting, writes Christine Davenne in Cabinets of Wonder, a book about cabinets of curiosities, is “close kin to passion and excess.”70

  A whiff of fetishism has clung to collecting ever since Freud proposed that the collector’s desire is prompted by the unconscious mechanism of psychological substitution. “When an old maid keeps a dog or an old bachelor collects snuffboxes,” he declared, “the former is finding a substitute for her need for a companion in marriage and the latter for his need for—a multitude of conquests.”71 Freud was careful to note that an attachment to such “erotic equivalents” was normal enough; after all, he was a collector himself. He’d begun accumulating his famous trove of tribal totems and archaeological artifacts shortly after his father’s death, a “most poignant loss” whose blow was softened by the acquisition of objets d’art that proved to be a “source of exceptional renewal and comfort.”

  Nonetheless, Freud’s analysis paved the way for pop-psych caricatures of the collector as sexually frustrated and socially maladjusted. In psychoanalytic studies of collecting, there is talk of a libidinal attachment to the idealized object, of a yearning for the absent phallus. Noting “the traumatic events in so many collectors’ early lives,” the psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger observes in Collecting: An Unruly Passion, “It is easy to see how affection has been displaced to things, rather than to people, who have proven not to be reliable.”72 The glib dismissal of collectors as damaged or deviant has become a fixture of pop psychology, from the psychologist April Benson’s parable, in the New York Times, of a “desperate and childless” woman whose traumatic miscarriage and birth of a stillborn baby drove her to amass “a vast graveyard of porcelain dolls” to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s gothic-Freudian depiction of the collector as a man over forty who “invests in objects all that [he] finds impossible to invest in human relationships,” the “sultan of a secret seraglio” whose possessions are his “harem” and who “can never entirely shake off an air of impoverishment and depleted humanity.”73

  Such descriptions hardly fit Gorey. Still, there’s no denying the psychological peculiarities of a lifelong solitary who claimed that cats were the love of his life, whose flat affect invited speculation about whether he was on the autism spectrum (he wasn’t),74 and who didn’t do handshakes and shrank from hugs. (“Did you ever see him hug anyone?” I asked Skee Morton. She searched her memory. “He hugged me at my father’s funeral,” she decided at last. “I think that’s the only time.” “Physical contact…was not in Edward’s repertoire” is the way Carol Verburg, who produced all but two of his Cape Cod theatricals, puts it. “His level of physical contact was cat level.”)75

  Whether some psychic trauma drove Gorey to displace his deepest affections to cats and collections “rather than to people, who have proven not to be reliable,” who can say? The literary critic Mario Praz, a fanatical collector who’d spent his childhood as a lonely singleton and who, too, ended up alone in a museum of his own making, surrounded by bibelots and curios, Empire furniture and neoclassical marbles, once remarked that his mania for rare and precious things was indeed a substitute, a craving for “a mistress of another kind, safer and more exciting” than the unreliable human sort.76

  * * *

  The quintessential Gorey obsessions, when it came to collecting, were of course books (“I can’t go out the door without buying books”) and, in a sense, cats.77 Playing to type, he also collected finials—the hood ornament of Victorian culture, so to speak—and nineteenth-century postmortem photographs of children, affectingly posed. (“Everyone says ‘Don’t tell them that!’” he confided to an interviewer. “I have a friend in New York who has a huge collection of postcards.…He goes to these postcard shows and sheepishly says, ‘Any dead babies?’ to the dealers. He tells me ‘I hate it! I hate it!’ I say, ‘Well, just keep looking!’”)78 To no one’s surprise, Gorey collected Mexican Day of the Dead papier-mâché skulls and owned a toothless human skull, which he jauntily outfitted with a pair of antique spectacles.

  Of course, these are the sorts of things we’d expect Gorey to collect. Less predictable was his flirtation with numismatics, which yielded a handful of Roman coins bearing the image of Trebonianus Gallus (206–253 CE), a not terribly successful emperor who was murdered by his own troops. He was much taken with “sandpaper drawings,” as they’re erroneously called—pictures done in charcoal on stiff-stock paper coated with a ground of marble dust and varnish. A pastime of young ladies in the mid-nineteenth century, the work tends toward picturesque landscapes and romantic fantasies, such as moonlight shimmering on black waters (the ever-popular Magic Lake theme). Some practitioners worked in pastels; Gorey, unsurprisingly, preferred the grisaille variety. “The ones that are imaginary landscapes are kitschy, because they’re sort of castles on the Rhine and blah-ty blah-ty blah-ty,” he said. “I think people just kind of made them up, you know; you did obelisks and ruins and columns and trees.”79

  Also in the entrance room was a chest that, according to Kevin McDermott, “contained over three hundred pounds of rusting metal objects, including machine parts, stakes for railroad ties, and old tools.”80 “I just like rusted iron,” Gorey told an interviewer.81 “Edward had a fondness for the texture of decay,” says McDermott.82

  In light of Gorey’s Japanophilia, it’s hard not to see “fondness for the texture of decay” as an expression of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that singles out the beauty “of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete…of things modest and humble…of things unconventional,” as Leonard Koren defines it in Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (a book Gorey owned).83 Wabi is understated, austere beauty, made more perfect by its imperfections—the tea-ceremony utensil that has been broken and repaired and because of this defect is more beautiful than a flawless but characterless brand-new one. Sabi, according to Koren, is the “beauty of things withered…taking pleasure in that which is old, faded, and lonely.”84 “Edward appreciated objects that indicated some degree of prior use—things that had had a life,” says McDermott.85

  Things imperfect, impermanent, incomplete: these were the sorts of things Gorey loved best. In a sense, his entire oeuvre, steeped in the gothic aesthetic, nineteenth-century ballet and opera, penny dreadfuls, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, silent film, and semimythologized visions of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Jazz Ages, can be seen as a monument to the “beauty of things withered,” to “taking pleasure in that which is
old, faded, and lonely.”

  What else did Gorey collect? Rocks. Gorey loved rocks. He kept beach pebbles in bowls by his kitchen sink, covered in water to restore their submarine luster. In fact, rocks proliferated all over the countertop—a surrealist’s idea of a Zen rock garden. (His dearest dream, as we know from one of his postcards to Peter Neumeyer, was to make a pilgrimage to the renowned rock garden at the Zen temple Ryōan-ji, in Kyoto.) “If you were to die and come back as a person or thing,” ran one of the questions in Vanity Fair’s Proust questionnaire, “what would it be?” “A stone” was Gorey’s reply.86 “I had a terrible trauma this week,” he told the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff. “I didn’t know what had become of my favorite rock. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t live.’ Fortunately, it was found.”87

  Do we detect a subtle philosophical statement in Gorey’s habit of lavishing as much attention on his minutely detailed renderings of rocks as he did on his human characters? His rocks are characters in the sense that they’re always individuals, never generic: think of the Wobbling Rock in The Willowdale Handcar and the “absolutely useless stone” in The Iron Tonic. But they’re also characters in the animistic sense of Japanese folktales, in which inanimate things exude a presence. “Few people seem to notice that a largish part of my stuff is not about human beings,” he said. “I mean, I’ve done several books about inanimate objects.…I just don’t think humanity is the ultimate end.”88

  Whether he thought rocks have inner lives who knows, but he certainly didn’t regard humans as the crown of creation. Of course, Gorey’s geophilia also aligned him with the surrealists, for whom weird geological formations were the solidified stuff of dreams. Poetically suggestive rocks were charged with occult power. “Stones—particularly, hard stones—go on talking to those who wish to hear them,” wrote André Breton in his essay “The Language of Stones.” “They speak to each listener according to his capabilities; through what each listener knows, they instruct him in what he aspires to know.”89