Born to Be Posthumous

Ronald Firbank (1886–1926), a little-known English novelist of the ’20s, was typical of their rarefied tastes. If Gorey and O’Hara’s aesthetic cult had a patron saint, it was Firbank, whose influence on both men lasted long after Harvard. O’Hara’s wordplay, his ironic humor, and his witty interpolation, in his poems, of snippets of overheard dialogue owe much to Firbank. As for Gorey, he once cited the author as “the greatest influence on me … because he is so concise and so madly oblique,” though he later qualified his admiration, conceding that he was “reluctant to admit” his debt to Firbank “because I’ve outgrown him in one way, though in another I don’t suppose I ever will. Firbank’s subject matter isn’t very congenial to me—the ecclesiastical frou-frou, the adolescent sexual innuendo. But the way he wrote things, the very elliptical structure, influenced me a great deal.”9 (Gorey repaid the debt in 1971 when he illustrated a limited edition of Two Early Stories by Firbank.)10 He also took from Firbank what he took from Japanese and Chinese literature, namely, the aesthetic of “leaving things out, being very brief,” to achieve an almost haikulike narrative compression.11 (“I think nothing,” Firbank declared, “of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.”)12

Gorey admired Firbank’s exquisitely light touch, his mastery of an irony so subtle it was barely there; we hear echoes of Firbank’s drily hilarious style in Gorey’s prose and in his conversational bon mots. To the Goreyphile, Firbank sounds startlingly Goreyesque: “The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.”13 In Vainglory (1915), Lady Georgia Blueharnis thinks the view of the hills near her estate would be improved “if some sorrowful creature could be induced to take to them. I often long for a bent, slim figure to trail slowly along the ridge, at sundown, in an agony of regret.”14 Can’t you just see that bent, slim figure trailing slowly through the twilight of a Gorey drawing?

A writer’s style is inextricable from his way of looking at the world, and Gorey absorbed Firbank’s sensibility along with his style. His habit of treating serious subjects frivolously and frivolous matters seriously, his love of the inconsequential and the nonchalant, his carefully cultivated ennui, his puckish perspective on the human comedy: all these Goreyesque traits bear the stamp of Firbank’s influence.

Even Gorey’s stifled-yawn lack of interest in the subject of sex—“Such excess of passion / Is quite out of fashion,” a young lady observes in The Listing Attic—has its parallel in the can’t-be-bothered languor that was part of the Firbank pose. “My husband had no amorous energy whatsoever,” one of his characters confides, “which just suited me, of course.”15

Gorey’s most obviously Firbankian attribute is his immersion in the nineteenth century. Firbank was besotted by the same fin-de-siècle literature and aesthetic posturing whose influence wafts off the pages of Gorey’s Dugway plays. A throwback to the Mauve Decade, he was “1890 in 1922,” to quote the critic Carl Van Vechten.16 (“I adore all that mauvishness about him!” a Firbank character cries.)17 Yet, like Gorey, he was very much of his moment: his compressed plots and collagelike rendering of cocktail-party chatter were as modern in their own way as Gorey’s Balanchinian economy of line, absurdist plots, and pared-down texts were in theirs.

Firbank, it should go without saying, was gay. He looms large in the prehistory of camp, the coded sensibility that enabled gays, in pre-Stonewall times, to signal their sexuality under the radar of mainstream (read: straight) culture and, simultaneously, to mock that culture with tongue firmly in cheek. To gay readers who could read the subtext in Firbank’s pricking wit and “orchidaceous” style, as detractors called it, his prose hid his queerness in plain sight.

The content of his novels, which poked fun at bourgeois institutions such as marriage, had special meaning for gay readers, too. “One can imagine how such a flagrant parody of heterosexual mores might function within the gay subculture—reinforcing the self-esteem of those who thought their nontraditional sexuality a rebellion against the conventionalism of late Victorianism,” writes David Van Leer in The Queening of America.18 “An appreciation of [Firbank] became the litmus test of one’s sexuality and of one’s allegiance to the dandyism of post-Wildean homosexuality. When gay poet W. H. Auden announced that ‘a person who dislikes Ronald Firbank may, for all I know, possess some admirable quality, but I do not wish ever to see him again,’ his statement was not an aesthetic judgment. It was a declaration of community solidarity.”

It’s hard to imagine Gorey rejoicing in the gay “community solidarity” signaled by a fondness for Firbank. A nonjoiner if ever there was one, Gorey distanced himself from those, like the “very militant” museum curator he knew in later years, who insisted that their queerness was central to their identity.19 “I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is—but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too,” he said. “And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.”

Too true. But being a homosexual in 1946, or facing up to the fact that you might be, was surely just a little bit more serious, as problems go, than being heterosexual. When Gorey arrived on campus, the Harvard Advocate was defunct, closed in the early ’40s by outraged trustees who’d discovered that its editorial board was, for all purposes, a gays-only club. When the magazine resumed publication in 1947, it did so with the understanding that gays were banned from the board (a prohibition everyone disregarded but that was nervous-making nonetheless). During Gorey’s Harvard days, a student caught making out with another young man was expelled. Shortly after he graduated, in the spring of 1951, two Harvard men who’d engaged in what O’Hara’s biographer calls “illicit activities” got the axe as well—a regrettable affair that turned into a “horrible tragedy,” says Gorey’s schoolmate Freddy English, when one of the young men committed suicide.

Whether Gorey thought of himself as gay at Harvard and whether his emerging style and sensibility represented a coming to terms with his sexuality he never said. Still, as noted earlier, nearly all his influences during those formative four years, from Firbank to Compton-Burnett to E. F. Benson, were gay. Then, too, the fact that he was surrounded, for the first time in his life, by unmistakably gay men—one of whom, Frank O’Hara, had become a close friend (though not, it should be emphasized, a lover)—must have pressed the question of his own sexuality.

If he, like O’Hara and others in their clique, was struggling with his identity, the pervasive homophobia of the times must have affected him in some way. With the coming of the Cold War, right-wing opportunists whipped up fears of communist infiltration at the highest levels of government. Gays, they maintained, were an especially worrisome threat to national security, since their “perversion” rendered them vulnerable to being blackmailed into spying for the Russkies. Harvard’s expulsions of gay students made the mood of the moment impossible to ignore.

A report by Gorey’s freshman adviser, Alfred Hower, hints at shadows moving beneath the witty insouciance he showed the world. “Gorey seems a rather nervous type and not particularly well adjusted,” Hower writes, adding, hilariously, “He started to grow a beard, which may or may not be an indication of some eccentricity.”20

When his frequent absences from Harvard’s required “physical training” course landed him on academic probation, his mother pled his case with Judson Shaplin, the assistant dean of the college. In a revealing letter, she laments the difficulty Ted is having adjusting to the demands of college life, noting that he coasted through grade school and as a result “just never learned how to study,” a weakness compounded, in her eyes, by Parker’s unorthodox, no-grades approach to academics.21 But the roots of her son’s fecklessness lie, she suggests, in the fact that Ted, “as the only child of divorced parents … has been handicapped by a combination of too much mother and too little masculine influence.”22

To our ears, Helen Gorey’s pat analysis of her son as a mama’s boy, infantilized (and, presumably, sissified) by a smothering mother, sounds like an outtake from the script for Hitchcock’s Psycho. But she was only echoing the Freudian wisdom of her day. “From the 1940s until the early 1970s, sociologists and psychiatrists advanced the idea that an overaffectionate or too-distant mother … hampers the social and psychosexual development of her son,” Roel van den Oever asserts in Mama’s Boy: Momism and Homophobia in Postwar American Culture.23

It seems likely that this mounting intolerance toward gays—or, for that matter, any weirdo who came off as “very, very faggoty”24 (George Montgomery’s first impression of Gorey)—would have unsettled a college student trying to make sense of who he was. A nightmarish little vignette in Gorey’s collection of limericks, The Listing Attic (most of which he wrote “all at once” in ’48 or ’49), suggests something was troubling him.25

At night, in a scene straight out of Hawthorne or Poe but perfect for the lynch-mob mentality of the McCarthy era, capering men encircle a statue, brandishing torches. On top of the statue—the famous bronze likeness of John Harvard in Harvard Yard—a terrified figure cowers as one of the revelers strains with outstretched torch to set him on fire. In the foreground, black trees shrink back in horror; even their shadows recoil, stretching toward us in the firelight. Gorey writes,

Some Harvard men, stalwart and hairy,

Drank up several bottles of sherry;

In the Yard around three

They were shrieking with glee:

“Come on out, we are burning a fairy!”

Within a month of meeting, Gorey and O’Hara had decided to room together. On a November 21, 1946, application for a change of residence, Gorey says he’d like to move to Eliot House, a residential house for upperclassmen whose invigorating mixture of aesthetes, athletes, scholars, and “Eliot gentlemen” (young men with Brahmin surnames like Cabot and Lodge) was handpicked by the housemaster and eminent classicist John Finley.26 A devout believer in Harvard’s house system, which was modeled on Oxford’s residential colleges, Finley fostered the life of the mind over tea parties and at more formal symposia featuring luminaries such as the poet Archibald MacLeish and I. A. Richards, a founding father of New Criticism.

It wasn’t until the beginning of Gorey’s sophomore year, in the fall of ’47, that Harvard approved his move to Eliot, where he and O’Hara ended up in suite F-13, a triple. O’Hara took one of the two little bedrooms; the third man, Vito Sinisi—a philosophy major who, in a zillion-to-one coincidence, had studied Japanese with Gorey in the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of Chicago—called dibs on the other; and Gorey slept in the suite’s common room. By day, he could often be found there, at a big table near a window, drawing his little men in raccoon coats.

Gorey and O’Hara transformed their suite into a salon, furnishing it, in suitably bohemian fashion, with white modernist garden furniture rented from one of the shops in Harvard Square. A tombstone, pilfered from Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground or perhaps from Mount Auburn Cemetery and repurposed as a coffee table, added just the right touch of macabre whimsy. (Founded in 1831, Mount Auburn is a bucolic necropolis in Cambridge, not far from Harvard. It’s inconceivable that Gorey didn’t frequent its winding paths; judging by his books, the prop room of his imagination was well stocked with Auburn’s gothic tombs, Egyptian revival obelisks, and sepulchres adorned with urns and angels.)

Gorey and O’Hara decorated F-13 with soirees in mind; it was just the sort of place for standing contrapposto, cocktail in one hand, cigarette in the other, making witty chitchat. “The idea,” said O’Hara’s friend Genevieve Kennedy, “was to lie down on a chaise longue, get mellow with a few drinks, and listen to Marlene Dietrich records. They loved her whisky voice.”27 (Dietrich was to gay culture in the ’40s what Judy Garland would be to later generations of gay men. Gorey carried a torch for her long after Harvard.*)

Gorey and O’Hara continued to swap newly discovered enthusiasms and kindle each other’s obsessions. The ’50s would witness the birth pangs of what the ’60s would call the counterculture. As youth culture pushed back against the father-knows-best authoritarianism and mind-cramping conformity of postwar America, Hollywood and the news media provided teenagers with templates for rebellion: the brooding, alienated rebel without a cause role-modeled by James Dean; the beatniks in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). At Harvard in 1947, though, countercultures were strictly do-it-yourself affairs. Gorey and O’Hara were a subculture unto themselves within a larger subculture, the gay underground. At a moment when T. S. Eliot’s high-modernist formalism held sway in literature classes and little magazines, its brow-knitting seriousness and self-conscious symbolism the order of the day, Gorey and O’Hara embraced the satirical, knowingly frivolous novels of writers like Firbank, Compton-Burnett, and Evelyn Waugh.

Gorey and O’Hara and their clique weren’t defiantly nonconformist (although they were obliquely so) or overtly political (though there was a politics to their pose). Nor were they populist in the Whitmanesque way the Beats were or in the communitarian way the hippies were. Even so, says Gooch, “they were a counterculture,” albeit “an early and élitist form of it”—textbook examples of what the cultural critic Susan Son-tag called the “improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves aristocrats of taste.”28

Joined, over time, by kindred spirit John Ashbery—a class ahead of them at Harvard and destined to win acclaim as a major voice in American poetry—Gorey and O’Hara defined themselves through their tastes, sense of style, and aesthetic way of looking at the world.

“Nobody was organized; there was just style, so to speak, rather than movements,” says the critic and novelist Alison Lurie, a close friend of Gorey’s at Harvard and afterward, during his Cambridge period. To Lurie, Gorey and his friends “represented an alternative reality” to the blustering machismo of iconic he-men like Norman Mailer (who impressed her as “a noisy, bullying kind of person” when she met him through his sister, Barbara, her classmate at Radcliffe).

Gorey, O’Hara, and their circle recoiled from the strutting, pugnacious masculinity epitomized by Mailer, but they staked out their position through taste, not the sort of polemical tantrums he staged. Ted “loved Victorian novels and Edwardian novels,” Lurie recalls. “He would never have read with much pleasure The Naked and the Dead. This macho thing was very irritating to Ted and his friends…. So if you were tired of men behaving this way, these writers were very encouraging to you.” Vets who’d seen combat, as Mailer had, looked down on men who hadn’t, like Gorey, Lurie notes, “and sometimes they would show this, you know? So I suppose there was this kind of reaction to this violent masculine mystique that some of these guys came back with.”

Gorey, O’Hara, and their inner circle shared an affection for the self-consciously artificial, the over-the-top, and the recherché. Their ironic, outsider’s-eye view of society often expressed itself in the parodic, highly stylized language of camp. In her essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag defines that elusive sensibility as a “way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon … not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization”—a definition that harmonizes with Gorey’s remark, “My life has been concerned completely with aesthetics. My responses to things are almost completely aesthetic.”29 His work isn’t campy in the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? sense, but there’s undeniably an element of camp in his poker-faced parodies of Victorian sentimentality and Puritan sermonizing.

With predictable perversity, Gorey decided to major not in art, despite his declaration in his application that he’d set his career sights on “some field of Commercial Art,” or in English, a natural fit given his insatiable appetite for literature, but in French. “With hysterical disregard for practicality I decided to major in French,” he told his army buddy Bill Brandt in a letter dated April 17, 1947. “As you well know for the simple reason of being able to write in the language.”30 (Brandt would “well know” this through his familiarity with Gorey’s habit of giving the plays he wrote at Dugway French titles and of sprinkling them, and his correspondence, with French phrases.) “One and all, including my advisor, are just a teeny bit baffled by such an attitude,” he admitted, “but then so am I.”

In 1977, with the advantages of hindsight, he offered a more plausible explanation: “I figured I’d read anything I wanted to read in English, but I would have to force myself to read all of French literature. And I thought I would like to read all of French literature.”31 Unfortunately, Harvard turned out to have “a perfectly god-awful French department,” in Gorey’s estimation. His French classes were “dim proceedings,” especially the survey courses, which were scheduled right after lunch, with the predictable result that he “would have a nice nap,” but his French, he later claimed, was “absolutely atrocious.”32

From his class notes, we see that Gorey’s French courses force-marched him through Hugo, Rousseau, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Proust, Perrault, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld, none of whom, with the exception of Perrault and La Rochefoucauld, seems to have made much of an impression. Perrault he liked because he was taken with “the funny, irrational quality of fairy tales” (although he also said they disturbed him).33 As for La Rochefoucauld, Gorey seems to have found the witty, cynical Frenchman’s way of looking at the world congenial to his own. Gorey shared La Rochefoucauld’s perspective on la comédie humaine, expressed in tart truisms such as “We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others” and “We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire.”34 In an undergraduate essay on his maxims, Gorey writes, “I myself happen to agree with La Rochefoucauld’s estimate of Man almost completely.”35

The French phrasemaker’s deft way with the short, sharp zinger was a model of the pithiness and clarity Gorey would strive for in his writing. In his essay on the Maximes—which is brilliant, by the way; cogent and clear and startlingly assured in its critical judgments—he admires the lucidity of a style so transparent that it performs a kind of vanishing act in the reader’s mind. “Personality and everything else which is in the slightest degree superfluous to his thought have been stripped away,” writes Gorey.36 This is fascinating on two counts: it reveals the scope of Gorey’s artistic intellect, broad enough to appreciate an aesthetic poles apart from the effete, hothouse-orchid style epitomized by Firbank, and it foreshadows his use of stripped-down, prosy language to ironic, often comic effect.

Gorey’s uncharacteristically self-reflective thoughts on La Rochefou-cauld’s ideas about morality and human nature speak volumes about his own philosophical views. “I think to myself: ‘This is the way people are, their every action is explained once and for all.’”37 La Rochefoucauld “sees Man as being motivated by one thing alone: amour-propre, or the love of self, all other motives being merely masks which more or less effectively conceal the same face beneath. Thus all actions have the same moral value, which is to say none at all.”38

This is strong stuff, a premonition of the existentialism that will resurface in some of Gorey’s more confessional letters to his friend and literary collaborator Peter Neumeyer. When he writes about La Rochefoucauld’s “incurable pessimism” regarding human society, and of the “passion and suffering” beneath the “polite glaciality of his writing’s surface,” we’re reminded of the Gorey who once confided to an interviewer, “I read books about crazed mass murderers, and say to myself, ‘There but for the grace of God.’ … In one way I’ve never related to people or understood why they behave the way they do…. I think life is the pits.”39

In light of such remarks, it’s tempting to hear Gorey speaking through Theodore Pinkfoot, one of the characters in Paint Me Black

Angels, a novel he produced some fifty-odd pages of at Harvard before abandoning it:

I dislike people, I am incapable of hate, but they terrify me. Though I am always analyzing it, human nature bores me, really. I do not believe there are such things as goodness, loyalty, courage, nobility, and their opposites. There is no need for them…. Motives, for the most part, are fatuous and unexplainable; those of which people speak are at best irrelevant.40

Not that Gorey, at Harvard, was a mass murderer manqué or a mis-anthrope sunk in gloom. To be sure, he’d always felt a little alienated: he confided to Bill Brandt, in a typically histrionic letter written in the spring term of his freshman year, that he’d been going slowly insane since September, at a loss as to why he was there and what purpose the whole business served (although he was accumulating a wealth of “idiotic but fascinating isolated bits,” he allowed). He spent the better part of his study hours procrastinating or, paradoxically, “wondering in an obscure sort of way why my grades aren’t brilliant.”41

But if his attitude toward his classes was lackadaisical, Gorey’s appetite for culture-bingeing outside the classroom was undiminished. He regrets, in his letter to Brandt, that he hasn’t made it to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, “what with going to see every play, after the great hiatus in my theatre-going days occasioned by the army, and the ballet, every performance needless to say, whenever there’s a company in town …”42 And even if he has been remiss in his symphony-going, he’s been filling in the more obscure gaps in his record collection: “I have developed an unholy passion for everything pre-Bach of late, regardless of what it is.”

He was drawing constantly, too. Visitors to Eliot F-13 sometimes found him scratching away imperturbably amid the social whirl. “They had the best parties going at Harvard,” Donald Hall recalls. “They were jolly, funny, lively, with a mix of people, many strangers to each other, that mixed well.”43 He remembers Gorey as a man of few words, able to focus on his work amid the hubbub. “You’d go into the room to talk with Frank and there would be Ted sitting at the desk drawing one of his Christmas cards.”44

The academic paper trail that chronicles Gorey’s Harvard years is a fossil record of his evolution as an artist: drawings crowd the margins and cover the flip sides of many of his class notes, creative-writing assignments, research papers, even memos to roomies. Gorey drew women in ball gowns, their plunging décolletages ostentatiously on display, their spiky-lashed, almond-shaped eyes strikingly reminiscent of Picasso’s cubist muses. He drew nuns in wimples and claw-fingered crones hunched over cauldrons and elegant, loose-lined studies of society ladies who look as if they’ve stepped out of the pages of Vogue. He drew free-associated doodles—polymorphous whatnots melting into undulating something-or-others whose dream logic is reminiscent of the surrealist parlor game the exquisite corpse. Here, there, and everywhere, he drew his little men in raccoon coats, variations on an archetype that would soon have a name: Clavius Frederick Earbrass, the “well-known novelist” whose agonizing struggle with his book in progress—“He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel”—is chronicled in Gorey’s first published book, The Unstrung Harp.