Born to Be Posthumous

Being nil, Gorey decided, was the safest policy. “I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something,” he said twenty-nine years later when asked about his sexuality. “I’ve never said that I was gay and I’ve never said that I wasn’t. A lot of people would say that I wasn’t because I never do anything about it.”91 Would they? Is having desires yet not acting on them really the same as not having any desires to act on?

Gorey, ever paradoxical, is saying two contradictory things simultaneously: that he’s asexual (“undersexed”) and that he might be gay but since he never does anything about it, he’s as good as “neutral,” as Compton-Burnett would say.* He’s “fortunate” to be “undersexed,” he says, implying that Fate decreed it. But doesn’t his admission “I am probably terribly repressed” direct our attention to what, exactly, he’s repressing?92 “Every now and then someone will say my books are seething with repressed sexuality,” he conceded.93

In later life, when Gorey talked about sex, it was either with Swiftian disdain for its panting, grunting preposterousness—“No one takes pornography seriously,” he scoffed—or with Victorian mortification at the very mention of the unmentionable.94 When he talked about love, it was always in the past tense, as a farcical calamity that had befallen him, the sort of thing insurance claims adjusters file under Acts of God, like the flattening of the picnickers by the Wobbling Rock in The Willowdale Handcar. “You don’t choose the people you fall in love with,” he told an interviewer in 1980.95

In any event, his romantic imbroglios weren’t true love, he implied, but mere “infatuations.” Infatuations are a distinguishing characteristic of sexual immaturity—the stuff of adolescent crushes and teen-idol worship. Narcissistic at heart, they offer romance without the grunt work of relationship building, love without the hairy horrors of sex. “When I look back on my furious, ill-considered infatuations for people,” said Gorey, “they were really all the same person.”96 Of course they were: the objects of our obsessions are ideal types, spun from fantasy. “I thought I was in love a couple of times, but I rather think it was only infatuation,” said Gorey in 1992. “It bothered me briefly, but I always got over it. 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.’ … I realized I was accident-prone in that direction anyway, so the hell with it.”97

Was it his traumatic two years of worshipping Tony Smith that made Ted say to hell with love, and even sex, forever? Larry Osgood thinks Gorey swore off sex long before he got to Harvard. “He did tell me—because we were close friends, and we would talk about these things—that he once had a sexual experience in his late teens, I think. And he hadn’t liked it. And that was that. He wasn’t going to do that again.” Gorey didn’t offer any details about the incident, but Osgood is convinced, from his intimate knowledge of Ted’s emotional life, that it must have been a same-sex experience.

But whether it was a traumatic sexual encounter in his teens or his tempestuous affair with Tony Smith at Harvard that put Ted off sex, Osgood is convinced “there was more choice in his abstinence than biology.” Gorey “didn’t want the distractions of emotional engagements,” he says, “which would be messy, and he might get hurt, and in fact he had been hurt.” John Ashbery said something strikingly similar when I asked him for his recollections of Gorey at Harvard. “There was something very endearing about him, almost childlike,” Ashbery recalled. “At the same time, I feel that he was somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, fun-loving level…. I had the impression that he had constructed defenses against real intimacy, maybe as a result of early disappointments in friendship/affection.”98

At the same time, Osgood thinks Gorey was being honest when he said that relationships are a distraction from the writing desk and the drawing board. An aesthete to the end, Gorey lived for Art, in the opinion of the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff, who described him as someone who “cultivated the life of a vestal, the anchoritic handmaiden of his art.”99 “It’s hard enough to sit down to work every day, God knows, even if you are not emotionally involved,” Gorey told an interviewer. “Whole stretches of your life go kerplunk when that happens.”100

Unsurprisingly, Gorey’s grades had gone kerplunk during his “furious, ill-considered infatuation” with Tony Smith. Assistant dean Harrower notified him, on March 4 of ’49, that he was on academic probation. As always, he managed to pull himself out of his death spiral: by July, he’d been relieved from warning, as the official notification put it.

He rallied his creative energies, too. Sometime between 1948 and ’50, he created three little gems of commercial illustration, flawlessly executed cover designs for Lilliput, a British men’s monthly that offered a pre-Playboy potpourri of humor, short stories, arts coverage, cartoons, and, daringly, soft-core “art nudes” depicting female models cavorting— aesthetically, mind you—on beaches or in bohemian artists’ studios. Whether his covers ever appeared in print or were just fodder for his commercial-illustration portfolio isn’t known. The looming threat of graduation had concentrated his mind on the necessity of making a living, someday soon.

Gorey did submit his work to at least one publication outside Harvard. A rejection letter from the New Yorker, dated May 8, 1950, and signed “Franklyn B. Modell,” thanks him, in the usual perfunctory way, for letting the magazine see his drawings. Pleasantries out of the way, Mr. Modell gets down to business: “While I readily recognize their merit, I’m afraid they are not suitable for The New Yorker. The people in your pictures are too strange and the ideas, we think, are not funny…. By way of suggestion may I say that drawings of a less eccentric nature might find a more enthusiastic audience here.”101

This was the New Yorker of Harold Ross, the founding editor, who scolded E. B. White about his use of the unthinkably vulgar phrase “toilet paper,” so “sickening” it “might easily cause vomiting”; home to cartoonists such as Peter Arno, an upper-crust East Coaster whose covers and single-panel gags took little notice of the Depression, the war, or other unpleasantries, except as punch lines.102 Arno went down well with a dry martini at the Stork Club; Gorey’s camp-gothic eccentricities, not so much.

(Happily, Gorey followed his instincts and had the satisfaction, forty-three years later, of seeing his work appear in the pages, and ultimately on the cover, of a New Yorker that was ready, at last, for the amusingly unfunny. Shortly after his death, the magazine dedicated its end page, by way of an elegy, to a Gorey illustration.)

Gorey graduated from Harvard on June 22, 1950, with an AB in Romance languages and literatures. His final report card records an A in English, a C in French, and a B in history, an appropriately erratic ending to an academic career that had zigzagged all over the place.

Outside the classroom, however, he floored the accelerator. Harvard is where Gorey perfected his image, stylizing his zany fashion sense and theatrical mannerisms into the persona that, with a few last tweaks (pierced ears, copious necklaces, sidewalk-sweeping fur coats dyed heart-attack green or yellow), would turn heads in Manhattan. More important, Harvard is where he sketched in the intellectual substance of his eccentric persona, drawing inspiration from writers like Firbank and Compton-Burnett. From Lear, he took the limerick form. Encouraged by Ciardi, he put to drily amusing use a mock-moralistic tone that parodied Victorian writing for children. Even the melancholy epitaphs at Mount Auburn Cemetery, mementos of the Victorian cult of mourning, and the Puritan reproaches to mortal vanity in the Old Burying Ground near Harvard Square had something to teach him: their lugubrious cadences and morbid sentiments, so melodramatic they verge on black comedy, echo in Gorey’s verse.

He learned as much from his antipathies as he did from his sympathies: in several interviews, he returned to a subject dear to his heart, his adamantine hatred of Henry James, whose tendency to explain things to death he found wearisome, whose labyrinthine sentences maddened him, and whose characters he found morally repugnant, motivated by “utterly unpleasant arid curiosity.”103 In an essay for a comp lit class, he wrote, “James’s favoured method of unfolding an action is to have it revealed, slowly, bit by bit, through inexhaustible questionings, probings, pryings, comparings on the part of onlookers of the main action…. If anyone ever literally died of curiosity I am certain it must have been a Jamesian character.”

Crucially, he discovered that he wasn’t a novelist but that he might, by combining his gifts for narrative compression and epigrammatic wit with his meticulous, hand-drawn engravings, produce masterpieces of miniaturism that defy categorization. All the while, he was evolving as an artist, polishing his draftsmanship and, through his exploration of watercolor, developing a taste for subtle color harmonies and deliciously queasy hues.

But when it came to Gorey’s maturation as an artist and a thinker, nothing in his four years at Harvard affected him more profoundly than his relationship with Frank O’Hara. Their friendship introduced both men to new interests and influences; each sharpened his ideas about art, literature, music, film, theater, and ballet on the whetstone of the other’s equally nimble, wide-ranging mind. Postmodernists avant la lettre, they embraced lowbrow, highbrow, and middlebrow tastes with gusto and without apology.

As important, each was present at the birth of the other’s self-creation and, consciously or not, lent a hand. “All of us were obsessed,” Gorey later recalled, characterizing the mood of their Harvard years. “Obsessed by what? Ourselves, I expect.”104 The bearded dandy nerd in Keds and fur coat, fingers dripping rings, was “a kind of this-is-me-but-it’s-not-me thing,” Gorey later confided.105 Meaning: “Part of me is genuinely eccentric, part of me is a bit of a put-on.”106 He added, slyly, “But I know what I’m doing.” (Another time, he struck a more poignant note, seeming almost trapped by his eccentric image: “I look like a real person, but underneath I am not real at all. It’s just a fake persona.”)107

Though Gorey and O’Hara crossed paths briefly after graduation through their involvement with the Poets’ Theatre, in Cambridge, their friendship wouldn’t survive long. After both men moved to Manhattan—O’Hara in ’51, Gorey in ’53—their lives intersected only occasionally, though they frequented the New York City Ballet, had friends in common, and lived just a subway stop apart.

Their diverging trajectories had something to do with it. In New York, O’Hara’s engagement with contemporary art would draw him into the orbit of the abstract expressionists, whose frenetic socializing and improvisatory aesthetic would show him the way out of naturalism’s imitation of life and into a poetry collaged out of scraps of life itself—snatches of conversation, things seen and freeze-framed by his camera eye, quotations from his encyclopedic reading and movie watching and gallery going. O’Hara was addicted to the Now—to art forms such as action painting, which captured “the present rather than the past, the present in all its chaotic splendor,” writes Marjorie Perloff in Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters.108

Gorey, by contrast, immersed himself ever deeper in things past—silent movies, Victorian novels, Edward Lear, the Ballets Russes. Pursuing his solitary obsessions, he chased a vision all his own, wholly new yet sepia-tinted with a sense of lost time.* O’Hara was avant-garde; Gorey was avant-retro. At Harvard, Gorey distilled his influences into a concentrated essence that would nourish his art for the rest of his life. O’Hara, by the summer of ’49, was shaking off his Firbankian affectations. Critiquing a friend’s poem, he wrote, with mock condescension, “I can see certain tendencies in you which we all have to get rid of. With me it was Ronald Firbank, with you it looks a bit like the divine Oscar …”109

Their friendship came to grief over one of O’Hara’s pointed wisecracks. Maybe there had always been a little rivalry beneath their sharp-witted jousting—who knows? But O’Hara’s hipster derision at Gorey’s Firbankian sensibility—so arch, so preciously aesthetic, so aloof from the cultural ferment of the moment—emerged undisguised in a jab that cut too close to the bone. “Ted told me that he’d seen Frank at some point shortly after he’d moved to New York,” Larry Osgood remembers, “and Frank’s opening remark, practically, was, ‘So, are you still drawing those funny little men?’ And Ted took great offense at that, and that was that for that relationship.”

Years later, Gorey settled the score. Rolling his eyes at the idea that his former roommate, who banged out his poems on the fly, was some kind of genius, he told an interviewer, “I was astonished after his death, and even before, when he became a kind of icon for a whole generation. If you know somebody really well, you can never really believe how talented they are. I know how he wrote some of those poems, so I can’t take them all that seriously.”110

O’Hara died in 1966, at the age of forty, killed by a teenager joyriding at night in a Jeep on the beach at Fire Island. At Harvard, in the first flush of their friendship, he’d written a poem for Ted that was later included in his posthumous collection, Early Writing. Titled, simply, “For Edward Gorey,” it evokes not only the Victorian-Edwardian setting of Gorey’s work and its insular, dollhouse psychology but also the sense of the Freudian repressed that haunts it. Referring to the “anger” underlying Gorey’s “fight for order,” he notes, “you people this heatless square / with your elegant indifferent / and your busy leisured / characters who yet refuse despite surrounding flames / to be demons.”111 He evokes the taxidermy stillness of Gorey’s vitrine worlds (“You arrange on paper life stiller than / oiled fruits or wired twigs”) and the obsessive cross-hatching that is a Gorey signature (“See how upon the virgin grain / a crosshatch claws a patch / of black blood …”).

Strangely, in O’Hara’s spyhole view of Ted’s world, Gorey’s funny little men are female: “You transfigure hens, your men cluck tremulous, detached …” Is this a coded reference to their gay circle at a time when it was common for gay men, among themselves, to jokingly adopt women’s names? The poem ends on a moody, crepuscular note, wonderfully evocative of the perpetual twilight in which Gorey’s stories always seem to take place: “And when the sun goes down,” O’Hara writes, the hen-men’s “eyes glow gas jets / and the gramophone supplies them, / resting, soft-tuned squawks.”

Looking back in 1989, Gorey took stock of his time at Harvard and his friendship with O’Hara. “We were giddy and aimless and wanting to have a good time and to be artists,” he said. “We were just terribly intellectual and avant-garde and all that jazz.”112

* Rhymes with glower.

* In a 1968 letter to his friend and children’s book collaborator Peter Neumeyer, Gorey, having just seen Dietrich at a matinee, describes her as not so much “fantastically well-preserved, but like a younger, not so well-preserved second-rate version of the genre she herself created. Heaven knows she went through innumerable versions of herself, all equally artificial, but one was always aware of the person behind them, but that is scarcely in evidence at all now … ” That said, her shtick is ageless, he concedes, admitting that a decade earlier he would have “swooned away with rapture.” See Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 126.

* It came and went, apparently: a photo of him in New York in the early ’50s shows him beardless. In 1953 it comes to stay and soon attains an imposing Old Testament glory. “We heard through some family … that he has grown a beard,” his father wrote a friend that year. “I wonder what he’s trying to look like—a cross between Sir Thomas Beecham, Lennie Hayton, and Boris Karloff ?” See Edward Leo Gorey’s letter to Merrill Moore, April 24, 1953, Merrill Moore Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

* Compton-Burnett lived for many years with Margaret Jourdain, a noted writer on interior decor and furniture, in what the Victorians would have called a Boston marriage—two women living together in a mutually supportive, though not necessarily romantic, arrangement. Whether their relationship was sapphic or merely sororal isn’t known; Compton-Burnett referred to herself and Margaret as “neutrals.”

* In that respect, he had much in common with the artist Joseph Cornell. Like Gorey, Cornell was a species of one whose work is essentially uncategorizable. Also like Gorey, he was deeply indebted to surrealism. He worked on a dollhouse scale (another Gorey parallel), fastidiously arranging found objects and images in wooden boxes. Masterpieces of lyrical nostalgia and surrealist free association, his works are collaged from vintage photos, old toys, antique scientific illustrations, rusty scissors and skeleton keys, and other Goreyesque oddments.

Cornell was likewise a fervent worshipper at the temple of Balanchine. Surely he and Gorey passed each other in the lobby of the New York State Theater, at Lincoln Center, during intermission. Yet there’s no evidence they ever met, and neither, to the best of my knowledge, ever mentioned the other.