by Mark Dery
* * *
Most of Gorey’s poems and fictions had their origins as assignments for the creative-writing classes he took in his sophomore year with the young poet John Ciardi. Boston born and bred from working-class Italian-American stock, Ciardi was a firm believer in poetry that spoke to a mass audience. Donald Hall, who took the course with Gorey and O’Hara, remembers him as “a superb teacher” who “took our writing seriously enough to give us a bad time.”48
Intriguingly, it was Ciardi who fanned Gorey’s interest in the mock moralistic, encouraging him to parody the sermonizing voice of traditional children’s literature. Like Gorey, he recalled childhood as fraught with “intensities and losses,” a time of “enormous violence,” figuratively and literally.49 He scorned the “sugar-coated moralities” of most poetry intended for kids, which he thought sounded as if it were “written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar”; his children’s verse, he said, was written “in the happy conviction that children were small savages with a glad flair for violence.”
Gorey got to know Ciardi “fairly well”; he, O’Hara, and George Rinehart, son of the Rinehart who founded the New York publisher Holt, Rinehart & Winston (and grandson of the mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart), would often join their professor after class for caffeine-fueled bull sessions at a nearby coffee shop.50 When Ciardi and his wife needed some wallpaper steamed from the walls of the apartment they were renovating, they recruited Gorey, O’Hara, and Rinehart for the job. “They were at it for days as they played a game of killing insults,” Ciardi recalled. “They were beautiful and bright and I have never come on three students as a group who seemed to have such unlimited prospects.”51 After a day’s hard work peeling wallpaper while Rossini overtures blared from the record player, the trio would join Ciardi and his wife, Judith, for spaghetti washed down with wine. Judith thought the three young men were “the funniest people in the world, with tongues like scalpels.”52
Ciardi had no doubt that O’Hara was a prodigious talent, writing “like a young Mozart,” although the young poet’s worship of style over sincerity led his professor to observe that he “showed his brilliance rather than his feelings.”53 As for Gorey, who shared O’Hara’s fascination with irony, parody, artifice, and nonsense, along with his aversion to the earnest, confessional voice, Ciardi’s comments on his papers are keenly insightful. Ciardi could be as pitiless in his written remarks as he was solicitous in class, and his analysis of Gorey’s cultivated artificiality and ironic distance from his subject matter is both penetrating and prophetic, foreshadowing charges leveled at Gorey’s work in later years.
Ciardi’s response to a ten-page short story Ted submitted on October 27, 1947, for his English A-1a course is illuminating. “The Colours of Disillusion” (note Gorey’s Anglophilic insistence on British spelling) is a Firbank knockoff, from its gossipy cocktail-party setting to the near-fatal preciosity of the writing. But it’s not all Firbank; already Gorey’s comic-macabre aesthetic is spreading its dark wings. The setting is vaguely Victorian-Edwardian, as is the language (“‘How too frightening,’ said a young man with a soigné moustache”); “the eldest lady of the party” is addicted to shilling shockers; a child is in peril; “great black beards” are fetishized, cathected with infantile notions of “all that was good and kind and moral and strong”; a young woman pours vitriol—literally—on her sleeping husband’s face.54
Ciardi gives Gorey an A, then renders judgment in full: “It begins to appear inevitable that I can never do more than pass your stories back with a question mark. Actually I think it’s your question mark. Everything you’re writing is flawless and unfinished. Unfinished in the sense that you’re following your own instinct but haven’t found it completely. When you do, it—your writing—will, I suspect, be either transcendent or simply pointless, depending on whether you follow it into some idea of order, or merely into the bric-a-brac of amusing reverie.”55 Ciardi is prescient in his observation that Gorey is guided by a lodestar all his own, as he will be for the rest of his creative life. And he’s right to point out that Ted’s sensibility is taking shape but hasn’t yet coalesced.
But he misses the mark when he says that Gorey must choose between transcendence and pointlessness. Gorey, who straddled Taoism and Dadaism, irony and existentialist angst, made a career of defying dualisms, in the course of which he produced works that managed to be both marvelous and pointless, serious and frivolous. Again, Sontag is helpful: “There are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high culture,” she writes in “Notes on ‘Camp.’” “Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”56
Ciardi’s critiques were love notes compared to Professor Kenneth P. Kempton’s comments on a story submitted for his English 1b course, which Gorey took in the spring of ’49. “Your rococo manner, derived from self-consciousness and reading, is here made more than usually irritating by meager content spread very thin,” he wrote in a critique that can be fairly described as withering.57 He gave it a C.
Undeniably, Gorey’s undergraduate efforts earn his professors’ criticisms—and then some. The brittle artificiality of his drawing-room comedies, his thinly drawn characters, his inability to resist overegging the pudding of his prose style: the Firbankian posturing quickly grows tiresome. Then again, shameless imitation is part of any young writer’s apprenticeship. “That’s what happens to young people in college,” said a friend of O’Hara’s, commenting on Frank’s Wildean affectations at Harvard. “They decide on their mentor and they go all the way trying to be like him.”58
At the same time, there’s a culture war going on here between naturalism and what I’ll call unnaturalism: between the novel as an exercise in depth psychology, plumbing the neuroses of realistic characters, and the novel as a puppet show where we see the human comedy—the masks we wear, the little dramas we act out—from a wry, ironic remove. It’s naturalism versus aestheticism, Hemingway in A Moveable Feast exhorting himself to “write the truest sentence that you know” versus Wilde in “The Decay of Lying” lamenting the “morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling.”59 But we can also see this clash of artistic philosophies as a proxy war for the conflict between masculinity American-style (whose literary correlative is the “lean” and “muscular” style of tough-guy modernists like Hemingway and Mailer, with their terse sentences and their commitment to fiction as hard truth, straight up, no chaser) and its mauvish discontents.
In his little books, Gorey would, like the surrealists, the French avant-gardists known as the Oulipo group, and Victorian writers of nonsense verse such as Lear and Lewis Carroll, privilege formal experimentation over conventional storytelling (although he did believe in the importance of plot). Rather than the psychologically three-dimensional characters we meet in mainstream fiction, he preferred the stock types and mythic archetypes familiar from silent films and ballets, folktales and fairy tales, Kabuki and Noh theater, whodunits and penny dreadfuls.
This doesn’t mean his work was divorced from lived experience: surrealism, aestheticism, and nonsense are no less capable than realism of accessing the deeper truths of the human condition. Brad Gooch’s analysis of O’Hara applies equally to Gorey: “He didn’t want to be a Hemingway, the sort of popular writer who reduced the complexities of felt life to an ‘elegant machinery’ while his characters pretended to a deceptive lifelikeness.” Instead, as O’Hara put it, he wanted “to move towards a complexity which makes life within the work and which does not (necessarily, although it may) resemble life as much as most people think it is lived.”60
After Harvard, Gorey would never again attempt long-form fiction. He would invent a genre all his own, one that partook of the illustrated children’s book, the mystery story, the graphic novel (Gorey anticipated the genre decades before Art Spiegelman’s Maus popularized it, in 1986), the artist’s book (conceptual artwork in
book form), and tongue-in-cheek treatments of moralizing nursery rhymes (Heinrich Hoffmann’s grisly-funny Struwwelpeter and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children are the most obvious influences). His little books don’t fit neatly into any category but Gorey, really. Yet they’re inarguably a species of fiction, however uncategorizable, and Gorey would always think of himself as “first a writer, then an artist.”61
* * *
By the spring of ’49, O’Hara had gotten so tight with another Eliot House resident, Hal Fondren, that he was spending much of his time in O-22, Fondren’s suite, which looked out on the housemaster’s garden. A fellow vet who’d served as an air force gunner in England, Fondren was witty and cultured in the usual Anglophilic way: he liked to show off his collection of the early pamphlet editions of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which he’d purchased as they came out, one by one.
Speaking of quartets, Gorey struck up a friendship with Fondren’s roommate, Tony Smith. Smith, the scion of a wealthy Republican family, was an econ major who’d prepared at ultraexclusive Exeter. He doesn’t seem like Gorey’s type, but, against all odds, they began palling around.
Gorey and O’Hara were growing apart, partly as a result of O’Hara’s absorption in Fondren and partly because their diverging creative trajectories and social styles were accentuating their differences. O’Hara’s appetite for intellectual blood sports—cocktail-party games of one-upmanship—and his hard-partying, hard-drinking gregariousness contrasted sharply with Gorey’s reclusiveness and dry, ironic style. “Gorey’s style was never entirely appropriate for O’Hara,” notes Gooch.62 “As a schoolmate put it, Gorey’s style was ‘cool, English. Nothing could get to you. But then Frank was someone who everything got to.’”63 Even so, Gorey continued to serve as a model of unapologetic individuality for O’Hara, especially in his flamboyant manner and dress, a style later characterized by an obituary writer as “dandy nerd.”64
The Gorey beard made its first appearance around this time.c Gorey later claimed, in an unpublished interview with a young fan named Faith Elliott, that he let his whiskers grow long to conceal the fact that he had a receding chin, “which is one of the things that’s a deep, dark secret.”65 “If you pushed his beard, for a long face he had a very small chin,” Mel Schierman, his friend from the New York City Ballet scene, confirms. “He made me do it one time.” (In one of her letters to Ted at Harvard, Helen Gorey, ever helpful, enclosed a clipping of a magazine humor column quoting a “physiologist” who reassures weak-chinned readers that “a receding chin does not indicate weakness—either mental or physical.”)66
Of course, if Ted’s beard was a disguise for the shameful secret that he was a chinless wonder, it did double duty as a token of his affection for Wildean aestheticism, Edwardian dandyism, and nineteenth-century litterateurs like Edward Lear, who sported a majestic beard that’s a dead ringer for Gorey’s. An attraction to the beard as an emblem of Victorian manliness may be somewhere in there, too: Gorey’s fiction, as far back as Harvard, is full of strapping chaps with luxuriant facial hair. Then, too, beards are masks, tailor-made for concealing your true self if you’re the shy, reserved type.
The sneakers and the flowing coat, both as much a part of the Gorey look as his beard, were de rigueur by this time as well, though the coat wasn’t yet the floor-length fur version that would later inspire dropped jaws on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. “Tony [Smith] and Ted would go shopping every week at [the Boston department store] Filene’s Basement,” Fondren recalled. “It was just at the time when those long canvas coats with sheepskin collars became very fashionable and they both wore them.”67
Gorey may have borrowed the idea for his famous fur coat from the poet John Wheelwright (Harvard class of ’20), an improbable mix of bohemian and Boston Brahmin who flew the flag of his nonconformity in the form of a floor-sweeping raccoon coat. But it’s just as likely that he lifted the idea from Oscar Wilde, who in some portraits cuts a glamorous figure in his beloved fur coat. Certainly Gorey’s habit, as a freshman, of wearing his hair “plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor,” as George Montgomery described it, sounds an awful lot like Wilde in the 1883 Sarony picture of him wearing his hair cut short, with a little fringe of a bang.68
As for the three-inch-long fingernail that caught Larry Osgood’s eye, it’s useful to know that Firbank wore his nails “long and polished,” according to one of his biographers, “and what was unusual in a man is that they were stained a deep carmine.”69 When we learn that Firbank wore exotic rings on his pale fingers—jade rings from China, Egyptian rings made of blue ceramic—we can’t help wondering if Gorey’s signature rings were, in a sense, Firbank’s.
Gorey’s own explanation, when asked about the origins of his image in a 1978 interview, was predictably scattershot. “The thing is, my drawing tends to be rather Victorian and everything,” he said, and “when I first got [fur] coats, they looked like…they were Victorian, you know, period pieces. (Now they don’t, because other people are going for them.)…I’ve always worn a lot of jewelry, which nobody ever did…and I’ve had a beard for twenty-eight years…and when I first had it everybody said, ‘Do you belong to the House of David or something?’”70
O’Hara would never be the screwball dandy Gorey was; still, he was taken with Gorey’s independence of mind, manifest not only in his flamboyant dress but also in an intellectual curiosity that followed its own inscrutable logic and in a literary voice that was immune to prevailing trends and critical orthodoxies. In their sophomore year, Gorey and O’Hara favored the Grolier Book Shop on Plympton Street, rummaging through tall shelves stuffed mostly with literary fiction and poetry or reading on the comfily dilapidated sofa that dominated the small but high-ceilinged shop. O’Hara was on a C. Day-Lewis jag, collecting all his novels, which to Gorey’s mind were “sort of elegant, a little dull, concerning sensitive young English men in the early thirties.”71 Gorey was smitten with Ivy Compton-Burnett and was collecting the Penguin editions of her novels.
In the spring term of their junior year, however, the Mandrake Book Store on Boylston, near Harvard Square, was their preferred haunt. Unlike the cramped, dusty Grolier, the Mandrake had the feel of a comfortably appointed sitting room, with customers reading in chairs among the well-ordered shelves. Hal Fondren recalled, “I had an account there because I wanted every Henry Green novel.…Ivy Compton-Burnett, of course, was the patron saint of the group with Ted Gorey as her chief acolyte. We were all dying over the latest Ivy Compton-Burnett. You can’t imagine the excitement it created.”72
Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) was a bloodless anatomist of English society. Like Firbank’s, her novels consist mostly of dialogue, much of it Wildean epigrams. They read like plays, which may go far in explaining Gorey’s attraction to her work (and to Firbank’s). A philosophical dialogue with the butler, Deakin, from A Heritage and Its History is worth reprinting in full:
“And we cannot depend on the silver lining, sir,” said Deakin. “I have seen many clouds without it.”
“I have never seen one with it,” said Walter. “My clouds have been so very black.”
“Well, the lighter the lining, sir, the darker the cloud may seem.”
“You pride yourself on pessimism, Deakin,” said Julia.
“Well, ma’am, when we are told to look on the bright side of things, it is not generally at a happy time.”
“But it is good advice for daily life.”
“Daily life harbors everything, ma’am. All our troubles come into it.”73
A very Goreyesque sentiment.
* * *
Near the end of the spring term, in May of ’49, Ted exhibited his watercolors at the Mandrake. The show was a success: “The tiny store was overflowing with an animated crowd of young students smoking, drinking, and, above all, uttering sharp, fast comments,” Gooch reports.74 Behind the scenes, however, Ted was coming unstrung, as he would say. O’Hara had announced his decision to move in with
Fondren that fall, at the beginning of their senior year, a turn of events that left Gorey feeling “mildly abandoned,” he later confessed.75 Ted saw Frank as “moving onward and upward” in the spring of ’49.76 “I felt that after we stopped rooming together that he sort of expanded,” said Gorey.77
Ted may be referring to O’Hara’s forays into artistic territory outside the sharply defined borders of their shared style; beyond Firbank and Compton-Burnett into Beckett, Camus, and, soon enough, in New York, de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Alice Neel. But Gorey’s reference to O’Hara having “expanded” may have had a hidden meaning. According to Gooch, “O’Hara began to flirt during the spring term with some of the homosexual implications of the high style he had so cleverly absorbed” from Gorey.78
He’d started fooling around with various gentlemen in Eliot House. “There was some carrying on towards the end” of their two years as roommates, Gorey recalled. “He would occasionally come back bombed out of his wits.”79 It’s ironic that Gorey’s Anglophilic, inescapably gay “high style” beckoned O’Hara out of the closet, since Ted himself was securely closeted at Harvard, his outrageousness notwithstanding. Nonetheless, Gooch suggests, he was instrumental in O’Hara’s acceptance of his homosexuality. “He had friends in the Music Department who actually accused me of having corrupted Frank,” Gorey said, “like in some turn-of-the-century novel.”80