by Mark Dery
What Ted thought of his parents’ reunion we can only guess. “I remember [him] telling me about it when I went up to Radcliffe,” says Skee Morton. (Skee, like her sister, Eleanor, went to Radcliffe.) “He took me out to the movies occasionally, and I remember he said once, ‘Oh, incidentally, my parents got married again today.’” Eleanor added, “I remember him rolling his eyes when asked about his family.”
Gorey’s jaundiced reaction to his parents’ remarriage isn’t surprising. Father and son were poles apart. A hail-fellow-well-met type, always good for a laugh, with a toastmaster’s supply of one-liners, Ed Gorey was the antithesis of his oddball, bookworm son in practically every way. Both were writers, it’s true. But there the resemblances end. As a reporter, Ed turned out workmanlike prose, indistinguishable from the characterless wire-service copy that unfurled from Teletype machines in newsrooms everywhere. By contrast, Ted’s voice on the page is instantly recognizable. Tellingly, Gorey fils was “Ted” to family, childhood friends, and his social circles at Harvard and in New York and “Edward” to seemingly everyone he met after moving to the Cape but never, ever “Ed” if he could help it.
Skee is certain that Ted “was never close to his father.” “We never heard anything about his father,” Eleanor confirms. Ed “never came here [Cape Cod], and as far as Ted told me he never went there [Chicago], except perhaps at the end [of Gorey senior’s life, when he was dying of cancer].”
As for the view from Ed Gorey’s side of the father-son divide, he seemed bemused by his son. Early the following year, in a letter written in the jocose, life-of-the-party tone he affected in his correspondence, he confided to Merrill Moore about his eccentric son’s antics, comparing his letters to “a joint report from Vera Vague, Gracie Allen, and Judy Canova.”52 At the very least, the older Gorey allowed, there was never a dull moment with Ted: “He has you either amused—or clutching the chandelier.”b
In Chicago for the holidays with his newly remarried parents, Ted delivered “a joint lecture…shortly after New Year’s with Miss Camille Chaddick, a director of the Northwestern Drama group,” according to Judith Cass’s puff piece in the Tribune—the fruit, most likely, of Ed’s PR campaign for the Merrill Moore books. The Trib writer laid it on a little thick when she described Ted as “busy writing and directing for the Poets’ Theatre…and with art assignments in his Boston studio.”53
Gorey had, in fact, just published his first cover illustration for a national magazine. His artless, loose-lined sketch of a dapper chap in a trilby hat gazing at a cluster of onion-domed Oriental buildings (plunked, improbably, at the end of a wharf) adorns the cover of the November 1952 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The image appears again inside the magazine, in the opening pages of “Evangelist,” a short story by Joyce Cary with “drawings by Edward Gorey,” the name he would use in his professional life from then on (when he wasn’t writing under one of his countless pseudonyms). There are two more Gorey illustrations, done in the same freehand, “unfinished” style as the cover. His compositional skills are evident, as is his ability to hint at psychological depths with the subtlest of cues. We sense a subconscious interplay, a counterpoint of averted gazes and furtive glances, between the figures he arranges in little knots, each absorbed in his or her own thoughts. And his draftsmanship—specifically, his feeling for landscape and his attention to architectural detail—is getting better.
But in December of ’52 Ted was nowhere near the conquering hometown hero suggested by Cass’s breathless description. That June, he bemoaned the general state of his affairs in a letter to Alison Lurie, who’d moved away from Cambridge by then. “Existence, if one chooses to be optimistic enough to call it that, is, here, deadly,” he writes. “I am on the verge of starvation and debtors’ prison once again. I wrote Cap Pearce the end of last week for a job at Little, Brown, but he hasn’t answered yet.…Being without the wherewithal to buy gin, I am drinking tonic all by itself.”54 He was going to redouble his assault on the job market, targeting libraries, “publishers, advertising agencies, and after that, Gawd knows.” Meantime, “a small child (presumed) is beating furiously on the back fence with a poker. Too dreary.”55
Things were about to change. Just before his Christmas trip to Chicago, he’d visited New York, where Barbara Epstein—a friend from his Harvard days, when she was Barbara Zimmerman—was an editor at Doubleday. Her husband, Jason, also a Doubleday editor, was launching Anchor Books, the company’s first venture into what were then uncharted waters: quality literature published in mass-market paperback format. Strictly speaking, Barbara wasn’t on the Anchor staff, but she had her husband’s ear, and Jason respected her “very strong sense” of the visual statement the new imprint should make.56 Hiring Gorey to design covers for Anchor was her idea. “We had to have a cover designer, and Barbara suggested Ted—Teddles, as she called him,” says Jason. “He was perfect. He was a genius.” Gorey whipped up a portfolio of fake covers for them, which in his recollection were “as uncommercial as you can reasonably get.”57 Somehow, though, they were just the thing for Anchor as far as the Epsteins were concerned. “They offered me a job,” said Gorey, “which at first I turned down because I didn’t want to live in New York.”58
His move to Manhattan would mark the true beginning of his long, dogged trudge to cult fame and, ultimately, more mainstream success than an incurable eccentric could have hoped for. Even so, thirty-four years in New York wouldn’t do much to diminish his antipathy for the city. In another version of the story of his hiring by the Epsteins, he sharpened that point: “At first I said no, but then I thought, ‘I’m not really surviving very noticeably in Boston, so I’ll move to New York, much as I hate the place.’ A thought I never lost sight of. It’s just too much.”59
a “Vous sera un succès fou” is French for “You will be a wild success.” “Goodbye Arno Cobean and Steig here comes…Gorey”: Peter Arno, Sam Cobean, and William Steig were marquee names in the New Yorker’s roster of cartoonists at the time.
b Vera Vague was a screw-loose “spinster” created in the radio era by the actress Barbara Jo Allen. A fluttery hysteric, nonstop yakker, and font of misinformation on every subject, Vera was the sort of genially sexist stereotype that cracked them up on the Bob Hope and Rudy Vallée shows. In like fashion, Gracie Allen played a nutty, corkscrew-logic housewife to George Burns’s wryly perplexed man of the house on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show from 1950 to ’58. Judy Canova, another movie actress and radio personality of the day, often played a gullible goofball hillbilly. (Odd that Gorey’s father should compare his son exclusively to exaggerated caricatures of femininity.)
Chapter 5
“Like a Captive Balloon, Motionless Between Sky and Earth”
New York, 1953
Gorey on the New Jersey Palisades near the George Washington Bridge, November 1958. (Photograph by Sandy Everson-Levy.
Bambi Everson, private collection.)
“I MOVED TO NEW YORK at the beginning of 1953,” recalled Gorey, “and embarked on what is laughingly called my career.”1 During his visit in December of ’52, before going home to Chicago for the holidays, he’d apartment-hunted in Greenwich Village, whose time-honored bohemianism made it Gorey’s natural habitat. Unable to find anything suitable in the Village, he’d settled, at last, on a studio apartment in an elegant four-story town house in the midtown neighborhood of Murray Hill.
Thirty-six East 38th Street is a brick-and-limestone-trimmed mansion built circa 1862 and remodeled in 1903 with a Beaux-Arts facade. The feel of the place was similar to that of his Marlborough Street apartment in Boston, except that he lived on the second floor rather than in the basement, “at the back and so quiet,” he told Merrill Moore, “with a roof which I can use to sunbathe and the like.”2
Gorey’s new lodgings were handy for the Doubleday offices at 575 Madison Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets. The art department was shoehorned into a single space on the sixteenth floor. “Nine people in one big
room” is how Diana Klemin, the art director at the time, remembers it. Improbably, one of Ted’s workmates was none other than Connie Joerns, his bosom friend from Francis Parker. Like Gorey, she’d moved to New York to seek her fortune. Joerns was a production assistant, handling pasteup and layout, though she doubled as an illustrator on occasion.
Job titles weren’t taken all that seriously at Anchor. The Epsteins envisioned Gorey as a designer, creating a distinctive look for the trailblazing imprint, but Klemin thought of him, initially, as an in-house artist. “I started out as an artist in the art department, then I switched over to being a book designer” is how he remembered it.3 He underwent a brief apprenticeship, learning the ropes of book-cover production, before graduating to full-fledged design. “He was on the drawing boards,” says Klemin, “fixing mechanicals [for freelancers like Leonard Baskin and Ben Shahn], doing paste-ups and designing jackets.”4 “Mechanicals,” in the precomputer age, were templates created by pasting cover elements such as artwork and type proofs onto a sheet of stiff-stock paper; printers used this template to make a printing plate.
Doing pasteup involved laying out the artwork and typographic elements, such as the title. Type had to be specced—marked up with instructions that specified which typeface, font, and font size the printer should use. For Gorey, who didn’t have a design-school knowledge of typefaces, it was a laborious, detail-intensive chore. Frustration, it turned out, was the mother of invention: the hand-lettered typography that’s so much a part of his work’s anachronistic charm began as a quick-and-dirty solution to the demands of his job. “I really didn’t know too much about type in those days, and it was simply easier to hand-letter the whole thing than to spec type,” he told the design writer Steven Heller.5 Everyone went gaga over Gorey’s hand-lettered typography, “which I did very poorly, I always felt, but everybody seemed to like it. So I got stuck with it for the rest of my life.”6
Lafcadio’s Adventures by André Gide, cover design and illustration by Edward Gorey. (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953)
Sure enough, the title, cover lines, and even the price on his first cover for Anchor, Lafcadio’s Adventures by André Gide, are hand-lettered in an antique typeface style. By drawing them askew, he gives them a jaunty, animated quality that captures the madcap spirit of Gide’s novel, a satirical thriller about a gang of con men who disguise themselves as priests in order to dupe a bunch of wealthy Catholic monarchists. Gorey sets the white title against a slate-blue trestle whose arches frame a series of vignettes: a furtive figure spying on red-cloaked priests, a lady in a bustle and a hat with huge plumes, and so forth. In the foreground, a gawky youth—Lafcadio, we imagine—strikes one of Gorey’s ballet poses, observing the goings-on. Gorey’s visual wit and tonic use of color are on display, and the eye bounces around the busy scene, guided by his strong sense of composition.
The Wanderer by Alain-Fournier, cover design and illustration by Edward Gorey. (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953)
By contrast, his cover for Alain-Fournier’s The Wanderer, also published in ’53, is masterful in its use of empty space: in a landscape whose austerity recalls the black-ink paintings of the Japanese sumi-e tradition, a lone traveler toils along a white road under a white sun in a white sky. The gusting wind whips his cape. Ahead looms the forest primeval, deep and dark. Compositions such as this, in which expanses of empty space—limitless vistas, big skies—are contrasted dramatically with single-hair details or densely crosshatched shadows, will become a Gorey signature.
Gorey had “a natural tendency toward black and white,” he said. “Line drawing is where my talent lies.”7 He claimed, in his usual self-deprecating fashion, to be helpless when it came to color. “With color,” he told his friend Clifford Ross, “I have a tendency to wish to blow my brains out at some point or other. I always have trouble finishing color. I mean, I start out and put in the colors I like—olive green, and lemon yellow, and lavender. And I think, ‘Oh, dear, there are other colors that have to go in this some way or other.’ But I don’t know what colors I want in there. And then I realize I don’t want any more color than this at all. And so I sit there.”8
He protested too much. One of the things that makes Gorey’s Anchor covers so instantly identifiable, and so seductive, is what Diana Klemin calls his “very refreshing use of color.” At times, his palette is reminiscent of the Japanese artists he loved, ukiyo-e masters of the wood-block print such as Hokusai, and of English illustrators such as Edward Ardizzone (1900–1979) and Edward Bawden (1903–89), both of whom he admired. We can detect, in some of Gorey’s covers, the influence of Ardizzone’s delicate watercolor washes and Bawden’s linocuts, with their blocks of solid color and sharply incised lines. Gorey drew inspiration, more generally, from British book design, which he encountered by way of his fondness for British writers. “I was aware of British book jackets because I bought a lot of British books at the time,” he said.9
Asked by Steven Heller about his partiality for colors that are “always muted, very earthy, and distinctly subtle,” Gorey replied, “I guess I could have picked bright reds or blues, but I’ve never been much for that. My palette seems to be sort of lavender, lemon-yellow, olive-green, and then a whole series of absolutely no colors at all.”10 He was especially fond of his cover for Travels in Arabia Deserta, a classic of Victorian travel writing, which evokes the desolate beauty of the desert in “three different shades of blah gray-olive.”11
Heller thinks Gorey’s aesthetic was partly a child of necessity. “Having to use three flat colors plus black, rather than process color, was the factor that would give his paperback covers a certain silkscreened or etched look,” he asserts in Edward Gorey: His Book Cover Art & Design.12 In process printing, translucent inks in three primary colors—cyan (blue), magenta (red), and yellow—are superimposed, in the form of countless tiny dots, to produce what are known as halftone images. For example, when cyan and yellow overlap, they make green. Flat-color printing, also known as spot-color printing, involves premixing inks to produce specific colors. Each color is printed discretely, a process that requires multiple runs through the printing press; the result is shapes that are crisply incised and colors that are more densely opaque than process colors—more solid looking.
Often Gorey exploits the theatrical potential of spot-color printing’s defining aspect—its ability to create sharply defined areas, or spots, of pigment—by striking a single, plangent note of vivid color against a monochromatic or muted background. The results are dramatic: on François Villon (1958) by D. B. Wyndham Lewis, a lady in vermilion, framed by a black arch and set against Gorey’s generic gray emptiness, stands out like a candle flame in the dark. Gorey will take this special effect to stunning heights in the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula, in which each of his black-and-white sets will incorporate a single blood-red element.
“Flat-color printing inks for Gorey are like the melodramatic extremes of light and dark for the noir cinematographer,” Heller maintains. “The deliberate choice of hue is both design tool and dramatic device and is used to focus the viewer’s eyes on a character.”13 His cover for Thérèse (1956) by François Mauriac is a case in point:
Color heightens anxiety in Gorey’s cover for…Thérèse, about a woman who has poisoned her husband and reflects on her reasons, spending the novel recalling her deed. It is dominated by two shades of sienna, one for the ground, the other the sky. The viewer’s eye, however, is directed to a crimson hat and coat on a woman sitting joylessly (or maybe not) alone on a small bench with her thoughts. Color washes over the minimally expressive line work and imposes a sense of sorrow over the entire vignette. The viewer is encouraged to question what came before and what comes after this frozen moment.14
For Heller, this open-endedness, this invitation to participate in the act of making meaning, is a significant part of what makes Gorey’s book covers so beguiling. I’d go further, arguing that this quality characterizes not just his cover art but his entire bod
y of work; it’s an essential aspect of what makes Gorey Gorey. Think of his revealing remark “I’m beginning to feel that if you create something, you’re killing a lot of other things. And the way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I’m doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader’s mind.”15
His palette of unsettling, ambiguous colors makes a philosophical point: the world is full of ambiguity and mutability, things that elude the snares of language. The best art, he believed, “is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else.”16 In some ineffable, lavender, lemon-yellow, olive-green way, his use of color captures that feeling.
But Gorey’s color sense wasn’t the only aspect of his Anchor covers that elevated them above mere commercial come-on into works of art you could put in your pocket. On occasion, he used type and nothing else to decorate a book’s cover, treating text as illustration. Stymied by the cerebral subject matter of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s two-volume Either/Or (1959)—a dialectical tug-of-war between ethics and aesthetics as seen from a Christian-existentialist perspective—Gorey did away with illustration altogether. For volume 1, he set the author’s name in contrasting white type against a black square and the book’s title in black type against a gray square. For the second volume, he reversed that color scheme, standing the logic of volume 1 on its head: the white type is now black, the black type is white. Viewed side by side, his covers for Either/Or mirror the dialectical structure of Kierkegaard’s book, which presents its argument in the form of a debate. At the same time, Gorey slyly mocks the black-or-white binaries that underwrite much of Western philosophy.