by Mark Dery
Known as the bird circuit (because so many of the bars had names like the Swan, the Golden Pheasant, and the Blue Parrot, in homage to Charlie Parker’s famous jazz club, Birdland), the gay bars Gorey had in mind were sprinkled along Third Avenue between 50th and 60th Streets on the city’s East Side. Frank O’Hara, who had moved to Manhattan in 1951, was living with Hal Fondren on East 49th between First and Second Avenues—a neighborhood O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch describes as “bursting with gay bars,” hangouts that O’Hara, Fondren, and Ashbery often cruised.28 Gorey saw all three of his former schoolmates now and again, though whether he joined them in their barhopping isn’t known.
The Village was a magnet for gay nightlife, too, and Gorey’s letters reveal that he ventured downtown on at least a couple of occasions. In a September ’53 letter to Lurie, he remarks, offhandedly, that a lesbian friend was going to take him to the Bagatelle, a “frightful” bar in the West Village.29 Now long gone, the Bagatelle, at 86 University Place, was one of the few lesbian bars in ’50s New York. In the back room, butch “daddies” (women in male drag, hair slicked back, breasts tightly bound with Ace bandages) competed for “mommies” (“lipstick lesbians” who dressed in a conventionally feminine manner). A warning light flashed, announcing a raid, whenever the vice squad barged into the front room. The Bag was a tough joint, catering to a working-class crowd. “If you asked the wrong woman to dance,” the lesbian poet Audre Lorde recalled, “you could get your nose broken in the alley down the street by her butch.”30 It’s hard to imagine Gorey in such a place; hard, even, to imagine him that far downtown in an era when “queer hunters” prowled the Village late at night. One such gang beat the Bag’s bartender to death with bike chains. “Even in the Village, or especially in the Village, you couldn’t be gay and feel safe,” according to one of the bar’s habitués.31
Gorey’s furtive explorations of gay New York took place against a backdrop of raids and other forms of legalized harassment. Snickering caricatures of “pansies,” “horticultural” young men, “the effeminate clan,” and other “degenerates” were commonplace in newspaper reportage. The antigay witch hunt known as the Lavender Scare was given the seal of official approval on April 29, 1953, when President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, barring homosexuals from federal employment on the grounds that their “perversion” made them vulnerable to Soviet agents who might blackmail them into spying for the Russkies.
In such a climate, Gorey’s reticence about his sexuality is perfectly understandable. Of course, the fact that he was a solitary, bookish man who found solace in the arts and companionship in his cats may have had something to do with his circumspection, too. While he relished Larry Osgood’s tales of his torrid love life, Gorey’s “Victorian soul” would have quailed at the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am assignations of gay friends like O’Hara. “The good love a park and the inept a railway station,” O’Hara observed in his poem “Homosexuality,” written in 1954.32 “Tallying up the merits of each of the [subway] latrines” for the purposes of anonymous sex, he ends, plaintively, “It’s a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.”
Did Gorey want to be wanted? Or did he really require nothing more than books, Balanchine, cats, and his work? In an August 1953 letter to Lurie, he confides that he feels “even less alive” in New York than he did in Boston and that, while he doesn’t envy his friends the turbulence of their love lives, he does think he “ought to be having a few direct emotional experiences, however small.”33 He was twenty-eight when he wrote those poignant lines.
His letters to Lurie do make reference to occasional infatuations—very occasional, if his mention of two in the years spanning ’53 through ’58 is a full accounting. In a September ’53 letter, he announces, out of the blue, that Larry Osgood introduced him to a friend from Buffalo. “I fear I have fallen in love with it very badly indeed,” he confides.34 “It” is a drop-dead-gorgeous thirty-year-old named Ed who may or may not be bisexual but is without question “almost perfectly narcissistic.” Ed is taken with Ted, both “mentally and physically,” and much two-fisted drinking ensues, culminating in a shrieking match outside a bar.
When Ed leaves town, an overwrought correspondence follows, though with no mention of when they’ll see each other again, which Gorey finds odd, reasonably enough. In November, he tells Lurie that he’s been suicidal because he hasn’t heard from Ed; happily, a ten-page letter arrived before Gorey took drastic action.35 Still, things continue weird: as he drifts off to sleep one night, he realizes he can only remember Ed with some difficulty, and when he does the indistinct personage who materializes in his mind’s eye seems only vaguely related to the recipient of his love letters. “Very odd,” he admits to Lurie, “but I imagine it all has to do with sex.”
Come December, he’s at least “partially cured” of his obsession, he tells Lurie, having discovered that a mutual friend was simultaneously carrying on with Ed.36 Listening to his besotted friend agonize over his infatuation, Gorey realizes what an ass he’s been, having seen himself “in the mirror, as it were,” of his lovesick friend’s addle-brained behavior.
Nevertheless, Ed has unsettled him to the extent that all manner of rash actions, from sleeping with strangers to taking the cloth, have suddenly gone from “the unthinkable to the ponderable.”37 Whether Gorey threw caution to the wind and buried his sorrows in one-night stands we’ll never know, though that seems about as likely as his joining the Church. One thing is certain: that’s the last we ever hear of Ed.
* * *
Life went on, as it tends to do. Gorey’s job at Doubleday wasn’t too bad, he wrote Lurie, although the low wages left him “financially in perfectly ghastly straits”; moreover, “about fifty percent of the work is veddy dull indeed, but I think that’s probably rather a low percentage considering.”38
He decorated his part of “the art department cubbyhole” with Goreyesque bric-a-brac, Diana Klemin remembers, including “a skeleton head.” At times, having a resident weirdo came in handy, she says. “If you were on a project and you were stuck, and the editor was just unbearable, and you hated the assignment but you had to get it done, you’d say, ‘Ted, throw me a tantrum.’ For three or four minutes, he would jump up and down and scream. All the tension went out of the art department.”
During his lunch hour, Gorey would hit the art galleries on Madison Avenue or gulp a quick bite, then work on freelance assignments or his own projects. Sometimes he went out to lunch with Connie Joerns or Barbara Epstein.
He saw quite a bit of Barbara socially. Ted and Barbara “were as close as two people could be,” Jason recalls. They had a jokey lingo all their own, an “Edwardian babble” in which “his name was Teddles, Barbara’s name was Bubsy,” a cigarette was a “ciggy-boo” or a “flaming bo-bo,” and so on. Jason attributes their in-crowd argot to “that campy thing they all were doing” at Radcliffe and Harvard. “It was a way of being different and revolutionary. Others might have wanted to become Communists or Buddhists or something but that’s what they were doing.”
On occasion, Gorey went to parties at the Epsteins’, a stunning two-story apartment with fireplaces, plural, on 67th between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Over cocktails, his favorite conversational topics were literature and gossip “in a gentle way,” Jason remembers. “There wasn’t a mean bone in his body.” The truth of the matter, though, is that Ted “didn’t like New York parties. He almost never invited people to his apartment.”
Jason was one of the lucky few. “Everything about it was [in] great style,” he says. It was “very elegant” but small and overstuffed, bulging at the seams with cats and curios and books packed two layers deep in built-in bookshelves and stacked in the fireplace, even. (By ’53, Gorey had three cats. Ultimately, he’d keep as many as five in the one-room apartment.) It was so crammed with stuff, Epstein remembers, that there was nowhere to sit down. (When Tobi Tobias interviewed Gorey for Dance Magazine, in 1
974, she got “the only chair—a drafting stool; Gorey, fidgeting with his many Indian silver rings, perched on the seat of a small stepladder…”)39 “There was no room for two in that apartment—or in that life,” says Jason.
Gorey’s collection of memento mori caught his eye. There was a human skull and “an ivory carving of a dead person with flies all over it”—the sort of thing “crazy Catholics” kept around “to remind them of mortality,” Jason thought—and a mummy’s head, which Gorey, unbeknownst to his workmates, had kept wrapped in brown paper on the shelf of the Doubleday coat locker while waiting for its glass display case to be made. The head would, in time, find lifelong—if that’s the word—companionship in the mummy’s hand that Gorey also acquired. He kept the hand in a wooden box on one of his bookshelves. “It’s only a child’s,” he told an interviewer, as if that explained things.40
At some point, Gorey’s library overflowed his bookcases and engulfed everything: a journalist visiting his apartment in 1979 was agape at “mountains—better make that mountain ranges—rising from the floor, falling off the mantel, wedged against the bureau, stacked beside the bed. It’s impossible to say with assurance that the floor holds a rug, since every square inch of space (except for a narrow aisle that snakes from the drawing board to a narrow hall containing a wall-kitchen and the bathroom) is taken up with cartons and packing crates. My wild hunch is that these contain books.”41
Gorey never used his minuscule kitchenette, he claimed, because his apartment was so tiny that the smell of whatever he cooked would be hanging in the air “three weeks later.”42 Peter Wolff, a member of Gorey’s New York City Ballet circle in the ’70s, confirms that “every meal was eaten out at one horrible restaurant or another” whose only virtue was its proximity to 36 East 38th.
For someone who filled his pen-and-ink interiors with sumptuous decor, Gorey lived in conditions that would make a self-flagellating monk feel right at home: all that was missing was the scourge. The walls were scabrous with peeling paint. His floor-level bed had no headboard. When he sat in it, reading, he leaned against the wall; directly over his head hung “two large sculpted pieces of corpselike faces wearing expressions of extreme pain.”43 On another wall, a large antique sculpture of the crucified Christ, sans cross, added a touch of morbid religiosity. With his close-cropped hair and biblical beard, the suffering Messiah looked remarkably like Ted, a resemblance his friends were quick to point out.
Gorey at 36 East 38th Street, 1978. (Photograph by Harry Benson. Copyright Harry Benson Ltd.)
Thirty-six East 38th was Gorey’s cabinet of wonders, bohemian atelier, and Fortress of Solitude rolled into one. Doubleday’s art department closed up shop at five, and if he wasn’t going to the movies or the ballet, he went home, where he worked on drawings for his books until nine-ish, after which a little light reading—a mystery, more often than not—and so to bed. “All the brilliant thoughts and insights and such which I had about New York seem to have vanished or shriveled by this time,” he wrote Lurie in March of ’53. “It’s just another place, with better bookstores, and more movies to go to.”44 Never a New Yorker in the Saul Steinberg sense—that is, one of those Gothamites whose “view of the world from Ninth Avenue,” like the Steinberg cartoon of the same name, places Manhattan at the center of the universe—Gorey always found the city “terribly provincial.”45 “Most of the people seem either hopeless or horrid or both, especially the cultural ones,” he went on in his letter to Lurie, pseudosophisticated phonies who “looked and behaved as if they had emerged from the Remo,” a Bleecker Street bar favored by gay culturati.46 He ended on a wistful note: “I feel like a captive balloon, motionless between sky and earth,” he said. “I want birds to bring me messages.”
Chapter 6
Hobbies Odd—Ballet, the Gotham Book Mart, Silent Film, Feuillade
1953
IN THE FALL OF ’53, Duell, Sloan and Pearce published the first of Gorey’s hundred-odd little books, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel. Gorey’s meeting with Cap Pearce in Cambridge two years earlier had, at long last, borne fruit. He’d managed to write a good bit of the book at work. “I was fast and competent at what I was doing, as opposed to some people in the editorial department, who were scatterbrained to the point of lunacy, so I wrote a lot of my own books at Doubleday,” said Gorey. “I began with The Unstrung Harp, which I thought was a neat trick. I had never written a book before, and it was all about writing, which I didn’t know anything about.”384
The Unstrung Harp holds up a magnifying glass to the agonies of the scribbling trade. Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass, a novelist of the hand-wringingly neurotic variety, wrestles with writer’s block, the petty jealousies of the literary world, and the loneliness of the writing life. It’s the closest Gorey ever came to a conventional work of fiction: written in prose rather than verse, typeset rather than hand-lettered, with a paragraph of text on each left-hand page facing a full-page illustration on the right, it’s his longest book by far, at sixty pages—a Victorian novel in miniature, its drawing-room dramas and writing-desk miseries writ small.
Of course it isn’t a novel, or even a novella. His little books refuse to be categorized. What are they, exactly? Picture books for grown-ups? Precursors of the graphic novel? Mash-ups of Victorian literature, the comic strip, and the silent-movie storyboard? Throughout Gorey’s career, the genre-defying size and tone of his books, never mind their content, would frustrate publishers and booksellers alike. Publishers were reluctant to market them to children, fearing that their morbid subject matter and gleeful amorality were inappropriate for tots and might enrage self-appointed morality police, who like to ban books. Booksellers didn’t know if they were children’s books or adult fare and were confounded, in any event, by their awkward format. (Even Jason Epstein found the unconventional size of Gorey’s books a tough sell. Asked why he never published his in-house genius, he said, “He never asked me to,” then added, “It would’ve been hard for me to publish [his books]—the format, I wouldn’t know how to sell them. Where would you put them? You’d have to make a little box and put it on the counter somewhere.a It looked like a lot of trouble.”)
Whatever else it is, The Unstrung Harp is a masterpiece of miniaturism in the literal and psychological senses. Its small format—five by eight inches—and intricate illustrations usher us into a dollhouse world. Gorey maintains a tight close-up on the domestic sphere and on the psychological interior it so clearly represented for him, a man who later turned his Cape Cod house into a museum of his obsessions and inspirations—in effect externalizing the contents of his mind.
The anxieties and eccentricities that afflict the book’s high-strung protagonist, its setting in the England of yesteryear (mostly in Mr. Earbrass’s sprawling, gloomy mansion, Hobbies Odd, near Collapsed Pudding, in Mortshire), and its British vocabulary and syntax—wastebaskets are “dustbins,” cookies are “biscuits,” an “athletic sweater of forgotten origin and unknown significance” isn’t worn backwards (for good luck while writing) but rather “hind-side-to”—contribute to the book’s twee-gothic atmosphere. Gorey’s whisker-fine lines and meticulous cross-hatching bring back childhood memories of Ernest Shepard’s illustrations for The Wind in the Willows and Tenniel’s pictures for the Alice books.
Yet in its tone, sophistication, and subject, The Unstrung Harp is anything but childish. The omniscient narrator speaks in a voice that is shockingly arch for its time, far from the bright-eyed breathlessness affected by most children’s writers in the 1950s. It’s the Gorey Voice, a deadpan that never cracks, but with a droll undertow; the distance between its sublime indifference and the lugubrious or odious or horrendous nature of the events it recounts is what makes for irony, and irony is what turns tragedy into black comedy in Gorey’s world.
The Unstrung Harp. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce/Little, Brown, 1953)
Nor is the book’s subject kid stuff. The Unstrung Harp is about “the unspeakable horrors of th
e literary life,” as the author puts it, by which he means “disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews,” and, worse yet, the terrors of the looming deadline and the blank page. “The best novel ever written about a novelist,” Graham Greene called it in all apparent seriousness.1
Gorey’s claim that he knew nothing about writing when he wrote TUH notwithstanding, he is sharply—and amusingly—perceptive about the brain-racking labor involved in giving birth to a novel. At one point, a minor character named Glassglue startles the author by materializing out of thin air—Gorey’s amusing comment on the implicit loopiness of making up characters, then regarding them as real, as novelists do. Of course there’s the inevitable crisis of confidence, a loss of faith not just in the book in progress but also in writing itself:
Mr Earbrass has rashly been skimming through the early chapters, which he has not looked at for months, and now sees TUH for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why didn’t he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why aren’t there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?
At last, after the protracted agony of revision and a dustup over the book jacket, the book is published by Scuffle and Dustcough (a satirical echo, we suspect, of “Sloan” and “Duell”). But the torture isn’t over: the author has to endure “an afternoon forgathering at the Vicarage vaguely in [his] honor,” where he is buttonholed by Colonel Knout, Master of Foxhounds of the Blathering Hunt. A blustery, barrel-chested chap in tweeds and gaiters, the colonel “demands to know just what Mr Earbrass was ‘getting at’ in the last scene of Chapter XIV. Mr Earbrass is afraid he doesn’t know what the Colonel is. Is what? Getting at himself. The Colonel snorts, Mr Earbrass sighs.” That’s the sound of clashing masculinities, the one Firbankian, effete, the other Maileresque, overcompensating. We get Gorey’s hint that the colonel has sniffed out something unmanly in Earbrass, who in an earlier scene wears a coat with a fur collar and cuffs that is virtually identical to the coat Oscar Wilde wore in his famous Sarony photos.