by Mark Dery
In the penultimate scene, we see Mr. Earbrass standing on the terrace at twilight, gazing into the gloaming with the stricken expression he always wears. “It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything.” Twilight is the most Goreyesque hour, just as autumn is the most Goreyesque season; both are memento mori moments, inviting us to contemplate the impermanence of things, the folly of human vanity, the Meaning (or Meaninglessness) of Life.
To a surrealist such as Gorey, twilight is also a liminal zone, an uncanny space between the daylit world, ruled by the conscious mind, and the nighttime of the unconscious. (In a January 1957 letter to Lurie, he says of his drawing on the envelope that it “represents the heart’s desire seen at twilight, the time when it most often is.”)2 A string of words bubbles up unbidden out of Earbrass’s unconscious as he stands on the terrace. “Words drift through his mind: ANGUISH TURNIPS CONJUNCTIONS ILLNESS DEFEAT STRING PARTIES NO PARTIES URNS DESUETUDE DISAFFECTION CLAWS LOSS TREBIZOND NAPKINS SHAME STONES DISTANCE FEVER ANTIPODES MUSH GLACIERS INCOHERENCE LABELS MIASMA AMPUTATION TIDES DECEIT MOURNING ELSEWARDS…”
Like all free association, it invites us to mine it for hidden meanings. At its most existential, Earbrass’s dispirited exhaustion is a disenchantment with language reminiscent of Beckett or Derrida. His stream-of-consciousness ruminations expose the workings of language for the parlor magic it is, revealing that words are defined not in any absolute sense but only in relation to other words (CONJUNCTIONS), especially the opposite of the idea expressed (ANTIPODES). As well, they question the either/or worldview that uses binary oppositions (PARTIES/NO PARTIES) as a philosophical mill for grinding out meaning. Each term in a binary is unthinkable without its opposite, as Taoism reminds us.
All is DEFEAT and DECEIT and INCOHERENCE, Beckett would add; nothing left but the fool’s errand of using silence and incoherence in an attempt, funny in its futility, to speak outside language—to name the unnamable. “Nothing to communicate, no way of communicating, must communicate,” says Beckett in L’Innommable (The Unnamable), a book Gorey owned. (“If I had to say I’m like anyone I suppose it’d be Gertrude Stein and Beckett,” Gorey once observed—a startling admission but not, according to Andreas Brown, an improbable one.3 “Gorey admired Beckett immensely,” said Brown. “The occasionally gloomy but always existential Beckett, the absurdist writer tiptoeing to the edge of nonsense literature, appealed to Gorey greatly.”4) Earbrass’s seemingly random string of words is an unconscious attempt to express the inexpressible through surrealist dream logic, conjuring a meaning that is more than the sum of its linguistic parts. Paradoxically, it’s simultaneously an admission of defeat, the sound of language becoming gibberish, surrendering any attempt at meaning. Is the book’s title Gorey’s idea of a Zen koan? Q: What is the sound of an unstrung harp? A: Silence, of course, which is its own kind of utterance, one that sometimes speaks louder than language in the same way that Gorey’s use of blank space—visual “silence”—is wordlessly eloquent. Not for nothing was his motto “O, the of it all!”5
On the last page of The Unstrung Harp, Earbrass stands on a dock next to a small mountain of steamer trunks and portmanteaus. “Numb with cold and trepidation, looking at the churning surface of the Channel,” he’s about to leave for a vacation on the Continent. “Though he is a person to whom things do not happen, perhaps they may when he is on the other side.” Although Earbrass, like Gorey, is a solitary, bookish homebody whose digestion is upset by travel, he both fears the unknown and hopes for a life-changing encounter outside the pages of a book.
“I am becoming seriously disturbed by the fact that I seem to be even less alive in NY than I was in Boston,” Gorey wrote Lurie around the time the book came out. As mentioned earlier, he felt that he really “ought to be having a few direct emotional experiences, however small.” Does he dare risk the deeper, darker waters of experience in order to immerse himself in life more fully? Earbrass’s journey may give shape to Gorey’s yearning for a life lived firsthand rather than vicariously, through books and movies.
* * *
“I lead a dreary life,” Gorey told an interviewer during his New York years, reprising the role of irrepressible gloompot. “My interests are solitary, I don’t do anything; it’s an unlurid existence.”6 The truth of the matter is that he was, in his own odd way, quite sociable. He counted Connie Joerns, Alison Lurie, and Barbara Epstein among his close friends, and members of his Harvard circle, such as Larry Osgood, Bunny Lang, and Freddy English, orbited in and out of his life. He even managed, at one point, to rekindle his friendships with Frank O’Hara and his Francis Parker classmate Joan Mitchell, who’d moved to New York in 1947. By the early ’50s, she’d sharp-elbowed her way into the boys’ club of abstract expressionism and was a recognized member of the New York School. (In an intriguing plot twist, she’d married another Parker alum, Barney Rosset, in ’49.)
Gorey’s most enduring relationships during his New York years began as marriages of convenience, so to speak—cliques drawn together by shared passions, such as film and ballet, or friendships rooted in business dealings, such as his close working relationship with Andreas Brown, owner of the Gotham Book Mart. “Most of my friends in New York were my friends because we were all so busy going to things we had no time to do anything else,” he recalled in his Cape Cod years. “I might never have seen people if I didn’t see them that way,” adding, enigmatically, “Social events—foof.7 You know.”8
* * *
Shortly after arriving in the city, in that first winter of ’53, Gorey bought a ticket to the New York City Ballet. His infatuation with narrative ballets in the classic style of the Ballets Russes and Ballet Theatre,b which had sent him into ecstasies in his high-school years, had waned considerably. By the time he saw the Ballet Theatre again, in 1950, after a long ballet drought during his exile in the Great Salt Lake Desert, “the first, fine careless raptures had worn off,” he confessed, “and I wasn’t really terribly interested in them anymore.”9 Still, he’d never seen the NYCB before, so he thought he’d give it a whirl.
His conversion to what would become an aesthetic religion crept up on him; it wasn’t one of those Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moments that make for biographical melodrama. “The first year I went to the ballet four or five times, if that,” he recalled. “I felt that Balanchine merely illustrated music, and that if you had seen his ballets once, you had seen them. But before long I was attending more often. By 1956 I was going to every performance because it was too much trouble to figure out which twenty-five out of thirty I really had to see.”10 By then, he was “absolutely hooked on Balanchine, to the point where, I’m afraid, everybody else bores me. Rather.”11
He ended up attending nearly every performance of every ballet staged by the company for the following twenty-three years—eight performances a week, five months out of the year, including as many as thirty-nine performances of The Nutcracker annually, until around 1979. (By then, Balanchine was in failing health, and the company’s subordinate ballet masters, predominantly Peter Martins, were handling much of the choreography. Since ballet was Balanchine, as far as Gorey was concerned, he began going to the ballet less frequently, more or less stopping altogether after he moved to the Cape permanently, around 1983.)
In the early years, Gorey saw the NYCB at City Center, as everyone knew it—officially, the New York City Center of Music and Drama, on West 55th Street near Carnegie Hall. Built in the Moorish revival style in 1924, the former Mecca Temple of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine—the Shriners, by any other name—was an Arabian Nights fantasia come to life, crowned with a mosquelike dome. The theater where Balanchine’s dancers performed is a delirium of arabesque details, all green, gold, and maroon; the polychrome tilework on the cupola radiates outward in a spiderweb pattern, dizzying to behold. Gorey would buy a cheap seat—tickets for the nosebleed zone cost $1.80—then move down to sit at the foot of the stairs, at the front of the balcony.
For the old guard of City Ballet fandom, the years at City Center were the company’s golden age. Balanchine was reinventing ballet, scrapping the sentimentality and theatrical mannerisms that made it seem like a museum piece moldering in Europe’s attic. Sweeping away the cobwebs, he used classical technique to create a thrillingly new—and thoroughly American—ballet that championed pure form over storytelling, a move interpreted by most critics as a neoclassical reaction to romanticism.
Which it was, though he was capable of achingly bittersweet romanticism when a dance called for it, as in his Liebeslieder Walzer (1960) and The Nutcracker (1954). At his most radical, though, Balanchine was as modern as they come. In the plotless Agon (1957), dancers twist themselves into angular shapes and strike friezelike attitudes, dodging the jabs of Stravinsky’s dissonant music. A radical traditionalist, Balanchine created a neoclassical high modernism by pushing ballet technique to its limits. Even the use of rehearsal gear as costumes—black leotards and white tights for the women, white T-shirts over black tights for the men—signaled his sharp break with the artifice and sentimentality of Old World Romanticism, as did the bare stage, stripped of all scenery, and the silence in which Agon begins, the curtain rising on four male dancers standing motionless, their backs to the crowd. The Dadaist iconoclast Marcel Duchamp compared Agon’s debut to the riotous opening, in 1913, of The Rite of Spring, which he’d also attended; Arlene Croce, who would later become the dance critic for the New Yorker, claimed not to have slept for a week after seeing the ballet’s premiere.
New York’s bohemian underground and the edgier members of its cultural elite were entranced by the NYCB. Frank O’Hara was a devotee, naturally, attending “almost all the performances,” according to Brad Gooch.12 In “Notes from Row L,” a brief appreciation written for the program of a 1961 performance, O’Hara rhapsodized that Balanchine’s art is for those who “want your heart to beat, your blood to pound through your veins and your mind to go blank with joy…”13
Balanchine spoke to Gorey on many levels. When the ballet master said that ballet, “like the music of great musicians…can be enjoyed and understood without any verbal introduction or explanation,” he was singing Gorey’s song.14 His insistence on dance as an expression of the ineffable, its grand jetés a leap beyond language, struck a chord with Gorey, as did Balanchine’s impatience with what he saw as the reductionism inherent in critical attempts to articulate the “meaning” of his ballets.
Gorey’s sense of what’s lost when we try to use words to nail down meaning was honed by his need, as an illustrator, to complement a text by saying something in images that couldn’t be said in words. Balanchine, as an illustrator of musical “texts,” faced the same challenge: “His movement is never an exact illustration of the music, but rather an interpretation that [complements] the rhythm, quality, and density of the score,” notes the dance writer Kirsten Bodensteiner.15
Expressing his frustration with the ways in which language maps its either/or binarism onto our thinking, Gorey reached, reflexively, for ballet as an example of something that’s irreducibly itself, untranslatable into language: “All the things you can talk about in anyone’s work are the things that are least important. It’s like the ballet. You can describe the externals of a performance—everything, in fact, but what really constituted its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what’s important is left after you have explained everything else. Ideally, if something were good it would be indescribable. What’s the core of Mozart or Balanchine?”16
Then, too, Balanchine, like Gorey, was a draftsman, though his drawings were sketched in space by bodies in motion. The sharp attack he demanded in his dancers’ footwork reminds us of the machinelike precision of Gorey’s hatching and stippling; the crisp yet lyrical lines of Balanchine’s dances, accentuated by his preference for ballerinas with impossibly long legs, are the choreographic equivalent of Gorey’s line, which balanced economy with expressiveness. The formalist in Gorey responded to Balanchine’s mastery of form—the classical architecture of his dances; his geometer’s love of bodies resolving into kaleidoscopic patterns, then reassembling into new ones. It’s not much of a stretch to see the visual aspect of Gorey’s work as an extended meditation on pattern.
Also like Gorey, Balanchine was an eclecticist. Anything was fair game for his magpie mind: the grand tradition of the Imperial Russian Ballet in Saint Petersburg, the modernist avant-gardism of Diaghilev, the jazz and tap styles he explored in his choreography for Hollywood and Broadway, the folk forms he celebrated in Western Symphony (1954). “God creates, I do not create,” said Balanchine. ”I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it—from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.”17 “I have a strong sense of imitation,” echoed Gorey, who believed his gifts lay in recombining elements rather than in creating something ex nihilo. In the end, it didn’t matter, he thought, because his pastiches, like Balanchine’s, always ended up inimitably his own. “So I can afford to indulge this kind of exercise, filch blatantly from all over the place, because it will ultimately be mine.”18
The New York City Ballet, in its City Center years, was electrifying. That the company often performed to half empty houses only made Balanchine cultists and the dancers they adored feel they were part of something desperately important. Years later, Gorey wrote a wry love letter to the City Center era. Featured in a spring 1970 issue of Playbill and published in book form by the Gotham Book Mart in ’73, The Lavender Leotard; or, Going a Lot to the New York City Ballet recalls that romantic time when Balanchine was turning out one masterpiece after another but the troupe lived from hand to mouth, supported—just barely—by a small but fervent fandom. “Of course, Gorey can’t describe…just how beautiful and exciting those fifty seasons were,” wrote Tobi Tobias in Dance Magazine. “But he details it again for each of us, in the mind’s eye…And he sums up the snobbery we—surely America’s most fanatical audience outside Ebbets Field—cultivated as ardent supporters of that odd and wonderful troupe…”19
The Lavender Leotard. (Gotham Book Mart, 1973)
Balanchine’s NYCB was “a breath of fresh air in a really old form,” says Peter Anastos, the choreographer who cofounded the all-male comic ballet troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, which performs the classical repertoire in drag. “[It] was a complete break from the old world of ballet. So that’s what [Gorey] fell in love with. And he loved those dancers, you know, people like Diana Adams and Tanny [Tanaquil] Le Clercq and some of those really odd dancers that Balanchine more or less discovered and trained.”
Gorey was especially entranced by Patricia McBride, who joined the company in ’59. She was “surely the greatest dancer in the world,” he declared in a 1974 interview, though Adams, a statuesque beauty noted for her emotional intensity and long-legged line, was his “favorite dancer of all time.”20 Allegra Kent, who joined the NYCB in ’53, was another Gorey favorite. Fey, fairylike, yet possessed of what Tobi Tobias called “extreme plasticity, coupled with a supercharged poetic imagination,” Kent could play the wide-eyed innocent, the passionate sensualist, or the Balanchinian vision of Woman as Untouchable Ideal.21
Gorey said he “suddenly burst into tears” over Kent’s portrayal of the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker: “I thought, she is the Sugar Plum Fairy; she really is a figment of this little girl’s imagination, and she’s going to vanish into air when they leave…”22 (That Gorey, whose appreciation of Balanchine’s work always struck his close friend and fellow Balanchinian Mel Schierman as “very intellectual,” would be moved to tears by Kent’s poignant evocation of the lost world of childhood offers a tantalizing clue to Gorey’s own past.)
Later, long after the City Center era, Kent and Gorey became friends when she asked him to do a drawing for the invitation to a publication party for her aquatic-exercise book Allegra Kent’s Water Beauty Book (1976). “One day my phone rang and this chirpy little voice came over the phone,” said
Gorey.23 It was Kent, asking if she could send him a prepublication copy of her book. “I was sort of startled by this, because I always worshipped at her shrine.” In due time, the book arrived. “Then she started sending me notes and things. She does things like write a note and then stitch it up inside a paper bag and mail it. I was just crazed, but it was very amusing.”24
In 1978, Gorey approached Kent about starring in Fête Diverse, ou Le Bal de Madame H—,c a ballet for which he’d written the scenario and was going to design the costumes and scenery. Peter Anastos would handle the choreography; the Long Island–based Eglevsky Ballet, founded by former Balanchine principal André Eglevsky, would perform it. As Anastos remembers it, the ballet was about “guests at a party suffering from some type of degenerative disease.”25 Kent signed on without a moment’s hesitation.
At the costume fitting, Gorey decided Kent’s “pale sea foam”–colored dress would look better, she recalled, with “five hundred safety pins of various sizes…placed at random over the expanse of tulle.”26 This wasn’t Gorey’s nod to punk rock, whose iconic fashion statement was the safety pin, but rather to Kent’s zany habit of adding them to her outfits as ornaments. (“I had to completely reconstruct the partnering in the pas de deux because the pins kept popping open,” said Anastos, in a 1990 New Yorker profile.)27