by Mark Dery
Kent remembers Fête Diverse as “a delicious romp.”28 Anastos looks back on it as “colorful and silly, but really not much more than that.”
I was young and dumb enough to think that I could realize all the possibilities that were hinted at in the libretto. It’s hard to build dramatic structure into Ted’s work—it’s all so atmospheric. Charles Addams’s characters can have real lives, but Gorey’s don’t exist outside their condition.29
That said, “we did have Allegra Kent in the lead,” he notes. “I always thought she was the complete Edward Gorey ballerina. Most of her performances seemed to have been drawn by him.”
* * *
Asked, by Vanity Fair, “Who are your heroes in real life?” Gorey replied, “George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein,d Frances Steloff.”30
Steloff, who died at the age of 101 in 1989, was the legendary founder of the Gotham Book Mart, which Gorey began frequenting shortly after moving to Manhattan. A treasure house of modernist poetry, literature, and avant-garde “little magazines,” the Gotham was to literary America what Sylvia Beach’s storied Shakespeare and Company was to Hemingway, Pound, and other English-speaking expats in Paris between the wars. Founded in 1920, it stood, incongruously, in a five-story brownstone at 41 West 47th Street, smack in the middle of midtown Manhattan’s diamond district, which had sprung up around it.
The Gotham (which closed in 2007 after eighty-seven years as a New York literary landmark) was every bibliophile’s fantasy of a bookshop. A bell on the door jingled when you entered. The store was a warren of alcoves and aisles so narrow they were a tight squeeze for two abreast. The floorboards squeaked; the reassuring mustiness of old books hung in the air. In the spirituality section, a battered cardboard sign admonished, SHOPLIFTERS: REMEMBER YOUR KARMA!
George and Ira Gershwin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Woody Allen, Alexander Calder, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Jackie O., and Katharine Hepburn were devoted customers. Max Ernst mounted an exhibit of his work in the second-floor gallery; Salvador Dalí held a book signing at the store. J. D. Salinger liked to sneak in whenever he was in town, confident that he could browse unnoticed. One fine day, H. L. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser rolled in, “full of beer and gaiety,” as one account has it, and proceeded to sign their books, “embellish[ing] them with long inscriptions.”31 When they’d exhausted their oeuvres, they autographed other authors’ works, among them the Bible, which one of them inscribed, “With the compliments of the author.” Sightings of Jorge Luis Borges were not uncommon. Janet Morgan, who oversaw the store’s small press and poetry department, remembers the time Allen Ginsberg came in with his mother and a Brooks Brothers shopping bag: “I’m just kind of thinking, ‘The Beat generation is dead!’” And then there was the time she was busy typing something up, “and someone’s standing above me going, ‘Do you take traveler’s checks?’ and it’s David Bowie,” buying Gorey books.32
Raised in Dickensian poverty, Steloff sold flowers to wealthy vacationers in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she grew up in the 1890s. “I never had books,” she told an interviewer. “I never read the juveniles and classics.…I missed all that. It used to hurt…”33 In later life, she revered books as sacred things and writers as initiates into the mysteries of creative genius. If a writer was especially hard up, she might give him a temporary job to get him back on his feet: at one time or another, Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Tennessee Williams all worked as clerks at the Gotham. (Williams, hopeless at tying up parcels with twine, was sacked by Steloff after a day on the job.) Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Anaïs Nin, William Carlos Williams, and Eugene O’Neill were just a few of the famous or soon-to-be-famous writers who flocked to the store, swapping literary gossip, making sure their books had pride of place, and, not infrequently, cadging a loan from Miss Steloff, as she was reverently known.
Gorey knew about the Gotham long before he moved to New York. According to Andreas Brown, he’d “established an association with [the] Gotham Book Mart in the early 1940s while still in the Army,” through mail-order requests.34 “When he came to the city to work he began making frequent visits to the bookshop and became a close friend” of Steloff, Brown recalls.
No doubt the two quietly uncompromising eccentrics recognized each other as birds of a feather. Steloff was a diminutive woman, her graying hair done up in a loose bun, her working costume a shawl, a frumpy blouse, and an apron, its pockets stuffed with seeds and dried fruit—the vegetarian fare she snacked on in lieu of lunch. Clerks dispatched to her apartment before the store opened were sometimes startled to find her in a yoga headstand, buck naked. (Steloff, a firm believer in the virtues of nudism, was unperturbed.)
With her eye for unselfconscious originality, she was drawn to Gorey’s work. When he dropped by with copies of The Unstrung Harp, she took some on consignment, inaugurating a lifelong relationship between Gorey and the store. From the early ’50s on, his little books were prominently displayed near the cash register. Through Brown’s careful cultivation, that relationship would flourish. Acting as what Gorey called his unofficial manager—a role that encompassed publisher, gallerist, marketer, and merchandiser—Brown, who bought the store from Steloff in 1967, would prove instrumental in catapulting him from an obscure author whose mostly out-of-print books were the closely guarded secret of a jealous few to the much-admired object of a mainstream cult.35
* * *
Nineteen fifty-three turned out to be a watershed year for Gorey: not only did he move to New York, install himself at 36 East 38th Street, settle into the nine-to-five routine at Doubleday—his first real job—and publish his first book, he also immersed himself in the New York City Ballet, the Gotham Book Mart, and, lastly, the movie screenings hosted by the film historian William K. Everson—hubs of activity whose artistic pleasures, intellectual excitements, and social milieu would feed his art and fill his life throughout his time in New York.
Gorey discovered Everson’s circle of movie buffs, the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, “not long after January 1953,” according to Brown.36 Originally known as the Film Circle, the Huff Society was a loose-knit group of movie buffs who met for screenings of rarely seen silents, early talkies, and foreign gems from the ’20s and ’30s. The group had coalesced in ’52, when Theodore Huff and Everson, film historians and pioneering preservationists, started getting together with a few of their movie-industry friends to screen prints of hard-to-find titles. When Huff died, in March of ’53, Everson renamed the group in his honor.
The Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society was just the sort of cultish group Gorey was drawn to, a secret society knitted together by shared obsession rather than camaraderie, like the “in crowd” dissecting Balanchine at City Center or the impossibly knowledgeable clerks at the Gotham or the cocktail-party aesthetes in Eliot House. A nonprofit endeavor sustained (just barely) by ticket sales, the Huff Society scrounged projection space wherever it could—one month a film studio, another month a movie theater or even a room in a psychiatric institute (which was appropriate, Everson joked, given the oddballs his screenings attracted).
When Gorey met him, Everson was a publicist for independent film distributors. Later, he would win acclaim among cineastes as a pioneering preservationist of disintegrating silents (which movie studios viewed, at the time, as Dumpster fodder). An ardent cinephile with a prodigious knowledge of pre-’40s film, he used the nearly twenty books he wrote on movie history to promote the serious study of the silent era.
By the 1970s, he’d amassed a hoard of more than four thousand feature films, which he kept in stacks in his overstuffed apartment on the Upper West Side. Huff Society members whom he found simpatico comprised an inner circle, invited to Saturday night screenings at his home. Gorey was one of the devotees who squeezed into Everson’s living room. If an evening was oversubscribed and all the chairs were taken, overflow attendees sat on film canisters piled high.
“When my dad was having his Saturday night screenings, there was no oth
er way to see these films that he was showing,” says Everson’s daughter, Bambi. “That’s why we had this conglomeration of really wonderful people and then the people that came regularly.” Among the wonderful people were Andrew Sarris, the noted critic and standard-bearer for the auteur theory, and Susan Sontag. As for the regulars, Bambi remembers them as “molelike people” with “pasty white skin” who “lived in their mothers’ basements.”
Gorey kept his distance. His devastating zingers were his way of discouraging chumminess, she believes. “The other people just sat in their chairs, feverishly writing notes, and during the break they would ask dumb questions,” she says. Gorey, by contrast, “had a sardonic wit.…[W]hen one of the Great Unwashed would say something, he would come back with a witty retort.”
“He definitely had a camp sensibility,” recalls Howard Mandelbaum, an alumnus of Everson’s Saturday night screenings and cofounder of the entertainment-photo archive Photofest. Ted’s startling height, “thrift-store bohemian” garb, and stentorian delivery, perfect for broadcasting opinions about the evening’s fare, made an impression on Mandelbaum, then a “pretty unworldly junior-high-school student.” Gorey liked gossip, he recalls: “We talked about [the French model and actress] Capucine. She was a very beautiful actress who was rumored to have had a sex change, she was the mistress of William Holden, she was in Song Without End, North to Alaska. [He] enjoyed the possibility that she might have been a man.”
Gorey and Everson struck up a friendship. They would remain friends until the ’70s, when Gorey’s attendance at screenings dropped off, presumably because of his growing freelance illustration workload. In the days before streaming services such as Netflix and premium cable, when the chance to see a rare or suppressed movie might come once in a lifetime (if ever), Everson’s “incredible collection” was an Aladdin’s cave for movie addicts. His Saturday night screenings gave Gorey a degree in film history, broadening and deepening his knowledge of pre–World War II cinema, specifically the silent era.
It’s tempting to dismiss Gorey’s comment that “movies made a terrible mistake when they started to talk” as his usual calculated outrageousness.37 In this case, however, he was deadly serious. When an interviewer asked why silent films appealed to him, he replied, “It’s what you had to leave out.…[O]ur imagination is engaged, whereas movies today get more in your face by the moment. What has killed movies is the special effects. See one screen filled with flames and you’ve seen all of them.…And if it’s a special-effects movie, you’ve seen all the effects already in the trailer, so don’t bother to go.”38
Gorey’s belief that the silents were superior to the talkies makes perfect sense in light of his aesthetic preference for the understated and the unstated, as in Asian art and literature, and his attraction to the highly stylized, as in Firbank and Balanchine. He abhorred Hollywood’s increasing tendency to pander to the lowest common denominator for the same reason he lost patience with Henry James novels: the lunkheaded insistence on explaining things to death, which kills ambiguity and, with it, subtlety, leaving no room for imaginative participation by the audience. Film exerted a profound influence on Gorey’s aesthetic. “I’ve been watching movies for close to seventy years,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “My family took me to movies very early. I’ve always been an inveterate moviegoer. There was a period in New York where I would see a thousand movies a year.”39 If this strains credulity, bear in mind that Everson’s screenings sometimes verged on endurance tests: “Movies used to be an hour long,” Gorey recalled, “but we’d see twelve or fifteen movies and be bleary by the time it was all over.”40
Consider, too, that Gorey, who detested Christmas—because it “really is a family holiday,” he observed, revealingly—liked nothing better on December 25 than hanging around “with a lot of people who also didn’t have any families or anything,” seeing as many movies as they could cram in. “We used to go to four or five movies on Christmas Day. We’d have breakfast at Howard Johnson’s, and then we’d go to a movie—and then we’d go back to the Howard Johnson’s. Then we’d go to another movie, and go back to Howard Johnson’s—’til about midnight.”41
And then there were the tantalizing offerings of so-called revival houses—repertory cinemas such as the New Yorker, the Elgin, and the Thalia—which showed foreign films and Hollywood classics from the ’30s and ’40s, mostly. And the period, stretching over several years, when “the Museum of Modern Art started to go through its entire film collection on Saturday mornings,” as Gorey recalled.42 And the Buddhist temple on the Upper West Side that showed Japanese movies on weekends. (Gorey had a preternatural ability to pick up such off-the-radar blips.)
Little wonder, then, that his knowledge of the medium was prodigious. He could discourse with equal facility—and equal exuberance—on masterworks of early cinema such as Feuillade’s 1918 serial Tih Minh and grind-house schlock like Blood Fiend (1967). (By his own admission, Gorey had an ungovernable “passion for horror movies,” which, together with his “ability to sit through practically anything thrown on the silver screen,” resulted in a cheery willingness to give the most overripe tripe a chance.)43
He seems to have seen everything and to have had a quotable opinion on even the most forgettable fare. But even he was barely able to make it through the 1968 Filipino horror movie Brides of Blood, though he did think the inclusion of “a band of Filipino dwarves whose presence was never commented upon” was a nice touch, adding, “It is things like this that keep one functioning sometimes. Me at least.”44 In a similar vein, he thought The Mad Room (1969), a horror movie starring Stella Stevens and Shelley Winters, was a disappointment, “mainly because everyone has lost all sense of genre these days”; nonetheless, he rejoiced in the film’s “delightful shots of a large, shaggy, and utterly lovable dog padding about with a severed hand in its mouth.”45
With his artist’s eye and oblique, surrealist angle on reality, Gorey brought a fresh perspective to thoroughly chewed-over fodder. Contrary to expectation, he “ended up quite enjoying” Candy (1968), a much-hyped psychedelic sex farce based on the novel by Terry Southern.46 It was “a dreadful film,” he allowed, but “its very ham-handedness and foolishness creates a sort of valid surrealist commentary, and it is marvelously cluttered with gewgaws and extravagances of décor that for some reason only the Italians are capable of anymore.…I am beginning to think that most of the comment being made today is in the décor.” He mentions, in several interviews, the “very Mondrian” palette (“dead white and then bright blue, bright red, bright yellow, and black”) of La Prisonnière (1968), a twisted love triangle by the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, known for his dark, often existentially bleak thrillers.
As a rule, though, Gorey was skeptical of much contemporary cinema, especially the overhyped and the winkingly hip. His true north was pre–World War II film, especially from the silent era. His book The Hapless Child was directly inspired by L’Enfant de Paris, a 1913 French silent directed by Léonce Perret, which he saw only once, at MOMA, but apparently never forgot. His unfilmed screenplay, The Black Doll, was “very much inspired by so many of the D. W. Griffiths that were made out in New Jersey,”e he said.47
Gorey being Gorey, he was never explicit about precisely how silent film influenced his work, beyond the fact that it played a large part in his decision to set his work in a Victorian-Edwardian ’20s milieu. “I kind of think in a silent-film way,” he said in a 1995 interview. “I think, looking back, I was seeing an awful lot of silent films and everything when I was starting out publicly, as it were. I think I tended to look at lots of film stills and so…I began to draw people that way, and pick up costumes and backgrounds…”48
We can detect the influence of silent movies in the anachronistic phrasing and ironic histrionics of his captions, which remind us of silent-movie intertitles, and in the existentialist blankness with which his characters confront the confounding and the calamitous, so reminiscent of the deader-th
an-deadpan Buster Keaton, who Gorey claimed was his “idol.”49 Keaton’s face struck him “as having been the most fascinating of any actor’s—that sort of deadpan is somehow far more mysterious and evocative than any amount of expressiveness,” he thought.50 (In yet another intriguing overlap with Beckett, the playwright was a great Keaton fan, too.51 ) In a sense, Gorey’s fascination with deadpan is yet another reminder of his belief in the vital importance of leaving gaps for the viewer to fill in.f
* * *
The moody, gothic-surrealist crime serials of Louis Feuillade (1873–1925) epitomize that aesthetic of gaps—of loose ends and non sequiturs. Which is why he, of all silent filmmakers, and possibly all filmmakers, was unquestionably Gorey’s favorite. Gorey once said that Feuillade was “the greatest influence on my work,” period.52 Barrabas (1920), Feuillade’s silent thriller about the ruthless leader of a gang of brigands, was “the greatest movie ever made,” he declared.53 (Now might be the time to note that Gorey’s reigning passion of the moment was always his favorite, regardless of the genre or medium. Still, there’s no understating Feuillade’s influence on his art.)
The director of more than seven hundred silents, most of them shorts or serials, Feuillade is best known for the multipart crime thrillers Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915–16), and Judex (1916). Based on a wildly popular series of pulp novels, Fantômas chronicles the exploits of a Mephistophelean archfiend, a man of a thousand faces who walks among us disguised as a pillar of respectability—a banker, a judge, a bourgeois gentleman. The Houdini of villainy, Fantômas is an escape artist par excellence: grab him by the arms, as Inspector Juve and the journalist Jérôme Fandor do in Juve contre Fantômas (1913), and—what’s this?! You’re left holding the prosthetic arms attached to his Inverness cape as he bolts free, mockingly doffing his cap as he leaps into a cab. (Gorey, by the way, loved this scene, which struck the surrealist in him as “a wonderful dislocation of reality.”)54