Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Like Batman’s nemesis the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), whose ravings about being an “agent of chaos” were directly inspired by Feuillade’s archcriminal, Fantômas is only incidentally a burglar; what he’s really up to is terrorizing the aristocracy, whose stuffy nineteenth-century morals and manners and sense of entitlement were stifling belle époque France. Likewise, the vampires in Les Vampires aren’t undead bloodsuckers at all but rather members of a catsuited gang that seems to be half criminal conspiracy, half secret society. At heart, their bizarre crimes are acts of poetic terrorism against the social order.

  In Feuillade’s films, as in Gorey’s work, Freud’s concept of the repressed lurks behind the snobberies and starched proprieties of polite society. “The films are cozy, with domestic settings, and they have sinister underpinnings,” said Gorey. “There’s a German word which is the word for cozy but with the negative attached to it, so that it’s cozy and sinister, settled and unsettling, cozy and uncozy.”55 The word he’s looking for is unheimlich, Freud’s term, introduced in his essay on the uncanny, for the sensation of “dread and creeping horror” that arises from the familiar rendered unfamiliar, the homey (heimlich) suddenly haunted. Unsurprisingly, the surrealists were devout fans of Feuillade’s crime thrillers, which brought the horrors of the Grand Guignol into the sitting rooms and opera houses of the bourgeoisie and transformed the sunlit boulevards of Paris into uncanny backstreets of the unconscious. Gorey, who shared the surrealist poet Paul Éluard’s belief that “there is another world, but it is in this one,” surely responded to that aspect of Feuillade’s films.

  He was captivated, too, by Feuillade’s use of theatrical tableaux. Unlike his contemporary D. W. Griffith, who pioneered the use of cutting and camera movement in cinematic storytelling, Feuillade used a stationary camera, relying on his actors’ movements to direct the eye. Using long takes and exploiting his sets’ depth of field, he choreographed his actors’ movements with the precision of a ballet master, a parallel surely not lost on Gorey.

  Gorey rarely makes use of the cinematic tropes (the close-up, the low-angle shot, the aerial shot) whose influence is everywhere in comic books and graphic novels. Instead he places us in the position of a theatergoer looking at a proscenium stage, a point of view undoubtedly influenced by a lifetime of ballet going but no less the product of Feuillade’s tableau-style filmmaking.

  The French director Georges Franju, who remade Judex in 1964, was eloquent on the subject of the spell cast by Feuillade’s tableaux: “He left on me the impress of a magic that was black, white, and silent.…In his shots where nothing happens, something can occur that profits from this nothing, this inaction, this void and silence, something that profits precisely from the waiting, from inquietude. This something is called mystery.”56 Looking at the wordless tableaux in Gorey’s most gothic-surrealist works, such as The West Wing, Les Passementeries Horribles, Les Urnes Utiles, and The Prune People, we can see Feuillade’s influence in their brooding inaction, their inexpressible mystery. Like the French filmmaker’s, Gorey’s was a magic that was black, white, and silent.

  * * *

  The gothic-surrealist atmosphere and imagery of Feuillade classics such as Fantômas and Les Vampires crept into Gorey’s work. Irwin Terry, who writes the fan blog Goreyana, sees “instantly recognizable Gorey motifs” everywhere in Feuillade’s silents—the “distinctive potted palms and pattern-on-pattern decor in the interior sets, a host of 1913 touring cars, veiled mysterious women wrapped in dark clothing with only their heeled shoes peeking from the bottom of their wraps, men in top hats and frock coats. In short, many of the figures and places we have come to assume were [English] in Mr. Gorey’s books are probably French.”57

  Sometimes Gorey’s allusions to Feuillade are more oblique. Terry believes that the mysterious blank calling card hidden in plain sight in nearly every one of Gorey’s books was inspired by the scene in the first installment of Fantômas in which “the disguised villain appears in the hotel room of a wealthy woman who asks, ‘Who are you?’ and is handed a blank calling card by the intruder.”58 Likewise, in The Sopping Thursday, a cat burglar scrambles along a rooftop clutching a purloined parasol. It’s Gorey’s nod to the scene in the Vampires episode “The Severed Head” in which one of the catsuited gang members skulks from roof to roof along the Paris skyline.

  And then there’s the prototype of Gorey’s slinky, shifty-eyed vamps: Irma Vep, the mesmerizing killer queen of the Vampires, with her heavily shadowed, kohl-rimmed eyes and curve-hugging catsuit. (Her name is an anagram for “vampire.”) Unforgettably played by the wild-eyed Musidora, Vep is a femme fatale with an anarchic spin—Theda Bara reimagined as a member of the Bonnot Gang, the band of anarchists whose bank robberies made them the tabloid antiheroes of belle époque France. The surrealists adored her.

  Silent, mysterious, disquieting, dreamlike, Feuillade’s silent black-and-white world had always been there, flickering in the movie palaces of the unconscious, waiting for Gorey to discover it.

  a The Gotham Book Mart, which in time cornered the market on Goreyana, solved the problem of where to stock his books by doing just that. “His stuff was always at the cash register,” former Gotham employee Janet Morgan told me. “It was kind of like the stuff people would buy at the last minute, kind of like the candy at the drugstore.”

  b The precursor of the American Ballet Theatre.

  c Fête Diverse (literally, “diverse party”) appears to be a Gorey pun on faits divers, miscellaneous short news items, often of a lurid or sensational nature, which were once a fixture in French newspapers.

  d Lincoln Kirstein, the heir to the Filene’s fortune, cofounded (with George Balanchine) the New York City Ballet in 1948.

  e He’s referring to the shorts Griffith directed for Biograph Studios in Fort Lee, the Hollywood of the pre–World War I years, where The Perils of Pauline, Theda Bara’s “vamp” movies, and Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops comedies were filmed.

  f Deadpan is a fittingly Goreyesque term. Like all dead metaphors, its literal meaning has been obscured over time by the figurative sense. Originally it referred to a corpselike expressionlessness (from dead plus pan, ’20s slang for “face”). Deadpan humor, an essential component in black comedy, still retains a hint of its macabre etymological origins.

  Chapter 7

  Épater le Bourgeois

  1954–58

  IN 1954, DUELL, SLOAN AND PEARCE published Gorey’s second book, The Listing Attic, a collection of whimsically grim limericks that read like penny-dreadful items written by Edward Lear.

  In a letter to the eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson (who had sent an appreciative but not entirely uncritical note to The Listing Attic’s author), Gorey apologizes for the “lack of ability” that “weakened” some of the limericks, especially the ones in French, his command of that language being “atrocious,” he admitted, “except for reading purposes.”1 In his defense, he adds, the poems in The Listing Attic “were written rather in the manner that Housman says he wrote the Shropshire Lad—most of them all at once some five or six years ago, and then rewritten this year with a few new ones added. The drawings got dashed off in a month or so any old which way. A depressing thought.”

  The limericks written “five or six years ago” were the verses he was fooling around with at Harvard. He’d fiddled with them during his time in Cambridge and, when Duell, Sloan and Pearce expressed interest in a follow-up to The Unstrung Harp, cherry-picked a suitable number, polishing them and adding new ones.

  He adopted a looser, sketch-pad style for some of the Listing Attic illustrations that not only freed him up as an artist but that also seemed, with their roughed-out look, better suited to the book’s grim, often grisly content. “I’m now working…on the drawings for my limericks,” he wrote Alison Lurie in August of 1953. “Unfortunately, I can’t seem to draw ‘funny’ drawings, and most of the ones I have done so far are not only morbid but serious.”2

  He’
s right: at their funniest (a relative term, in this context), the illustrations for The Listing Attic are black comedy; most of them could have done double duty as macabre engravings in a Victorian true-crime gazette. Gorey’s drawings of a psychopath stabbing a woman with a rusty stiletto, an abusive husband knocking his wife’s teeth out with a hammer, and a cocaine-addled young curate about to beat a small child to death leave little doubt that, if some of his books might have been profitably marketed to young readers, this was not one of them.

  Of course the illustrations are only as dark as the subject matter, which at times crosses the line into outright nastiness. (Midway through his work on the book, in March of ’54, he told Lurie that it was going to be “remarkably tasteless,” noting that “an air of uneasy lunacy hangs over the whole thing.”)3 Wife beating, sex crimes, infanticide, random acts of senseless violence, parents who treat their offspring with the wanton cruelty of Dickensian villains: The Listing Attic is one dark little book. Gorey wasn’t kidding when he said his mission in life was to make everybody as uneasy as possible. The incongruous pairing of shilling-shocker subject matter with the limerick, poetry’s most frivolous form, only makes matters weirder. Crossing silliness with depravity, violence with dark humor, The Listing Attic is downright disturbing.

  * * *

  Reading The Listing Attic, we do get the impression Gorey’s trying (perhaps a little too hard) to outrage. “I fear this is my épater le bourgeois work,” he said in a letter to Peter Neumeyer.4 Clifton Fadiman, a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club and popularizer of Serious Literature, “once refused to quote from it in an article on limericks in Holiday because it was so horrid,” Gorey claimed. Seen in its historical context—three years after The Catcher in the Rye gave voice to adolescent alienation, a year before Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” waved the flag for drugs, gay sex, and countercultural rebellion—The Listing Attic takes its quietly perverse place in a groundswell of intellectual discontent with the conformity of ’50s America. (Gorey, of course, would’ve let out a theatrical groan at the suggestion that he was some sort of agent provocateur for the incipient counterculture.)

  Even so, setting aside the obviousness of his nose tweaking and what Wilson, in his 1959 New Yorker essay, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” decried as the “awkwardness of meter and phrasing” of some of the poems, the book introduced themes and motifs that would recur in his work.5

  Here, for the first time, we encounter the woman in peril and the hapless child, both silent-movie staples; the monstrous father figure; Gorey neuroses, such as “feeling somewhat unreal,” and Gorey anxieties, such as finding parties “a terrible strain”; the association of the crepuscular with the uncanny; the fixation on luxuriant beards and mustaches, floor-length fur coats, and “white footgear intended for tennis”; the secret sorrows and “sense of unease” hidden in the darkness of the human heart; the psychopathologies of domestic life; and the alien ickiness of babies (a mother throws her infant at the ceiling “to be rid / Of a strange, overpowering feeling”).

  Gorey seems to find the whole idea of childbearing repugnant: Mrs. Keats-Shelley’s children are born with monstrous deformities; a horrified father says of the newborn whose difficult birth has left his wife at death’s door, “Can it be this is all? / How puny! How small!” (Alexander Theroux remembers Gorey telling him that there were only two reasons he’d walk out on a movie: “One. If an animal is being abused, shot, killed, or hurt in any way. Oh please! And two. Birth scenes! I spent entire segments in the foyer during Hawaii with Julie Andrews heavy with pheasant and howling in hospital stirrups, and I wonder to this day why I did not continue all the way home.”)6

  Religion pops up in various forms, none of them promising, all of them good for a blasphemous laugh: a clerical student mortifies his flesh by wearing a hair shirt, eating dirt, and bathing in brine; a baby drowns in a baptismal font; a monk cries out, in the middle of mass, that the religious life is dreadful and obscene and stabs himself—revealingly?—in the buttocks. As we read the limerick in which the heartless Lord Stipple tells his puny, sad-eyed son, “Your mother’s behaviour / Gave pain to Our Saviour, / And that’s why He made you a cripple,” it’s a little hard to believe Gorey when he claims, “I’m not a ‘lapsed Catholic’ like so many people I know who apparently were influenced forever by it.”

  “There’s a rather odd couple in Herts…” The Listing Attic. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce/Little, Brown, 1954)

  Something strange is going on with gender in The Listing Attic: a naked lady, peering anxiously into a full-length mirror, fears that she’s “coming unsexed”; a “rather odd couple” of Edwardian gents in starched collars and bowler hats are of uncertain gender, since “they’re never without / Their moustaches and long, trailing skirts.” (They’re cousins, we’re told—the primary family tie in Gorey’s world—but give the distinct impression of being a couple in the life-partner sense, which makes us wonder if cousin is a euphemism.) Gorey touches on the question of homosexuality more explicitly in his chilling depiction, discussed earlier, of a gang of Harvard men “burning a fairy.”

  Children are introduced, for the first time in Gorey’s work, as emblems of vulnerability, which makes them perfect targets for willful cruelty and cosmic injustice. (Gorey—who, it should probably be noted, got on well with his friends’ kids—always insisted that he used children for gothic-novel and silent-movie melodrama purposes because their vulnerability made them the perfect victims. “It’s just so obvious,” he told Stephen Schiff of the New Yorker. “They’re the easiest targets.”)7 In Goreyland, little ones exist to be menaced or murdered outright, often in ingenious ways, as in the case of the infant whose nurse ties it to a kite out of spite and lets it float off into the wild blue yonder.

  The Listing Attic marks other, less momentous firsts, too. The mysterious Black Doll, an armless, faceless cipher of a toy, calculated to give a child nightmares, makes its first appearance. There it is on the front cover, passing by a window in a row house whose curious flatness suggests a stage set. And there it is again, marching along a tall brick wall in the beautifully rendered surrealist snapshot that ends the book. It will put in cameos in The Willowdale Handcar; or, The Return of the Black Doll, The West Wing, and The Tunnel Calamity; appear on the cover of The Raging Tide; or, The Black Doll’s Imbroglio; and make its final bow in Gorey’s silent screenplay, The Black Doll.

  The Listing Attic is the first of his books in which Gorey hand-letters the captions to his illustrations. The way he told it, he’d hand-lettered a few sample pages, and his publisher, like his bosses at Anchor, had gone gaga over his spidery, skittering type, sentencing him to hard labor for life. “They, the publishers, thought what a good idea hand-lettering was, and since then I have never been able to stop,” he kvetched in 1980. “I sometimes get fearfully bored lettering the damn things, especially since I really detest my hand-lettering.”8 Of course, Gorey was self-deprecating to a fault and, more to the point, a world-class self-dramatizer who loved to play the put-upon drudge.

  His second book confirmed his near-total lack of what sales teams like to call commercial potential. “My first two books…didn’t make any money, nor did [I] get paid much attention,” he said in a 1977 interview. “Great piles of those books were remaindered on 42nd Street for nineteen cents several years later.”9 (As this is written, a New York antiquarian book dealer, Peter L. Stern & Company, lists a “very good plus” copy of The Listing Attic, first edition, dust jacket intact, for $375.)10 In a letter to Alison Lurie, Gorey reported that Attic had sold only “a little over two thousand copies, which is sad,” but noted that “it seems to have acquired a slight and dismal cachet with les boys.”11 If “les boys” was Gorey’s Holly Golightly version of the slang term for gays (e.g., “the boys in the band”), it raises the intriguing question of whether gay readers were responding specifically to the gay influences in Gorey’s work—its Wildean irony and Firbankian outrageousness. Were gays, ahead of the curve of
popular taste in so many things, the first wave of Gorey fans?

  * * *

  Meanwhile, back in the everyday world, Gorey soldiered on at Doubleday, which in January of ’54 was “particularly tedious and dull,” he told Lurie. “I am in the frame of mind to have a real temper tantrum if I can find an excuse.”12 When he was not “struggling for Doubleday after hours,” he was “whizzing from one ancient film to another.”13

  That February, he joined the American Society for Psychical Research, a New York–based organization founded in 1885, according to its literature, “by a distinguished group of scholars and scientists who shared the courage and vision to explore the uncharted realms of human consciousness,” among them William James, the celebrated Harvard psychologist and brother of Gorey’s least favorite novelist, Henry.14 In the first flush of his newfound enthusiasm, Gorey gobbled up “all the classic books on the subject in great gulps” and even recruited Lurie for an experiment in telepathy, the results of which were, as they inevitably seem to be, inconclusive.15

  He later claimed, in a letter to Peter Neumeyer, to “have always, if desultorily and spasmodically, been interested in what is loosely [called] the occult.”16 That interest crescendoed in the late ’60s, when the cultural atmosphere was thick with Eastern mysticism, New Age philosophy, pop astrology, and bestselling accounts of supernatural phenomena, whether fictional (Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby, about devil worshippers in ’60s New York) or purportedly real (Hans Holzer’s paperback books on paranormal activity).