by Mark Dery
He believed in the occult and in parapsychological phenomena, he said, but only insofar as they’re “indicative of the nature of things and the relations between them” as opposed to “the more specific kind of fortune-telling.”17 In other words, he “believed,” in ironic quotes. For Gorey, the tarot, astrology, palmistry, and the I Ching were just so many ways of “by-passing the cause-and-effect, rational world in which we normally try to function.” By translating reality as we know it into a symbolic language, systems of divination “show you things,” he wrote Neumeyer, “which otherwise you might have much more trouble finding out.” The ultimate goal, of course, was to internalize the logic of such systems, rendering them unnecessary. Thinking aloud on the page, he mused, Hadn’t someone said that true mastery of the I Ching meant that it became “so much a part of you that your conscious mind would no longer need to consult it at all, and that then you would directly be apprehending the Tao and acting in accordance with it without any conscious thought”?
What Gorey is saying is that a literal belief in the predictive powers of the I Ching, the tarot, palmistry, and the like misses the point. Better to use them as boreholes down to the deeper reality underlying the world as we perceive it—what Taoists call li, the ever-changing, infinitely complex, ineffably meaningful order of nature.
His observation that the goal is to internalize the mind-set of the I Ching, an ancient method of divination closely associated with Taoism, so that you have direct access to the inexpressible, irresolvable mystery of things—li, by any other name—is a profoundly Taoist insight. But it’s also surrealist to the core, if for li we substitute the surrealist concept of the Marvelous, the poetic mystery and uncanny beauty just beneath the surface of everyday life. Maintaining “an alert, elevated, otherworldly state of mind,” the surrealist is always on the lookout for the Marvelous, according to the visual-culture critic Rick Poynor—that “moment when reality seems to open up and disclose its essence more fully.”18 In his brief but brilliant ruminations to Neumeyer, Gorey gives us as lucid an exposition of his philosophy as he ever gave, gracefully resolving his Taoism with his surrealism.
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In March of ’54, Gorey was reading Arthur Ransome, the English author whose Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books are perennial favorites in the UK. Ransome, he told Lurie, was “second only to J. Austen in his ability to create a complete, small, realistic world. I begin to think that is what I most enjoy in books nowadays: little worlds. I suppose because I don’t have one of my own, except in my work.”19
Indeed, Gorey continued to be a person, like C. F. Earbrass, to whom things do not happen. In ’55, he was invited, on the strength of his books, to a cocktail party swarming with admen, models, novelists, and other bright young things. But when the “young men who were pretending not to be interested in other young men began surreptitiously to get each other’s phone numbers,” Gorey ducked out. Just once, he confided to Lurie, he wished someone would consider him sufficiently attractive to want to put the moves on him, but no one ever did, or would, and he was “too bored” to make the first move.20
At Doubleday, he’d ascended from “merely having a job to embarking on a career,” that of book designer—a change in job description that left him hip deep in work but no richer for his troubles.21 “Designing the insides of books is neither more nor less dull than designing their jackets, and so far it pays exactly the same,” he groused.22
As always, his gloom was relieved by newfound passions, most notably his discovery, that fall, of The Tale of Genji, a classic of Japanese literature that Anchor had published in 1955. Written by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting in the imperial court of eleventh-century Japan, Genji is a tale of romantic love and court intrigue, full of musings on the impermanence of beauty and the short span of man’s days. It’s perfumed with the sweet sadness that clings to what the Japanese call mono no aware—the capacity to feel things deeply, especially the pathos of passing time, poignantly evoked by the ephemeral beauty of nature. For Gorey, the novel captured “subtleties of feeling about existence rarely dealt with in Western literature.”23 He was “enthralled,” he told Lurie, by the Heian-era masterpiece, declaring it “the great novel of the world.”24
It would go on to become his all-time-favorite work of fiction. By 1995, he’d reread the thousand-plus-page epic “six or seven times” yet was still “absolutely ga-ga” over it.25 Something in Murasaki’s evocations of the inexpressible mystery of being human spoke to Gorey in his deepest self. Japanese literature, he felt, “has a stronger sense of what life is like to the individual living it than any other literature I’ve ever read.”26 In a letter to Neumeyer, he quotes a line from Lady Murasaki’s diary: “Yet the human heart is an invisible and dreadful being.”27
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In 1957, two books arrived on the cultural scene, one very obviously a children’s book, the other a children’s book at first glance, but on closer inspection maybe not. Both were about uninvited guests who insinuate themselves into bourgeois households then wreak havoc. Incarnations of the trickster—an archetype familiar from myth and folklore whose avatars include Brer Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—both invaders straddled the binaries of animal and human, child and adult, wild and domesticated, malicious and mischievous. In that sense, they were boundary crossers in the best trickster tradition.
One was Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, the top-hatted agent of chaos who blew away the idea that little learners should cut their teeth on stodgy, see-Spot-run-type stuff. The other was the ill-mannered animal “something between a penguin and a lizard” (as Gorey described it) that made its debut—seven months after the Cat—in The Doubtful Guest, published by Doubleday.28 Both house-wrecking pranksters can be seen as advance scouts for the countercultural backlash against the ’50s. (In retrospect, the Cat, with his candy-striped top hat and long-haired sidekicks, Thing One and Thing Two, looks like a cartoony premonition of the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia in his red-and-white-striped top hat on the cover of the band’s first record. And the Doubtful Guest, raising hell in his high-top sneakers and all-black getup—or pelt, or whatever it is—recalls beatnik bad boys such as Gregory Corso.)
But that’s where the similarities between the two books end. The fast-talking, glad-handing Cat barges into what we assume is the suburban home of a pair of grammar-school kids—a brother and sister whose mother has left them alone, inexplicably, with the pet goldfish for a babysitter. Juggling the terrified fish in its bowl, balancing mom’s cake on his stovepipe hat, the Cat unleashes playful mayhem. Seuss began as a cartoonist, and his style, as an illustrator, is cartoony—brash and boldly colorful. The text, constrained by his editor’s requirement that he limit himself to a beginner’s vocabulary, zips along in its repetitive, singsong way.
If The Cat in the Hat is a Looney Tunes short, The Doubtful Guest is one of Feuillade’s gothic-surrealist silents. Gorey’s hand-drawn nineteenth-century engravings are in a different universe altogether from Seuss’s animated-cartoon aesthetic. The Cat’s raucous world blares at us in bright reds and blues; the Doubtful Guest’s is rendered in rich blacks and subtle shades of gray, its minute details and machinelike cross-hatching achieved with a hair-fine line. Seuss’s tale careens along wildly, its lunatic pace conveyed by cartoon speed lines; Gorey tells his story with frozen tableaux whose stillness showcases his gift for composition.
Through the Balanchinian (or, if you prefer, Feuilladian) arrangement of characters on his miniature stage, he creates satisfying visual rhythms. Likewise, his contrapuntal use of white space, solid black shapes, and fine-lined shading produces beautifully balanced compositions that make us want to linger on each scene, exploring every nook and cranny. At times, he lights his scene as if it were a movie set or a stage, dramatically spotlighting the central figure amid the surrounding shadows, as in the panel where the Doubtful Guest stands firmly planted, nose to the wall like a naughty child, while
the family shuffles off to bed.
Gorey’s decision to isolate his couplets on an otherwise blank page, facing his illustrations, allows us to savor his drawings, free from the distractions of language, while at the same time permitting us to appreciate the wittiness of his verse for its own sake. Taking note of his division of text and image, we realize just how much Gorey’s books differ from such seemingly related genres as the comic book and the graphic novel, in which the text is appended to the illustrated panel as a caption or, more often, incorporated into it in the form of speech bubbles and thought balloons.
Gorey’s writing is a world away from Seuss’s, too, though both texts are written in rhyme, employing related meters. (Seuss uses anapestic dimeter for the most part, Gorey anapestic tetrameter, instantly familiar from Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”)a The tone of Gorey’s text is wittier and darker than Seuss’s, deadpan rather than hyperkinetic. (Gorey, who generally avoided sniping at other picture-book authors, once decried the “endless numbers of children’s books which are stuck together with the first rhyme that comes into somebody’s head for an animal’s name or something. Well, I don’t wish to denigrate Dr. Seuss, but I mean, you know, ‘the cat in the hat.’”)29
The Doubtful Guest opens on one of Gorey’s gaslit family scenes, dominated by that stock Gorey character, the bearded paterfamilias in his smoking jacket. The lord of all he surveys, he’s a monument to the Edwardian-Victorian patriarchy. But his authority is about to be challenged. It’s the proverbial dark and stormy night. The doorbell rings, but “when they answered the bell on that wild winter night, / There was no one expected—and no one in sight.” Craning their necks around the terrace of their elegant manor, they spy a puzzling creature perched on one of those large stone urns that proliferate in Goreyland. It—we never do learn its gender—resembles the offspring of a penguin and a raven, though its beady, bulging eyes recall Mr. Earbrass’s perpetually anxious look. Without warning, it runs into the house and assumes the position of a disobedient child sentenced to stand “nose to the wall”; there it remains, deaf to everyone’s screaming, until the defeated family shuffles off to bed. In the days that follow, it makes itself at home, turning the decorous domesticity of its hosts’ family life upside down.
In its “fits of bewildering wrath,” infantile orality (at breakfast, it eats “all the syrup and toast, and a part of a plate”), insatiable curiosity, and poltergeistlike destructiveness—it wrenches the horn off the new gramophone, tears apart books, puts roomfuls of pictures askew on their hooks—the Doubtful Guest embodies the bestial nature of babies, at least to a lifelong bachelor who never changed a diaper and who seemed to find the idea of childbearing distasteful and infants decidedly repugnant.
Gorey’s decision to dedicate The Doubtful Guest to Alison Lurie (then Alison Bishop), who was the mother of a toddler at the time, lends credence to the idea that the anthropomorphized creature of the title was Gorey’s caricature of infancy, a reading Lurie subscribes to. “[The Doubtful Guest]…was inspired, more or less, by a remark I made to Ted when my first son was less than two years old,” she said in 2008. “I said that having a young child around all the time was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left. This, of course, is what happens in the story.”30 She expanded on this anecdote in an essay for the New York Review of Books. “I have sometimes thought that…The Doubtful Guest…was partly a comment on my inexplicable (to him) decision to reproduce,” she wrote. “The title character in this book is smaller than anyone in the family it appears among. It has a peculiar appearance at first and does not understand language. As time passes it becomes greedy and destructive: it tears pages out of books, has temper tantrums, and walks in its sleep. Yet nobody even tries to get rid of the creature; their attitude toward it remains one of resigned acceptance. Who is this Doubtful Guest? The last page of the story makes everything clear:
“It came seventeen years ago—and to this day It has shown no intention of going away.
“Of course, after about seventeen years, most children leave home.”31
“It joined them at breakfast and presently ate / All the syrup and toast, and a part of a plate.” The Doubtful Guest. (Doubleday, 1957)
Looked at from a biographical angle, the Doubtful Guest, in its “white canvas shoes” and Harvard scarf, is unquestionably an alter ego, a poetic evocation of Gorey as a little boy. Like Ted, it’s a species of one—an only child. It’s surrounded by screaming adults, as Skee Morton thinks her cousin often was in his early years. Also like Gorey, it’s a born oddball, incapable of passing as a stuffy, dull-minded member of polite society, here represented by its adoptive family. (Doesn’t every bright, alienated weirdo wonder if he’s really adopted?)
The Cat in the Hat changed children’s books as America knew them. An instant bestseller, it ushered in a more irreverent view of childhood and the beginnings of an antiauthoritarian streak in kids’ culture. Most important, it killed off those insipid, boring goody-goodys Dick and Jane and injected the bang-zoom! anarchy of the animated cartoon into picture books. (Bart Simpson is a direct descendant of the Cat in the Hat.) Dr. Seuss joined Dr. Spock as one of mass culture’s most profound influences on the childhoods of Baby Boomers. The Doubtful Guest, by contrast, sank with barely a trace, selling few copies and garnering even fewer reviews, mostly from “provincial sources,” all of them “stressing how peculiar it is,” Gorey lamented.32
What would Boomer childhoods, and Boomer ideas about childhood, look like if Gorey’s wry, disquieting book about the oddness of babies—published in the peak year of the Baby Boom—had taken its place alongside Seuss and Sendak on America’s shelves? That might have happened if Duell, Sloan and Pearce’s marketing department had been less timid and more tuned in to educators’ calls for beginner books that didn’t taste like pablum. Sendak bemoaned publishers’ reluctance to market Gorey as a children’s author. “It was a received idea of children that had nothing to do with kids,” he told an interviewer. More’s the pity, he thought, because “Ted Gorey is perfect for children.”33
“When I first started out, I wasn’t trying to write for children because I didn’t know any children,” said Gorey in 1977. “Then again, I mean ‘knowing’ in the fashion of people who talk to the kiddies all the time. This simply would not work for me. However, I have thought that more of my work might have been for children than anybody would ever publish on a juvenile list. The Doubtful Guest was for children, by my estimation. I used to try to persuade a publisher by saying, ‘Why don’t you bring this out as a children’s book? I have an adult audience which will buy the book anyway. You might as well pick up some children along the line.’ But they would not risk it, they’d get all twittery. So I gave up.”34
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“A free verse poem conscientiously about nothing at all, very despairing emotionally,” is how Gorey described The Object-Lesson in a letter to Lurie.35 Published in 1958 by Doubleday—and dedicated to Jason and Barbara Epstein—it was Gorey’s first full-fledged venture into surrealism. Edmund Wilson was quick to note Gorey’s debt to the movement in his New Yorker essay “The Albums of Edward Gorey.” “Here you have another [Gorey] family, but their adventures are entirely Surrealist and remind one a little of such books of Max Ernst’s as La Femme 100 Têtes,” he wrote. “The ‘story line’ is always shifting; the situations are never explained.”36
A string of more or less unrelated phrases that nonetheless flow seamlessly, The Object-Lesson follows the associative logic of a dream rather than the cause-and-effect plotting of a conventional narrative. “It was already Thursday,” the story begins, “but his lordship’s artificial limb could not be found.” We see him on one leg, hopping mad, holding a limp trouser leg upright. Once again, the authority of one of Gorey’s bearded patriarchs is under assault, this time in a manner whose Freudian symbolism is so obvious it verges on camp. (Castration complex, anyone?) Directing the servants to fill the baths, his
lordship seizes a pair of fireplace tongs and sets off—in his pajamas, swaddled in the obligatory fur coat and Harvard scarf—for the edge of the lake.
At the lake, his lordship presents the Throbblefoot Spectre with a length of string; the forlorn wraith promptly fashions it into a cat’s cradle, to amuse itself.b Seating himself beside the statue of Corrupted Endeavour, his lordship awaits the arrival of autumn, that most Goreyesque time of year, with its melancholy nostalgia and its intimations of mortality. Things proceed from there with an illogic that somehow feels perfectly logical, thanks to Gorey’s clever use of stock images evocative of Sherlock Holmes mysteries and Victorian ghost stories—the mysterious theft of the prosthetic leg, the unexplained lady in mourning costume, the disconsolate ghost, the villain disguised by a false mustache. As the book winds down, an ineffable sadness settles over its little world: “On the shore a bat, or possibly an umbrella, disengaged itself from the shrubbery, causing those nearby to recollect the miseries of childhood.”
This sentence is not only one of the most beautifully wrought lines of gothic-surrealist poetry Gorey ever wrote, it is also one of the most densely allusive. His linkage of the twilight flight of a bat, or a forlorn umbrella, with recollections of childhood crosses Proustian reverie with gothic (the bat) and surrealist (Magritte’s umbrellas) symbolism. The confusion between bat and umbrella recalls surrealism’s combination of incongruous elements (quintessentially, “the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella” in Lautréamont’s novel, Les Chants de Maldoror) to create a new, dreamlike synthesis that destabilizes everyday reality, if only for a moment. The irresolvability of whether the dark, flapping thing in The Object-Lesson is bat or umbrella has the effect of making us view it as an uncanny conjunction of both.