Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  * * *

  Wilson had remarked on the “morbid Edwardian household” of The Doubtful Guest and, more generally, on the “macabre or Surrealist character” of Gorey’s work.12 But in 1960, Gorey pulled a switcheroo: The Bug Book was as colorful and cute—there’s no other word for it—as the book immediately preceding it, The Object-Lesson, was somber and brooding. (Like the Doubtful Guest, Gorey was himself a boundary crosser, jumping from one side of a philosophical dualism to the other just when we thought we’d got him pegged.)

  The Bug Book had originally been published in December of ’59 in a privately printed edition of six hundred copies under the Looking Glass colophon. A glorified Christmas card, it was an attention-getting way of introducing the newly launched imprint to everyone in the book business. In March of 1960, Jason and Clelia reprinted it for the general market under their Epstein and Carroll imprint, another Random House venture.

  The Bug Book was the first Gorey story to be printed in color and the first Gorey title that was unequivocally a kid’s book. Printed in perky primary colors and drawn in a generically childlike stick-figure style, The Bug Book tells the story of two blue antlike bugs who live in an upended teacup with a chunk missing from the rim, leaving a notch that’s convenient for ingress and egress. “They were frivolous, and often danced on the roof,” hand in hand. (Are they a couple? They seem to be, and their matching coloring—both are baby blue—invites us to read them as a same-sex couple.) They live in a close-knit community—a rare thing in a Gorey story—with three red bugs and two yellow ones. This being Goreyland, they’re all cousins, naturally. “All the bugs were on the friendliest possible terms and constantly went to call on each other.…And had delightful parties.”

  A pall falls over things when the neighborhood bully crashes the party—a big black bug (“who was related to nobody”) with the menacing headgear of a stag beetle and an attitude problem to match. Gorey uses his gift for understatement to hilarious effect: “The other bugs were dubious, but nevertheless made an attempt to be friendly,” notes the caption beneath a drawing of one of the yellow bugs attempting to shake the interloper’s claw. Cut to: the unfortunate peacemaker hurtling through the air, knocked ass over teakettle by the big bug. “It was not a success,” the narration informs, with perfect deadpan. Distraught, the little bugs conspire to rid themselves of the pestilence by dropping a big black stone onto the big black bug, with satisfyingly splattery results. The terror vanquished, they slip his remains into an envelope, address it “To whom it may concern,” and leave it “propped against the fatal stone to be mailed,” after which they throw a celebratory party, “complete with cake crumbs and raspberry punch.” The Bug Book is the only Gorey title with an unambiguously happy ending. Good triumphs over evil, and everyone lives happily ever after.

  Of course, since it’s a Gorey book, we can’t entirely suppress the feeling that there’s something tongue-in-cheek about this uplifting tale for tots. Gorey’s faux-naïf style puts an ironic spin on things, underscoring our sense that his “tiny work for children,” as he called it, is simultaneously a parody of tiny works for children. At once sincere and ironic, it can be appreciated on either level—or both. In that light, The Bug Book can be seen as paving the way for post–Baby Boom kiddie entertainments such as The Ren and Stimpy Show and The Simpsons, which use irony and double entendre to appeal to parents, too.

  As for The Bug Book’s commercial prospects, the subject filled him “with profound apathy,” he told Alison Lurie that March, on the eve of the book’s publication.13 Adopting his half joking doomsayer mode, he predicted it, like his previous efforts, would vanish into oblivion, adding wryly, “As you can see, success in the form of Edmund’s article hasn’t spoiled me.” Come September, he sent Lurie the cheering news that a pest-control company was interested in copies of The Bug Book as a gift for its clients. “Success is right around the corner,” he deadpanned.14

  Nevertheless, he plugged away at his books in progress and his freelance assignments. In his March letter, he told Lurie that he’d finished another book, called The Hapless Child, which Epstein had promised to publish that fall, and that he was “about two-thirds of the way through…an alphabet about the dreadful deaths of twenty-six tiny children.” It would appear in ’63 as The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

  * * *

  Nineteen-sixty also saw the publication of The Fatal Lozenge, by the New York publisher Ivan Obolensky. (This was Gorey’s fourth publisher. “I never changed publishers; they always changed me, as it were,” he protested in a 1977 interview. “They all thought they were going to make more of a splash with whatever particular book they were doing at the time. And then they’d do, like, one or two, and the splash didn’t arrive. So they would say reluctantly, ‘Well—’”)15

  Subtitled An Alphabet, The Fatal Lozenge was Gorey’s first foray into the genre. He would go on to perform variations on the abecedarium theme in six books,a one of which, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, would become his best-known title.

  The alphabet book is one of the oldest forms of children’s literature. Rhyming couplets, illustrated by woodcuts, aided memorization. Early examples wedded ABCs and Calvinist catechism. The New England Primer, ubiquitous in late-seventeenth-century America, is typical of the genre:

  A In Adam’s Fall

  We sinnèd all.

  B Heaven to find;

  The Bible Mind.

  C Christ crucify’d

  For sinners dy’d.

  D The Deluge drown’d

  The Earth around.16

  Gorey’s interest in the alphabet book was undoubtedly a by-product of his interest in Lear, well known for loopy abecedaria like “Nonsense Alphabet” (1845) (“P was a pig, / Who was not very big; / But his tail was too curly, / And that made him surly”).17 His library reveals a longstanding fascination with the form, with a predictable focus on the nineteenth century. On his bookshelves, we find A Moral Alphabet (1899) by Hilaire Belloc, A Comic Alphabet (1836) by George Cruikshank, a Dover facsimile of The Adventures of A, Apple Pie, Who Was Cut to Pieces and Eaten by Twenty Six Young Ladies and Gentlemen with Whom All Little People Ought to Be Acquainted (circa 1835), and of course Lear in abundance.

  At the same time, he couldn’t have been oblivious, as an illustrator working in commercial book publishing, to the waves Dr. Seuss was making in kid lit. Alphabet books were playing an important part in reshaping American ideas about childhood. Consider Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra! (1955), whose boy narrator dreams up a new alphabet for kids who think outside the Little Golden box (“In the places I go there are things that I see / That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z”). Or Sendak’s Alligators All Around (1962), in which “shockingly spoiled” reptilian protagonists throw tantrums and juggle jelly beans with abandon. These and other unconventional abecedaria celebrate Romper Room radicals who flout the rules. Seen in their cultural and historical context, they look like premonitions of the hippie era, with its worship of nonconformity and its elevation of the child to a cultural icon, not to mention its stoner humor and acid-soaked song lyrics.

  Though he seemed barely to notice the counterculture of the ’60s, beyond the Beatles, Gorey was in his own quietly perverse way more iconoclastic than Seuss or Sendak. In The Fatal Lozenge, as in The Listing Attic, his combination of a children’s genre (in this case, the ABC book) with dark subject matter and black comedy is both mordantly funny and unsettling, especially when he crosses the line, as he occasionally does, into the “sick humor” of contemporaries such as the cartoonist Gahan Wilson. When an interviewer mentioned to Sendak that the grisly drawing of an infant skewered on the point of a Zouave’s sword in The Fatal Lozenge was the moment when Gorey went “down the road of no return as far as publishers were concerned,” Sendak quipped, “That’s why he was so loved. There’s never enough dead babies for us.”18

  The Fatal Lozenge. (Ivan Obolensky, 1960)

  The literary theorist George R. Bodmer places Gorey’s ironic, s
ardonic ABCs in the context of a postwar push-back, among children’s authors such as Seuss and Sendak, “against the limits of imagination, or the limits the outside world would impose on imagination…”19 In his essay “The Post-Modern Alphabet: Extending the Limits of the Contemporary Alphabet Book, from Seuss to Gorey,” Bodmer calls Gorey’s “anti-alphabets” a “sarcastic rebellion against a view of childhood that is sunny, idyllic, and instructive.”20 Gorey’s mock-moralistic tone satirizes received wisdom about the benignity of parents and other authority figures: a magnate waiting for his limousine “ponders further child-enslavement / And other projects still more mean”; two little children quail in terror at the sight of their towering, bearded uncle, for they “know that at his leisure / He plans to have them come to harm.” Yet Gorey also punctures the myth that children are little angels: a baby, “lying meek and quiet” on a bearskin rug, “Has dreams about rampage and riot / And will grow up to be a thug.” (The rug’s enormous, snarling head, with its bared fangs, is an omen of mayhem to come.)

  Talking about The Fatal Lozenge in 1977, Gorey said, “This was a very early book and at that date I was not above trying to shock everyone a bit.”21 In that sense, his sixth book is so similar to his second that it might as well be called Son of Listing Attic. The drawings are more accomplished (though they’re nowhere near the perfection he attained in The Object-Lesson) and more coherent stylistically, but Gorey gives in to the same snickering nastiness that weakens the earlier effort.

  A good part of the book consists of the usual droll riffing on stock characters and situations borrowed from gothic novels, penny dreadfuls, Conan Doyle, and Dickens. But just as clearly, there’s more going on in The Fatal Lozenge than enfant terrible-ism (“trying to shock everyone a bit”) or the larger trends identified by Bodmer: the bohemian backlash against the suffocating normalcy of the Eisenhower era and the growing resistance, led by Drs. Spock and Seuss, to outdated, repressive ideas about childhood and parenting. The recurrence of themes closer to home—the beastliness of babies, the depravity of the clergy (a nun is “fearfully bedevilled”), the furtiveness and shamefulness of homosexual desire, here associated with child molestation and even more monstrous perversions (“The Proctor buys a pupil ices, / And hopes the boy will not resist / When he attempts to practice vices / Few people even know exist”22)—makes us feel, at times, as if we’re eavesdropping on a psychotherapy session. That these disconcerting images come to us in the reassuring wrappings of a children’s book makes The Fatal Lozenge even more disquieting.

  * * *

  Gorey, as far as we know, never spent time on the Freudian couch, though he did cross paths with someone who was in therapy “forever,” wrestling with his closeted homosexuality and his unhappy childhood, when the other kids ostracized him as a sissy.23

  That someone was Maurice Sendak, whom Gorey met when Sendak dropped by the Looking Glass offices to discuss book ideas with Jason Epstein. “I remember how much I admired Ted,” Sendak recalled in a 2002 interview. “I just loved his work.…I loved the line. I loved the sort of scintillating toe dance that he does. It was his love of ballet which was a part of that.”24 He had great respect for Gorey’s technique. “He was so totally in control. And he was so elegant and he was so refined.…Like Mozart.”25

  The respect was mutual, though Gorey expressed his high opinion of Sendak’s art in a predictably oblique way: perusing children’s books led him to the “sad conclusion,” he told Peter Neumeyer, “that except for Ardizzone and Sendak, I am about the best around. A sad commentary on the state of things if ever there was one.”26 Nonetheless, he said, “I do like Sendak, especially Mr. Rabbitb (an otherwise absolutely vile book); his own writing I am ambivalent toward.”27

  An irascible loner and uncompromisingly honest artist who, against all odds, hit the commercial—and critical—jackpot, Sendak had a deeply felt sympathy for Gorey. He knew what it was like to spend long years in the wilderness, more or less ignored by the critical elite, scraping by financially. But unlike Seuss, who knew “how to satisfy the customer,” and unlike himself, who had no inkling of how to satisfy the customer but managed to nonetheless, “Ted had no intention of satisfying the customer,” Sendak thought.28

  He urged his editor at Harper & Row, the legendary Ursula Nordstrom, to take up Gorey’s cause. An indefatigable champion of “good books for bad children,” Nordstrom was at the barricades of the revolution in children’s literature from 1940 to 1970, mentoring Sendak, Tomi Ungerer, Shel Silverstein, E. B. White, and others who were reinventing and reinvigorating kids’ books. She was a Gorey enthusiast, Sendak recalled, but in the end “couldn’t quite put a hold on him.”29

  Not that she didn’t try: having cajoled Gorey into a contract for something called The Interesting List, she wrote a series of typically playful letters, urging him to get a move on, as first one deadline passed, then another. It was all for naught. Gorey sent her a few drawings, but the manuscript never materialized—done in, most likely, by his wandering interests, towering workload, and benign neglect of his career.30 Whether out of bohemianism or just plain contrarianism, he seemed to view the very idea of striving as pushily self-important. “I have a lot of friends in New York who are involved in various enterprises where they’re always fanning their careers,” he said with affectionate contempt.31 In the wake of Dracula’s success, he recalled, “I began to realize what it would be like to be rich and famous, but I’ve decided unh-unh.”

  Sendak got to know Gorey during their New York years. Like John Ashbery and so many others, he found Ted “generous and funny” but never felt as if he truly knew him.32 He was nagged by the feeling that Gorey had truer friends elsewhere—a sentiment shared by nearly everyone who knew Ted, curiously.

  One of the few times he “felt intimate” with Gorey, oddly enough, was when a bizarre bit of absurdist comedy broke the ice of what Sendak called Gorey’s “aloof and refined-looking” persona.33 After not having seen Gorey for a year, he spotted him striding along Fifth Avenue in his signature getup—fur coat, earrings, all of it—and trotted up, tugging Ted’s sleeve to get his attention. (Sendak was short and squared-off, a Jewish garden gnome from Brooklyn. Maybe he thought Gorey, towering above the foot traffic, hadn’t noticed him.) “He looked askance and he seemed to either not remember me or not to wish to recognize me. I got pissed. So I tugged harder, and then he turned to me—and his eyes—his face looked like Nosferatu—and he actually yelled. He said, ‘Rape!’…[H]e thought I was a molester.” Sendak was rattled. “Of course then he smiled and I knew it was all right.”

  Sendak regretted that he and Gorey weren’t closer. “If we could have talked more, we might have shared ideas,” he said, “but he was not a sharer.”34 Then, too, their personalities were comically dissimilar. An avowed misanthrope and career depressive, Sendak was a product of the New York Jewish culture of kvetch epitomized by Woody Allen and Larry David. Gorey, on the other hand, was about as goyische as they come: a WASP from the Midwest, Episcopalian by background, Anglophile by inclination, whose chitchat touched on everything (but sex) while revealing next to nothing about himself or his work.

  Even so, the two men had much in common, intellectually and artistically: both were ravenous consumers of culture, high and low, and shameless borrowers from anyone or anything that caught their eye. Both were masters of the picture-book medium who helped transform it into a serious art form. (“A true picture book is a visual poem,” Sendak believed—an apt description of Gorey titles like The Object-Lesson.)35 Both were virtuosos of pen-and-ink draftsmanship and epigrammatic storytelling; both were snubbed by the art world as mere illustrators. Both experimented with genre and format, from the alphabet book to the miniature book (in Sendak’s case, the Nutshell Library) to the mock cautionary tale (Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue was Sendak’s entry in that category). Selma G. Lanes’s perceptive comments on Sendak’s style in The Art of Maurice Sendak could do double duty as an analysi
s of Gorey’s:

  His early popularity notwithstanding, Sendak has at no time during his career been in step with the mainstream of American children’s book illustration. In the mid-fifties, when bold exploitation of color, abstract design, outsized formats, and showy technical virtuosity abounded, Sendak’s work remained consistently low-key, curiously retrograde and nineteenth-century in spirit. The use of crosshatching was introduced into his illustrations right from the start.…Sendak’s drawings actually achieve the look of nineteenth-century wood engravings.36

  On a more personal note, both understood “the miseries of childhood,” and, as Sendak pointed out in an unpublished interview with Kevin Shortsleeve, a scholar of children’s literature, both were gay.c

  As a gay man who wrote and illustrated children’s books, Sendak knew too well what an explosive combination that was in an America whose dream life was haunted by nightmares of predatory pedophiles. “Well, just look at the time we [he and Gorey] both grew up in America, as artists, both gay—and we had to hide that,” he told an interviewer.37 As a New York Times article on Sendak noted in 2008, “A gay artist in New York is not exactly uncommon, but Mr. Sendak said that the idea of a gay man writing children’s books would have hurt his career when he was in his 20s and 30s.”38

  Paradoxically, the closet inspired gay artists like him and Gorey to become virtuosos of subtext, he maintained. “When you look at the new gay-lib,” Sendak observed, “you say, gee whiz, why did we suffer so much? But I think it added to what we were doing.…We had to adapt more cunningly.”39 The need to hide in plain sight gave rise to sly, secretive systems for signaling queerness, he thought. Consider Gorey’s books: “They all had what appealed to me so much—aside from the graphics and the writing—[which] was the wicked sexual ambiguity that ran through all of it. I remember a jacket he did for…a novel by Melville, Redburn. And the jacket summed up completely the kind of confused homosexuality of that novel.…So erotic and yet so simple. You can look at it any way you like.…[H]e buried a lot of information about himself in the art.”40