by Mark Dery
Coincidentally, another novel by Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, was the key that opened the closet door for Sendak. Teaching a course at the University of California at Berkeley, he was discussing his illustrations for a 1995 edition of the book, unblushingly homoerotic drawings that brought the novel’s gay themes to the fore. A female student asked “whether the intensity of…the homoeroticism—which was flagrant—reflected anything in my life.” To his own astonishment, he found himself admitting that, well, yes, it did: he was gay. “It was a wonderful moment,” he said. “I can see her face right now…like a little votive lamp leading me on. Leading me to explain things. It was wonderful. I wish Ted had that. But maybe he didn’t seem to ever want it.”41
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Gorey’s professional orbit brought him into contact with other illustrators and cartoonists whose work, like Sendak’s, cast a long shadow in the mass imagination. He was friendly with Charles Addams—to whom he was often compared, a lazy analogy Gorey found irritating. “Neither of us really cared for the comparison,” he said. “We thought we were doing basically different things, with little overlap. The Addams Family had more to do with role reversal; I’ve always leaned in my own direction.”42
He’s right. Addams turns conventional morality and bourgeois propriety upside down—a carnivalesque prank that reaffirms the social order by providing a harmless outlet for our fear of death and fantasies of murdering our bosses and spouses. Perversely funny as his single-panel gags can be, his brand of black humor lite only sneaks a peek at the darkness Gorey peers deep into. The Addams Family, for all its creepiness and kookiness, is a close-knit, mutually supportive unit, more heimlich than unheimlich.
Still, the two men got on. Addams, a bon vivant who collected crossbows, picnicked in graveyards, and used an embalming slab for a coffee table in his Manhattan apartment, was by all accounts great fun. Gorey must have admired his surrealist wit, not to mention his subtle wash technique and precise line.
“I love Charles Addams’s stuff,” Gorey professed. “We had the same agent.d I occasionally would have lunch with him. I was told he envied me because I had a more highbrow reputation than he did.”43 Conversely, Gorey seems to have envied Addams his commercial success: “I suppose there’s always the possibility somebody will come along and want to do the equivalent of The Addams Family movie with my stuff. Well, I’m not that rich, so I’d probably say, ‘Go ahead.’”
Another artist whose work left an indelible stamp on the pop unconscious in the ’60s and whose trajectory carried him through Gorey’s life was the French-born illustrator and children’s book author Tomi Ungerer. Politically outspoken and gleefully perverse, Ungerer was equally in tune with the emerging counterculture and the childhood he never outgrew. He wrote and illustrated morally ambiguous children’s books such as The Three Robbers (1961), designed antiwar posters, and turned out bizarre, satirical art-porn depicting bondage freaks strapped into sex machines (Fornicon, 1969). Like Gorey (and Sendak, whom he knew socially), his unfettered imagination was darkened by a sense of the absurd—a gift, in his case, from the Nazis, who occupied not only his hometown of Strasbourg during the war but also his family’s house. Like Gorey, he had no stomach for “the mushy sentimentality” of American children’s books of the day, “all semi-realistic, with smiling children and pink cheeks.”44
An “absolute fan” of Gorey’s work, especially of his writing—“everything he ever published, I collected”—Ungerer sang his praises to his Swiss-German publisher, Daniel Keel of Diogenes Verlag, a bit of matchmaking that resulted in a relationship that began in ’63 with Eine Harfe ohne Saiten (The Unstrung Harp) and endures to this day. But, echoing Sendak’s experience, his attempt to strike up a friendship with Gorey came to naught. “I said, ‘I love your work and I’d like to meet you because I think we have a lot to share,’” he said, recalling the time he called Gorey on a whim. “And I just hit into nothing. I am outgoing and he was inkeeping—he was an innkeeper!”
Chagrined though he was, he understood and even respected Gorey’s standoffishness. Ungerer’s own books were “for the child in me,” he says, and he assumed “it was the same thing with Gorey. Innocence takes discipline, and this applies absolutely to Gorey. I’m talking about his thinking: one must be aware of one’s innocence and preserve it. He kept to himself to be what he was.”
In that sense, the two artists were comrades in arms, their mismatched social styles notwithstanding. “I just did my thing,” says Ungerer. “Once I had my first chance, I just decided to do what I felt like doing, but then it turned out that we”—he, Gorey, Sendak, and illustrators like them—“were a group of people who changed children’s books in America.”
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Gorey hit his stride in the late ’50s, harmonizing the haikulike concision of his writing with the flawless economy of his India-ink line in The Doubtful Guest. By The Object-Lesson, in ’58, he’d elevated the picture book, a genre dismissed by most critics as kid stuff, into something rich and strange—just what no one was exactly sure. Were his little books intended for precocious children of unwholesome disposition? Or were they bedtime reading for decadents? Camp-gothic divertissements for “les boys”? None could say. Nor did anyone seem to grasp that, with The Object-Lesson, he’d placed the picture book at the service of mysteries deep and dark—haunting childhood memories, existential questions.
The ’60s were a time of artistic exuberance for Gorey, beginning with The Curious Sofa and The Hapless Child, both published by Ivan Obolensky in ’61. In The Hapless Child, we find him in a deliciously ironic mood. Charlotte Sophia, the only child of well-to-do Victorian-Edwardians, is frolicking in the parlor with fur-coated, mustachioed Papa; Mama looks on with fond regard.e But wait: something’s moving in our peripheral vision. Through a door ajar, we glimpse a reptilian thing creeping by on all fours, a cartoony version of those grotesques tormenting Saint Anthony in medieval paintings. It lurks in nearly every scene, playing Where’s Waldo? with the reader—a cryptic in-joke from Gorey to himself. “The devil is in the details,” as the art historian Joseph Stanton wittily points out.45 Stanton reads Gorey’s imps as agents of chaos; they’re there to ensure that every turn of events is a turn for the worse.
And they are: Papa, a colonel in the army, is dispatched to some colonial adventure in Africa, then “reported killed in a native uprising.” Mother falls into a decline, as women often do in Victorian novels, and expires. An uncle who might have come to Charlotte Sophia’s rescue is fatally “brained by a piece of masonry.” Alone, unloved, the poor dear is bundled off to boarding school, where the teachers and the other girls single her out for capricious cruelties: schoolyard bullies tear her beloved doll, Hortense, limb from limb. Unable to bear it any longer, she escapes, only to be kidnapped and sold to “a drunken brute.” He forces her to make artificial flowers; she subsists “on scraps and tap-water.” Terrified by one of his drunken rages, Charlotte Sophia flees into the streets, where she’s promptly flattened by a motorcar. The driver is—who else?—her father, “who was not dead after all” and has been searching high and low for his lost child. Clad in motorist’s goggles and a floor-length leopard-skin coat—a preposterous getup whose comic-grotesque effect mocks the tragedy of the scene—he holds the frail creature in his arms as she gasps her last. Naturally, “she was so changed, he did not recognize her.” Curtain.
A tongue-in-cheek spoof of Victorian sentimentality and silent-movie melodramas about children in peril, such as D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm, The Hapless Child plays to the Oscar Wilde in all of us. (When Dickens jerked readers’ tears with the three-hankie death of the angelic orphan Little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop, Wilde—a sworn foe of Victorian schmaltz—famously remarked, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”)46 “There’s so little heartless work around,” said Gorey. “So I feel I am filling a small but necessary gap.”47
The Hapless Child is “
clearly meant to remind readers of a well-known type of nineteenth-century novel for girls—Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Sara Crewe is a model of its kind—in which a young heroine is wrenched, usually by the death of a parent or a reversal in family fortune, from a life of privilege and plunged into deprivation and misery,” writes the art critic Karen Wilkin.48 More immediately, the book was inspired by L’Enfant de Paris (1913), a silent by the French director Léonce Perret that Gorey saw just once, at one of the Museum of Modern Art’s Saturday morning screenings. (His visual memory was remarkable.) “The movie starts out exactly the way The Hapless Child does,” he recalled, although the book “deviates quite early” from the plot of the film.49 (In the movie, as in Gorey’s book, the orphan is snatched up and sold to an abusive, hard-boozing cobbler, but unlike Charlotte Sophia, she’s watched over by a kindhearted soul, the cobbler’s apprentice.)50
In hindsight, Gorey felt The Hapless Child was “excessive.”51 “Overdone is the best way I can put it,” he said, meaning that he found the book’s satire heavy-handed. (The book is dedicated, after all, to the arch, over-the-top V. R. Lang, a hapless child in her own right and hardly one to shrink from excess.)
To this reader, the tone seems just right, a witty caricature of Dickensian sentimentality and silent-era weepers. The drawings, too, are superb, fastidiously rendered in Gorey’s fine-lined style with the usual attention to period detail: the ashlar walls, umbrella stands, balustrades, spoke-wheeled motorcars, and, naturally, the wallpaper are so dizzily detailed they look as if they were drawn with the aid of a jeweler’s loupe. (“Wallpaper is my bête noir,” Gorey told Peter Neumeyer. “I put aside The Hapless Child after about three drawings for several years because I couldn’t face the notion of drawing any more wallpaper.”)52
Charlotte Sophia is the very type of the Gorey child, a woebegone thing whose perpetually mournful gaze and expressionless mouth, hardly more than a hyphen, mark her as a victim-in-waiting. She invites our hilarity, not our sympathy. The sheer number of her Job-like afflictions heightens the comic effect, pushing the needle from tragedy into farce. Gorey gives us Oliver Twist with an ending by Beckett: unlike the saintly waifs of Victorian sentiment, ennobled by their suffering and rewarded in the hereafter, Charlotte Sophia endures her tribulations to no end. Things happen, more or less without reason, then you die, beaned by a hunk of masonry or run down by a motorcar. Sometimes the cosmos plays an existential prank at your expense: the motorcar is driven by your father, who’s combing the streets in search of you, a turn of events that reduces your death to an absurdist punch line. Of course, from an absurdist perspective, all deaths are a punch line: the good news is, you’re born; the bad news is, you die. Life is a death sentence.
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The Curious Sofa, Gorey’s third book with Ivan Obolensky, is strikingly different from The Hapless Child in tone, style, and setting, though both are genre parodies. Whereas The Hapless Child is dark with cross-hatching, The Curious Sofa is bright and airy, its playful line drawings dancing against all-white backdrops. Most of The Hapless Child is set in gloomy, claustrophobic interiors; much of The Curious Sofa takes place outdoors. Gorey’s compositions are as beautifully balanced as ever, but he eschews solid blacks, breaking up the blank space with busy patterns, mostly on the characters’ clothing. The style suits the story’s breezy wit, just as the silent-movie murk of The Hapless Child is a better fit for that story’s ironic-gothic mood. Even the hand-lettered typography is uncharacteristically loopy, its curlicues more suggestive of handwriting than printed type.
Subtitled A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary (Gorey’s first use of what would become a signature gimmick, the anagrammatic pen name), The Curious Sofa opens with Alice eating grapes in the park. She’ll be eating them in every scene in the book, which may be Gorey’s shorthand for her sexual availability: grape as symbol of fertility and Dionysian indulgence. As events unfold, Alice loses her innocence—if she ever had any: she’s half wide-eyed ingenue, half slyly knowing New Woman, as the independent, free-spirited working girls of the 1920s were known. (The story takes place in the Jazz Age.) Herbert, “an extremely well-endowed young man,” introduces himself, and we’re off and running. A page later, they’re in a taxi, “on the floor of which they did something Alice had never done before.” All we see of them is Alice’s hand clutching a single grape; the cabbie keeps one eye on the road and the other on the backseat, smiling lasciviously.
And so to the home of Herbert’s aunt, Lady Celia, who requests that Alice “perform a rather surprising service,” after which the three of them work up an appetite for dinner with “a most amusing game of Herbert’s own invention called ‘Thumbfumble.’” The trio is treated to an after-dinner visit from Colonel Gilbert and his wife, both of whom have wooden legs “with which they could do all sorts of entertaining tricks.” Bestiality is all in good fun, too: the next day, Herbert, the “unusually well-formed” butler, Albert, and the “exceptionally well-made” gardener, Harold, frolic on the lawn with Herbert’s “singularly well-favoured sheepdog, and many were the giggles and barks that came from the shrubbery.”
Herbert, Albert, and Harold disport themselves on the lawn in The Curious Sofa. (Ivan Obolensky, 1961)
Staging the juicy stuff just offstage, hinting at the unmentionable through the winking use of epithets and euphemisms: in The Curious Sofa Gorey suggests everything but reveals nothing, a rhetorical strategy that’s hilariously effective. Just as Henry James’s habit of leaving nothing to the reader’s imagination drove Gorey to distraction, it’s porn’s literal-minded insistence on showing us everything—the gooey, grunting mechanics of the act—that irked him. A masterpiece of innuendo in which everything is implied but nothing is shown, The Curious Sofa is his satirical revenge on the genre.
Near the end, things take a sinister turn, modulating from frolicsome debauchery into a darker key. The change in mood is signaled by everyone’s favorite line: “Still later Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan,” a sexual transaction so abominable it proves fatal to Elsie. Bullwhips are produced. Things come to an, er, climax during a visit to the home of Sir Egbert, who shows the swingers his notorious sofa. “Alice felt a shudder of nameless apprehension.” Here Gorey is unbeatable: the sofa, which has nine legs and seven arms, is kept in “a windowless room lined with polar bear fur.” Locking his guests in, Sir Egbert pulls a lever, bringing the mechanized sofa to life. What began as a sexual romp ends in Lovecraftian horror: “When Alice saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably…”53
Is there a more eloquent ellipsis in all of literature?
“I think, in a way, The Curious Sofa is possibly the cleverest book I ever did,” Gorey once remarked. “I look at it, and I think, ‘I don’t know quite how I managed this because it really is quite brilliant.’”54 Undoubtedly. And it’s very possibly the most quickly written of his books, whipped up in a single weekend.
He offered various accounts of its origins. It was inspired partly by Story of O, he said, a French novel whose de Sadean fantasies of dominance and bondage caused a stir when it was published, in 1954. Edmund Wilson—a man of prodigious sexual appetites—had recommended it to him. Trudging through it, Gorey thought, “Oh, Edmund, this is absurd. No one takes pornography seriously.”55 And so he didn’t. “If you will notice it,” he told an interviewer, “The Curious Sofa begins the same way as The Story of O, which is what finally set me off—where I think he picks her up in the park and puts her in a taxi after that.”56 A rainy afternoon spent slogging through The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade (in French!) left its mark, too. “I was ready to blow my brains out after wading through that,” said Gorey. “But I always wonder how people can manage to write pornography.…There are only so many things you can do and so forth and so on.”57
Alison Lurie thought she played a role in summoning the muse as well. When she and Ted were friends in Cambridge, she learned, at her job in the rare book
s department of the Boston Public Library, of “a locked stack full of old-fashioned erotica, and if you worked there, or a friend worked there, it was possible to look at these books,” she recalled. “I think that some of them were probably one source of The Curious Sofa.…At that time there was a lot of censorship and complaint in the press about erotic or suggestive fiction, which Ted thought of as rather silly and hysterical.”58
As always, Gorey is complicated. In The Curious Sofa, same-sex love—between Alice and Lady Celia’s “delightfully sympathetic” French maid and between Sir Egbert and his effeminate-looking friend Louie—is as common, and as accepted, as the heterosexual sort. Yet if we assume the perspective of an author who is not so much a closeted, or at least nonpracticing, gay man as an asexual, the book looks less like a satirical comment on sexual repression in midcentury America than it does a shudder of amused revulsion at the ickiness of all sex. “Is the sexlessness of your books a product of your asexuality?” an interviewer asked. “I would say so,” said Gorey, noting that, in The Curious Sofa, “no one has any sex organs.”59 The Curious Sofa bears the dedication “For others,” which could be a nod to Gorey’s gay readership but might just as easily be a veiled expression of solidarity with a group that, in ’61, was barely known, even to other sexual minorities: asexuals. What, exactly, is Ogdred Weary weary of? The mind-bending tedium of everyone else’s obsession with sex, perhaps? Then, too, The Curious Sofa, for all its bed-hopping high jinks, begins as a winking parody of erotica but ends up a horror story. And, like so many horror stories, it’s conservative at heart, ending on a parochial-school note: immorality is sternly punished.