Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Gorey, with characteristic wit, once said, “I think it’s really about a girl who’s got an obsession for grapes more than anything else.”60 He was astonished, in later years, to discover that the book had a juvenile following. “People have come to me and said, ‘My child just adores The Curious Sofa,’” he told an interviewer. “At first this baffled me, but apparently they find it funny.”61

  * * *

  Gorey was a dust devil of productivity in 1961. Not only did he produce two books of his own, but several books he’d illustrated were also published that year.

  Lippincott brought out The Man Who Sang the Sillies, a book of children’s nonsense verse by John Ciardi. Cartoony, with a naive quality, Gorey’s illustrations recall Edward Lear’s charmingly artless sketches for his nonsense poems, a style that suited Ciardi’s Learian kookiness perfectly. Over the course of the decade, Gorey would illustrate five more titles by his former Harvard professor, mostly in the same loose, sketchy style: You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You (1962), You Know Who (1964), The King Who Saved Himself from Being Saved (1966), The Monster Den; or, Look What Happened at My House—and to It (1966), and Someone Could Win a Polar Bear (1970).

  Houghton Mifflin’s publication of Scrap Irony, an uneven collection of sometimes clever, sometimes strained satirical poetry, marked the beginning of Gorey’s association with Felicia Lamport. A practitioner of that much-snubbed form light verse, Lamport rattled off topical poems for her Muse of the Week in Review column in the Boston Globe, lampooning politicians, poking fun at fads and trends, and satirizing women’s roles in society. Gorey counterpointed Lamport’s satirical zingers in Scrap Irony with what a New York Times review of the book praised as “cheerfully saturnine illustrations”—the usual droll, delicately limned cartoons of characters in Victorian-Edwardian or sometimes 1920s costume.62 His relationship with Lamport lasted more than two decades, spanning Cultural Slag (1966) and Light Metres (1982), but became more fraught over time, as his star ascended and her shtick grew stale.

  He was also turning out illustrations for magazines, doing the occasional freelance book jacket, and punching the clock at the Looking Glass Library. Then, in 1962, Epstein’s “children’s book thing,” which had been on shaky financial footing for a while, folded.

  Gorey landed almost instantly at 3 West 57th Street—Bobbs-Merrill, where from ’62 through ’63 he spent a dreary year as art director. After Looking Glass, Bobbs-Merrill’s more corporate atmosphere felt suffocatingly buttoned-down to Gorey. To make matters worse, the place was badly run, he thought. (He and his similarly disgruntled coworkers referred to their employer as “Boobs Muddle.”) Mercifully, Gorey was fired sometime in ’63—collateral damage in a managerial power struggle. “Eventually there was internecine warfare, and I was unfortunately on the side of the president, who got fired with all his entourage,” he said. “Which was just as well. After that I just had too much freelance work to look for another job, and I moved up to the Cape.”63

  Truth to tell, Gorey didn’t “move up to the Cape” in the sense of pulling up stakes at 36 East 38th Street. He kept his apartment, but from ’63 on more or less lived on the Cape whenever the New York City Ballet wasn’t performing. Nonetheless, he had made a decisive break with the nine-to-five world. Out of patience with the deadline grind and gray-flannel culture of corporate publishing, he realized he had enough freelance work to make a go of it as a self-employed illustrator and—despite his aesthete’s pose as a languid idler—a prolific producer of little books.

  a They are, in chronological order, The Fatal Lozenge, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Utter Zoo, The Chinese Obelisks, The Glorious Nosebleed, and The Eclectic Abecedarium.

  b Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present by Charlotte Zolotow, published by Harper & Row in 1962.

  c Or, more accurately, Sendak was gay and Gorey was a professed asexual whose social presentation of self was stereotypically gay and whose only sexual experiences, as far as we know, were with members of the same sex. Whether that makes him gay or an asexual who on rare occasions experimented with gay sex or just someone who exemplifies the range of human sexual experience I leave to the reader. Gore Vidal’s assertion that there are only homo- or heterosexual acts, not individuals (since in his view we’re all bisexual by nature), puts an interesting spin on the question.

  d For once, Gorey’s famously infallible memory is playing tricks on him. Addams was one of those rare birds in the illustration world who was so famous that he needed no agent, although Barbara Nicholls, who ran a Manhattan gallery specializing in original art by New Yorker cartoonists and illustrators, sometimes lent a hand with reproduction rights. Gorey may have gotten the mistaken impression that his illustration agent, John Locke, handled Addams, too, because clients in search of Addams sometimes came to Locke, whose star-studded roster included just about everyone who was anyone. Eileen McMahon, an agent with John Locke Studios from 1988 until the agency’s closing, in 1997, told me in a June 7, 2017, e-mail that she believes Addams “could very well have worked with John” in instances when clients came to Locke with assignments that were “too good to miss.”

  Kevin Miserocchi, executive director of the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, thinks it’s entirely possible that Addams and Gorey lunched, perhaps at the Coffee House, a members-only club in midtown Manhattan frequented by New Yorker artists and editors.

  e Charlotte Sophia’s namesake just might be Gorey’s great-great-grandmother Charlotte Sophia St. John (1811–95). She’s the mother of Helen Amelia St. John Garvey, maker of mottoes and greeting cards and the wellspring, according to family lore, of Gorey’s artistic talent. After her husband fell sick, Helen supported the family by painting postcard illustrations in watercolor, which she sold to the Chicago publishing house A. C. McClurg & Co.

  Chapter 9

  Nursery Crimes—The Gashlycrumb Tinies and Other Outrages

  1963

  Gorey with Skee Morton and her mother, Betty Garvey, July 22, 1963. Note Ted’s contrapposto stance, reminiscent of the ballet. (Photograph by Eleanor Garvey. Courtesy Elizabeth Morton, private collection.)

  IN HIS LAST YEAR at Looking Glass, Gorey managed, despite the threat of impending doom, to publish two of his own books. He’d found a home, in ’62, for The Willowdale Handcar at what would soon be his new employer, Bobbs-Merrill, and self-published The Beastly Baby that same year under the colophon of his newly launched Fantod Press, using his Ogdred Weary pen name. The first edition consisted of five hundred copies, many of which were sold by the Gotham Book Mart.

  Fantod was a child of necessity, founded to publish a book no one would touch. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve been sitting around looking at this stupid little thing for many years,’” he recalled. “‘Waste not, want not’ was always my motto, so I founded the Fantod Press.”1 (The name derives from “the fantods,” nineteenth-century slang for “heebie-jeebies.”)

  He’d written the book in 1953, shortly after Alison Lurie had given birth to her first child. When Lurie sent a snapshot of her newborn, Gorey replied with a belated shower gift, The Beastly Baby. “I got into a kind of flap over the weekend,” he explained in a letter to the new mother, “flap” being Goreyese for “creative frenzy”; the result—inspired, perhaps, by the photo—was a book, dedicated to Lurie’s new arrival, that was “apparently very odd indeed, as it horrified Bubsy [Barbara Epstein] rather…”2

  The Beastly Baby is a minor Gorey work—a one-line joke, amusing enough in a mean-spirited way. The drawings are done in the dashed-off, unfinished manner of The Listing Attic, whose calculated outrageousness The Beastly Baby shares. The baby itself is a nasty piece of work, a Humpty Dumpty of hatefulness, “not merely obese but downright bloated.” As in folktales and fairy tales, its freakishness—two left hands, too many toes on one foot and not enough on the other—is visible evidence of moral depravity. (The book begins as an arch takeoff on the Brothers Grimm: “Once upon a time there was a baby. It was worse than other babies.”) We
see it chortling after tearing kitty’s head off, a ghastly noise Gorey describes as a “choked gurgling, reminiscent of faulty drains.”

  Babies, in Goreyland, tend to be either abject creatures, deserving of victimization, or monstrous. The Beastly Baby is a bad seed of the worst sort; its horror-struck parents try to rid themselves of it, but Fate keeps intervening. It grows older and bigger by the minute, “and what this would eventually lead to, no-one liked to think.” Providentially, an eagle snatches up the child; struggling to get a better grip on its uncooperative prey, the bird punctures the bloated creature. “There was a wet sort of explosion, audible for several miles.”

  Gorey seemed surprised that publishers shunned the book. When he showed it to Cap Pearce at Duell, Sloan and Pearce, the publisher acted jittery, Gorey told Lurie, and kept giving him strange looks. “He even dragged out a bottle and gave me a drink, this being eleven o’clock in the morning,” Gorey wrote.3 The obviously shaken Pearce said, somewhat unconvincingly, that he’d take The Beastly Baby under advisement, “but intimated that in ten years perhaps the public would be ready for it.”

  As for Lurie, she sent Gorey a postcard thanking him for sending a copy. “The boys love it,” she wrote. “Yesterday they were running around, pointing their toy guns at each other, saying, ‘I’m the beastly baby and I’m shooting up the bric-a-brac.’ So I want you to know that there’s one family in the world in which your books are just as much a beloved part of childhood as Beatrix Potter.”4

  * * *

  The Willowdale Handcar is one of the capstones of Gorey’s body of work. Each scene is a postage-stamp masterpiece, the understated wittiness of its prose joined seamlessly to needlepoint-fine drawing. The surrealism of the story’s dreamlike chain of events is suffused with what the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff calls “an air of almost metaphysical mystery.”5

  That, in fact, is what The Willowdale Handcar is: a metaphysical mystery—specifically, a metaphysical mystery in the guise of a silent movie. (The book is dedicated to Lillian Gish.)6 Three young people—Edna, Harry, and Sam—discover their ticket out of dull-as-dishwater Willowdale: a handcar at the railroad station, which they promptly mount and ride out of town, following the call of the open road. The time, as always, is vaguely Victorian-Edwardian; the town, whose name recalls the Wilmette of Gorey’s boyhood as well as the 1888 small town in the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” (1960), appears to be somewhere in the Midwest. Thematically, The Willowdale Handcar is a variation on a quintessentially American myth—the road trip. Gorey’s illustrations, most notably the Hopperesque picture of a house burning mysteriously in the middle of a vast field, and Wobbling Rock tumbling off its pedestal to crush some picnickers, are among his finest. The draftsmanship is impeccable, the compositions beautifully balanced.

  Running on a parallel track to the dominant narrative is an Agatha Christie subplot involving the mysterious Nellie Flim, a missing person whose “frantic face” the trio glimpses pressed against a parlor window as a train flashes past and whom they ultimately meet up with, tied to the tracks like the imperiled heroine of one of D. W. Griffith’s Biograph shorts. When they free her, she hops on her bicycle and rides away without explanation. A week later, they think they see her “walking the grounds of the Weedhaven Laughing Academy.”

  As for the metaphysical mystery, the description on the book’s back cover is intriguing, especially if we entertain the possibility that Gorey wrote it, as authors sometimes do. “In which three Pilgrims find mystery, abort peril and partake of religious community,” the blurb reads. “And the discerning Reader discovers Meaning in their Progress.” We’re invited to read the Willowdale trio’s trip in explicitly religious terms: as an allegorical journey—a pilgrim’s progress, not to put too fine a point on it.

  Is The Willowdale Handcar a “subtle yet magisterial view of the human condition,” as Schiff suggests, chronicling our voyage from youth to tomb?7 Undoubtedly the book has an elegiac feel: death and decay are everywhere, from the burning house to the trio’s contemplative stop at a cemetery to the final scene, a wonderfully evocative drawing of the travelers pumping their handcar into the Stygian gloom of a tunnel. “At sunset they entered a tunnel in the Iron Hills and did not come out the other end.” The pitch-black mouth of the tunnel that swallows the travelers forever is inescapably tomblike, a portal to Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Willowdale is suggestive, too: weeping willows, in Victorian memorial iconography, symbolize mourning.

  The Willowdale Handcar. (Bobbs-Merrill, 1962)

  As for the Black Doll of the title, it, too, remains a cipher. We see it only briefly, sitting on a writing desk.a Perhaps it’s meant to be an absent presence—a disquieting reminder of the irreducible mystery of things. An effigy of the god of naught, it personifies the black hole in Gorey’s cosmos, right where the discerning Reader looks for Meaning.

  * * *

  During his tedious time at Bobbs-Merrill, Gorey produced three classic works, one of which, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, would become his best-known title—the dictionary definition, in the public mind, of the Goreyesque.

  The Gashlycrumb Tinies; or, After the Outing; The Insect God; and The West Wing appeared in 1963, in a boxed set published by Simon and Schuster called The Vinegar Works: Three Volumes of Moral Instruction. It debuted a year after the arrival of Maurice Sendak’s four-volume Nutshell Library. Since he knew Sendak and seemed to have kept abreast of children’s book publishing, it’s unlikely Gorey hadn’t gotten wind of Sendak’s wry take on Puritan primers and Struwwelpeter-type cautionary tales. Whether The Vinegar Works is his response we don’t know, but the timing is suggestive.

  Written in sprightly dactylic couplets, The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a mocking abecedarium steeped in the gothic aesthetic and the real-life horrors of the penny dreadful. It purports to teach children their ABCs through the unhappy (but often hilarious) ends of twenty-six lugubrious-looking children: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears,” and so on. Tinies was inspired, said Gorey, by “those 19th century cautionary tales, I guess, though my book is punishment without misbehavior.”8

  The drawings are wonderful, in their restrained way. Gorey’s compositions, as always, are expertly balanced: he conducts duets between dark or densely patterned shapes and white or gray space and between his little victims and the mostly empty spaces that surround them.

  Gorey could be a great single-panel gag artist when he wanted to be. The verse is often uproarious, and the artwork showcases his cartoonist’s gift for illustrating a joke in the most amusing way. “N is for Neville who died of ennui” takes an inherently hilarious notion—expiring from world-weariness, a concept only Gorey could dream up—and makes it even funnier by showing us nothing but the top of Neville’s bored little head, his black-dot eyes peering blankly at us out of an enormous window. (This was one of Gorey’s favorite scenes. When an interviewer noted one of the many paradoxical aspects of the man—“He delivers punch lines and sardonic commentary with ease, but rarely laughs”—Gorey observed, “I don’t set out to be funny. Obviously, if I find myself giggling about something, I’ll keep it in.…I must say I did think at the time that ‘N is for Neville who died of ennui’ was rather fetching.”)9

  The Gashlycrumb Tinies. (Simon and Schuster, 1963)

  Gorey’s ironic distance absolves us of the moral obligation to empathize. It gives us license to chuckle at the messy end we know is in store for the dapper little gent in tweeds, eagerly opening his booby-trapped gift in “T is for Titus who flew into bits.” Sometimes it’s the cluelessness of the little dears that turns tragedy into slapstick: why is Olive, in “O is for Olive run through with an awl,” tossing such a nasty implement into the air? To see where it will land? In The Gashlycrumb Tinies, parents are nowhere to be seen, leaving children to their fates, which, nine times out of ten, the little ninnyhammers richly deserve.

  Actually there
is one parental figure in the book. The cover illustration depicts Death as a skeletal nanny surrounded by his charges. Like the child-snatching bogeyman of every parent’s worst nightmares, Death is only posing as the Tinies’ guardian. The book’s back cover reveals their fate: a cluster of headstones huddles where the children stood. This, presumably, is what happened “after the outing.” Death is ever present, even in the coziest domestic settings, just waiting for one dumb move (say, swallowing tacks), a freak accident (suffocating under a rug), or an Act of God (managing, somehow, to be devoured by mice). And it doesn’t make exceptions for youth or cuteness.

  The Gashlycrumb Tinies broaches the subject of death in a children’s book, or at least in what looks like a children’s book. And it did so at a time when the Little Golden Books, which dominated kinderculture, were serving up a steady diet of treacle and mush. Seen in that light, it really does offer moral instruction after all. Gorey’s gift to his youngest readers is a book of ABCs that uses a variation on that schoolyard staple, the dead-baby joke, to teach them that death is part of life. “When you were a child, would you have relished The Gashlycrumb Tinies?” an interviewer asked. “Probably, yes,” was his predictable reply.10

  * * *

  Wonderfully weird as it is, grotesquely funny as it is, The Insect God is a slight work—another one-line joke and, at fourteen panels, one of Gorey’s shortest. A cautionary tale, told in rhyme, about the dangers of taking candy from strangers (and what could be stranger than man-size mantids who sacrifice humans to their six-legged deity?), The Insect God recounts the fate of little Millicent Frastley (one of Gorey’s funniest faux-English names).