by Mark Dery
Gorey’s following ensured that the hardcover edition sold out within two months of publication. In no time flat, Harcourt was doing a land-office business in the paperback edition, too. When the musical opened at the Winter Garden Theatre that October, sales of the book spiked off the charts. Once again, Gorey had lucked into an unexpected windfall; the book’s steady sales, propelled by what was then the longest-running musical in Broadway history, kept him in royalty checks for the rest of his life—one of several sources of steady income that afforded him a level of comfort and financial security in his white-bearded years. “Dracula of course was very remunerative because I had a piece of the show,” he revealed in a 1982 interview, but “what I make a lot of money now on is…T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The fact that Cats, the Broadway show, is based on it [means] it sells like hotcakes. I mean, my drawings have nothing to do with the show, but it’s in both paperback and hardbound and it’s selling like mad.”11
Old Possum is rambunctiously silly, drawing on Eliot’s fondness for Edward Lear (mostly in the cats’ names, such as Bombalurina and Jellylorum and Rumpelteazer). Of course Gorey was an incurable ailurophile and a Lear devotee, so the match was a perfect one. Working in his meticulous, fine-lined style, he portrays a tiger-striped feline on an ottoman, contemplating with deep satisfaction his secret cat name, which “no human research can discover”; a tabby conducting a chorus of mice; and the Jellicle cats cavorting under the moon, camouflaged in the dark by their tuxedo markings.12 (Gorey is scrupulous in his attention to the distinctive patterns of various cat breeds.)
Old Possum’s orange, black, and white cover is another of Gorey’s little masterpieces, depicting cats of various breeds striking dandyish poses in top hats and bowlers or brandishing Japanese fans decorated with feline motifs or, in a clever bit of mise en abyme, reading Old Possum, its cover a copy of the book’s actual cover. They’re posed against a many-tiered neoclassical monument, a layer cake of capitals and balusters whose details reflect Gorey’s close study of Dover books. Wittily, he duplicates the scene, as seen from behind, on the back cover.
Drawing on a lifetime of close observation, Gorey captures cats’ sleepy guile, their loopy antics, their majestic indolence, their solitary nature. Of all his characters, his cats are the only ones who look truly happy. Unlike his humans, who manage to look both deadpan and doleful, Gorey’s felines sport ear-to-ear grins. (Or maybe cats’ muzzles just look that way, and we’re anthropomorphizing, as we always do. It would be like Gorey to leave that question unresolved.) In melancholy moments, he seemed to regard humanity as another species altogether. Contrariwise, he seemed to see cats as kindred spirits, occasionally referring to them as “people.” He told an interviewer, “It’s very interesting sharing a house with a group of people who obviously see things, hear things, think things in a vastly different way.”13
* * *
With the same matter-of-fact contrarianism that made him insist that the “movies made a terrible mistake when they started to talk,” Gorey contended that “the musical theater has been downhill” since Gilbert and Sullivan. He never missed a chance, during the Dracula craze, to drop the hint that he much preferred G&S’s Victorian comic operas to bloodsucking. Now that Dracula was a success, he told New York magazine, “I wish someone would invite me to splash fresh paint on Gilbert and Sullivan.”14
Someone did, and as usual that someone was John Wulp. Wulp was teaching scenic design in the drama department at Carnegie Mellon—just the place for a Gorey version of The Mikado, it occurred to him. “I knew that Edward, a great fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, had long wanted to design this show, and I thought it would be ideal for a school production,” he recalls.15 The department chair, Mel Shapiro, was agreeable. So was Gorey—under one condition, as Wulp remembers it: “that the production be a traditional one with no gimmicks,” true to Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu was written at the height of Japonism—the infatuation, in Victorian England and belle époque France, with Japan—or, rather, the Japan of Western fantasies, a land of beguilingly exotic customs and culture, so far away it might as well have been Mars to an Englishman of the time. Yet Gilbert and Sullivan’s Japan is an Orientalized Britain: The Mikado is a pointed satire, in kimonos and topknots, of British politics and Victorian manners and mores. At the same time, Gilbert was sincerely interested in Japanese art and culture, and the Japanese aesthetic was undoubtedly part of what appealed to Gorey, along with the sparkling tunes and the libretto’s zippy wit.
After Dracula and Mystery!, Gorey was wary of being typecast as the guy who cranked out whimsically macabre black-and-white scenery by the yard. Now he had a chance to play against type, and he seized it, creating enchanting, pastel-colored backdrops that recall floating-world prints as well as the delicate washes of English watercolorists such as Edward Ardizzone. His drop curtain, “East Parade, Titipu” (reproduced in The World of Edward Gorey), depicts Japanese villagers promenading along a waterfront, flanked by a neat row of Tudor houses that look as if they’ve been airlifted from Stratford-upon-Avon; one of the strollers shelters under the sort of black parasol no British banker or barrister would be seen without rather than the Japanese bamboo model. His costumes are equally clever: the Mikado and Pish-Tush wear pajamalike Japanese trousers and split-toed socks, but their fanciful kimonos wed the traditional billowing sleeves to a Victorian gentleman’s suit jacket and cravat; their hats cross the British top hat with the lacquered headdresses worn by Japanese nobility of the period.
When the show opened at Carnegie Mellon’s Kresge Theatre, on April 14, 1983, Wulp was aghast. Shapiro had reconceived Gilbert and Sullivan’s Victorian comic opera as a country-and-western musical. “Mel either forgot [Gorey’s] request or chose to disregard it,” he remembers. “The show itself was bizarre: Edward’s beautiful, witty sets and costumes presented a view of Japan as it might have been imagined by an eccentric Victorian Englishman, while the actors behaved like fugitives from the Grand Ole Opry.”16 The reviewer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shared Wulp’s discomfiture. Visually, the production was “quite stunning,” he thought, applauding Gorey’s sets and his “thoroughly delightful” costumes, “which incorporate a range of styles from Japanese kimonos to Edwardian knickers.”17 He was disconcerted, though, to hear the inhabitants of Titipu speaking in a cornpone twang and thought the hayride high jinks in one act dragged the show “into the realm of the lowest TV sitcom”—Gilbert and Sullivan meet The Beverly Hillbillies.
What Gorey made of this desecration is anyone’s guess. In a rare violation of his ban on travel, he’d gone to see the show, but what he thought of it not even Wulp knows. As in Gorey’s own stories, events took a bizarre turn after he saw the production: his real motivation in making the trip to Pittsburgh, it turned out, was his desire to see Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic, unsettling last work, the perverse—some might even say pornographic—installation Étant Donnés (1966), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “He wasn’t interested, really, in The Mikado,” says Wulp. “He was quite clear on his intent: he was going to go to Pittsburgh to see the show, then pop up to Philly to see the Duchamp. He was fascinated with it.”
Gorey never ceases to amaze. Who could’ve imagined that the man who claimed to “blush crimson at the other end of the phone” when someone asked him to illustrate something X-rated would make a pilgrimage (all the way to Philly, which for Gorey’s purposes might as well have been Saskatoon) to see a surrealist’s idea of a peep show?
Installed in the wall of a gallery full of Duchamp’s work, Étant Donnés appears, at first glance, to be a weathered rustic door set in an arch of bricks. Peer through the two peepholes in the door, though, and you’ll see what looks like the aftermath of a sex murder: on the grass in the foreground sprawls an uncannily realistic female mannequin, naked; in one hand, she holds aloft (rigor mortis?) an antique gas lamp. Her hairless sex looks like a wound. Nothing moves but a glitter
ing waterfall pouring into a toy lake. The effect is both eerily realistic and obviously staged, somewhere between a crime-scene photo and a natural-history-museum diorama. Jasper Johns, the Pop artist, called it “the strangest work of art in any museum.”18
Gorey was a man full of locked rooms whose art is about what isn’t said and isn’t shown. Was he intrigued, as a stage designer and aspiring playwright, by Duchamp’s stagecraft? Was he taken by the intimacy and secrecy of a theater designed for an audience of one? (Étant Donnés can only be viewed by a single person at a time.) Was he drawn by Duchamp’s combination of voyeurism and concealment? Did he respond to the presentation, in Duchamp’s piece, of sexuality as mysterious, dark, closeted? Maybe he saw the intensely personal work (which Duchamp had worked on in secret and which was revealed to the world only after he died) as a surrealist shrine to desire—something he claimed not to feel but that seemed to haunt him nonetheless.
* * *
“My nightmare is picking up the newspaper some day and finding out George has dropped dead,” Gorey had said in 1974.
On April 30, 1983, his worst fears were realized: George Balanchine died. He was seventy-nine. For Gorey, it was the end of a sustained crescendo of genius that had lasted nearly three decades, diminishing only at the very end, when Mr. B., as his dancers knew him, was reduced to a shadow of his brilliance by heart problems, failing eyesight, and—catastrophically for a choreographer—a deteriorating sense of balance brought on by Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The City Ballet was scheduled to perform that day, a Sunday, and the show went on, as it must. Lincoln Kirstein, the City Ballet’s cofounder, stepped in front of the curtain just before the matinee performance began. Addressing the hushed crowd, he said, “I don’t have to tell you that Mr. B. is with Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky.”19 The man Gorey called “the great, important figure in my life…sort of like God” was gone.
For almost thirty years, Balanchine’s art had been Gorey’s aesthetic lodestar. Mr. B.’s dances meant everything to him, though their significance can’t be measured by any direct influence on his work. “There wasn’t very much I could take directly from George,” he told Clifford Ross.20 Of course, thirty years spent watching Balanchine’s dances had to have some effect. Most obviously, Gorey’s characters often strike balletic poses and tend to stand with their feet turned out, in ballet positions. (As did Gorey himself, according to Alexander Theroux: “He invariably stood in the naturalistic stance known as contrapposto, hand on hip, like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy or Donatello’s David, but at times he would appear almost in balletic ‘turn out’ or fully cross-legged—a gay icon—in exaggerated pose.”)21 “It’s not so much conscious, but I think I realized early on one of the things that makes ballet what it is, is that it’s the maximum of expressiveness,” said Gorey. “You know, obviously, when your legs are turned out, they’re, well, like Egyptian art or something. You know, each piece is the way it’s most expressive: the profile, the profiles of the legs, the front of the torso, the front of the hands, and stuff.”22
Then, too, Gorey people, though hardly ever in motion, often seem as if they’ve just moved or are about to move. “In Edward Gorey’s drawings, everybody is at a tipping point where they’re off-balance, so you know they’re not in a static pose,” Eugene Fedorenko points out. To be sure, his carefully staged tableaux seem about as dynamic as daguerreotypes next to the action-packed drawings of illustrators like Ralph Steadman and cartoonists like Jack Kirby, whose characters explode out of the picture plane. Yet through balletic attitudes—a tilt of the head, a hand gesture, the slightly off-center inclination of the torso—Gorey offers the subtlest suggestion of movement.
More profoundly, his clarity and concision—the witty brevity of his writing, the economy of his line, his eloquent use of negative space, his beautifully balanced compositions—harmonize with the Balanchinian aesthetic. Mr. B’s choreography is “pared down to something that is irreducible and Ted had that,” says Peter Sellars. “Everything unnecessary is eliminated and the strange empty space that results is psychologically charged.”
Gorey found wisdom in Balanchine’s artistic philosophy—“Everything he ever said about art I just thought was so true”—and inspiration in his approach to his craft.23 “George Balanchine’s choreography has had—it’s totally impossible to put into words—but somehow the way he works has influenced me a great deal,” said Gorey. “The way he works with dancers; in a sense I’m trying to emulate his thinking.”24 On occasion, he went into greater detail about what he meant by that. “Well, I think one thing he taught me, above all, is, ‘Don’t waffle,’” he said. “‘Better don’t do’ was one of his phrases. Or, on the other hand, ‘Just do it!’ You know, don’t dither.”25 “How does a writer-illustrator apply that?” the interviewer wondered. “Well, I try not to presuppose what I’m doing,” Gorey replied. “I just do it.”
Chapter 14
Strawberry Lane Forever
Cape Cod, 1985–2000
The house on Strawberry Lane, Yarmouth Port, Cape Cod. (Photograph by Kevin McDermott. Copyright Kevin McDermott, 2000. This photograph first appeared in Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey by Kevin McDermott, Pomegranate, 2003.)
GOREY HAD WONDERED, as early as ’74, what he’d do when Balanchine died. “Do I watch the company go into a slow decline or do I say, ‘That’s it. I saw it. It’s past,’ and just go away?”1
The romantic version, now written into myth, is that Gorey just went away—moved to the Cape permanently the year Balanchine died in “an act of aestheticism worthy of Oscar Wilde,” as Stephen Schiff put it in the New Yorker.2 In fact, he left the city more in the manner of someone inching offstage than a dancer doing a grand jeté into the wings. There’s no doubt that he decided, that year, to break his practically perfect record of attendance at the City Ballet and remain on the Cape during ballet season. (Andreas Brown confirms that Gorey “resolved to leave” the city in ’83.3 His decision, around that time, to start shipping the tonnage of his library up to his cousins’ house in Barnstable argues Brown’s point; even more decisive was his permanent relocation of his cats to the Cape. HOME IS WHERE YOUR CAT IS proclaims a sentimental plaque hanging in the Millway house.)
He kept his apartment on East 38th until 1986, using it as a base of operations during visits to the city. But his primary residence from 1983 to ’86 was the house on Millway and, from ’86 on, his own home in Yarmouth Port. In late ’79, he’d used his Dracula earnings to purchase a two-story, early-nineteenth-century house on the east side of the Yarmouth Port common, or village green, just down the road from his cousins’ house. Formerly a sea captain’s home, it had begun life as that most iconic of Cape Cod houses, a “Federal-style full Cape,” notes Kevin McDermott in Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey, but was expanded and remodeled by later owners.4 Built in 1820 or thereabouts, 8 Strawberry Lane was a fixer-upper: some of its windows were broken, the gray shingles were in a state of decrepitude, the roof needed replacing, the grounds were engulfed by weeds. In other words, it was perfect. Ted “was attracted by the unkempt yard and air of genteel decay,” Skee Morton recalls.5
Gorey would spend seven years renovating his house, living, all the while, at Millway, in the attic where he’d spent so many summers. He tore down walls to create more spacious rooms and removed two bathrooms but decided the roof could wait ’til he’d moved in. The roof obliged, though not for long. “Very early one morning,” shortly after he’d installed himself, “Gorey awoke to a crashing noise in the next room,” the Washington Post Book World reported in a ’97 profile. “He yelled at the cats to knock it off. Presently, there was another crash. When he finally got up and looked, it turned out part of the ceiling had fallen in.”6
Despite his extensive remodeling of his new home’s interior, he left the exterior more or less as it was. Shaggy with splintered shingles, it looked like a weather-beaten ship adrift in a sea of weeds, wild clematis clambering up its north side.
Lawn mowing? Perish the thought. “The grass and burdock…was almost always feet long and swaying,” recalls Alexander Theroux. “The sunken and squeaky old front porch was wonky and broken in places…”7
And then there was the poison ivy insinuating itself into the living room through a crack in the wall. And the family of raccoons that took up residence in the attic. And the other raccoons who lived in the crawl space under the house. According to Rick Jones, a member of Gorey’s inner circle on the Cape, he let the squatters stay to atone for his sins as a former wearer of raccoon-fur coats. Then a skunk joined the party; at that, he drew the line and evicted the lot of them.
The house’s original owner, Captain Edmund Hawes, was lost in a storm at sea. Whether the captain’s restless shade still stood watch who can say, but Gorey did mention a few otherworldly occurrences. Once, a number of his finials simply vanished, he claimed, along with his collection of miniature teddy bears. And then there was the time he was sitting on the couch with four or five of his cats when suddenly “everyone turned,” staring intensely at nothing, as if something invisible to human eyes—a visitor from the spirit realm?—was passing through the room.8
* * *
After the contretemps over The Mikado, John Wulp landed in the drama department at New York University, where he headed the newly founded Playwrights Horizons Theater School. In 1985, he decided to mount a musical production of unpublished texts Gorey had lying around. The choreographer and ballet dancer Daniel Levans would direct; David Aldrich, who had done the music for Gorey Stories, would compose the score; and the man himself would design the sets and costumes. The former consisted almost entirely of an enormous can of menacingly large lettuce leaves; the latter included bat costumes and some Victorian-Edwardian getups, all in taupe and complemented by sneakers. (Gorey was adamant: “No modern sneakers, only the classic variety.”)9