Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

As for Gorey’s relationship with the Schierman kinder, “he was just delightful,” Mel remembers. What, no secret scheming to smother them under a rug or catapult them into a lily-choked pond? “That was a pose,” he says. “He liked to create an image of himself, because of The Gashlycrumb Tinies and all that, but that was not Ted.” Gorey treated the Schierman children “as adults,” Mel recalls. “He took an interest in them as people, not as children.” Anthony does recollect his being a bit discomfited by the infant Annabelle, though. “He just wouldn’t know what to do with a [small] child. You could hand him my little sister as a three-year-old and he’d just be, like, ‘What is this? What am I supposed to do here?’”

  Orbiting around Gorey’s inner circle was Alexander Theroux, who lives in West Barnstable. They’d met in ’72, after which Theroux wrote a profile that appeared in the June ’74 issue of Esquire. He and Gorey idled away countless afternoons chatting in Ted’s “quiet and cool” kitchen, taking tea—“Lapsang Souchong, which gives off the scent of freshly tarred roads at 50 yards”—and munching cinnamon toast.28

  Theroux’s admiration for Gorey’s talents was boundless, but his delight in his conversation was almost as ardent. “Mind you, it was not that the man was trying to be something, contriving, say, to appear a cavalcade of wit, merely that, rather like Dr. Samuel Johnson, he happened to have sharp, remarkable ‘views’ on all sorts of subjects, almost all worthy of note.”29 Theroux was the perfect foil: Harvard-educated and absurdly erudite, with the sort of mind that’s flypaper for droll anecdotes and words so obscure they can’t be found in the OED.

  If Gorey was Johnsonian in his easygoing brilliance and aphoristic wit, Theroux was Boswellian in his ability to show him off to best advantage. “I was always feeding him meat to provoke reactions about movies or whatever,” he recalls. Gorey was “full of obiter dicta,” he says, “full of gnomic remarks.”

  In his slim memoir of their friendship, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, Theroux captures the digressive pleasures of Gorey in full flow:

  He could discuss The Simpsons or the worth of the old actor James Gleason with the same passion that he brought to an explanation of what Ludwig Wittgenstein meant by the “synopsis of trivialities.” Any given conversation with him could range from—as it once did and which I made note of—the geometry of cats’ ears to G. W. Pabst’s film technique, Little Lulu, Bronowski on the age of huts, low water levels on Cape Cod, who danced Giselle in 1911, and the invincible vulgarity of the preposterous Kathie Lee Gifford and the host of miniature faces she was constantly pulling.30

  As well, he gives us deft sketches of Gorey’s physical presence and eccentric behavior:

  Gorey…spoke in a rather fey tone, heavily sibilant, and his voice, mirthful almost always among friends, could border on glee when he was enthusiastic or excited.…When he became reflective about something, pondering, say, a question you asked, he had a way of clenching his hand and pressing it to his mouth, looking into the far distance as if the answer had just flown away.…When he was not petting a cat, dramatic gestures, along with heavy sighs or moans, almost always accompanied his highly various conversation. He would chatter on with a kind of…self-amused intolerance of things, squawking through a very pronounced sibilance in moments of both delight and exasperation with his own slang expressions, like, “Not on your tintype!” “Snuggy-poos, desist!”—when addressing his cats—“Talk about loopy!” “What is that blather about?”31

  The Strange Case is itself delightful and exasperating; you’d fling it at the nearest wall if it weren’t so unputdownable. It’s written in the Boswellian style, meaning: it’s a garrulous, gossipy portrait of the man in full, stuffed with scandalous morsels of gossip, piquant table talk, and the author’s insights into the Great Man’s mind and art, some of which are acutely perceptive and some of which are a country mile wide of the bull’s-eye. There are closely observed sketches of Gorey being Gorey, quotations (and misquotations) from magazine and newspaper profiles, and side trips into the weeds of Theroux’s enthusiasms and bêtes noires, with bits of potted biography embedded throughout, like currants in a scone. Following the meandering, apropos-of-nothing logic of a conversation over afternoon tea and toast, it isn’t really in aid of anything, especially—which is part of its perverse charm.

  Less amusingly, it’s got some notable groaners when it comes to errors of fact.32 Theroux’s style tends toward the hyperbolic; that and the absence of footnotes leave the reader uneasy about what to take as verbatim Gorey and what to chalk up to exaggeration for effect.33 Did “outraged mothers” really send Gorey copies of The Beastly Baby “ripped to shreds”?34 Did he really say, “Barbara Walters, I’m afraid, belongs to the communion of kitsch, rather than the art of communication”? (For a man who cordially loathed self-conscious cleverness, the line’s too clever by half, a little too epigrammatic in its tidy parallelism.)35

  Still, Theroux shows us Gorey from a new and revealing angle, his silhouette outlined by his likes and dislikes. “He lived according to his tastes, unfettered by second-hand opinions,” writes Theroux.36 What did he like? “He liked the way Humphrey Bogart said ‘Thursby’ [in The Maltese Falcon] and the way Robert Newton said ‘Jim Arkins’ [in Treasure Island] and the way Audrey Hepburn said ‘chocolate’ and the way unshaven Akim Tamiroff said, ‘Drunken bum—I should shoot you in the fooooot.’”37 What else? “Along with cats, Gorey loved tea…Dick Van Dyke Show reruns…his Cuisinart…a glass of Glenfiddich, hard shaving soap, the palace purple coral bells of the perennial plant Heuchera micrantha…papyrus…and the actor James Cagney.”38 As for what he didn’t like, the list is long, but a nibble gives a taste: “brussels sprouts, false sentiment, minimal art, overcommitment to work, being solicited for blurbs, the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber,” and “movies about ea-ting,” as he told Theroux in “a malicious lilt, ‘like My Dinner with André and Like Water for Chocolate.’”39

  Superficial, you say? An aesthete like Gorey would point out that we’re as defined by our likes and dislikes as we are by what we regard as our core convictions—if not more so: our politics and religious beliefs mark us as members of clubs for the like-minded, whereas our tastes—idiosyncratic, intuitive, capricious—are often more revealing about who we really are. Sontag again, from “Notes on ‘Camp’”: “To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”40 As a thought experiment, Theroux’s attempt at building a Unified Theory of Edward Gorey from his antipathies and sympathies is frequently illuminating in ways that more conventional character sketches are not.

  Of course, as Theroux notes, Gorey was more than the sum of his opinions on B movies, brussels sprouts, and Kathie Lee Gifford. “You talk about the complicated icosahedron of the human spirit,” says Theroux. “He was coming from 16 different places. He had all the earmarks of a [stereotypically] gay man—the rings, the sibilance in his voice, walking down Fifth Avenue or Lexington Avenue with a big fur coat and sneakers and many rings and an insect pendant, going to the ballet. He was outlandishly up front with it, but he was in many ways a very shy man. Gorey was trying to complete himself by that floral, highly decorative, unbelievably showy front.” Theroux’s conclusion? “He was a completely complicated, conflicted person in thousands of ways, as all brilliant people are.”

  * * *

  Gorey’s day-to-day existence on the Cape was, in his own estimation, “featureless.”41

  Granted, you could set your watch by his arrival for breakfast or lunch at Jack’s. When he wasn’t there, a likely spot for Gorey sightings was Parnassus Book Service, a used-book store on Route 6A, just around the corner from his house. If he wasn’t sitting cross-legged on the floor, rearranging books as he browsed (an unshakable compulsion for anyone who’s ever worked in
a bookstore), you’d find him gabbing with Isobel Grassie, a Parnassus clerk and actress in community theater productions who shared his devotion to soap operas. (Gorey dedicated The Water Flowers to Grassie.) Judith Cressy, who spent several college summers in the early ’70s clerking at Parnassus, recalls Gorey’s appetite for Flaubert, books on Japanese art and culture (especially Noh and Kabuki), and “novels that nobody else cared about,” such as the social-satirical fictions of Angela Thirkell, an English novelist of the 1930s. As she came to know Gorey’s fondness for “icky Victorian stuff,” she took to setting aside titles she thought might interest him—books on “nineteenth-century cabinets of curiosities with taxidermied animals,” Victorian hair jewelry, and “photos of dead children arranged as peaceful little angels.”

  One title that caught her eye was L. H. Bailey’s Manual of Gardening: A Practical Guide to the Making of Home Grounds and the Growing of Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables for Home Use, published in 1910. The book’s pen-and-ink illustrations were beautifully limned, she thought, but “odd. There’d be this funny little drawing of…almost symmetrical plantings, but then there was this tree that was in the wrong place and there would be a caption that would say, ‘A regrettable vista,’ or something. It looked like an Edward Gorey drawing, and the caption was like an Edward Gorey caption. The whole book was full of these Edward Goreyisms that were done before he was born.” When Cressy showed Gorey some photocopies of the book’s illustrations, “he just whooped and rolled up the papers and tucked them in his pocket and ran away. He got it immediately.”

  The result was The Improvable Landscape (Albondocani Press, 1986), which Gorey dedicated to Cressy. A note-perfect send-up of Bailey’s didactic Manual, it’s a kind of cautionary tale for gardeners and landscape architects; Gorey’s impeccably deadpan renderings of “a less than ornamental pond,” “a meaningless hedge,” “an unsuccessful vista,” and other horticultural mishaps provide object lessons in what not to do.

  Parnassus’s owner, Ben Muse, also kept an eye out for books he knew would grab Gorey, such as the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn’s whimsically weird sketches of Japanese culture in the 1890s and his translations of grotesque Japanese folktales, full of man-eating goblins and crabs with human faces. After a little arm-twisting, Muse “conned” (his words) the long-suffering, ever-acquiescent Gorey into letting him publish one of his books. In ’92, Parnassus Imprints released The Betrayed Confidence, a compilation of seven of Gorey’s Dogear Wryde postcard sets, spanning 1976 to 1990.

  In his Yarmouth Port years, Gorey was far from a recluse. He was out and about in his bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle with its OGDRED vanity plate, not exactly the sort of thing you’d drive if you wanted to elude celebrity stalkers. Then, too, he was in the book, as they used to say, right there between Gorewitz and Gorfinkle; you could ring him up, and fans sometimes did. Others put pen to paper, unaware that their fan mail was headed for the dustbin of history, or at least the “six enormous cartons of unanswered letters, contracts, old theater programs, that sort of thing” into which he unceremoniously tossed a good deal of his incoming mail.42 “I just don’t connect very well,” was his explanation. “I connect less well as the years go by. At one point I drew a postcard up, which says: ‘You’ve written me to no avail / Because I never read my mail.’ Every now and again I send one of those out with my signature on it. Every once in a while you hear about somebody like Carol Burnett, who says, ‘Oh, I answer every fan letter I get, in my hand,’ and I think, ‘This isn’t possible! Are you insane? Have you no priorities?!’”

  Determined fans, such as the underground cartoonist Johnny Ryan, a clerk at the Hyannis Barnes & Noble, where Gorey had done a book signing, simply showed up unannounced on his doorstep. Ryan and a friend invited him to lunch, and the trio spent the next two hours at Jack’s, discussing the fine points of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, “and any movies that had animals in them, like Paulie, Dr. Dolittle (the one with Eddie Murphy), or Dunston Checks In,” in Ryan’s recollection.43 (Their lunch took place in the early ’90s.) After lunch, Gorey stepped behind the cash register and rang them up, which Ryan found amusing.

  The following weekend, he and Gorey conducted a more formal interview for issue 8 of Ryan’s self-published zine, Angry Youth Comix. “This time, we had a whole list of questions we wanted to ask him,” says Ryan.44

  Q. Who was your favorite Stooge from the Three Stooges?

  A. Who’s the one with the bangs?

  Q. Who’s the biggest asshole you ever met?

  A. Robert Frost. He wouldn’t shut up about how much he hated his parents.

  Q. Have you ever listened to Howard Stern?

  A. Life’s too short for all that gassing.

  Ryan and his friend took to dropping in on Gorey “to see if he wanted to hang out, which in retrospect seems incredibly obnoxious, but…he was always very nice and willing to sit and talk to us. We used to bring him copies of our zines/comix but he probably just threw them in the garbage or something. I don’t think they were really his cup of tea, but we really didn’t care.”45

  Ryan was forty-five years Gorey’s junior, and his scabrous, willfully crude comics crossed the self-flagellating confessionalism of underground artists like R. Crumb with the postpunk cynicism of Peter Bagge, the grunge cartoonist known for his bilious, bleakly funny strip Hate. Ryan’s work had next to nothing in common with Gorey’s, but the older artist’s boundless imagination and independence of mind impressed the twentysomething cartoonist mightily.

  “Mr. Gorey was a consummate individual,” says Ryan. “He had an original mind and he did his own thing, both in the way he lived his life and in the way he worked. I mean, his work is so unique it can’t even be classified. Are his books comics or graphic novels or children’s books or surrealist art books or gothic fiction? They’re all of these things. And nobody has ever been able to pull that off before or since.”46

  * * *

  “Since I’ve been living up here,…at some point or other I succumbed to television,” Gorey told an interviewer in 1995, “so there I am, parked in front of the television more often than not, making stuffed animals or reading or drawing or writing…”47

  During his thirty years in New York, he’d never owned a television. Defying the cultural logic of the times, he’d lived a life unplugged from the media feed that shaped the American mind. Chances are good he missed the on-camera murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s funeral cortege, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Neil Armstrong on the moon, the Watergate hearings, the nightly horrors of Vietnam. If Gorey took much notice of the political and social tremors registered by TV’s seismograph, he never mentioned it. When he did discover the delights of the boob tube, he was drawn to everything but news programming, current-affairs shows, and the self-consciously high-middlebrow fare served up by PBS. (He made no exception for Mystery!, claiming he was fed up with “overly psychologized detectives and their problems.”)48

  In his last decade and a half, he made up for lost time, glutting himself on mass-market TV and late-night box-office bombs with the same omnivorous relish that characterized his consumption of books and art films. “The Avengers is coming back on,” Gorey told an interviewer, obviously exultant. “I adore Diana Rigg. I think she’s the greatest thing since shredded wheat.…This week we’re truly blessed with two episodes of Dallas. And, oh, God, those Mexican vampire movies on Channel 27.”49 Dark Star, a cult sci-fi comedy, was “tacky in a nice sort of way,” he thought (“They made outer space look like the size of a phone booth”), but what the world needed was “a horror movie about demon people on roller skates.”

  The big open-beamed room on the second floor of his house, up a narrow, steep flight of stairs, was Gorey’s TV room—his “entertainment center in all its squalor,” as he called it.50 “Being a collector, he videotaped his favorite shows,” Kevin McDermott notes in Elephant House, his book of photographs documenting every nook and cranny of Gorey’s domestic world. “He tape
d every episode of Buffy. On the sofa were seven or eight television guides: one for the satellite dish, one for the cable, one for local programs, etc. He knitted a small, pocketed remote holder to house the many remotes. Edward feigned not being able to do the simplest household chore, but he could program the VCR to switch taping from cable to satellite on West Coast time.”51 Betraying the same compulsion that led him to affix little white stickers to his CDs, recording the dates he’d first listened to them, he was scrupulous in labeling each videotape, noting the program title, air date, even the time it ran.

  Profiles of Gorey inevitably mention his passing infatuations with soaps such as All My Children and Days of Our Lives or his devotion to Golden Girls or his long-running addiction to Buffy, The X-Files, and Star Trek, partly as evidence of the unselfconscious postmodernism of his eclectic tastes and partly for comic effect. (The man who lived for Balanchine and rhapsodizes about eleventh-century Japanese literature watches Alf and Magnum, P.I.! Who knew?) Gorey, of course, was quick to puncture inflated theories about his TV viewing: asked, by an interviewer, if his was “a scholarly interest in American pop culture,” he replied, “No, I just like trash.”52

  What he watched is less interesting than the associations it sparked or the droll observations it inspired, tossed off with an amusingly blasé air. Here he is on his friend (and fellow Cape Cod resident) Julie Harris in the prime-time soap Knots Landing, which aired from ’79 to ’93: “Much as I adore Julie, she’s theater to her fingertips, if you know what I mean. She never would’ve appeared in Knots Landing if she had any real standards, but…she was absolutely marvelous. She played this kind of ditzy lady who wanted to be [a] country-and-western singer and who was writing songs. She was acting up a storm all the time, and she was very funny and very touching. Alec Baldwin was her psychotic son, who eventually fell off the building, I believe; he was a born-again fake minister or something. Oh, it had everything. But she was absolutely wonderful.…I do wish she would do something that [isn’t] quite so lofty; it’s got to be Tolstoy or nothing these days.”53