by Mark Dery
In fact, Gorey’s relationship to the objects he collected was surrealist to the core. He would’ve fit right in among the exhibitors at Exhibition of Surrealist Objects, held at the Galerie Charles Ratton, in Paris, in 1936. The show included what Marcel Jean described, in The History of Surrealist Painting, as natural objects (“stibnites from Transylvania”), “interpreted” natural objects (“a monkey-shaped fern, as found in florists’ shops”), “perturbed” objects (a wineglass melted and twisted like ribbon candy by the eruption of Mont Pelée, in Martinique, in 1902), objets trouvés (found objects, such as a “book that had spent some time in the sea and was encrusted with shellfish”), and “interpreted” objets trouvés (“roots, round pebbles, and various rock structures arranged in such a way that they took on an added meaning or seemed to reveal some hidden message”).90
Gorey’s collections abounded in “interpreted” natural objects: rocks that resembled frogs; a hunk of driftwood that looked like an elephant’s head. The surrealists exploited the dream logic of analogy; Gorey’s witty, poetic ability to see the figurative hiding in the literal—the frog in the rock, the elephant in the driftwood—underscores the extent to which he viewed the world with a surrealist eye.
“Interpreted” objets trouvés, “arranged in such a way that they took on an added meaning or seemed to reveal some hidden message,” were everywhere at 8 Strawberry Lane, too. Gorey had a surrealist’s understanding of the uncanniness of the double and of the disquieting sense of a collective presence evoked by multiple copies of a thing. “This is something I learned from Ted,” Ken Morton says. “One wrench is just a wrench. But get a lot of them, and it becomes something.” Flat surfaces in Gorey’s home tended to be populated by groups of objects arranged just so—doorknobs, finials, telephone-pole insulators, metal graters. (“Greater graters and lesser graters,” he dubbed them.)
He arranged a flock of pewter salt and pepper shakers on a tray, then balanced it on a stool in a back room on the first floor. Thus arrayed, they looked like people, he thought, or maybe chess pieces. Gorey collected “spherical objects,” as he liked to say: bocce balls, glass fishing floats, terra-cotta globes from “Smith & Hawken, or wherever.”91 These, too, went into the back room, arranged on the floor in patterns that were satisfying to the eye. More spherical objects joined the colony, heaped high in bowls. In time, they claimed the room as their own; Gorey christened it the Ball Room. There was just enough space, in the center of the room, for his exercise bike, prescribed by his doctor. Surrounded by spherical objects, he pedaled placidly, reading as he cycled.
Sometimes Gorey’s imagination ran riot, extracting multiple meanings from a single object, as was the case with the pile of antique cobbler’s tools called “lasting pincers,” which he’d found in an antiques shop. “They look vaguely like lizards or something, combination birds’ heads or lizards,” he told an interviewer. “Oh, dear, it’s all so complicated. There was a very famous French horror movie called Eyes Without a Face. Long before I ever saw the movie, there was a still that was reproduced a lot, with a young lady who had been operated on—they were removing her face, and they had those things that pry the skin away, keep the skin separated. So there’s this photograph of her lying there with this slight trickle of blood around the outline of her face, with all these…instruments attacking her. It impressed me a lot at the time. Anyway, lasting pincers look sort of like that. If it weren’t for Max Ernst, of course, none of this would anybody look at as being…” He trailed off, then added, apropos of nothing, “But you know, if you look at this”—he held up a pair of pincers—“it looks like a person, sort of.”92 And there you have it: an object lesson in the surrealist alchemy of free association, which transmutes a thing, natural or man-made, into what the New York gallerist Julien Levy called a “concrete realization of the dream or of irrationality,” under whose uncanny influence “reality may begin to assume the dreamed-of aspects.”93
One of Gorey’s obsessions seems less surrealist than Freudian: his mania for stuffed animals. On the second floor, in an alcove near his bedroom, aging, worse-for-wear elephants, cats, and other creatures slumped on built-in shelves. More were heaped, pell-mell, on a chest in his bedroom. According to Kevin McDermott, Gorey “preferred old, worn stuffed animals—the more worn, the better”; whether that was just another instance of his wabi-sabi sensibility or some muffled echo of the miseries of childhood, who knows?94 His was a cloudless Midwestern childhood, he always claimed, but there’s something about a seventy-two-year-old man who still has his childhood bear (“not a teddy bear, but a bear, fuzzy”) and who collects stuffed animals at yard sales, battered creatures orphaned by children who’d outgrown them, that suggests otherwise.95 “I wondered if something bad happened to him once that he never told us about, that he never told anybody about,” Morton mused.96
Dolls and stuffed toys are enigmatic presences in Gorey stories, cathected, as Freud would say, with psychic energy: in The Other Statue, Augustus is frantic upon discovering that his “stuffed twisby” is missing; Charlotte Sophia’s only friend in the world, her doll, Hortense, is “torn limb from limb” by the mean girls at the orphanage in The Hapless Child; and the Black Doll is a surrealist cipher, a floating signifier haunting Gorey’s narrative landscape.97
“Like another Edward—Lear—he was a cheerfully morbid bachelor uncle who refused the injunction of St. Paul to put away childish things,” John Updike observes of Gorey in his foreword to McDermott’s book.98 Gorey in his seventies had the same unfettered imagination he had in grammar school, evident in his never-ending delight in playing with words, images, and objects.
In that context, his collection of stuffed animals and animal figurines seems like an innocent pleasure—an expression, however goofy, of his fondness for animals as well as his childlike attachment to cuddly toys. Looked at in the light of his books, though, in which children are ill treated, abandoned, or worse, the animals in Gorey’s alcove—the cast-off transitional objects of nameless children long since grown up, grown old, or dead—assume an abject air, like the artist Mike Kelley’s assemblages of grungy crocheted animals and abused plush toys scavenged from thrift stores.
One of Gorey’s most obliquely revealing remarks about his childhood can be found in a letter to Peter Neumeyer. Prompted by his reading of Contrary Imaginations, a critique of IQ tests and prevailing definitions of intelligence, he tells Neumeyer that Francis Parker’s principal “lived in the same decaying mansion on the south side of Chicago as did a little group called, I think, the Human Engineering Laboratory which devised intelligence tests so, needless to remark, we got a new one of some sort about every week, sometimes oftener…”99 What he wants to know from Neumeyer, then a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is “just how important intelligence tests are in the education scheme of things.…[W]hat I really mean is…how seriously do they affect the life of a child in school and his development?”100 When we remember his mother loftily informing Gorey’s Florida cousins that her wunderkind’s IQ was 165 and trumpeting his record-breaking score on the army intelligence test, it’s hard not to hear a plaintive note in Gorey’s question. Intelligent and articulate beyond their years, prodigies are, by definition, dour little adults, like the tinies in Gorey stories.
At the risk of pop psychologizing, one can’t help wondering: did Gorey, a great one for paradox, have in late life the childhood he never had as a kid? He collected teddy bears (“in a desultory sort of way”), read Nancy Drew mysteries ’til his dying day, and devoted much of his last decade or so to puppet shows, traditionally a children’s genre.101 “One of the great deprivations of my life is that I never learned how to make papier-mâché,” he once lamented, “and now it’s too late.”102 Except it wasn’t: Gorey crafted his puppets himself, molding their heads out of papier-mâché—the stuff of lost time.
Chapter 15
Flapping Ankles, Crazed Teacups, and Other Entertainments
Gorey with two
members of Le Théâtricule Stoïque.
(Photograph by Brennan Cavanaugh)
ASKED, IN A 1998 INTERVIEW, if he’d been bitten by the theater bug while designing Dracula, Gorey said, “Well, I think, in a kind of way, it’s been theater all along.”1 Of course it had been, from his high-school raptures over the Ballets Russes to his Dugway plays to his all-consuming affair with the Poets’ Theatre to his passion for silent film to his fascination with Kabuki and Noh to Dracula, Gorey Stories, and Tinned Lettuce. Then, too, many of Balanchine’s ballets had story lines, however loose, and some, such as The Nutcracker, were wordless plays, incorporating elements of pantomime and costume drama.
Tellingly, Gorey’s earliest literary efforts were plays. “Apparently I must have had a leaning toward theater at the very beginning and I didn’t follow it up,” he said.2 In a 1977 interview, he regretted the road not taken: “I tend to drift my way through existence, and if I had decided to direct myself a little more than I ever did, I think I probably would have worked in the theater more.”3
With Lost Shoelaces, a “musical entertainment” performed at the Woods Hole Community Hall in August of ’87, Gorey came full circle to the evening of entertainments “Somewhat in the Victorian Manner” that he’d staged in 1952 with the Poets’ Theatre. Genie Stevens, a director whose work with the Woods Hole Theater Company Gorey had seen and liked, had approached him about bringing his work to the stage. Gorey was agreeable but urged her to adapt some of his unpublished work rather than rehash ground already covered by Gorey Stories. He supposed he could do a flyer or a poster for the show, he said. Perhaps he could make the props, too. And the sets. And the costumes. Come to think of it, when was she going to hold auditions? He might as well pop by. Clearly he hadn’t forgotten the fun he’d had with the Poets’ Theatre, putting on arty plays in an atmosphere of goofy amateurism.
Riffling through the pile of pages Gorey had given her, typed on yellow legal-pad sheets, Stevens realized that Lost Shoelaces was going to be “really tricky.” “I’ve directed a lot of Shakespeare and Shakespeare is much more straight ahead than Edward’s work,” she says. “I couldn’t make head or tail of what to do with it, exactly. It was like an evening of Victorian entertainments, where somebody would come out and recite and somebody would sing and somebody would do a dance and often there was a tragic ending.” The question was, how to translate Gorey from the page to the stage? “What’s it about is a very funny question, because what are any of his books about? They’re about strange things happening, but they’re more about tickling your brain, having you become engaged with words and ideas.”
Consider “The Folded Napkin,” a send-up of the “rational amusements”—drawing-room recitals and Chautauqua-style lectures—popular with the Victorian bourgeoisie, a relentlessly self-improving lot. The silent skit featured an actor in black turtleneck and black tights solemnly displaying, for the audience’s edification, illustrations of napkins folded in various ways. “People were on the floor laughing,” says Stevens. “It built and built, there was music behind it, and it was just hysterically funny.”
Another playlet, “The Besotted Mother: or, Hubris Collected For,” was, in Gorey’s words, a “heart-rending little work about a mother whose child is eaten by a pack of wild dogs.”4 Scrimping and saving, the doting mother buys her little darling an outfit made of “bunny fur.” Confident that her dear one is snug against the elements, she leaves the child outside the greengrocer’s while she’s inside, buying eggplants. (Eggplants, like turnips, are surrealist fetishes in Goreyland, charged with occult significance. To Gorey, the eggplant was “an otherworldly fruit” with a portentous presence, says Eric Edwards, who performed in many of his entertainments, as he liked to call them.5 As an inside joke, he dubbed his stable of players the Aubergine Company.) Predictably, a pack of ravening dogs “tears this child in bunny fur to pieces!” Gorey told an interviewer.6 For the coup de grâce, he selected, as an ironic backdrop to the carnage, what Stevens recalls as a “very sweet, soothing” piece by Chopin.
A hodgepodge of unrelated playlets performed by actors and hand puppets, Lost Shoelaces was the mold from which nearly all Gorey’s subsequent entertainments were cast. Based, like Tinned Lettuce, on his books or on unpublished texts he hadn’t gotten around to illustrating, they weren’t exactly plays, he admitted, but neither were they revues, “because they don’t start and stop, they just sort of drivel along without interruption.”7 Somewhere between verse drama, Victorian parlor entertainments, and surrealist vaudeville, they were born of “a theatrical sensibility more illuminated by Dada, Beckett, and Japanese art” than by traditional theater, thought Carol Verburg.8 “I’m not at all interested in realistic theater,” Gorey confirmed.9 The stars by which he navigated as a dramatist included “old-time musicals,” “anything that emanates from Japan—Kabuki, Noh, anything of that sort,” as well as “ballet, opera”—in short, “anything that’s highly stylized.”10
Puppets were perfect for Gorey’s embrace of artifice, especially the enigmatic little heads he sculpted out of CelluClay, a brand of instant papier-mâché. Expressionless personages with pinhole eyes, a cursory nose (at best), and no more than a suggestion of a mouth (if that), they were as cryptic as the characters in his books. Their costumes—the glove hiding the puppeteer’s hand—were, by contrast, as eye-catching as their faces were unremarkable, hand-sewn by Gorey from material in wild patterns, from plaid to polka-dot, star-spangled to striped.
Gorey once claimed that the inspiration for his puppet plays struck when he was toying with the idea of staging the tragedies of the Stoic philosopher Seneca—closet dramas noted for their grisly descriptions of revenge killings. “There’s a famous collection of Elizabethan translations, which are absolutely quite wonderful,” he recalled. “I kept thinking, ‘Oh, wouldn’t this be fun to do Seneca with puppets.’”11
It’s just preposterous enough to be true. But a paper he wrote for a French class at Harvard in 1947, proposing a stage design for Pierre Corneille’s verse tragedy Horace (1640), is more revealing about Gorey’s vision of a theater whose “unnaturalist” aesthetic reveled in striking tableaux, special effects, choreographed movement, and poetic language rather than depth psychology, naturalistic acting, and the willing suspension of disbelief. He imagines automatons, remote-controlled by backstage technicians, that glide across the stage on rails like “a child’s electric train,” their prerecorded lines crackling through the PA system.12 Gorey’s thespian robots would create a jarringly ironic distance between the “passions and sufferings” of Corneille’s tragedy and their impassive features and “artificial” gestures, “synchronized with those of other characters” to create kinetic patterns reminiscent of classical ballet.13 As envisioned, his mechanized Horace would have had more in common with the Bauhaus choreographer Oskar Schlemmer’s Machine Age ballets than conventional theater.
At the same time, Gorey’s remote-controlled puppets realize the aesthete’s dream of an art about art, focused on form, fluent in historical allusion, rejoicing in the impulse to play (with images, words, ideas), and freed at last from the gooey sentimentality and showbiz hamminess that afflict commercial theater. It’s an aesthetic he would embrace to the fullest, some forty years later, in his Cape Cod entertainments.
Lost Shoelaces marked the debut of the puppet troupe Gorey called Le Théâtricule Stoïque (the stoic little theater), and of Eric Edwards, Vincent Myette, Joe Richards, and Cathy Smith—charter members of the close-knit company that for more than a decade would dedicate itself to the performance of Gorey’s entertainments. The show was notable, too, as the first—and last—time anyone but Gorey occupied the director’s chair. With Stevens’s departure—she’d taken a job in New York—he assumed the role, a part he’d continue to play throughout his decade-long involvement with community theater on the Cape.
Gorey’s approach to directing was laissez-faire—in the extreme. “As a director, Edward’s favorite maxim was that the
director’s job is to keep the actors from running into the furniture,” recalls Carol Verburg, who began working with him in 1990, producing his shows and acting as director’s assistant.14 He “scoffed at motivation and character development,” she says.15 In her brief reminiscence, Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod, she draws a parallel between Gorey’s refusal to connect the dots for his actors (or, for that matter, his audience) and the aesthetic of understatement, omission, and ambiguity that characterizes his books. It was his intent “simply to show what happened to whom,” she believes, freeing cast and audience alike to make whatever sense they might of his always oblique, often inscrutable texts.
In Gorey’s works for the stage, the spotlight is squarely on language—language at play, freed from the need to make sense (though not the requirement to make nonsense). “My stuff is fairly carefully written, so I don’t feel that anything needs explaining,” said Gorey. Thus his dictum “There is no motivation, just read the lines.”16
Paradoxically, Gorey demanded expressive subtleties from his puppets that would’ve reduced Jim Henson to tears. (We’re talking, remember, about the emotive possibilities of a lump of papier-mâché no bigger than a golf ball, with pinprick eyes, a perfunctory nose, and no mouth.) As if coaxing emotion out of a puppet with only rudimentary facial features weren’t challenging enough, the props were the puppets on occasion. Gorey’s surrealist eye for objets trouvés, as well as his bricoleur’s delight in transmuting whatever’s at hand into something wondrous, led him to scour “yard sales for promising objects—less for illustration than for provocative juxtaposition,” notes Verburg.17 Balls of yarn, strings of beads, bags of confetti, glass doorknobs—seemingly anything might be reborn as a prop or even a puppet.