by Alison Lurie
Early in her career Barbara worked as an almost unpaid intern at Partisan Review, and then at Random House, where she met the young editor Jason Epstein, whom she was to marry. They had two intelligent and attractive children, Jacob, now a Los Angeles film producer and screenwriter, and Helen, a molecular biologist specializing in public health in developing countries. But even as a mother Barbara kept on working, now with Edward Gorey at the famous reprint series The Looking Glass Library, which revolutionized paperback publishing by making it both respectable and profitable to reprint literary classics.
The job Barbara was most famous for, of course, was as coeditor, with Robert Silvers, of The New York Review of Books. Founded during the New York newspaper strike of 1963, as what at first looked like a temporary replacement for the New York Times Book Review, the NYRB went on to become probably the most famous literary magazine in the English-speaking world. It changed serious reporting on the arts and politics and science and society by giving writers both the space and the time to say all they wanted to say, and expert help in saying it as well as possible. The NYRB was especially well known for finding writers who were not already well known themselves, many of them from other countries, and encouraging them to propose subjects for reviews and essays, rather than simply assigning currently prominent authors to currently popular topics. One result of all this was a long list of good books that began as NYRB articles, many of which probably would not have existed otherwise.
Barbara’s editorial skill and her editorial tact were remarkable. Her first response to a manuscript was always enthusiastic; but when the proofs arrived, the margins would be full of questions and suggestions and sometimes embarrassing corrections. Often there would be three or four sets of proofs, and I sometimes felt awkward when I received congratulations on one of my articles, since I knew how much its apparently easy style and accuracy of detail were owing to her. Many other writers have said the same, commenting on how much time Barbara had spent on their pieces, and how reluctant she was to take credit for her contribution to them.
Because Barbara was so kind, generous, and modest—she never gave speeches, interrupted anyone, or raised her voice—it was easy to underestimate how much she knew and saw. There seemed to be nothing she hadn’t read, and no one she’d never known or seen—and sometimes seen through. Her accounts of public occasions were often brilliantly comic: I remember how she described Norman Mailer standing on the bottom step of a staircase to lecture George Plimpton and several other men, all of whom were considerably taller than he, on the errors of the current administration. Offered a drink, Mailer seemed eager, but he refused to step down to get it; instead he insisted it be passed to him by his audience.
Barbara gave wonderful parties, successfully mixing unmatching guests: conservatives and radicals, young and old, provincial and international, famous and unknown. Some of the best parties took place during the last seventeen years of her life, which she shared with the gifted journalist Murray Kempton. Like him, she loved a good personal or political scandal, and often somehow knew it before the newspapers did. At the same time, she was strikingly discreet. You knew that nothing you told her would ever be repeated, and also that she would never tell you anything about anyone that you didn’t know already. Sometimes I thought that Barbara carried this rule too far. Occasionally she would say with a sigh of regret that she couldn’t meet me that evening because she had to “go to something.” It would then turn out that “something” was a party given by people we both knew well, and to which I had also been invited. In the same way, she was more likely to conceal than to reveal her close acquaintance with anyone, especially if they were in any way famous.
It was always a wonder to me how Barbara managed to read so much, including, apparently, most of the books discussed in her magazine. When I asked her about this once, she simply said, “I read enough.” In any case, she read enough of a great many books to produce some amazingly perceptive and original remarks about them. One of my great regrets is that I never wrote any of these comments down. Another, more serious, is that Barbara never published anything herself, as far as I know, though for a long time I hoped a manuscript or a diary would turn up. Now and then I would suggest that she should write her memoirs. Her reply was always, “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” Just as well, maybe—the world must still be full of people who are not only grieving for her loss, but sighing with relief that some comic incident in their lives may never be revealed.
It is hard for me, even now, to realize that if I were to go to 33 West 67th Street and take the antique elevator to apartment 3F, where I so often stayed, Barbara would not be there. Without her, the building, once so important in my life, is meaningless; the whole world, and especially New York, seems darker, sadder, and most of all, less interesting.
Edward Gorey
I met him, very appropriately, in a bookstore named after a legendary plant with magical uses: the Mandrake Bookshop on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the sort of shop you seldom see now: cozy and cluttered, with free coffee. You could browse the shelves, or sit and read on the big sagging sofa, without anyone asking “Can I help you?” which of course always translates as, “All right, buy something or scram.” Not everyone did, but the bookshop managed to keep going, because back then—over sixty years ago now—rents were not that expensive, and neither were books.
Ted Gorey often hung out at the Mandrake. He was a friend of the owner, Helen McCormick, who was only a couple of years older than us. Ted was twenty-five when we met, just back from two years as an Army typist, finishing up college on the G.I. Bill. He wasn’t the striking figure he later became. He looked like a pale lanky engineering student, unstylishly dressed and unremarkable except for his height. He had a crewcut and no facial hair; he wore T-shirts and jeans and sneakers, and when it was cold, a black turtleneck sweater. I was twenty-three, already graduated and working as an editorial assistant in Boston.
We began talking and discovered we liked the same books; the only difference was that Ted had already read almost all my favorites, and I hadn’t heard of many of his. After a while we began to meet on purpose, and to go to museums and films together, usually without my husband, Jonathan Bishop, who was working too hard. He wanted to become a professor of English—and he did become a professor—but this meant that he had to do very well in school and didn’t have much free time for anything else.
Jonathan and I were living in a one-room apartment on Harvard Street, and if people were there talking, he couldn’t study, so Ted and I would usually meet at the Mandrake or at a coffee shop. When the warm weather came, we began going for walks around Cambridge, and one day we went to the old graveyard near Harvard Square. The tombstones there are strange and wonderful, but time and weather were blurring them and wearing them down. We wanted to save them somehow, and so we began making tombstone rubbings. It’s easy to do: you take a big piece of shelf paper, stick it to the tombstone with tape, and rub over it with the flat side of a wax crayon in any color you like. If you want a more brilliant effect, when you get home you go over the paper with a sponge soaked in black or colored ink. In those days there were no felt-tip pens, but you could buy many different colors of ink almost anywhere.
Later on we began driving to other graveyards in Boston and its suburbs, and finding many more strange tombstones. I don’t know if any of Ted’s original rubbings have survived—mine are all gone, and I regret this very much. But in many of his books, as well as his titles for the TV show Masterpiece Theatre, you can see their influence—that of both the nineteenth-century tombstones with their urns and weeping willows, and the earlier ones with their winged cherubs and angels and skulls and crossbones, strange fruits and flowers, and the circular patterns that look like Celtic crosses or magical symbols. Ted preferred the older tombstones, and their strange inscriptions and scary verses. One that we often came across read:
Behold and think as you pa
ss by,
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you will be.
Prepare to die and follow me.
It was on one of these trips that I realized for the first time that I was not going to live forever. Of course I knew this theoretically, but I hadn’t taken it personally. We were in a beautiful graveyard in Concord, Massachusetts, on a warm soft bright summer day, and I said to Ted, “If I die, I want to be buried somewhere like this.” And he said, “What do you mean, if you die?”
In 1950 both Ted and I became involved in the Poets’ Theatre of Cambridge. I worked on costumes and makeup, mostly. Ted designed almost all the posters and programs, and helped to create its distinctive style. He was also one of the sanest and calmest people in an organization that wasn’t always calm or even sane, though it was always a lot of fun; I’ve written about it in a memoir of V. R. Lang, the poet who was one of its founders. Eventually both Ted and I wrote short plays for the theater; his was called Amabel, or The Partition of Poland, and was semi-surrealist.
After Ted graduated from Harvard, he got a job with a book publisher in Boston, near Copley Square. I was working in Copley Square too, in the Rare Book Room of the Boston Public Library. It wasn’t all fun: Ted spent a lot of time packing and shipping books and taking them to the post office, and I had to dust and shelve heavy old volumes of maps and documents and fend off the occasional groping and patting hands of our boss. (Back then nobody complained of this sort of thing, but we took precautions; “If Mr. H asks you to come into his office, stay on the other side of his desk, and excuse yourself if you need to,” I was warned my first week on the job.)
We were both also badly paid, but our jobs had compensations: we got first look at a lot of books and we could meet regularly. We used to have lunch or an early supper together in a cafeteria on Marlborough Street; I still remember the two sausages with sauerkraut and applesauce that was one of the cheapest items on the menu. From 1949 to 1952, when Ted moved to New York, we saw more of each other than of anyone else—we were best friends.
Ted then was already the person he later became famous as: immensely intelligent, perceptive, amusing, inventive, skeptical, and a scarily gifted artist. He saw through anyone who was phony, or pretentious, or out for personal gain, very fast. As he said very early in our friendship, in September 1951, according to my journal, “I pity any opportunist who thinks I’m an opportunity.” Ted had crushes on acquaintances sometimes, mostly older men, but nothing much ever came of them, and I think he preferred it that way. Later in life he told an interviewer that he had never been romantic, and was not really interested in sex. I also noticed quite soon that he did not much like to be touched, and respected this almost unconsciously.
In 1953 Ted moved to New York City. At first he didn’t care much for the place. Here’s an excerpt from a letter he wrote me that September:
All the brilliant thoughts and such which I had about New Yorkseem to have vanished or shriveled by this time, and it’s just another place, with better bookstores, and more movies to go to… . Though when the weather is really good, it does seem to have a clarity and glitter I never saw anywhere else. I feel like a captive balloon, motionless between sky and earth. I want birds to bring me messages.
Over the following years Ted gradually grew to love the city, especially after he discovered the New York City Ballet. He became a co-director of the Looking Glass Press, which reprinted lost literary classics, almost all of them with his brilliant cover designs and illustrations. He also began to be noticed not only for his strange but fascinating small books with titles like The Wuggly Ump and The Sinking Spell, but for his whimsical and memorable cover illustrations for The New York Review, and the serial he contributed to its pages, “Les Mysteres de Constantinople,” whose heroine was thought by many people to resemble one of the NYRB’s coeditors, Barbara Epstein.
Personally Ted was always somewhat noticeable because he was so tall and thin, but now he began to attract more attention. He dressed more and more eccentrically; he grew a mustache and wore a lot of heavy, strange rings. People started to turn around to look at him on the street. After a while he grew a beard too; he began wearing fur coats with his white sneakers, and sometimes the coat matched the beard. Eventually he became both a famous artist and writer and a famous New York character, often recognized in public. People approached him in restaurants or went up to him at intermission at the ballet to say how much they admired his work. He had many friends, but he continued to live alone and remained physically detached from other human beings.
For many years he continued to enjoy New York life. Besides the New York City Ballet, his other enthusiasms were classical art, Victorian novels, silent films, all of which provided inspiration for his work. His passion for the productions of George Balanchine and the principal dancer Suzanne Farrell was so great that at one time he attended every performance. After Balanchine’s death he lost interest in dance and also, eventually, in the city. In 1983 he moved with his cats to Cape Cod, where he had already spent many summers, and had a large extended family and many friends.
To enter the world of Edward Gorey is to step into a kind of parallel Gothic universe full of haunted mansions, strange topiary, and equally haunted and strange beings. Though they are mainly well-meaning and well-dressed and live in surroundings of slightly decaying Victorian and Edwardian luxury, they tend to seem lost, baffled, or oppressed by life. They play croquet and go on picnics and have elaborate tea parties, but somehow things often go wrong. There are sudden deaths and disappearances, and the human characters are often haunted, not only by ghosts but by strange creatures of all sorts, some of which resemble giant bugs, while others suggest hairy wombats or small flying lizards or devils.
In many of his books, children especially are at risk. They fall victim to natural disasters, are carried off by giant birds or eaten by comic monsters like the Wuggly Ump. In The Gashlycrumb Tinies every letter of the alphabet announces the death of a little girl or boy. Yet somehow the overall effect is not tragic, but merely strange and mysterious, just as it often is in the work of Edward Lear, whom Gorey greatly admired.
In these macabre comedies almost no one looks happy—with the striking exception of the cats, who always seem to be contented and pleased with themselves. Often they appear to be having a wonderful time, especially on the covers of the anthologies of Gorey’s work, Amphigorey and Amphigorey Too.
Of course, in real life Edward Gorey was remarkably fond of cats. According to report, after he moved to New York he seldom had less than five at any one time, and when I visited his apartment in Manhattan I had the impression that there were at least seven or eight in residence, all of them looking extremely well cared for and well fed, even smug. As long as Ted was not working the cats were allowed to use him as a sort of soft furniture, and sometimes several might be purring on his lap—but I have also heard him swear and seen him drop a cat or two abruptly off his drawing board onto the floor.
Though Ted always denied being inspired by real life, I have sometimes thought that two of his early books were partly a comment on my inexplicable (to him) decision to reproduce. In 1953, when the result of this decision, my son John, was about six months old, I wrote Ted a note that said, “I can’t go to the movies because I have to stay home to take care of the beastly baby,” and enclosed a perhaps not very flattering photo of John. Ted replied, on September 10:
Thank you so much for the picture of your infant. As it happened, as it always seems to, which is sometimes boring and sometimes not, I got into a kind of flap over the weekend, and wrote and illustrated a book which I am dedicating to aforementioned infant. It is apparently very odd indeed … when I took it to show Cap [EG’s editor], he behaved most nervously, and kept looking at me as if he had never seen me before; he even dragged out a bottle and gave me a drink, this being eleven o’clock in the morning. He is brooding over it at present, bu
t intimated that in ten years perhaps the public would be ready for it… . The title of it is The Beastly Baby and that is really all I can tell you about it except that it is a sort of depraved cautionary tale with no moral at all.
The baby Ted created is indeed beastly, and comes to a very bad end. As for the book, it was not published for nearly ten years. After it eventually became available, in 1962, I would sometimes give a copy to friends whose babies were behaving especially badly; I think the message was that things could be a lot worse than they were.
The Doubtful Guest, which was dedicated to me under my married name at the time, Alison Bishop, appeared in 1957. It recalls a remark I made to Ted when John was less than two years old. I said that having a young child around all the time was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left. This, of course, is what happens in the story. The Doubtful Guest appears out of nowhere. It is smaller than anyone else; it has “a peculiar appearance” at first and does not understand language. As time passes. it becomes greedy and destructive: it tears pages out of books, has temper tantrums, and walks in its sleep. Yet nobody even tries to get rid of the creature. It is just always there. It sits around, or moves from room to room, and it always wears sneakers. The attitude of the other characters towards it remains one of resigned acceptance.
Who is this Doubtful Guest? The last page of the story makes everything clear:
It came seventeen years ago—and to this day
It has shown no intention of going away.
Of course, after about seventeen years most children leave home. The Doubtful Guest is a child, and since the book was published many mothers have recognized this. My own doubtful guest left home at eighteen, and is now over sixty. He still comes to visit, but he always has plenty to say, and often I think he leaves too soon, so there is hope for anyone who has this kind of guest in their own home right now. I myself still have a version of the original one, because one of my daughters-in-law who was a Gorey fan made me a stuffed Doubtful Guest, which still sits in a Victorian armchair in our spare bedroom.