The more they’re about writing, the better I like these tapes. Like Frank O’Hara, I was the sort of child to whom people gave books. One day a family friend gave me Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey Also, no doubt because as a skinny child who liked looking out windows, I was a natural reader for Gorey’s Victorian rhymes and morbid pen-and-ink illustrations. In his books, which I did enjoy, children are always being eaten by mice or drowned in lakes or carried off by illness.
Gorey grew up in Chicago, where he was in the same high school class as the painter Joan Mitchell, who would later live near us on St. Marks Place. His spooky style was in place even before, in old age, his long white beard completed the picture—earrings, lots of rings, fur coat, sneakers. O’Hara said Gorey was the first person ever to wear sneakers with dress-up clothes. He didn’t fit in with the Harvard veterans for a number of reasons; among them, he wore his hair in little bangs and was “yawningly uninterested in sex,” according to his biographer. At Harvard there were rumors about him being, among other suspicious things, a virgin.
O’Hara and Gorey bonded over their love of the ballet and of the witty British novelist Ronald Firbank, and they staged avant-garde plays together in Cambridge at the Poets’ Theatre, a small performance space over a hardware store.
When they both moved to New York in the early fifties, Gorey worked as an illustrator and author, self-publishing his first books and selling them directly through Midtown’s Gotham Book Mart bookstore, which is where my father interviews him as classical music plays in the background. Gorey starts off sounding nervous.
Edward Gorey—Gotham Book Mart, Midtown, New York City (41 West Forty-Seventh Street) —6/26/77
Edward Gorey: As I remember, you know, Frank was, you know, I mean, I, well, I don’t know how serious either one of us were about, you know, writing as a career or anything at that time. We were just sort of, I just remember, sort of, you know, having fun, as it were. And Frank, you know, Frank was terrifically prol— You know, he really ground out those, some of those poems very rapidly indeed. And there’s not much revision and so forth and so on.
Gorey says his and O’Hara’s methods of writing were entirely different. He struggled, while O’Hara would “sit down and tweedle, tweedle, tweedle, write another three-page poem, then off to the movies.” I’ve never before heard the sound of a typewriter represented as “tweedle, tweedle, tweedle,” but Gorey always was fanciful.
Gorey seems to look down on O’Hara—and on nearly everyone else, too—except husky-voiced Bunny Lang, whom he adored, insisting that she, more than O’Hara, seemed like the member of their Harvard clique who would and should become famous.
When O’Hara, Gorey, and Lang put on their plays together, Lang was famous for, in one instance, having learned not one line of her dialogue. She sat there onstage in a hostess gown, playing with pearls, having each line fed to her until, Gorey says with a laugh, the entire audience wanted her dead.
She had an affair with the abstract expressionist painter Mike Goldberg, who asked her patrician father for her hand in marriage. Mr. Lang was having none of it, in part because Bunny had Hodgkin’s disease and needed more looking after than Goldberg could manage.
In an essay, O’Hara recalled the first time he saw Bunny: across the room at a Cambridge cocktail party in a bookstore. She was sulking in a corner, wearing a Roman-striped skirt. The girl he was talking to said, “That’s Bunny Lang. I’d like to give her a good slap.” He wrote about her often. In “A Mexican Guitar,” he calls her “a mysteriosabelle.”
When the Harvard crowd went swimming at Marblehead Rock, someone tried to tell her it wasn’t safe to dive. Before plunging into the water, she recited these lines from the British poet Ben Jonson:
It is the common moth
That eats on wits and arts, and quite destroys them both.
That was how she earned the nickname Miss Marblehead Rock of 1954.
Their Harvard clique was obsessed with “art with a capital A,” Gorey said. They spent a lot of time at concerts and in bookstores, conducting all-night bridge games, and drinking Lloyd’s gin, the cheapest booze they could find. Gorey believed that the relationship would continue once they reconvened in New York City postgraduation, but by then O’Hara had new friends.
EG: The thing about Frank, which I’m sure you’ve heard before from other people— You would say, “I’m coming down to New York.” And he would say, “Oh, meet me—the minute you get here, come down to the [San] Remo.” People who didn’t really know New York terribly all that well or have a great many friends—which was the case of me—would come down. Then Frank would say, “Oh, hi,” and possibly throw his arms around you or possibly not. And he was perfectly capable of ignoring you for the rest of the evening, as if you had just come in from down the street, which sometimes annoyed people considerably. The one thing about Frank was that he was so totally in the present all the time, I guess. I think I said this a long time ago, and I may just be fantasizing: I was always surprised that Frank lived as long as he did. Not that I felt that he was particularly accident-prone, exactly, or catastrophe-prone in that sense. I didn’t really feel that. It was just that he never seemed to realize or never seemed to want to admit that anything he did had any consequences beyond the immediate.
In other words: Safety third.
Like many members of that Harvard contingent, Gorey became disillusioned with O’Hara. Larry Osgood says the split came because Gorey was offended when, upon seeing Gorey’s first published book, O’Hara said to his old friend: “Still drawing that funny little man, are you?”
Peter Schjeldahl: Somebody told me that you once told Frank a rather grim vision or dream you’d had about him that upset him very much, that he was going to die violently.
EG: Really? I don’t remember it. [Laughs.]
PS: It seemed to have hit the bull’s-eye of his superstition or something.
EG: Really? How funny. I don’t remember this at all. I mean, I can only imagine that I might have had some loopy dream and said, “Listen, kid, I had this dream that you were disemboweled by wild horses.” I can’t imagine. I’m not given to having visions about people or anything. You know, more and more I think, you know, what one person will remember about someone and what someone else will remember is very— [Opera gets very loud in background.]
PS: I think that might interfere with my recording.
EG: [To bookstore employee] Down, Gordon, down!
Gorey died in the year 2000 at the age of seventy-five. He spent his final years living with several cats on Cape Cod, in a cluttered house with poison ivy poking through the walls. Bunny Lang died in 1956 at the age of thirty-two. The Gotham Book Mart closed in 2006. The Poets’ Theatre was destroyed in a fire in 1962 but was resurrected in the mid-1980s—its reopening heralded by a poster created by Edward Gorey showing some of his “funny little men” rising from their graves.
Around that time, the nearby Strand bookstore was doing a brisk business in Edward Gorey books (The Wuggly Ump, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Curious Sofa), and I was on St. Marks Place dressing up for Halloween as charismatic, mustachioed New York Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez.
When I was in elementary school, my parents took delight in making my Halloween costumes each year with a ten-dollar budget using papier-mâché and old sheets decorated with acrylic paint. My Statue of Liberty torch contained a flashlight; the cardboard tablet was hollow, for candy. My skeleton costume was a suit of white long underwear with painted-on black bones. All were paired with my usual Velcro sneakers. But the Keith Hernandez costume was special because that team was special.
Usually, the Yankees were winners and the Mets were under-dogs whom we loved in spite of and maybe sometimes because of their messiness. Only this incarnation of the Mets, still awkward and scrappy but somehow also unstoppable, won the World Series. Those funny little men rose from their graves, too.