Sacred Monsters
Cambridge, 1950–53
Edward Gorey, poster for “An Entertainment Somewhat in the Victorian Manner” by the Poets’ Theatre. (Larry Osgood, private collection)
THE WAY GOREY TOLD IT, he kicked around Boston two and a half years after Harvard, drifting and dithering in the usual fashion. He was twenty-five and not exactly taking the world by storm.
“I worked for a man who imported British books,” he recalled, “and I worked in various bookstores and starved, more or less, though my family was helping to support me.”1 He entertained vague ideas about pursuing a career in publishing. Or maybe he’d open a bookshop. His pipe dreams vaporized on contact with the unglamorous reality of bookselling. “I wanted to have my own bookstore until I worked in one,” he reflected in 1998. “Then I thought I’d be a librarian until I met some crazy ones.”2 In later, more successful days, he liked to say he was “starving to death” in his Cambridge years, although given his penchant for Dickensian melodrama, who knows if things were quite that dire?3 “I never had to live on peanut butter and bananas, but close,” he claimed in 1978.4
Shortly before graduating, he mentioned, over dinner at the Ciardis’, that he planned to stay in Boston but hadn’t yet found a place. On the spot, John and Judy offered him a room, rent free, in the house they shared with John’s mother in the Boston suburb of Medford. All he had to do in return was feed their cat, Octavius, when they were away that summer.
Installed at the Ciardis’, Gorey pounded the pavement hunting for jobs in publishing, then in advertising, but couldn’t find a berth in either field, he told Bill Brandt in a letter.5 He was writing, desultorily, mostly limericks in his penny-dreadful style. Four years later, he’d collect the best of them in The Listing Attic. According to Alexander Theroux, he “started ‘an endless number of novels,’ now, alas, all jettisoned.”6 “Having nothing to do,” he wrote Brandt, “is the most demoralizing thing known to man.”7 Still, there were always scads of movies he was eager to see and a book, if not “several hundred,” he couldn’t wait to devour.
Jobless and footloose, Gorey started visiting his uncle Ben and aunt Betty Garvey and their daughters, Skee and Eleanor, at their summer house in Barnstable, on the Cape. The Garveys lived in suburban Philadelphia, but Betty, née Elizabeth Hinckley, came from old Cape stock. “Hinckleys have been on the Cape, in one way or another, from the Mayflower,” notes Ken Morton, Skee’s son. The Garveys’ first summer house, near the water on Freezer Road, was the standard beach cottage—“very tiny,” with “ratty cottage furniture,” in Skee’s recollection. It was so overstuffed with Garveys that Ted had to sleep on the porch, which didn’t seem to bother him in the least.
The cramped confines were a goad to get up and go. Gorey and the gang were keen yard-salers and moviegoers and beachcombers and picnickers. “We drove all over the Cape, and you could swim at any beach you happened to arrive at,” Skee remembers. Sometimes they’d take their little motorboat, or a sailboat borrowed from relatives, out to Sandy Neck, an arm of barrier beach embracing Barnstable Harbor. It’s a place of desolate beauty. The shoreline is littered with pebbles, spent ammo in the ocean’s ceaseless bombardment of the land. The dunes are carpeted with bayberry, beach plum, sandwort, and spurge. Some are “walking” dunes, their wind-whipped sands slowly but inexorably engulfing stands of pitch pine and scrub oak. With their clawing branches and bony boughs, these skeletal forests look as if Gorey drew them. Little wonder, then, that he was drawn to them, and kept an eye peeled for fallen limbs beaten by the weather into suggestive shapes—driftwood that “never actually drifted,” Ken calls it.
Shedding his Firbankian persona, Gorey slipped effortlessly into the new role of Cousin Ted, happy to be swept along in the currents of his relatives’ daily routines and social rituals. He was spending his summer days on the Cape “being unlike my usual exotic self,” he told Brandt, “messing about in boats (vide The Wind in the Willows) and having great fun observing Old New England in the person of my aunt’s fantastically typical relatives.”8
The Cape, in the late ’40s and early ’50s, was a world away from Ted’s urbane, killingly witty Harvard clique. Often the Garveys would drop in on Betty’s aunt and uncle, who also spent their summers on the Cape. “They had an open house almost every evening,” says Skee, “with friends and relatives sitting around the living room, talking. It was a lot of gossip and a lot of family stories and he seemed to really enjoy that a lot.” The Garveys and their “fantastically typical relatives” were only the first of a number of loose-knit groups that offered Ted a sense of belonging without the demands—or risks—of emotional intimacy. In years to come, the Balanchinians who orbited around the New York City Ballet, especially Mel and Alex Schierman; Cape Codders such as Rick Jones, Jack Braginton-Smith, Helen Pond, and Herbert Senn; and the actors in his nonsense plays and puppet shows would play that role in Gorey’s life, blurring the line between social circle and surrogate family.
* * *
“I have almost no friends, but the few I do I like very much,” Gorey confided in a January 1951 letter to Brandt.9 Chief among them was Alison Lurie. In later days, she would earn a reputation (and a Pulitzer) as a writer of social satires—sharply observed, subtly feminist comedies of manners, most of them drily amusing in the English way. Barbara Epstein, her Radcliffe schoolmate (and, later, editor of her essays for the New York Review of Books), thought she was “witty, skeptical and articulate” and, even as an undergraduate, a supremely gifted writer.10
But when Lurie met Gorey, she was Alison Bishop, recent Radcliffe grad and newlywed. “After Ted finished Harvard he got a job working for a book publisher in Boston, in Copley Square,” she recalled in 2008. “I was working there, too, at the Boston Public Library, and we used to have lunch together in a cheap cafeteria on Marlborough Street. Neither of us liked our jobs very much, but they had compensations—we got first look at a lot of books, and we could meet regularly.”11 Until Gorey moved to New York, in ’53, she remembered, “we saw more of each other than of anyone else—we were best friends.”
They’d met in ’49, at the Mandrake, she thinks. They clicked instantly, bonding over their shared tastes in literature—“mostly literary classics and the poetry that people were beginning to read then.”12 Naturally, Gorey pressed Firbank and Compton-Burnett on Lurie, who liked Compton-Burnett but “couldn’t stand Firbank; it didn’t seem like literature, it was just posing. [Ted] liked the artificiality, the idea of an imagined world with artificial rules and a kind of old-fashioned overtone.” They went to the ballet and museums and the movies, taking in foreign films and the old movies Gorey was especially fond of. The Gorey Lurie knew was, in all the essentials, the Gorey we know. “Ted then was much like he was always—immensely intelligent, perceptive, amusing, inventive, and skeptical, though he was completely unknown,” she recalled.13 “He saw through anyone who was phony, or pretentious, or out for personal gain, very fast. As he said very early in our friendship,…‘I pity any opportunist who thinks I’m an opportunity.’”
She and Gorey were a matched pair. “We gossiped, we talked about books and movies, I saw his drawings, he looked at what I was writing,” she says.14 “We were both Anglophiles, definitely. [We shared] a love of British literature and poetry and films and all that. We’d both been brought up on British children’s books, so this was a world that was romantic and interesting to us.…Back then, when neither of us had been abroad, it was a kind of fantasy world.”
The Gorey Lurie knew in Cambridge was “strikingly tall and strikingly thin,” a head-turning apparition in his unvarying costume of black turtleneck sweater, chinos, and white sneakers—the standard-issue uniform of that late-’40s hipster, the literary bohemian.15 (By then, he’d shed the long canvas coats with sheepskin collars that he sported at Harvard but hadn’t yet replaced them with the floor-sweeping fur coats of his Victorian beatnik phase. They’d come later, when he moved to Manhattan.)
Gorey “was already eccentric and individual when I first knew him,” said Lurie in 2008.16 One of his distinguishing quirks, she remembers, was that enigmatic combination of sociability and reserve John Ashbery had in mind when he described Gorey as “somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, fun-loving level.” “He had a lot of friends,” she notes, and could be gregarious in the right setting—she recalls him chatting with “a lot of people” who came into the Mandrake—but “was solitary in the sense that he didn’t form a partnership with anybody.”17
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, she says. “Not everybody wants to wake up in the morning and there’s somebody in bed with them, you know? Some people value their solitude, and I think Ted was like that. He wanted to live alone; he wasn’t looking for somebody to be with for the rest of his life. He would have romantic feelings about people, but he wouldn’t really have wanted it to turn into a full-blown relationship, and that’s why it never did.”18 He wasn’t a recluse, she emphasizes, just solitary by nature. “It was important to him to have a place where he could do, and be, by himself.”
Some of Lurie’s most sharply etched memories of Ted are recollections of their rambles in cemeteries, fittingly. In the Old Burying Ground, near Harvard Square, they made rubbings of the “really strange and wonderful” headstones—impressions created by taping a sheet of paper onto a stone, then rubbing it with a crayon.19 Visual echoes of the images they collected—urns and weeping willows from the nineteenth-century tombstones, grinning death’s heads and skull-and-crossbones motifs and “circular patterns that looked like Celtic crosses or magical symbols” from the colonial grave markers—reverberate in Gorey’s books and in the animated title sequence he created for the Masterpiece Theatre spin-off series Mystery! Unsurprisingly, Ted was much taken with “the older tombstones with strange inscriptions and scary verses,” says Lurie. A particular favorite read:
Behold and think as you pass 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,” Lurie recalled. “Of course I knew this theoretically, but I hadn’t taken it personally. We were in a beautiful graveyard in Concord”—Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, most likely, where Hawthorne, Thoreau, and all the Alcotts sleep on Authors Ridge—“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?’…He was more aware of mortality than I was,” she reflects. “He’d been in the army, and even though he hadn’t been overseas, he’d seen people come back from overseas. Or not come back.”
At the same time, Gorey’s susceptibility to the morose charms of Puritan memento mori had as much to do with his desire to escape the stultifying ’50s, Lurie suggests, as it did any sense that we’ll all end up moldering in the ground. “One of the things you want to remember is what the 1950s were like,” she says. “All of a sudden everybody was sort of square and serious, and the whole idea was that America was this wonderful country and everybody was smiling and eating cornflakes and playing with puppies.” Gorey’s ironic appropriation, in his art, of Puritan gloom and the Victorian cult of death and mourning “was sort of in reaction to this 1950s mystique…that everything was just wonderful and we lived forever and the sun was shining,” she believes.
* * *
That fall, the Ciardis set off for a year in Europe on John’s sabbatical, leaving their “quite huge” apartment to Gorey “for a ridiculously low rental,” he recalled.20 In letters, he played the role he’d perfected by then, equal parts world-weary idler and hopeless flibbertigibbet, buffeted by life’s squalls one minute, becalmed in the doldrums the next. “My life,” he lamented in a letter to Brandt, “is as near not being one as is possible I think. However.”21 There’s a world of meaning in that “however.” It’s the written equivalent of one of Gorey’s melodramatic sighs, signifying something between ennui, weltschmerz, and the shrugging resignation summed up in the Yiddish utterance meh.
Of course, this business about his nearly nonexistent existence was mostly posing. Gorey wasn’t half as indolent as his letters suggested. For example, he illustrated two covers for the Harvard Advocate, the 1950 commencement issue and that fall’s registration issue.22 Credited to “Edward St. J. Gorey,” Ted’s black-and-white cover for the commencement issue depicts two identical little men standing, in balletic attitudes, on a bleak beach—or is it an ice floe? “L’adieu,” says the caption. His deft use of highly stylized blocks of black against a white background recalls Beardsley’s tour-de-force use of a monochromatic palette as well as the Japanese wood-block prints Gorey loved.
The registration issue made an indelible impression on John Updike, whose Twelve Terrors of Christmas Gorey would one day illustrate. “Gorey came to my attention when I entered Harvard in the fall of 1950,” he remembered in 2003. “The Registration issue of The Harvard Advocate, the college literary magazine, sported a cover drawn by ‘Edward St. J. Gorey’ that showed, startlingly, two browless, mustachioed, high-collared, seemingly Edwardian gentlemen tossing sticks at two smiling though disembodied jesters’ heads. The style was eccentric but consummately mature; it hardly changed during the next fifty years…”23
Shortly before the Ciardis left for Europe, Dr. Merrill Moore dropped by to confer with John about his forthcoming book of poems. Ciardi moonlighted as editor of the Twayne Library of Modern Poetry, which was slated to bring out Moore’s Illegitimate Sonnets. Moore was a psychiatrist—shrink to the Hollywood director Joshua Logan, the poet Robert Lowell, and about “half of Beacon Hill,” Gorey cracked—and, incongruously, a prolific writer of sonnets.24 During his visit, he happened to see some drawings Ted had given the Ciardis and “was much taken with them,” Gorey told Brandt, “and the upshot, and very frazzling to my already tattered nerves, was that ever since I have been doing drawings for him of an indescribable nature (I do not mean obscene—he has even suggested some semi-o ones, but my Victorian soul shrieked ‘Never!’) at $10 per.”
Gorey’s six cartoons for the endpapers of Illegitimate Sonnets mark his first appearance, in the fall of 1950, in a commercially published book. Meticulously rendered in the style of his most polished work, they depict Gorey’s signature little men acting out single-panel gags that riff on the notion of a sonnet-writing shrink. In “Dr. Merrill Moore Psychoanalyzes the Sonnet,” for example, we see the neurotic Sonnet—personified as one of Gorey’s Earbrass types—on the Freudian couch, free-associating a vision of himself huddled in a bell jar, about to be liberated by a hand brandishing a hammer.
All Gorey had to say about his professional debut as a book illustrator was, “The drawings are neither bad nor excellent, but the reproduction makes them look as if I’d done them with a hang nail on pitted granite.”25 Illegitimate Sonnets marked the beginning of a fruitful, if frazzling, relationship that would see Gorey providing endpaper cartoons for the third printing of Clinical Sonnets (which rolled off the presses in October of 1950, around the same time Illegitimate Sonnets came out); fifty-one drawings of his little men acting out sonnet-related gags plus the front-cover illustration for Case Record from a Sonnetorium in ’51; and sixty-five illustrations for More Clinical Sonnets in ’53, all of which were published by Twayne.
There’s an unsettling quality to some of Moore’s verse—a darkness behind the drollery. Take More Clinical Sonnets: most of the book’s entries are sardonic portraits of neurotics and depressives; we can’t shake the nasty suspicion that the objects of Moore’s contempt are his own patients. Cartoonish but bleak, Gorey’s drawings accentuate the underlying creepiness of Moore’s blend of jocularity and cruelty.
Still, the exposure could only help Gorey’s nascent career. Moore was well connected in the literary world and, over the course of their four-book collaboration, a tireless drummer for their cause. He even recruited Ed Gorey to target Chicago media. Gorey senior obliged, playing up the hometown-boy-makes-good angle with his PR connections; soon enough, the chitchat columns in Chicago papers started to take notice of Moore’s books—and Ted’s art. By Case Record, he merited a title-page credit: “Cartoons by Edward St. John Gorey.”
“I’m delighted that all goes so well,” Ciardi, on sabbatical, wrote Moore from Rome. “I’m especially delighted that Gorey is getting this chance to launch himself: I have great faith in the final success of his little men. I think they will have to create and educate an audience for themselves, but I see no reason why they shouldn’t…”26
Moore was unquestionably an ardent fan, telling Helen Gorey that he considered Ted “a finer illustrator than Tenniel,” possessed of a rare combination of “satire, social reality, and general artistic integrity,” though the shrink in him couldn’t resist adding, “Much of this has been developed at the expense of a balanced personality…”27 He sang Ted’s praises to prospective publishers, most fortuitously Charles “Cap” Pearce of the New York publishing house Duell, Sloan and Pearce, a bit of matchmaking that secured Gorey a meeting with some of the company’s decision makers to discuss the possibility of a book of his own. (That book, when it came to pass, would be the first title published under his own name, The Unstrung Harp.)
“You were a tremendous success last night,” Moore enthused in a celebratory telegram on December 2, 1951, the day after the meeting.28 “The entire company was captivated by your scrapbook your talents and yourself I am sure something good will come of it Cap Pearce called me this morning to tell me how delighted he was…Good luck you are launched now chum vous sera un succes fou goodbye Arno Cobean and Steig here comes…Gorey.”a
* * *
Even as Ted was making his professional debut in Illegitimate Sonnets, he was being drawn into the creative ferment of the Poets’ Theatre.
In 1950, verse drama was having its moment, and Cambridge was ground zero for American experiments in the form. The trend was fanned by resurgent interest in the verse plays of Stephen Spender, Yeats, Auden, and, most of all, T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s thoughts on the poet as playwright struck a responsive chord in the pre-Beat literary bohemia of early ’50s Cambridge. “Every poet…would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively,” he had said in 1933, during a lecture at Harvard, “and the theatre is the best place in which to do it.”29 Putting theory into practice, he’d tried his hand at verse drama in Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170. It was an unqualified success. In his later years, he’d turned his creative attentions increasingly to the stage, whether in verse plays such as The Cocktail Party, which won the 1950 Tony Award for best play, or in critical essays such as Poetry and Drama, delivered as a lecture at Harvard in November of 1950, just as the Poets’ Theatre was getting under way.
The Theatre came together one hot June evening in 1950 at the poet Richard Eberhart’s house, near Brattle Street, when, as the group’s prospectus later put it, “several of New England’s outstanding poets joined forces with a group of younger writers in an effort to encourage poetic drama.”30 Lyon Phelps, Gorey’s former housemate at Eliot House and an aspiring poet, floated the idea of a theater devoted to plays by poets. Eberhart and the Dublin-born actress and playwright Mary Manning Howe (Molly to everyone who knew her) were quick to embrace the concept, and others soon rallied to the cause: George Montgomery, in the capacity of photographer and set designer; Lurie, in the role of costumer and makeup artist; Gorey as set designer and graphic artist. A who’s who of prominent poets and playwrights took their seats on the board of directors, among them Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur, Thornton Wilder, William Carlos Williams, and Ciardi.
The fledgling group took its first bow on February 26, 1951, when it performed an evening of one-act plays—Everyman by John Ashbery, The Apparition by Eberhart, Three Words in No Time by Phelps, and Try! Try! by Frank O’Hara—in the basement auditorium of the Christ Church parish house, on Garden Street. In its early days, the company had no permanent home and performed wherever it could. In 1954, it took up residence at 24 Palmer Street, an alley behind the Harvard student co-op, or Coop, as it’s known. Up a ramshackle flight of stairs, the performance space was a cramped loft behind an art gallery, accommodating seating for forty-nine, give or take a folding chair. The stage lights were jury-rigged from pineapple-juice cans. At sold-out shows, late arrivals perched on the perpetually drippy sink at the back of the room; their soggy backsides proclaimed their devotion to Art.
On Try! Try!’s opening night, the standing-room-only crowd of more than two hundred was packed four deep at the back of the room. Thornton Wilder was there. So were Archibald MacLeish and Richard Wilbur as well as up-and-coming young poets such as Robert Bly. Gusts of applausive laughter punctuated O’Hara’s witty dialogue, volleyed between Violet, the disconsolate wife of a GI away at war (played by O’Hara’s bohemian-debutante friend Violet Lang), and John, with whom she’s having an affair (played by John Ashbery). Satirizing postwar melodramas like The Best Years of Our Lives, O’Hara waggishly transposed the clichés of Hollywood tearjerkers about traumatized vets into the idiom of the Noh play, an ancient Japanese form then popular among the literary vanguard, who’d discovered it through Ezra Pound’s anthology Certain Noble Plays of Japan. The set, by Gorey, was austere: an ironing board in a pool of light, an antique gramophone, and, painted on a pull-down shade, a window with a Goreyesque spider (also painted) dangling from one corner.
To Nora Sayre, a film critic and essayist, the group gave off the “exciting aura of a counterculture, which was very hard to locate in the Fifties.”31 Dylan Thomas gave his first American reading of Under Milk Wood at the Poets’ Theatre. Their production of All That Fall, by Samuel Beckett, was the first in the States. The Beat poet Gregory Corso hung around, teaching the Harvard-educated poets hustler slang and driving Sayre half mad with his moocher’s come-on: “Can I have the bacon out of your BLT?”32 She remembers the company as “a home for poets and performers when artists were often classified as freaks, when academia was repressive, when homosexuality was regarded with horrified fascination,” adding that “there were a number of openly gay men in the group, and some of the heterosexuals savored the audacity that mocked the conventional world.”33 Members drew inspiration from surrealism, Jacobean drama, Yeats’s vision of a literary theater, and the lyrical, dreamlike cinema of Jean Cocteau—artistic lodestars that, to varying degrees, would guide Gorey’s verse dramas and puppet shows on the Cape in later life. Sayre recalls him reading the Djuna Barnes novel Nightwood, a radical experiment in modernist prose as well a shockingly early instance of explicitly gay fiction.
Lurie’s most vivid recollections of the group have less to do with its experiments in poetic drama and more to do with offstage histrionics. “There were secrets, confidences, collaborations, poems, and dramas à clef passed from hand to hand, public quarrels and reconciliations,” she later wrote, “and the best scenes were not always played on stage.”34
The inner life of the Poets’ Theatre was dominated by Violet Ranney Lang—V. R. Lang in her life as a poet and playwright and Bunny to her friends, of whom Gorey, Lurie, O’Hara, and Larry Osgood were among the closest. Living according to the Wildean principle “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works,” she was one of those people who are never offstage.35 Her poetry showed promise, but her compulsive inability to let the thing be, rewriting her poems until she’d written the life out of them, was fatal. (In some cases, she revised a poem as many as forty times.) As for her acting, the unlikely juxtaposition of what Ashbery called her “mournful clown’s face,” dominated by large, doleful eyes, and her impeccable comic timing made her wonderful to watch onstage, but her range was limited to one role, the role she was born to play: Bunny Lang.36
Quick-witted and fiercely opinionated, she was charismatic, manipulative, mercurial, and, depending on your perspective, charmingly or exasperatingly eccentric. She had a genius for score settling. When a man named Parker wronged her, she ordered up a thousand stickers whose black lettering announced, against a background pink as boiled ham, “My name is Parker and I am a pig.” She stuck them everywhere the luckless wretch was sure to pass, from his apartment-house door to his subway station to the bathroom in his office building to his favorite bar, leaving the man “in a state of continual nervous rage,” Lurie recalls.37 “Bunny was definitely one of the great sacred monsters,” Gorey agreed.38 Ted and Bunny were “very close,” says Osgood. “Anecdotes about Bunny, they would please Ted enormously, just the strangeness and funniness and mischievousness of them.” She shared his ironic, opera-box view of the human comedy, a gently mocking perspective that recalls the Wilde quotation “To become a spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.”39
When she died at the age of thirty-two, on July 29, 1956, of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she left behind a slim—some would say slight—body of work, collected in V. R. Lang: Poems & Plays with a Memoir by Alison Lurie. But everyone who knew her agrees that her most memorable creation was her offstage persona. Even her funeral had a theatrical quality to it. Mount Auburn Cemetery, where she was laid to rest on a midsummer afternoon, provided the perfect backdrop for her last bow. With its Greek temples and Egyptian monoliths and “marble Victorian nymphs wiping away marble tears under weeping willows,” it “was like a painting,” Lurie thought, “some crazy half-classical, half-romantic Arcadia.”40
* * *
Amid the backstage dramas of the Poets’ Theatre, Gorey was his wittily ironic self, aloof from the emotional maelstrom, although he savored the morsels of gossip he swapped with Lurie and Lang. Lurie thought he was “one of the sanest and calmest people in the whole organization.”41 He was unquestionably one of the most industrious. In his time with the Poets’ Theatre, Gorey designed stage sets for Try! Try! and Three Words in No Time and, as important, a blizzard of posters and handbills, most of them drawn in a loose-lined, quick-sketch style. For Lang’s Fire Exit (Vaudeville for Eurydice) (1952), he dashed off an evocative sketch of a downcast burlesque dancer in fishnet stockings, slumped in a chair. He also designed the group’s logo, a classical Greek poet contemplating an actor’s mask while a cherub drapes him in a toga bearing the group’s name. And he came up with the arresting salmon-and-yellow-striped motif that embellished the theater curtain and the group’s mailings. Even the tickets, with their antique typography (hand-drawn, naturally), were the product of his pen. Sayre recalled, “Gorey’s late Victorian taste dominated the visual aspects of the first productions: he designed most of the sets, and his frowning cherubs and somber fantasies recurred in the Poets’ backdrops and posters.”42 His aesthetic—the Victorian-Edwardian references, the gloomy-cartoony drawings, the hand lettering, the deliciously icky color schemes—defined what we’d now call the group’s visual branding.
Not satisfied with designing stage sets and turning out a flurry of posters and other promotional materials, Gorey wrote two plays for the group, The Teddy Bear, a Sinister Play (credited, on the program, to a Mr. Egmont Glebe) and Amabel, or The Partition of Poland (attributed to Timothy Carapace). Teddy Bear premiered on February 20, 1952, as part of an evening of entertainments “Somewhat in the Victorian Manner” whose divertissements also included something called “The Children’s Hour” by Molly Howe and Gorey (writing under the name Mr. Edmund Godelpus); “Undine” by Mr. Eldritch Gorm (another Gorey pseudonym); and “The Entertainment,” directed by Mr. Ector Gasmantle (Gorey again, behind an unimprovably Goreyesque nom de plume).
Sayre remembers Teddy Bear as “the kind of short nonplay that they [the Poets’ Theatre people] esteemed.”43 As she recalls it, “a murderous Teddy bear was attached to a string on which it was slowly pulled offstage while a husband and wife argued with each other. (They didn’t know that the bear was on its way to strangle their baby in the nursery).” In the bickering parents, we hear echoes of Gorey’s childhood. Amabel, which premiered on May 22, 1952, in the Fogg Museum court, was a bit of Firbankian whimsy, buffeted by paroxysms of (tongue-in-cheek) angst. “The world’s a garden full of bears,” Amabel soliloquizes,
A pool of noisome balderdash,
A closet choked with rotting trash.
…A fearful trick, a frightful hoax,
An endless string of pointless jokes
—And all on me.
One day I’ll die.44
It was “very amusing,” Lurie thought, “very much like the work he became famous for; kind of Victorian, kind of Edwardian. It had the kind of way-out characters and costumes that he had fun creating.”45
The allure of the Poets’ Theatre, for Gorey, had partly to do with its intellectual effervescence, partly to do with the personalities orbiting around the scene. “It was the most fun I had in the early days because of the variety of people who were involved,” Ted recalled in 1984.46 Theater is social by definition, of course, and he relished the opportunity to escape the isolation of the drawing board for a more collaborative art form and to be part of a collective that also served as a surrogate family of sorts. “It was goofy amateur theater where we all did very arty plays and came up with all sorts of ideas and projects,” he remembered. “‘Ooo, goody,’ we’d say, devising something or other. And then ‘Oh, God, what was that all about?’ as we watched it sink without a trace.”47
* * *
Gorey’s artistic activities—his involvement in the Poets’ Theatre and his never-ending labors for Moore, who pelted him with letters suggesting cringeworthy ideas for illustrations such as “The sonnet’s warts are removed by electric needle”—took place against the backdrop of everyday life, which went on in the usual uneventful way, enlivened now and then by minor dramas.48
In September of ’51 he moved to a basement apartment at 70 Marlborough Street—a brownstone Victorian row house in Boston’s Back Bay, a neighborhood that was an architectural mausoleum of well-preserved Victorians. Given the chance, he’d begun living with cats again. “The cats are…dismembering pigeons all over everywhere,” he wrote in a letter to Alison Lurie, “and leaving snacks for later on in the evening lying about.”49 From then on, he’d never be catless.
That same year, he enlisted as a foot soldier in Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson’s presidential run, mailing campaign literature—an eyebrow-raising spasm of activism in light of Gorey’s later attitude toward politics, which alternated between disdain and apathy. Stevenson’s opponent, the former general and World War II war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, tapped into the commie-hunting mood of Cold War America to hand the witty liberal Democrat a crushing defeat. Deeply dispirited, Gorey washed his hands of politics forever. “I voted one time, for Stevenson in 1952,” was his final word on the subject.50
Shortly before the election, there was another plot twist in Gorey’s story, this one so farcical it seems like something out of his nonsense plays. On September 20, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune’s Society Notebook column, Edward L. Gorey and Mrs. Helen G. Gorey were remarried in the rectory of Chicago’s venerable Holy Name Cathedral.51
Was the Goreys’ late-life remarriage a tale of lovers fated to remain together? Or was it an act of Good Samaritanism on Helen’s part? Ed was not in robust good health; his years as a newsman and a flack—decades of late nights, boozing, and smoking—were catching up with him. Did she take him in for old times’ sake, so he wouldn’t die alone?
During his brief marriage to Corinna Mura, Ed Gorey had worked, from ’39 to ’41, as the director of publicity at the Chicago office of the Illinois State Council of Defense, which organized civil-defense teams—wardens who oversaw air-raid drills, volunteer spotters who scanned the skies for enemy planes. Mura, meanwhile, was bouncing between Chicago and New York, performing on the radio and playing nightclubs. In ’41, Ed moved to Washington, DC, where, still in the employ of the defense council, he served as PR director of an office dedicated to securing armaments contracts and war-industry plants for Illinois. That same year, Mura left for Hollywood, where she signed with RKO. Sometime in the early ’40s, they divorced. Mura’s constant touring and the warring demands of DC and Hollywood must have taken their toll. (Their breakup seems to have been amicable; Ed corresponded with Corinna until his death, and his surviving letters are warmly affectionate.) After the war, Ed returned to Chicago, where by the late ’40s he’d landed a job as public relations director for P. J. “Parky” Cullerton, the powerful, deep-pocketed alderman of the city’s Thirty-Eighth Ward and chairman of the city council’s finance committee.
What Ted thought of his parents’ reunion we can only guess. “I remember [him] telling me about it when I went up to Radcliffe,” says Skee Morton. (Skee, like her sister, Eleanor, went to Radcliffe.) “He took me out to the movies occasionally, and I remember he said once, ‘Oh, incidentally, my parents got married again today.’” Eleanor added, “I remember him rolling his eyes when asked about his family.”
Gorey’s jaundiced reaction to his parents’ remarriage isn’t surprising. Father and son were poles apart. A hail-fellow-well-met type, always good for a laugh, with a toastmaster’s supply of one-liners, Ed Gorey was the antithesis of his oddball, bookworm son in practically every way. Both were writers, it’s true. But there the resemblances end. As a reporter, Ed turned out workmanlike prose, indistinguishable from the characterless wire-service copy that unfurled from Teletype machines in newsrooms everywhere. By contrast, Ted’s voice on the page is instantly recognizable. Tellingly, Gorey fils was “Ted” to family, childhood friends, and his social circles at Harvard and in New York and “Edward” to seemingly everyone he met after moving to the Cape but never, ever “Ed” if he could help it.
Skee is certain that Ted “was never close to his father.” “We never heard anything about his father,” Eleanor confirms. Ed “never came here [Cape Cod], and as far as Ted told me he never went there [Chicago], except perhaps at the end [of Gorey senior’s life, when he was dying of cancer].”
As for the view from Ed Gorey’s side of the father-son divide, he seemed bemused by his son. Early the following year, in a letter written in the jocose, life-of-the-party tone he affected in his correspondence, he confided to Merrill Moore about his eccentric son’s antics, comparing his letters to “a joint report from Vera Vague, Gracie Allen, and Judy Canova.”52 At the very least, the older Gorey allowed, there was never a dull moment with Ted: “He has you either amused—or clutching the chandelier.”b
In Chicago for the holidays with his newly remarried parents, Ted delivered “a joint lecture…shortly after New Year’s with Miss Camille Chaddick, a director of the Northwestern Drama group,” according to Judith Cass’s puff piece in the Tribune—the fruit, most likely, of Ed’s PR campaign for the Merrill Moore books. The Trib writer laid it on a little thick when she described Ted as “busy writing and directing for the Poets’ Theatre…and with art assignments in his Boston studio.”53
Gorey had, in fact, just published his first cover illustration for a national magazine. His artless, loose-lined sketch of a dapper chap in a trilby hat gazing at a cluster of onion-domed Oriental buildings (plunked, improbably, at the end of a wharf) adorns the cover of the November 1952 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The image appears again inside the magazine, in the opening pages of “Evangelist,” a short story by Joyce Cary with “drawings by Edward Gorey,” the name he would use in his professional life from then on (when he wasn’t writing under one of his countless pseudonyms). There are two more Gorey illustrations, done in the same freehand, “unfinished” style as the cover. His compositional skills are evident, as is his ability to hint at psychological depths with the subtlest of cues. We sense a subconscious interplay, a counterpoint of averted gazes and furtive glances, between the figures he arranges in little knots, each absorbed in his or her own thoughts. And his draftsmanship—specifically, his feeling for landscape and his attention to architectural detail—is getting better.
But in December of ’52 Ted was nowhere near the conquering hometown hero suggested by Cass’s breathless description. That June, he bemoaned the general state of his affairs in a letter to Alison Lurie, who’d moved away from Cambridge by then. “Existence, if one chooses to be optimistic enough to call it that, is, here, deadly,” he writes. “I am on the verge of starvation and debtors’ prison once again. I wrote Cap Pearce the end of last week for a job at Little, Brown, but he hasn’t answered yet.…Being without the wherewithal to buy gin, I am drinking tonic all by itself.”54 He was going to redouble his assault on the job market, targeting libraries, “publishers, advertising agencies, and after that, Gawd knows.” Meantime, “a small child (presumed) is beating furiously on the back fence with a poker. Too dreary.”55
Things were about to change. Just before his Christmas trip to Chicago, he’d visited New York, where Barbara Epstein—a friend from his Harvard days, when she was Barbara Zimmerman—was an editor at Doubleday. Her husband, Jason, also a Doubleday editor, was launching Anchor Books, the company’s first venture into what were then uncharted waters: quality literature published in mass-market paperback format. Strictly speaking, Barbara wasn’t on the Anchor staff, but she had her husband’s ear, and Jason respected her “very strong sense” of the visual statement the new imprint should make.56 Hiring Gorey to design covers for Anchor was her idea. “We had to have a cover designer, and Barbara suggested Ted—Teddles, as she called him,” says Jason. “He was perfect. He was a genius.” Gorey whipped up a portfolio of fake covers for them, which in his recollection were “as uncommercial as you can reasonably get.”57 Somehow, though, they were just the thing for Anchor as far as the Epsteins were concerned. “They offered me a job,” said Gorey, “which at first I turned down because I didn’t want to live in New York.”58
His move to Manhattan would mark the true beginning of his long, dogged trudge to cult fame and, ultimately, more mainstream success than an incurable eccentric could have hoped for. Even so, thirty-four years in New York wouldn’t do much to diminish his antipathy for the city. In another version of the story of his hiring by the Epsteins, he sharpened that point: “At first I said no, but then I thought, ‘I’m not really surviving very noticeably in Boston, so I’ll move to New York, much as I hate the place.’ A thought I never lost sight of. It’s just too much.”59
a “Vous sera un succès fou” is French for “You will be a wild success.” “Goodbye Arno Cobean and Steig here comes…Gorey”: Peter Arno, Sam Cobean, and William Steig were marquee names in the New Yorker’s roster of cartoonists at the time.
b Vera Vague was a screw-loose “spinster” created in the radio era by the actress Barbara Jo Allen. A fluttery hysteric, nonstop yakker, and font of misinformation on every subject, Vera was the sort of genially sexist stereotype that cracked them up on the Bob Hope and Rudy Vallée shows. In like fashion, Gracie Allen played a nutty, corkscrew-logic housewife to George Burns’s wryly perplexed man of the house on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show from 1950 to ’58. Judy Canova, another movie actress and radio personality of the day, often played a gullible goofball hillbilly. (Odd that Gorey’s father should compare his son exclusively to exaggerated caricatures of femininity.)