“Like a Captive Balloon, Motionless Between Sky and Earth”
New York, 1953
Gorey on the New Jersey Palisades near the George Washington Bridge, November 1958. (Photograph by Sandy Everson-Levy.
Bambi Everson, private collection.)
“I MOVED TO NEW YORK at the beginning of 1953,” recalled Gorey, “and embarked on what is laughingly called my career.”1 During his visit in December of ’52, before going home to Chicago for the holidays, he’d apartment-hunted in Greenwich Village, whose time-honored bohemianism made it Gorey’s natural habitat. Unable to find anything suitable in the Village, he’d settled, at last, on a studio apartment in an elegant four-story town house in the midtown neighborhood of Murray Hill.
Thirty-six East 38th Street is a brick-and-limestone-trimmed mansion built circa 1862 and remodeled in 1903 with a Beaux-Arts facade. The feel of the place was similar to that of his Marlborough Street apartment in Boston, except that he lived on the second floor rather than in the basement, “at the back and so quiet,” he told Merrill Moore, “with a roof which I can use to sunbathe and the like.”2
Gorey’s new lodgings were handy for the Doubleday offices at 575 Madison Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets. The art department was shoehorned into a single space on the sixteenth floor. “Nine people in one big room” is how Diana Klemin, the art director at the time, remembers it. Improbably, one of Ted’s workmates was none other than Connie Joerns, his bosom friend from Francis Parker. Like Gorey, she’d moved to New York to seek her fortune. Joerns was a production assistant, handling pasteup and layout, though she doubled as an illustrator on occasion.
Job titles weren’t taken all that seriously at Anchor. The Epsteins envisioned Gorey as a designer, creating a distinctive look for the trailblazing imprint, but Klemin thought of him, initially, as an in-house artist. “I started out as an artist in the art department, then I switched over to being a book designer” is how he remembered it.3 He underwent a brief apprenticeship, learning the ropes of book-cover production, before graduating to full-fledged design. “He was on the drawing boards,” says Klemin, “fixing mechanicals [for freelancers like Leonard Baskin and Ben Shahn], doing paste-ups and designing jackets.”4 “Mechanicals,” in the precomputer age, were templates created by pasting cover elements such as artwork and type proofs onto a sheet of stiff-stock paper; printers used this template to make a printing plate.
Doing pasteup involved laying out the artwork and typographic elements, such as the title. Type had to be specced—marked up with instructions that specified which typeface, font, and font size the printer should use. For Gorey, who didn’t have a design-school knowledge of typefaces, it was a laborious, detail-intensive chore. Frustration, it turned out, was the mother of invention: the hand-lettered typography that’s so much a part of his work’s anachronistic charm began as a quick-and-dirty solution to the demands of his job. “I really didn’t know too much about type in those days, and it was simply easier to hand-letter the whole thing than to spec type,” he told the design writer Steven Heller.5 Everyone went gaga over Gorey’s hand-lettered typography, “which I did very poorly, I always felt, but everybody seemed to like it. So I got stuck with it for the rest of my life.”6
Lafcadio’s Adventures by André Gide, cover design and illustration by Edward Gorey. (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953)
Sure enough, the title, cover lines, and even the price on his first cover for Anchor, Lafcadio’s Adventures by André Gide, are hand-lettered in an antique typeface style. By drawing them askew, he gives them a jaunty, animated quality that captures the madcap spirit of Gide’s novel, a satirical thriller about a gang of con men who disguise themselves as priests in order to dupe a bunch of wealthy Catholic monarchists. Gorey sets the white title against a slate-blue trestle whose arches frame a series of vignettes: a furtive figure spying on red-cloaked priests, a lady in a bustle and a hat with huge plumes, and so forth. In the foreground, a gawky youth—Lafcadio, we imagine—strikes one of Gorey’s ballet poses, observing the goings-on. Gorey’s visual wit and tonic use of color are on display, and the eye bounces around the busy scene, guided by his strong sense of composition.
The Wanderer by Alain-Fournier, cover design and illustration by Edward Gorey. (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953)
By contrast, his cover for Alain-Fournier’s The Wanderer, also published in ’53, is masterful in its use of empty space: in a landscape whose austerity recalls the black-ink paintings of the Japanese sumi-e tradition, a lone traveler toils along a white road under a white sun in a white sky. The gusting wind whips his cape. Ahead looms the forest primeval, deep and dark. Compositions such as this, in which expanses of empty space—limitless vistas, big skies—are contrasted dramatically with single-hair details or densely crosshatched shadows, will become a Gorey signature.
Gorey had “a natural tendency toward black and white,” he said. “Line drawing is where my talent lies.”7 He claimed, in his usual self-deprecating fashion, to be helpless when it came to color. “With color,” he told his friend Clifford Ross, “I have a tendency to wish to blow my brains out at some point or other. I always have trouble finishing color. I mean, I start out and put in the colors I like—olive green, and lemon yellow, and lavender. And I think, ‘Oh, dear, there are other colors that have to go in this some way or other.’ But I don’t know what colors I want in there. And then I realize I don’t want any more color than this at all. And so I sit there.”8
He protested too much. One of the things that makes Gorey’s Anchor covers so instantly identifiable, and so seductive, is what Diana Klemin calls his “very refreshing use of color.” At times, his palette is reminiscent of the Japanese artists he loved, ukiyo-e masters of the wood-block print such as Hokusai, and of English illustrators such as Edward Ardizzone (1900–1979) and Edward Bawden (1903–89), both of whom he admired. We can detect, in some of Gorey’s covers, the influence of Ardizzone’s delicate watercolor washes and Bawden’s linocuts, with their blocks of solid color and sharply incised lines. Gorey drew inspiration, more generally, from British book design, which he encountered by way of his fondness for British writers. “I was aware of British book jackets because I bought a lot of British books at the time,” he said.9
Asked by Steven Heller about his partiality for colors that are “always muted, very earthy, and distinctly subtle,” Gorey replied, “I guess I could have picked bright reds or blues, but I’ve never been much for that. My palette seems to be sort of lavender, lemon-yellow, olive-green, and then a whole series of absolutely no colors at all.”10 He was especially fond of his cover for Travels in Arabia Deserta, a classic of Victorian travel writing, which evokes the desolate beauty of the desert in “three different shades of blah gray-olive.”11
Heller thinks Gorey’s aesthetic was partly a child of necessity. “Having to use three flat colors plus black, rather than process color, was the factor that would give his paperback covers a certain silkscreened or etched look,” he asserts in Edward Gorey: His Book Cover Art & Design.12 In process printing, translucent inks in three primary colors—cyan (blue), magenta (red), and yellow—are superimposed, in the form of countless tiny dots, to produce what are known as halftone images. For example, when cyan and yellow overlap, they make green. Flat-color printing, also known as spot-color printing, involves premixing inks to produce specific colors. Each color is printed discretely, a process that requires multiple runs through the printing press; the result is shapes that are crisply incised and colors that are more densely opaque than process colors—more solid looking.
Often Gorey exploits the theatrical potential of spot-color printing’s defining aspect—its ability to create sharply defined areas, or spots, of pigment—by striking a single, plangent note of vivid color against a monochromatic or muted background. The results are dramatic: on François Villon (1958) by D. B. Wyndham Lewis, a lady in vermilion, framed by a black arch and set against Gorey’s generic gray emptiness, stands out like a candle flame in the dark. Gorey will take this special effect to stunning heights in the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula, in which each of his black-and-white sets will incorporate a single blood-red element.
“Flat-color printing inks for Gorey are like the melodramatic extremes of light and dark for the noir cinematographer,” Heller maintains. “The deliberate choice of hue is both design tool and dramatic device and is used to focus the viewer’s eyes on a character.”13 His cover for Thérèse (1956) by François Mauriac is a case in point:
Color heightens anxiety in Gorey’s cover for…Thérèse, about a woman who has poisoned her husband and reflects on her reasons, spending the novel recalling her deed. It is dominated by two shades of sienna, one for the ground, the other the sky. The viewer’s eye, however, is directed to a crimson hat and coat on a woman sitting joylessly (or maybe not) alone on a small bench with her thoughts. Color washes over the minimally expressive line work and imposes a sense of sorrow over the entire vignette. The viewer is encouraged to question what came before and what comes after this frozen moment.14
For Heller, this open-endedness, this invitation to participate in the act of making meaning, is a significant part of what makes Gorey’s book covers so beguiling. I’d go further, arguing that this quality characterizes not just his cover art but his entire body of work; it’s an essential aspect of what makes Gorey Gorey. Think of his revealing remark “I’m beginning to feel that if you create something, you’re killing a lot of other things. And the way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I’m doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader’s mind.”15
His palette of unsettling, ambiguous colors makes a philosophical point: the world is full of ambiguity and mutability, things that elude the snares of language. The best art, he believed, “is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else.”16 In some ineffable, lavender, lemon-yellow, olive-green way, his use of color captures that feeling.
But Gorey’s color sense wasn’t the only aspect of his Anchor covers that elevated them above mere commercial come-on into works of art you could put in your pocket. On occasion, he used type and nothing else to decorate a book’s cover, treating text as illustration. Stymied by the cerebral subject matter of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s two-volume Either/Or (1959)—a dialectical tug-of-war between ethics and aesthetics as seen from a Christian-existentialist perspective—Gorey did away with illustration altogether. For volume 1, he set the author’s name in contrasting white type against a black square and the book’s title in black type against a gray square. For the second volume, he reversed that color scheme, standing the logic of volume 1 on its head: the white type is now black, the black type is white. Viewed side by side, his covers for Either/Or mirror the dialectical structure of Kierkegaard’s book, which presents its argument in the form of a debate. At the same time, Gorey slyly mocks the black-or-white binaries that underwrite much of Western philosophy.
From ’53 until he left Doubleday, in 1960, he did the cover art on something like fifty books and handled the pasteup, lettering, or design of many others. If Jason Epstein had had his way, “the whole line” would’ve been “Edward Gorey,” says Klemin, but she put her foot down, pointing out that at Vintage and Knopf the “sales department hated their paperbacks because they were all one design.”
Epstein relented, and Klemin branched out, using illustrators such as Leonard Baskin, Ben Shahn, Robin Jacques, Ivan Chermayeff, and, in his hardscrabble, pre-Pop days, a young Andy Warhol, whom Gorey may have known passingly.17 Even so, Gorey’s work embodied the Anchor aesthetic as far as the Epsteins were concerned, and they continued to cherry-pick titles they wanted him to illustrate, discussing the details with Ted in their apartment after work. “They were beautiful, ravishing,” said Barbara in 1992, talking about Gorey’s cover illustrations. “He worked very slowly, with a tremendous perfectionism, and he would never let a drawing out of his hands if it was less than perfect.”18
* * *
Anchor Books, founded in 1953 by twenty-four-year-old Jason Epstein, was in the vanguard of the paperback revolution. Robert de Graff fired the first salvo in 1939 when he launched the first mass-market paperback line in America, Pocket Books. Publishing’s old guard had pooh-poohed de Graff’s assumption that consumers would buy cheap paperbound reprints of classics and bestsellers. Book buying was an elite pastime, the exclusive province of those with the income and education to indulge in expensive status symbols like hardbound books.
What they couldn’t foresee was a mass audience swollen by the millions of veterans who’d acquired the reading habit overseas, thanks to Armed Services Editions of popular paperbacks distributed free to the troops. After the war, many of them would go to college on the GI Bill, as Gorey and O’Hara had. Vets made up a sizable part of the new book-hungry audience that gobbled up 2,862,792 copies of Pocket’s Five Great Tragedies by Shakespeare the year it was published. Pocket Books were cheap—a quarter apiece—and they were everywhere, not just in tony big-city bookshops: de Graff distributed them to newsstands, drugstores, lunch counters, and bus and train stations. They flew off the racks.
A gold rush was on: competing imprints such as Avon, Dell, and Bantam sprang up throughout the ’40s. Lurid covers by hack illustrators accosted the browser with all the subtlety of a peep-show barker. “Paperback publishers made no effort to distinguish classics from kitsch,” writes the cultural critic Louis Menand.19 “On the contrary, they commissioned covers for books like Brave New World and The Catcher in the Rye from the same artists who did the covers for books like Strangler’s Serenade and The Case of the Careless Kitten.” “Horrible,” says Epstein. “They came out of the magazine business, the illustrators.”
Anchor’s covers were an indispensable part of his strategy, conveying at a glance the difference between serious literature for the educated millions, published in a “quality paperback” format, and books born to be pulped, like My Gun Is Quick by Mickey Spillane. While Gorey’s visual rhetoric was sophisticated, speaking to “those in college and just after college,” as Klemin put it, his work was illustrative in the time-honored sense, deftly conveying the mood of a novel or the subject of a scholarly work. “Ted was inimitable and gave the series its cachet; he gave it the look,” says Epstein. “The covers made a huge difference. They said what we were trying to do.”
“Within a year or so, Anchor Books was well-established and very profitable,” Epstein recalls. “Since the titles belonged to the postwar intellectual zeitgeist, they all sold well, especially those with Gorey’s covers.”20 By 1958, Print magazine, an influential voice in the fields of design and illustration, had taken notice of Gorey’s innovative cover art. “There have been a group of Anchor Book covers that have a quality all their own,” the unnamed editorial staffer proclaimed. “Print has discovered that these are the work of one man, Edward Gorey. Gorey designs the covers, letters the titles, and very often the rest of the cover. He also does the final illustrations. This versatility has resulted in a unity of feeling…a quality that is highly distinctive.”21
Just as Anchor blazed the trail for what would soon be known as the trade paperback, a format that would help democratize highbrow culture by bringing classics of world literature and philosophy to the masses, Gorey was part of a wave of designers and illustrators who used the four-by-seven cover as a canvas, transforming the book cover into a popular art form. Heller, who during his thirty-three years as an art director at the New York Times often used Gorey for freelance illustration work, groups him together with boundary-pushing designer-illustrators such as Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Leo Lionni. “What he created was an environment of original art for paperback books that had a personality, a character,” says Heller.
At first glance, Gorey’s work for Anchor looks reactionary next to the swinging, sophisticated modernism epitomized by Paul Rand’s covers for Knopf and Alvin and Elaine Lustig’s covers for Noonday and Meridian. But by asserting the virtues of anachronism—hand-drawn antique fonts as opposed to machine-produced type, Victorian and Edwardian imagery instead of jazzy abstraction—at a moment when postwar America was giddy with visions of a shiny new world of suburban dream homes and laborsaving gadgets, Gorey was postmodern avant la lettre. Like Frank O’Hara’s poetry, his Anchor covers sampled and remixed high and low culture, referencing period styles as well as contemporary British illustration.
At the same time, he was unquestionably part of the paperback revolution, which, along with cultural forces such as television, rock ’n’ roll, and the movies, gave rise to pop culture as we know it. “Paperbacks changed the book business in the same way that 45-r.p.m. vinyl records (‘singles’), introduced in 1949, and transistor radios, which went on sale in 1954, changed the music industry,” writes Menand.22 Gorey’s Anchor covers were part of that social transformation.
* * *
Yet they had things to say about Gorey’s inner life, too. His Anchor covers introduce what will become psychological motifs in his work. The lone figure recurs, making his way through city streets, as on The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (1953), or lost in reverie on a railway platform, as on The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling (1957). Gorey insisted that such motifs had more to do with his limitations as a draftsman than anything else. “There were certain kinds of books where I followed a routine, such as my famous landscape which was mostly sky so I could fit in a title,” he said. “Things like…Victory [Joseph Conrad, 1957] and The Wanderer tend to have low-lying landscapes, a lot of sky, sort of odd colors, and tiny figures that I didn’t have to draw very hard.”23
Still, his solitary nature, his habit of viewing the human comedy with a Beckettian black humor, and his childhood memories of family strife and whispered tales of his grandmother Garvey locked away in a sanitarium make us think there’s more here than meets the eye. Moody figures cluster in small groups. Often one person stands apart, regarded with a cold eye by the others. Furtive, sidelong glances are exchanged or gazes are averted altogether. Faces are expressionless masks, revealing nothing.
His covers for Anchor’s reprints of Henry James novels are case studies in group psychology. Here Gorey psychoanalyzes with pen and ink, exposing the duels and subterfuges just beneath the drawing-room propriety of the Victorian and Edwardian ages in which James wrote. On The Ambassadors, a top-hatted man and a woman in dark blue formal dress stand marooned in a gray infinity, close in proximity but alone in their heads. On What Maisie Knew (1954), a little girl looks on anxiously while her parents hold what seems to be a heated conference in one corner of the room. The man holds his wife by one arm; he looms over her menacingly, and she shrinks away.24
Speaking of psychoanalysis, Gorey’s assignments for Anchor inspired some of the most obviously gay imagery in his oeuvre. His cover illustration for Herman Melville’s Redburn (1957), a novel famous for its rampant homoeroticism, is so winkingly gay it teeters on the brink of self-parody. Many scholars now believe Melville was gay, or at least bisexual. In Redburn, a semiautobiographical bildungsroman about a young New Englander’s first voyage on a merchant ship, Melville draws back the curtain on nineteenth-century shipboard life, where the line between homosocial fraternizing and love between men was a blurry one.
Redburn by Herman Melville, cover design and illustration by Edward Gorey. (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957)
Gorey’s campy cover depicts a young sailor in a bright red shirt—Redburn, we guess—trading suggestive looks with a trio of seafarers, one of whom is sitting spraddle-legged, another of whom is standing with his firmly packed rump toward the young, er, seaman peering at him over his shoulder. There’s a suspicious bulge in Redburn’s crotch, and his hands are thrust into his pockets (for a round of “thumbfumble,” perhaps, the diverting game played by the swingers in Gorey’s parody of Victorian porn, The Curious Sofa). In case we didn’t get the Freudian hint, Gorey draws our attention to the upthrusting belaying pin, its phallic symbolism unmissable. (A gay friend of mine, on seeing this illustration, quipped, “Provincetown meat market.”)
If this seems like a Freudian scavenger hunt run amok, finding phallic symbols everywhere, consider the critic Thomas Garvey’s essay “Edward Gorey and the Glass Closet: A Moral Fable.” Arguing that Gorey’s imagery “was obviously coded as queer,” Garvey chooses his Redburn cover as exhibit A in the case for a queer-theory reading of his work. “Gorey’s design [for Redburn] is hilariously deadpan,” he writes. “All it lacks is a word balloon with ‘Yoo hoo, Sailor!’ to make its come-hither subtext clear: the buttoned-up Redburn’s hands frame his pubes, even as he gazes at the open crotch of a swarthy sailor (while his twin offers up his bum).”25
But behind Garvey’s knowing tone is a searching analysis of mainstream culture’s insistence on turning a blind eye to queer subtexts in Gorey’s work and persona. Garvey isn’t out to “prove” that Gorey is gay: “I never personally knew the talented Mr. Gorey,” he says, “so I don’t ‘know’ if he was gay or not.” His point is that the gay imagery in Gorey’s work, and the gay sensibility encoded in his ironic wit, his flamboyant style, and his pantheon of canonically gay tastes (ballet, Dietrich, silent film, Firbank, Compton-Burnett), urge us to consider his art and life in relation to gay culture and history.
Yet media coverage of Gorey is consistently—and a little too insistently—oblivious to the gay themes in his art, the gay influences on his aesthetic, the gay origins of his persona. The Gorey we meet in perfunctory newspaper profiles is a Dr. Seuss for Tim Burton fans; little is made of the gay subtext of his art and life, presumably because mentioning children’s literature and homosexuality in the same breath stirs dark suspicions in the American mind, especially when the subject is an eccentric old gent who seems to enjoy killing off children (in his stories, at least). If such articles are to be believed, then “Gorey wasn’t necessarily gay, even though he was a life-long bachelor who dressed in necklaces and furs,” Garvey writes. “He was just asexual, a kind of lovable eunuch who spent his spare time petting his cats down on the Cape when he wasn’t drawing his funny little books.”
Moving beyond Redburn, Garvey finds queer-coded images elsewhere in Gorey’s work: a bearded Gorey alter ego standing naked on a “cold, lonely” balcony in The West Wing (1963), “his hands covering his…bum”; the dandyish Victorian uncle in The Hapless Child, staring “furtively at the tush of a male statue just before meeting his doom.” It bears noting that the “eccentric” uncle, inevitably a lifelong bachelor who lived with a male friend, was a stock character in Victorian society, the secret of his sexuality hidden in plain sight. “Who was it who said most gay history lies buried in bachelor graves?” asks Douglass Shand-Tucci, a historian of gay culture.26
It’s also worth pointing out that the image of a man with a well-rounded rear seen from behind is something of a motif in Gorey’s work; it crops up not only in the instances Garvey records but also in the gold statuette of a male nude flexing his buttocks on the back cover of another Anchor title, Michael Nelson’s A Room in Chelsea Square, a bitchy, high-camp comedy of manners about a young man who takes up with a sugar daddy in London. And there it is again in the fastidiously rendered bottoms of the gay young things (Herbert, Albert, and the “exceptionally well-made” Harold) “disporting themselves on the lawn” in The Curious Sofa, and in The Other Statue, where two foppish gents are staring intently at the backside of a well-muscled male statue whose crotch, covered by one of those fig leaves that only draws attention to what it pretends to conceal, is thrust toward us. In the near distance stands another beefy male statue, buttocks rampant. “On the roof a curious discovery was made,” Gorey tells us in what is surely one of his most obliquely revealing lines.
Garvey singles out the image of the naked male figure seen “hind-side-to,” as Gorey would say, in The West Wing. It’s a poignant image in a somber, surrealist poem of a book, free from the camp-gothic whimsy of Gorey’s better-known works. Drawn in what for Gorey is a highly realistic style, the man resembles him in beard and pose; it’s hard not to see the picture as a self-portrait: the artist as a solitary, surrounded on all sides by limitless gloom. A balustrade fences him off from the world. Clasping his hands, childlike, over his buttocks, he conceals the seat of his desire (so to speak). The sense of vulnerability and loneliness—of unrequited love; of never venturing beyond the adolescent crush, even in middle age—is palpable.
“Such an image, it goes without saying, could be troubling to gays and straights alike,” Garvey argues.
To straights, it means pondering the artist’s identity not as some emasculated entertainer but as an actual sexual outsider, expertly manipulating their responses; to gays, it means facing the author’s estrangement from that identity, and his horror of it. And isn’t being gay supposed to be wonderful now? Well, when you look over the oeuvre of Edward Gorey, you get the distinct impression that he didn’t think so. Which makes him a tricky subject for gay critics. For can you have a gay cultural hero who was alienated from gay sex?
Garvey coins the useful term glass closet to describe “that strange cultural zone” inhabited by people in the public eye who “simultaneously operate as both gay and straight.” By dodging interviewers’ questions about his sexuality with evasive or inscrutable replies while sublimating his homosexuality into his art and aesthetics, Gorey had it both ways, Garvey contends. “Gorey kept perfectly mum about his true nature to the press; he only spoke about it in his art. And in a way, to be honest, the glass closet was appropriate to his artistic persona, which was itself neither here nor there, but locked in a kind of alienated stasis. And as his books and designs became more popular with the mass audience, Gorey probably found the glass closet a commercially convenient place to reside as well.”
Garvey thinks it’s our duty to take a sledgehammer to Gorey’s glass closet, especially now that he’s dead. “We’d look down at a Jewish performer who concealed his or her religion, and we’d never tolerate a black performer who worked in whiteface,” he contends. “Why is the glass closet so different?” He exhorts anyone who takes Gorey’s work seriously neither to “emasculate his gayness” nor to “deny his alienation from it. Both aspects of his personality enrich his art—which of course makes it less marketable but more moving.”
Garvey resists the conventional reading of Gorey as a campier Charles Addams whose ironic perversity “allows his art to be re-purposed by heterosexuals into a tonic for the pressures of wholesomeness.” For Garvey, there’s a river of melancholy beneath the surface of Gorey’s camp-macabre diversions. He reads Gorey’s recurrent motif, the death of a child, as a metaphor for the death of innocence that comes with childhood’s end. “And it’s hard not to equate this ‘death,’” he says, “with a similar childish ‘death’—the onset of sexual experience.” He cuts deep here, because one of the great unsolved mysteries of Gorey’s life is what, exactly, happened at that first (and, by all accounts, last) attempt at sex, which put him off the idea forever. It’s Gorey’s Rosebud moment, the experience that made him who he was.
* * *
In New York, Gorey came closer to self-identifying as gay—if only in his mind and to a few close friends—than at any other time in his life, succumbing to crushes on several men, meeting friends for drinks in gay bars, moving in mostly gay circles. He was as cloaked as ever, maintaining the pose of an aloof asexual who finds the whole bothersome business of sex a matter of world-weary indifference. But his letters to Alison Lurie tell a different story.
He refers, now and then, to Third Avenue bars, shorthand for the string of gay gentlemen’s bars on Third Avenue, where the unofficial dress code was conservative and the crowd was well turned out. (In a December 1953 letter to Lurie, Gorey announces that he can’t bear looking so “tatty” a minute longer and is therefore opening a charge account at Chipp—a New York clothier known for its Ivy League style—and is having bespoke suit jackets made and is stocking up on cashmere sweaters and whipcord trousers. He is, he announces, perilously close to chic but hopes he’ll achieve a newfound elegance “in my own manner rather than the Madison Avenue-cum-Third Avenue gay bar one.”)27
Known as the bird circuit (because so many of the bars had names like the Swan, the Golden Pheasant, and the Blue Parrot, in homage to Charlie Parker’s famous jazz club, Birdland), the gay bars Gorey had in mind were sprinkled along Third Avenue between 50th and 60th Streets on the city’s East Side. Frank O’Hara, who had moved to Manhattan in 1951, was living with Hal Fondren on East 49th between First and Second Avenues—a neighborhood O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch describes as “bursting with gay bars,” hangouts that O’Hara, Fondren, and Ashbery often cruised.28 Gorey saw all three of his former schoolmates now and again, though whether he joined them in their barhopping isn’t known.
The Village was a magnet for gay nightlife, too, and Gorey’s letters reveal that he ventured downtown on at least a couple of occasions. In a September ’53 letter to Lurie, he remarks, offhandedly, that a lesbian friend was going to take him to the Bagatelle, a “frightful” bar in the West Village.29 Now long gone, the Bagatelle, at 86 University Place, was one of the few lesbian bars in ’50s New York. In the back room, butch “daddies” (women in male drag, hair slicked back, breasts tightly bound with Ace bandages) competed for “mommies” (“lipstick lesbians” who dressed in a conventionally feminine manner). A warning light flashed, announcing a raid, whenever the vice squad barged into the front room. The Bag was a tough joint, catering to a working-class crowd. “If you asked the wrong woman to dance,” the lesbian poet Audre Lorde recalled, “you could get your nose broken in the alley down the street by her butch.”30 It’s hard to imagine Gorey in such a place; hard, even, to imagine him that far downtown in an era when “queer hunters” prowled the Village late at night. One such gang beat the Bag’s bartender to death with bike chains. “Even in the Village, or especially in the Village, you couldn’t be gay and feel safe,” according to one of the bar’s habitués.31
Gorey’s furtive explorations of gay New York took place against a backdrop of raids and other forms of legalized harassment. Snickering caricatures of “pansies,” “horticultural” young men, “the effeminate clan,” and other “degenerates” were commonplace in newspaper reportage. The antigay witch hunt known as the Lavender Scare was given the seal of official approval on April 29, 1953, when President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, barring homosexuals from federal employment on the grounds that their “perversion” made them vulnerable to Soviet agents who might blackmail them into spying for the Russkies.
In such a climate, Gorey’s reticence about his sexuality is perfectly understandable. Of course, the fact that he was a solitary, bookish man who found solace in the arts and companionship in his cats may have had something to do with his circumspection, too. While he relished Larry Osgood’s tales of his torrid love life, Gorey’s “Victorian soul” would have quailed at the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am assignations of gay friends like O’Hara. “The good love a park and the inept a railway station,” O’Hara observed in his poem “Homosexuality,” written in 1954.32 “Tallying up the merits of each of the [subway] latrines” for the purposes of anonymous sex, he ends, plaintively, “It’s a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.”
Did Gorey want to be wanted? Or did he really require nothing more than books, Balanchine, cats, and his work? In an August 1953 letter to Lurie, he confides that he feels “even less alive” in New York than he did in Boston and that, while he doesn’t envy his friends the turbulence of their love lives, he does think he “ought to be having a few direct emotional experiences, however small.”33 He was twenty-eight when he wrote those poignant lines.
His letters to Lurie do make reference to occasional infatuations—very occasional, if his mention of two in the years spanning ’53 through ’58 is a full accounting. In a September ’53 letter, he announces, out of the blue, that Larry Osgood introduced him to a friend from Buffalo. “I fear I have fallen in love with it very badly indeed,” he confides.34 “It” is a drop-dead-gorgeous thirty-year-old named Ed who may or may not be bisexual but is without question “almost perfectly narcissistic.” Ed is taken with Ted, both “mentally and physically,” and much two-fisted drinking ensues, culminating in a shrieking match outside a bar.
When Ed leaves town, an overwrought correspondence follows, though with no mention of when they’ll see each other again, which Gorey finds odd, reasonably enough. In November, he tells Lurie that he’s been suicidal because he hasn’t heard from Ed; happily, a ten-page letter arrived before Gorey took drastic action.35 Still, things continue weird: as he drifts off to sleep one night, he realizes he can only remember Ed with some difficulty, and when he does the indistinct personage who materializes in his mind’s eye seems only vaguely related to the recipient of his love letters. “Very odd,” he admits to Lurie, “but I imagine it all has to do with sex.”
Come December, he’s at least “partially cured” of his obsession, he tells Lurie, having discovered that a mutual friend was simultaneously carrying on with Ed.36 Listening to his besotted friend agonize over his infatuation, Gorey realizes what an ass he’s been, having seen himself “in the mirror, as it were,” of his lovesick friend’s addle-brained behavior.
Nevertheless, Ed has unsettled him to the extent that all manner of rash actions, from sleeping with strangers to taking the cloth, have suddenly gone from “the unthinkable to the ponderable.”37 Whether Gorey threw caution to the wind and buried his sorrows in one-night stands we’ll never know, though that seems about as likely as his joining the Church. One thing is certain: that’s the last we ever hear of Ed.
* * *
Life went on, as it tends to do. Gorey’s job at Doubleday wasn’t too bad, he wrote Lurie, although the low wages left him “financially in perfectly ghastly straits”; moreover, “about fifty percent of the work is veddy dull indeed, but I think that’s probably rather a low percentage considering.”38
He decorated his part of “the art department cubbyhole” with Goreyesque bric-a-brac, Diana Klemin remembers, including “a skeleton head.” At times, having a resident weirdo came in handy, she says. “If you were on a project and you were stuck, and the editor was just unbearable, and you hated the assignment but you had to get it done, you’d say, ‘Ted, throw me a tantrum.’ For three or four minutes, he would jump up and down and scream. All the tension went out of the art department.”
During his lunch hour, Gorey would hit the art galleries on Madison Avenue or gulp a quick bite, then work on freelance assignments or his own projects. Sometimes he went out to lunch with Connie Joerns or Barbara Epstein.
He saw quite a bit of Barbara socially. Ted and Barbara “were as close as two people could be,” Jason recalls. They had a jokey lingo all their own, an “Edwardian babble” in which “his name was Teddles, Barbara’s name was Bubsy,” a cigarette was a “ciggy-boo” or a “flaming bo-bo,” and so on. Jason attributes their in-crowd argot to “that campy thing they all were doing” at Radcliffe and Harvard. “It was a way of being different and revolutionary. Others might have wanted to become Communists or Buddhists or something but that’s what they were doing.”
On occasion, Gorey went to parties at the Epsteins’, a stunning two-story apartment with fireplaces, plural, on 67th between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Over cocktails, his favorite conversational topics were literature and gossip “in a gentle way,” Jason remembers. “There wasn’t a mean bone in his body.” The truth of the matter, though, is that Ted “didn’t like New York parties. He almost never invited people to his apartment.”
Jason was one of the lucky few. “Everything about it was [in] great style,” he says. It was “very elegant” but small and overstuffed, bulging at the seams with cats and curios and books packed two layers deep in built-in bookshelves and stacked in the fireplace, even. (By ’53, Gorey had three cats. Ultimately, he’d keep as many as five in the one-room apartment.) It was so crammed with stuff, Epstein remembers, that there was nowhere to sit down. (When Tobi Tobias interviewed Gorey for Dance Magazine, in 1974, she got “the only chair—a drafting stool; Gorey, fidgeting with his many Indian silver rings, perched on the seat of a small stepladder…”)39 “There was no room for two in that apartment—or in that life,” says Jason.
Gorey’s collection of memento mori caught his eye. There was a human skull and “an ivory carving of a dead person with flies all over it”—the sort of thing “crazy Catholics” kept around “to remind them of mortality,” Jason thought—and a mummy’s head, which Gorey, unbeknownst to his workmates, had kept wrapped in brown paper on the shelf of the Doubleday coat locker while waiting for its glass display case to be made. The head would, in time, find lifelong—if that’s the word—companionship in the mummy’s hand that Gorey also acquired. He kept the hand in a wooden box on one of his bookshelves. “It’s only a child’s,” he told an interviewer, as if that explained things.40
At some point, Gorey’s library overflowed his bookcases and engulfed everything: a journalist visiting his apartment in 1979 was agape at “mountains—better make that mountain ranges—rising from the floor, falling off the mantel, wedged against the bureau, stacked beside the bed. It’s impossible to say with assurance that the floor holds a rug, since every square inch of space (except for a narrow aisle that snakes from the drawing board to a narrow hall containing a wall-kitchen and the bathroom) is taken up with cartons and packing crates. My wild hunch is that these contain books.”41
Gorey never used his minuscule kitchenette, he claimed, because his apartment was so tiny that the smell of whatever he cooked would be hanging in the air “three weeks later.”42 Peter Wolff, a member of Gorey’s New York City Ballet circle in the ’70s, confirms that “every meal was eaten out at one horrible restaurant or another” whose only virtue was its proximity to 36 East 38th.
For someone who filled his pen-and-ink interiors with sumptuous decor, Gorey lived in conditions that would make a self-flagellating monk feel right at home: all that was missing was the scourge. The walls were scabrous with peeling paint. His floor-level bed had no headboard. When he sat in it, reading, he leaned against the wall; directly over his head hung “two large sculpted pieces of corpselike faces wearing expressions of extreme pain.”43 On another wall, a large antique sculpture of the crucified Christ, sans cross, added a touch of morbid religiosity. With his close-cropped hair and biblical beard, the suffering Messiah looked remarkably like Ted, a resemblance his friends were quick to point out.
Gorey at 36 East 38th Street, 1978. (Photograph by Harry Benson. Copyright Harry Benson Ltd.)
Thirty-six East 38th was Gorey’s cabinet of wonders, bohemian atelier, and Fortress of Solitude rolled into one. Doubleday’s art department closed up shop at five, and if he wasn’t going to the movies or the ballet, he went home, where he worked on drawings for his books until nine-ish, after which a little light reading—a mystery, more often than not—and so to bed. “All the brilliant thoughts and insights and such which I had about New York seem to have vanished or shriveled by this time,” he wrote Lurie in March of ’53. “It’s just another place, with better bookstores, and more movies to go to.”44 Never a New Yorker in the Saul Steinberg sense—that is, one of those Gothamites whose “view of the world from Ninth Avenue,” like the Steinberg cartoon of the same name, places Manhattan at the center of the universe—Gorey always found the city “terribly provincial.”45 “Most of the people seem either hopeless or horrid or both, especially the cultural ones,” he went on in his letter to Lurie, pseudosophisticated phonies who “looked and behaved as if they had emerged from the Remo,” a Bleecker Street bar favored by gay culturati.46 He ended on a wistful note: “I feel like a captive balloon, motionless between sky and earth,” he said. “I want birds to bring me messages.”