IN THE FALL OF ’53, Duell, Sloan and Pearce published the first of Gorey’s hundred-odd little books, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel. Gorey’s meeting with Cap Pearce in Cambridge two years earlier had, at long last, borne fruit. He’d managed to write a good bit of the book at work. “I was fast and competent at what I was doing, as opposed to some people in the editorial department, who were scatterbrained to the point of lunacy, so I wrote a lot of my own books at Doubleday,” said Gorey. “I began with The Unstrung Harp, which I thought was a neat trick. I had never written a book before, and it was all about writing, which I didn’t know anything about.”384
The Unstrung Harp holds up a magnifying glass to the agonies of the scribbling trade. Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass, a novelist of the hand-wringingly neurotic variety, wrestles with writer’s block, the petty jealousies of the literary world, and the loneliness of the writing life. It’s the closest Gorey ever came to a conventional work of fiction: written in prose rather than verse, typeset rather than hand-lettered, with a paragraph of text on each left-hand page facing a full-page illustration on the right, it’s his longest book by far, at sixty pages—a Victorian novel in miniature, its drawing-room dramas and writing-desk miseries writ small.
Of course it isn’t a novel, or even a novella. His little books refuse to be categorized. What are they, exactly? Picture books for grown-ups? Precursors of the graphic novel? Mash-ups of Victorian literature, the comic strip, and the silent-movie storyboard? Throughout Gorey’s career, the genre-defying size and tone of his books, never mind their content, would frustrate publishers and booksellers alike. Publishers were reluctant to market them to children, fearing that their morbid subject matter and gleeful amorality were inappropriate for tots and might enrage self-appointed morality police, who like to ban books. Booksellers didn’t know if they were children’s books or adult fare and were confounded, in any event, by their awkward format. (Even Jason Epstein found the unconventional size of Gorey’s books a tough sell. Asked why he never published his in-house genius, he said, “He never asked me to,” then added, “It would’ve been hard for me to publish [his books]—the format, I wouldn’t know how to sell them. Where would you put them? You’d have to make a little box and put it on the counter somewhere.a It looked like a lot of trouble.”)
Whatever else it is, The Unstrung Harp is a masterpiece of miniaturism in the literal and psychological senses. Its small format—five by eight inches—and intricate illustrations usher us into a dollhouse world. Gorey maintains a tight close-up on the domestic sphere and on the psychological interior it so clearly represented for him, a man who later turned his Cape Cod house into a museum of his obsessions and inspirations—in effect externalizing the contents of his mind.
The anxieties and eccentricities that afflict the book’s high-strung protagonist, its setting in the England of yesteryear (mostly in Mr. Earbrass’s sprawling, gloomy mansion, Hobbies Odd, near Collapsed Pudding, in Mortshire), and its British vocabulary and syntax—wastebaskets are “dustbins,” cookies are “biscuits,” an “athletic sweater of forgotten origin and unknown significance” isn’t worn backwards (for good luck while writing) but rather “hind-side-to”—contribute to the book’s twee-gothic atmosphere. Gorey’s whisker-fine lines and meticulous cross-hatching bring back childhood memories of Ernest Shepard’s illustrations for The Wind in the Willows and Tenniel’s pictures for the Alice books.
Yet in its tone, sophistication, and subject, The Unstrung Harp is anything but childish. The omniscient narrator speaks in a voice that is shockingly arch for its time, far from the bright-eyed breathlessness affected by most children’s writers in the 1950s. It’s the Gorey Voice, a deadpan that never cracks, but with a droll undertow; the distance between its sublime indifference and the lugubrious or odious or horrendous nature of the events it recounts is what makes for irony, and irony is what turns tragedy into black comedy in Gorey’s world.
The Unstrung Harp. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce/Little, Brown, 1953)
Nor is the book’s subject kid stuff. The Unstrung Harp is about “the unspeakable horrors of the literary life,” as the author puts it, by which he means “disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews,” and, worse yet, the terrors of the looming deadline and the blank page. “The best novel ever written about a novelist,” Graham Greene called it in all apparent seriousness.1
Gorey’s claim that he knew nothing about writing when he wrote TUH notwithstanding, he is sharply—and amusingly—perceptive about the brain-racking labor involved in giving birth to a novel. At one point, a minor character named Glassglue startles the author by materializing out of thin air—Gorey’s amusing comment on the implicit loopiness of making up characters, then regarding them as real, as novelists do. Of course there’s the inevitable crisis of confidence, a loss of faith not just in the book in progress but also in writing itself:
Mr Earbrass has rashly been skimming through the early chapters, which he has not looked at for months, and now sees TUH for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why didn’t he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why aren’t there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?
At last, after the protracted agony of revision and a dustup over the book jacket, the book is published by Scuffle and Dustcough (a satirical echo, we suspect, of “Sloan” and “Duell”). But the torture isn’t over: the author has to endure “an afternoon forgathering at the Vicarage vaguely in [his] honor,” where he is buttonholed by Colonel Knout, Master of Foxhounds of the Blathering Hunt. A blustery, barrel-chested chap in tweeds and gaiters, the colonel “demands to know just what Mr Earbrass was ‘getting at’ in the last scene of Chapter XIV. Mr Earbrass is afraid he doesn’t know what the Colonel is. Is what? Getting at himself. The Colonel snorts, Mr Earbrass sighs.” That’s the sound of clashing masculinities, the one Firbankian, effete, the other Maileresque, overcompensating. We get Gorey’s hint that the colonel has sniffed out something unmanly in Earbrass, who in an earlier scene wears a coat with a fur collar and cuffs that is virtually identical to the coat Oscar Wilde wore in his famous Sarony photos.
In the penultimate scene, we see Mr. Earbrass standing on the terrace at twilight, gazing into the gloaming with the stricken expression he always wears. “It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything.” Twilight is the most Goreyesque hour, just as autumn is the most Goreyesque season; both are memento mori moments, inviting us to contemplate the impermanence of things, the folly of human vanity, the Meaning (or Meaninglessness) of Life.
To a surrealist such as Gorey, twilight is also a liminal zone, an uncanny space between the daylit world, ruled by the conscious mind, and the nighttime of the unconscious. (In a January 1957 letter to Lurie, he says of his drawing on the envelope that it “represents the heart’s desire seen at twilight, the time when it most often is.”)2 A string of words bubbles up unbidden out of Earbrass’s unconscious as he stands on the terrace. “Words drift through his mind: ANGUISH TURNIPS CONJUNCTIONS ILLNESS DEFEAT STRING PARTIES NO PARTIES URNS DESUETUDE DISAFFECTION CLAWS LOSS TREBIZOND NAPKINS SHAME STONES DISTANCE FEVER ANTIPODES MUSH GLACIERS INCOHERENCE LABELS MIASMA AMPUTATION TIDES DECEIT MOURNING ELSEWARDS…”
Like all free association, it invites us to mine it for hidden meanings. At its most existential, Earbrass’s dispirited exhaustion is a disenchantment with language reminiscent of Beckett or Derrida. His stream-of-consciousness ruminations expose the workings of language for the parlor magic it is, revealing that words are defined not in any absolute sense but only in relation to other words (CONJUNCTIONS), especially the opposite of the idea expressed (ANTIPODES). As well, they question the either/or worldview that uses binary oppositions (PARTIES/NO PARTIES) as a philosophical mill for grinding out meaning. Each term in a binary is unthinkable without its opposite, as Taoism reminds us.
All is DEFEAT and DECEIT and INCOHERENCE, Beckett would add; nothing left but the fool’s errand of using silence and incoherence in an attempt, funny in its futility, to speak outside language—to name the unnamable. “Nothing to communicate, no way of communicating, must communicate,” says Beckett in L’Innommable (The Unnamable), a book Gorey owned. (“If I had to say I’m like anyone I suppose it’d be Gertrude Stein and Beckett,” Gorey once observed—a startling admission but not, according to Andreas Brown, an improbable one.3 “Gorey admired Beckett immensely,” said Brown. “The occasionally gloomy but always existential Beckett, the absurdist writer tiptoeing to the edge of nonsense literature, appealed to Gorey greatly.”4) Earbrass’s seemingly random string of words is an unconscious attempt to express the inexpressible through surrealist dream logic, conjuring a meaning that is more than the sum of its linguistic parts. Paradoxically, it’s simultaneously an admission of defeat, the sound of language becoming gibberish, surrendering any attempt at meaning. Is the book’s title Gorey’s idea of a Zen koan? Q: What is the sound of an unstrung harp? A: Silence, of course, which is its own kind of utterance, one that sometimes speaks louder than language in the same way that Gorey’s use of blank space—visual “silence”—is wordlessly eloquent. Not for nothing was his motto “O, the of it all!”5
On the last page of The Unstrung Harp, Earbrass stands on a dock next to a small mountain of steamer trunks and portmanteaus. “Numb with cold and trepidation, looking at the churning surface of the Channel,” he’s about to leave for a vacation on the Continent. “Though he is a person to whom things do not happen, perhaps they may when he is on the other side.” Although Earbrass, like Gorey, is a solitary, bookish homebody whose digestion is upset by travel, he both fears the unknown and hopes for a life-changing encounter outside the pages of a book.
“I am becoming seriously disturbed by the fact that I seem to be even less alive in NY than I was in Boston,” Gorey wrote Lurie around the time the book came out. As mentioned earlier, he felt that he really “ought to be having a few direct emotional experiences, however small.” Does he dare risk the deeper, darker waters of experience in order to immerse himself in life more fully? Earbrass’s journey may give shape to Gorey’s yearning for a life lived firsthand rather than vicariously, through books and movies.
* * *
“I lead a dreary life,” Gorey told an interviewer during his New York years, reprising the role of irrepressible gloompot. “My interests are solitary, I don’t do anything; it’s an unlurid existence.”6 The truth of the matter is that he was, in his own odd way, quite sociable. He counted Connie Joerns, Alison Lurie, and Barbara Epstein among his close friends, and members of his Harvard circle, such as Larry Osgood, Bunny Lang, and Freddy English, orbited in and out of his life. He even managed, at one point, to rekindle his friendships with Frank O’Hara and his Francis Parker classmate Joan Mitchell, who’d moved to New York in 1947. By the early ’50s, she’d sharp-elbowed her way into the boys’ club of abstract expressionism and was a recognized member of the New York School. (In an intriguing plot twist, she’d married another Parker alum, Barney Rosset, in ’49.)
Gorey’s most enduring relationships during his New York years began as marriages of convenience, so to speak—cliques drawn together by shared passions, such as film and ballet, or friendships rooted in business dealings, such as his close working relationship with Andreas Brown, owner of the Gotham Book Mart. “Most of my friends in New York were my friends because we were all so busy going to things we had no time to do anything else,” he recalled in his Cape Cod years. “I might never have seen people if I didn’t see them that way,” adding, enigmatically, “Social events—foof.7 You know.”8
* * *
Shortly after arriving in the city, in that first winter of ’53, Gorey bought a ticket to the New York City Ballet. His infatuation with narrative ballets in the classic style of the Ballets Russes and Ballet Theatre,b which had sent him into ecstasies in his high-school years, had waned considerably. By the time he saw the Ballet Theatre again, in 1950, after a long ballet drought during his exile in the Great Salt Lake Desert, “the first, fine careless raptures had worn off,” he confessed, “and I wasn’t really terribly interested in them anymore.”9 Still, he’d never seen the NYCB before, so he thought he’d give it a whirl.
His conversion to what would become an aesthetic religion crept up on him; it wasn’t one of those Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moments that make for biographical melodrama. “The first year I went to the ballet four or five times, if that,” he recalled. “I felt that Balanchine merely illustrated music, and that if you had seen his ballets once, you had seen them. But before long I was attending more often. By 1956 I was going to every performance because it was too much trouble to figure out which twenty-five out of thirty I really had to see.”10 By then, he was “absolutely hooked on Balanchine, to the point where, I’m afraid, everybody else bores me. Rather.”11
He ended up attending nearly every performance of every ballet staged by the company for the following twenty-three years—eight performances a week, five months out of the year, including as many as thirty-nine performances of The Nutcracker annually, until around 1979. (By then, Balanchine was in failing health, and the company’s subordinate ballet masters, predominantly Peter Martins, were handling much of the choreography. Since ballet was Balanchine, as far as Gorey was concerned, he began going to the ballet less frequently, more or less stopping altogether after he moved to the Cape permanently, around 1983.)
In the early years, Gorey saw the NYCB at City Center, as everyone knew it—officially, the New York City Center of Music and Drama, on West 55th Street near Carnegie Hall. Built in the Moorish revival style in 1924, the former Mecca Temple of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine—the Shriners, by any other name—was an Arabian Nights fantasia come to life, crowned with a mosquelike dome. The theater where Balanchine’s dancers performed is a delirium of arabesque details, all green, gold, and maroon; the polychrome tilework on the cupola radiates outward in a spiderweb pattern, dizzying to behold. Gorey would buy a cheap seat—tickets for the nosebleed zone cost $1.80—then move down to sit at the foot of the stairs, at the front of the balcony.
For the old guard of City Ballet fandom, the years at City Center were the company’s golden age. Balanchine was reinventing ballet, scrapping the sentimentality and theatrical mannerisms that made it seem like a museum piece moldering in Europe’s attic. Sweeping away the cobwebs, he used classical technique to create a thrillingly new—and thoroughly American—ballet that championed pure form over storytelling, a move interpreted by most critics as a neoclassical reaction to romanticism.
Which it was, though he was capable of achingly bittersweet romanticism when a dance called for it, as in his Liebeslieder Walzer (1960) and The Nutcracker (1954). At his most radical, though, Balanchine was as modern as they come. In the plotless Agon (1957), dancers twist themselves into angular shapes and strike friezelike attitudes, dodging the jabs of Stravinsky’s dissonant music. A radical traditionalist, Balanchine created a neoclassical high modernism by pushing ballet technique to its limits. Even the use of rehearsal gear as costumes—black leotards and white tights for the women, white T-shirts over black tights for the men—signaled his sharp break with the artifice and sentimentality of Old World Romanticism, as did the bare stage, stripped of all scenery, and the silence in which Agon begins, the curtain rising on four male dancers standing motionless, their backs to the crowd. The Dadaist iconoclast Marcel Duchamp compared Agon’s debut to the riotous opening, in 1913, of The Rite of Spring, which he’d also attended; Arlene Croce, who would later become the dance critic for the New Yorker, claimed not to have slept for a week after seeing the ballet’s premiere.
New York’s bohemian underground and the edgier members of its cultural elite were entranced by the NYCB. Frank O’Hara was a devotee, naturally, attending “almost all the performances,” according to Brad Gooch.12 In “Notes from Row L,” a brief appreciation written for the program of a 1961 performance, O’Hara rhapsodized that Balanchine’s art is for those who “want your heart to beat, your blood to pound through your veins and your mind to go blank with joy…”13
Balanchine spoke to Gorey on many levels. When the ballet master said that ballet, “like the music of great musicians…can be enjoyed and understood without any verbal introduction or explanation,” he was singing Gorey’s song.14 His insistence on dance as an expression of the ineffable, its grand jetés a leap beyond language, struck a chord with Gorey, as did Balanchine’s impatience with what he saw as the reductionism inherent in critical attempts to articulate the “meaning” of his ballets.
Gorey’s sense of what’s lost when we try to use words to nail down meaning was honed by his need, as an illustrator, to complement a text by saying something in images that couldn’t be said in words. Balanchine, as an illustrator of musical “texts,” faced the same challenge: “His movement is never an exact illustration of the music, but rather an interpretation that [complements] the rhythm, quality, and density of the score,” notes the dance writer Kirsten Bodensteiner.15
Expressing his frustration with the ways in which language maps its either/or binarism onto our thinking, Gorey reached, reflexively, for ballet as an example of something that’s irreducibly itself, untranslatable into language: “All the things you can talk about in anyone’s work are the things that are least important. It’s like the ballet. You can describe the externals of a performance—everything, in fact, but what really constituted its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what’s important is left after you have explained everything else. Ideally, if something were good it would be indescribable. What’s the core of Mozart or Balanchine?”16
Then, too, Balanchine, like Gorey, was a draftsman, though his drawings were sketched in space by bodies in motion. The sharp attack he demanded in his dancers’ footwork reminds us of the machinelike precision of Gorey’s hatching and stippling; the crisp yet lyrical lines of Balanchine’s dances, accentuated by his preference for ballerinas with impossibly long legs, are the choreographic equivalent of Gorey’s line, which balanced economy with expressiveness. The formalist in Gorey responded to Balanchine’s mastery of form—the classical architecture of his dances; his geometer’s love of bodies resolving into kaleidoscopic patterns, then reassembling into new ones. It’s not much of a stretch to see the visual aspect of Gorey’s work as an extended meditation on pattern.
Also like Gorey, Balanchine was an eclecticist. Anything was fair game for his magpie mind: the grand tradition of the Imperial Russian Ballet in Saint Petersburg, the modernist avant-gardism of Diaghilev, the jazz and tap styles he explored in his choreography for Hollywood and Broadway, the folk forms he celebrated in Western Symphony (1954). “God creates, I do not create,” said Balanchine. ”I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it—from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.”17 “I have a strong sense of imitation,” echoed Gorey, who believed his gifts lay in recombining elements rather than in creating something ex nihilo. In the end, it didn’t matter, he thought, because his pastiches, like Balanchine’s, always ended up inimitably his own. “So I can afford to indulge this kind of exercise, filch blatantly from all over the place, because it will ultimately be mine.”18
The New York City Ballet, in its City Center years, was electrifying. That the company often performed to half empty houses only made Balanchine cultists and the dancers they adored feel they were part of something desperately important. Years later, Gorey wrote a wry love letter to the City Center era. Featured in a spring 1970 issue of Playbill and published in book form by the Gotham Book Mart in ’73, The Lavender Leotard; or, Going a Lot to the New York City Ballet recalls that romantic time when Balanchine was turning out one masterpiece after another but the troupe lived from hand to mouth, supported—just barely—by a small but fervent fandom. “Of course, Gorey can’t describe…just how beautiful and exciting those fifty seasons were,” wrote Tobi Tobias in Dance Magazine. “But he details it again for each of us, in the mind’s eye…And he sums up the snobbery we—surely America’s most fanatical audience outside Ebbets Field—cultivated as ardent supporters of that odd and wonderful troupe…”19
The Lavender Leotard. (Gotham Book Mart, 1973)
Balanchine’s NYCB was “a breath of fresh air in a really old form,” says Peter Anastos, the choreographer who cofounded the all-male comic ballet troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, which performs the classical repertoire in drag. “[It] was a complete break from the old world of ballet. So that’s what [Gorey] fell in love with. And he loved those dancers, you know, people like Diana Adams and Tanny [Tanaquil] Le Clercq and some of those really odd dancers that Balanchine more or less discovered and trained.”
Gorey was especially entranced by Patricia McBride, who joined the company in ’59. She was “surely the greatest dancer in the world,” he declared in a 1974 interview, though Adams, a statuesque beauty noted for her emotional intensity and long-legged line, was his “favorite dancer of all time.”20 Allegra Kent, who joined the NYCB in ’53, was another Gorey favorite. Fey, fairylike, yet possessed of what Tobi Tobias called “extreme plasticity, coupled with a supercharged poetic imagination,” Kent could play the wide-eyed innocent, the passionate sensualist, or the Balanchinian vision of Woman as Untouchable Ideal.21
Gorey said he “suddenly burst into tears” over Kent’s portrayal of the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker: “I thought, she is the Sugar Plum Fairy; she really is a figment of this little girl’s imagination, and she’s going to vanish into air when they leave…”22 (That Gorey, whose appreciation of Balanchine’s work always struck his close friend and fellow Balanchinian Mel Schierman as “very intellectual,” would be moved to tears by Kent’s poignant evocation of the lost world of childhood offers a tantalizing clue to Gorey’s own past.)
Later, long after the City Center era, Kent and Gorey became friends when she asked him to do a drawing for the invitation to a publication party for her aquatic-exercise book Allegra Kent’s Water Beauty Book (1976). “One day my phone rang and this chirpy little voice came over the phone,” said Gorey.23 It was Kent, asking if she could send him a prepublication copy of her book. “I was sort of startled by this, because I always worshipped at her shrine.” In due time, the book arrived. “Then she started sending me notes and things. She does things like write a note and then stitch it up inside a paper bag and mail it. I was just crazed, but it was very amusing.”24
In 1978, Gorey approached Kent about starring in Fête Diverse, ou Le Bal de Madame H—,c a ballet for which he’d written the scenario and was going to design the costumes and scenery. Peter Anastos would handle the choreography; the Long Island–based Eglevsky Ballet, founded by former Balanchine principal André Eglevsky, would perform it. As Anastos remembers it, the ballet was about “guests at a party suffering from some type of degenerative disease.”25 Kent signed on without a moment’s hesitation.
At the costume fitting, Gorey decided Kent’s “pale sea foam”–colored dress would look better, she recalled, with “five hundred safety pins of various sizes…placed at random over the expanse of tulle.”26 This wasn’t Gorey’s nod to punk rock, whose iconic fashion statement was the safety pin, but rather to Kent’s zany habit of adding them to her outfits as ornaments. (“I had to completely reconstruct the partnering in the pas de deux because the pins kept popping open,” said Anastos, in a 1990 New Yorker profile.)27
Kent remembers Fête Diverse as “a delicious romp.”28 Anastos looks back on it as “colorful and silly, but really not much more than that.”
I was young and dumb enough to think that I could realize all the possibilities that were hinted at in the libretto. It’s hard to build dramatic structure into Ted’s work—it’s all so atmospheric. Charles Addams’s characters can have real lives, but Gorey’s don’t exist outside their condition.29
That said, “we did have Allegra Kent in the lead,” he notes. “I always thought she was the complete Edward Gorey ballerina. Most of her performances seemed to have been drawn by him.”
* * *
Asked, by Vanity Fair, “Who are your heroes in real life?” Gorey replied, “George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein,d Frances Steloff.”30
Steloff, who died at the age of 101 in 1989, was the legendary founder of the Gotham Book Mart, which Gorey began frequenting shortly after moving to Manhattan. A treasure house of modernist poetry, literature, and avant-garde “little magazines,” the Gotham was to literary America what Sylvia Beach’s storied Shakespeare and Company was to Hemingway, Pound, and other English-speaking expats in Paris between the wars. Founded in 1920, it stood, incongruously, in a five-story brownstone at 41 West 47th Street, smack in the middle of midtown Manhattan’s diamond district, which had sprung up around it.
The Gotham (which closed in 2007 after eighty-seven years as a New York literary landmark) was every bibliophile’s fantasy of a bookshop. A bell on the door jingled when you entered. The store was a warren of alcoves and aisles so narrow they were a tight squeeze for two abreast. The floorboards squeaked; the reassuring mustiness of old books hung in the air. In the spirituality section, a battered cardboard sign admonished, SHOPLIFTERS: REMEMBER YOUR KARMA!
George and Ira Gershwin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Woody Allen, Alexander Calder, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Jackie O., and Katharine Hepburn were devoted customers. Max Ernst mounted an exhibit of his work in the second-floor gallery; Salvador Dalí held a book signing at the store. J. D. Salinger liked to sneak in whenever he was in town, confident that he could browse unnoticed. One fine day, H. L. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser rolled in, “full of beer and gaiety,” as one account has it, and proceeded to sign their books, “embellish[ing] them with long inscriptions.”31 When they’d exhausted their oeuvres, they autographed other authors’ works, among them the Bible, which one of them inscribed, “With the compliments of the author.” Sightings of Jorge Luis Borges were not uncommon. Janet Morgan, who oversaw the store’s small press and poetry department, remembers the time Allen Ginsberg came in with his mother and a Brooks Brothers shopping bag: “I’m just kind of thinking, ‘The Beat generation is dead!’” And then there was the time she was busy typing something up, “and someone’s standing above me going, ‘Do you take traveler’s checks?’ and it’s David Bowie,” buying Gorey books.32
Raised in Dickensian poverty, Steloff sold flowers to wealthy vacationers in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she grew up in the 1890s. “I never had books,” she told an interviewer. “I never read the juveniles and classics.…I missed all that. It used to hurt…”33 In later life, she revered books as sacred things and writers as initiates into the mysteries of creative genius. If a writer was especially hard up, she might give him a temporary job to get him back on his feet: at one time or another, Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Tennessee Williams all worked as clerks at the Gotham. (Williams, hopeless at tying up parcels with twine, was sacked by Steloff after a day on the job.) Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Anaïs Nin, William Carlos Williams, and Eugene O’Neill were just a few of the famous or soon-to-be-famous writers who flocked to the store, swapping literary gossip, making sure their books had pride of place, and, not infrequently, cadging a loan from Miss Steloff, as she was reverently known.
Gorey knew about the Gotham long before he moved to New York. According to Andreas Brown, he’d “established an association with [the] Gotham Book Mart in the early 1940s while still in the Army,” through mail-order requests.34 “When he came to the city to work he began making frequent visits to the bookshop and became a close friend” of Steloff, Brown recalls.
No doubt the two quietly uncompromising eccentrics recognized each other as birds of a feather. Steloff was a diminutive woman, her graying hair done up in a loose bun, her working costume a shawl, a frumpy blouse, and an apron, its pockets stuffed with seeds and dried fruit—the vegetarian fare she snacked on in lieu of lunch. Clerks dispatched to her apartment before the store opened were sometimes startled to find her in a yoga headstand, buck naked. (Steloff, a firm believer in the virtues of nudism, was unperturbed.)
With her eye for unselfconscious originality, she was drawn to Gorey’s work. When he dropped by with copies of The Unstrung Harp, she took some on consignment, inaugurating a lifelong relationship between Gorey and the store. From the early ’50s on, his little books were prominently displayed near the cash register. Through Brown’s careful cultivation, that relationship would flourish. Acting as what Gorey called his unofficial manager—a role that encompassed publisher, gallerist, marketer, and merchandiser—Brown, who bought the store from Steloff in 1967, would prove instrumental in catapulting him from an obscure author whose mostly out-of-print books were the closely guarded secret of a jealous few to the much-admired object of a mainstream cult.35
* * *
Nineteen fifty-three turned out to be a watershed year for Gorey: not only did he move to New York, install himself at 36 East 38th Street, settle into the nine-to-five routine at Doubleday—his first real job—and publish his first book, he also immersed himself in the New York City Ballet, the Gotham Book Mart, and, lastly, the movie screenings hosted by the film historian William K. Everson—hubs of activity whose artistic pleasures, intellectual excitements, and social milieu would feed his art and fill his life throughout his time in New York.
Gorey discovered Everson’s circle of movie buffs, the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, “not long after January 1953,” according to Brown.36 Originally known as the Film Circle, the Huff Society was a loose-knit group of movie buffs who met for screenings of rarely seen silents, early talkies, and foreign gems from the ’20s and ’30s. The group had coalesced in ’52, when Theodore Huff and Everson, film historians and pioneering preservationists, started getting together with a few of their movie-industry friends to screen prints of hard-to-find titles. When Huff died, in March of ’53, Everson renamed the group in his honor.
The Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society was just the sort of cultish group Gorey was drawn to, a secret society knitted together by shared obsession rather than camaraderie, like the “in crowd” dissecting Balanchine at City Center or the impossibly knowledgeable clerks at the Gotham or the cocktail-party aesthetes in Eliot House. A nonprofit endeavor sustained (just barely) by ticket sales, the Huff Society scrounged projection space wherever it could—one month a film studio, another month a movie theater or even a room in a psychiatric institute (which was appropriate, Everson joked, given the oddballs his screenings attracted).
When Gorey met him, Everson was a publicist for independent film distributors. Later, he would win acclaim among cineastes as a pioneering preservationist of disintegrating silents (which movie studios viewed, at the time, as Dumpster fodder). An ardent cinephile with a prodigious knowledge of pre-’40s film, he used the nearly twenty books he wrote on movie history to promote the serious study of the silent era.
By the 1970s, he’d amassed a hoard of more than four thousand feature films, which he kept in stacks in his overstuffed apartment on the Upper West Side. Huff Society members whom he found simpatico comprised an inner circle, invited to Saturday night screenings at his home. Gorey was one of the devotees who squeezed into Everson’s living room. If an evening was oversubscribed and all the chairs were taken, overflow attendees sat on film canisters piled high.
“When my dad was having his Saturday night screenings, there was no other way to see these films that he was showing,” says Everson’s daughter, Bambi. “That’s why we had this conglomeration of really wonderful people and then the people that came regularly.” Among the wonderful people were Andrew Sarris, the noted critic and standard-bearer for the auteur theory, and Susan Sontag. As for the regulars, Bambi remembers them as “molelike people” with “pasty white skin” who “lived in their mothers’ basements.”
Gorey kept his distance. His devastating zingers were his way of discouraging chumminess, she believes. “The other people just sat in their chairs, feverishly writing notes, and during the break they would ask dumb questions,” she says. Gorey, by contrast, “had a sardonic wit.…[W]hen one of the Great Unwashed would say something, he would come back with a witty retort.”
“He definitely had a camp sensibility,” recalls Howard Mandelbaum, an alumnus of Everson’s Saturday night screenings and cofounder of the entertainment-photo archive Photofest. Ted’s startling height, “thrift-store bohemian” garb, and stentorian delivery, perfect for broadcasting opinions about the evening’s fare, made an impression on Mandelbaum, then a “pretty unworldly junior-high-school student.” Gorey liked gossip, he recalls: “We talked about [the French model and actress] Capucine. She was a very beautiful actress who was rumored to have had a sex change, she was the mistress of William Holden, she was in Song Without End, North to Alaska. [He] enjoyed the possibility that she might have been a man.”
Gorey and Everson struck up a friendship. They would remain friends until the ’70s, when Gorey’s attendance at screenings dropped off, presumably because of his growing freelance illustration workload. In the days before streaming services such as Netflix and premium cable, when the chance to see a rare or suppressed movie might come once in a lifetime (if ever), Everson’s “incredible collection” was an Aladdin’s cave for movie addicts. His Saturday night screenings gave Gorey a degree in film history, broadening and deepening his knowledge of pre–World War II cinema, specifically the silent era.
It’s tempting to dismiss Gorey’s comment that “movies made a terrible mistake when they started to talk” as his usual calculated outrageousness.37 In this case, however, he was deadly serious. When an interviewer asked why silent films appealed to him, he replied, “It’s what you had to leave out.…[O]ur imagination is engaged, whereas movies today get more in your face by the moment. What has killed movies is the special effects. See one screen filled with flames and you’ve seen all of them.…And if it’s a special-effects movie, you’ve seen all the effects already in the trailer, so don’t bother to go.”38
Gorey’s belief that the silents were superior to the talkies makes perfect sense in light of his aesthetic preference for the understated and the unstated, as in Asian art and literature, and his attraction to the highly stylized, as in Firbank and Balanchine. He abhorred Hollywood’s increasing tendency to pander to the lowest common denominator for the same reason he lost patience with Henry James novels: the lunkheaded insistence on explaining things to death, which kills ambiguity and, with it, subtlety, leaving no room for imaginative participation by the audience. Film exerted a profound influence on Gorey’s aesthetic. “I’ve been watching movies for close to seventy years,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “My family took me to movies very early. I’ve always been an inveterate moviegoer. There was a period in New York where I would see a thousand movies a year.”39 If this strains credulity, bear in mind that Everson’s screenings sometimes verged on endurance tests: “Movies used to be an hour long,” Gorey recalled, “but we’d see twelve or fifteen movies and be bleary by the time it was all over.”40
Consider, too, that Gorey, who detested Christmas—because it “really is a family holiday,” he observed, revealingly—liked nothing better on December 25 than hanging around “with a lot of people who also didn’t have any families or anything,” seeing as many movies as they could cram in. “We used to go to four or five movies on Christmas Day. We’d have breakfast at Howard Johnson’s, and then we’d go to a movie—and then we’d go back to the Howard Johnson’s. Then we’d go to another movie, and go back to Howard Johnson’s—’til about midnight.”41
And then there were the tantalizing offerings of so-called revival houses—repertory cinemas such as the New Yorker, the Elgin, and the Thalia—which showed foreign films and Hollywood classics from the ’30s and ’40s, mostly. And the period, stretching over several years, when “the Museum of Modern Art started to go through its entire film collection on Saturday mornings,” as Gorey recalled.42 And the Buddhist temple on the Upper West Side that showed Japanese movies on weekends. (Gorey had a preternatural ability to pick up such off-the-radar blips.)
Little wonder, then, that his knowledge of the medium was prodigious. He could discourse with equal facility—and equal exuberance—on masterworks of early cinema such as Feuillade’s 1918 serial Tih Minh and grind-house schlock like Blood Fiend (1967). (By his own admission, Gorey had an ungovernable “passion for horror movies,” which, together with his “ability to sit through practically anything thrown on the silver screen,” resulted in a cheery willingness to give the most overripe tripe a chance.)43
He seems to have seen everything and to have had a quotable opinion on even the most forgettable fare. But even he was barely able to make it through the 1968 Filipino horror movie Brides of Blood, though he did think the inclusion of “a band of Filipino dwarves whose presence was never commented upon” was a nice touch, adding, “It is things like this that keep one functioning sometimes. Me at least.”44 In a similar vein, he thought The Mad Room (1969), a horror movie starring Stella Stevens and Shelley Winters, was a disappointment, “mainly because everyone has lost all sense of genre these days”; nonetheless, he rejoiced in the film’s “delightful shots of a large, shaggy, and utterly lovable dog padding about with a severed hand in its mouth.”45
With his artist’s eye and oblique, surrealist angle on reality, Gorey brought a fresh perspective to thoroughly chewed-over fodder. Contrary to expectation, he “ended up quite enjoying” Candy (1968), a much-hyped psychedelic sex farce based on the novel by Terry Southern.46 It was “a dreadful film,” he allowed, but “its very ham-handedness and foolishness creates a sort of valid surrealist commentary, and it is marvelously cluttered with gewgaws and extravagances of décor that for some reason only the Italians are capable of anymore.…I am beginning to think that most of the comment being made today is in the décor.” He mentions, in several interviews, the “very Mondrian” palette (“dead white and then bright blue, bright red, bright yellow, and black”) of La Prisonnière (1968), a twisted love triangle by the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, known for his dark, often existentially bleak thrillers.
As a rule, though, Gorey was skeptical of much contemporary cinema, especially the overhyped and the winkingly hip. His true north was pre–World War II film, especially from the silent era. His book The Hapless Child was directly inspired by L’Enfant de Paris, a 1913 French silent directed by Léonce Perret, which he saw only once, at MOMA, but apparently never forgot. His unfilmed screenplay, The Black Doll, was “very much inspired by so many of the D. W. Griffiths that were made out in New Jersey,”e he said.47
Gorey being Gorey, he was never explicit about precisely how silent film influenced his work, beyond the fact that it played a large part in his decision to set his work in a Victorian-Edwardian ’20s milieu. “I kind of think in a silent-film way,” he said in a 1995 interview. “I think, looking back, I was seeing an awful lot of silent films and everything when I was starting out publicly, as it were. I think I tended to look at lots of film stills and so…I began to draw people that way, and pick up costumes and backgrounds…”48
We can detect the influence of silent movies in the anachronistic phrasing and ironic histrionics of his captions, which remind us of silent-movie intertitles, and in the existentialist blankness with which his characters confront the confounding and the calamitous, so reminiscent of the deader-than-deadpan Buster Keaton, who Gorey claimed was his “idol.”49 Keaton’s face struck him “as having been the most fascinating of any actor’s—that sort of deadpan is somehow far more mysterious and evocative than any amount of expressiveness,” he thought.50 (In yet another intriguing overlap with Beckett, the playwright was a great Keaton fan, too.51 ) In a sense, Gorey’s fascination with deadpan is yet another reminder of his belief in the vital importance of leaving gaps for the viewer to fill in.f
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The moody, gothic-surrealist crime serials of Louis Feuillade (1873–1925) epitomize that aesthetic of gaps—of loose ends and non sequiturs. Which is why he, of all silent filmmakers, and possibly all filmmakers, was unquestionably Gorey’s favorite. Gorey once said that Feuillade was “the greatest influence on my work,” period.52 Barrabas (1920), Feuillade’s silent thriller about the ruthless leader of a gang of brigands, was “the greatest movie ever made,” he declared.53 (Now might be the time to note that Gorey’s reigning passion of the moment was always his favorite, regardless of the genre or medium. Still, there’s no understating Feuillade’s influence on his art.)
The director of more than seven hundred silents, most of them shorts or serials, Feuillade is best known for the multipart crime thrillers Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915–16), and Judex (1916). Based on a wildly popular series of pulp novels, Fantômas chronicles the exploits of a Mephistophelean archfiend, a man of a thousand faces who walks among us disguised as a pillar of respectability—a banker, a judge, a bourgeois gentleman. The Houdini of villainy, Fantômas is an escape artist par excellence: grab him by the arms, as Inspector Juve and the journalist Jérôme Fandor do in Juve contre Fantômas (1913), and—what’s this?! You’re left holding the prosthetic arms attached to his Inverness cape as he bolts free, mockingly doffing his cap as he leaps into a cab. (Gorey, by the way, loved this scene, which struck the surrealist in him as “a wonderful dislocation of reality.”)54
Like Batman’s nemesis the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), whose ravings about being an “agent of chaos” were directly inspired by Feuillade’s archcriminal, Fantômas is only incidentally a burglar; what he’s really up to is terrorizing the aristocracy, whose stuffy nineteenth-century morals and manners and sense of entitlement were stifling belle époque France. Likewise, the vampires in Les Vampires aren’t undead bloodsuckers at all but rather members of a catsuited gang that seems to be half criminal conspiracy, half secret society. At heart, their bizarre crimes are acts of poetic terrorism against the social order.
In Feuillade’s films, as in Gorey’s work, Freud’s concept of the repressed lurks behind the snobberies and starched proprieties of polite society. “The films are cozy, with domestic settings, and they have sinister underpinnings,” said Gorey. “There’s a German word which is the word for cozy but with the negative attached to it, so that it’s cozy and sinister, settled and unsettling, cozy and uncozy.”55 The word he’s looking for is unheimlich, Freud’s term, introduced in his essay on the uncanny, for the sensation of “dread and creeping horror” that arises from the familiar rendered unfamiliar, the homey (heimlich) suddenly haunted. Unsurprisingly, the surrealists were devout fans of Feuillade’s crime thrillers, which brought the horrors of the Grand Guignol into the sitting rooms and opera houses of the bourgeoisie and transformed the sunlit boulevards of Paris into uncanny backstreets of the unconscious. Gorey, who shared the surrealist poet Paul Éluard’s belief that “there is another world, but it is in this one,” surely responded to that aspect of Feuillade’s films.
He was captivated, too, by Feuillade’s use of theatrical tableaux. Unlike his contemporary D. W. Griffith, who pioneered the use of cutting and camera movement in cinematic storytelling, Feuillade used a stationary camera, relying on his actors’ movements to direct the eye. Using long takes and exploiting his sets’ depth of field, he choreographed his actors’ movements with the precision of a ballet master, a parallel surely not lost on Gorey.
Gorey rarely makes use of the cinematic tropes (the close-up, the low-angle shot, the aerial shot) whose influence is everywhere in comic books and graphic novels. Instead he places us in the position of a theatergoer looking at a proscenium stage, a point of view undoubtedly influenced by a lifetime of ballet going but no less the product of Feuillade’s tableau-style filmmaking.
The French director Georges Franju, who remade Judex in 1964, was eloquent on the subject of the spell cast by Feuillade’s tableaux: “He left on me the impress of a magic that was black, white, and silent.…In his shots where nothing happens, something can occur that profits from this nothing, this inaction, this void and silence, something that profits precisely from the waiting, from inquietude. This something is called mystery.”56 Looking at the wordless tableaux in Gorey’s most gothic-surrealist works, such as The West Wing, Les Passementeries Horribles, Les Urnes Utiles, and The Prune People, we can see Feuillade’s influence in their brooding inaction, their inexpressible mystery. Like the French filmmaker’s, Gorey’s was a magic that was black, white, and silent.
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The gothic-surrealist atmosphere and imagery of Feuillade classics such as Fantômas and Les Vampires crept into Gorey’s work. Irwin Terry, who writes the fan blog Goreyana, sees “instantly recognizable Gorey motifs” everywhere in Feuillade’s silents—the “distinctive potted palms and pattern-on-pattern decor in the interior sets, a host of 1913 touring cars, veiled mysterious women wrapped in dark clothing with only their heeled shoes peeking from the bottom of their wraps, men in top hats and frock coats. In short, many of the figures and places we have come to assume were [English] in Mr. Gorey’s books are probably French.”57
Sometimes Gorey’s allusions to Feuillade are more oblique. Terry believes that the mysterious blank calling card hidden in plain sight in nearly every one of Gorey’s books was inspired by the scene in the first installment of Fantômas in which “the disguised villain appears in the hotel room of a wealthy woman who asks, ‘Who are you?’ and is handed a blank calling card by the intruder.”58 Likewise, in The Sopping Thursday, a cat burglar scrambles along a rooftop clutching a purloined parasol. It’s Gorey’s nod to the scene in the Vampires episode “The Severed Head” in which one of the catsuited gang members skulks from roof to roof along the Paris skyline.
And then there’s the prototype of Gorey’s slinky, shifty-eyed vamps: Irma Vep, the mesmerizing killer queen of the Vampires, with her heavily shadowed, kohl-rimmed eyes and curve-hugging catsuit. (Her name is an anagram for “vampire.”) Unforgettably played by the wild-eyed Musidora, Vep is a femme fatale with an anarchic spin—Theda Bara reimagined as a member of the Bonnot Gang, the band of anarchists whose bank robberies made them the tabloid antiheroes of belle époque France. The surrealists adored her.
Silent, mysterious, disquieting, dreamlike, Feuillade’s silent black-and-white world had always been there, flickering in the movie palaces of the unconscious, waiting for Gorey to discover it.
a The Gotham Book Mart, which in time cornered the market on Goreyana, solved the problem of where to stock his books by doing just that. “His stuff was always at the cash register,” former Gotham employee Janet Morgan told me. “It was kind of like the stuff people would buy at the last minute, kind of like the candy at the drugstore.”
b The precursor of the American Ballet Theatre.
c Fête Diverse (literally, “diverse party”) appears to be a Gorey pun on faits divers, miscellaneous short news items, often of a lurid or sensational nature, which were once a fixture in French newspapers.
d Lincoln Kirstein, the heir to the Filene’s fortune, cofounded (with George Balanchine) the New York City Ballet in 1948.
e He’s referring to the shorts Griffith directed for Biograph Studios in Fort Lee, the Hollywood of the pre–World War I years, where The Perils of Pauline, Theda Bara’s “vamp” movies, and Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops comedies were filmed.
f Deadpan is a fittingly Goreyesque term. Like all dead metaphors, its literal meaning has been obscured over time by the figurative sense. Originally it referred to a corpselike expressionlessness (from dead plus pan, ’20s slang for “face”). Deadpan humor, an essential component in black comedy, still retains a hint of its macabre etymological origins.