IN 1954, DUELL, SLOAN AND PEARCE published Gorey’s second book, The Listing Attic, a collection of whimsically grim limericks that read like penny-dreadful items written by Edward Lear.
In a letter to the eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson (who had sent an appreciative but not entirely uncritical note to The Listing Attic’s author), Gorey apologizes for the “lack of ability” that “weakened” some of the limericks, especially the ones in French, his command of that language being “atrocious,” he admitted, “except for reading purposes.”1 In his defense, he adds, the poems in The Listing Attic “were written rather in the manner that Housman says he wrote the Shropshire Lad—most of them all at once some five or six years ago, and then rewritten this year with a few new ones added. The drawings got dashed off in a month or so any old which way. A depressing thought.”
The limericks written “five or six years ago” were the verses he was fooling around with at Harvard. He’d fiddled with them during his time in Cambridge and, when Duell, Sloan and Pearce expressed interest in a follow-up to The Unstrung Harp, cherry-picked a suitable number, polishing them and adding new ones.
He adopted a looser, sketch-pad style for some of the Listing Attic illustrations that not only freed him up as an artist but that also seemed, with their roughed-out look, better suited to the book’s grim, often grisly content. “I’m now working…on the drawings for my limericks,” he wrote Alison Lurie in August of 1953. “Unfortunately, I can’t seem to draw ‘funny’ drawings, and most of the ones I have done so far are not only morbid but serious.”2
He’s right: at their funniest (a relative term, in this context), the illustrations for The Listing Attic are black comedy; most of them could have done double duty as macabre engravings in a Victorian true-crime gazette. Gorey’s drawings of a psychopath stabbing a woman with a rusty stiletto, an abusive husband knocking his wife’s teeth out with a hammer, and a cocaine-addled young curate about to beat a small child to death leave little doubt that, if some of his books might have been profitably marketed to young readers, this was not one of them.
Of course the illustrations are only as dark as the subject matter, which at times crosses the line into outright nastiness. (Midway through his work on the book, in March of ’54, he told Lurie that it was going to be “remarkably tasteless,” noting that “an air of uneasy lunacy hangs over the whole thing.”)3 Wife beating, sex crimes, infanticide, random acts of senseless violence, parents who treat their offspring with the wanton cruelty of Dickensian villains: The Listing Attic is one dark little book. Gorey wasn’t kidding when he said his mission in life was to make everybody as uneasy as possible. The incongruous pairing of shilling-shocker subject matter with the limerick, poetry’s most frivolous form, only makes matters weirder. Crossing silliness with depravity, violence with dark humor, The Listing Attic is downright disturbing.
* * *
Reading The Listing Attic, we do get the impression Gorey’s trying (perhaps a little too hard) to outrage. “I fear this is my épater le bourgeois work,” he said in a letter to Peter Neumeyer.4 Clifton Fadiman, a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club and popularizer of Serious Literature, “once refused to quote from it in an article on limericks in Holiday because it was so horrid,” Gorey claimed. Seen in its historical context—three years after The Catcher in the Rye gave voice to adolescent alienation, a year before Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” waved the flag for drugs, gay sex, and countercultural rebellion—The Listing Attic takes its quietly perverse place in a groundswell of intellectual discontent with the conformity of ’50s America. (Gorey, of course, would’ve let out a theatrical groan at the suggestion that he was some sort of agent provocateur for the incipient counterculture.)
Even so, setting aside the obviousness of his nose tweaking and what Wilson, in his 1959 New Yorker essay, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” decried as the “awkwardness of meter and phrasing” of some of the poems, the book introduced themes and motifs that would recur in his work.5
Here, for the first time, we encounter the woman in peril and the hapless child, both silent-movie staples; the monstrous father figure; Gorey neuroses, such as “feeling somewhat unreal,” and Gorey anxieties, such as finding parties “a terrible strain”; the association of the crepuscular with the uncanny; the fixation on luxuriant beards and mustaches, floor-length fur coats, and “white footgear intended for tennis”; the secret sorrows and “sense of unease” hidden in the darkness of the human heart; the psychopathologies of domestic life; and the alien ickiness of babies (a mother throws her infant at the ceiling “to be rid / Of a strange, overpowering feeling”).
Gorey seems to find the whole idea of childbearing repugnant: Mrs. Keats-Shelley’s children are born with monstrous deformities; a horrified father says of the newborn whose difficult birth has left his wife at death’s door, “Can it be this is all? / How puny! How small!” (Alexander Theroux remembers Gorey telling him that there were only two reasons he’d walk out on a movie: “One. If an animal is being abused, shot, killed, or hurt in any way. Oh please! And two. Birth scenes! I spent entire segments in the foyer during Hawaii with Julie Andrews heavy with pheasant and howling in hospital stirrups, and I wonder to this day why I did not continue all the way home.”)6
Religion pops up in various forms, none of them promising, all of them good for a blasphemous laugh: a clerical student mortifies his flesh by wearing a hair shirt, eating dirt, and bathing in brine; a baby drowns in a baptismal font; a monk cries out, in the middle of mass, that the religious life is dreadful and obscene and stabs himself—revealingly?—in the buttocks. As we read the limerick in which the heartless Lord Stipple tells his puny, sad-eyed son, “Your mother’s behaviour / Gave pain to Our Saviour, / And that’s why He made you a cripple,” it’s a little hard to believe Gorey when he claims, “I’m not a ‘lapsed Catholic’ like so many people I know who apparently were influenced forever by it.”
“There’s a rather odd couple in Herts…” The Listing Attic. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce/Little, Brown, 1954)
Something strange is going on with gender in The Listing Attic: a naked lady, peering anxiously into a full-length mirror, fears that she’s “coming unsexed”; a “rather odd couple” of Edwardian gents in starched collars and bowler hats are of uncertain gender, since “they’re never without / Their moustaches and long, trailing skirts.” (They’re cousins, we’re told—the primary family tie in Gorey’s world—but give the distinct impression of being a couple in the life-partner sense, which makes us wonder if cousin is a euphemism.) Gorey touches on the question of homosexuality more explicitly in his chilling depiction, discussed earlier, of a gang of Harvard men “burning a fairy.”
Children are introduced, for the first time in Gorey’s work, as emblems of vulnerability, which makes them perfect targets for willful cruelty and cosmic injustice. (Gorey—who, it should probably be noted, got on well with his friends’ kids—always insisted that he used children for gothic-novel and silent-movie melodrama purposes because their vulnerability made them the perfect victims. “It’s just so obvious,” he told Stephen Schiff of the New Yorker. “They’re the easiest targets.”)7 In Goreyland, little ones exist to be menaced or murdered outright, often in ingenious ways, as in the case of the infant whose nurse ties it to a kite out of spite and lets it float off into the wild blue yonder.
The Listing Attic marks other, less momentous firsts, too. The mysterious Black Doll, an armless, faceless cipher of a toy, calculated to give a child nightmares, makes its first appearance. There it is on the front cover, passing by a window in a row house whose curious flatness suggests a stage set. And there it is again, marching along a tall brick wall in the beautifully rendered surrealist snapshot that ends the book. It will put in cameos in The Willowdale Handcar; or, The Return of the Black Doll, The West Wing, and The Tunnel Calamity; appear on the cover of The Raging Tide; or, The Black Doll’s Imbroglio; and make its final bow in Gorey’s silent screenplay, The Black Doll.
The Listing Attic is the first of his books in which Gorey hand-letters the captions to his illustrations. The way he told it, he’d hand-lettered a few sample pages, and his publisher, like his bosses at Anchor, had gone gaga over his spidery, skittering type, sentencing him to hard labor for life. “They, the publishers, thought what a good idea hand-lettering was, and since then I have never been able to stop,” he kvetched in 1980. “I sometimes get fearfully bored lettering the damn things, especially since I really detest my hand-lettering.”8 Of course, Gorey was self-deprecating to a fault and, more to the point, a world-class self-dramatizer who loved to play the put-upon drudge.
His second book confirmed his near-total lack of what sales teams like to call commercial potential. “My first two books…didn’t make any money, nor did [I] get paid much attention,” he said in a 1977 interview. “Great piles of those books were remaindered on 42nd Street for nineteen cents several years later.”9 (As this is written, a New York antiquarian book dealer, Peter L. Stern & Company, lists a “very good plus” copy of The Listing Attic, first edition, dust jacket intact, for $375.)10 In a letter to Alison Lurie, Gorey reported that Attic had sold only “a little over two thousand copies, which is sad,” but noted that “it seems to have acquired a slight and dismal cachet with les boys.”11 If “les boys” was Gorey’s Holly Golightly version of the slang term for gays (e.g., “the boys in the band”), it raises the intriguing question of whether gay readers were responding specifically to the gay influences in Gorey’s work—its Wildean irony and Firbankian outrageousness. Were gays, ahead of the curve of popular taste in so many things, the first wave of Gorey fans?
* * *
Meanwhile, back in the everyday world, Gorey soldiered on at Doubleday, which in January of ’54 was “particularly tedious and dull,” he told Lurie. “I am in the frame of mind to have a real temper tantrum if I can find an excuse.”12 When he was not “struggling for Doubleday after hours,” he was “whizzing from one ancient film to another.”13
That February, he joined the American Society for Psychical Research, a New York–based organization founded in 1885, according to its literature, “by a distinguished group of scholars and scientists who shared the courage and vision to explore the uncharted realms of human consciousness,” among them William James, the celebrated Harvard psychologist and brother of Gorey’s least favorite novelist, Henry.14 In the first flush of his newfound enthusiasm, Gorey gobbled up “all the classic books on the subject in great gulps” and even recruited Lurie for an experiment in telepathy, the results of which were, as they inevitably seem to be, inconclusive.15
He later claimed, in a letter to Peter Neumeyer, to “have always, if desultorily and spasmodically, been interested in what is loosely [called] the occult.”16 That interest crescendoed in the late ’60s, when the cultural atmosphere was thick with Eastern mysticism, New Age philosophy, pop astrology, and bestselling accounts of supernatural phenomena, whether fictional (Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby, about devil worshippers in ’60s New York) or purportedly real (Hans Holzer’s paperback books on paranormal activity).
He believed in the occult and in parapsychological phenomena, he said, but only insofar as they’re “indicative of the nature of things and the relations between them” as opposed to “the more specific kind of fortune-telling.”17 In other words, he “believed,” in ironic quotes. For Gorey, the tarot, astrology, palmistry, and the I Ching were just so many ways of “by-passing the cause-and-effect, rational world in which we normally try to function.” By translating reality as we know it into a symbolic language, systems of divination “show you things,” he wrote Neumeyer, “which otherwise you might have much more trouble finding out.” The ultimate goal, of course, was to internalize the logic of such systems, rendering them unnecessary. Thinking aloud on the page, he mused, Hadn’t someone said that true mastery of the I Ching meant that it became “so much a part of you that your conscious mind would no longer need to consult it at all, and that then you would directly be apprehending the Tao and acting in accordance with it without any conscious thought”?
What Gorey is saying is that a literal belief in the predictive powers of the I Ching, the tarot, palmistry, and the like misses the point. Better to use them as boreholes down to the deeper reality underlying the world as we perceive it—what Taoists call li, the ever-changing, infinitely complex, ineffably meaningful order of nature.
His observation that the goal is to internalize the mind-set of the I Ching, an ancient method of divination closely associated with Taoism, so that you have direct access to the inexpressible, irresolvable mystery of things—li, by any other name—is a profoundly Taoist insight. But it’s also surrealist to the core, if for li we substitute the surrealist concept of the Marvelous, the poetic mystery and uncanny beauty just beneath the surface of everyday life. Maintaining “an alert, elevated, otherworldly state of mind,” the surrealist is always on the lookout for the Marvelous, according to the visual-culture critic Rick Poynor—that “moment when reality seems to open up and disclose its essence more fully.”18 In his brief but brilliant ruminations to Neumeyer, Gorey gives us as lucid an exposition of his philosophy as he ever gave, gracefully resolving his Taoism with his surrealism.
* * *
In March of ’54, Gorey was reading Arthur Ransome, the English author whose Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books are perennial favorites in the UK. Ransome, he told Lurie, was “second only to J. Austen in his ability to create a complete, small, realistic world. I begin to think that is what I most enjoy in books nowadays: little worlds. I suppose because I don’t have one of my own, except in my work.”19
Indeed, Gorey continued to be a person, like C. F. Earbrass, to whom things do not happen. In ’55, he was invited, on the strength of his books, to a cocktail party swarming with admen, models, novelists, and other bright young things. But when the “young men who were pretending not to be interested in other young men began surreptitiously to get each other’s phone numbers,” Gorey ducked out. Just once, he confided to Lurie, he wished someone would consider him sufficiently attractive to want to put the moves on him, but no one ever did, or would, and he was “too bored” to make the first move.20
At Doubleday, he’d ascended from “merely having a job to embarking on a career,” that of book designer—a change in job description that left him hip deep in work but no richer for his troubles.21 “Designing the insides of books is neither more nor less dull than designing their jackets, and so far it pays exactly the same,” he groused.22
As always, his gloom was relieved by newfound passions, most notably his discovery, that fall, of The Tale of Genji, a classic of Japanese literature that Anchor had published in 1955. Written by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting in the imperial court of eleventh-century Japan, Genji is a tale of romantic love and court intrigue, full of musings on the impermanence of beauty and the short span of man’s days. It’s perfumed with the sweet sadness that clings to what the Japanese call mono no aware—the capacity to feel things deeply, especially the pathos of passing time, poignantly evoked by the ephemeral beauty of nature. For Gorey, the novel captured “subtleties of feeling about existence rarely dealt with in Western literature.”23 He was “enthralled,” he told Lurie, by the Heian-era masterpiece, declaring it “the great novel of the world.”24
It would go on to become his all-time-favorite work of fiction. By 1995, he’d reread the thousand-plus-page epic “six or seven times” yet was still “absolutely ga-ga” over it.25 Something in Murasaki’s evocations of the inexpressible mystery of being human spoke to Gorey in his deepest self. Japanese literature, he felt, “has a stronger sense of what life is like to the individual living it than any other literature I’ve ever read.”26 In a letter to Neumeyer, he quotes a line from Lady Murasaki’s diary: “Yet the human heart is an invisible and dreadful being.”27
* * *
In 1957, two books arrived on the cultural scene, one very obviously a children’s book, the other a children’s book at first glance, but on closer inspection maybe not. Both were about uninvited guests who insinuate themselves into bourgeois households then wreak havoc. Incarnations of the trickster—an archetype familiar from myth and folklore whose avatars include Brer Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—both invaders straddled the binaries of animal and human, child and adult, wild and domesticated, malicious and mischievous. In that sense, they were boundary crossers in the best trickster tradition.
One was Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, the top-hatted agent of chaos who blew away the idea that little learners should cut their teeth on stodgy, see-Spot-run-type stuff. The other was the ill-mannered animal “something between a penguin and a lizard” (as Gorey described it) that made its debut—seven months after the Cat—in The Doubtful Guest, published by Doubleday.28 Both house-wrecking pranksters can be seen as advance scouts for the countercultural backlash against the ’50s. (In retrospect, the Cat, with his candy-striped top hat and long-haired sidekicks, Thing One and Thing Two, looks like a cartoony premonition of the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia in his red-and-white-striped top hat on the cover of the band’s first record. And the Doubtful Guest, raising hell in his high-top sneakers and all-black getup—or pelt, or whatever it is—recalls beatnik bad boys such as Gregory Corso.)
But that’s where the similarities between the two books end. The fast-talking, glad-handing Cat barges into what we assume is the suburban home of a pair of grammar-school kids—a brother and sister whose mother has left them alone, inexplicably, with the pet goldfish for a babysitter. Juggling the terrified fish in its bowl, balancing mom’s cake on his stovepipe hat, the Cat unleashes playful mayhem. Seuss began as a cartoonist, and his style, as an illustrator, is cartoony—brash and boldly colorful. The text, constrained by his editor’s requirement that he limit himself to a beginner’s vocabulary, zips along in its repetitive, singsong way.
If The Cat in the Hat is a Looney Tunes short, The Doubtful Guest is one of Feuillade’s gothic-surrealist silents. Gorey’s hand-drawn nineteenth-century engravings are in a different universe altogether from Seuss’s animated-cartoon aesthetic. The Cat’s raucous world blares at us in bright reds and blues; the Doubtful Guest’s is rendered in rich blacks and subtle shades of gray, its minute details and machinelike cross-hatching achieved with a hair-fine line. Seuss’s tale careens along wildly, its lunatic pace conveyed by cartoon speed lines; Gorey tells his story with frozen tableaux whose stillness showcases his gift for composition.
Through the Balanchinian (or, if you prefer, Feuilladian) arrangement of characters on his miniature stage, he creates satisfying visual rhythms. Likewise, his contrapuntal use of white space, solid black shapes, and fine-lined shading produces beautifully balanced compositions that make us want to linger on each scene, exploring every nook and cranny. At times, he lights his scene as if it were a movie set or a stage, dramatically spotlighting the central figure amid the surrounding shadows, as in the panel where the Doubtful Guest stands firmly planted, nose to the wall like a naughty child, while the family shuffles off to bed.
Gorey’s decision to isolate his couplets on an otherwise blank page, facing his illustrations, allows us to savor his drawings, free from the distractions of language, while at the same time permitting us to appreciate the wittiness of his verse for its own sake. Taking note of his division of text and image, we realize just how much Gorey’s books differ from such seemingly related genres as the comic book and the graphic novel, in which the text is appended to the illustrated panel as a caption or, more often, incorporated into it in the form of speech bubbles and thought balloons.
Gorey’s writing is a world away from Seuss’s, too, though both texts are written in rhyme, employing related meters. (Seuss uses anapestic dimeter for the most part, Gorey anapestic tetrameter, instantly familiar from Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”)a The tone of Gorey’s text is wittier and darker than Seuss’s, deadpan rather than hyperkinetic. (Gorey, who generally avoided sniping at other picture-book authors, once decried the “endless numbers of children’s books which are stuck together with the first rhyme that comes into somebody’s head for an animal’s name or something. Well, I don’t wish to denigrate Dr. Seuss, but I mean, you know, ‘the cat in the hat.’”)29
The Doubtful Guest opens on one of Gorey’s gaslit family scenes, dominated by that stock Gorey character, the bearded paterfamilias in his smoking jacket. The lord of all he surveys, he’s a monument to the Edwardian-Victorian patriarchy. But his authority is about to be challenged. It’s the proverbial dark and stormy night. The doorbell rings, but “when they answered the bell on that wild winter night, / There was no one expected—and no one in sight.” Craning their necks around the terrace of their elegant manor, they spy a puzzling creature perched on one of those large stone urns that proliferate in Goreyland. It—we never do learn its gender—resembles the offspring of a penguin and a raven, though its beady, bulging eyes recall Mr. Earbrass’s perpetually anxious look. Without warning, it runs into the house and assumes the position of a disobedient child sentenced to stand “nose to the wall”; there it remains, deaf to everyone’s screaming, until the defeated family shuffles off to bed. In the days that follow, it makes itself at home, turning the decorous domesticity of its hosts’ family life upside down.
In its “fits of bewildering wrath,” infantile orality (at breakfast, it eats “all the syrup and toast, and a part of a plate”), insatiable curiosity, and poltergeistlike destructiveness—it wrenches the horn off the new gramophone, tears apart books, puts roomfuls of pictures askew on their hooks—the Doubtful Guest embodies the bestial nature of babies, at least to a lifelong bachelor who never changed a diaper and who seemed to find the idea of childbearing distasteful and infants decidedly repugnant.
Gorey’s decision to dedicate The Doubtful Guest to Alison Lurie (then Alison Bishop), who was the mother of a toddler at the time, lends credence to the idea that the anthropomorphized creature of the title was Gorey’s caricature of infancy, a reading Lurie subscribes to. “[The Doubtful Guest]…was inspired, more or less, by a remark I made to Ted when my first son was less than two years old,” she said in 2008. “I said that having a young child around all the time was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left. This, of course, is what happens in the story.”30 She expanded on this anecdote in an essay for the New York Review of Books. “I have sometimes thought that…The Doubtful Guest…was partly a comment on my inexplicable (to him) decision to reproduce,” she wrote. “The title character in this book is smaller than anyone in the family it appears among. It has a peculiar appearance at first and does not understand language. As time passes it becomes greedy and destructive: it tears pages out of books, has temper tantrums, and walks in its sleep. Yet nobody even tries to get rid of the creature; their attitude toward it remains one of resigned acceptance. Who is this Doubtful Guest? The last page of the story makes everything clear:
“It came seventeen years ago—and to this day It has shown no intention of going away.
“Of course, after about seventeen years, most children leave home.”31
“It joined them at breakfast and presently ate / All the syrup and toast, and a part of a plate.” The Doubtful Guest. (Doubleday, 1957)
Looked at from a biographical angle, the Doubtful Guest, in its “white canvas shoes” and Harvard scarf, is unquestionably an alter ego, a poetic evocation of Gorey as a little boy. Like Ted, it’s a species of one—an only child. It’s surrounded by screaming adults, as Skee Morton thinks her cousin often was in his early years. Also like Gorey, it’s a born oddball, incapable of passing as a stuffy, dull-minded member of polite society, here represented by its adoptive family. (Doesn’t every bright, alienated weirdo wonder if he’s really adopted?)
The Cat in the Hat changed children’s books as America knew them. An instant bestseller, it ushered in a more irreverent view of childhood and the beginnings of an antiauthoritarian streak in kids’ culture. Most important, it killed off those insipid, boring goody-goodys Dick and Jane and injected the bang-zoom! anarchy of the animated cartoon into picture books. (Bart Simpson is a direct descendant of the Cat in the Hat.) Dr. Seuss joined Dr. Spock as one of mass culture’s most profound influences on the childhoods of Baby Boomers. The Doubtful Guest, by contrast, sank with barely a trace, selling few copies and garnering even fewer reviews, mostly from “provincial sources,” all of them “stressing how peculiar it is,” Gorey lamented.32
What would Boomer childhoods, and Boomer ideas about childhood, look like if Gorey’s wry, disquieting book about the oddness of babies—published in the peak year of the Baby Boom—had taken its place alongside Seuss and Sendak on America’s shelves? That might have happened if Duell, Sloan and Pearce’s marketing department had been less timid and more tuned in to educators’ calls for beginner books that didn’t taste like pablum. Sendak bemoaned publishers’ reluctance to market Gorey as a children’s author. “It was a received idea of children that had nothing to do with kids,” he told an interviewer. More’s the pity, he thought, because “Ted Gorey is perfect for children.”33
“When I first started out, I wasn’t trying to write for children because I didn’t know any children,” said Gorey in 1977. “Then again, I mean ‘knowing’ in the fashion of people who talk to the kiddies all the time. This simply would not work for me. However, I have thought that more of my work might have been for children than anybody would ever publish on a juvenile list. The Doubtful Guest was for children, by my estimation. I used to try to persuade a publisher by saying, ‘Why don’t you bring this out as a children’s book? I have an adult audience which will buy the book anyway. You might as well pick up some children along the line.’ But they would not risk it, they’d get all twittery. So I gave up.”34
* * *
“A free verse poem conscientiously about nothing at all, very despairing emotionally,” is how Gorey described The Object-Lesson in a letter to Lurie.35 Published in 1958 by Doubleday—and dedicated to Jason and Barbara Epstein—it was Gorey’s first full-fledged venture into surrealism. Edmund Wilson was quick to note Gorey’s debt to the movement in his New Yorker essay “The Albums of Edward Gorey.” “Here you have another [Gorey] family, but their adventures are entirely Surrealist and remind one a little of such books of Max Ernst’s as La Femme 100 Têtes,” he wrote. “The ‘story line’ is always shifting; the situations are never explained.”36
A string of more or less unrelated phrases that nonetheless flow seamlessly, The Object-Lesson follows the associative logic of a dream rather than the cause-and-effect plotting of a conventional narrative. “It was already Thursday,” the story begins, “but his lordship’s artificial limb could not be found.” We see him on one leg, hopping mad, holding a limp trouser leg upright. Once again, the authority of one of Gorey’s bearded patriarchs is under assault, this time in a manner whose Freudian symbolism is so obvious it verges on camp. (Castration complex, anyone?) Directing the servants to fill the baths, his lordship seizes a pair of fireplace tongs and sets off—in his pajamas, swaddled in the obligatory fur coat and Harvard scarf—for the edge of the lake.
At the lake, his lordship presents the Throbblefoot Spectre with a length of string; the forlorn wraith promptly fashions it into a cat’s cradle, to amuse itself.b Seating himself beside the statue of Corrupted Endeavour, his lordship awaits the arrival of autumn, that most Goreyesque time of year, with its melancholy nostalgia and its intimations of mortality. Things proceed from there with an illogic that somehow feels perfectly logical, thanks to Gorey’s clever use of stock images evocative of Sherlock Holmes mysteries and Victorian ghost stories—the mysterious theft of the prosthetic leg, the unexplained lady in mourning costume, the disconsolate ghost, the villain disguised by a false mustache. As the book winds down, an ineffable sadness settles over its little world: “On the shore a bat, or possibly an umbrella, disengaged itself from the shrubbery, causing those nearby to recollect the miseries of childhood.”
This sentence is not only one of the most beautifully wrought lines of gothic-surrealist poetry Gorey ever wrote, it is also one of the most densely allusive. His linkage of the twilight flight of a bat, or a forlorn umbrella, with recollections of childhood crosses Proustian reverie with gothic (the bat) and surrealist (Magritte’s umbrellas) symbolism. The confusion between bat and umbrella recalls surrealism’s combination of incongruous elements (quintessentially, “the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella” in Lautréamont’s novel, Les Chants de Maldoror) to create a new, dreamlike synthesis that destabilizes everyday reality, if only for a moment. The irresolvability of whether the dark, flapping thing in The Object-Lesson is bat or umbrella has the effect of making us view it as an uncanny conjunction of both.
The Object-Lesson is only thirty pages long, and its text totals just 224 words, but its depth of feeling, and its ability to provoke reveries, make it feel like a philosophical novel in miniature. The lesson hidden in plain sight, in this bit of gothic-surrealist-absurdist nonsense, is that “the cause-and-effect, rational world in which we normally try to function,” as Gorey called it, is only part of the story. “I’m not a firm believer in cause and effect,” he told an interviewer.37 Life, in Goreyland, is a random walk, full of mystery and melancholy, punctuated by the unpredictable and the inexplicable. Our earliest memories begin in the middle of things (“It was already Thursday…”); the slow fade to black, at the end of our lives, is similarly Shrouded in Mystery, “the tea-urn empty save for a card on which was written the single word: Farewell.” Asking what it all means misses the point: namely, its pointlessness. That, perhaps, is the object lesson The Object-Lesson teaches.
The relationship between cause and effect hasn’t been abolished in the world of The Object-Lesson; it’s been rendered absurd. Gorey’s use of conventional narrative structure, in which events proceed in chronological order, implies causality—logical causality. In fact, Gorey’s story is an object lesson in what philosophers call the post hoc, ergo propter hoc error, a type of logical fallacy that results from the erroneous assumption that because one event follows another, it must be the result of the event that preceded it. (The Latin phrase means “after this, therefore because of this.”) Of course, The Object-Lesson’s surrealist-absurdist view of the world is a more psychologically accurate reflection of the way we experience our lives than the logician’s “cause-and-effect, rational world.”
The Object-Lesson was Gorey’s attempt to write “a novel about nothing,” he said. “I have always been sort of fascinated by that; you know, Flaubert’s idea of writing a novel about nothing.…[T]hat’s one of those tag lines that has always stuck in my head.”38
His immediate inspiration, however, was Samuel Foote’s prose poem “The Grand Panjandrum,” a delightful bit of nonsense that gave us the titular phrase. Foote (1720–77) was an English comic actor known for his wicked satires of British society. When the actor Charles Macklin boasted that he could memorize any text upon a single hearing, Foote rose to the challenge by improvising, on the spot, a nonsense monologue calculated to strain the faculties of the most accomplished mnemonist: “So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming down the street, pops its head into the shop—What! No soap? So he died; and she very imprudently married the Barber: and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the great Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top; and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.”39
Of his books, The Object-Lesson was one of Gorey’s favorites, he said, precisely because it didn’t make any sense, and “those kinds of things are harder to do than almost anything else.”40 Following the lead of literary experimentalists such as Georges Perec, the Oulipoc writer who set himself the task of writing a novel without using the letter e, Gorey often used formal constraints—the limerick form, nonsense verse, the abecedarian poem, the wordless narrative—as a conceptual goad to spur himself into unexplored creative territory. He seemed to thrive under such self-imposed restrictions.
Of course, it’s his flawless marriage of text and image that makes The Object-Lesson such a feast for the imagination. Gorey counterpoints the playful perversity of surrealist word games and the cartwheeling nuttiness of Victorian nonsense with a melancholy atmosphere, “very despairing emotionally” in its oncoming autumn, descending twilight, letters destroyed unread, and cryptic messages on calling cards. Here and there, we catch glimpses of the shadows circling in the deeper waters of Gorey’s subconscious: the father figure, loveless and unlovable; “the miseries of childhood”; his grandmother packed off to the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane in Kankakee, Illinois (“At twilight, however, no message had come from the asylum”).
The illustrations, which are among Gorey’s finest, enhance the autumnal mood, especially the indescribably beautiful drawing of the bat, or battered umbrella, swooping over the leafless trees. Gorey’s loving attention to the intricate, fractal branchings of each twig, and their plaintive grasping after the airborne thing beyond their reach, betrays his close study of Japanese wood-block prints, in which nature has an animistic part to play. Then, too, they suggest a fondness for the uncanny, clawing forests of English illustrators such as Arthur Rackham.
A bat, or possibly an umbrella, disengages itself from the shrubbery in The Object-Lesson. (Doubleday, 1958)
“These seem to me the very best drawings that Gorey so far has done; he is really becoming a master,” enthused Wilson, marveling at Gorey’s mastery of composition, both at the level of individual panels and in the arc of the book. The “anxious-faced” woman in the opening scene, “lightly balanced at the right by a potted plant” and “thrown into rigid and sharp relief by a long expanse of curly-patterned wallpaper,” is bookended on the book’s last page, he points out, by the “three silent figures” facing “a long expanse of darkening sky, a background like the wallpaper in the first of the pictures, balanced by a remote little moon, which, in its place in the composition, has the value of the potted plant.”41
* * *
Gorey’s emotional life had, since his ill-fated crush on Ed from Buffalo in 1953, been “nil,” as he liked to say. Then, in January of ’58, at the age of thirty-two, he found himself confronting the worrisome possibility that he was “about to become Emotionally Entangled,” as he told Lurie, with a “middle-aged Mexican of extremely bizarre appearance and character.”42 From the outset, he was buffeted by doubts about the object of his latest crush, who was as unlike him as unlike could be. Of course, discomfort was Gorey’s comfort zone. At least, that’s the impression he liked to give in his letters and interviews, where he often played the role of angsty, ennui-ridden neurotic (though with such be-still-my-heart histrionics—the full-body sighs, the woebegone declamations—that he let his irony show, revealing the whole thing for the pose it was). It’s hard to make out, through the overgrowth of Gorey’s Edwardian-Victorian verbiage and campy style, just how deep his feelings for the Mexican—whose name, by the way, was Victor—ran, but he seems to have been in the throes of one of his periodic infatuations, if not in love.
As was inevitably the case with Gorey’s love life, things were fraught. It soon emerged that Victor, having been unlucky in love, was skittish about sex, which he seemed to regard as a recipe for romantic self-destruction. As a result, Gorey confided to Lurie in a letter that is startling in its candor, Victor issued a strict prohibition on hanky-panky, which Ted found odd, since it was Victor who’d initiated “the moderate erotic goings-on” during their first “encounter,” at Victor’s apartment.43
However moderate they were, the erotic goings-on suggest that Gorey, behind his public pose as a thirty-two-year-old virgin with a Victorian aversion to sex, wasn’t entirely asexual.
Sadly, this, like Gorey’s other abortive romances, was not to be. Victor, despite his “muscularity,” boyish charm, and beguiling way of wearing heavy sweaters, was too busy to see Gorey with any frequency, dividing his time between illustrating fashion ads for Bonwit Teller and serving as arm candy for rich women. Then, too, he had a hair-raising habit of making “rather creepy little remarks delivered in bubbly tones,” such as, “Would you kill the cats if I asked you to?”44
In a letter dated April 1, Gorey tells Lurie that he’s relegating Victor, like all his predecessors, to the dustbin of history. “Sinister Victor never turned up again after I last wrote you,” he writes, “which is obviously Just as Well.” You can almost hear the sigh.45
a Gorey’s use of a meter that makes visions of sugarplums dance in most readers’ heads makes us wonder if The Doubtful Guest is a parody of Moore’s moldy chestnut. Both tales are set on winter nights in snowbound houses; both involve home invasions by bizarre beings, each “dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot.” In both books, it’s the man of the house who’s most alarmed by the intruder. And both trespassers have a thing for chimneys: Saint Nick disappears up one at the end of Moore’s poem; the Doubtful Guest betrays “a great liking for peering up flues.”
It makes sense that Gorey, a confirmed Christmas loather, would satirize Moore’s yuletide classic. Yet when Faith Elliott, a young fan interviewing him in his apartment on November 30, 1976, asked, “I might be wrong about this, but since The Doubtful Guest is done in the same meter as ‘A Visit from Saint Nick,’ is there any correlation?” he was quick to dismiss the idea. “Not that I know of,” he said. “I didn’t even know that it was.” Still, the parallels, even if unconscious, are provocative. (Elliott hoped to publish her interview, but never found a home for it. All quotes from her conversation with Gorey are taken from the original cassette tape.)
b String was an enduring Gorey obsession. “Do you think it is too late for me to devote my life to something to do with String?” he wondered in a 1968 letter to Peter Neumeyer. (See Floating Worlds, 91.) The capitalization is his—an indication, perhaps, of the gravity of the subject.
c Sometimes spelled OuLiPo, Oulipo is an acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), an avant-garde literary collective founded in France in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, a mathematician, tellingly. Tellingly because the Oulipo writers use rule-based generative devices such as “n + 7,” which stipulates that the author must replace every noun in his or her text with the noun that follows it, seven entries later, in the dictionary. It’s literature as word game, an approach heavily influenced by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Oulipians, in Queneau’s unforgettable formulation, are “rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape.” (See Mónica de la Torre, “Into the Maze: OULIPO,” Poets.org, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/maze-oulipo.) Texts generated through the use of Oulipo techniques have something of the quality of surrealist literature or, more accurately, of a surrealist literature written by mathematicians, one that eschews the subconscious altogether.