UNEXPECTED TURBULENCE HIT Gorey’s work life, too. In the fall of ’58, Jason Epstein left Doubleday. There had been considerable backroom intrigue leading up to his departure; where book publishing’s golden boy would end up next was “rather a secret of sorts,” Gorey told Lurie, though he was confident Epstein would offer him a job “whenever the new whatever it is gets set up.”1
By 1959, Epstein was ensconced at Random House, and his new sideline—a “children’s book thing” called the Looking Glass Library—was up and running, with Gorey on staff, after a fashion. He still had one foot in the art department at Doubleday and was juggling his nine-to-five workload while doing illustrations for Epstein’s fledgling company, all of which left him “in a state of total frazzle.”2 He hoped to jump ship to Looking Glass, he told Lurie, because it “would mean more money and prestige and time to work on my own things.”3
On February 1, 1960, just shy of his thirty-fifth birthday, Gorey moved to Epstein’s new venture after seven years at Doubleday. Founded by Epstein and Clelia Carroll, who had been Epstein’s assistant at Anchor, the Looking Glass Library was a line of classic children’s books in hardcover. “Modern educational theory has underestimated the old children’s books, and the trend has been to have books no more complicated than the experience of the children who read them,” Epstein told Newsweek in a clear jab at Seuss’s use of vocabulary lists approved by early-learning experts. “We want to get away from categorization, and treat children as human beings.”4 (No mention was made of the happy coincidence that old children’s books, especially the Victorian titles Epstein and Carroll had in mind, are often in the public domain, which lowers a publisher’s overhead substantially. Dead Victorians tend not to demand royalties.) “The idea was that it was going to do for children’s books what Anchor had done for the parents,” Gorey recalled. “The books were not paperbacks, but rather paper over boards.…It was really a neat batch of sometimes quite forgotten 19th-century stories. We tended to pick up stuff from England.”5
Looking Glass, with its skeleton crew of four (secretary included) and its unconventional offices—away from “the garrets of Random House,” as Gorey put it, in a “rather posh” apartment with a terrace on 69th Street, across from Hunter College—was congenial to Gorey’s eccentricities in a way that the more buttoned-down Doubleday had never been. Epstein, who was up to his eyebrows in Random House affairs while worrying “frantically about [Looking Glass’s] sales and whatnot,” didn’t meddle in the imprint’s day-to-day operations, which suited Gorey just fine.6
His job title was art director, but he was happy to lend an editorial hand when a book played to his strengths: The Haunted Looking Glass (1959), an anthology of spooky stories, is both illustrated and edited by Gorey, with the predictable result that its table of contents is heavily weighted toward nineteenth-century English writers such as Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Wilkie Collins.
Of course the design of the Looking Glass line, like Gorey’s work for Anchor, was eye-catchingly fresh. Putting the traditionally unexploited real estate of the books’ spines to shrewd use, Gorey designed titles to look “chic,” as he put it, in a row on a shelf.7 Volumes 1 through 10 were available as a boxed set; his distinctive hand-drawn typography, done in a wide variety of typefaces and colors, adorns all ten spines. The visual rhythms of the quirky lettering and disparate yet harmonious color schemes tickle the eye. Side by side, the books assume a collective identity—catnip to the collector, as Gorey, a case study in bibliomania, knew all too well.
He art-directed the twenty-eight titles published by Looking Glass between 1959 and 1961, when the imprint closed up shop.
Not all of Gorey’s designs hit the mark. In a real-life plot twist that’s stranger than fiction, he designed an Epstein and Carroll title destined to become a classic of Baby-Boom kid lit: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. At least, he tried to. When Juster saw Gorey’s page layouts, “the placement of the illustrations in relation to the text struck [him] as needlessly complex and fussy,” writes Leonard S. Marcus, in his introduction to The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth.8 Juster scrapped Gorey’s work and redesigned the book himself.
The War of the Worlds. (Epstein and Carroll/Looking Glass, 1960)
On top of his design duties, Gorey did the cover art, and in some cases the illustrations, for The Comic Looking Glass (1961), The Looking Glass Book of Stories (1960), The War of the Worlds (1960), Men and Gods (1959), and The Haunted Looking Glass, mentioned earlier. Some of his illustrations, such as those for Men and Gods, a collection of Greek myths, have the perfunctory feel of work dashed off under deadline pressure. By contrast, his interior art for H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds is superlative. The cover, too, is a stunner, its impact maximized by the clever strategy of wrapping the illustration around the front, back, and spine of the book. A nightmare panorama unfolds: lashing the air with their whiplike antennae, Martian war machines stalk fleeing humans across the hills, zapping them to ashes with their death rays. Gorey’s lurid palette of purple, orange, and grass green gives the scene a nightmarish unreality.
Compared to Doubleday, the production schedule at Looking Glass was considerably less demanding, which gave Gorey the time he dreamed of—time to crosshatch away at his own books, time to take on some of the growing number of requests for freelance work he was getting.
Gorey’s freelance boomlet was partly the result of Edmund Wilson’s groundbreaking essay on his work, which had appeared in the December 26, 1959, issue of the New Yorker. Wilson was unquestionably the preeminent critic of his day, a lion of letters whose pronouncements were taken as holy writ by the cultural elite. In “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” he let New Yorker readers in on the Gorey secret. “I find that I cannot remember to have seen a single printed word about the books of Edward Gorey,” he began, “but it is not, I suppose, surprising that his work should have received no attention.”9 Admittedly, Gorey’s body of work was slim, but Wilson attributed his obscurity to the fact that “he has been working perversely to please himself and has created a whole personal world, amusing and somber, nostalgic and claustrophobic, at the same time poetic and poisoned.”
Wilson’s essay is full of such insights. He notes the supreme importance of “costume and furnishings” in Gorey’s world, which is “sometimes late Victorian,” “sometimes of the early nineteen-hundreds,” and “sometimes, though more rarely, of the twenties”; he is quick to notice that the bearded patriarch, “evidently domineering, probably a little cruel,” is “the most impressive figure in Mr. Gorey’s world”; and he is thoughtful on the point of Gorey’s relationship to surrealism and to contemporary English illustrators such as Ronald Searle.10 With an almighty whack, he drives straight down the fairway, establishing some of the major themes of Gorey criticism. Yet he ends on an affectingly personal note: “These albums give me something of the same sort of pleasure that I get from Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm, and I find that I like to return to them.”11
* * *
Wilson had remarked on the “morbid Edwardian household” of The Doubtful Guest and, more generally, on the “macabre or Surrealist character” of Gorey’s work.12 But in 1960, Gorey pulled a switcheroo: The Bug Book was as colorful and cute—there’s no other word for it—as the book immediately preceding it, The Object-Lesson, was somber and brooding. (Like the Doubtful Guest, Gorey was himself a boundary crosser, jumping from one side of a philosophical dualism to the other just when we thought we’d got him pegged.)
The Bug Book had originally been published in December of ’59 in a privately printed edition of six hundred copies under the Looking Glass colophon. A glorified Christmas card, it was an attention-getting way of introducing the newly launched imprint to everyone in the book business. In March of 1960, Jason and Clelia reprinted it for the general market under their Epstein and Carroll imprint, another Random House venture.
The Bug Book was the first Gorey story to be printed in color and the first Gorey title that was unequivocally a kid’s book. Printed in perky primary colors and drawn in a generically childlike stick-figure style, The Bug Book tells the story of two blue antlike bugs who live in an upended teacup with a chunk missing from the rim, leaving a notch that’s convenient for ingress and egress. “They were frivolous, and often danced on the roof,” hand in hand. (Are they a couple? They seem to be, and their matching coloring—both are baby blue—invites us to read them as a same-sex couple.) They live in a close-knit community—a rare thing in a Gorey story—with three red bugs and two yellow ones. This being Goreyland, they’re all cousins, naturally. “All the bugs were on the friendliest possible terms and constantly went to call on each other.…And had delightful parties.”
A pall falls over things when the neighborhood bully crashes the party—a big black bug (“who was related to nobody”) with the menacing headgear of a stag beetle and an attitude problem to match. Gorey uses his gift for understatement to hilarious effect: “The other bugs were dubious, but nevertheless made an attempt to be friendly,” notes the caption beneath a drawing of one of the yellow bugs attempting to shake the interloper’s claw. Cut to: the unfortunate peacemaker hurtling through the air, knocked ass over teakettle by the big bug. “It was not a success,” the narration informs, with perfect deadpan. Distraught, the little bugs conspire to rid themselves of the pestilence by dropping a big black stone onto the big black bug, with satisfyingly splattery results. The terror vanquished, they slip his remains into an envelope, address it “To whom it may concern,” and leave it “propped against the fatal stone to be mailed,” after which they throw a celebratory party, “complete with cake crumbs and raspberry punch.” The Bug Book is the only Gorey title with an unambiguously happy ending. Good triumphs over evil, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Of course, since it’s a Gorey book, we can’t entirely suppress the feeling that there’s something tongue-in-cheek about this uplifting tale for tots. Gorey’s faux-naïf style puts an ironic spin on things, underscoring our sense that his “tiny work for children,” as he called it, is simultaneously a parody of tiny works for children. At once sincere and ironic, it can be appreciated on either level—or both. In that light, The Bug Book can be seen as paving the way for post–Baby Boom kiddie entertainments such as The Ren and Stimpy Show and The Simpsons, which use irony and double entendre to appeal to parents, too.
As for The Bug Book’s commercial prospects, the subject filled him “with profound apathy,” he told Alison Lurie that March, on the eve of the book’s publication.13 Adopting his half joking doomsayer mode, he predicted it, like his previous efforts, would vanish into oblivion, adding wryly, “As you can see, success in the form of Edmund’s article hasn’t spoiled me.” Come September, he sent Lurie the cheering news that a pest-control company was interested in copies of The Bug Book as a gift for its clients. “Success is right around the corner,” he deadpanned.14
Nevertheless, he plugged away at his books in progress and his freelance assignments. In his March letter, he told Lurie that he’d finished another book, called The Hapless Child, which Epstein had promised to publish that fall, and that he was “about two-thirds of the way through…an alphabet about the dreadful deaths of twenty-six tiny children.” It would appear in ’63 as The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
* * *
Nineteen-sixty also saw the publication of The Fatal Lozenge, by the New York publisher Ivan Obolensky. (This was Gorey’s fourth publisher. “I never changed publishers; they always changed me, as it were,” he protested in a 1977 interview. “They all thought they were going to make more of a splash with whatever particular book they were doing at the time. And then they’d do, like, one or two, and the splash didn’t arrive. So they would say reluctantly, ‘Well—’”)15
Subtitled An Alphabet, The Fatal Lozenge was Gorey’s first foray into the genre. He would go on to perform variations on the abecedarium theme in six books,a one of which, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, would become his best-known title.
The alphabet book is one of the oldest forms of children’s literature. Rhyming couplets, illustrated by woodcuts, aided memorization. Early examples wedded ABCs and Calvinist catechism. The New England Primer, ubiquitous in late-seventeenth-century America, is typical of the genre:
A In Adam’s Fall
We sinnèd all.
B Heaven to find;
The Bible Mind.
C Christ crucify’d
For sinners dy’d.
D The Deluge drown’d
The Earth around.16
Gorey’s interest in the alphabet book was undoubtedly a by-product of his interest in Lear, well known for loopy abecedaria like “Nonsense Alphabet” (1845) (“P was a pig, / Who was not very big; / But his tail was too curly, / And that made him surly”).17 His library reveals a longstanding fascination with the form, with a predictable focus on the nineteenth century. On his bookshelves, we find A Moral Alphabet (1899) by Hilaire Belloc, A Comic Alphabet (1836) by George Cruikshank, a Dover facsimile of The Adventures of A, Apple Pie, Who Was Cut to Pieces and Eaten by Twenty Six Young Ladies and Gentlemen with Whom All Little People Ought to Be Acquainted (circa 1835), and of course Lear in abundance.
At the same time, he couldn’t have been oblivious, as an illustrator working in commercial book publishing, to the waves Dr. Seuss was making in kid lit. Alphabet books were playing an important part in reshaping American ideas about childhood. Consider Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra! (1955), whose boy narrator dreams up a new alphabet for kids who think outside the Little Golden box (“In the places I go there are things that I see / That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z”). Or Sendak’s Alligators All Around (1962), in which “shockingly spoiled” reptilian protagonists throw tantrums and juggle jelly beans with abandon. These and other unconventional abecedaria celebrate Romper Room radicals who flout the rules. Seen in their cultural and historical context, they look like premonitions of the hippie era, with its worship of nonconformity and its elevation of the child to a cultural icon, not to mention its stoner humor and acid-soaked song lyrics.
Though he seemed barely to notice the counterculture of the ’60s, beyond the Beatles, Gorey was in his own quietly perverse way more iconoclastic than Seuss or Sendak. In The Fatal Lozenge, as in The Listing Attic, his combination of a children’s genre (in this case, the ABC book) with dark subject matter and black comedy is both mordantly funny and unsettling, especially when he crosses the line, as he occasionally does, into the “sick humor” of contemporaries such as the cartoonist Gahan Wilson. When an interviewer mentioned to Sendak that the grisly drawing of an infant skewered on the point of a Zouave’s sword in The Fatal Lozenge was the moment when Gorey went “down the road of no return as far as publishers were concerned,” Sendak quipped, “That’s why he was so loved. There’s never enough dead babies for us.”18
The Fatal Lozenge. (Ivan Obolensky, 1960)
The literary theorist George R. Bodmer places Gorey’s ironic, sardonic ABCs in the context of a postwar push-back, among children’s authors such as Seuss and Sendak, “against the limits of imagination, or the limits the outside world would impose on imagination…”19 In his essay “The Post-Modern Alphabet: Extending the Limits of the Contemporary Alphabet Book, from Seuss to Gorey,” Bodmer calls Gorey’s “anti-alphabets” a “sarcastic rebellion against a view of childhood that is sunny, idyllic, and instructive.”20 Gorey’s mock-moralistic tone satirizes received wisdom about the benignity of parents and other authority figures: a magnate waiting for his limousine “ponders further child-enslavement / And other projects still more mean”; two little children quail in terror at the sight of their towering, bearded uncle, for they “know that at his leisure / He plans to have them come to harm.” Yet Gorey also punctures the myth that children are little angels: a baby, “lying meek and quiet” on a bearskin rug, “Has dreams about rampage and riot / And will grow up to be a thug.” (The rug’s enormous, snarling head, with its bared fangs, is an omen of mayhem to come.)
Talking about The Fatal Lozenge in 1977, Gorey said, “This was a very early book and at that date I was not above trying to shock everyone a bit.”21 In that sense, his sixth book is so similar to his second that it might as well be called Son of Listing Attic. The drawings are more accomplished (though they’re nowhere near the perfection he attained in The Object-Lesson) and more coherent stylistically, but Gorey gives in to the same snickering nastiness that weakens the earlier effort.
A good part of the book consists of the usual droll riffing on stock characters and situations borrowed from gothic novels, penny dreadfuls, Conan Doyle, and Dickens. But just as clearly, there’s more going on in The Fatal Lozenge than enfant terrible-ism (“trying to shock everyone a bit”) or the larger trends identified by Bodmer: the bohemian backlash against the suffocating normalcy of the Eisenhower era and the growing resistance, led by Drs. Spock and Seuss, to outdated, repressive ideas about childhood and parenting. The recurrence of themes closer to home—the beastliness of babies, the depravity of the clergy (a nun is “fearfully bedevilled”), the furtiveness and shamefulness of homosexual desire, here associated with child molestation and even more monstrous perversions (“The Proctor buys a pupil ices, / And hopes the boy will not resist / When he attempts to practice vices / Few people even know exist”22)—makes us feel, at times, as if we’re eavesdropping on a psychotherapy session. That these disconcerting images come to us in the reassuring wrappings of a children’s book makes The Fatal Lozenge even more disquieting.
* * *
Gorey, as far as we know, never spent time on the Freudian couch, though he did cross paths with someone who was in therapy “forever,” wrestling with his closeted homosexuality and his unhappy childhood, when the other kids ostracized him as a sissy.23
That someone was Maurice Sendak, whom Gorey met when Sendak dropped by the Looking Glass offices to discuss book ideas with Jason Epstein. “I remember how much I admired Ted,” Sendak recalled in a 2002 interview. “I just loved his work.…I loved the line. I loved the sort of scintillating toe dance that he does. It was his love of ballet which was a part of that.”24 He had great respect for Gorey’s technique. “He was so totally in control. And he was so elegant and he was so refined.…Like Mozart.”25
The respect was mutual, though Gorey expressed his high opinion of Sendak’s art in a predictably oblique way: perusing children’s books led him to the “sad conclusion,” he told Peter Neumeyer, “that except for Ardizzone and Sendak, I am about the best around. A sad commentary on the state of things if ever there was one.”26 Nonetheless, he said, “I do like Sendak, especially Mr. Rabbitb (an otherwise absolutely vile book); his own writing I am ambivalent toward.”27
An irascible loner and uncompromisingly honest artist who, against all odds, hit the commercial—and critical—jackpot, Sendak had a deeply felt sympathy for Gorey. He knew what it was like to spend long years in the wilderness, more or less ignored by the critical elite, scraping by financially. But unlike Seuss, who knew “how to satisfy the customer,” and unlike himself, who had no inkling of how to satisfy the customer but managed to nonetheless, “Ted had no intention of satisfying the customer,” Sendak thought.28
He urged his editor at Harper & Row, the legendary Ursula Nordstrom, to take up Gorey’s cause. An indefatigable champion of “good books for bad children,” Nordstrom was at the barricades of the revolution in children’s literature from 1940 to 1970, mentoring Sendak, Tomi Ungerer, Shel Silverstein, E. B. White, and others who were reinventing and reinvigorating kids’ books. She was a Gorey enthusiast, Sendak recalled, but in the end “couldn’t quite put a hold on him.”29
Not that she didn’t try: having cajoled Gorey into a contract for something called The Interesting List, she wrote a series of typically playful letters, urging him to get a move on, as first one deadline passed, then another. It was all for naught. Gorey sent her a few drawings, but the manuscript never materialized—done in, most likely, by his wandering interests, towering workload, and benign neglect of his career.30 Whether out of bohemianism or just plain contrarianism, he seemed to view the very idea of striving as pushily self-important. “I have a lot of friends in New York who are involved in various enterprises where they’re always fanning their careers,” he said with affectionate contempt.31 In the wake of Dracula’s success, he recalled, “I began to realize what it would be like to be rich and famous, but I’ve decided unh-unh.”
Sendak got to know Gorey during their New York years. Like John Ashbery and so many others, he found Ted “generous and funny” but never felt as if he truly knew him.32 He was nagged by the feeling that Gorey had truer friends elsewhere—a sentiment shared by nearly everyone who knew Ted, curiously.
One of the few times he “felt intimate” with Gorey, oddly enough, was when a bizarre bit of absurdist comedy broke the ice of what Sendak called Gorey’s “aloof and refined-looking” persona.33 After not having seen Gorey for a year, he spotted him striding along Fifth Avenue in his signature getup—fur coat, earrings, all of it—and trotted up, tugging Ted’s sleeve to get his attention. (Sendak was short and squared-off, a Jewish garden gnome from Brooklyn. Maybe he thought Gorey, towering above the foot traffic, hadn’t noticed him.) “He looked askance and he seemed to either not remember me or not to wish to recognize me. I got pissed. So I tugged harder, and then he turned to me—and his eyes—his face looked like Nosferatu—and he actually yelled. He said, ‘Rape!’…[H]e thought I was a molester.” Sendak was rattled. “Of course then he smiled and I knew it was all right.”
Sendak regretted that he and Gorey weren’t closer. “If we could have talked more, we might have shared ideas,” he said, “but he was not a sharer.”34 Then, too, their personalities were comically dissimilar. An avowed misanthrope and career depressive, Sendak was a product of the New York Jewish culture of kvetch epitomized by Woody Allen and Larry David. Gorey, on the other hand, was about as goyische as they come: a WASP from the Midwest, Episcopalian by background, Anglophile by inclination, whose chitchat touched on everything (but sex) while revealing next to nothing about himself or his work.
Even so, the two men had much in common, intellectually and artistically: both were ravenous consumers of culture, high and low, and shameless borrowers from anyone or anything that caught their eye. Both were masters of the picture-book medium who helped transform it into a serious art form. (“A true picture book is a visual poem,” Sendak believed—an apt description of Gorey titles like The Object-Lesson.)35 Both were virtuosos of pen-and-ink draftsmanship and epigrammatic storytelling; both were snubbed by the art world as mere illustrators. Both experimented with genre and format, from the alphabet book to the miniature book (in Sendak’s case, the Nutshell Library) to the mock cautionary tale (Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue was Sendak’s entry in that category). Selma G. Lanes’s perceptive comments on Sendak’s style in The Art of Maurice Sendak could do double duty as an analysis of Gorey’s:
His early popularity notwithstanding, Sendak has at no time during his career been in step with the mainstream of American children’s book illustration. In the mid-fifties, when bold exploitation of color, abstract design, outsized formats, and showy technical virtuosity abounded, Sendak’s work remained consistently low-key, curiously retrograde and nineteenth-century in spirit. The use of crosshatching was introduced into his illustrations right from the start.…Sendak’s drawings actually achieve the look of nineteenth-century wood engravings.36
On a more personal note, both understood “the miseries of childhood,” and, as Sendak pointed out in an unpublished interview with Kevin Shortsleeve, a scholar of children’s literature, both were gay.c
As a gay man who wrote and illustrated children’s books, Sendak knew too well what an explosive combination that was in an America whose dream life was haunted by nightmares of predatory pedophiles. “Well, just look at the time we [he and Gorey] both grew up in America, as artists, both gay—and we had to hide that,” he told an interviewer.37 As a New York Times article on Sendak noted in 2008, “A gay artist in New York is not exactly uncommon, but Mr. Sendak said that the idea of a gay man writing children’s books would have hurt his career when he was in his 20s and 30s.”38
Paradoxically, the closet inspired gay artists like him and Gorey to become virtuosos of subtext, he maintained. “When you look at the new gay-lib,” Sendak observed, “you say, gee whiz, why did we suffer so much? But I think it added to what we were doing.…We had to adapt more cunningly.”39 The need to hide in plain sight gave rise to sly, secretive systems for signaling queerness, he thought. Consider Gorey’s books: “They all had what appealed to me so much—aside from the graphics and the writing—[which] was the wicked sexual ambiguity that ran through all of it. I remember a jacket he did for…a novel by Melville, Redburn. And the jacket summed up completely the kind of confused homosexuality of that novel.…So erotic and yet so simple. You can look at it any way you like.…[H]e buried a lot of information about himself in the art.”40
Coincidentally, another novel by Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, was the key that opened the closet door for Sendak. Teaching a course at the University of California at Berkeley, he was discussing his illustrations for a 1995 edition of the book, unblushingly homoerotic drawings that brought the novel’s gay themes to the fore. A female student asked “whether the intensity of…the homoeroticism—which was flagrant—reflected anything in my life.” To his own astonishment, he found himself admitting that, well, yes, it did: he was gay. “It was a wonderful moment,” he said. “I can see her face right now…like a little votive lamp leading me on. Leading me to explain things. It was wonderful. I wish Ted had that. But maybe he didn’t seem to ever want it.”41
* * *
Gorey’s professional orbit brought him into contact with other illustrators and cartoonists whose work, like Sendak’s, cast a long shadow in the mass imagination. He was friendly with Charles Addams—to whom he was often compared, a lazy analogy Gorey found irritating. “Neither of us really cared for the comparison,” he said. “We thought we were doing basically different things, with little overlap. The Addams Family had more to do with role reversal; I’ve always leaned in my own direction.”42
He’s right. Addams turns conventional morality and bourgeois propriety upside down—a carnivalesque prank that reaffirms the social order by providing a harmless outlet for our fear of death and fantasies of murdering our bosses and spouses. Perversely funny as his single-panel gags can be, his brand of black humor lite only sneaks a peek at the darkness Gorey peers deep into. The Addams Family, for all its creepiness and kookiness, is a close-knit, mutually supportive unit, more heimlich than unheimlich.
Still, the two men got on. Addams, a bon vivant who collected crossbows, picnicked in graveyards, and used an embalming slab for a coffee table in his Manhattan apartment, was by all accounts great fun. Gorey must have admired his surrealist wit, not to mention his subtle wash technique and precise line.
“I love Charles Addams’s stuff,” Gorey professed. “We had the same agent.d I occasionally would have lunch with him. I was told he envied me because I had a more highbrow reputation than he did.”43 Conversely, Gorey seems to have envied Addams his commercial success: “I suppose there’s always the possibility somebody will come along and want to do the equivalent of The Addams Family movie with my stuff. Well, I’m not that rich, so I’d probably say, ‘Go ahead.’”
Another artist whose work left an indelible stamp on the pop unconscious in the ’60s and whose trajectory carried him through Gorey’s life was the French-born illustrator and children’s book author Tomi Ungerer. Politically outspoken and gleefully perverse, Ungerer was equally in tune with the emerging counterculture and the childhood he never outgrew. He wrote and illustrated morally ambiguous children’s books such as The Three Robbers (1961), designed antiwar posters, and turned out bizarre, satirical art-porn depicting bondage freaks strapped into sex machines (Fornicon, 1969). Like Gorey (and Sendak, whom he knew socially), his unfettered imagination was darkened by a sense of the absurd—a gift, in his case, from the Nazis, who occupied not only his hometown of Strasbourg during the war but also his family’s house. Like Gorey, he had no stomach for “the mushy sentimentality” of American children’s books of the day, “all semi-realistic, with smiling children and pink cheeks.”44
An “absolute fan” of Gorey’s work, especially of his writing—“everything he ever published, I collected”—Ungerer sang his praises to his Swiss-German publisher, Daniel Keel of Diogenes Verlag, a bit of matchmaking that resulted in a relationship that began in ’63 with Eine Harfe ohne Saiten (The Unstrung Harp) and endures to this day. But, echoing Sendak’s experience, his attempt to strike up a friendship with Gorey came to naught. “I said, ‘I love your work and I’d like to meet you because I think we have a lot to share,’” he said, recalling the time he called Gorey on a whim. “And I just hit into nothing. I am outgoing and he was inkeeping—he was an innkeeper!”
Chagrined though he was, he understood and even respected Gorey’s standoffishness. Ungerer’s own books were “for the child in me,” he says, and he assumed “it was the same thing with Gorey. Innocence takes discipline, and this applies absolutely to Gorey. I’m talking about his thinking: one must be aware of one’s innocence and preserve it. He kept to himself to be what he was.”
In that sense, the two artists were comrades in arms, their mismatched social styles notwithstanding. “I just did my thing,” says Ungerer. “Once I had my first chance, I just decided to do what I felt like doing, but then it turned out that we”—he, Gorey, Sendak, and illustrators like them—“were a group of people who changed children’s books in America.”
* * *
Gorey hit his stride in the late ’50s, harmonizing the haikulike concision of his writing with the flawless economy of his India-ink line in The Doubtful Guest. By The Object-Lesson, in ’58, he’d elevated the picture book, a genre dismissed by most critics as kid stuff, into something rich and strange—just what no one was exactly sure. Were his little books intended for precocious children of unwholesome disposition? Or were they bedtime reading for decadents? Camp-gothic divertissements for “les boys”? None could say. Nor did anyone seem to grasp that, with The Object-Lesson, he’d placed the picture book at the service of mysteries deep and dark—haunting childhood memories, existential questions.
The ’60s were a time of artistic exuberance for Gorey, beginning with The Curious Sofa and The Hapless Child, both published by Ivan Obolensky in ’61. In The Hapless Child, we find him in a deliciously ironic mood. Charlotte Sophia, the only child of well-to-do Victorian-Edwardians, is frolicking in the parlor with fur-coated, mustachioed Papa; Mama looks on with fond regard.e But wait: something’s moving in our peripheral vision. Through a door ajar, we glimpse a reptilian thing creeping by on all fours, a cartoony version of those grotesques tormenting Saint Anthony in medieval paintings. It lurks in nearly every scene, playing Where’s Waldo? with the reader—a cryptic in-joke from Gorey to himself. “The devil is in the details,” as the art historian Joseph Stanton wittily points out.45 Stanton reads Gorey’s imps as agents of chaos; they’re there to ensure that every turn of events is a turn for the worse.
And they are: Papa, a colonel in the army, is dispatched to some colonial adventure in Africa, then “reported killed in a native uprising.” Mother falls into a decline, as women often do in Victorian novels, and expires. An uncle who might have come to Charlotte Sophia’s rescue is fatally “brained by a piece of masonry.” Alone, unloved, the poor dear is bundled off to boarding school, where the teachers and the other girls single her out for capricious cruelties: schoolyard bullies tear her beloved doll, Hortense, limb from limb. Unable to bear it any longer, she escapes, only to be kidnapped and sold to “a drunken brute.” He forces her to make artificial flowers; she subsists “on scraps and tap-water.” Terrified by one of his drunken rages, Charlotte Sophia flees into the streets, where she’s promptly flattened by a motorcar. The driver is—who else?—her father, “who was not dead after all” and has been searching high and low for his lost child. Clad in motorist’s goggles and a floor-length leopard-skin coat—a preposterous getup whose comic-grotesque effect mocks the tragedy of the scene—he holds the frail creature in his arms as she gasps her last. Naturally, “she was so changed, he did not recognize her.” Curtain.
A tongue-in-cheek spoof of Victorian sentimentality and silent-movie melodramas about children in peril, such as D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm, The Hapless Child plays to the Oscar Wilde in all of us. (When Dickens jerked readers’ tears with the three-hankie death of the angelic orphan Little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop, Wilde—a sworn foe of Victorian schmaltz—famously remarked, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”)46 “There’s so little heartless work around,” said Gorey. “So I feel I am filling a small but necessary gap.”47
The Hapless Child is “clearly meant to remind readers of a well-known type of nineteenth-century novel for girls—Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Sara Crewe is a model of its kind—in which a young heroine is wrenched, usually by the death of a parent or a reversal in family fortune, from a life of privilege and plunged into deprivation and misery,” writes the art critic Karen Wilkin.48 More immediately, the book was inspired by L’Enfant de Paris (1913), a silent by the French director Léonce Perret that Gorey saw just once, at one of the Museum of Modern Art’s Saturday morning screenings. (His visual memory was remarkable.) “The movie starts out exactly the way The Hapless Child does,” he recalled, although the book “deviates quite early” from the plot of the film.49 (In the movie, as in Gorey’s book, the orphan is snatched up and sold to an abusive, hard-boozing cobbler, but unlike Charlotte Sophia, she’s watched over by a kindhearted soul, the cobbler’s apprentice.)50
In hindsight, Gorey felt The Hapless Child was “excessive.”51 “Overdone is the best way I can put it,” he said, meaning that he found the book’s satire heavy-handed. (The book is dedicated, after all, to the arch, over-the-top V. R. Lang, a hapless child in her own right and hardly one to shrink from excess.)
To this reader, the tone seems just right, a witty caricature of Dickensian sentimentality and silent-era weepers. The drawings, too, are superb, fastidiously rendered in Gorey’s fine-lined style with the usual attention to period detail: the ashlar walls, umbrella stands, balustrades, spoke-wheeled motorcars, and, naturally, the wallpaper are so dizzily detailed they look as if they were drawn with the aid of a jeweler’s loupe. (“Wallpaper is my bête noir,” Gorey told Peter Neumeyer. “I put aside The Hapless Child after about three drawings for several years because I couldn’t face the notion of drawing any more wallpaper.”)52
Charlotte Sophia is the very type of the Gorey child, a woebegone thing whose perpetually mournful gaze and expressionless mouth, hardly more than a hyphen, mark her as a victim-in-waiting. She invites our hilarity, not our sympathy. The sheer number of her Job-like afflictions heightens the comic effect, pushing the needle from tragedy into farce. Gorey gives us Oliver Twist with an ending by Beckett: unlike the saintly waifs of Victorian sentiment, ennobled by their suffering and rewarded in the hereafter, Charlotte Sophia endures her tribulations to no end. Things happen, more or less without reason, then you die, beaned by a hunk of masonry or run down by a motorcar. Sometimes the cosmos plays an existential prank at your expense: the motorcar is driven by your father, who’s combing the streets in search of you, a turn of events that reduces your death to an absurdist punch line. Of course, from an absurdist perspective, all deaths are a punch line: the good news is, you’re born; the bad news is, you die. Life is a death sentence.
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The Curious Sofa, Gorey’s third book with Ivan Obolensky, is strikingly different from The Hapless Child in tone, style, and setting, though both are genre parodies. Whereas The Hapless Child is dark with cross-hatching, The Curious Sofa is bright and airy, its playful line drawings dancing against all-white backdrops. Most of The Hapless Child is set in gloomy, claustrophobic interiors; much of The Curious Sofa takes place outdoors. Gorey’s compositions are as beautifully balanced as ever, but he eschews solid blacks, breaking up the blank space with busy patterns, mostly on the characters’ clothing. The style suits the story’s breezy wit, just as the silent-movie murk of The Hapless Child is a better fit for that story’s ironic-gothic mood. Even the hand-lettered typography is uncharacteristically loopy, its curlicues more suggestive of handwriting than printed type.
Subtitled A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary (Gorey’s first use of what would become a signature gimmick, the anagrammatic pen name), The Curious Sofa opens with Alice eating grapes in the park. She’ll be eating them in every scene in the book, which may be Gorey’s shorthand for her sexual availability: grape as symbol of fertility and Dionysian indulgence. As events unfold, Alice loses her innocence—if she ever had any: she’s half wide-eyed ingenue, half slyly knowing New Woman, as the independent, free-spirited working girls of the 1920s were known. (The story takes place in the Jazz Age.) Herbert, “an extremely well-endowed young man,” introduces himself, and we’re off and running. A page later, they’re in a taxi, “on the floor of which they did something Alice had never done before.” All we see of them is Alice’s hand clutching a single grape; the cabbie keeps one eye on the road and the other on the backseat, smiling lasciviously.
And so to the home of Herbert’s aunt, Lady Celia, who requests that Alice “perform a rather surprising service,” after which the three of them work up an appetite for dinner with “a most amusing game of Herbert’s own invention called ‘Thumbfumble.’” The trio is treated to an after-dinner visit from Colonel Gilbert and his wife, both of whom have wooden legs “with which they could do all sorts of entertaining tricks.” Bestiality is all in good fun, too: the next day, Herbert, the “unusually well-formed” butler, Albert, and the “exceptionally well-made” gardener, Harold, frolic on the lawn with Herbert’s “singularly well-favoured sheepdog, and many were the giggles and barks that came from the shrubbery.”
Herbert, Albert, and Harold disport themselves on the lawn in The Curious Sofa. (Ivan Obolensky, 1961)
Staging the juicy stuff just offstage, hinting at the unmentionable through the winking use of epithets and euphemisms: in The Curious Sofa Gorey suggests everything but reveals nothing, a rhetorical strategy that’s hilariously effective. Just as Henry James’s habit of leaving nothing to the reader’s imagination drove Gorey to distraction, it’s porn’s literal-minded insistence on showing us everything—the gooey, grunting mechanics of the act—that irked him. A masterpiece of innuendo in which everything is implied but nothing is shown, The Curious Sofa is his satirical revenge on the genre.
Near the end, things take a sinister turn, modulating from frolicsome debauchery into a darker key. The change in mood is signaled by everyone’s favorite line: “Still later Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan,” a sexual transaction so abominable it proves fatal to Elsie. Bullwhips are produced. Things come to an, er, climax during a visit to the home of Sir Egbert, who shows the swingers his notorious sofa. “Alice felt a shudder of nameless apprehension.” Here Gorey is unbeatable: the sofa, which has nine legs and seven arms, is kept in “a windowless room lined with polar bear fur.” Locking his guests in, Sir Egbert pulls a lever, bringing the mechanized sofa to life. What began as a sexual romp ends in Lovecraftian horror: “When Alice saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably…”53
Is there a more eloquent ellipsis in all of literature?
“I think, in a way, The Curious Sofa is possibly the cleverest book I ever did,” Gorey once remarked. “I look at it, and I think, ‘I don’t know quite how I managed this because it really is quite brilliant.’”54 Undoubtedly. And it’s very possibly the most quickly written of his books, whipped up in a single weekend.
He offered various accounts of its origins. It was inspired partly by Story of O, he said, a French novel whose de Sadean fantasies of dominance and bondage caused a stir when it was published, in 1954. Edmund Wilson—a man of prodigious sexual appetites—had recommended it to him. Trudging through it, Gorey thought, “Oh, Edmund, this is absurd. No one takes pornography seriously.”55 And so he didn’t. “If you will notice it,” he told an interviewer, “The Curious Sofa begins the same way as The Story of O, which is what finally set me off—where I think he picks her up in the park and puts her in a taxi after that.”56 A rainy afternoon spent slogging through The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade (in French!) left its mark, too. “I was ready to blow my brains out after wading through that,” said Gorey. “But I always wonder how people can manage to write pornography.…There are only so many things you can do and so forth and so on.”57
Alison Lurie thought she played a role in summoning the muse as well. When she and Ted were friends in Cambridge, she learned, at her job in the rare books department of the Boston Public Library, of “a locked stack full of old-fashioned erotica, and if you worked there, or a friend worked there, it was possible to look at these books,” she recalled. “I think that some of them were probably one source of The Curious Sofa.…At that time there was a lot of censorship and complaint in the press about erotic or suggestive fiction, which Ted thought of as rather silly and hysterical.”58
As always, Gorey is complicated. In The Curious Sofa, same-sex love—between Alice and Lady Celia’s “delightfully sympathetic” French maid and between Sir Egbert and his effeminate-looking friend Louie—is as common, and as accepted, as the heterosexual sort. Yet if we assume the perspective of an author who is not so much a closeted, or at least nonpracticing, gay man as an asexual, the book looks less like a satirical comment on sexual repression in midcentury America than it does a shudder of amused revulsion at the ickiness of all sex. “Is the sexlessness of your books a product of your asexuality?” an interviewer asked. “I would say so,” said Gorey, noting that, in The Curious Sofa, “no one has any sex organs.”59 The Curious Sofa bears the dedication “For others,” which could be a nod to Gorey’s gay readership but might just as easily be a veiled expression of solidarity with a group that, in ’61, was barely known, even to other sexual minorities: asexuals. What, exactly, is Ogdred Weary weary of? The mind-bending tedium of everyone else’s obsession with sex, perhaps? Then, too, The Curious Sofa, for all its bed-hopping high jinks, begins as a winking parody of erotica but ends up a horror story. And, like so many horror stories, it’s conservative at heart, ending on a parochial-school note: immorality is sternly punished.
Gorey, with characteristic wit, once said, “I think it’s really about a girl who’s got an obsession for grapes more than anything else.”60 He was astonished, in later years, to discover that the book had a juvenile following. “People have come to me and said, ‘My child just adores The Curious Sofa,’” he told an interviewer. “At first this baffled me, but apparently they find it funny.”61
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Gorey was a dust devil of productivity in 1961. Not only did he produce two books of his own, but several books he’d illustrated were also published that year.
Lippincott brought out The Man Who Sang the Sillies, a book of children’s nonsense verse by John Ciardi. Cartoony, with a naive quality, Gorey’s illustrations recall Edward Lear’s charmingly artless sketches for his nonsense poems, a style that suited Ciardi’s Learian kookiness perfectly. Over the course of the decade, Gorey would illustrate five more titles by his former Harvard professor, mostly in the same loose, sketchy style: You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You (1962), You Know Who (1964), The King Who Saved Himself from Being Saved (1966), The Monster Den; or, Look What Happened at My House—and to It (1966), and Someone Could Win a Polar Bear (1970).
Houghton Mifflin’s publication of Scrap Irony, an uneven collection of sometimes clever, sometimes strained satirical poetry, marked the beginning of Gorey’s association with Felicia Lamport. A practitioner of that much-snubbed form light verse, Lamport rattled off topical poems for her Muse of the Week in Review column in the Boston Globe, lampooning politicians, poking fun at fads and trends, and satirizing women’s roles in society. Gorey counterpointed Lamport’s satirical zingers in Scrap Irony with what a New York Times review of the book praised as “cheerfully saturnine illustrations”—the usual droll, delicately limned cartoons of characters in Victorian-Edwardian or sometimes 1920s costume.62 His relationship with Lamport lasted more than two decades, spanning Cultural Slag (1966) and Light Metres (1982), but became more fraught over time, as his star ascended and her shtick grew stale.
He was also turning out illustrations for magazines, doing the occasional freelance book jacket, and punching the clock at the Looking Glass Library. Then, in 1962, Epstein’s “children’s book thing,” which had been on shaky financial footing for a while, folded.
Gorey landed almost instantly at 3 West 57th Street—Bobbs-Merrill, where from ’62 through ’63 he spent a dreary year as art director. After Looking Glass, Bobbs-Merrill’s more corporate atmosphere felt suffocatingly buttoned-down to Gorey. To make matters worse, the place was badly run, he thought. (He and his similarly disgruntled coworkers referred to their employer as “Boobs Muddle.”) Mercifully, Gorey was fired sometime in ’63—collateral damage in a managerial power struggle. “Eventually there was internecine warfare, and I was unfortunately on the side of the president, who got fired with all his entourage,” he said. “Which was just as well. After that I just had too much freelance work to look for another job, and I moved up to the Cape.”63
Truth to tell, Gorey didn’t “move up to the Cape” in the sense of pulling up stakes at 36 East 38th Street. He kept his apartment, but from ’63 on more or less lived on the Cape whenever the New York City Ballet wasn’t performing. Nonetheless, he had made a decisive break with the nine-to-five world. Out of patience with the deadline grind and gray-flannel culture of corporate publishing, he realized he had enough freelance work to make a go of it as a self-employed illustrator and—despite his aesthete’s pose as a languid idler—a prolific producer of little books.
a They are, in chronological order, The Fatal Lozenge, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Utter Zoo, The Chinese Obelisks, The Glorious Nosebleed, and The Eclectic Abecedarium.
b Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present by Charlotte Zolotow, published by Harper & Row in 1962.
c Or, more accurately, Sendak was gay and Gorey was a professed asexual whose social presentation of self was stereotypically gay and whose only sexual experiences, as far as we know, were with members of the same sex. Whether that makes him gay or an asexual who on rare occasions experimented with gay sex or just someone who exemplifies the range of human sexual experience I leave to the reader. Gore Vidal’s assertion that there are only homo- or heterosexual acts, not individuals (since in his view we’re all bisexual by nature), puts an interesting spin on the question.
d For once, Gorey’s famously infallible memory is playing tricks on him. Addams was one of those rare birds in the illustration world who was so famous that he needed no agent, although Barbara Nicholls, who ran a Manhattan gallery specializing in original art by New Yorker cartoonists and illustrators, sometimes lent a hand with reproduction rights. Gorey may have gotten the mistaken impression that his illustration agent, John Locke, handled Addams, too, because clients in search of Addams sometimes came to Locke, whose star-studded roster included just about everyone who was anyone. Eileen McMahon, an agent with John Locke Studios from 1988 until the agency’s closing, in 1997, told me in a June 7, 2017, e-mail that she believes Addams “could very well have worked with John” in instances when clients came to Locke with assignments that were “too good to miss.”
Kevin Miserocchi, executive director of the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, thinks it’s entirely possible that Addams and Gorey lunched, perhaps at the Coffee House, a members-only club in midtown Manhattan frequented by New Yorker artists and editors.
e Charlotte Sophia’s namesake just might be Gorey’s great-great-grandmother Charlotte Sophia St. John (1811–95). She’s the mother of Helen Amelia St. John Garvey, maker of mottoes and greeting cards and the wellspring, according to family lore, of Gorey’s artistic talent. After her husband fell sick, Helen supported the family by painting postcard illustrations in watercolor, which she sold to the Chicago publishing house A. C. McClurg & Co.