Worshipping in Balanchine’s Temple
1964–67
Gorey near one of the Nadelman sculptures on the promenade at the New York State Theater, 1973. (Photograph by Bruce Chernin. Image provided by the Alpern Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.)
ON THE EVENING OF April 23, 1964, the New York City Ballet opened the doors to its new home, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center,a with a gala performance of Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante and Stars and Stripes. It was, for all practical purposes, Gorey’s new home, too, five months out of the year.
As in all the rituals that governed his life, he was compulsive in his devotion to routine, arriving for 8:00 p.m. performances at 7:30, when the doors opened. Yet he sometimes spent long stretches in the lobby if he didn’t like one of the evening’s offerings. Gorey “had to be there on time, partly (he would say) because maybe they would change the order of the program, but I think it was just his compulsion—he had to be there,” says Peter Wolff, a ballet friend of Gorey’s who now sits on the board of the George Balanchine Foundation. “It was all part of his insane routine.”
During intermissions, Gorey could be found in the theater’s main lobby, the Grand Promenade, located above the orchestra level. Three tiers of undulating balconies overhang the room; Elie Nadelman’s massive, generously proportioned female nudes, sculpted in white marble, bookend it. Inevitably, Gorey was near a bench by the east stairs, at the center of a circle of gossipy, inexhaustibly opinionated ballet obsessives. Toni Bentley, a Balanchine dancer turned author whose Costumes by Karinska features a foreword by Gorey, recalls him “leaning in his full-length fur coat, in his full-length beard, against the left-side Nadelman statue at intermission every single night.”1
Gorey “was very breezy about his opinions,” tossing them off in an artless manner, says Peter Anastos. “He just sat back and proclaimed evident truths about the company from a lofty cloud.”2 He had a flair for the bitchy bon mot, dubbing Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, neither of whom he could abide, “the world’s tallest albino asparagus.”3 Asked about the moldy chestnuts of the classical repertoire, he sniffed, “Les Sylphides? Where they’re all looking for their contact lenses?”4 That said, his pronouncements were never mean-spirited. “Even if Ted hated something or somebody or some costume or set, and covered it with abuse, it was never really very fearsome,” Anastos emphasizes. (“You can often hear me bitching about somebody’s performance, but I’m bitching on a terribly high level,” said Gorey.)5
Behind the bitchy witticisms, however, was a profound appreciation of Balanchine’s genius, says Anastos—“a knowledge and a familiarity with every arcane aspect of life at the NYCB going back to City Center days” coupled with a fluency in the vocabulary of ballet (arabesques and grand jetés and penchés and all the rest of it) that enabled Gorey to pick apart a dancer’s performance on a technical level and compare it to another ballerina’s interpretation of the same steps, way back when. He tossed off his aperçus in a nonchalant manner that dared the listener to take them seriously, although dance critics such as Arlene Croce, of the New Yorker, and intellectuals such as Susan Sontag, who knew Gorey from Bill Everson’s screenings, knew better. “They’d want to know what he thought of things,” Peter Wolff recalls. “He was experiencing it on a different level.” People who didn’t know Gorey may have thought he was “a campy character because of the way he dressed and spoke and all that,” says Croce, but he impressed her as “utterly serious…a thoughtful man who made penetrating remarks” yet was “genuinely witty.”
To those who weren’t admitted into his charmed circle, however, Gorey could exude an in-crowd snootiness. Even old friends such as Larry Osgood and Freddy English got the freeze-out, since they were mere balletgoers, not acolytes of the Balanchine cult. “Ted would be holding court with his admirers and his fellow aficionados and you couldn’t get near him,” says Osgood. “He wouldn’t even recognize old friends who might try to approach him during the intermission.”
Some of this may have been high-school-cafeteria cliquishness, but it might have had something to do with Gorey’s secretiveness, too. He lived a compartmentalized life, maintaining strict boundaries between his social lives: between his Harvard friends and his ballet coterie, between his New York circle and his Cape Cod crowd, and so on. For the nearly three decades he went to the ballet, the Promenade crowd was his social life when the NYCB was in residence. “I have very little social life, because the only people I have time to see are the ones I’m going to the ballet with,” he said.6
New York City in the ’60s and ’70s was the dance capital of the world. Balanchine was producing works of genius; the NYCB was a serious contender for the most dazzling collection of dance talent on the planet; avant-garde choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, and Paul Taylor were blazing trails for modern dance. The fever-pitch anticipation that greeted the premiere of a new work by Balanchine is unimaginable today, when the New York City Ballet no longer dominates New York’s cultural consciousness. “Being in New York in the ’70s with Balanchine working was like being in Salzburg when Mozart was working,” Wolff recalls. “It was like abstract expressionism: it was of its time; it was wildly earth-shattering.”
Seeing a Balanchine premiere was an indispensable part of being culturally au courant, of understanding the zeitgeist. “The lobby of the State Theater was the one place where you could see, night after night, literary intellectuals like Susan Sontag, the poetry critic David Kalstone, the essayist Richard Poirier, the cartoonist Edward Gorey, the music and dance critic Dale Harris, the editor of Knopf, Robert Gottlieb—and dozens of others,” recalled Edmund White, the novelist and memoirist, in his essay “The Man Who Understood Balanchine.”7 “We were all enjoying a rare privilege—the unfolding of genius. Balanchine had started out in imperial Russia, reached his first apogee under Diaghilev in France and, in the 1930’s, moved to the United States, where he led dance to summits it had never known before.”
Gorey’s sentiments exactly. “I feel absolutely and unequivocally,” he said in 1974, “that Balanchine is the great genius in the arts today.…My nightmare is picking up the newspaper some day and finding out George has dropped dead.”8
* * *
When Gorey wasn’t worshipping in Balanchine’s temple, he was hard at work at the drawing board (if he wasn’t at the movies). Nineteen sixty-four saw the release of a spoken-word record, The Dream World of Dion McGregor, a collection of monologues by the “sleep talker” Dion McGregor, along with a companion book of McGregor’s somniloquies. Gorey illustrated both, employing the laborious fine-line technique he reserved for his own work and projects that caught his fancy, as McGregor’s voice-overs for his zany dreams apparently did.
An aspiring songwriter, McGregor suffered, supposedly, from a sleep disorder that caused him to narrate his dreams aloud. His roommate tape-recorded these nightly sessions, and Decca Records released the results. Shot through with macabre humor and brimming with bizarre imagery, McGregor’s babblings sound like a cross between sketch comedy and the trance poems spouted by Robert Desnos at surrealist séances. His nocturnal emissions, as one wag called them, told of cemeteries for midgets, “food roulette” played with a poisoned éclair, and a cottage whose closets were fitted with meat hooks, handy for hanging overnight guests (“See that they swing properly. Yes, on their meathooks. Gorgeous meathooks”).9 The record flopped, but it’s easy to see why Gorey would have gotten a bang out of it.
Meanwhile, the little books kept coming. In 1964, Gorey published The Nursery Frieze, another Fantod Press production. It was, he later wrote Peter Neumeyer, “perhaps my favourite work of mine.”10 In an interview, he said, “I tend to like the ones that make the least obvious sense,” ticking off The Nursery Frieze, [The Untitled Book], and The Object-Lesson as examples.11
When Gorey says The Nursery Frieze makes less “obvious” sense than most of his books, we have to wonder if he’s putting us on. To most readers, the question is whether it makes any sense. True to its name, the book consists of a long friezelike procession of squat, dark creatures—or, very possibly, a single creature caught in successive instants, like the galloping horse in Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion studies of animal locomotion. Judging from the rough sketches included in the exhibition catalog for Karen Wilkin’s Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey, the beast began as a hippopotamus; by the time it made its debut in print, it had morphed into an anxious-looking capybara, or maybe a tapir, or something in between. Marching fretfully through cartoon-lunar terrain reminiscent of the sublimely empty landscapes of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, it utters, in rhyming couplets, a series of non sequiturs: “Archipelago, [cardamom], obloquy, tacks / Ignavia, samisen, bandages, wax,” and so on, through “Corposant, madrepore, ophicleide, paste / Jequirity, tombola, sphagnum, distaste,” all the way to “Wapentake, orrery, aspic, mistrust / Ichor, ganosis, velleity, dust.”
The Nursery Frieze. (Fantod Press, 1964)
As Gorey would groan, in the middle of movies that drove him bonkers, “Can someone please tell me what this is in aid of?”12
We can try. First, that worried, capybaralike creature is a nonsense-verse staple, the imaginary beast, like Carroll’s Bandersnatch, Lear’s Pobble Who Has No Toes, and Sendak’s Wild Things. It takes its place in the Gorey bestiary alongside the Doubtful Guest, the Wuggly Ump, Figbash, and the Bahhum Bug (from The Haunted Tea-Cosy), to name a few. It tells us that we’re in nonsense territory, as does Gorey’s list of heterogeneous things, which, as mentioned earlier, is an essential nonsense trope. By rattling off a catalog of weird words that tickle his fancy and roll trippingly off the tongue, Gorey is also giving us an inventory of the arbitrary. Such nonsense lists mock taxonomy’s attempts to impose order on a disorderly world in the same way that Borges does in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” the essay that inspired Gorey’s unfinished book, The Interesting List.
Speaking of categories, Gorey was that specific species of eccentric, the collector. Like Zeph Clagg in The Willowdale Handcar with his prized collection of more than seven thousand telephone-pole insulators, he amassed all sorts of things: cats, of course, and books by the ton, but also finials and antique potato mashers and pewter salt and pepper shakers and countless other curiosa. Yet he hoarded immaterial things, too: ideas and images (he could see the entire NYCB repertory “like a movie in my head,” he claimed) and, of course, words, which he jotted down in his ever-present notebook with the satisfaction of a lepidopterist snaring a butterfly.13 Newspaper puzzle pages were an inexhaustible trove of obscure, archaic, and sesquipedalian words, too. When the Cape Cod gang was having dinner, Ted would “quickly finish and then start doing the [New York Times] crossword puzzle or the acrostic,” says Ken Morton. “He just found it joyful to manipulate words and letters.” In The Nursery Frieze, as in later books such as The Glorious Nosebleed (1975), in which every sentence ends with an adverb, and [The Untitled Book], whose text consists entirely of gibberish, Gorey gives himself over to the unalloyed pleasures of wordplay.
That said, the words spoken by Gorey’s capybara-whatsit weren’t just plucked out of a hat. Gorey chose them—after coming across them in his battles with the crossword or his peripatetic reading—and because he chose them, they, like the odd bits of driftwood he picked up in his beachcombings, have things to tell us about his interests and outlook. Some are predictably Goreyesque: dismemberment, exequies (funeral rites), catafalque (a raised bier for a coffin), Gehenna (in the Old Testament, a fiery place where the souls of the wicked are tormented, or, if you prefer, a valley near Jerusalem where the followers of Moloch sacrificed children). In keeping with his interest in old-fashioned things, many of the words in The Nursery Frieze are nineteenth-century relics such as gibus (“a collapsible top hat operated by a spring,” according to the Collins English Dictionary).14 A surprisingly high percentage have religious associations, such as epistle, hymn, thurible (a censer used in ecclesiastical rituals), and purlicue (the reviewing, in Presbyterianism, of a previous sermon)—evidence of Gorey’s abiding interest, however sublimated, in religion. A few of the words evoke the idler persona Gorey liked to affect: ignavia (indolence) and velleity (“1. volition in its weakest form. 2. a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it”—was there ever a more Goreyesque sentiment?).15
The oddest thing about The Nursery Frieze is its ostensible purpose: to act as a decorative band around a tot’s room and, presumably, promote the notion that reading is “fun-damental,” as the literacy campaign has it. Gorey’s matter-of-fact presentation of preposterous words such as febrifuge and jequirity as age-appropriate vocabulary is funny on its face. And what sort of parent would adorn his or her child’s nursery with a frieze whose subtext seems to be morbid religiosity and death? Imagine laying yourself down to sleep, after praying the Lord your soul to keep, with thoughts of dismemberment and Gehenna in your little head! Doomfully, the last word in the frieze is dust, to which we all return, a gloomy sentiment perfect for the Puritan nursery. Sweet dreams.
* * *
In 1965, Gorey brought out The Sinking Spell, his fourth and last title with Ivan Obolensky, and The Remembered Visit, published by Simon and Schuster.16
An amusing, bemusing little Victorian-surrealist mystery without a solution, or, better yet, an absurdist joke without a punch line, The Sinking Spell has the feel of Charles Fort’s matter-of-fact retellings of those mind-boggling freak occurrences now called Fortean phenomena. Fort was especially fascinated by weird weather, specifically, what he called falls—red rain, black snow, showers of frogs or fish, “thunderstones,” “the fall of a thousand tons of butter,” and so forth.17 The tale of a mysterious presence that descends, by degrees, through an Edwardian household, unsettling everything it touches, The Sinking Spell would be right at home in a Fort collection like The Book of the Damned.
Told in couplets, Gorey’s story begins with the arrival, in the middle of an Edwardian family’s croquet game, of a “creature floating in the sky.” Gorey never describes it, and it remains invisible to us throughout the story, though it’s plainly visible to the family. Closer and closer it comes, until, “morose, inflexible, aloof,” it hovers just above their house. It moves ever downward, floor by floor. It frightens the maid, “declines in fretful curves / Among the pickles and preserves,” and finally disappears forever into the cellar floor.
No one in the unflappable, well-starched family has any idea “just what can be meant / By this implacable descent,” nor do we. Gorey hazarded the theory, in a letter to Peter Neumeyer, that the book had something to do with crossing borders, passing into realms from which there is no return. A “sinking spell,” in the nineteenth century, was a sudden collapse, from illness, into a dead faint or deathlike sleep. The title is a pun: Gorey’s sinking spell is a literal one, a diabolical enchantment that causes something to descend from the heavens, passing wraithlike through anything in its path, en route, we assume, to the underworld. Once again, Gorey’s subject is death. Ultimately, though, he seemed as baffled as the family in the story by the dreamlike events that bubbled up from his unconscious.
* * *
Tinged with a sense of lost time and suffused with regret, The Remembered Visit is one of Gorey’s serious works, though he undercuts that seriousness, as always, with his light touch. The writing is inimitably Goreyesque—“Tea was brought: it was nearly colourless, and there was a plate of crystallized ginger”—and the drawing is superb: in the opening scene, in which we see Drusilla on an ocean liner, the overlapping patterns of the stylized waves recall the seas in prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige.
When Drusilla’s parents go on an excursion and never return, she takes their disappearance (or is it her abandonment?) in stride. A family friend, Miss Skrim-Pshaw, takes her to meet Mr. Crague, “a wonderful old man who had been or done something lofty and cultured in the dim past.” They take tea in a garden “where the topiary was being neglected.” Mr. Crague can’t show Drusilla his albums filled with beautiful pieces of paper, he regrets, because they’re upstairs in his room; she promises to mail the old gent “some insides of envelopes she had saved” when she gets home.
Days melt into months; months dissolve into years. Catching sight of one of those fiendish little imps last seen in The Hapless Child, Drusilla remembers Mr. Crague. Hunting for the envelope linings she’d promised to send, she happens on an old newspaper, which informs her that he died “the autumn after she had been abroad.” In a flashback, we see him slumped in the garden where the trio had tea. “When she found the pretty pieces of paper, she felt very sad and neglectful. The wind came and took them through an open window; she watched them blow away.”
In one of his letters to Peter Neumeyer, Gorey reveals that The Remembered Visit, subtitled A Story Taken from Life, was indeed “a story from real life, the germ anyway.”18 Dedicated to Consuelo Joerns, the book was inspired by Joerns’s encounter with the English actor and stage designer Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966). “The visit itself took place when Connie was introduced to…Craig in the south of France,” Gorey writes, “and the paper collection is true.” A pioneer of symbolism in scenic design, Craig used movable colored screens in conjunction with richly tinted lighting to create dramatic visual harmonies.
Following the surrealists’ lead, Gorey produced the story by channeling his unconscious. “At the risk of sounding potty,” he tells Neumeyer, “the sentence ‘Mr Crague asked Drusilla if she liked paper’ was something I felt strongly at the time I was incapable of, that it came from somewhere else.”19 He notes that it’s not in his “usual vein” and speculates that it has something to do with innocence. (There’s the whispered hint of a Humbert-Lolita flirtation in Crague’s comment, which echoes the old come-on “Would you like to come upstairs to see my etchings?”)
Perhaps The Remembered Visit isn’t really about anything in the conventional narrative sense. Rather, it evokes a mood—a sense of longing and, most of all, the ache of regret, a feeling that sneaks up on us as the years go by.
* * *
In the fall of ’65, Gorey taught a course called “Advanced Children’s Book Illustration” at the School of Visual Arts, a college of art and design on East 23rd Street. SVA stressed professional experience over academic credentials, recruiting its faculty from artists working in commercial fields.
Gorey returned to SVA in the fall of ’66 to teach two sessions of “Advanced Children’s Book Illustration” and again in the fall and spring of ’67 to teach “Children’s Picture Books” (“A workshop for those who want to write and illustrate their own books, with emphasis on the development of ideas and on creative individuality”).20 He’s listed among the faculty in the 1968–69 course catalog as well, but what course he taught, or whether he just guest-lectured, we don’t know.
Nor do we know whether he was driven to teach, as so many freelancers are, by the need to bolster his income. Likewise, we have no inkling of what kind of professor he was. It’s hard to imagine Gorey, who by his own admission tended “to be very inconsequential and trail off,” running a classroom. But SVA invited him back, so he must’ve passed muster.
To announce his 1965 course, Gorey produced a brochure, wittily designed in the form of a book jacket. The course name is given on the spine, and Gorey’s thumbnail biography, along with details about the class’s meeting time and so forth, appears on the back. A course description, included on the jacket flaps, is worth quoting at length:
The course will emphasize the creative and imaginative aspects of illustrating—and writing—children’s books and give practical experience in techniques, media, design, and typography. Included will be an informal history of children’s books, their illustrations, and their illustrators, and a survey of the field now, ranging from the picture book for the youngest child to the novel for the young adult, from the most popular work to the most sophisticated. The course will deal, also, with the nature of illustration, its various kinds and purposes, its relationship to text, and the two conceived as an entity.…The main work of the course will be illustrating and designing a complete book.21
Gorey’s emphasis on the interrelationship of text and image (“the two conceived as an entity”) goes to the heart of his approach to illustration, which was rooted in a deep understanding of the way words and images can form a whole greater than its parts. “I think my drawing is not terribly good at best, but I do know how to illustrate a book better than most,” he once observed. “Illustrations shouldn’t be smaller than the book—that’s why you couldn’t possibly illustrate Jane Austen. At the same time, they shouldn’t be larger. Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for Salome make Oscar Wilde seem in a way rather idiotic. The drawings are so powerful they create their own world, and one more interesting than Mr. Wilde’s. They are a perfectly terrible job of illustration, demolishing the text they are attached to.”22
On the front cover of Gorey’s brochure is a stick-thin man jauntily attired in a seersucker jacket and broad-brimmed straw hat; a defeated-looking corvid roosts on his head. He’s perched on the capybara-potamus from The Nursery Frieze, which is lumbering along with the same look of wide-eyed unease it wore in that book.
The creature was Gorey’s totem animal in those days. His business card from that period depicts an identical pair of the beasts trotting past each other, caught in the moment of their conjunction. BOOK DESIGN reads the word balloon—more of a banner, really—unfurling from one creature; EDWARD GOREY says the other.
Significantly, Gorey chose not to identify himself as an illustrator, a job title he may have seen as too limiting. His training in book design at Doubleday and his bibliophile’s fascination with books as objects converged in a vision of the book as a medium for creative expression and formal innovation. “My training caused me to be very conscious of what constituted a book, so I have always been very careful in coordinating the parts of my books, putting them together,” he said in a 1978 interview.b “I naturally think in terms of how many pages there will be, how the pages turn, and so forth.”23 Gorey saw every detail of book production, no matter how mundane, as an invitation to design—a philosophy that, when given full rein, yielded benchmarks of the book designer’s art, elegant yet economical, as in his 1972 omnibus, Amphigorey.
* * *
Nineteen sixty-six brought up a bumper crop of Goreys.
The December issue of the men’s magazine Esquire featured “A Chthonian Christmas,” the sort of holiday feature Gorey was often asked to do—to his undying vexation, no doubt, given his detestation of holidays. This was the golden age of magazines, and Esquire was riding high, its ad-fat issues overstuffed with the innovative New Journalism of zeitgeist dowsers such as Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, fiction by heavy hitters such as Norman Mailer and John Cheever, and celebrity profiles. At 360 pages, the December 1966 issue had an editorial budget that could easily afford witty frivolities like the Fantod Pack, the Gorey tarot that was part of “A Chthonian Christmas.”
“A Chthonian Christmas”—the Goreyan adjective means “of, or relating to, the underworld”—includes eight Gorey cartoons. In one vignette, a trio of children find Father sprawled beside the hearth, throttled with a Christmas stocking. In another, a man, confronted by the December days left on his wall calendar, eyes his gas range speculatively. Behind the black humor, we detect a whiff of the loneliness that’s only made bleaker by other people’s holiday cheer.
The centerpiece of “A Chthonian Christmas” is a two-page gallery displaying the Fantod Pack, a set of twenty tarot cards designed and illustrated by Gorey.c As late as 1969, his interest in esoteric matters was still going strong. “In answer to your queries,” he wrote Peter Neumeyer that January, “of course I believe in graphology, also palmistry, the I Ching, the tarot, astrology, and all those other delicious things you can find in places like thesaurusi (can that be the plural? No, it can’t, it must be thesauri), which turn out to mean prognostication by means of snail tracks or something.”24 (As noted earlier, Gorey’s “belief” wasn’t a literal faith in the oracle’s prophetic powers. The Taoist in him thought it might be one of many ways of tapping into the Tao, while his inner surrealist hoped it might prove useful in accessing the unconscious.)
Gorey didn’t intend the Fantod Pack to be taken all that seriously, but like most of his jokes it hints at hidden truths. After all, he chose the images that make up his Major Arcana, handpicking them from the visual lexicon of characters, objects, plants and animals, and landscapes that recur in his work. (The Major Arcana are the tarot’s trump cards.)
Like Magritte’s surrealist painting The Key to Dreams (1930), the Fantod Pack is an inventory of unlike things whose only connection is their role in the artist’s personal mythology: urns (“The Urn”); the bearded, fur-coated, hypermasculine gent (“The Ancestor”); dead, dying, and ill-used children (“The Child,” a grinning skeleton tot pulling a wooden animal on wheels); the Black Doll (which, unlike the other nineteen trumps, bears no title and has no explanation beyond “In the words of the old rhyme: What most you fear / Is coming near”).
On the back of each card, Figbash—the Doubtful Guest’s curious cousin, an inscrutable creature with a long-beaked, featureless face; a squat, short-legged body; and impossibly long arms—rides a unicycle while balancing a platter on his upraised hands. On the platter sit a skull, a chalice, and a candle, barely more than a stump but still burning—memento mori rich in occult associations, though their spookiness is undercut by Figbash’s antics.
“The Bundle.” The Fantod Pack. (Gotham Book Mart, 1995)
Each of the Fantod Pack’s cryptic images dares us to uncover its meaning. But one card, “The Bundle,” suggests that the key to Gorey’s dreams will always elude us. A bulky package tied up with a latticework of ropes, it calls to mind The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (1920), a surrealist object created by the photographer Man Ray in homage to Ducasse’s deathless line, in his novel, Les Chants de Maldoror, “beautiful as the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”d In Ray’s case, we know what’s inside the lumpy blanket tied with twine: a sewing machine. The contents of Gorey’s bundle, on the other hand, are unknowable.
To those who believe that “eroticism is all-pervasive, almost claustrophobic, in his little books,” as the author of one magazine profile asserted, “The Bundle” will invite the obvious Freudian reading: a stifled sexuality, kept tightly under wraps.25 At the same time, it has a huddled, abject look; its outline strongly suggests a shrouded figure with its head on its knees—the universal posture of despair. Like the rest of Gorey’s “great secrets,” it’s an arcanum whose purpose is to remain arcane.
* * *
True to its name, The Inanimate Tragedy (Fantod Press, 1966) is a tragedy—a farcical tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless—of Death and Distraction, Destruction and Debauchery, as its Greek chorus puts it. The Greek chorus, in this case, is a thicket of overemoting pins and needles, part of a cast of commonplace objects that also includes a marble, a thumbtack, a pair of buttons, a bit of knotted string, and a “No. 37 Pen point.”
Joseph Stanton, in his essay for the exhibition catalog Looking for Edward Gorey, reads The Inanimate Tragedy as a fatalistic “tragedy of manners” that lampoons human society as a war of all against all in which “intrigue and gossip undermine reputations and destroy lives.” Things end badly, in a comedy of terrors. Grappling on the brink of the Yawning Chasm, the villains of the tale, the Knotted String and the Four-Holed Button, lose their footing and plummet into the crevasse. Lemminglike, the other characters follow them over the brink: the Two-Holed Button flings itself into the Chasm, quickly followed by the Pins and Needles. For no good reason, the “Half-Inch Thumbtack” drops dead.
There’s no causal relationship between any of the scenes in The Inanimate Tragedy, and much of the action lacks any discernible motivation (though the fact that we’re discussing the dramatic motivations of thumbtacks and buttons is a testimonial to Gorey’s absurdist wit). Yet Gorey manages, through the measured repetition of motifs (gossip, plotting, the Two-Holed Button’s high-strung reactions, the chorus’s interjections), to give his desktop drama a Sophoclean fatefulness.
Where are we? Somewhere on surrealism’s topography of the unconscious, where the tools and toys of everyday existence come uncannily to life. The featureless waste where most of the action takes place—a white nothingness bifurcated by a horizon line—recalls Yves Tanguy’s moonscapes, littered with cosmic debris, and the lonely stretch of Catalonian beach where Salvador Dalí’s limp watches washed ashore.
But can mundane things such as thumbtacks and buttons be reborn as surrealist objects? No doubt, especially if they blur the line between animate and inanimate. Peter Neumeyer told Gorey that he found the book not only “surreal” but also “cold and steely—quite chilling I think—in its suggestion of a depopulated world” reminiscent of the uncanny dreamscapes of “Lewis Carroll, early still life surrealists with pots and pans, or Fernand Léger cogs and wheels.”26
Nonsense literature turns an irreverent eye on the system that structures our understanding of our societies, ourselves, even our realities: language. The Inanimate Tragedy isn’t nonsense, but its inscrutable story unfolds in a series of non sequiturs that obscure as much as they reveal. It reminds the literary theorist Peter Schwenger of the leaps of illogic that characterize “the most jumbled dreams” and of the psychologist Jean Piaget’s “description of children’s narratives where ‘causal relationships are rarely expressed, but are generally indicated by a simple juxtaposition of the related terms.’”27 In his essay “The Dream Narratives of Debris,” Schwenger writes,
The large cast of characters [in The Inanimate Tragedy is] playing out a drama to which we do not have access. It’s not just that we don’t have the answers; we don’t even know the questions.…Yet every frame of this drama seems to be fraught with significance, even while the frames don’t always link up with one another. Not only are the characters of this tragedy bits of debris; narrative elements themselves have become a kind of bric-a-brac that can be willfully shuffled…28
For Schwenger, The Inanimate Tragedy is at once “a sly satire of narrative, especially its more melodramatic nineteenth-century versions,” and a postmodern critique of narrative’s claim that it tells us “the truth,” whether that truth is the hard fact of nonfiction, the representational truth of literary realism, or simply the causality that gives a story its shape and meaning.29 Gorey raids the grab bag of conventional fiction for his plot devices—“reversals, mistaken identities, miscommunications and secrets”—but divorces them “from the specious promise of ‘truth,’” Schwenger argues. “In place of truth he gives us play, a play beyond the rules of the game, or rather a play with the rules of the game.”
* * *
The Inanimate Tragedy was published in Three Books from the Fantod Press, a paperback collection issued in a yellow envelope that also included The Pious Infant and The Evil Garden. (Printed in an edition of five hundred copies, it was the first of four such collections bearing that name.)
In The Pious Infant, Gorey is once again in mock-moralistic mode, with wickedly funny results. Told in prose and shorter by half than his thirty-page norm, it’s a merciless parody of Puritan children’s literature, inspired by A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671–72) by the Puritan divine James Janeway, an enormously popular book in its day. Gorey’s hero, Little Henry Clump, is a model of plaster-saint piety, scolding other boys for “sliding on the ice” on Sunday (“Oh, what a shame it is for you to idle on the Sabbath instead of reading your Bibles!”) and taking care to blot out, in books, any “frivolous mention of the Deity.” But the Lord moves in mysterious ways: God expresses his love for Little Henry by buffeting him with a freak hailstorm. The child sickens and dies but goes to his reward: “Henry Clump’s little body turned to dust in the grave, but his soul went up to God.”
Gorey’s parody uses the Calvinist gloom and grim didacticism of the original to mock the guilt, hypocrisy, and hell-haunted terrors that fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism has inflicted on generations of American children. How close to home that critique struck we don’t know, though it’s difficult to imagine that the dry chuckle of irreligious sentiment that echoes through Gorey’s work doesn’t have something to do with his parents’ abortive attempts to raise him as a Catholic.
Amusingly, Gorey once played the role of devil’s advocate in real life. Chris Garvey, the son of Gorey’s cousin William Garvey, recalls the time he and Ted talked about the Faith of Our Fathers. “I was going to Catholic school at the time,” he says, “and I had made up a play altar and was playing at being a priest, and we talked a little bit about religion, and I probably gave him some Catholic-school answers, and he said, ‘Oh my God, you’re the pious infant!’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s a book I wrote and it’s like you’ve come to life!’”
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Gorey rarely mentioned Aubrey Beardsley, but the magnificent orchestration of black and white in The Evil Garden strongly resembles Beardsley’s dramatic, Japonism-influenced drawings for The Yellow Book magazine, which Gorey knew.
The bold interplay of inky black and stark white that made Beardsley’s work so arresting in the 1890s was his ingenious solution to the limitations of photomechanical printing, which reproduced all lines and solids in the same tone value; intermediate shades had to be suggested through stippling, cross-hatching, or striated lines. In The Evil Garden, Gorey utilizes a nearly identical technique for his scenery but renders his characters in an almost diagrammatic style that recalls the ligne claire (clear line) aesthetic of the Belgian cartoonist Hergé (whose Tintin comics Gorey collected).
The book recounts, in rhyming couplets, an Edwardian family’s ramble through a botanical garden. The park looks Edenic but soon reveals itself to be one big booby trap, a turnabout foreshadowed by the eerie sound, as they enter the garden, of “falling tears” that “comes from nowhere to the ears.” Great-Uncle Franz has the life wrung out of him by a constrictor; a carnivorous plant swallows an aunt feetfirst; “A hissing swarm of hairy bugs / Has got the baby and its rugs.” As night descends on the doomed family, Gorey brilliantly reverses his polarities, switching for the last two scenes from nearly all-white backgrounds with black accents to pitch-black backdrops with white elements floating here and there. The effect is that of a shivering minor chord, sustained by the orchestra’s string section, as the curtain falls.
* * *
Rounding out Gorey’s bibliography for 1966 was The Gilded Bat, a gothic valentine to the Diaghilev era, when the Romantic ballet of the nineteenth century was giving way to the modernism pioneered by choreographers such as Balanchine. It’s also an affectionately humorous tribute to Gorey’s first, unforgettable encounter with the ballet, in January of 1940, when he saw the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre.
Drawn in a fine-grained, almost pointillist style, The Gilded Bat begins in the Edwardian era and ends in the ’20s, paralleling the life span of the Ballets Russes. Young Maudie Splaytoe’s ascent from toiling ballet student to anonymous trouper in the Ballet Hochepot’s corps de ballet to “the reigning ballerina of the age, and one of its symbols,” mirrors the rise of modernism, which Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes helped midwife.
Simon and Schuster published The Gilded Bat in book form, but it had been serialized earlier that year in Ballet Review, whose readers had fun sleuthing out Gorey’s obscure references and inside jokes. Yet The Gilded Bat is more than Trivial Pursuit for balletomanes. As Selma G. Lanes points out in her essay “Edward Gorey’s Tantalizing Turns of the Screw,” “It is, at once, a work of grim satire and deep seriousness. Nowhere does Gorey’s melancholy grasp of the realities of the artist’s daily existence get hammered home more insistently.”30 The Gilded Bat counterpoints the gauzy fantasies the audience sees with the bleak reality of an artist’s life. We see Maud in her cheerless room, washing her leotards in the sink: “Her life went on being fairly tedious.” Even after she becomes “the reigning ballerina of the age,” her life is “really no different from what it had ever been”: we see her, alone as always, working out at the barre; she’s such a washed-out soul that she’s on the verge of disappearing into the enveloping gloom, a grayness created by a blizzard of minute pen strokes.
It’s those innumerable dots and dashes, as much as the scene itself, that tell us something about the solitary, laborious hours Gorey invested in his art—at the expense, perhaps, of intimate relationships. When he shows us Maud monkishly devoted to her art, untouched by the passion seething all around her, it occurs to us that he’s confiding something about himself. (Most of that passion, intriguingly, is same-sex desire: Miss Marshgrass, the mannishly lesbian backer of Madame Trepidovska’s ballet school, becomes jealous of Madame’s attentions to Maud; in another scene, a pair of epicene, limp-wristed male dancers flirts backstage while Maud’s father looks on with distaste.)
When Serge, a member of the company, develops “an unlikely infatuation with her”—the adverb is instructive—the disconcerted Maud has a heart-to-heart with the Hochepot’s manager, the Baron de Zabrus, who assures her that “only art [means] anything.” He echoes the thoughts of the Diaghilevian impresario Boris Lermontov in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ballet film The Red Shoes (1948), a movie Gorey would not have missed and that may well have influenced The Gilded Bat. Denouncing a ballerina “who is imbecile enough to get married,” Lermontov warns his protégée, the young ballerina Vicky, “You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer—never!” “That’s all very fine, Boris, very pure and fine, but you can’t alter human nature,” says the choreographer Ljubov. Lermontov replies, “No, I think you can do better than that—you can ignore it.”31
That, in a nutshell, was the Gorey strategy for avoiding romantic distractions: ignore your nature, and it’ll go away. He saved his passion for his art and sublimated any desires he might have had into a kind of cultural eros—his love of books, his cinephilia, and most of all his balletomania. “It was to ballet that Edward Gorey gave, I think, most of his adult passion,” writes Alexander Theroux in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey.32 “He was capable of great adoration, truly Stendhalian in power, and over the years he was explicitly devoted to such great ballerinas as Patricia McBride, Maria Calegari…and…Diana Adams.”33
The Gilded Bat is dedicated to Adams, one of Balanchine’s “muses” and Gorey’s “favorite dancer of all time.”34 She was “crystal clear, absolutely without mannerisms, and she had one of the most beautiful bodies I ever saw in a ballet dancer—flawless proportions, those ravishing legs,” he recalled. “If I had to name the single greatest performance I ever saw, I’d say it was Diana rehearsing Swan Lake. She had no make-up on and a ratty old whatever dancers rehearse in, and she was chewing gum, and she walked through half of it, but it suddenly had all the qualities…”
Prima-ballerina worship, like its close cousin opera-diva adulation, is a gay cliché, like a fondness for show tunes or a fanatical devotion to Streisand. Peter Stoneley argues, in A Queer History of the Ballet, that gay men in the “mid-twentieth-century”—that is, pre-Stonewall—“tended to identify with [female] stars who gave ‘an excessive or parodic performance of femininity,’ such as Joan Crawford, Mae West, and Marlene Dietrich.”35 The cartoonish femininity of such stars was so obviously a put-on that rather than reinforcing gender norms, it undermined them by underscoring the point that femininity and masculinity are roles we perform, a kind of drag. In like fashion, ballet struck a subconscious chord with gay men because it, too, makes “visible an ‘excessive’ and obviously ‘worked’ version of gender,” Stoneley asserts, “whereby the woman produces, through much labor, an extreme version of lightness and delicacy.”
Gorey’s passion for the ballet is too aesthetically complex, his appreciation of Balanchine’s genius and the artistry of dancers like Diana Adams too profound, to be squeezed into a queer-theory pigeonhole. Still, the gay veneration of prima ballerinas such as Dame Margot Fonteyn is so well established, and ballet’s association with gay culture such a commonplace, that ignoring those connections would amount to willful blindness. The Gilded Bat isn’t just a book about the ballet; it’s also a profoundly gay book about the ballet: slyly coded references to same-sex desire keep popping up, and Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes are central to the story. “In the decades following Diaghilev’s death, the legends of the Ballets Russes served as touchstones that revealed the presence of queerness,” Stoneley writes. “One need not admit one’s own sexual preferences, nor inquire into another person’s, when one could more cautiously discover a mutual enthusiasm for and knowledge of Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes.”36
At the same time, Gorey’s balletomania was an aesthetic religion. “The more I go on, the more I feel Balanchine was the great, important figure in my life,” he told his friend Clifford Ross. “In what way?” Ross wanted to know. “Well, sort of like God,” said Gorey, in all seriousness.37 Both Christianity and the ballet are about transcendence: ascending to heaven, grand jetés, the Rapture, the Black Swan’s never-ending fouetté in Swan Lake. Both conjure visions of gravity defied, dreams of weightlessness that are really about a leap out of the mundane into the sublime.
Gorey’s light touch and understated wit give The Gilded Bat a somber frivolity, but the image he leaves us with—Mirella’s gilded bat wings floating against the darkness—is truly affecting. “At the gala her costume was suspended from the centre of the stage while the music for her most famous variation was played in her memory.” (She’d met her end a page earlier when “a great dark bird” flew into the propeller of her plane.) Gorey evokes one of the most poignant moments in ballet history: shortly after Pavlova died of pneumonia, having refused the surgery that might have saved her life but would have ended her career as a dancer, her company performed as scheduled, but her solo was danced by a spotlight on the empty stage.
Ballet’s evanescent illusions of beauty and transcendence are purchased at the cost of isolation and the grinding monotony of practice, four or five hours a day, year in, year out—an ascetic regimen Gorey, who scratched away a good part of his life alone in little rooms, knew all too well. For some, though, “only art means anything.” Pavlova’s last words, according to legend, were “Get my ‘Swan’ costume ready.”38
* * *
In December of ’67, on the eve of her eightieth birthday, Frances Steloff sold the Gotham Book Mart to Andreas Brown. Anxious about what would happen to the legendary store when she went to the great remainder bin in the sky, her most devoted customers had urged her to appoint an heir. For $125,000, Brown got a renowned literary mecca, a stock of some five hundred thousand volumes, a fifth-floor walk-up above the shop, and Steloff as “consultant.” (She “fooled them all by living to be 101,” he later joked.)39 He must never think of himself as the Gotham’s owner, she gravely informed him, only its caretaker. Oh, and she would continue to reign supreme over the alcove where books on Eastern mysticism and New Age spirituality were shelved. And her overfed cats would still have the run of the store.
Brown had made a name for himself in the book trade as an appraiser of rare books and manuscripts. En route to Europe from the West Coast in 1959, he’d made a pilgrimage to the shop. He was standing near the register when an assortment of diminutive volumes, priced from fifty cents to a buck, caught his eye. Intrigued, he had a half dozen or so of the “funny little books” shipped to his home, in San Francisco. “Well, when I got home from Europe and I read them, I said, ‘We’ve got another extraordinary human being that’s doing something no one’s ever done before,’” he recalled decades later.40
Frances Steloff and Andreas Brown in the Gotham Book Mart, 1975. (Photograph by Larry C. Morris. Used by permission of Larry C. Morris/The New York Times/Redux.)
Soon after moving to Manhattan to oversee the running of the Gotham, he met Gorey, a frequent visitor to the store. “When I told him how much I admired his work, he got a little nervous,” Brown remembered. “He was a little shy about that kind of thing.”41
Under Brown’s guidance, the Gotham promoted new waves of literary avant-gardists while staying true to the modernist icons in Steloff’s personal pantheon. As the Gotham’s sales of Gorey’s deliciously “biscuity” little books (Theroux) outstripped those of any other store, Gorey’s relationship with the Gotham’s new owner deepened.42 In 1970, the Gotham brought out The Sopping Thursday under its own imprint. It was the first of eight Gorey titles Brown would publish. Publishing Gorey meant that the store had ready access to first editions of those titles, which would in time command stratospheric sums among collectors. Shrewdly, Brown double-dipped, wooing collectors with pricey limited editions, signed and numbered, then striking a deal with a corporate publisher to produce a more affordable version for the trade market. To promote the release of The Sopping Thursday, he mounted an exhibition of Gorey originals in the Gotham’s upstairs gallery, initiating what would become an annual trend.
Ahead of the marketing curve, he had the bright idea of launching a line of merchandise. In ’77, the Gotham began selling Gorey-branded products, an ever-expanding category that at one time or another included Gorey bookmarks, Gorey calendars, Gorey posters, Gorey postcards, Gorey stationery, Gorey mugs, Gorey stickers, rubber stamps of Gorey illustrations, beanbag dolls of Gorey characters, Doubtful Guest pins (and other “high quality Gorey sterling silver jewelry items”), Gashlycrumb Tinies watches, “small plush cats in Gorey striped sweaters (by Gund),” and on and on.43
Thus was Gorey turned into a “cottage industry,” as the man himself put it with his usual good-natured resignation.44 In a 1986 interview, he was less flippant, admitting, “Frankly, I’d be lost without the Gotham Book Mart. I feel my reputation to date depends to such a great extent on them.”45
Brown’s masterstroke was the Amphigoreys, a series of anthologies that brought Gorey’s out-of-print titles back into print. Noting that most of Gorey’s little books were scarcer than unicorn horns, Brown negotiated a deal with the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons to reprint fifteen of them in omnibus form. Published in ’72, Amphigorey was the first of three such collections produced in Gorey’s lifetime. (The others were Amphigorey Too in ’75 and Amphigorey Also in ’83. A fourth, Amphigorey Again, was published posthumously, in 2006.) It was a smashing success and did much to make him an unmissable landmark on the literary map.
a Renamed in 2008, the New York State Theater is now the David H. Koch Theater, after the philanthropist and archconservative political donor—a name many New Yorkers of the liberal persuasion refuse to use.
b David Hough, who as the production director for adult books at Harcourt Brace and Company worked with Gorey on The Haunted Tea-Cosy and The Headless Bust, offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at just how attentive Gorey was to every detail of the production of his books. “Edward understood and was meticulous about the production of his books (the paper, the binding, the trim size, the printing),” Hough told me in a September 6, 2012, e-mail. “Edward’s art boards were meticulous. There was only a rare boo-boo that he had to correct. He certainly didn’t need editing—though I remember a bit of ruckus over that hyphen in The Haunted Tea-Cosy. His art came self-contained and perfect.…I think people should be reminded that he was a meticulous and hardworking craftsman as well as an artist of genius.”
c The Fantod Pack has been published as an actual pack of cards in various versions. It first appeared in 1969, in pirated form, as a cheaply produced deck released by the Owl Press. In 1995, the Gotham Book Mart published a quality edition. The most recent version is the laminated, crisply printed set produced by Pomegranate in 2007.
d Really, the Comte de Lautréamont’s line, since Ducasse wrote his 1868 protosurrealist novel under that pen name.