Strawberry Lane Forever
Cape Cod, 1985–2000
The house on Strawberry Lane, Yarmouth Port, Cape Cod. (Photograph by Kevin McDermott. Copyright Kevin McDermott, 2000. This photograph first appeared in Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey by Kevin McDermott, Pomegranate, 2003.)
GOREY HAD WONDERED, as early as ’74, what he’d do when Balanchine died. “Do I watch the company go into a slow decline or do I say, ‘That’s it. I saw it. It’s past,’ and just go away?”1
The romantic version, now written into myth, is that Gorey just went away—moved to the Cape permanently the year Balanchine died in “an act of aestheticism worthy of Oscar Wilde,” as Stephen Schiff put it in the New Yorker.2 In fact, he left the city more in the manner of someone inching offstage than a dancer doing a grand jeté into the wings. There’s no doubt that he decided, that year, to break his practically perfect record of attendance at the City Ballet and remain on the Cape during ballet season. (Andreas Brown confirms that Gorey “resolved to leave” the city in ’83.3 His decision, around that time, to start shipping the tonnage of his library up to his cousins’ house in Barnstable argues Brown’s point; even more decisive was his permanent relocation of his cats to the Cape. HOME IS WHERE YOUR CAT IS proclaims a sentimental plaque hanging in the Millway house.)
He kept his apartment on East 38th until 1986, using it as a base of operations during visits to the city. But his primary residence from 1983 to ’86 was the house on Millway and, from ’86 on, his own home in Yarmouth Port. In late ’79, he’d used his Dracula earnings to purchase a two-story, early-nineteenth-century house on the east side of the Yarmouth Port common, or village green, just down the road from his cousins’ house. Formerly a sea captain’s home, it had begun life as that most iconic of Cape Cod houses, a “Federal-style full Cape,” notes Kevin McDermott in Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey, but was expanded and remodeled by later owners.4 Built in 1820 or thereabouts, 8 Strawberry Lane was a fixer-upper: some of its windows were broken, the gray shingles were in a state of decrepitude, the roof needed replacing, the grounds were engulfed by weeds. In other words, it was perfect. Ted “was attracted by the unkempt yard and air of genteel decay,” Skee Morton recalls.5
Gorey would spend seven years renovating his house, living, all the while, at Millway, in the attic where he’d spent so many summers. He tore down walls to create more spacious rooms and removed two bathrooms but decided the roof could wait ’til he’d moved in. The roof obliged, though not for long. “Very early one morning,” shortly after he’d installed himself, “Gorey awoke to a crashing noise in the next room,” the Washington Post Book World reported in a ’97 profile. “He yelled at the cats to knock it off. Presently, there was another crash. When he finally got up and looked, it turned out part of the ceiling had fallen in.”6
Despite his extensive remodeling of his new home’s interior, he left the exterior more or less as it was. Shaggy with splintered shingles, it looked like a weather-beaten ship adrift in a sea of weeds, wild clematis clambering up its north side. Lawn mowing? Perish the thought. “The grass and burdock…was almost always feet long and swaying,” recalls Alexander Theroux. “The sunken and squeaky old front porch was wonky and broken in places…”7
And then there was the poison ivy insinuating itself into the living room through a crack in the wall. And the family of raccoons that took up residence in the attic. And the other raccoons who lived in the crawl space under the house. According to Rick Jones, a member of Gorey’s inner circle on the Cape, he let the squatters stay to atone for his sins as a former wearer of raccoon-fur coats. Then a skunk joined the party; at that, he drew the line and evicted the lot of them.
The house’s original owner, Captain Edmund Hawes, was lost in a storm at sea. Whether the captain’s restless shade still stood watch who can say, but Gorey did mention a few otherworldly occurrences. Once, a number of his finials simply vanished, he claimed, along with his collection of miniature teddy bears. And then there was the time he was sitting on the couch with four or five of his cats when suddenly “everyone turned,” staring intensely at nothing, as if something invisible to human eyes—a visitor from the spirit realm?—was passing through the room.8
* * *
After the contretemps over The Mikado, John Wulp landed in the drama department at New York University, where he headed the newly founded Playwrights Horizons Theater School. In 1985, he decided to mount a musical production of unpublished texts Gorey had lying around. The choreographer and ballet dancer Daniel Levans would direct; David Aldrich, who had done the music for Gorey Stories, would compose the score; and the man himself would design the sets and costumes. The former consisted almost entirely of an enormous can of menacingly large lettuce leaves; the latter included bat costumes and some Victorian-Edwardian getups, all in taupe and complemented by sneakers. (Gorey was adamant: “No modern sneakers, only the classic variety.”)9
The threatening lettuce leaves derived from the title, Tinned Lettuce, whose vaguely Victorian ring and eccentric English silliness were classic Gorey. Where he’d stumbled across the phrase he couldn’t remember, but he was “a firm believer that it exists somewhere.”10 Asked what it meant, he said it meant nothing—always a virtue, in his estimation. Elsewhere, he said the phrase captured the very essence of the ephemeral, a concept dear to the Gorey heart. “Thinking about his title after the fact, Mr. Gorey wondered what tinned lettuce, if it existed, would look like,” Mel Gussow wrote in the New York Times. “His answer: Ghastly Brine…”11 Like Gorey Stories, Tinned Lettuce was a vaudevillian musical revue consisting of dramatic vignettes with songs and dances interspersed throughout. The playlets had names like “The Frozen Man, or, Going Farther and Faring Worse,” “The Towering Rage,” and “The Black Lobster.” They were drawn, with the exception of “The Object-Lesson” and “The Nursery Frieze,” from Gorey’s unpublished writings (“things I haven’t gotten around to doing drawings for”), a strategy he’d employ when he turned his hand to amateur theater on Cape Cod.12
From the first, Gorey proceeded on the Balanchinian assumption that psychology was irrelevant to his plays. His works for the stage were about Victorian nonsense, mock moralizing, surrealism, silliness, absurdism—anything but psychological motivations and character development. “They wanted to know what their characters’ motivations were,” he said of Tinned Lettuce’s undergraduate cast. “There are no motivations. There is nothing underlying.”13
“He wanted flat characters…almost like a drawing,” says Jane MacDonald, a trained actor who’d worked in the professional theater in New York and LA before becoming a stalwart of Gorey’s Cape Cod troupe. “It’s hard to make a drawing. I wanted to make this character come to life and sometimes I would fill it up or give it more of an attitude or a twist than he wanted.”14 “Less acting,” Gorey would admonish from the director’s chair.
He was more involved in the production, at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, than he’d ever been in a show based on his work. “Edward attended every audition and every rehearsal, just about,” Wulp recalls. “He just adored Tinned Lettuce.” Kevin McDermott, then a twenty-one-year-old acting student at NYU, later to perform in a number of Gorey’s works, remembers auditioning for the revue. While a pianist played a tango, he and a gaggle of actors struck Egyptian temple–frieze poses. “With a combination of deathly seriousness and total nonchalance,” he recalls, “we moved across the floor. Huge gulps of laughter filled the room. Sounding like a cross between a large gull and a hyena, it was coming from behind the table. I had never heard anything like it. It was Edward Gorey’s giant, infectious laugh.”15
Gorey enjoyed himself mightily at performances, too. Irwin Terry sat behind him at one of the shows. “It was general admission,” he recalls, “so we sat right behind him on purpose. He hooted, whooped, and generally had a gay old time watching his work on stage. It was almost more entertaining watching him than the performance itself—but the combination was priceless.”16
Tinned Lettuce was scheduled to run from April 17 to 27 but was held over through May 4. Gussow, as always, was enthusiastic: “The Throbblefoot Spectre loiters in a distraught manner, a wedding is held in the Church of the Whited Sepulchre and people fall mysteriously from balustrades or fling themselves into Yawning Chasms.”17 Gorey had a ball, which was all that mattered as far as he was concerned. “We had so much fun,” Wulp remembers. “He loved to laugh.”
Over the next decade and a half, Gorey would invest much of his prodigious creative energy in writing, producing, and directing productions of his theatrical work all over the Cape, uncategorizable affairs with unimprovably Goreyesque titles such as Lost Shoelaces (1987), Useful Urns (1990), Stuffed Elephants (1990), Flapping Ankles (1991), Crazed Teacups (1992), Inverted Commas (1995), and Moderate Seaweed (1999). He had, he told an interviewer in 1996, contracted a serious case of stage fever: “In the last 10 years, I’ve done a lot of very local theater. I write, I direct, I design, I do everything. I even act if something happens to somebody in the cast. A lot of the actors I use are people who look like I might have drawn them. I even choose the music. That’s really what I enjoy. People sometimes say it’s such a pity this isn’t going somewhere else and I say, ‘Well, where would it go?’”18
As one nonplussed audience member noted, these productions were often impenetrable to the uninitiated. “The very mystery and understatement that makes for good visual art and reading made for terrible theater,” a theatergoer recalled. Take Useful Urns, he said: “There were these big stage pieces shaped like urns that would move about the stage with actors popping out saying various unconnected phrases. I read an interview with one of the actors who admitted that Edward Gorey himself was one of the few appreciative audience members. Even though many people would walk out of these shows, he would remain undaunted and the actors were carried on by his chortling laughter and their sense of camaraderie.”19
* * *
Snug in the attic at Millway, Gorey proceeded—in fits and starts, as funds allowed—with the renovation of 8 Strawberry Lane. From time to time, he made forays into Manhattan for infusions of culture, staying at 36 East 38th Street. Sometime around ’86, however, the person he’d sublet his apartment to ratted him out, informing the landlord of Gorey’s largely absentee status so that he, the new tenant, could take over the lease—an act of jaw-dropping perfidy, though hardly an uncommon one in New York’s cutthroat real-estate market. Gorey’s apartment was rent-controlled—a real plum. In the end, his sublessee’s treachery forced his hand, putting a period at the end of his New York years.
There was a fittingly Goreyesque denouement to the whole affair. He’d asked some friends to move everything out of his apartment (“because I was already back up here on the Cape”) but had neglected to tell them about the mummy’s head gathering dust in his closet.20 “It didn’t occur to me to say, ‘And don’t forget the mummy’s head!’” As it happened, they didn’t notice the mysterious object swaddled in brown paper on the top shelf. The super, however, did. “I got a call from a detective at some precinct or other who said, ‘Mr. Gorey, we’ve discovered a head in your closet,’ and I said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you tell a mummy’s head when you see one? It’s thousands of years old! Good grief! Did you think it took place over the weekend?’ They said, ‘Well, you can have it back,’ and then they never sent it back to me, so I don’t know what happened to it. I had the detective’s name and phone number and I lost that so I’ve never been able to get it back—not that I’m really desperate to get it back.”
* * *
Gorey had always been “a terrible creature of habit,” as he was the first to admit, and at sixty-one was only more so. Ensconced at 8 Strawberry Lane, he soon laid the rails for his daily routines, without which he would “go to pieces,” he claimed.21
He settled into the habit of eating breakfast and lunch, day in, day out, at Jack’s Outback, a café minutes away from his house. (The authors of The World of Edward Gorey wryly note that he simply switched his “allegiance from New York City Ballet to Jack’s Outback, where, ‘all things considered,’ he…maintained an almost perfect attendance for breakfast and lunch.”)22 Jack’s served comfort food: pot roast, chicken potpie, eggs Benedict. Compulsion dictated that Gorey sit in the same spot every day: at the far end of the counter, near the door, for breakfast and on the long bench on the right-hand side of the dining room for lunch, unless he was eating with friends or conducting an interview, in which case he would sit in the third booth on the right. His menu selections were set in stone, too. His guest checks for the month of June 1998, preserved for posterity at the Edward Gorey House, are a case study in repetition: “2 poached in a bowl, ham, white toast” (breakfast, 6/6); “2 poached in a cup, ham, white toast, fruit cup in a bowl” (6/7); “egg salad, white toast butter only, fruit cup in a bowl” (6/9); “2 poached in a bowl, ham, white toast” (6/11); you get the idea.
There’s an existential comfort—purchased at the price of monotony—in knowing where you’ll be eating breakfast tomorrow morning and every tomorrow thereafter and that, barring Acts of God, it will involve poached eggs. “Life is distracting and uncertain” was a Gorey maxim; repetition imposes order on an unpredictable world. (His wardrobe, like his daily dining habits, reflected his preference for predictability, at least in mundane matters: shopping for clothes, he’d buy half a dozen copies of a shirt if it caught his eye.) It’s hard not to see Gorey’s beloved routines as a bulwark against the unpredictable and the unsettling, a lifelong reaction to a childhood marked by constant disruption.
Jack’s proprietor was Jack Braginton-Smith, one of life’s character actors. His long-running role was that stock type the Lovable Curmudgeon. He looked the part, with the rumpled features of a wizened codger, his white hair permanently mussed, like ruffled feathers. A staunch Yankee who “was of the mind you would need a passport and shots to go off Cape Cod,” as his daughter Dianna Braginton-Smith puts it, he served up insults as an amuse-bouche, in a New England accent thick as chowder. “The jibing and the repartee was part of the performance—his way of interacting with the people in his community,” she says.
Like the cocktail parties in Eliot F-13 or the intermission confabs in the State Theater lobby, Jack’s would become a social stage for Gorey. A community watering hole frequented by quirky locals, it was Yarmouth Port’s answer to the bar in Cheers. Customers took their own orders, poured their own coffee, bused their own tables. When the lunch rush overwhelmed him, Braginton-Smith would scrawl an exasperated note and slap it on the door: GO AWAY. They never did.
Braginton-Smith, who died in 2005, was hopeless as a businessman but a born conductor of collective mood, creating a bantering, gossip-swapping vibe that made his restaurant “the heart of the town,” says Dianna, a place where “a bunch of people who were on their own” could be “comfortable being alone together”—a singularly Yankee trait, in her opinion. (Gorey, never one for Garrison Keillor sentimentality, said that Jack’s Outback provided “the illusion of what most people think of as village life. You hear everything that’s going on and a lot of things that aren’t going on.”)23
In time, Gorey shed his New York persona. His fur coats had been synonymous with his gothic-beatnik image, so it’s fitting they went first. Making a grand entrance was outlandish on the Cape, especially in a double-breasted otter coat with sable trim; Yarmouth Port had an artsy element, but it leaned toward Yankee eccentricity, not Wildean aestheticism. Besides, animal-rights activists had made wearing fur an act of moral turpitude. Gorey put the coats in storage for good.
“His whole New York City getup with the jeans and the jewelry and the fur coats and making big entrances and waving bejeweled hands around was, by his own admission, a bit of a put-on,” says Ken Morton. “He was acting.” When Gorey hung up his furs for the last time, what remained were his unfeigned idiosyncrasies: the stagy delivery, the obscure passions, the unpredictable opinions on everything under the sun, the obsessive routines—“the certain flamboyances that were always there, that were not an affectation,” as Morton puts it.
Mothballing his natural diffidence took a bit more doing. “When he first came in here, he’d come in with a book,” recalled Braginton-Smith. “He’d read his book, eat his food, out the door, he’s gone. But the people that come in here have a sense of humor, and they have an affinity for one another, and…it began to get to him so that he wasn’t as aloof.…And then it got to the point where he was really friendly, didn’t read his book anymore, intruded in private conversations, told people his opinion—and he was very opinionated, and he had the statistics to back up his thoughts—so that, at the end, he was a tyrant!”24
Before long, Gorey was one of the gang, taking his personalized coffee mug from the rack reserved for regulars. Getting into the swing of things, he started ringing himself up, recording lunch totals of, oh, $14,028—acts of everyday Dada that gave Braginton-Smith fits when he went over the day’s receipts. Taking note of the oversize bowl for gratuities near the door, Gorey made a sign calculated to wring a tip from the flintiest heart. Framed by distrait children and women in widow’s weeds, the hand-lettered text beseeched, PRAY FORGET NOT THE WIDOWS AND ORPHANS. (It counterpointed another sign that warned, UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL BE SOLD AS SLAVES.)
The two men struck up a ribbing, riffing friendship that was resolutely unserious. In all the years he and Gorey knew one another, said Braginton-Smith, they “never had one serious discussion, not one, because he was on such an intellectual level that I couldn’t reach. So we did fantasy all the time, little vignettes back and forth. I didn’t intrude in his life and he didn’t intrude in mine and it was a perfect relationship because we didn’t owe anybody anything.”25 “They were both deeply reclusive and guarded people,” says Dianna, “and they recognized that in each other and respected each other’s need to be unavailable. They could be unavailable in the same space together, and that is a great gift if you are somebody who feels that discomfort but still wants to be known.”
Gorey and Braginton-Smith went to antiques auctions, a favorite pastime, and took in shows at the venerable Cape Playhouse in Dennis, since 1927 the epicenter of a thriving summer theater scene. (The Playhouse was one of the birthplaces of summer stock, attracting A-listers such as Bogie, Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, and Gregory Peck.) Braginton-Smith’s friends the Broadway set designers Helen Pond and Herbert Senn did the scenery for Playhouse productions, and Gorey began socializing with them and Braginton-Smith, often at the couple’s breathtaking home, a deconsecrated Unitarian Universalist church built in the Gothic style in 1836, where they hosted unforgettable parties.
The building’s austere white clapboard exterior belies a ravishing interior, tastefully appointed with antique furniture and Goreyesque curios—deer horns mounted on plaques, cast-iron tassels from Victorian cemetery fencing—and stage-magic illusions: the carved Gothic tracery on the ceiling and lustrous marble flooring turn out to be hand-painted trompe l’oeil.
Senn, an Anglophile whose tastes ran to Gothic revival, christened the house Strawberry Hill in homage to Horace Walpole’s Twickenham mansion of the same name.26 Unsurprisingly, he and Gorey got on swimmingly. A supremely cultured man, Senn, who died in 2003, had an encyclopedic knowledge of design history, was an aficionado of classical music, and was entranced by Russian art, from Léon Bakst’s opulent costumes and scenery for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to Palekh, the folk art of painting miniatures on lacquered boxes. His library ranged over such topics as decorative antique ironwork, Klee, Klimt, and the carceral nightmares of Piranesi. Pond, the quieter of the two, liked to listen while Senn and Gorey talked. As they chatted, Ted fed potato chips to their black Labrador, Lucky, a violation of house rules impermissible for anyone but him. What did they talk about? “Usually nothing after 1750,” quips Rick Jones, who was sometimes part of the group.
Pond and Senn inaugurated a tradition of inviting friends who might be spending Christmas morning alone—Gorey, Jones, and Braginton-Smith—over for breakfast. Gorey was famous for not bringing gifts (“He would give you a gift any time he wanted to give you a gift,” says Jones, but “not for any specific time”) and for his obscenely rich scrambled eggs. In truth, they were the surrealist painter Francis Picabia’s eggs, prepared according to Alice B. Toklas’s recipe for “eggs Francis Picabia”—stirred constantly over very, very low heat for a very, very long time with copious amounts of butter.
Despite never eating in, during his New York years, Gorey had become a dab hand in the kitchen after many a summer cooking for his relatives. When the Garveys moved into Millway, he “decided he wanted to learn how to cook,” Skee Morton recalls. Her mother, Betty Garvey, “sort of coached him along, and then it got so that he was cooking all our dinners.” He stocked up on cookbooks—Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer, The Shaker Cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer, first published in 1896—and tried his hand, when the mood struck him, at surrealist cuisine. “A couple of times, he made us completely blue dinners,” says Skee. “He dyed the mashed potatoes blue and had a casserole they put curaçao in that made it bluish, and there were probably blueberries involved.” No blue aspic, oddly enough.
On occasion, he had friends or family over for dinner. “He loved big tureens,” Pond recalls, perhaps for the theatricality of the presentation, possibly because they resembled urns. “We used to go to his house to dinner, Herbert and Helen and I,” Braginton-Smith remembered, “and we were in the kitchen one time—he was cooking—and he flambéed his beard. We killed ourselves laughing. That was the last time we got invited to dinner—Herbert, Helen, or myself. He was an absolute joy.”27
* * *
Mel and Alexandra (“Alex”) Schierman were around, too, with their kids, Anthony and Annabelle. Ballet friends going back to the City Center days, they’d bought a vacation house in Yarmouth Port, and Gorey seemed to regard them as family. He’d drop by without warning, flopping down on the couch and making himself at home. “I remember him storming into the house, saying, ‘I’m starving! When’s dinner?’” says Anthony. Gorey would sit around, sipping Campari, while Annabelle’s dog, a Lab–border collie mix, snuggled up against him, its head on his lap. “I do feel like he felt some kind of refuge with my parents,” Anthony reflects. “They didn’t want anything from him except friendship. They really liked and respected his work, but that was never a topic; they bonded over shared interests in cultural things, like movies and music and TV shows.”
As for Gorey’s relationship with the Schierman kinder, “he was just delightful,” Mel remembers. What, no secret scheming to smother them under a rug or catapult them into a lily-choked pond? “That was a pose,” he says. “He liked to create an image of himself, because of The Gashlycrumb Tinies and all that, but that was not Ted.” Gorey treated the Schierman children “as adults,” Mel recalls. “He took an interest in them as people, not as children.” Anthony does recollect his being a bit discomfited by the infant Annabelle, though. “He just wouldn’t know what to do with a [small] child. You could hand him my little sister as a three-year-old and he’d just be, like, ‘What is this? What am I supposed to do here?’”
Orbiting around Gorey’s inner circle was Alexander Theroux, who lives in West Barnstable. They’d met in ’72, after which Theroux wrote a profile that appeared in the June ’74 issue of Esquire. He and Gorey idled away countless afternoons chatting in Ted’s “quiet and cool” kitchen, taking tea—“Lapsang Souchong, which gives off the scent of freshly tarred roads at 50 yards”—and munching cinnamon toast.28
Theroux’s admiration for Gorey’s talents was boundless, but his delight in his conversation was almost as ardent. “Mind you, it was not that the man was trying to be something, contriving, say, to appear a cavalcade of wit, merely that, rather like Dr. Samuel Johnson, he happened to have sharp, remarkable ‘views’ on all sorts of subjects, almost all worthy of note.”29 Theroux was the perfect foil: Harvard-educated and absurdly erudite, with the sort of mind that’s flypaper for droll anecdotes and words so obscure they can’t be found in the OED.
If Gorey was Johnsonian in his easygoing brilliance and aphoristic wit, Theroux was Boswellian in his ability to show him off to best advantage. “I was always feeding him meat to provoke reactions about movies or whatever,” he recalls. Gorey was “full of obiter dicta,” he says, “full of gnomic remarks.”
In his slim memoir of their friendship, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, Theroux captures the digressive pleasures of Gorey in full flow:
He could discuss The Simpsons or the worth of the old actor James Gleason with the same passion that he brought to an explanation of what Ludwig Wittgenstein meant by the “synopsis of trivialities.” Any given conversation with him could range from—as it once did and which I made note of—the geometry of cats’ ears to G. W. Pabst’s film technique, Little Lulu, Bronowski on the age of huts, low water levels on Cape Cod, who danced Giselle in 1911, and the invincible vulgarity of the preposterous Kathie Lee Gifford and the host of miniature faces she was constantly pulling.30
As well, he gives us deft sketches of Gorey’s physical presence and eccentric behavior:
Gorey…spoke in a rather fey tone, heavily sibilant, and his voice, mirthful almost always among friends, could border on glee when he was enthusiastic or excited.…When he became reflective about something, pondering, say, a question you asked, he had a way of clenching his hand and pressing it to his mouth, looking into the far distance as if the answer had just flown away.…When he was not petting a cat, dramatic gestures, along with heavy sighs or moans, almost always accompanied his highly various conversation. He would chatter on with a kind of…self-amused intolerance of things, squawking through a very pronounced sibilance in moments of both delight and exasperation with his own slang expressions, like, “Not on your tintype!” “Snuggy-poos, desist!”—when addressing his cats—“Talk about loopy!” “What is that blather about?”31
The Strange Case is itself delightful and exasperating; you’d fling it at the nearest wall if it weren’t so unputdownable. It’s written in the Boswellian style, meaning: it’s a garrulous, gossipy portrait of the man in full, stuffed with scandalous morsels of gossip, piquant table talk, and the author’s insights into the Great Man’s mind and art, some of which are acutely perceptive and some of which are a country mile wide of the bull’s-eye. There are closely observed sketches of Gorey being Gorey, quotations (and misquotations) from magazine and newspaper profiles, and side trips into the weeds of Theroux’s enthusiasms and bêtes noires, with bits of potted biography embedded throughout, like currants in a scone. Following the meandering, apropos-of-nothing logic of a conversation over afternoon tea and toast, it isn’t really in aid of anything, especially—which is part of its perverse charm.
Less amusingly, it’s got some notable groaners when it comes to errors of fact.32 Theroux’s style tends toward the hyperbolic; that and the absence of footnotes leave the reader uneasy about what to take as verbatim Gorey and what to chalk up to exaggeration for effect.33 Did “outraged mothers” really send Gorey copies of The Beastly Baby “ripped to shreds”?34 Did he really say, “Barbara Walters, I’m afraid, belongs to the communion of kitsch, rather than the art of communication”? (For a man who cordially loathed self-conscious cleverness, the line’s too clever by half, a little too epigrammatic in its tidy parallelism.)35
Still, Theroux shows us Gorey from a new and revealing angle, his silhouette outlined by his likes and dislikes. “He lived according to his tastes, unfettered by second-hand opinions,” writes Theroux.36 What did he like? “He liked the way Humphrey Bogart said ‘Thursby’ [in The Maltese Falcon] and the way Robert Newton said ‘Jim Arkins’ [in Treasure Island] and the way Audrey Hepburn said ‘chocolate’ and the way unshaven Akim Tamiroff said, ‘Drunken bum—I should shoot you in the fooooot.’”37 What else? “Along with cats, Gorey loved tea…Dick Van Dyke Show reruns…his Cuisinart…a glass of Glenfiddich, hard shaving soap, the palace purple coral bells of the perennial plant Heuchera micrantha…papyrus…and the actor James Cagney.”38 As for what he didn’t like, the list is long, but a nibble gives a taste: “brussels sprouts, false sentiment, minimal art, overcommitment to work, being solicited for blurbs, the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber,” and “movies about ea-ting,” as he told Theroux in “a malicious lilt, ‘like My Dinner with André and Like Water for Chocolate.’”39
Superficial, you say? An aesthete like Gorey would point out that we’re as defined by our likes and dislikes as we are by what we regard as our core convictions—if not more so: our politics and religious beliefs mark us as members of clubs for the like-minded, whereas our tastes—idiosyncratic, intuitive, capricious—are often more revealing about who we really are. Sontag again, from “Notes on ‘Camp’”: “To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”40 As a thought experiment, Theroux’s attempt at building a Unified Theory of Edward Gorey from his antipathies and sympathies is frequently illuminating in ways that more conventional character sketches are not.
Of course, as Theroux notes, Gorey was more than the sum of his opinions on B movies, brussels sprouts, and Kathie Lee Gifford. “You talk about the complicated icosahedron of the human spirit,” says Theroux. “He was coming from 16 different places. He had all the earmarks of a [stereotypically] gay man—the rings, the sibilance in his voice, walking down Fifth Avenue or Lexington Avenue with a big fur coat and sneakers and many rings and an insect pendant, going to the ballet. He was outlandishly up front with it, but he was in many ways a very shy man. Gorey was trying to complete himself by that floral, highly decorative, unbelievably showy front.” Theroux’s conclusion? “He was a completely complicated, conflicted person in thousands of ways, as all brilliant people are.”
* * *
Gorey’s day-to-day existence on the Cape was, in his own estimation, “featureless.”41
Granted, you could set your watch by his arrival for breakfast or lunch at Jack’s. When he wasn’t there, a likely spot for Gorey sightings was Parnassus Book Service, a used-book store on Route 6A, just around the corner from his house. If he wasn’t sitting cross-legged on the floor, rearranging books as he browsed (an unshakable compulsion for anyone who’s ever worked in a bookstore), you’d find him gabbing with Isobel Grassie, a Parnassus clerk and actress in community theater productions who shared his devotion to soap operas. (Gorey dedicated The Water Flowers to Grassie.) Judith Cressy, who spent several college summers in the early ’70s clerking at Parnassus, recalls Gorey’s appetite for Flaubert, books on Japanese art and culture (especially Noh and Kabuki), and “novels that nobody else cared about,” such as the social-satirical fictions of Angela Thirkell, an English novelist of the 1930s. As she came to know Gorey’s fondness for “icky Victorian stuff,” she took to setting aside titles she thought might interest him—books on “nineteenth-century cabinets of curiosities with taxidermied animals,” Victorian hair jewelry, and “photos of dead children arranged as peaceful little angels.”
One title that caught her eye was L. H. Bailey’s Manual of Gardening: A Practical Guide to the Making of Home Grounds and the Growing of Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables for Home Use, published in 1910. The book’s pen-and-ink illustrations were beautifully limned, she thought, but “odd. There’d be this funny little drawing of…almost symmetrical plantings, but then there was this tree that was in the wrong place and there would be a caption that would say, ‘A regrettable vista,’ or something. It looked like an Edward Gorey drawing, and the caption was like an Edward Gorey caption. The whole book was full of these Edward Goreyisms that were done before he was born.” When Cressy showed Gorey some photocopies of the book’s illustrations, “he just whooped and rolled up the papers and tucked them in his pocket and ran away. He got it immediately.”
The result was The Improvable Landscape (Albondocani Press, 1986), which Gorey dedicated to Cressy. A note-perfect send-up of Bailey’s didactic Manual, it’s a kind of cautionary tale for gardeners and landscape architects; Gorey’s impeccably deadpan renderings of “a less than ornamental pond,” “a meaningless hedge,” “an unsuccessful vista,” and other horticultural mishaps provide object lessons in what not to do.
Parnassus’s owner, Ben Muse, also kept an eye out for books he knew would grab Gorey, such as the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn’s whimsically weird sketches of Japanese culture in the 1890s and his translations of grotesque Japanese folktales, full of man-eating goblins and crabs with human faces. After a little arm-twisting, Muse “conned” (his words) the long-suffering, ever-acquiescent Gorey into letting him publish one of his books. In ’92, Parnassus Imprints released The Betrayed Confidence, a compilation of seven of Gorey’s Dogear Wryde postcard sets, spanning 1976 to 1990.
In his Yarmouth Port years, Gorey was far from a recluse. He was out and about in his bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle with its OGDRED vanity plate, not exactly the sort of thing you’d drive if you wanted to elude celebrity stalkers. Then, too, he was in the book, as they used to say, right there between Gorewitz and Gorfinkle; you could ring him up, and fans sometimes did. Others put pen to paper, unaware that their fan mail was headed for the dustbin of history, or at least the “six enormous cartons of unanswered letters, contracts, old theater programs, that sort of thing” into which he unceremoniously tossed a good deal of his incoming mail.42 “I just don’t connect very well,” was his explanation. “I connect less well as the years go by. At one point I drew a postcard up, which says: ‘You’ve written me to no avail / Because I never read my mail.’ Every now and again I send one of those out with my signature on it. Every once in a while you hear about somebody like Carol Burnett, who says, ‘Oh, I answer every fan letter I get, in my hand,’ and I think, ‘This isn’t possible! Are you insane? Have you no priorities?!’”
Determined fans, such as the underground cartoonist Johnny Ryan, a clerk at the Hyannis Barnes & Noble, where Gorey had done a book signing, simply showed up unannounced on his doorstep. Ryan and a friend invited him to lunch, and the trio spent the next two hours at Jack’s, discussing the fine points of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, “and any movies that had animals in them, like Paulie, Dr. Dolittle (the one with Eddie Murphy), or Dunston Checks In,” in Ryan’s recollection.43 (Their lunch took place in the early ’90s.) After lunch, Gorey stepped behind the cash register and rang them up, which Ryan found amusing.
The following weekend, he and Gorey conducted a more formal interview for issue 8 of Ryan’s self-published zine, Angry Youth Comix. “This time, we had a whole list of questions we wanted to ask him,” says Ryan.44
Q. Who was your favorite Stooge from the Three Stooges?
A. Who’s the one with the bangs?
Q. Who’s the biggest asshole you ever met?
A. Robert Frost. He wouldn’t shut up about how much he hated his parents.
Q. Have you ever listened to Howard Stern?
A. Life’s too short for all that gassing.
Ryan and his friend took to dropping in on Gorey “to see if he wanted to hang out, which in retrospect seems incredibly obnoxious, but…he was always very nice and willing to sit and talk to us. We used to bring him copies of our zines/comix but he probably just threw them in the garbage or something. I don’t think they were really his cup of tea, but we really didn’t care.”45
Ryan was forty-five years Gorey’s junior, and his scabrous, willfully crude comics crossed the self-flagellating confessionalism of underground artists like R. Crumb with the postpunk cynicism of Peter Bagge, the grunge cartoonist known for his bilious, bleakly funny strip Hate. Ryan’s work had next to nothing in common with Gorey’s, but the older artist’s boundless imagination and independence of mind impressed the twentysomething cartoonist mightily.
“Mr. Gorey was a consummate individual,” says Ryan. “He had an original mind and he did his own thing, both in the way he lived his life and in the way he worked. I mean, his work is so unique it can’t even be classified. Are his books comics or graphic novels or children’s books or surrealist art books or gothic fiction? They’re all of these things. And nobody has ever been able to pull that off before or since.”46
* * *
“Since I’ve been living up here,…at some point or other I succumbed to television,” Gorey told an interviewer in 1995, “so there I am, parked in front of the television more often than not, making stuffed animals or reading or drawing or writing…”47
During his thirty years in New York, he’d never owned a television. Defying the cultural logic of the times, he’d lived a life unplugged from the media feed that shaped the American mind. Chances are good he missed the on-camera murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s funeral cortege, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Neil Armstrong on the moon, the Watergate hearings, the nightly horrors of Vietnam. If Gorey took much notice of the political and social tremors registered by TV’s seismograph, he never mentioned it. When he did discover the delights of the boob tube, he was drawn to everything but news programming, current-affairs shows, and the self-consciously high-middlebrow fare served up by PBS. (He made no exception for Mystery!, claiming he was fed up with “overly psychologized detectives and their problems.”)48
In his last decade and a half, he made up for lost time, glutting himself on mass-market TV and late-night box-office bombs with the same omnivorous relish that characterized his consumption of books and art films. “The Avengers is coming back on,” Gorey told an interviewer, obviously exultant. “I adore Diana Rigg. I think she’s the greatest thing since shredded wheat.…This week we’re truly blessed with two episodes of Dallas. And, oh, God, those Mexican vampire movies on Channel 27.”49 Dark Star, a cult sci-fi comedy, was “tacky in a nice sort of way,” he thought (“They made outer space look like the size of a phone booth”), but what the world needed was “a horror movie about demon people on roller skates.”
The big open-beamed room on the second floor of his house, up a narrow, steep flight of stairs, was Gorey’s TV room—his “entertainment center in all its squalor,” as he called it.50 “Being a collector, he videotaped his favorite shows,” Kevin McDermott notes in Elephant House, his book of photographs documenting every nook and cranny of Gorey’s domestic world. “He taped every episode of Buffy. On the sofa were seven or eight television guides: one for the satellite dish, one for the cable, one for local programs, etc. He knitted a small, pocketed remote holder to house the many remotes. Edward feigned not being able to do the simplest household chore, but he could program the VCR to switch taping from cable to satellite on West Coast time.”51 Betraying the same compulsion that led him to affix little white stickers to his CDs, recording the dates he’d first listened to them, he was scrupulous in labeling each videotape, noting the program title, air date, even the time it ran.
Profiles of Gorey inevitably mention his passing infatuations with soaps such as All My Children and Days of Our Lives or his devotion to Golden Girls or his long-running addiction to Buffy, The X-Files, and Star Trek, partly as evidence of the unselfconscious postmodernism of his eclectic tastes and partly for comic effect. (The man who lived for Balanchine and rhapsodizes about eleventh-century Japanese literature watches Alf and Magnum, P.I.! Who knew?) Gorey, of course, was quick to puncture inflated theories about his TV viewing: asked, by an interviewer, if his was “a scholarly interest in American pop culture,” he replied, “No, I just like trash.”52
What he watched is less interesting than the associations it sparked or the droll observations it inspired, tossed off with an amusingly blasé air. Here he is on his friend (and fellow Cape Cod resident) Julie Harris in the prime-time soap Knots Landing, which aired from ’79 to ’93: “Much as I adore Julie, she’s theater to her fingertips, if you know what I mean. She never would’ve appeared in Knots Landing if she had any real standards, but…she was absolutely marvelous. She played this kind of ditzy lady who wanted to be [a] country-and-western singer and who was writing songs. She was acting up a storm all the time, and she was very funny and very touching. Alec Baldwin was her psychotic son, who eventually fell off the building, I believe; he was a born-again fake minister or something. Oh, it had everything. But she was absolutely wonderful.…I do wish she would do something that [isn’t] quite so lofty; it’s got to be Tolstoy or nothing these days.”53
Gorey’s through-the-looking-glass view of things makes his pronouncements on even the most forgettable shows entertaining. “I’m also very partial to surrealist sitcoms,” he told an interviewer. “There was one called Stat, a medical one. It had—oh dear. One of those actors whose name is Ron.”54 Trawling the depths of public-access cable TV one Sunday morning, he was smitten with a morbidly obese woman who sang Seventh-day Adventist hymns of her own composition written in what Gorey called a country-gospel style. She was a “genius,” he thought—“in a curious way.”55 He genuinely liked her, he maintained, insisting that she had “quite a nice voice, actually.” Then again, she did remind him of the inimitable Florence Foster Jenkins, a socialite and would-be coloratura soprano whose tin ear and pitiless mangling of opera lyrics reduced audiences to helpless mirth in ’40s New York.
Sitting on a couch, flanked by a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that ran much of the length of the house, with more books in piles all around, he watched his shows and movies while hand-sewing the beanbag creatures he sold at his theatrical performances to raise money for his troupe. Using richly colored, ornately patterned fabrics, Gorey made dolls of every conceivable species, from Figbash, his vaguely avian answer to Max Ernst’s bird-headed totem, Loplop, to iconic members of the Gorey bestiary such as cats, bats, elephants, frogs, and rabbits. Truth to tell, they weren’t beanbag animals in the strict sense, since he stuffed them with rice. (Which is why he stored them in the fridge: mice like rice.)
Gorey’s stitching, like his cross-hatching, was machinelike in its precision—“precise and perfect and very close,” Ken Morton says. “He was very dexterous, very good at doing small, detailed things.” His nimble fingers seemed to have a mind of their own; eager to be occupied, they’d fiddle with his rings if nothing more absorbing was at hand. “Throughout the conversation, Gorey’s hands never come to rest,” an interviewer from the Providence Sunday Journal observed. “They are molding a rubber band one minute, twisting it into a variety of shapes, testing its elasticity, feeling its texture. A few minutes later, the hands are tearing pieces of cellophane tape, sticking them at random onto the cover of the black sketch book that Gorey always has with him. The tape strips form an abstract design.”56 He was, as Morton puts it, “very…gesture-ful,” yet as the Journal vignette suggests, his fiddling wasn’t just a nervous tic; it had as much, or more, to do with Gorey’s irrepressible impulse to create.57
Anthony Schierman was struck by Gorey’s effortless mastery—in his sixties, mind you—of multitasking. In the mid-’80s, Schierman spent a high-school summer living with Gorey at Strawberry Lane while working as a dishwasher at a nearby restaurant. “He’d read a novel a day while watching five TV shows, sitting there knitting stuff, making these beanbag things, going to the movies at night, eating out twice a day,” he recalls, “and then still [find] time to do the drawings that he did. I don’t remember him sleeping very much.”
* * *
At a glance, the life of a man who lived alone with a clowder of cats, ate at the same short-order joint twice a day, and proclaimed himself “passionately devoted to reruns” of sitcoms like Golden Girls is, by any objective standard, “featureless.”58 But as in Gorey’s little tragicomedies, in which the most Grand Guignol events occur offstage or in the padlocked vaults of the psyche, the quirky, revealing goings-on in his everyday life took place between his ears, or behind closed doors.
Consider his house. Inside, it was a yard-saler’s idea of a wunderkammer—a cabinet of wonders, one of those private museums that emerged in the sixteenth century as the Enlightenment was gathering steam. Progenitors of the natural history museum, they were crammed full of all manner of fossils, freaks of nature, archaeological artifacts, clockwork automata, unicorn horns, mermaid hands, mummies, pieces of the True Cross, skeletal deformities, bezoars, zoological specimens, and, foreshadowing the surrealists, curiously shaped things (stones, deformed vegetables) that resembled other things, all promiscuously jumbled together with the zany taxonomic logic of the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, the make-believe taxonomy Borges cites in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.”
Gorey tended to socialize outside his home. Friends who were allowed entrée rarely saw more than his kitchen, which served as Gorey’s parlor. (“It is the only bearable room,” he claimed.)59 “Few were invited to venture past this room,” confirms Kevin McDermott. “Edward usually met guests outside on the porch, or he waited with a book on a bench in the common across the way. He and his company would then depart for their destination. Elephant House remained for the most part Edward’s private world.”60 (Elephant House, according to McDermott, was the “special name, known only to a few people,” that Gorey gave his “great bulky home,” possibly because its shaggy gray hide of splintering shingles resembled elephant skin or, more likely, because the antique white porcelain toilet he’d removed from an upstairs bathroom reminded him of an elephant’s head.61 He was so taken with it he repurposed it into an end table.)
The inner sanctum of that world, just off the TV room, was Gorey’s studio, a closet-size workspace barely big enough to swing a cat in. In keeping with his preference for rooms without a view in order to minimize distractions, his studio’s single window was all but obscured by the tangled branches of a majestic southern magnolia—“brought back from Mount Vernon in a small pot,” according to a plaque at the Gorey museum, “by the sisters who owned and resided in this house, Louise and Olive Simkins, during one of their ‘motoring trips’ from 1928 (or perhaps 1929).”
Dominating the little room was his drawing board, smeared and splotched with black ink and the white tempera he used to correct mistakes. (“I correct drawings only in a very minor way—with white tempera and/or a razor blade,” he said, meaning that he would either white out a mistake or cut it out with a knife, in his case a vintage matte knife. “In desperation I may redraw a segment and paste it over if I feel unable to redo the rest of the drawing as well a second time.”)62 Tools of the trade littered his desk: a metal ruler, a draftsman’s triangle, an old rotary phone (whose on/off buttons the cats liked to step on, disconnecting Gorey midconversation), and of course his pens and ink bottles.
Gorey’s desk, Strawberry Lane. (Photograph by Christopher Seufert)
Gorey had, for many years, scratched away on Strathmore two-ply matte-finish paper with Hunt 204 pen points dipped in Higgins India ink. When he discovered Pelikan ink and Gillott’s exquisitely fine-nibbed tit-quill pen points, he switched allegiances. The tit quill, he told Clifford Ross, was “very small and, by a brilliant bit of packaging,” could only be bought “a dozen at a time on a little card that was wrapped in cellophane. And of course, by the time you got them home, at least three of the 12 were totally useless. One of them would usually last for about a year. Some of them were split in the first place and others you couldn’t use for more than about three lines. They cost 20 times as much as any other penpoint and then they stopped making them. I had a real crise.”63 He went—“with reluctance”—back to the Hunt 204. “None of these—paper, pen, and ink—seem to be what they once were,” he lamented in 1980, “so I expect I am getting old.”64
By his Cape Cod days, Gorey was using an ergonomically correct kneeling chair; the sight of his six-foot-plus frame hunched over his drawing board, in his tiny studio, must’ve been something to see. As he drew, a few familiars looked on: squatting on his desk were some metal frogs; nearby sat a framed photo of a bull terrier, the breed he would’ve owned if he owned a dog. (“I think they’re so wonderful,” he told a reporter from CBS News. “I just love their looks.”)65 Over his desk were postcards of paintings by Goya and Matisse, along with a framed award for “Very Superior Pencil Sketches,” bestowed in 1849 on his great-grandmother Helen Amelia St. John Garvey, from whom, according to family lore, he got his talent. The room’s decor also included one of Helen Amelia’s small botanical studies, some Japanese wood-block prints, and, on a more Goreyan note, what Mel Gussow described as “an Indian sculpture of a tiger devouring a missionary.”66
An ink stain down the wall behind his desk testified to the truth of Gorey’s remark, to an interviewer, that “anywhere from one to six cats are almost always sitting on wherever I am working.”67 The cats’ antics sometimes cost him dearly when they bounded across his drawing board. According to Kevin McDermott, “His archives contain more than one example of a dried puddle of spilled ink destroying a large, complex crosshatched drawing.”68 Ever the Taoist, Gorey simply refilled his inkwell and started over.
* * *
Christopher Seufert, a filmmaker who from August of ’96 until Gorey’s death, in 2000, shot footage of him for a documentary he hoped to make, was one of a very few visitors who were allowed to explore beyond the kitchen. He was fascinated to discover installationlike arrangements of curiosa amid the clutter. “He seemed to treat his house almost like a gallery, because things would change,” Seufert recalls. “You’d be in there one day and you could tell everything was set up very deliberately, and the next day there would be, like, a new display.”69 The house on Strawberry Lane was an evolving work of installation art, frequently rearranged and ever expanding, all for an audience of one.
It was also a case study in the eros of collecting. Gorey’s irresistible urge to collect, like his obsessive devotion to Balanchine’s art, afforded a rare opportunity for a man who claimed to be “reasonably undersexed” to give himself over to desire—the desire to have and to hold, to possess. Collecting, writes Christine Davenne in Cabinets of Wonder, a book about cabinets of curiosities, is “close kin to passion and excess.”70
A whiff of fetishism has clung to collecting ever since Freud proposed that the collector’s desire is prompted by the unconscious mechanism of psychological substitution. “When an old maid keeps a dog or an old bachelor collects snuffboxes,” he declared, “the former is finding a substitute for her need for a companion in marriage and the latter for his need for—a multitude of conquests.”71 Freud was careful to note that an attachment to such “erotic equivalents” was normal enough; after all, he was a collector himself. He’d begun accumulating his famous trove of tribal totems and archaeological artifacts shortly after his father’s death, a “most poignant loss” whose blow was softened by the acquisition of objets d’art that proved to be a “source of exceptional renewal and comfort.”
Nonetheless, Freud’s analysis paved the way for pop-psych caricatures of the collector as sexually frustrated and socially maladjusted. In psychoanalytic studies of collecting, there is talk of a libidinal attachment to the idealized object, of a yearning for the absent phallus. Noting “the traumatic events in so many collectors’ early lives,” the psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger observes in Collecting: An Unruly Passion, “It is easy to see how affection has been displaced to things, rather than to people, who have proven not to be reliable.”72 The glib dismissal of collectors as damaged or deviant has become a fixture of pop psychology, from the psychologist April Benson’s parable, in the New York Times, of a “desperate and childless” woman whose traumatic miscarriage and birth of a stillborn baby drove her to amass “a vast graveyard of porcelain dolls” to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s gothic-Freudian depiction of the collector as a man over forty who “invests in objects all that [he] finds impossible to invest in human relationships,” the “sultan of a secret seraglio” whose possessions are his “harem” and who “can never entirely shake off an air of impoverishment and depleted humanity.”73
Such descriptions hardly fit Gorey. Still, there’s no denying the psychological peculiarities of a lifelong solitary who claimed that cats were the love of his life, whose flat affect invited speculation about whether he was on the autism spectrum (he wasn’t),74 and who didn’t do handshakes and shrank from hugs. (“Did you ever see him hug anyone?” I asked Skee Morton. She searched her memory. “He hugged me at my father’s funeral,” she decided at last. “I think that’s the only time.” “Physical contact…was not in Edward’s repertoire” is the way Carol Verburg, who produced all but two of his Cape Cod theatricals, puts it. “His level of physical contact was cat level.”)75
Whether some psychic trauma drove Gorey to displace his deepest affections to cats and collections “rather than to people, who have proven not to be reliable,” who can say? The literary critic Mario Praz, a fanatical collector who’d spent his childhood as a lonely singleton and who, too, ended up alone in a museum of his own making, surrounded by bibelots and curios, Empire furniture and neoclassical marbles, once remarked that his mania for rare and precious things was indeed a substitute, a craving for “a mistress of another kind, safer and more exciting” than the unreliable human sort.76
* * *
The quintessential Gorey obsessions, when it came to collecting, were of course books (“I can’t go out the door without buying books”) and, in a sense, cats.77 Playing to type, he also collected finials—the hood ornament of Victorian culture, so to speak—and nineteenth-century postmortem photographs of children, affectingly posed. (“Everyone says ‘Don’t tell them that!’” he confided to an interviewer. “I have a friend in New York who has a huge collection of postcards.…He goes to these postcard shows and sheepishly says, ‘Any dead babies?’ to the dealers. He tells me ‘I hate it! I hate it!’ I say, ‘Well, just keep looking!’”)78 To no one’s surprise, Gorey collected Mexican Day of the Dead papier-mâché skulls and owned a toothless human skull, which he jauntily outfitted with a pair of antique spectacles.
Of course, these are the sorts of things we’d expect Gorey to collect. Less predictable was his flirtation with numismatics, which yielded a handful of Roman coins bearing the image of Trebonianus Gallus (206–253 CE), a not terribly successful emperor who was murdered by his own troops. He was much taken with “sandpaper drawings,” as they’re erroneously called—pictures done in charcoal on stiff-stock paper coated with a ground of marble dust and varnish. A pastime of young ladies in the mid-nineteenth century, the work tends toward picturesque landscapes and romantic fantasies, such as moonlight shimmering on black waters (the ever-popular Magic Lake theme). Some practitioners worked in pastels; Gorey, unsurprisingly, preferred the grisaille variety. “The ones that are imaginary landscapes are kitschy, because they’re sort of castles on the Rhine and blah-ty blah-ty blah-ty,” he said. “I think people just kind of made them up, you know; you did obelisks and ruins and columns and trees.”79
Also in the entrance room was a chest that, according to Kevin McDermott, “contained over three hundred pounds of rusting metal objects, including machine parts, stakes for railroad ties, and old tools.”80 “I just like rusted iron,” Gorey told an interviewer.81 “Edward had a fondness for the texture of decay,” says McDermott.82
In light of Gorey’s Japanophilia, it’s hard not to see “fondness for the texture of decay” as an expression of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that singles out the beauty “of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete…of things modest and humble…of things unconventional,” as Leonard Koren defines it in Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (a book Gorey owned).83 Wabi is understated, austere beauty, made more perfect by its imperfections—the tea-ceremony utensil that has been broken and repaired and because of this defect is more beautiful than a flawless but characterless brand-new one. Sabi, according to Koren, is the “beauty of things withered…taking pleasure in that which is old, faded, and lonely.”84 “Edward appreciated objects that indicated some degree of prior use—things that had had a life,” says McDermott.85
Things imperfect, impermanent, incomplete: these were the sorts of things Gorey loved best. In a sense, his entire oeuvre, steeped in the gothic aesthetic, nineteenth-century ballet and opera, penny dreadfuls, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, silent film, and semimythologized visions of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Jazz Ages, can be seen as a monument to the “beauty of things withered,” to “taking pleasure in that which is old, faded, and lonely.”
What else did Gorey collect? Rocks. Gorey loved rocks. He kept beach pebbles in bowls by his kitchen sink, covered in water to restore their submarine luster. In fact, rocks proliferated all over the countertop—a surrealist’s idea of a Zen rock garden. (His dearest dream, as we know from one of his postcards to Peter Neumeyer, was to make a pilgrimage to the renowned rock garden at the Zen temple Ryōan-ji, in Kyoto.) “If you were to die and come back as a person or thing,” ran one of the questions in Vanity Fair’s Proust questionnaire, “what would it be?” “A stone” was Gorey’s reply.86 “I had a terrible trauma this week,” he told the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff. “I didn’t know what had become of my favorite rock. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t live.’ Fortunately, it was found.”87
Do we detect a subtle philosophical statement in Gorey’s habit of lavishing as much attention on his minutely detailed renderings of rocks as he did on his human characters? His rocks are characters in the sense that they’re always individuals, never generic: think of the Wobbling Rock in The Willowdale Handcar and the “absolutely useless stone” in The Iron Tonic. But they’re also characters in the animistic sense of Japanese folktales, in which inanimate things exude a presence. “Few people seem to notice that a largish part of my stuff is not about human beings,” he said. “I mean, I’ve done several books about inanimate objects.…I just don’t think humanity is the ultimate end.”88
Whether he thought rocks have inner lives who knows, but he certainly didn’t regard humans as the crown of creation. Of course, Gorey’s geophilia also aligned him with the surrealists, for whom weird geological formations were the solidified stuff of dreams. Poetically suggestive rocks were charged with occult power. “Stones—particularly, hard stones—go on talking to those who wish to hear them,” wrote André Breton in his essay “The Language of Stones.” “They speak to each listener according to his capabilities; through what each listener knows, they instruct him in what he aspires to know.”89
In fact, Gorey’s relationship to the objects he collected was surrealist to the core. He would’ve fit right in among the exhibitors at Exhibition of Surrealist Objects, held at the Galerie Charles Ratton, in Paris, in 1936. The show included what Marcel Jean described, in The History of Surrealist Painting, as natural objects (“stibnites from Transylvania”), “interpreted” natural objects (“a monkey-shaped fern, as found in florists’ shops”), “perturbed” objects (a wineglass melted and twisted like ribbon candy by the eruption of Mont Pelée, in Martinique, in 1902), objets trouvés (found objects, such as a “book that had spent some time in the sea and was encrusted with shellfish”), and “interpreted” objets trouvés (“roots, round pebbles, and various rock structures arranged in such a way that they took on an added meaning or seemed to reveal some hidden message”).90
Gorey’s collections abounded in “interpreted” natural objects: rocks that resembled frogs; a hunk of driftwood that looked like an elephant’s head. The surrealists exploited the dream logic of analogy; Gorey’s witty, poetic ability to see the figurative hiding in the literal—the frog in the rock, the elephant in the driftwood—underscores the extent to which he viewed the world with a surrealist eye.
“Interpreted” objets trouvés, “arranged in such a way that they took on an added meaning or seemed to reveal some hidden message,” were everywhere at 8 Strawberry Lane, too. Gorey had a surrealist’s understanding of the uncanniness of the double and of the disquieting sense of a collective presence evoked by multiple copies of a thing. “This is something I learned from Ted,” Ken Morton says. “One wrench is just a wrench. But get a lot of them, and it becomes something.” Flat surfaces in Gorey’s home tended to be populated by groups of objects arranged just so—doorknobs, finials, telephone-pole insulators, metal graters. (“Greater graters and lesser graters,” he dubbed them.)
He arranged a flock of pewter salt and pepper shakers on a tray, then balanced it on a stool in a back room on the first floor. Thus arrayed, they looked like people, he thought, or maybe chess pieces. Gorey collected “spherical objects,” as he liked to say: bocce balls, glass fishing floats, terra-cotta globes from “Smith & Hawken, or wherever.”91 These, too, went into the back room, arranged on the floor in patterns that were satisfying to the eye. More spherical objects joined the colony, heaped high in bowls. In time, they claimed the room as their own; Gorey christened it the Ball Room. There was just enough space, in the center of the room, for his exercise bike, prescribed by his doctor. Surrounded by spherical objects, he pedaled placidly, reading as he cycled.
Sometimes Gorey’s imagination ran riot, extracting multiple meanings from a single object, as was the case with the pile of antique cobbler’s tools called “lasting pincers,” which he’d found in an antiques shop. “They look vaguely like lizards or something, combination birds’ heads or lizards,” he told an interviewer. “Oh, dear, it’s all so complicated. There was a very famous French horror movie called Eyes Without a Face. Long before I ever saw the movie, there was a still that was reproduced a lot, with a young lady who had been operated on—they were removing her face, and they had those things that pry the skin away, keep the skin separated. So there’s this photograph of her lying there with this slight trickle of blood around the outline of her face, with all these…instruments attacking her. It impressed me a lot at the time. Anyway, lasting pincers look sort of like that. If it weren’t for Max Ernst, of course, none of this would anybody look at as being…” He trailed off, then added, apropos of nothing, “But you know, if you look at this”—he held up a pair of pincers—“it looks like a person, sort of.”92 And there you have it: an object lesson in the surrealist alchemy of free association, which transmutes a thing, natural or man-made, into what the New York gallerist Julien Levy called a “concrete realization of the dream or of irrationality,” under whose uncanny influence “reality may begin to assume the dreamed-of aspects.”93
One of Gorey’s obsessions seems less surrealist than Freudian: his mania for stuffed animals. On the second floor, in an alcove near his bedroom, aging, worse-for-wear elephants, cats, and other creatures slumped on built-in shelves. More were heaped, pell-mell, on a chest in his bedroom. According to Kevin McDermott, Gorey “preferred old, worn stuffed animals—the more worn, the better”; whether that was just another instance of his wabi-sabi sensibility or some muffled echo of the miseries of childhood, who knows?94 His was a cloudless Midwestern childhood, he always claimed, but there’s something about a seventy-two-year-old man who still has his childhood bear (“not a teddy bear, but a bear, fuzzy”) and who collects stuffed animals at yard sales, battered creatures orphaned by children who’d outgrown them, that suggests otherwise.95 “I wondered if something bad happened to him once that he never told us about, that he never told anybody about,” Morton mused.96
Dolls and stuffed toys are enigmatic presences in Gorey stories, cathected, as Freud would say, with psychic energy: in The Other Statue, Augustus is frantic upon discovering that his “stuffed twisby” is missing; Charlotte Sophia’s only friend in the world, her doll, Hortense, is “torn limb from limb” by the mean girls at the orphanage in The Hapless Child; and the Black Doll is a surrealist cipher, a floating signifier haunting Gorey’s narrative landscape.97
“Like another Edward—Lear—he was a cheerfully morbid bachelor uncle who refused the injunction of St. Paul to put away childish things,” John Updike observes of Gorey in his foreword to McDermott’s book.98 Gorey in his seventies had the same unfettered imagination he had in grammar school, evident in his never-ending delight in playing with words, images, and objects.
In that context, his collection of stuffed animals and animal figurines seems like an innocent pleasure—an expression, however goofy, of his fondness for animals as well as his childlike attachment to cuddly toys. Looked at in the light of his books, though, in which children are ill treated, abandoned, or worse, the animals in Gorey’s alcove—the cast-off transitional objects of nameless children long since grown up, grown old, or dead—assume an abject air, like the artist Mike Kelley’s assemblages of grungy crocheted animals and abused plush toys scavenged from thrift stores.
One of Gorey’s most obliquely revealing remarks about his childhood can be found in a letter to Peter Neumeyer. Prompted by his reading of Contrary Imaginations, a critique of IQ tests and prevailing definitions of intelligence, he tells Neumeyer that Francis Parker’s principal “lived in the same decaying mansion on the south side of Chicago as did a little group called, I think, the Human Engineering Laboratory which devised intelligence tests so, needless to remark, we got a new one of some sort about every week, sometimes oftener…”99 What he wants to know from Neumeyer, then a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is “just how important intelligence tests are in the education scheme of things.…[W]hat I really mean is…how seriously do they affect the life of a child in school and his development?”100 When we remember his mother loftily informing Gorey’s Florida cousins that her wunderkind’s IQ was 165 and trumpeting his record-breaking score on the army intelligence test, it’s hard not to hear a plaintive note in Gorey’s question. Intelligent and articulate beyond their years, prodigies are, by definition, dour little adults, like the tinies in Gorey stories.
At the risk of pop psychologizing, one can’t help wondering: did Gorey, a great one for paradox, have in late life the childhood he never had as a kid? He collected teddy bears (“in a desultory sort of way”), read Nancy Drew mysteries ’til his dying day, and devoted much of his last decade or so to puppet shows, traditionally a children’s genre.101 “One of the great deprivations of my life is that I never learned how to make papier-mâché,” he once lamented, “and now it’s too late.”102 Except it wasn’t: Gorey crafted his puppets himself, molding their heads out of papier-mâché—the stuff of lost time.