GOREY, AS WE KNOW, loved to melodramatize the horrors of everyday life. “I’m suffering from bronchitis at the moment,” he told an interviewer in 1992. “Psychosomatic bronchitis, I’m sure. But nevertheless, it’s bronchitis. Oh, it’s all too much, too grim, too lovely, too—how should I put this? It’s general chaos.”1
Yet depending on his mood, he could be curiously indifferent to his own mortality. When he learned, in ’94, that he had prostate cancer and diabetes, and had suffered a heart attack without knowing it, he thought, “Oh gee, why haven’t I burst into total screaming hysterics?” The answer, he decided, was: “I’m the opposite of hypochondriacal. I’m not entirely enamored of the idea of living forever.”2 Happily, the diabetes turned out to be “very controllable,” and a monthly “shot in the fanny” kept his cancer in check, so he wasn’t too worried, or so he claimed in 1996.3 “I may not live forever but I feel perfectly fine all the time.”
In truth, things were more complicated. His doctor had recommended a test in Boston (to determine his suitability for an implantable device to prevent future heart attacks, most likely).4 He asked Skee to drive him to the procedure, which required that he be sedated, then decided at the last minute—God only knows why—not to go through with it after all.5 “He had a fear of doctors and hospitals,” Kevin McDermott believes. “Near the end of his life his doctor gave him three options for dealing with his heart condition: have a pacemaker implanted, take a high dose of medicine and be monitored at the hospital, or, as a temporary measure, take a smaller dose of medication at home. Edward chose the third.”6
In 1999, Gorey published what would turn out to be the last book released during his lifetime, The Headless Bust, “a melancholy meditation on the false millennium,” which did for New Year’s Eve what The Haunted Tea-Cosy, Gorey’s parody of A Christmas Carol, did for Christmas Eve. A wryly saturnine rebuke to New Year’s jollity, it’s the tale of Edmund Gravel, the Recluse of Lower Spigot—any resemblance to Edward Gorey, the recluse of Yarmouth Port, is entirely coincidental—who in the small hours of New Year’s morning receives a visitation from the Bahhum Bug, the man-size beetle who in The Haunted Tea-Cosy guided Gravel through a parade of cautionary visions. This time, Gravel and the Bahhum Bug are spirited away, in clouds that Gorey ominously likens to shrouds, to be shown the secret “shame, also disgrace,” behind the closed doors of other people’s lives: “a certain X—, / Who looked to be of neither sex, / Was charged”—like Oscar Wilde—“with gross indecency / Which everyone could plainly see”; and so forth. Most disconcertingly, there’s a big, black monument to the unknown—an omen, surely, of unhappy things to come in the New Year.
Four months into the new millennium, death—the subject of so much of his work—came for Edward Gorey. It came not at the point of a rusty stiletto or in the jaws of predatory topiary or from the fatal effects of eating ill-mashed turnips or from being sucked dry by a leech, assaulted by bears, brained by falling masonry, flattened by an urn dislodged from the sky, or as a result of unendurable ennui.
On Wednesday, the twelfth of April, 2000, he was struck down by a heart attack.
He and Rick Jones were in the TV room. Jones was changing the battery in Gorey’s new cordless phone, a task that was beyond Edward’s home-repair know-how, or so he professed. Mission accomplished, Jones turned to him and said, “Edward, do you believe this battery cost twenty-two dollars?” Gorey, who was sitting on the couch, flung his head back with a groan, making Jones think he was feigning melodramatic horror at the scandalousness of the price. He wasn’t. Jones called 911, and the EMTs came almost instantly. They did all they could, but when the ambulance left, taking Gorey to Cape Cod Hospital, in Hyannis, it drove away slowly—never a good sign. “They weren’t in any rush to get to the hospital,” says Jones. Edward “was alive but not functioning at all.”
“They said that if his body didn’t kick back in and start operating on its own within three days, there was not really any possibility that it was going to,” Carol Verburg remembers. She and Connie Joerns, who had come up from Martha’s Vineyard, where she lived, held a bedside vigil. Family and friends, Aubergine players among them, drifted in and out of Gorey’s hospital room. The three days ticked by, but he showed no signs of reviving. The attending physician asked the family if they wanted to respect his wish, expressed in a living will and a health-care proxy, that he not be kept alive by artificial means. They did. He was taken off life support and died several hours later.
“Connie and I had each brought a copy of The Tale of Genji to read to him,” says Verburg. “We both stayed there all day, but then Rick [Jones] was having all the close friends over for dinner that night, and Connie left to clean up and get ready. I stayed and read to him the scene where the hero takes leave, decides to go into self-imposed exile, and looks around at the places that he’s been and thinks about how painful it is to leave but how necessary. Then I told Edward we’d be back after dinner. By the time I got to Rick’s house, the hospital had already called and said that Edward had died, apparently just moments after I left.” Skee recalled one of the nurses saying, “It was almost as if he wanted to be alone at the end.”7
Edward St. John Gorey died at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 15, 2000. He was seventy-five. The cause of death, according to his death certificate, was cardiac arrest brought on by ventricular fibrillation, a serious disturbance in cardiac rhythm in which the heart stops pumping—the result, in Gorey’s case, of his chronic ischemic cardiomyopathy (the weakening and enlargement of the left ventricle). Alexander Theroux claims in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey that Gorey’s doctor had told him just six days earlier to check into Cape Cod Hospital for five days’ observation. Following his long-standing habit of ignoring things he found disagreeable, Gorey turned a deaf ear to his doctor’s advice and went about his business.8
Skee Morton can’t confirm Theroux’s account of events. More to the point, she thinks it’s “very unlikely” that Ted would’ve discussed his health-care issues with Theroux, given that he didn’t confide in her or any of his close friends when it came to such matters.9 One thing is clear: the “pacemaker” (McDermott) Gorey chose not to have implanted—more accurately, an implantable defibrillator, which uses electrical pulses to jolt the heart back into its normal rhythm when arrhythmias occur—would almost certainly have given him a few more years, perhaps many more.10
An interviewer once asked Gorey, “Your work is often concerned with death; what’s your own attitude toward death?” He replied, “I hope it comes painlessly and quickly.”11 An answered prayer. Or maybe just the perfectly scripted end to a theatrical life.
* * *
The obituaries came thick and fast. In some cases, Gorey got front-page treatment. His family was staggered to discover how big a celebrity Cousin Ted was. Skee recalls, “A half page in the New York Times”—“Two obituaries in the New York Times,” Ken corrects. “The front page of the London Times,” continues Skee, “People magazine, the Los Angeles Times. We just thought, wow.”
Anglophile that he was, Gorey would’ve been pleased by the accolades he received in the British papers, not just in the London Times but in the Independent, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph as well. The Francophile in him would’ve gotten at least a modicum of pleasure (modified by mortification) out of Le Monde’s insistence that he’d created a language as inventive as Lewis Carroll’s or Lear’s with the extravagance of Joyce and the profundity of Beckett. And he would have been drily amused by the New Yorker’s wreath-laying: a Gorey illustration of ’20s ingenues with bedroom eyes frolicking with topiary creatures come to life, accompanied by the caption, “Postscript: Edward Gorey (1925–2000).” Henry Allen, writing in the Washington Post, perceptively framed Gorey as a “narrative illustrator” who “reached deeper into the educated American psyche” than the cartoonist with whom he was often paired, Charles Addams.12 “Not only did he defy the clamorous Doris Day optimism rampant at the start of his career” in the 1950s, wrote Allen, “but he also vivisected the beast of Victorian and Edwardian society, which still lingers as an example for moral and social rectitude. He set almost all his work in England. No doubt he understood how powerful that particular public-television dream remains in the American imagination—a sort of psychic theme park.”13 A Reuters story reporting Gorey’s death noted, with fittingly sinister suggestiveness, “It was not clear if there were any survivors.”14
There were, however, beneficiaries. Gorey’s personal estate was estimated, in the probate of his will, at $2,250,000.15 Of that, he left tidy sums of $100,000 each to Connie Joerns and Robert Greskovic, dance critic for the Wall Street Journal and a member of Gorey’s intermission clique at the State Theater. To the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, whose visionary director A. Everett “Chick” Austin had sponsored George Balanchine’s immigration to America, in 1933, he bequeathed his art collection, which was every bit as eclectic as you’d expect: photographs by Atget, drawings by Balthus, lithographs by the French postimpressionist Pierre Bonnard, a drawing done in 1558 by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, prints by Dubuffet, Delacroix, Klee, Miró, Munch, and Goya (from his mordant Los Caprichos, naturally), a painting titled Dandelions in a Blue Tin by the reclusive modernist-primitivist Albert York, to whom Gorey had dedicated The Prune People II (Albondocani Press, 1985), and, touchingly, a landscape by Edward Lear. It wasn’t all highbrow stuff, though: the sandpaper drawings he’d hunted down in antiques shops were included, too, as were cartoons by the English absurdist Glen Baxter and the zany New Yorker stalwart George Booth.
But his largest bequest was to nonhuman beings. Gorey’s will mandated the creation of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, whose primary purpose is to use any income generated by his “literary and artistic property” in the service of animal welfare.16 This, after all, is the man who insisted on saving earwigs when family members discovered them on bouquets and who had qualms about putting out poison bait for ants. It was this Taoist mind-set that led him to create a charitable trust that supports such organizations as the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee; the Xerces Society in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to invertebrate conservation; and Bat Conservation International in Austin, Texas.
As coexecutor, along with Clifford Ross and Gorey’s attorney, R. Andrew Boose, of Gorey’s will, Andreas Brown moved swiftly to “secure the property,” as Kevin McDermott puts it.17 The day Gorey died, Brown contacted McDermott, who was then working for the Gotham on various Gorey-related matters. “It would be necessary to remove valuable art and other objects from the house immediately,” McDermott recalls, “and then begin the arduous task of sorting through the massive accumulation of Gorey’s life.”18 A week after Gorey’s death, McDermott took the pensive, quietly affecting photos collected in Elephant House, painstakingly documenting the museumlike environment Gorey had created, with its many little installations. “I realized the uniqueness of Edward’s home would soon be gone and that it needed to be preserved in some way,” he says.19
Brown made the trip from Manhattan to Yarmouth Port “almost every weekend during the year after Edward died,” Rick Jones recalls, excavating manuscripts, original art, notebooks, and, tantalizingly, unpublished work from what Gorey had called the “ever-increasing pile of debris” he’d lived in.20 Brown discovered “hundreds of stories and sketches, some finished, some unfinished,” the New York Times reported—“a trove of [Goreyana], with ample material for many future books and for plays based on his work.”21 This precious detritus, along with iconic artifacts such as his drawing board and memorabilia that had been lovingly preserved by Helen Gorey—childhood drawings, family photo albums, even baby shoes and a bib (MADE BY EDWARD’S AUNT RUTH, BECAUSE APPARENTLY HE DROOLED A LOT, as a placard in the Edward Gorey House’s 2016 show, Artifacts from the Archives, informed)—was transferred by Brown to a storage unit in the New York City area, where it still reposes, inaccessible to scholars but occasionally on loan for exhibits at the Gorey House, which opened its doors to the public in 2002.
Among the gems Brown unearthed was the seemingly complete manuscript of a previously unknown book from around the time of The Unstrung Harp, done in Gorey’s early, Earbrass style—The Angel, The Automobilist, & Eighteen Others. Another jaw-dropper consisted of a number of pages from an unfinished manuscript for something called Poobelle; or, The Guinea-Pig’s Revenge (circa mid-’50s), a perversely funny little parable about the perils of mistreating your pet, drawn in a style that at times recalls Garth Williams’s furry, soft-focus rendering.
A legal document filed in 2007 by Boose on behalf of the trust describes the Gorey archive, “including his original drawings and other works of art and the original manuscripts for many of his literary works,” as consisting of “more than 10,000 items,” valued by an appraiser for Christie’s auction house “at a gross fair market value of more than $4.6 million.”22 Whether this hoard of Goreyana locked away in a New York City storage unit has been inventoried, and whether the “ample material for many future books and for plays based on his work” will ever come to light, is known only to Boose and Brown, Ross having resigned his position as trustee in late 2000.
* * *
The aftermath of Gorey’s death was suitably Goreyesque, marked by portentous events and mysterious developments. The weekend after he died, Jane—the small but imperious queen of his clutter of cats—spent long hours curled up on his empty bed. Photographing in the musty, cobwebby “hidden room”—a disused chamber on the second floor, its doorway concealed by a bookcase—McDermott noticed a bust of Charles Dickens on the windowsill, facing out, toward the Yarmouth Port common. He snapped it. Weeks later, when he printed the photo, he was startled to see Gorey’s bearded face reflected in the rain-speckled window. It was Dickens’s, of course, but when he showed the image to Gorey’s friends and family, they, too, “saw him clearly in the reflection,” McDermott writes in Elephant House. “Perhaps Edward was leaving us something as mysterious as the message written on the card found in the empty tea urn at the end of The Object Lesson—the single word ‘farewell.’”
And then there was the business with the lights.
In the chaotic days after Gorey’s death, Brown asked Carol Verburg to stay at Strawberry Lane to look after the cats. “I am a person who doesn’t believe in ghosts and has never had any experience with ghosts,” she says. “In his house, I begged him to haunt me and he didn’t. But I would be standing in the bathroom and the light would suddenly go out. This happened all over the house, wherever I was: the light would suddenly go out and then it would go back on again after a while. I finally just stood there and said, ‘Edward, is this you? Look, if you’re trying to tell me something, would you turn the light out now?’ Nothing. ‘Is there something you want me to do?’ Nothing. I asked all the questions I could think of, and nothing happened, and then I said, ‘So is this thing with the lights just totally random and meaningless and has nothing to do with you at all?’ And then the light went out. It was just so Edward!”
Queerest of all, though, was the Mysterious Affair of the Misplaced Ashes. Gorey was cremated. In accordance with his wishes, some of his ashes were shipped to Woodland Cemetery in Ironton, Ohio, the ancestral hometown of the American branch of the Garvey tree (whose roots were anchored in Limerick, Ireland—the perfect punch line to Gorey’s life story, given his close association with that poetic form). There, in the Garvey family plot, his mother and aunt Isabel were already at their ease, alongside his great-grandparents Benjamin and Helen Amelia St. John Garvey (the maker of “Very Superior Pencil Sketches”), and his great-great-grandmother Charlotte Sophia St. John, mother of Helen Amelia (and namesake of the ill-fated mite in The Hapless Child). An interment card in Woodland’s files records the burial of Gorey’s cremated remains in lot 32, section 7—the Garvey plot—on July 15, 2000. Yet no gravestone marks the spot where Gorey’s cremains were purportedly interred. A funeral director in Yarmouth Port ordered a price quote on a headstone from the Buckeye Monument Company in Ironton but never purchased it. Had Gorey gotten the memorial he deserved (surmounted, naturally, by one of those enormous Victorian urns he was so fond of), it would have borne one of the two inscriptions he offered when Richard Dyer asked him, in 1984, what his epitaph would be. “[T]wo of my expressions spring to mind: ‘Oh, the of it all’ and ‘Not really,’” he said.a “That’s right, ‘Oh, the of it all’ without anything in the middle; just leave the middle out. And, yes, I think, ‘Not really.’”23 In the end, though, it’s only fitting that the man whose art was an art of the unseen and the unspoken, and whose enigmatic life was Freud’s idea of an Agatha Christie mystery, is buried (if he’s buried at all) in an unmarked grave.
As for the rest of his ashes, some were cast over the waters of Barnstable Harbor near the lighthouse on Sandy Neck by a boatload of friends and family. It was September 10, “a lovely sunny warm day,” as Skee recalls it—not “overcast and gray and hammering with rain,” as Theroux has it in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, a bit of meteorological humbug that, while appropriately Goreyesque, is belied by Skee’s memories, not to mention family photos.24 “There were so many other people in boats enjoying it that we had to go quite far out to find a private, secluded sandbar,” she remembers.”25 Some of Gorey’s ashes were scattered; others were placed on a wreath of branches taken from the southern magnolia outside his studio window and set adrift, to float out to sea on the sun-dappled waters. (“It was low tide, still going out,” says Skee. “We planned it that way.”) With the family’s blessing, Rick Jones set a few handfuls aside to be mingled with the ashes of Gorey’s cats when all five—Jane, George, Thomas, Alice, and Weedon—had died, then strewn in the wilds of 8 Strawberry Lane, following Edward’s offhanded directive to just “throw me in the yard.” (Gorey’s closest friends did exactly that at a “Gathering for a Scattering” on June 25, 2011, after Jane, the last holdout, had gone to her reward.)
Shortly after Gorey’s death, there had been a memorial soiree at Strawberry Hill, billed as “A Gathering…of the friends of Edward Gorey.” On June 5 of 2000, friends and family gathered in Herbert Senn and Helen Pond’s chapel turned glorious parlor to celebrate Edward’s art and life. People sipped drinks. An ensemble played the music he loved best, pieces by baroque composers such as Handel, Bach, and Purcell.
Appropriately, there was a whiff of mystery in the air. People who’d known Gorey for years were surprised to meet emissaries from hidden corners of his life, friends he’d never so much as mentioned. “Being a solitary person, he gave his full focus to whoever he was with,” says Carol Verburg. “Whatever you were interested in, he knew something about it, so that he had a different friendship with each person that he was friends with. That became really quite startling after he died. There was no group of people who felt that they all knew him in the same way; rather, each little set of people or individual felt that they knew him in a different way…”
* * *
But did anyone really know him? Did he even want to be known?
“You know far more about me than anyone else in the world,” he told Peter Neumeyer in a 1968 letter.26 Yet as noted earlier, even Neumeyer doubted that he truly knew Gorey. He wasn’t alone in that sentiment. “I never thought I really knew Ted,” says Skee Morton. “I was always aware that we saw only one side of him and that there were others that we knew little or nothing about.”27 Mel Schierman, too, felt their “friendship was long, comfortable, accepting, but Ted never revealed himself.” Gorey’s flamboyant persona was a weapon of mass distraction, he thinks, a shy, secretive man’s way of misdirecting the world’s attention. “It was not an aesthetic—it was protection,” says Schierman. “‘Look at the rings; don’t look at me. Look; don’t ask, don’t probe.’” When that ruse failed, Gorey barricaded himself behind a book—a tactic that not only afforded refuge from social situations but also broadcast the message, loud and clear, that he was unavailable. The beard was another mask. So were the pseudonyms. That Ashbery quotation from so long ago comes reverberating back: “He was somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, fun-loving level.…I had the impression that he had constructed defenses against real intimacy, maybe as a result of early disappointments in friendship/affection.”
Interviewers who attempted to lift the curtain on Gorey’s inner life were greeted with monosyllables. Attempts to make sense of his art were discouraged on the grounds that, too often, such inquiries lead to pop-psych poking and prodding. “Gorey is miserable discussing his work,” Stephen Schiff observed in his New Yorker profile. “His eyes dart. Gradually, he withdraws into a silence punctuated by ‘tsk’s and groans.”28
The title of Theroux’s book says it all: Gorey was indeed a strange case—and an uncrackable one. The man who loved mysteries was himself a mystery—even to himself, it seems. “He was not entirely joking,” Neumeyer thought, “when he signed one letter ‘Ted (I think)’ and wrote in another, ‘There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe that I do.’”29 It’s one of Gorey’s most cryptic remarks. What can he mean? Is the Taoist-deconstructionist in him saying that the self is a fiction—a “center of narrative gravity,” as the philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett calls it, narrated into existence by the voice in our heads? “Our tales are spun, but for the most part, we don’t spin them; they spin us,” Dennett writes in Consciousness Explained. “Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.”
Maybe Gorey’s fundamental unknowability lies in the fact he was “neither one thing nor the other, particularly”; adamantly this and the next minute just as emphatically that, tongue firmly in cheek the whole time, as if to mock the very idea of binary oppositions. Asked in the Proust questionnaire what his current state of mind was, he replied, “Changeable.”30 Water, emblem of mutability and symbol of the Tao—the ever-changing, unpredictable “watercourse way”—was his element, he told Neumeyer, an observation that casts a revealing light on his oft-repeated admission that he was “a great one for drift.”31
The man was a walking paradox. But of all the contradictions he contained, his sexuality was surely the most puzzling. Everyone who encountered him assumed he was gay, yet he maintained, to his dying day, that he was a neutral. Nonetheless, his crushes, as we know, were entirely male. Was he, like some gay men of his generation, simply someone who wished he hadn’t been born that way? Is that what he meant when he told Lisa Solod of Boston magazine that he was “fortunate” to be “apparently reasonably undersexed or something”?32 Expatiating, in another interview, on his fatalistic philosophy, he questioned the idea of free will, opining, “You never really choose anything. It’s all presented to you, and then you have alternatives. You don’t choose the subject matter of anything you write. You don’t choose the people you fall in love with.”33 That last sentence echoes with regret.
The question of Gorey’s sexuality has all the makings of a good mystery. Consider the Curious Case of the Missing Admission. In the Solod interview, as reproduced in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, he responds to the pointed question “What are your sexual preferences?” with the legendary dodge, “Well, I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.”34 But in the original, unexpurgated version of the article, as it appeared in Boston magazine, he adds, “I suppose I’m gay. But I don’t really identify with it much. [laughs].”35
Kevin McDermott, who worked for Andreas Brown during the editing of Ascending Peculiarity, was “disheartened” by the deletion of that all-important afterthought, a smoking gun if ever there was one. The decision, he claims, was Brown’s. As a gay man who was much younger than Gorey, McDermott thought it was “a brave thing he was doing there, as a man of that generation—finally saying it. And then he qualified it, which I think is totally appropriate because that’s probably true; when he said he was asexual, I’ll take him at his word.” Why Brown excised it McDermott has no idea. Maybe he was “concerned that Edward wouldn’t be taken seriously as an artist because he was a gay artist,” he speculates.
Gorey’s own preference, of course, was that he be seen not as a type—a gay artist or even an artist—but as an individual. “What I’m trying to say,” he told Solod, “is that I’m a person before I am anything else.”36 His response reads, in historical hindsight, as a rebuke to identity politics. He goes on to question the ghettoization of female poets in feminist anthologies and the personal-is-political stance of his museum-curator friend, a “very militant” gay man who held that “his creative life and his homosexuality were one and the same,” a position Gorey regarded as “hogwash, dear, hogwash!”
From our historical vantage point, when the cultural battle lines are drawn over issues related to racial, religious, sexual, and gender identity (all complicated by the question of class), Gorey’s remarks seem blithely entitled. Rolling an incredulous eye at the idea of “a big anthology of…say, women poets,” he underscores the patent preposterousness of identity politics (as he sees it) by pointing out, “You’re not going to find an anthology of heterosexual male poets, or anything like that!”37 Which misses the point entirely, of course. You’re not going to find an anthology titled Heterosexual Male Poets because there’s no need: the vast majority of poetry anthologies consist largely if not exclusively of poetry written by heterosexual males. Gorey seems to be wearing the blinkers of white male privilege. Likewise, he betrays a curious blind spot when it comes to the ways in which the personal is inescapably political if you’re gay, an obliviousness that seems especially odd when we recall that he lived in New York in the ’70s, when, as Edmund White has written, “we gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets.”38 Peter Wolff recalls the time he and Ted were strolling along Fifth Avenue, Ted in a mink coat, “and somebody said ‘Faggot!’ right to his face.” Gorey feigned incomprehension, asking Wolff what the man had said. “He had to’ve heard it,” says Wolff, “but he chose not to.”
Yet it’s also possible that Gorey was ahead of his time, and not just his but ours as well. Was the radical doubter—who questioned not just who he was but whether he was—raising a skeptical eyebrow about this whole business of constructing identity, not to mention a collective identity, around sexuality? In like fashion, was he questioning the underlying assumptions of what it means to be gay? If you’re a bundle of stereotypical tastes and behaviors—“flamboyant” dress, swooping vocal tones, balletomania, an inordinate fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan and Golden Girls—but chaste as a vestal, can you really be said to be gay? “A lot of people would say that I wasn’t [gay] because I never do anything about it,” Gorey observed.39
Then, too, he didn’t self-define as gay, and isn’t the right to define oneself a cornerstone assumption of identity politics? Connect the dots of Gorey’s responses to the are-you-gay question and they add up to asexuality, which is, in a way, very Taoist of him. In a world built on philosophical binaries, bisexuality is threatening enough, as White points out. Bisexuals, he contends, “keep a low profile, not because they’re ashamed but because everyone distrusts and fears them. Tribes have only two ways of treating interstitial members; they either make them into gods or banish them.”40 Asexuality is beyond interstitial; it steps outside the sexual continuum altogether. Asexuals are the Bartlebys of human sexual response; like the protagonist of Melville’s novel, they simply “prefer not to.”
In his classic coming-out memoir, City Boy, White, an early standard-bearer for the notion of a gay literature, reflects on how he came to regard it, and even the essentialist definition of a gay identity, with an ambivalent eye. He cites the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was gay but “very much against identity politics and ‘the culture of avowal,’ by which he meant a culture that thought every individual had a secret, that that secret was sexual, and that by confessing it one had come to terms with one’s essence.” Gorey would have agreed. An open secret yet irresolvably mysterious even so, his sexuality was an essential part of who he was and the art he made but hardly the essence of who he was.
“He didn’t want it to become the sole center of his life,” says Peter Anastos. “I think that’s what happened in my generation, starting in the ’60s and ’70s. People let their homosexuality become the absolute center of their lives and there was nothing else. I’ve known a lot of [gay] guys Ted’s age and…they just see it in a whole different way. Being gay is not the center of their lives.…Ted never struck me as closeted; he just was who he was.” Guy Trebay, a fashion writer for the New York Times and a keen-eyed observer of culture, sums it up neatly: “Whether his mysterious lifelong retreat was a flight from sex or a simple desire to be a solitary cat-loving, raccoon-coat-wearing Firbankian geek…I respect the decision to hold the line. Why queer him? He was far queerer than queer.”41
* * *
At the June 5, 2000, memorial party at Strawberry Hill, the actress Julie Harris read The Osbick Bird, Gorey’s story about a gawky bird, half toucan, half flamingo, that swoops down out of the blue one day to land on Emblus Fingby’s derby. The two become bosom friends, joining in lute-flute duets and playing games of double solitaire so frenzied that the cards get “battered past repair,” after which “they would not speak / to one another for a week.” An interspecies romance, it’s unnatural, admittedly, though apparently platonic. But then, given the human condition—we’re born alone, we die alone, we’re as isolated by language as we are knitted together by it—isn’t every romantic relationship unnatural? Gorey, who never quite got the hang of romance, seemed to think so.
When Fingby dies, his constant companion is by his side, devoted to the last. Or so it seems.
He was interred; the bird alone
Was left to sit upon his stone.
But after several months, one day
It changed its mind and flew away.
It’s classic Gorey: the ineffable inscrutability of things; the sublime pointlessness of life; “the of it all.” People love us, and then they don’t. You get emotionally involved with someone, and “whole stretches of your life go kerplunk.” You may “look like a real person” but really you’re masked by “a fake persona.” You might telegraph the most obvious social signals of queerness, but really be “neither one thing nor the other particularly,” a pose that may, of course, be yet another “fake persona” behind the face you show the world, like the selves within selves in a Russian nesting doll. Or not. “To catch and keep the public’s gaze / One must have lots of little ways,” Gorey slyly reminds us in The Awdrey-Gore Legacy.
“The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself,” said Oscar Wilde.42 Whatever else he was, Gorey was incomparably, unimprovably himself, a model of uncompromising (yet unaffected) originality. Dick Cavett gave voice to the thoughts of countless fans who, having fallen for Gorey’s work, ended up equally smitten with the man behind it. “I have to tell you that I have total admiration for your work,” confessed Cavett near the end of their interview, “and I think, also, for your lifestyle—that dreadful phrase. The idea that you live exactly as you want to. You do, apparently, a very satisfying kind of work. I find it just marvelous to look at, but I can imagine that it must be wonderful to do.…And I’m talking, also, about the fact that if you want to go to the ballet 50 nights in a row, you do; if your work isn’t ready by the time the publisher wants it to be, apparently this doesn’t get you terribly upset. [O]f the thousands and thousands of kinds of lives there are to lead, most people opt for one or two of the best-known ones. And you have done exactly, as I see it, what you want to do.”43
Not only that, but “working quite perversely to please himself,” as Edmund Wilson so memorably put it, he created “a whole little world,” a black-and-white wonderland so transportingly Goreyesque that many who encounter it wish they could live in it, taking tea with “Mr C(lavius) F(rederick) Earbrass” at his country manor, riding the Willowdale Handcar, wandering the haunted halls of the West Wing, discovering at last just what it was Gerald did to Elsie with that saucepan, maybe even hazarding the horrors of Sir Egbert’s unspeakable sofa, with its nine legs and seven arms, and, in the end, solving the mystery of the portentous Black Doll. “My background in anthropology really was appropriate,” says Chris Seufert, reflecting on the experience of filming Gorey for his documentary. “My sense, shooting him, was that he was indeed the last of a disappearing race. That’s the sense you got with Edward—he was the last member of some race, maybe an alien race. But the thing with Edward was, there was no race. It was only ever Edward. He was the most one-of-a-kind person you’d ever meet.”44
A line from The Utter Zoo comes floating back:
About the Zote what can be said?
There was just one, and now it’s dead.
Bust of Charles Dickens peering from the window of the “hidden room” at Strawberry Lane the week after Gorey’s death. (Photograph by Christopher Seufert)
a What those two catchphrases reveal about Gorey and his art is the stuff of dissertations.