➤ EDWARD GOREY, from p.33
like Wilde were gay.” And both of
whom were decisive infl uences on
Gorey.
O’Hara at this point in his life
wasn’t yet the gay bon vivant he
would become when he worked at
the Museum of Modern Art but,
as is obvious from the tastes he
and Gorey shared, he was well
on his way. Curioulsy, while they
frequented many of the same New
York circles, Gorey and O’Hara saw
little of each other after Harvard.
It was at Harvard that Gorey began
to assemble his public persona
which came to include the large fur
coats and a furry beard. This outward
appearance screamed “eccentric”
if not outright gay at a time
when nonconformity could court
danger. Dery notes that during his
Harvard years some of his classmates
were outed and expelled.
One of them was so disgraced that
he committed suicide. That doubtless
affected Gorey’s outlook, but
there were other factors as well.
Gorey was the quintessential
loner. Of himself he once observed,
“I feel other people exist in a way I
don’t.” This was less a statement of
fact than the declaration of a goal.
While he could enjoy the company
of others and was involved in several
separate social circles (his ballet
friends often being different from
his art and literary friends such as
Alison Lurie and Peter Neumeyer).
He had few romantic relationships
of any length. As Dery charts it,
Gorey’s personal life was a series
of crushes where sexual relations
weren’t always achieved. He did,
however, at a certain period in the
late ‘60s and early ‘70s venture into
the Bird Circuit, those gay bars in
the 50s on Third Avenue with such
names as the Blue Parrot, The
Swan, and “The Faison d’Or” (aka
the Golden Pheasant) that catered
to well-heeled business-suited gentlemen.
He was never so louche as
to hit the bars in the West Village
But he wasn’t always buttoned-up.
I myself spotted him a few times at
the Everard Baths.
As for his work, gayness was
refl ected rarely. One of the best
examples is his cover drawing for
“Redburn,” Herman Melville’s gayest
novel, showing a group of older
men at a dock cruising a younger
one who has just come into view.
It’s quite in keeping with this daring
novel’s homoerotic contents.
“Redburn” was one of more than
50 covers Gorey created for Doubleday/
Anchor. He later moved on to
Bobbs-Merrill and Looking Glass
Library before going freelance, creating
his own entirely individual
works at the same time. All told he
illustrated more than 300 books —
some he loved like Melville’s, others
he was less enthusiastic about, like
Henry James’. Gorey didn’t care
for James’ penchant for explaining
his character’s inner thoughts in
exhaustive detail.
Conventional sentiment played
no role in Gorey’s work even when
children were involved — perhaps
a refl ection of his own childhood.
Gorey’s parents divorced in 1936
when he was 11 years old, then remarried
in 1952 when he was 27.
Abandonment and betrayal are
perpetual Gorey themes. No standard
expression of distress was attached
to them — just violence as
brought starkly into relief in “The
Gashlicrumb Tinies,” a satirical
alphabetical guide that begins, “A
is for Amy who fell down the stairs.
B is for Basil assaulted by Bears.”
Its spirit well recalls Oscar Wilde’s
infamous remark that “One must
have a heart of stone to read the
death of little Nell without laughing.”
Convention minded adults
were appalled by Gorey’s images
of children in distress. But many
children were delighted. That Gorey
would link his oddly playful
images to such dark ideas enraptured
them and made him — quite
inadvertently — as popular with
the very young as the works of
his friend Maurice Sendak, whose
“Where The Wild Things Are” so
insightfully explores the aggressive
instincts of little boys.
But children had to compete for
Gorey’s artistic interest with adults
in such word-and-image minimasterpieces
as “The West Wing,”
a neo-gothic jape described by
Dery as consisting of “frozen moments
in the Victorian-Edwardian
Manner.” Of “The Unstrung Harp,”
Graham Greene declared it was
“the best novel ever written about
a novelist and I ought to know!”
But in Dery’s view, something is
missing from the praise heaped on
Gorey — an inistence by the mainstream
on turning a blind eye to
queer subtexts in his work and
persona.”
For all his success, Gorey’s oeuvre
includes one serious misstep:
“The Loathsome Couple.” This is
Gorey’s illustrated recreation of
Britain’s infamous Moors murders.
Between July 1963 and October
1965, in and around Manchester,
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered
fi ve children between the ages
of fi ve and 17, four of whom were
also sexually assaulted. Actor and
playwright Emlyn Williams (“Night
Must Fall”) wrote a book about it
entitled “Beyond Belief,” and Gordon
Burn in his novel “Alma” noted
the tape recordings the killers
made of their crimes that included,
in once instance, the voice of pop
singer Alma Cogan, heard amidst
a child’s agonized screaming, singing
“The Little Drummer Boy.” That
was a subtle reference. Gorey was
for once not subtle at all, and “The
Loathsome Couple” had no room for
camp or any other mode of amusement.
Gorey’s work here is rather a
surprise in light of his declaration
that he could barely read much of
the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of
Sodom,” so appalled was he by its
contents.
A far happier creative occasion
arrived in 1977 when director
Dennis Rosa asked him to
design the sets and costumes for
a production of “Dracula.” Frank
Langella was the nominal star of
this production, playing the Count
with the romantic suavity that was
his specialty. But from the moment
the curtain rose it was clear that
the show’s real star was Edward
Gorey. The audience burst into
applause at the sight of Gorey designs
served to them in life-sized
portions. As the story had inhabited
Gorey’s imagination for so long,
designing “Dracula” was doubtless
one of the great personal as well as
artistic triumphs of his life. Sadly,
he was never offered the chance
to design another project like it,
though his visual imaginativeness
was not altogether blocked from
wider popular view. The drawings
he created for the PBS “Mystery”
series were animated and served
as its visual introduction, bringing
him new fans.
On a less felicitous note for Gorey
is what Dery terms “the last
of his crushes” — a young man
named Tom Fitzharris who may
not have had sexual relations with
Gorey (“as far as we know,” Dery
notes slyly) but was a fellow ballet
enthusiast. Gorey famously
attended every performance by
the New York City Ballet. So worshipful
was he of its impresario
George Balanchine that when the
great man retired Gorey left New
York for Cape Cod — having in his
view no further reason to stay in
the city. As for Fitzharris, the apex
of their relationship was not ballet
but fi lm, for they both adored “I
Know Where I’m Going!,” Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s
1945 Scotland-set romance. Gorey
was, of course, more than passingly
familiar with Powell and Pressburger’s
ballet world masterpiece
“The Red Shoes” (1948), but it was
the earlier fi lm set in the Scottish
Hebrides that won his heart and
Fitzharris’ too. The two embarked
on a trip to see the places the fi lm
was set in, but in the middle of that
trip their relationship suddenly fell
apart. Fitzharris returned home
and Gorey continued the journey
on his own. What happened between
them may never be known.
What is known is that Gorey’s
fame and infl uence continued well
into in his last years, even going so
far as to include a Gorey appearance
in a music video for Nine Inch
Nails. As he approached death —
the subject in many ways dearest
to his heart — Gorey noted, “I’m
the opposite of a hypochondriac…
I’m not entirely enamored of the
idea of living forever.”
But Edward Gorey will live forever
in the hearts and minds of those
of us who love “Buffy The Vampire
Slayer” as much as he did, and in
the works of fi lm and literary artists
as diverse as Tim Burton, Wes
Anderson, and Dennis Cooper.
“I may not live forever but I feel
perfectly fi ne all the time, Gorey
said toward he close of his life.
It should be noted that he left
his estate to the Edward Gorey
Charitable Trust, which he established
for the welfare of all living
creatures including not only cats,
dogs, whales, and birds, but also
bats, insects, and invertebrates.
Surely that fully covers the “or
something” that was Edward Gorey.
BORN TO BE POSTHUMOUS:
THE ECCENTRIC LIFE AND
MYSTERIOUS GENIUS OF EDWARD
GOREY | By Mark Dery
| William Collins | $34.99 | 512
pages
September 12 - September 25, 2 44 019 | GayCityNews.com
/GayCityNews.com
