Still, it’s hard to imagine that Hackett wouldn’t have picked up on the cultural subtext of Gorey’s emerging aesthetic, which Adams characterizes as “implicitly homosexual…concentrating on matters of style and presentation, and literature that was not common in our parents’ homes at that time.” As for Gorey, what would he have made of Hackett’s boho macho? Would he have pushed back against it, following his teacher’s admonition to reject received truths? Maybe that’s the impulse behind Gorey’s earliest recorded act of eccentricity: sometime during his Parker years, he painted his toenails green and went for a walk, barefoot, down Michigan Avenue.60
* * *
At Parker, Gorey’s dawning awareness that his knack for drawing just might lead to something, maybe even a career, kept pace with his deepening interest in art. He soon fell in with the art clique: Joan Mitchell, who would go on to international fame as an abstract expressionist painter; Mitchell’s close friend Lucia Hathaway; and Connie Joerns, all of whom were smitten, to varying degrees, with the Hackett mystique. “There were four of us…whom [Hackett] inspired, and who existed as a group in the art studio,” remembered Joerns. (A close friend of Gorey’s for life, she would work alongside him in the art department at Doubleday and, like Ted, pursue a career as a freelance illustrator, authoring several children’s books along the way.) “We referred to him as ‘Mr. H’ and the four of us quite frankly adored him.”61
Fiercely intelligent and inimitably idiosyncratic, Gorey and Mitchell were drawn to each other; they “frequently ‘did stuff’ together,” writes Albers, sowing the seeds of a casual friendship that was rekindled after Parker whenever both were back in town for the holidays.62 Unsurprisingly, their pointed opinions and what was very likely a repressed rivalry gave their friendship “a mutually undercutting edge,” Albers notes. Ted “was intrigued by Joan,” recalled Joerns, but “thought her paintings were absolute garbage,” an appraisal that remained unaltered over the years, despite Mitchell’s ascent to art-world stardom.63 According to Mitchell’s first husband, Barney Rosset, who was two years ahead of Joan and Ted at Parker, the feeling was entirely mutual. “He wouldn’t have even been an artist to her,” said Rosset. (Rosset was another Parkerite who rattled the bourgeois complacency of postwar America: as head of Grove Press, he carried the battle standard for free speech, winning legal campaigns to publish such “pornographic” novels as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.)
When he wasn’t hanging out with the art pack, Gorey was studying art or making it, more often than not. Lloyd Lewis, sports editor for the Chicago Daily News, published one of Ted’s cartoons in his May 22, 1939, Voice from the Grandstand column, a weekly collection of sports-related cornpone.
More interesting than Gorey’s cartooning—single-panel gags drawn in a style reminiscent of Chic Young’s Blondie—is his pen name. (“I wanted to publish everything under a pseudonym from the very beginning,” he told an interviewer in 1977, “but everybody said, ‘What for?’ And I couldn’t really explain why I wanted to. I still don’t know exactly, except that I think what you publish and who you are are two different things. I don’t really see that much connection.”)64 All but a few of Gorey’s thirty-one noms de plume—memorialized on the dedication page of his last, posthumously published collection, Amphigorey Again—are anagrams of “Edward Gorey,” but this, his first, is not: Sinjun is a phonetic rendering of the British pronunciation of Gorey’s middle name, St. John—and a premonition of the Anglophilia that suffused much of his later work.
There’s a gag-book facility to Gorey’s stuff at this point, but if we look past the generic single-panel-cartoon style, we can see hints of originality. He’s got an illustrator’s knack for storytelling and a cartoonist’s gift for visual humor. Consider the wall-size mural he painted for a dance celebrating Parker’s athletic victories.
Gorey at work on a mural for a high-school social event, Parker Record yearbook (1942). (Francis W. Parker School, Chicago)
Described by the January 22, 1940, Parker Weekly as “a combination of Diego Rivero [sic], Salvadore [sic] Dali, and Botticelli,” it depicted “the audience as a player views it after just having missed the basket.”65 Just look at that poor sap pulling his fedora down over his ears to drown out the guy nearby, snoring away, and the goofball in the front row, sipping two Cokes at once, a straw in each corner of his mouth. Already Gorey is attentive to the signals our clothes send about who we are: the Coke guzzler is wearing appropriately nutty trousers, loud slacks crawling with serpentine squiggles.
Intriguingly, Gorey’s women—for example, the two cheerleaders sitting, knees bent at the same coquettish angle—are characterless mannequins, the same pert pinup babes that, right about then, were flaunting their painted curves in tattoos or on fighter planes. Betty Grable–esque cuties with upthrusting busts, they’re jarringly unlike the women in his little books, tightly corseted Victorians or monobosomed Edwardians or Jazz Age flappers with boyish figures.
Ted had girls on the brain in those days, apparently: in a December 1940 column, the Parker Weekly’s inquiring reporter quotes Gorey’s response to the question, “What do you look forward to in 1941?”
Ted Gorey:
Better marks in school.
More pretty girls.
An increase in allowance.
More pretty girls.
Better food in the lunchroom.
More pretty girls.66
Nothing odd in that for a heteronormative, hormone-fueled fifteen-year-old boy, but a bit difficult to reconcile with the Gorey we know, who claimed to be “reasonably undersexed or something.”67
* * *
His insistent interest in pretty girls notwithstanding, Gorey was consumed, in school and out of it, by his passion for the arts. He’s clear on that point in his application for a Harvard College National Scholarship, submitted in January of his senior year at Parker: “My main interests lie in the field of Art.”
I do a great deal of drawing and painting myself and I am very much interested in Art. I attend exhibits at the Chicago Art Institute and other galleries regularly. Music interests me a great deal also. I go to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts fairly often during the year. I like the Ballet very much and try to see it as many times as I can when there is a company in Chicago. The legitimate theater is one of the things I enjoy and I see most of the plays which come to Chicago. I go to the movies a lot and try to see all of the foreign movies which come here.68
To that wide-ranging cultural diet add books devoured by the shelfload. A good number of the titles he listed on his scholarship application were mysteries (“my favorite form of reading”): The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, books by Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, and of course Agatha Christie—and true-crime anthologies, too, such as William Roughead’s Murderer’s Companion, a collection of deliciously macabre retellings of nineteenth-century crimes, and Edmund Pearson’s Studies in Murder.
Not that Gorey subsisted on pulp alone. When the application asks him to list “all the books which you have read during the past twelve months,” he’s only too happy to inventory his prodigious intake of highbrow lit.