Reading insatiably, exploring Chicago’s cultural offerings with gusto, Gorey was refining the approach that would make him a species of one as an artist. Consciously or not, he was stuffing the curiosity cabinet of his mind with ideas and images (“I keep thinking, how can I use that?”) that would one day reappear, reimagined, in his art or writing.69
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His forays into Chicago’s art scene undoubtedly acquainted him with what would turn out to be another of his great passions, surrealism. At her eponymous gallery, the pioneering dealer and curator Katharine Kuh showed Miró, Man Ray, and the surrealist-influenced Mexican modernist Rufino Tamayo, all in ’38, Gorey’s first year at Parker. Improbably enough, the town that loathed modernism—the Tribune poured scorn on Kuh, and Sanity in Art protested her shows—proved surprisingly congenial to surrealism. The Arts Club, a private sanctum for the city’s moneyed elite whose exhibitions were nonetheless open to the public, introduced Chicagoans to Salvador Dalí in a 1941 show and, in ’42, to André Masson and Max Ernst; Gorey could easily have seen these shows.
Truth be known, though, he never had much use for surrealist art, beyond Ernst’s collage novels and Magritte, who he once claimed was one of his three favorite painters. (Francis Bacon and Balthus were the other two.) Nonetheless, he was profoundly influenced by surrealist ideas. Asked, “Do you view yourself in the Surrealist tradition?” he said, “Yes. That philosophy appeals to me. I mean that is my philosophy if I have one, certainly in the literary way.”70
In his books, he often employs surrealism’s dream logic, as in the non sequitur causality of The Object-Lesson, in which an umbrella disengages itself “from the shrubbery, causing those nearby to recollect the miseries of childhood” and it becomes apparent, “despite the lack of library paste,” that something has happened to the vicar. Sometimes he makes use of Magritte’s hallucinatory conjunctions, as in The Prune People, in which prim, proper Edwardians with prunes for heads go matter-of-factly about their affairs. Or he imagines the inner lives of objects—a very surrealist thing to do—as in Les Passementeries Horribles, in which hapless Edwardians are menaced by ornamental tassels grown to monstrous size.
But even when he isn’t drawing on surrealism so obviously, his stories are often thick with that atmosphere of somnambulistic strangeness that is a surrealist trademark, as in the eerie, wordless The West Wing, a procession of frozen moments set in the usual Victorian-Edwardian mansion, in the usual crepuscular gloom, where everything—the enigmatic package tightly tied with twine in one room, the wave-ruffled water rising halfway up the walls in another, the nude man standing with his back to us on a balcony—manages to seem simultaneously like a clue in an Agatha Christie mystery and a symbol from Magritte’s The Key to Dreams.
Gorey was a surrealist’s surrealist: he understood that surrealism wasn’t just the bourgeoisie’s idea of dream imagery—limp watches, lobster telephones, the guy with the floating apple obscuring his face. It was meant to be an applied philosophy—a way of looking at everyday life, a way of being in the world. “What appeals to me most is an idea expressed by [the surrealist poet Paul] Éluard,” said Gorey. “He has a line about there being another world, but it’s in this one. And [the surrealist turned experimental novelist] Raymond Queneau said the world is not what it seems—but it isn’t anything else, either. Those two ideas are the bedrock of my approach.”71
He even went so far as to suggest that life, with its random juxtapositions and meaningless events, could be seen as a surrealist collage. “I tend to think life is pastiche,” he said, adding drolly, “I’m not sure what it’s a pastiche of—we haven’t found out yet.”
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It was surrealism that led Gorey to what would become an overmastering passion: the ballet. In January of 1940, “I went off by myself to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo do Bacchanale,” he recalled, “because of its sets and costumes designed by Salvador Dalí, who had been sprung on me by Life magazine.”72 (At the age of fourteen, Gorey thought Dalí “was the cat’s ass.”)73
Bacchanale, unfortunately, was a letdown. But if Ted wasn’t swooning over Dalí’s decor—the dancers emerged from a ragged hole in the breast of the gargantuan swan in the backdrop—or his strenuously outrageous costumes (one dancer wore a fish head), he was bowled over by the ballerina who danced the role of Lola Montez in “enormous gold lamé bloomers encircled at their widest part by two rows of white teeth,” an appropriately surrealist getup that was the handiwork of the renowned costume maker Karinska.74 Gorey was entranced by Karinska’s creations; fifty-five years later, in his foreword to Costumes by Karinska, a book about her work, he rhapsodized about costumes “I have fondly remembered, some for over half a century,” such as “the satin and ruffled dresses for the cancan dancers in Gaîté Parisienne, whose combinations of colors I still think were the most gorgeous I ever saw.”75
As well, he liked Matisse’s brightly colored sets and abstract-patterned costumes for another ballet on the program, Rouge et Noir. As knots of dancers “formed and came apart” against the backdrop, a critic wrote, they created “wonderful blocks of color like an abstract painting set in motion.”76
Already Gorey’s omnivorous eye was drawn to set design, which he would dabble in for much of his artistic life, and to costumes, a fascination evident in the attention he lavished on his characters’ dress, poring over Dover books such as Everyday Fashions of the Twenties and Victorian Fashions and Costumes from Harper’s Bazaar to ensure they were period-perfect. In a sense, Gorey lived out his Karinska fantasy in his books, playing costumier to the casts of his stories (and, later, to the actors in his theatrical entertainments). On the page, where his imagination was unbounded by budget or tailoring skills, he conjured up outfits so dazzling they beg for the stage or the fashion runway.
His appetite whetted, he began going to the ballet off and on, though he wouldn’t become the obsessive balletomane we know until his conversion, sometime in the early ’50s, to the cult of Balanchine and the New York City Ballet (whose principal costumier, from 1963 to ’77, was Karinska).
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By his senior year at Parker, Gorey had matured from a kid who liked to draw into the budding artist who would bloom at Harvard. Along with Mitchell and her friend Lucia Hathaway, he juried the school’s Annual Exhibit of Students’ Work (a more heroic undertaking than it sounds, since the show included 856 pieces of art, 22 of which were Gorey’s). He did the sets and costumes for the senior play and, as a member of the social committee, handled the posters and decorations for extracurricular events. Somehow he found time, on top of all this, to art-direct the 1942 yearbook.
Yet despite this whirlwind of artistic activity, Gorey was far from an eccentric loner, hunched over his drawing board on prom night. “Though a newcomer to Joan’s Class of ’42, Ted had claimed a central position in that class, owing to a jaunty individualism,” Patricia Albers asserts.77 What made Gorey stand out, Robert McCormick Adams recalls,