Yet among the class photos in the 1942 yearbook, we find a blank spot on the page where Gorey’s thumbnail should be. Apparently he managed (accidentally on purpose?) to miss picture day. Alongside his name is the obligatory jokey biography, which in this case is surprisingly prescient: “Brilliant student…Art addict…Romanticist…Little men in raccoon coats.”
The seventeen-year-old Ted who graduated from Parker on June 5, 1942, was more than just an art addict who doodled little men in raccoon coats. He’d already settled on a career in the arts, though he was sufficiently a child of the Depression to hedge his bohemianism with pragmatism, betting that commercial illustration was more likely to fatten his wallet than art for art’s sake. To that end, he’d taken several courses in commercial art and cartooning at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago while still at Parker and had spent two summers, and a few terms’ worth of Saturday sessions, studying at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. (Walt Disney was its most famous alum.)
Yet despite such preparations, Gorey set his sights not on art school but on Harvard. When asked, on the application, what he expected to get out of Harvard, he said, “I expect to get a good Fine Arts education so that I may enter the field of Fine Art or more probably, use it as a basis for entering the field of Commercial Art.”78
The “historical and cultural advantages in Boston” were a draw, too, he noted. “I have lived all of my life in the Middle West and after I graduated from eighth grade I took a trip East,” wrote Gorey. “I like New England better than any place I have ever been.”79 It’s no surprise that Gorey felt right at home amid the death’s heads grinning from the gravestones in Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground, the crypts and obelisks in Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, and the brooding Victorians of Boston’s Back Bay, whose windows reminded Henry James of “candid inevitable eyes” watching each other “for revelations, indiscretions…or explosive breakages of the pane from within.”80
Herbert W. Smith, Parker’s principal, recommended Ted for the Harvard College National Scholarship. In his letter to the college, Smith judges him “a boy of real brilliance,” “highly gifted in art,” a front-runner “in any academic subjects in which swift reading and quick comprehension bring success,” though he tempers his praise with the observation that Gorey’s gifts can sometimes get the better of him: “He is the swiftest reader but not the most reflective,” says Smith, and “sometimes sacrifices accuracy to speed.” Still, there’s no denying his raw IQ: “He scores highest on such tests as the American Council of Psychological Examinations (100th percentile year after year).”81
Fascinatingly, the Harvard form includes a question about the applicant’s limitations (“physical, social, mental”), to which Smith replies that Gorey, as “the only child of a highly intelligent but divorced couple,” is prey to “social and financial insecurity.” He’s plagued, too, by occasional migraine headaches, an affliction that will bother him, on and off, for the rest of his life. These minor defects duly noted, Smith recommends him unreservedly; he is “an original and independent thinker” whose “boundless ambition and the direction of his development, quite as much as his high initial ability, make a career of unusual distinction seem likely.” Gorey was awarded a scholarship to Harvard.b
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He was accepted by Harvard in May, but with the draft hanging over his head—America was at war, and Congress was considering lowering the age of eligibility from twenty-one to eighteen—he decided to postpone his matriculation. As his mother later explained in a letter to the Harvard Committee on Admission, “By fall we knew that the chances of going through college before he would be in the Army were very slight, and he decided to attend the Art Institute for the fall term until Congress should decide about drafting the 18 year old boys.”82 That November, Congress approved the lowering of the age of eligibility to eighteen; on December 5, FDR signed that decision into law. “When that was decided,” Helen wrote, “we felt that it would be wise for him to enter the University of Chicago, where he had also been awarded a scholarship, as there was just a chance that he might be able to get a year’s credit under the accelerated program.” Gorey began classes at U of C in February of 1943, the month he would turn eighteen.
Four months into his studies, his number came up in the national lottery run by the Selective Service. On May 27, Gorey was inducted into the US Army at Camp Grant, near Rockford, Illinois. In June, he was sent to Camp Roberts, in central California, just north of San Miguel, for four months of basic training. IQ tests were part of the induction process, and as Helen Gorey—never one to hide her son’s light under a bushel—recalled, “His grade in the Army intelligence test was 157, which was the highest mark they had ever had at Camp Grant at that time.”83 On completing his basic training, he underwent another round of examinations, after which he learned from the Board of Examiners, according to Helen, “that he had the highest marks they had seen.”
Army life, Gorey wrote to his friend and former Parker schoolmate Bea Rosen, was dull to the point of deadliness.84 At one point, he and his company were marched out into the wastelands around Camp Roberts and bivouacked there, God knows why, a state of affairs Gorey found “too, too feeble-making.”85 He and his fellow grunts were sleeping on brick-hard ground, he told Rosen, and subsisting on canned rations eaten cold. Dessert consisted of chocolate bars that tasted suspiciously like Ex-Lax and had “practically the same effect, if not more so.” His mood was not improved when he managed to drop a rifle on his foot. The army routine alternated between torment and tedium; that, along with the infernal heat and lunar desolation of the place, was driving him out of his gourd, he claimed.
Gorey’s voice on the page is something to hear, as far from the average GI writing home as Oscar Wilde’s arch quips are from Hemingway’s tough-guy bluster. He opens his letters to Rosen with stage-entrance salutations like “Darling,” closes them with high-flown effusions (“tidal waves of passion” is a typical sign-off), and adopts pet names (he’s “Theo”; Rosen is “Beatrix the light of my life”). He affects a knowingness, a world-weariness; he indulges in high-opera histrionics and flights of fancy. It’s the put-on persona of a teenage aesthete who has lived much of his young life between the covers of a book. Life, he insists, is a tear-sodden handkerchief, a crumpled straw in a soda glass sucked dry, a foot-draggingly gloomy procession of “frustrated desires” and “sex entanglements from what they tell me—I wouldn’t know…”86 (Interesting to note that at eighteen—an age when most young men are feeling their oats—he’s already holding the subject of “sex entanglements” at arm’s length.)
Gorey’s letters are a study in camp. His tone is equal parts Sebastian Flyte, the charmingly unworldly idler from Brideshead Revisited, and the impulsive, outspoken Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, down to Holly’s precious use of French to signal her cosmopolitan chic. In a letter to Rosen, Gorey sighs, “The ancient esprit d’aventure still lives but what can it do?”87
Gorey’s summer in “God’s garbage pit,” as he called it, wasn’t all cold canned rations and damp rot of the soul. Rummaging through the camp library in his never-ending search for something new to read, he happened on E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels. “I first discovered them during World War II—quite by accident, although I prefer