Fate indeed: Benson’s comedies of manners arrived at just the right moment to influence Gorey’s emerging persona, that of an arch, Anglophilic aesthete. Wickedly witty and unimprovably English in their attention to small-town gossip and social jockeying, the Mapp and Lucia novels delight in the snobbery and pretensions of two smilingly vicious doyennes who elevate social climbing to a blood sport. As it happens, Benson (1867–1940) was gay, and the Mapp and Lucia novels are “cult classics…among gay readers,” according to the literary critic David Leon Higdon, beloved for “their campy exaggerations, social jealousies, and gentle but not altogether affectionate social satire.”89 Was Gorey drawn to Benson’s novels because he recognized in Benson’s voice a kindred style of mind, a covert consciousness that wore its wit as an invisibility cloak?
Whatever the reason, the books made a lasting impression on him: when asked about his favorite authors, he often mentioned Benson. “If I were driven to decide what to take along to a desert island,” he said in 1978, “it would be a toss-up among Jane Austen’s complete works, [the eleventh-century Japanese novel] The Tale of Genji, the ‘Lucia’ books, or one of the Trollope series,” adding, “I’ve read the ‘Lucia’ books so often I almost know them by heart.”90
Four months after his arrival at Camp Roberts, Gorey completed his basic training, in the course of which he, the overwrought aesthete, last seen dropping his rifle on his foot, managed to earn expert badges in pistol and rifle marksmanship.
Then the army had new marching orders for Private Gorey: he was to enroll in college under the auspices of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). “Note well the utterly hysterical fact that the Army is sending me to college to study languages under ASTP,” he wrote Rosen.91 Launched in 1943, the ASTP was intended “to provide the continuous and accelerated flow of high grade technicians and specialists needed by the Army.”92 Soldiers who scored high on military IQ tests were sent to select universities—in uniform, on active duty, and still subject to military discipline—for fast-tracked courses in engineering, medicine, and any of thirty-four foreign languages. Gorey was assigned to study Japanese, perhaps in advance of the anticipated occupation of Japan, where US administrators would be needed.
He entered the University of Chicago in the winter quarter of 1943. On November 8, he began courses. Two days later, he was diagnosed with scarlet fever and hospitalized for six weeks. Back on his feet, he reentered the program and was transferred, on February 7, 1944, to something called Curriculum 71, which entailed studying conversational Japanese along with contemporary history and geography. Then, on March 22, the army, with its usual sagacity, shut down the program in mid-term, around five weeks before it would have ended. By Gorey’s tally, he’d had “only two months” of study.93
In June, or thereabouts, the army, again demonstrating the discernment for which it is universally admired, put PFC Gorey’s record-breaking IQ to good use: he was dispatched to Dugway Proving Ground, an army base in the Great Salt Lake Desert, to sit out the rest of the war as a company clerk.
a After Skeezix, the foundling left on a doorstep in the long-running newspaper strip Gasoline Alley.
b According to Elizabeth M. Tamny in an unedited early draft of her November 10, 2005, Chicago Reader feature, “What’s Gorey’s Story? The Formative Years of a Very Peculiar Man,” Gorey was awarded scholarships to the University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon as well. Reportedly his was the highest score in the Midwest the year he took the college boards. Tamny cites her phone interview with Andreas Brown as the source of these details.
Dugway, 1944–46
Private Gorey, US Army, circa 1943.
(Elizabeth Morton, private collection)
DUGWAY SITS ABOUT SEVENTY-FIVE miles southwest of Salt Lake City in a no-man’s-land the size of Rhode Island. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the army had gone looking for a suitably godforsaken patch of land where its Chemical Warfare Service could test chemical, biological, and incendiary weapons. It found it in Dugway Valley, as far from human habitation as any place in the Lower Forty-Eight and cordoned off by mountain ranges, helpful in shielding top-secret experiments from prying eyes.
Dugway Proving Ground was “activated”—officially opened—on March 1, 1942; when Gorey arrived, a little more than two years later, it still had a ramshackle, frontier feel. The high-security areas devoted to top-secret research and testing would’ve been off-limits to Gorey, restricting him to a cluster of buildings about the size of a large city block, maybe two blocks at best.
All around lay wastelands: salt flats, sand dunes, and, from the base to the jagged mountains rearing up to the north and south, the never-ending desert, tufted with saltbush and sagebrush. The stillness was profound, a ringing in the mind. The sky was painfully clear, by day a vaulted blue vastness, at night a black dome powdered with stars.
Not for nothing was the base’s mimeographed newspaper called The Sandblast. “Dust from the local sand dunes, augmented by ancient lake-bed deposits (Lake Bonneville) and volcanic ash beds, pervaded everything each time the wind blew, which was most of the time,” a former Dugwayite recalled.1 New arrivals were greeted with the cheerful salutation, scrawled on the MP gatehouse, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” until top brass caught wind of the offending phrase and ordered it removed.2
Gorey was not enamored of Dugway. “It was a ghastly place, with the desert looming in every direction, so we kept ourselves sloshed on tequila, which wasn’t rationed,” he recalled in 1984. “The only thing the Army did for me was delay my going to college until I was twenty-one, and that I am grateful for.”3 His daily routine, as company clerk—technician fourth grade in the 9770th Technical Service Unit, in armyspeak—didn’t exactly challenge Camp Grant’s all-time high scorer on the army IQ test. He typed military correspondence, sorted mail, and kept the company’s books. “There was this one company: it had all of three people,” he remembered. “One man was in jail, one was in the hospital and one was AWOL for the entire time I was there. But every morning I had to type out this idiot report on the company’s progress.”4
It seems not to have occurred to Gorey, at the time, that swilling tequila and filing absurdist reports was preferable to crawling on your belly through the malarial swamps of some Pacific atoll under withering fire from the Japanese or rotting in a German POW camp. You had hot chow, cold beer—hell, even a bowling alley—and weekend passes to Salt Lake City. Best of all, your chances of dying were next to nil.
Of course, Ted had to grouse. His image, well defined by the time he arrived at Dugway, required that he do his best impression of Algernon Moncrieff from The Importance of Being Earnest, distraught at the impossibility of finding cucumber sandwiches in the middle of the desert. There’s no way of knowing how much of his horror was genuine and how much of it was part of a studied pose.
*