Five years younger than Brandt, Gorey impressed the older man “as a spare, gawky…boy who played with words,” Jan remembers. Brandt, too, had a quick wit and a knack for wordplay—specifically, puns. Brandt’s own recollection, in an unpublished memoir, of his first encounter with the “new company clerk” portrays Gorey as “a slim, blond man, younger than I, who, I discovered, was literate, in contrast to the professional chemists or old Army types that made up the rest of the outfit. He had actually read the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and Somerset Maugham’s novels!”6
Ted and Bill bonded over their shared interest in Eliot, classical music, and the movies. When Gorey came back from furlough in Chicago with Adolf Busch’s four-record set of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, he and Brandt commandeered the phonograph in the post library and listened to it “a couple of times late in the evening, when the others in the place had gone.”7
Often, they’d work on creative projects. “I copied music, read, and composed while Gorey wrote the too, too decadent little plays,” remembers Brandt, “or drew the equally decadent Victorians that he later became famous for.” At some point, Gorey painted a illustration for Brandt’s unpublished Quintet for Piano and String Quartet, op. 11 (1943), a whimsical depiction of Harlequin in a piebald body stocking, lounging in a lunar emptiness that suggests Gorey’s idea of Dugway Valley. Overhead, fireworks whizbang against the night sky, a white-on-black fantasia of streaks and curlicues and chrysanthemum bursts. From Harlequin’s rainbow-colored costume to the naïf, Chagall-ish looseness of the rendering, it’s poles apart from the precise, sharp-nibbed aesthetic of Gorey’s little books.
In time, their peas-in-a-pod rapport, artsiness, and manifest lack of interest in barhopping and skirt chasing in Salt Lake City invited the suspicion that Gorey and Brandt were more than good buddies. “Most of the other servicemen thought they were both gay,” says Jan, “but Gorey never put his foot under the bathroom partition,” so to speak. Brandt took Gorey’s sexuality, or what he perceived to be Gorey’s sexuality, in stride: “He was gay, but at that time, naive as I was, I had no idea what that meant and treated him just like anyone else, and his relationship to me was equally straight.”
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At Dugway, Gorey tried his hand at writing, hammering out a full-length play and a handful of one-acts. “The first things that I wrote seriously, for some unknown reason, were plays,” he recalled. “I suppose there must have been some strong dramatic urge at the time. I never tried to get them put on or anything. [T]hey were all very, very exotic and…pretentious, in a way. In another way, I don’t think they were as pretentious as they might have been. I mean, I didn’t go in for endless, dopey, poetic monologues for people; they moved right along. They were rather bizarre, I think, and were rather overwritten…”8 Elsewhere, he added, “I always wonder what I thought I was doing then, because what I was writing was clearly unpresentable—closet dramas, for instance. I had very little sense of purpose, which was just as well, because then I wasn’t disappointed about the outcome.”9
Gorey’s Dugway plays are indeed overwrought. All but one of their titles—typical Gorey kookiness such as Une Lettre des Lutins (a letter from the elves) and Les Serpents de Papier de Soie (the tissue-paper snakes)—are in French, though the plays themselves are in English, with the exception of a five-page effort untranslatably titled Les Scaphandreurs. The dialogue is sprinkled with French phrases, in the manner of Gorey’s correspondence at the time. The characters have names like Piglet Rossetti and Basil Prawn and dress more or less the way you’d imagine people named Piglet Rossetti and Basil Prawn would dress—in purple espadrilles and “mauve satin ribbons [that] cling like bedraggled birds to bosom, thigh, and wrist.”10 They exclaim—there’s a lot of exclaiming—things like “How unutterably mad!” and “How hideously un-chic,” and, of course, “Divine!”11 When they’re not exclaiming, they’re declaiming, in prose so purple it would bring a blush to Walter Pater’s cheek: “Have you ever danced naked before a lesbian sodden with absinthe?”12
Yet despite dialogue so over the top it sounds, at times, like a John Waters remake of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Gorey’s Dugway plays are remarkable if we remember that the author was only nineteen or twenty.13 Too clever by half and too obviously derivative, they’re self-indulgent juvenilia. But the dialogue does move right along: the characters riff off each other, volleying surrealist non sequiturs. A glimmer, at least, of the Gorey we know is recognizable in his first attempts at translating his sensibility onto the page.
The Victorian, Edwardian, and Jazz Age settings he’ll revisit endlessly in his little books are already in place. He’s resurrecting nineteenth-century words long ago fallen into disuse, such as distrait and fantods, words that will become Gorey trademarks. His Anglophilia is in full flower, down to the use of British spellings. The love of nonsensical titles, preposterous names (Centaurea Teep, Mrs. Firedamp), even more preposterous place names (Galloping Fronds, Crumbling Outset), and absurd deaths (suicide by eating live coals, homicide by defenestration from a railway carriage) is amply in evidence. Speaking of names, he’s already indulging his love of pseudonyms: all the plays are penned by “Stephen Crest.”
As well, he’s exploring what will become recurrent themes: the melancholy of lost time (“THE SCENE: An antique room, obscurely decaying”); the stealthy tiptoe of our approaching mortality (symbolized for Gorey by crepuscular or autumnal or wintry light); and, of course, angst, ennui, the banal horrors of everyday life, arbitrary and unpredictable turns of events, cruelty to children (a governess kills her charge’s pet canary), the cruelty of children (a little girl bashes her big sister’s head in with a silver salver), and murder most foul (a woman shoves her friend over a balustrade).14
His instinctive aversion to religion—specifically, Roman Catholicism—makes itself known, too. In Les Aztèques, a character jokes about painting a Crucifixion “with Christ nailed facing the cross instead of with his back to it,” which would have the happy effect of making believers “hideously embarrassed”; in the untranslatably titled L’Aüs et L’Auscultatrice,15 a man is fatally brained by a falling crucifix: an Act of God, played for laughs.
This is a far gothier, more calculatedly outrageous Gorey than we’ll ever meet in his books. He’s clearly in thrall to the Decadent movement associated with Dorian Gray, Baudelaire, and the perverse, pornographic drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Already he knows that aestheticism, not naturalism, is the stylistic language he’ll speak for the rest of his artistic life.
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Yet in one startling way, the Gorey who speaks to us in the Dugway plays is utterly unlike the Gorey we know from his little books. The plays touch repeatedly on homosexuality and gay culture, and their treatment of these subjects is startlingly frank, given his later reticence on the subject of sexuality—his or anyone’s. While obviously gay characters do have walk-on roles in his little books (and in his freelance illustration work, such as his cartoons for National Lampoon), their sexuality