In the Dugway plays, he takes us inside gay bars, something he never does in his books. There is talk, in Les Aztèques, of “chic dykes” and “violet eyed castrati” and boys dancing with boys, lilacs tucked coquettishly behind their ears.16 In one scene, we’re introduced to a guy who’s “just broken up with some boy” who owns “an enormous mauve teddy bear named Terence,” an image rich in gay symbolism. The teddy bear is borrowed from Evelyn Waugh’s eccentric gay aristocrat Sebastian Flyte, who is never without his beloved childhood companion. And mauve was synonymous in the Victorian mind with aestheticism and gay bohemia, thanks to Wilde’s signature mauve gloves; the association persists to this day in our linkage of lavender with gay culture. Gorey, who by Dugway was already well versed in Victorian literature and culture, was undoubtedly aware of the color’s symbolism. When a character in Les Aztèques observes, “Incredibly mauve sunset,” it’s hard not to imagine that Gorey isn’t sending up the Catholic conservative critic G. K. Chesterton’s famous swipe at the dandified—and, by implication, gay—aesthete who, “if his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing,…hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve.”17
In the Dugway plays, Gorey is attempting to resolve the fuzzy outline of his creative consciousness—a welter of inspirations and affinities—into a sharply defined artistic voice all his own. At the same time, like everyone crossing the threshold between adolescence and adulthood, he’s struggling toward self-definition as a person, questioning the parental wisdom and societal verities he’s grown up with. Deciding who he wants to be includes coming to terms with his sexuality, however he defines it—or doesn’t.
On the title page of Les Aztèques, Gorey uses an unattributed quotation for an epigraph. Each of us is given a theme all our own at birth, the anonymous author observes. The best we can hope for, in this life, is to “play variations on it.” Fatalistic sentiments for a twenty-year-old. Is he resignedly accepting some aspect of himself he hadn’t fully confronted until that moment, something he thought might be part of a passing phase but has come to realize is innate, irrevocable? On the sheet of A Scene from a Play, we read an even more enigmatic comment, an inscription to Brandt written in Gorey’s flowing script: “For Bill—Because my friendship is inarticulate and indirection is the only alternative.” He signs his inscription with the campy nom de plume he’ll use, at Harvard, in all his letters to Brandt: “Pixie.”
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Gorey was formally discharged from the army on February 2, 1946, at the Separation Center at Fort Douglas, near Salt Lake City. He and Brandt maintained an affectionate, if fitful, correspondence afterward, but it seems to have trailed off after Gorey graduated from Harvard.
In later life, Gorey rarely mentioned his army years. “After more than twenty-five years of knowing him,” says Alexander Theroux in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, his memoir of his friendship with Gorey, “I had never once heard a single reference, never mind anecdote, of his Army life, or for that matter, of the state of Utah.”18 When the subject did come up in interviews, Gorey inevitably deflected it with a quip about the mysterious incident of the dead sheep, an event straight out of The X-Files.
In March of 1968, upwards of 3,800 sheep grazing in the aptly named Skull Valley, near Dugway, died from unknown causes. Although an internal investigation conceded, in the words of one Dugway commander, “that an open-air test of a lethal chemical agent at Dugway on 13 March 1968 may have contributed to the deaths of the sheep,” the army did not, and does not, accept responsibility for the event, contending that the evidence is inconclusive.19 Whatever the cause, the incident became a flash point for outrage among antiwar activists and environmentalists—and a punch line for Gorey, who found a kind of black humor in the event.
When Dick Cavett asked him, in a 1977 interview, about his time in the army, he said, “Every time I pick up a paper and see, you know, that 12,000 more sheep died mysteriously out in Utah, I think, ‘Oh, they’re at it again.’”20 Still, his memories of Dugway can’t have been all that grim, given his tossed-off remark in a 1947 letter to Brandt: “If you ever get this, slob, write, and let me know what’s been what since we parted at Dugway (do you ever think about the place?—Rosebud [a pet name for a mutual friend at Dugway] and I find ourselves getting sentimental about it every now and then).”21
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Returning to Chicago, Gorey landed an afternoon job at an antiquarian bookshop specializing in railroadiana and a morning job at another bookstore. “I worked in a couple of bookstores, and as a consequence, spent all my salary on books; saw no one at all, and mentally stagnated on the beach on Sundays,” he wrote Brandt. “I did manage to drag myself to hear a lot of chamber music (your influence), usually on stifling hot evenings when one was flooded in one’s own perspiration. However, it all added to the intensity of the experience, or something.”22
In May, Gorey notified Harvard of his intent to register that fall, taking the college up on its long-deferred offer and the scholarship that went with it, supplemented by the GI Bill of Rights. The flood of veterans swelled the class of 1950 to 1,645, the biggest in Harvard’s history; more than half the incoming students were former servicemen, their entrée to one of the nation’s most prestigious Ivies made possible by the GI Bill.
* * *
Asked, on his Veteran Application for Rooms, about his preference in roommates, Gorey said he’d rather share a room with “someone from New England or New York, not any younger than I am, the same religion if possible”—Episcopal, he says, elsewhere on the questionnaire—and “with interests along the lines I have indicated,” namely, art and symphonic music and of course reading (“Mostly French and English moderns, both poetry and fiction”).23
Setting aside his uncharacteristic (and unconvincing) partiality for a fellow Episcopalian—irreligious Ted doing his best to sound like a Harvard man rather than the bohemian weirdo he was?—his response is revealing. His bias in favor of East Coasters invites the perception that he wants to put some distance between himself and the Grant Wood provincialism of the Midwest. He’s embarking on that quintessentially American rite of passage: pulling up stakes and moving far from home, where nobody knows you and you’re free to flaunt your true self or, for that matter, try on new selves.
But if Gorey’s departure for Harvard, at twenty-one, turned the page on his hometown days—he would spend the rest of his life on the East Coast, returning to Chicago for holidays, then infrequently, then hardly ever—the character, culture, and landscape of the city he grew up in left their stamp on him, if you knew where to look. Most obviously, there’s his accent, softened by long years on the East Coast and crossed with the theatrical, ironizing lilt of stereotypical gay speech, but still a dead giveaway. We hear Chicago in Gorey’s elongated vowels, especially in his long, flat a, which sounds like the ea in yeah: in recorded interviews, when he says “back” and “bad” and “happened,” they come out “be-yeah-k” and “be-yeah-d” and “he-yeah-pened.”
More profoundly, there’s his impatience with phoniness and pomposity, a trait native to the industrious, pragmatic city of immigrants he grew up in. Chicago is famously a working-class, beer-and-kielbasa town, staccato in speech, blunt in expression, unpretentious to the point of pugnacity—“perhaps the most typically American place in America,” thought the historian James Bryce.24 Being “regular” is a cardinal virtue.
Of course, Gorey was the least regular guy imaginable, an unapologetic oddity who thought of himself as “a category of one.”25