Undeniably, Gorey’s undergraduate efforts earn his professors’ criticisms—and then some. The brittle artificiality of his drawing-room comedies, his thinly drawn characters, his inability to resist overegging the pudding of his prose style: the Firbankian posturing quickly grows tiresome. Then again, shameless imitation is part of any young writer’s apprenticeship. “That’s what happens to young people in college,” said a friend of O’Hara’s, commenting on Frank’s Wildean affectations at Harvard. “They decide on their mentor and they go all the way trying to be like him.”58
At the same time, there’s a culture war going on here between naturalism and what I’ll call unnaturalism: between the novel as an exercise in depth psychology, plumbing the neuroses of realistic characters, and the novel as a puppet show where we see the human comedy—the masks we wear, the little dramas we act out—from a wry, ironic remove. It’s naturalism versus aestheticism, Hemingway in A Moveable Feast exhorting himself to “write the truest sentence that you know” versus Wilde in “The Decay of Lying” lamenting the “morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling.”59 But we can also see this clash of artistic philosophies as a proxy war for the conflict between masculinity American-style (whose literary correlative is the “lean” and “muscular” style of tough-guy modernists like Hemingway and Mailer, with their terse sentences and their commitment to fiction as hard truth, straight up, no chaser) and its mauvish discontents.
In his little books, Gorey would, like the surrealists, the French avant-gardists known as the Oulipo group, and Victorian writers of nonsense verse such as Lear and Lewis Carroll, privilege formal experimentation over conventional storytelling (although he did believe in the importance of plot). Rather than the psychologically three-dimensional characters we meet in mainstream fiction, he preferred the stock types and mythic archetypes familiar from silent films and ballets, folktales and fairy tales, Kabuki and Noh theater, whodunits and penny dreadfuls.
This doesn’t mean his work was divorced from lived experience: surrealism, aestheticism, and nonsense are no less capable than realism of accessing the deeper truths of the human condition. Brad Gooch’s analysis of O’Hara applies equally to Gorey: “He didn’t want to be a Hemingway, the sort of popular writer who reduced the complexities of felt life to an ‘elegant machinery’ while his characters pretended to a deceptive lifelikeness.” Instead, as O’Hara put it, he wanted “to move towards a complexity which makes life within the work and which does not (necessarily, although it may) resemble life as much as most people think it is lived.”60
After Harvard, Gorey would never again attempt long-form fiction. He would invent a genre all his own, one that partook of the illustrated children’s book, the mystery story, the graphic novel (Gorey anticipated the genre decades before Art Spiegelman’s Maus popularized it, in 1986), the artist’s book (conceptual artwork in book form), and tongue-in-cheek treatments of moralizing nursery rhymes (Heinrich Hoffmann’s grisly-funny Struwwelpeter and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children are the most obvious influences). His little books don’t fit neatly into any category but Gorey, really. Yet they’re inarguably a species of fiction, however uncategorizable, and Gorey would always think of himself as “first a writer, then an artist.”61
* * *
By the spring of ’49, O’Hara had gotten so tight with another Eliot House resident, Hal Fondren, that he was spending much of his time in O-22, Fondren’s suite, which looked out on the housemaster’s garden. A fellow vet who’d served as an air force gunner in England, Fondren was witty and cultured in the usual Anglophilic way: he liked to show off his collection of the early pamphlet editions of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which he’d purchased as they came out, one by one.
Speaking of quartets, Gorey struck up a friendship with Fondren’s roommate, Tony Smith. Smith, the scion of a wealthy Republican family, was an econ major who’d prepared at ultraexclusive Exeter. He doesn’t seem like Gorey’s type, but, against all odds, they began palling around.
Gorey and O’Hara were growing apart, partly as a result of O’Hara’s absorption in Fondren and partly because their diverging creative trajectories and social styles were accentuating their differences. O’Hara’s appetite for intellectual blood sports—cocktail-party games of one-upmanship—and his hard-partying, hard-drinking gregariousness contrasted sharply with Gorey’s reclusiveness and dry, ironic style. “Gorey’s style was never entirely appropriate for O’Hara,” notes Gooch.62 “As a schoolmate put it, Gorey’s style was ‘cool, English. Nothing could get to you. But then Frank was someone who everything got to.’”63 Even so, Gorey continued to serve as a model of unapologetic individuality for O’Hara, especially in his flamboyant manner and dress, a style later characterized by an obituary writer as “dandy nerd.”64
The Gorey beard made its first appearance around this time.c Gorey later claimed, in an unpublished interview with a young fan named Faith Elliott, that he let his whiskers grow long to conceal the fact that he had a receding chin, “which is one of the things that’s a deep, dark secret.”65 “If you pushed his beard, for a long face he had a very small chin,” Mel Schierman, his friend from the New York City Ballet scene, confirms. “He made me do it one time.” (In one of her letters to Ted at Harvard, Helen Gorey, ever helpful, enclosed a clipping of a magazine humor column quoting a “physiologist” who reassures weak-chinned readers that “a receding chin does not indicate weakness—either mental or physical.”)66
Of course, if Ted’s beard was a disguise for the shameful secret that he was a chinless wonder, it did double duty as a token of his affection for Wildean aestheticism, Edwardian dandyism, and nineteenth-century litterateurs like Edward Lear, who sported a majestic beard that’s a dead ringer for Gorey’s. An attraction to the beard as an emblem of Victorian manliness may be somewhere in there, too: Gorey’s fiction, as far back as Harvard, is full of strapping chaps with luxuriant facial hair. Then, too, beards are masks, tailor-made for concealing your true self if you’re the shy, reserved type.
The sneakers and the flowing coat, both as much a part of the Gorey look as his beard, were de rigueur by this time as well, though the coat wasn’t yet the floor-length fur version that would later inspire dropped jaws on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. “Tony [Smith] and Ted would go shopping every week at [the Boston department store] Filene’s Basement,” Fondren recalled. “It was just at the time when those long canvas coats with sheepskin collars became very fashionable and they both wore them.”67
Gorey may have borrowed the idea for his famous fur coat from the poet John Wheelwright (Harvard class of ’20), an improbable mix of bohemian and Boston Brahmin who flew the flag of his nonconformity in the form of a floor-sweeping raccoon coat. But it’s just as likely that he lifted the idea from Oscar Wilde, who in some portraits cuts a glamorous figure in his beloved fur coat. Certainly Gorey’s habit, as a freshman, of wearing his hair “plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor,” as George Montgomery described it, sounds an awful lot like Wilde in the 1883 Sarony picture of him wearing his hair cut short, with a little fringe of a bang.68
As for the three-inch-long fingernail that caught Larry Osgood’s eye, it’s useful to know that Firbank wore his nails “long and polished,” according to one of his biographers, “and what was unusual in a man is that they were stained a deep carmine.”69 When we learn that Firbank wore exotic rings on his pale fingers—jade rings from China, Egyptian