O’Hara would never be the screwball dandy Gorey was; still, he was taken with Gorey’s independence of mind, manifest not only in his flamboyant dress but also in an intellectual curiosity that followed its own inscrutable logic and in a literary voice that was immune to prevailing trends and critical orthodoxies. In their sophomore year, Gorey and O’Hara favored the Grolier Book Shop on Plympton Street, rummaging through tall shelves stuffed mostly with literary fiction and poetry or reading on the comfily dilapidated sofa that dominated the small but high-ceilinged shop. O’Hara was on a C. Day-Lewis jag, collecting all his novels, which to Gorey’s mind were “sort of elegant, a little dull, concerning sensitive young English men in the early thirties.”71 Gorey was smitten with Ivy Compton-Burnett and was collecting the Penguin editions of her novels.
In the spring term of their junior year, however, the Mandrake Book Store on Boylston, near Harvard Square, was their preferred haunt. Unlike the cramped, dusty Grolier, the Mandrake had the feel of a comfortably appointed sitting room, with customers reading in chairs among the well-ordered shelves. Hal Fondren recalled, “I had an account there because I wanted every Henry Green novel.…Ivy Compton-Burnett, of course, was the patron saint of the group with Ted Gorey as her chief acolyte. We were all dying over the latest Ivy Compton-Burnett. You can’t imagine the excitement it created.”72
Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) was a bloodless anatomist of English society. Like Firbank’s, her novels consist mostly of dialogue, much of it Wildean epigrams. They read like plays, which may go far in explaining Gorey’s attraction to her work (and to Firbank’s). A philosophical dialogue with the butler, Deakin, from A Heritage and Its History is worth reprinting in full:
“And we cannot depend on the silver lining, sir,” said Deakin. “I have seen many clouds without it.”
“I have never seen one with it,” said Walter. “My clouds have been so very black.”
“Well, the lighter the lining, sir, the darker the cloud may seem.”
“You pride yourself on pessimism, Deakin,” said Julia.
“Well, ma’am, when we are told to look on the bright side of things, it is not generally at a happy time.”
“But it is good advice for daily life.”
“Daily life harbors everything, ma’am. All our troubles come into it.”73
A very Goreyesque sentiment.
* * *
Near the end of the spring term, in May of ’49, Ted exhibited his watercolors at the Mandrake. The show was a success: “The tiny store was overflowing with an animated crowd of young students smoking, drinking, and, above all, uttering sharp, fast comments,” Gooch reports.74 Behind the scenes, however, Ted was coming unstrung, as he would say. O’Hara had announced his decision to move in with Fondren that fall, at the beginning of their senior year, a turn of events that left Gorey feeling “mildly abandoned,” he later confessed.75 Ted saw Frank as “moving onward and upward” in the spring of ’49.76 “I felt that after we stopped rooming together that he sort of expanded,” said Gorey.77
Ted may be referring to O’Hara’s forays into artistic territory outside the sharply defined borders of their shared style; beyond Firbank and Compton-Burnett into Beckett, Camus, and, soon enough, in New York, de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Alice Neel. But Gorey’s reference to O’Hara having “expanded” may have had a hidden meaning. According to Gooch, “O’Hara began to flirt during the spring term with some of the homosexual implications of the high style he had so cleverly absorbed” from Gorey.78
He’d started fooling around with various gentlemen in Eliot House. “There was some carrying on towards the end” of their two years as roommates, Gorey recalled. “He would occasionally come back bombed out of his wits.”79 It’s ironic that Gorey’s Anglophilic, inescapably gay “high style” beckoned O’Hara out of the closet, since Ted himself was securely closeted at Harvard, his outrageousness notwithstanding. Nonetheless, Gooch suggests, he was instrumental in O’Hara’s acceptance of his homosexuality. “He had friends in the Music Department who actually accused me of having corrupted Frank,” Gorey said, “like in some turn-of-the-century novel.”80
Many of O’Hara’s Harvard conquests were men who thought of themselves as straight despite their willingness to bat for the other team in a pinch. In yet another irony, Gorey himself was involved, at that very moment, in a relationship with just such a man: Tony Smith.
* * *
The word relationship, in this case, means “all-consuming crush.” Just how far things went we don’t know, though Larry Osgood doubts the relationship got physical for the simple reason that Ted, he firmly believes, “did not then and never had a sex life.”81 That said, it’s clear from a letter Gorey wrote to Connie Joerns that he made a clean breast of his feelings to Smith and that while Smith’s response wasn’t what Ted had hoped, the two did have an emotionally charged friendship, fraught with the soap-opera drama that would characterize all Ted’s crushes to come. By the fall of ’49, Smith had moved into F-13, leaving O-22 to Fondren and O’Hara, which suggests he was close to Gorey—either that or unusually accommodating to Fondren. (What F-13’s third inhabitant, the apparently unflappable Vito Sinisi, made of this round of musical chairs is anyone’s guess.)
“This was typical of Ted’s crushes and attachments,” says Osgood, who recalls Smith as “Ted’s very straight roommate who never went out drinking or mixed at all with the gay group”—which included Osgood, his Eliot House roommate Lyon Phelps, O’Hara, Fondren, Freddy English, George Montgomery, and, less frequently, Gorey—who met for beers two or three times a week at Cronin’s, a saloon whose ten-cent Ballantine on tap and close proximity to the Yard made it an ideal watering hole.82 Smith was “perhaps a little boring,” in Osgood’s judgment.83 Nonetheless, Ted fell for him. “I had the impression then, as now, that Ted was in love with him—unrequitedly,” says Osgood. “The rest of us respected and sympathized with Ted’s frustration, although I think we never discussed it within his hearing and found the object of his affections a little odd.”
Gorey’s feelings for Smith blossomed in the fall of ’48. By that December, however, the bloom was off the rose. In a long confessional letter to Connie Joerns written during Christmas break, he bemoans the dire state of his love life. Tony is in Fall River, he confides, and their relationship, such as it is, alternates between “utterly cloying and grim and addled”84 but is never less than “peculiar,” even at the best of times.85 Tony, it seems, is the manly, closemouthed type, hopeless at self-analysis and all thumbs when it comes to teasing out the knots in romantic entanglements, whereas Ted tends toward the “hysterical,” which makes for soap-operatic scenes, he tells Joerns.86