Ted’s claim that he was teetering on the brink of a nervous collapse wasn’t just the usual fainting-couch histrionics. Shortly after he returned to Harvard for the spring term of his junior year, in ’49, he was interviewed by assistant dean Norman Harrower Jr., presumably about his grades, which were slipping. “Says he has been having personal troubles all fall,” Harrower writes in a January 29 note scribbled on Gorey’s grade card. “Seemed extremely nervous and jittery. Smoked a cig. In short nervous puffs. His eyelids fluttered and he was very jumpy. Tried to get him to psych. But he feels that this is something that he ought to be able to force himself to control. He seemed to consider the possibility of a psych. and it may work. Queer looking egg.”88
Whether Gorey saw a psychologist we don’t know. But there’s grist for the Freudian mill in the poems and stories he wrote in the spring and fall of ’49, some of which can be read as oblique allusions to his “personal troubles” with Smith or as veiled references to his feelings about his sexuality. In one poem, a lighthearted apologia for asexuality, he eschews the emotional (and literal) messiness of romantic entanglements and sexual passion for the solitary pleasures of Just Saying No:
I’ve never been one for a messy clinch
a thigh to pinch
let’s keep calm.89
By the end of January in ’51, seven months after he graduated, Gorey was over his infatuation with Tony Smith, judging by his comments in a letter to Bill Brandt. His love life, fortunately, was “being nil,” he wrote, now that the “little tin god” he’d worshipped for two years was more or less history, barring the occasional visit to spend the night.90
Being nil, Gorey decided, was the safest policy. “I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something,” he said twenty-nine years later when asked about his sexuality. “I’ve never said that I was gay and I’ve never said that I wasn’t. A lot of people would say that I wasn’t because I never do anything about it.”91 Would they? Is having desires yet not acting on them really the same as not having any desires to act on?
Gorey, ever paradoxical, is saying two contradictory things simultaneously: that he’s asexual (“undersexed”) and that he might be gay but since he never does anything about it, he’s as good as “neutral,” as Compton-Burnett would say.d He’s “fortunate” to be “undersexed,” he says, implying that Fate decreed it. But doesn’t his admission “I am probably terribly repressed” direct our attention to what, exactly, he’s repressing?92 “Every now and then someone will say my books are seething with repressed sexuality,” he conceded.93
In later life, when Gorey talked about sex, it was either with Swiftian disdain for its panting, grunting preposterousness—“No one takes pornography seriously,” he scoffed—or with Victorian mortification at the very mention of the unmentionable.94 When he talked about love, it was always in the past tense, as a farcical calamity that had befallen him, the sort of thing insurance claims adjusters file under Acts of God, like the flattening of the picnickers by the Wobbling Rock in The Willowdale Handcar. “You don’t choose the people you fall in love with,” he told an interviewer in 1980.95
In any event, his romantic imbroglios weren’t true love, he implied, but mere “infatuations.” Infatuations are a distinguishing characteristic of sexual immaturity—the stuff of adolescent crushes and teen-idol worship. Narcissistic at heart, they offer romance without the grunt work of relationship building, love without the hairy horrors of sex. “When I look back on my furious, ill-considered infatuations for people,” said Gorey, “they were really all the same person.”96 Of course they were: the objects of our obsessions are ideal types, spun from fantasy. “I thought I was in love a couple of times, but I rather think it was only infatuation,” said Gorey in 1992. “It bothered me briefly, but I always got over it. I mean, for a while I’d think, after some perfectly pointless involvement that was far more trouble than it was worth—I’d think, ‘Oh God, I hope I don’t get infatuated with anybody ever again.’…I realized I was accident-prone in that direction anyway, so the hell with it.”97
Was it his traumatic two years of worshipping Tony Smith that made Ted say to hell with love, and even sex, forever? Larry Osgood thinks Gorey swore off sex long before he got to Harvard. “He did tell me—because we were close friends, and we would talk about these things—that he once had a sexual experience in his late teens, I think. And he hadn’t liked it. And that was that. He wasn’t going to do that again.” Gorey didn’t offer any details about the incident, but Osgood is convinced, from his intimate knowledge of Ted’s emotional life, that it must have been a same-sex experience.
But whether it was a traumatic sexual encounter in his teens or his tempestuous affair with Tony Smith at Harvard that put Ted off sex, Osgood is convinced “there was more choice in his abstinence than biology.” Gorey “didn’t want the distractions of emotional engagements,” he says, “which would be messy, and he might get hurt, and in fact he had been hurt.” John Ashbery said something strikingly similar when I asked him for his recollections of Gorey at Harvard. “There was something very endearing about him, almost childlike,” Ashbery recalled. “At the same time, I feel that he was somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, fun-loving level.…I had the impression that he had constructed defenses against real intimacy, maybe as a result of early disappointments in friendship/affection.”98
At the same time, Osgood thinks Gorey was being honest when he said that relationships are a distraction from the writing desk and the drawing board. An aesthete to the end, Gorey lived for Art, in the opinion of the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff, who described him as someone who “cultivated the life of a vestal, the anchoritic handmaiden of his art.”99 “It’s hard enough to sit down to work every day, God knows, even if you are not emotionally involved,” Gorey told an interviewer. “Whole stretches of your life go kerplunk when that happens.”100
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Unsurprisingly, Gorey’s grades had gone kerplunk during his “furious, ill-considered infatuation” with Tony Smith. Assistant dean Harrower notified him, on March 4 of ’49, that he was on academic probation. As always, he managed to pull himself out of his death spiral: by July, he’d been relieved from warning, as the official notification put it.
He rallied his creative energies, too. Sometime between 1948 and ’50, he created three little gems of commercial illustration, flawlessly executed designs for Lilliput, a British men’s monthly that offered a pre-Playboy potpourri of humor, short stories, arts coverage, cartoons, and, daringly, soft-core “art nudes” depicting female models cavorting—aesthetically, mind you—on beaches or in bohemian artists’ studios. Whether his covers ever appeared in print or were just fodder for his commercial-illustration portfolio isn’t known. The looming threat of graduation had concentrated his mind on the necessity of making a living, someday soon.
Gorey did submit his work