Strangely, in O’Hara’s spyhole view of Ted’s world, Gorey’s funny little men are female: “You transfigure hens, your men cluck tremulous, detached…” Is this a coded reference to their gay circle at a time when it was common for gay men, among themselves, to jokingly adopt women’s names? The poem ends on a moody, crepuscular note, wonderfully evocative of the perpetual twilight in which Gorey’s stories always seem to take place: “And when the sun goes down,” O’Hara writes, the hen-men’s “eyes glow gas jets / and the gramophone supplies them, / resting, soft-tuned squawks.”
Looking back in 1989, Gorey took stock of his time at Harvard and his friendship with O’Hara. “We were giddy and aimless and wanting to have a good time and to be artists,” he said. “We were just terribly intellectual and avant-garde and all that jazz.”112
a Rhymes with glower.
b In a 1968 letter to his friend and children’s book collaborator Peter Neumeyer, Gorey, having just seen Dietrich at a matinee, describes her as not so much “fantastically well-preserved, but like a younger, not so well-preserved second-rate version of the genre she herself created. Heaven knows she went through innumerable versions of herself, all equally artificial, but one was always aware of the person behind them, but that is scarcely in evidence at all now…” That said, her shtick is ageless, he concedes, admitting that a decade earlier he would have “swooned away with rapture.” See Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 126.
c It came and went, apparently: a photo of him in New York in the early ’50s shows him beardless. In 1953 it comes to stay and soon attains an imposing Old Testament glory. “We heard through some family…that he has grown a beard,” his father wrote a friend that year. “I wonder what he’s trying to look like—a cross between Sir Thomas Beecham, Lennie Hayton, and Boris Karloff?” See Edward Leo Gorey’s letter to Merrill Moore, April 24, 1953, Merrill Moore Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
d Compton-Burnett lived for many years with Margaret Jourdain, a noted writer on interior decor and furniture, in what the Victorians would have called a Boston marriage—two women living together in a mutually supportive, though not necessarily romantic, arrangement. Whether their relationship was sapphic or merely sororal isn’t known; Compton-Burnett referred to herself and Margaret as “neutrals.”
e In that respect, he had much in common with the artist Joseph Cornell. Like Gorey, Cornell was a species of one whose work is essentially uncategorizable. Also like Gorey, he was deeply indebted to surrealism. He worked on a dollhouse scale (another Gorey parallel), fastidiously arranging found objects and images in wooden boxes. Masterpieces of lyrical nostalgia and surrealist free association, his works are collaged from vintage photos, old toys, antique scientific illustrations, rusty scissors and skeleton keys, and other Goreyesque oddments.
Cornell was likewise a fervent worshipper at the temple of Balanchine. Surely he and Gorey passed each other in the lobby of the New York State Theater, at Lincoln Center, during intermission. Yet there’s no evidence they ever met, and neither, to the best of my knowledge, ever mentioned the other.
Cambridge, 1950–53
Edward Gorey, poster for “An Entertainment Somewhat in the Victorian Manner” by the Poets’ Theatre. (Larry Osgood, private collection)
THE WAY GOREY TOLD IT, he kicked around Boston two and a half years after Harvard, drifting and dithering in the usual fashion. He was twenty-five and not exactly taking the world by storm.
“I worked for a man who imported British books,” he recalled, “and I worked in various bookstores and starved, more or less, though my family was helping to support me.”1 He entertained vague ideas about pursuing a career in publishing. Or maybe he’d open a bookshop. His pipe dreams vaporized on contact with the unglamorous reality of bookselling. “I wanted to have my own bookstore until I worked in one,” he reflected in 1998. “Then I thought I’d be a librarian until I met some crazy ones.”2 In later, more successful days, he liked to say he was “starving to death” in his Cambridge years, although given his penchant for Dickensian melodrama, who knows if things were quite that dire?3 “I never had to live on peanut butter and bananas, but close,” he claimed in 1978.4
Shortly before graduating, he mentioned, over dinner at the Ciardis’, that he planned to stay in Boston but hadn’t yet found a place. On the spot, John and Judy offered him a room, rent free, in the house they shared with John’s mother in the Boston suburb of Medford. All he had to do in return was feed their cat, Octavius, when they were away that summer.
Installed at the Ciardis’, Gorey pounded the pavement hunting for jobs in publishing, then in advertising, but couldn’t find a berth in either field, he told Bill Brandt in a letter.5 He was writing, desultorily, mostly limericks in his penny-dreadful style. Four years later, he’d collect the best of them in The Listing Attic. According to Alexander Theroux, he “started ‘an endless number of novels,’ now, alas, all jettisoned.”6 “Having nothing to do,” he wrote Brandt, “is the most demoralizing thing known to man.”7 Still, there were always scads of movies he was eager to see and a book, if not “several hundred,” he couldn’t wait to devour.
Jobless and footloose, Gorey started visiting his uncle Ben and aunt Betty Garvey and their daughters, Skee and Eleanor, at their summer house in Barnstable, on the Cape. The Garveys lived in suburban Philadelphia, but Betty, née Elizabeth Hinckley, came from old Cape stock. “Hinckleys have been on the Cape, in one way or another, from the Mayflower,” notes Ken Morton, Skee’s son. The Garveys’ first summer house, near the water on Freezer Road, was the standard beach cottage—“very tiny,” with “ratty cottage furniture,” in Skee’s recollection. It was so overstuffed with Garveys that Ted had to sleep on the porch, which didn’t seem to bother him in the least.
The cramped confines were a goad to get up and go. Gorey and the gang were keen yard-salers and moviegoers and beachcombers and picnickers. “We drove all over the Cape, and you could swim at any beach you happened to arrive at,” Skee remembers. Sometimes they’d take their little motorboat, or a sailboat borrowed from relatives, out to Sandy Neck, an arm of barrier beach embracing