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That fall, the Ciardis set off for a year in Europe on John’s sabbatical, leaving their “quite huge” apartment to Gorey “for a ridiculously low rental,” he recalled.20 In letters, he played the role he’d perfected by then, equal parts world-weary idler and hopeless flibbertigibbet, buffeted by life’s squalls one minute, becalmed in the doldrums the next. “My life,” he lamented in a letter to Brandt, “is as near not being one as is possible I think. However.”21 There’s a world of meaning in that “however.” It’s the written equivalent of one of Gorey’s melodramatic sighs, signifying something between ennui, weltschmerz, and the shrugging resignation summed up in the Yiddish utterance meh.
Of course, this business about his nearly nonexistent existence was mostly posing. Gorey wasn’t half as indolent as his letters suggested. For example, he illustrated two covers for the Harvard Advocate, the 1950 commencement issue and that fall’s registration issue.22 Credited to “Edward St. J. Gorey,” Ted’s black-and-white for the commencement issue depicts two identical little men standing, in balletic attitudes, on a bleak beach—or is it an ice floe? “L’adieu,” says the caption. His deft use of highly stylized blocks of black against a white background recalls Beardsley’s tour-de-force use of a monochromatic palette as well as the Japanese wood-block prints Gorey loved.
The registration issue made an indelible impression on John Updike, whose Twelve Terrors of Christmas Gorey would one day illustrate. “Gorey came to my attention when I entered Harvard in the fall of 1950,” he remembered in 2003. “The Registration issue of The Harvard Advocate, the college literary magazine, sported a drawn by ‘Edward St. J. Gorey’ that showed, startlingly, two browless, mustachioed, high-collared, seemingly Edwardian gentlemen tossing sticks at two smiling though disembodied jesters’ heads. The style was eccentric but consummately mature; it hardly changed during the next fifty years…”23
Shortly before the Ciardis left for Europe, Dr. Merrill Moore dropped by to confer with John about his forthcoming book of poems. Ciardi moonlighted as editor of the Twayne Library of Modern Poetry, which was slated to bring out Moore’s Illegitimate Sonnets. Moore was a psychiatrist—shrink to the Hollywood director Joshua Logan, the poet Robert Lowell, and about “half of Beacon Hill,” Gorey cracked—and, incongruously, a prolific writer of sonnets.24 During his visit, he happened to see some drawings Ted had given the Ciardis and “was much taken with them,” Gorey told Brandt, “and the upshot, and very frazzling to my already tattered nerves, was that ever since I have been doing drawings for him of an indescribable nature (I do not mean obscene—he has even suggested some semi-o ones, but my Victorian soul shrieked ‘Never!’) at $10 per.”
Gorey’s six cartoons for the endpapers of Illegitimate Sonnets mark his first appearance, in the fall of 1950, in a commercially published book. Meticulously rendered in the style of his most polished work, they depict Gorey’s signature little men acting out single-panel gags that riff on the notion of a sonnet-writing shrink. In “Dr. Merrill Moore Psychoanalyzes the Sonnet,” for example, we see the neurotic Sonnet—personified as one of Gorey’s Earbrass types—on the Freudian couch, free-associating a vision of himself huddled in a bell jar, about to be liberated by a hand brandishing a hammer.
All Gorey had to say about his professional debut as a book illustrator was, “The drawings are neither bad nor excellent, but the reproduction makes them look as if I’d done them with a hang nail on pitted granite.”25 Illegitimate Sonnets marked the beginning of a fruitful, if frazzling, relationship that would see Gorey providing endpaper cartoons for the third printing of Clinical Sonnets (which rolled off the presses in October of 1950, around the same time Illegitimate Sonnets came out); fifty-one drawings of his little men acting out sonnet-related gags plus the front-illustration for Case Record from a Sonnetorium in ’51; and sixty-five illustrations for More Clinical Sonnets in ’53, all of which were published by Twayne.
There’s an unsettling quality to some of Moore’s verse—a darkness behind the drollery. Take More Clinical Sonnets: most of the book’s entries are sardonic portraits of neurotics and depressives; we can’t shake the nasty suspicion that the objects of Moore’s contempt are his own patients. Cartoonish but bleak, Gorey’s drawings accentuate the underlying creepiness of Moore’s blend of jocularity and cruelty.
Still, the exposure could only help Gorey’s nascent career. Moore was well connected in the literary world and, over the course of their four-book collaboration, a tireless drummer for their cause. He even recruited Ed Gorey to target Chicago media. Gorey senior obliged, playing up the hometown-boy-makes-good angle with his PR connections; soon enough, the chitchat columns in Chicago papers started to take notice of Moore’s books—and Ted’s art. By Case Record, he merited a title-page credit: “Cartoons by Edward St. John Gorey.”
“I’m delighted that all goes so well,” Ciardi, on sabbatical, wrote Moore from Rome. “I’m especially delighted that Gorey is getting this chance to launch himself: I have great faith in the final success of his little men. I think they will have to create and educate an audience for themselves, but I see no reason why they shouldn’t…”26
Moore was unquestionably an ardent fan, telling Helen Gorey that he considered Ted “a finer illustrator than Tenniel,” possessed of a rare combination of “satire, social reality, and general artistic integrity,” though the shrink in him couldn’t resist adding, “Much of this has been developed at the expense of a balanced personality…”27 He sang Ted’s praises to prospective publishers, most fortuitously Charles “Cap” Pearce of the New York publishing house Duell, Sloan and Pearce, a bit of matchmaking that secured Gorey a meeting with some of the company’s decision makers to discuss the possibility of a book of his own. (That book, when it came to pass, would be the first title published under his own name, The Unstrung Harp.)
“You were a tremendous success last night,” Moore enthused in a celebratory telegram on December 2, 1951, the day after the meeting.28 “The entire company was captivated by your scrapbook your talents and yourself I am sure something good will come of it Cap Pearce called me this morning to tell me how delighted he was…Good luck you are launched now chum vous sera un succes fou goodbye Arno Cobean and Steig here comes…Gorey.”a
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Even as Ted was making his professional debut in Illegitimate Sonnets, he was being drawn into the creative ferment of the Poets’ Theatre.
In 1950, verse drama was having its moment, and Cambridge was ground zero for American experiments in the form. The trend was fanned by resurgent interest in the verse plays of Stephen Spender, Yeats, Auden, and, most of all, T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s thoughts on the poet as playwright struck a responsive chord in the pre-Beat literary bohemia of early ’50s Cambridge. “Every poet…would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively,” he had said in 1933, during a lecture at Harvard, “and the theatre is the best place in which to do it.”29