With predictable perversity, Gorey decided to major not in art, despite his declaration in his application that he’d set his career sights on “some field of Commercial Art,” or in English, a natural fit given his insatiable appetite for literature, but in French. “With hysterical disregard for practicality I decided to major in French,” he told his army buddy Bill Brandt in a letter dated April 17, 1947. “As you well know for the simple reason of being able to write in the language.”30 (Brandt would “well know” this through his familiarity with Gorey’s habit of giving the plays he wrote at Dugway French titles and of sprinkling them, and his correspondence, with French phrases.) “One and all, including my advisor, are just a teeny bit baffled by such an attitude,” he admitted, “but then so am I.”
In 1977, with the advantages of hindsight, he offered a more plausible explanation: “I figured I’d read anything I wanted to read in English, but I would have to force myself to read all of French literature. And I thought I would like to read all of French literature.”31 Unfortunately, Harvard turned out to have “a perfectly god-awful French department,” in Gorey’s estimation. His French classes were “dim proceedings,” especially the survey courses, which were scheduled right after lunch, with the predictable result that he “would have a nice nap,” but his French, he later claimed, was “absolutely atrocious.”32
From his class notes, we see that Gorey’s French courses force-marched him through Hugo, Rousseau, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Proust, Perrault, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld, none of whom, with the exception of Perrault and La Rochefoucauld, seems to have made much of an impression. Perrault he liked because he was taken with “the funny, irrational quality of fairy tales” (although he also said they disturbed him).33 As for La Rochefoucauld, Gorey seems to have found the witty, cynical Frenchman’s way of looking at the world congenial to his own. Gorey shared La Rochefoucauld’s perspective on la comédie humaine, expressed in tart truisms such as “We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others” and “We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire.”34 In an undergraduate essay on his maxims, Gorey writes, “I myself happen to agree with La Rochefoucauld’s estimate of Man almost completely.”35
The French phrasemaker’s deft way with the short, sharp zinger was a model of the pithiness and clarity Gorey would strive for in his writing. In his essay on the Maximes—which is brilliant, by the way; cogent and clear and startlingly assured in its critical judgments—he admires the lucidity of a style so transparent that it performs a kind of vanishing act in the reader’s mind. “Personality and everything else which is in the slightest degree superfluous to his thought have been stripped away,” writes Gorey.36 This is fascinating on two counts: it reveals the scope of Gorey’s artistic intellect, broad enough to appreciate an aesthetic poles apart from the effete, hothouse-orchid style epitomized by Firbank, and it foreshadows his use of stripped-down, prosy language to ironic, often comic effect.
Gorey’s uncharacteristically self-reflective thoughts on La Rochefou-cauld’s ideas about morality and human nature speak volumes about his own philosophical views. “I think to myself: ‘This is the way people are, their every action is explained once and for all.’”37 La Rochefoucauld “sees Man as being motivated by one thing alone: amour-propre, or the love of self, all other motives being merely masks which more or less effectively conceal the same face beneath. Thus all actions have the same moral value, which is to say none at all.”38
This is strong stuff, a premonition of the existentialism that will resurface in some of Gorey’s more confessional letters to his friend and literary collaborator Peter Neumeyer. When he writes about La Rochefoucauld’s “incurable pessimism” regarding human society, and of the “passion and suffering” beneath the “polite glaciality of his writing’s surface,” we’re reminded of the Gorey who once confided to an interviewer, “I read books about crazed mass murderers, and say to myself, ‘There but for the grace of God.’ … In one way I’ve never related to people or understood why they behave the way they do…. I think life is the pits.”39
In light of such remarks, it’s tempting to hear Gorey speaking through Theodore Pinkfoot, one of the characters in Paint Me Black
Angels, a novel he produced some fifty-odd pages of at Harvard before abandoning it:
I dislike people, I am incapable of hate, but they terrify me. Though I am always analyzing it, human nature bores me, really. I do not believe there are such things as goodness, loyalty, courage, nobility, and their opposites. There is no need for them…. Motives, for the most part, are fatuous and unexplainable; those of which people speak are at best irrelevant.40
Not that Gorey, at Harvard, was a mass murderer manqué or a mis-anthrope sunk in gloom. To be sure, he’d always felt a little alienated: he confided to Bill Brandt, in a typically histrionic letter written in the spring term of his freshman year, that he’d been going slowly insane since September, at a loss as to why he was there and what purpose the whole business served (although he was accumulating a wealth of “idiotic but fascinating isolated bits,” he allowed). He spent the better part of his study hours procrastinating or, paradoxically, “wondering in an obscure sort of way why my grades aren’t brilliant.”41
But if his attitude toward his classes was lackadaisical, Gorey’s appetite for culture-bingeing outside the classroom was undiminished. He regrets, in his letter to Brandt, that he hasn’t made it to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, “what with going to see every play, after the great hiatus in my theatre-going days occasioned by the army, and the ballet, every performance needless to say, whenever there’s a company in town …”42 And even if he has been remiss in his symphony-going, he’s been filling in the more obscure gaps in his record collection: “I have developed an unholy passion for everything pre-Bach of late, regardless of what it is.”
He was drawing constantly, too. Visitors to Eliot F-13 sometimes found him scratching away imperturbably amid the social whirl. “They had the best parties going at Harvard,” Donald Hall recalls. “They were jolly, funny, lively, with a mix of people, many strangers to each other, that mixed well.”43 He remembers Gorey as a man of few words, able to focus on his work amid the hubbub. “You’d go into the room to talk with Frank and there would be Ted sitting at the desk drawing one of his Christmas cards.”44
The academic paper trail that chronicles Gorey’s Harvard years is a fossil record of his evolution as an artist: drawings crowd the margins and cover the flip sides of many of his class notes, creative-writing assignments, research papers, even memos to roomies. Gorey drew women in ball gowns, their plunging décolletages ostentatiously on display, their spiky-lashed, almond-shaped eyes strikingly reminiscent of Picasso’s cubist muses. He drew nuns in wimples and claw-fingered crones hunched over cauldrons and elegant, loose-lined studies of society ladies who look as if they’ve stepped out of the pages of Vogue. He drew free-associated doodles—polymorphous whatnots melting into undulating something-or-others whose dream logic is reminiscent of the surrealist parlor game the exquisite corpse. Here, there, and everywhere, he drew his little men in raccoon coats, variations on an archetype that would soon have a name: Clavius Frederick Earbrass, the “well-known novelist” whose agonizing struggle with his book in progress—“He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel”—is chronicled in Gorey’s first published book, The Unstrung Harp.
All along, he was writing, too. He wrote short stories, dozens of them, and reams of poetry (in French as well as English), trying his hand at everything from Petrarchan sonnets to limericks, working out problems in rhyme and scansion on the backs of old assignments. In a letter to Brandt written in the fall of ’47, the first term of his sophomore year, he mentions having written, to date, “some seventy five limericks (projected number: 110), many of them sordid,” which pegs them as early versions, most likely, of the grimly funny limericks in The Listing Attic.45
That fall, Gorey was at work on Paint Me Black Angels, too, or