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
Gorey being Gorey, he manages to see the existential punch line in his predicament. It’s ironic, he tells Joerns, that he, whose heart’s delight is getting involved with someone, then spending “all my free time in mutual analysis of the situation,” should end up with a lover who blanches in terror at the thought of baring his soul.87 But this is playacting. Two sentences later, the wry, self-mocking detachment gives way to anguish: he just might lose his mind, he says, if this “subterranean torture” goes on much longer.
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.* 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