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
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 cover 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 to at least one publication outside Harvard. A rejection letter from the New Yorker, dated May 8, 1950, and signed “Franklyn B. Modell,” thanks him, in the usual perfunctory way, for letting the magazine see his drawings. Pleasantries out of the way, Mr. Modell gets down to business: “While I readily recognize their merit, I’m afraid they are not suitable for The New Yorker. The people in your pictures are too strange and the ideas, we think, are not funny…. By way of suggestion may I say that drawings of a less eccentric nature might find a more enthusiastic audience here.”101
This was the New Yorker of Harold Ross, the founding editor, who scolded E. B. White about his use of the unthinkably vulgar phrase “toilet paper,” so “sickening” it “might easily cause vomiting”; home to cartoonists such as Peter Arno, an upper-crust East Coaster whose covers and single-panel gags took little notice of the Depression, the war, or other unpleasantries, except as punch lines.102 Arno went down well with a dry martini at the Stork Club; Gorey’s camp-gothic eccentricities, not so much.
(Happily, Gorey followed his instincts and had the satisfaction, forty-three years later, of seeing his work appear in the pages, and ultimately on the cover, of a New Yorker that was ready, at last, for the amusingly unfunny. Shortly after his death, the magazine dedicated its end page, by way of an elegy, to a Gorey illustration.)
Gorey graduated from Harvard on June 22, 1950, with an AB in Romance languages and literatures. His final report card records an A in English, a C in French, and a B in history, an appropriately erratic ending to an academic career that had zigzagged all over the place.
Outside the classroom, however, he floored the accelerator. Harvard is where Gorey perfected his image, stylizing his zany fashion sense and theatrical mannerisms into the persona that, with a few last tweaks (pierced ears, copious necklaces, sidewalk-sweeping fur coats dyed heart-attack green or yellow), would turn heads in Manhattan. More important, Harvard is where he sketched in the intellectual substance of his eccentric persona, drawing inspiration from writers like Firbank and Compton-Burnett. From Lear, he took the limerick form. Encouraged by Ciardi, he put to drily amusing use a mock-moralistic tone that parodied Victorian writing for children. Even the melancholy epitaphs at Mount Auburn Cemetery, mementos of the Victorian cult of mourning, and the Puritan reproaches to mortal vanity in the Old Burying Ground near Harvard Square had something to teach him: their lugubrious cadences and morbid sentiments, so melodramatic they verge on black comedy, echo in Gorey’s verse.
He learned as much from his antipathies as he did from his sympathies: in several interviews, he returned to a subject dear to his heart, his adamantine hatred of Henry James, whose tendency to explain things to death he found wearisome, whose labyrinthine sentences maddened him, and whose characters he found morally repugnant, motivated by “utterly unpleasant arid curiosity.”103 In an essay for a comp lit class, he wrote, “James’s favoured method of unfolding an action is to have it revealed, slowly, bit by bit, through inexhaustible questionings, probings, pryings, comparings on the part of onlookers of the main action…. If anyone ever literally died of curiosity I am certain it must have been a Jamesian character.”
Crucially, he discovered that he wasn’t a novelist but that he might, by combining his gifts for narrative compression and epigrammatic wit with his meticulous, hand-drawn engravings, produce masterpieces of miniaturism that defy categorization. All the while, he was evolving as an artist, polishing his draftsmanship and, through his exploration of watercolor, developing a taste for subtle color harmonies and deliciously queasy hues.
But when it came to Gorey’s maturation as an artist and a thinker, nothing in his four years at Harvard affected him more profoundly than his relationship with Frank O’Hara. Their friendship introduced both men to new interests and influences; each sharpened his ideas about art, literature, music, film, theater, and ballet on the whetstone of the other’s equally nimble, wide-ranging mind. Postmodernists avant la lettre, they embraced lowbrow, highbrow, and middlebrow tastes with gusto and without apology.
As important, each was present at the birth of the other’s self-creation and, consciously or not, lent a hand. “All of us were obsessed,” Gorey later recalled, characterizing the mood of their Harvard years. “Obsessed by what? Ourselves, I expect.”104 The bearded dandy nerd in Keds and fur coat, fingers dripping rings, was “a kind of this-is-me-but-it’s-not-me thing,” Gorey later confided.105 Meaning: “Part of me is genuinely eccentric, part of me is a bit of a put-on.”106 He added, slyly, “But I know what I’m doing.” (Another time, he struck a more poignant note, seeming almost trapped by his eccentric image: “I look like a real person, but underneath I am not real at all. It’s just a fake persona.”)107
Though Gorey and O’Hara crossed paths briefly after graduation through their involvement with the Poets’ Theatre, in Cambridge, their friendship wouldn’t survive long. After both men moved to Manhattan—O’Hara in ’51, Gorey in ’53—their lives intersected only occasionally, though they frequented