Born to Be Posthumous. Mark Dery

of conversation, things seen and freeze-framed by his camera eye, quotations from his encyclopedic reading and movie watching and gallery going. O’Hara was addicted to the Now—to art forms such as action painting, which captured “the present rather than the past, the present in all its chaotic splendor,” writes Marjorie Perloff in Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters.¹⁰⁸

      Gorey, by contrast, immersed himself ever deeper in things past—silent movies, Victorian novels, Edward Lear, the Ballets Russes. Pursuing his solitary obsessions, he chased a vision all his own, wholly new yet sepia-tinted with a sense of lost time.^* O’Hara was avant-garde; Gorey was avant-retro. At Harvard, Gorey distilled his influences into a concentrated essence that would nourish his art for the rest of his life. O’Hara, by the summer of ’49, was shaking off his Firbankian affectations. Critiquing a friend’s poem, he wrote, with mock condescension, “I can see certain tendencies in you which we all have to get rid of. With me it was Ronald Firbank, with you it looks a bit like the divine Oscar …”¹⁰⁹

      Their friendship came to grief over one of O’Hara’s pointed wisecracks. Maybe there had always been a little rivalry beneath their sharp-witted jousting—who knows? But O’Hara’s hipster derision at Gorey’s Firbankian sensibility—so arch, so preciously aesthetic, so aloof from the cultural ferment of the moment—emerged undisguised in a jab that cut too close to the bone. “Ted told me that he’d seen Frank at some point shortly after he’d moved to New York,” Larry Osgood remembers, “and Frank’s opening remark, practically, was, ‘So, are you still drawing those funny little men?’ And Ted took great offense at that, and that was that for that relationship.”

      Years later, Gorey settled the score. Rolling his eyes at the idea that his former roommate, who banged out his poems on the fly, was some kind of genius, he told an interviewer, “I was astonished after his death, and even before, when he became a kind of icon for a whole generation. If you know somebody really well, you can never really believe how talented they are. I know how he wrote some of those poems, so I can’t take them all that seriously.”¹¹⁰

      O’Hara died in 1966, at the age of forty, killed by a teenager joyriding at night in a Jeep on the beach at Fire Island. At Harvard, in the first flush of their friendship, he’d written a poem for Ted that was later included in his posthumous collection, Early Writing. Titled, simply, “For Edward Gorey,” it evokes not only the Victorian-Edwardian setting of Gorey’s work and its insular, dollhouse psychology but also the sense of the Freudian repressed that haunts it. Referring to the “anger” underlying Gorey’s “fight for order,” he notes, “you people this heatless square / with your elegant indifferent / and your busy leisured / characters who yet refuse despite surrounding flames / to be demons.”¹¹¹ He evokes the taxidermy stillness of Gorey’s vitrine worlds (“You arrange on paper life stiller than / oiled fruits or wired twigs”) and the obsessive cross-hatching that is a Gorey signature (“See how upon the virgin grain / a crosshatch claws a patch / of black blood …”).

      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

      ^* Rhymes with glower.

      ^* 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.

      ^* 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.

      ^* 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.”

      ^* 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.