I didn’t need Lord of the Flies as a paradigm

 “When I was 12, I read a book called A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. In it, good-natured pirates rescue some kids from a hurricane. But in the end the kids are responsible for having the pirates hanged. That killed the myth about innocent children for me. It was the sort of book you never forget, and you never feel the same because of it. I didn’t need Lord of the Flies as a paradigm.”17

***

“I have almost no friends, but the few I do I like very much,” Gorey confided in a January 1951 letter to Brandt.9 Chief among them was Alison Lurie. In later days, she would earn a reputation (and a Pulitzer) as a writer of social satires—sharply observed, subtly feminist comedies of manners, most of them drily amusing in the English way. Barbara Epstein, her Radcliffe schoolmate (and, later, editor of her essays for the New York Review of Books), thought she was “witty, skeptical and articulate” and, even as an undergraduate, a supremely gifted writer.10But when Lurie met Gorey, she was Alison Bishop, recent Radcliffe grad and newlywed. “After Ted finished Harvard he got a job working for a book publisher in Boston, in Copley Square,” she recalled in 2008. “I was working there, too, at the Boston Public Library, and we used to have lunch together in a cheap cafeteria on Marlborough Street. Neither of us liked our jobs very much, but they had compensations—we got first look at a lot of books, and we could meet regularly.”11 Until Gorey moved to New York, in ’53, she remembered, “we saw more of each other than of anyone else—we were best friends.”

They’d met in ’49, at the Mandrake, she thinks. They clicked instantly, bonding over their shared tastes in literature—“mostly literary classics and the poetry that people were beginning to read then.”12 Naturally, Gorey pressed Firbank and Compton-Burnett on Lurie, who liked Compton-Burnett but “couldn’t stand Firbank; it didn’t seem like literature, it was just posing. [Ted] liked the artificiality, the idea of an imagined world with artificial rules and a kind of old-fashioned overtone.” They went to the ballet and museums and the movies, taking in foreign films and the old movies Gorey was especially fond of. The Gorey Lurie knew was, in all the essentials, the Gorey we know. “Ted then was much like he was always—immensely intelligent, perceptive, amusing, inventive, and skeptical, though he was completely unknown,” she recalled.13 “He saw through anyone who was phony, or pretentious, or out for personal gain, very fast. As he said very early in our friendship,…‘I pity any opportunist who thinks I’m an opportunity.’”

She and Gorey were a matched pair. “We gossiped, we talked about books and movies, I saw his drawings, he looked at what I was writing,” she says.14 “We were both Anglophiles, definitely. [We shared] a love of British literature and poetry and films and all that. We’d both been brought up on British children’s books, so this was a world that was romantic and interesting to us.…Back then, when neither of us had been abroad, it was a kind of fantasy world.”

The Gorey Lurie knew in Cambridge was “strikingly tall and strikingly thin,” a head-turning apparition in his unvarying costume of black turtleneck sweater, chinos, and white sneakers—the standard-issue uniform of that late-’40s hipster, the literary bohemian.15 (By then, he’d shed the long canvas coats with sheepskin collars that he sported at Harvard but hadn’t yet replaced them with the floor-sweeping fur coats of his Victorian beatnik phase. They’d come later, when he moved to Manhattan.)

Gorey “was already eccentric and individual when I first knew him,” said Lurie in 2008.16 One of his distinguishing quirks, she remembers, was that enigmatic combination of sociability and reserve John Ashbery had in mind when he described Gorey as “somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, fun-loving level.” “He had a lot of friends,” she notes, and could be gregarious in the right setting—she recalls him chatting with “a lot of people” who came into the Mandrake—but “was solitary in the sense that he didn’t form a partnership with anybody.”17

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, she says. “Not everybody wants to wake up in the morning and there’s somebody in bed with them, you know? Some people value their solitude, and I think Ted was like that. He wanted to live alone; he wasn’t looking for somebody to be with for the rest of his life. He would have romantic feelings about people, but he wouldn’t really have wanted it to turn into a full-blown relationship, and that’s why it never did.”18 He wasn’t a recluse, she emphasizes, just solitary by nature. “It was important to him to have a place where he could do, and be, by himself.”

Some of Lurie’s most sharply etched memories of Ted are recollections of their rambles in cemeteries, fittingly. In the Old Burying Ground, near Harvard Square, they made rubbings of the “really strange and wonderful” headstones—impressions created by taping a sheet of paper onto a stone, then rubbing it with a crayon.19 Visual echoes of the images they collected—urns and weeping willows from the nineteenth-century tombstones, grinning death’s heads and skull-and-crossbones motifs and “circular patterns that looked like Celtic crosses or magical symbols” from the colonial grave markers—reverberate in Gorey’s books and in the animated title sequence he created for the Masterpiece Theatre spin-off series Mystery! Unsurprisingly, Ted was much taken with “the older tombstones with strange inscriptions and scary verses,” says Lurie. A particular favorite read:

Behold and think as you pass by,

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so you will be.

Prepare to die and follow me.

“It was on one of these trips that I realized for the first time that I was not going to live forever,” Lurie recalled. “Of course I knew this theoretically, but I hadn’t taken it personally. We were in a beautiful graveyard in Concord”—Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, most likely, where Hawthorne, Thoreau, and all the Alcotts sleep on Authors Ridge—“and I said to Ted, ‘If I die, I want to be buried somewhere like this.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean, if you die?’…He was more aware of mortality than I was,” she reflects. “He’d been in the army, and even though he hadn’t been overseas, he’d seen people come back from overseas. Or not come back.”

At the same time, Gorey’s susceptibility to the morose charms of Puritan memento mori had as much to do with his desire to escape the stultifying ’50s, Lurie suggests, as it did any sense that we’ll all end up moldering in the ground. “One of the things you want to remember is what the 1950s were like,” she says. “All of a sudden everybody was sort of square and serious, and the whole idea was that America was this wonderful country and everybody was smiling and eating cornflakes and playing with puppies.” Gorey’s ironic appropriation, in his art, of Puritan gloom and the Victorian cult of death and mourning “was sort of in reaction to this 1950s mystique…that everything was just wonderful and we lived forever and the sun was shining,” she believes.

**

The Willowdale Handcar is one of the capstones of Gorey’s body of work. Each scene is a postage-stamp masterpiece, the understated wittiness of its prose joined seamlessly to needlepoint-fine drawing. The surrealism of the story’s dreamlike chain of events is suffused with what the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff calls “an air of almost metaphysical mystery.”5That, in fact, is what The Willowdale Handcar is: a metaphysical mystery—specifically, a metaphysical mystery in the guise of a silent movie. (The book is dedicated to Lillian Gish.)6 Three young people—Edna, Harry, and Sam—discover their ticket out of dull-as-dishwater Willowdale: a handcar at the railroad station, which they promptly mount and ride out of town, following the call of the open road. The time, as always, is vaguely Victorian-Edwardian; the town, whose name recalls the Wilmette of Gorey’s boyhood as well as the 1888 small town in the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” (1960), appears to be somewhere in the Midwest. Thematically, The Willowdale Handcar is a variation on a quintessentially American myth—the road trip. Gorey’s illustrations, most notably the Hopperesque picture of a house burning mysteriously in the middle of a vast field, and Wobbling Rock tumbling off its pedestal to crush some picnickers, are among his finest. The draftsmanship is impeccable, the compositions beautifully balanced.

Running on a parallel track to the dominant narrative is an Agatha Christie subplot involving the mysterious Nellie Flim, a missing person whose “frantic face” the trio glimpses pressed against a parlor window as a train flashes past and whom they ultimately meet up with, tied to the tracks like the imperiled heroine of one of D. W. Griffith’s Biograph shorts. When they free her, she hops on her bicycle and rides away without explanation. A week later, they think they see her “walking the grounds of the Weedhaven Laughing Academy.”

As for the metaphysical mystery, the description on the book’s back cover is intriguing, especially if we entertain the possibility that Gorey wrote it, as authors sometimes do. “In which three Pilgrims find mystery, abort peril and partake of religious community,” the blurb reads. “And the discerning Reader discovers Meaning in their Progress.” We’re invited to read the Willowdale trio’s trip in explicitly religious terms: as an allegorical journey—a pilgrim’s progress, not to put too fine a point on it.

Is The Willowdale Handcar a “subtle yet magisterial view of the human condition,” as Schiff suggests, chronicling our voyage from youth to tomb?7 Undoubtedly the book has an elegiac feel: death and decay are everywhere, from the burning house to the trio’s contemplative stop at a cemetery to the final scene, a wonderfully evocative drawing of the travelers pumping their handcar into the Stygian gloom of a tunnel. “At sunset they entered a tunnel in the Iron Hills and did not come out the other end.” The pitch-black mouth of the tunnel that swallows the travelers forever is inescapably tomblike, a portal to Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Willowdale is suggestive, too: weeping willows, in Victorian memorial iconography, symbolize mourning.

As for the Black Doll of the title, it, too, remains a cipher. We see it only briefly, sitting on a writing desk.a Perhaps it’s meant to be an absent presence—a disquieting reminder of the irreducible mystery of things. An effigy of the god of naught, it personifies the black hole in Gorey’s cosmos, right where the discerning Reader looks for Meaning.

* * *

During his tedious time at Bobbs-Merrill, Gorey produced three classic works, one of which, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, would become his best-known title—the dictionary definition, in the public mind, of the Goreyesque.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies; or, After the Outing; The Insect God; and The West Wing appeared in 1963, in a boxed set published by Simon and Schuster called The Vinegar Works: Three Volumes of Moral Instruction. It debuted a year after the arrival of Maurice Sendak’s four-volume Nutshell Library. Since he knew Sendak and seemed to have kept abreast of children’s book publishing, it’s unlikely Gorey hadn’t gotten wind of Sendak’s wry take on Puritan primers and Struwwelpeter-type cautionary tales. Whether The Vinegar Works is his response we don’t know, but the timing is suggestive.

Written in sprightly dactylic couplets, The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a mocking abecedarium steeped in the gothic aesthetic and the real-life horrors of the penny dreadful. It purports to teach children their ABCs through the unhappy (but often hilarious) ends of twenty-six lugubrious-looking children: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears,” and so on. Tinies was inspired, said Gorey, by “those 19th century cautionary tales, I guess, though my book is punishment without misbehavior.”8The drawings are wonderful, in their restrained way. Gorey’s compositions, as always, are expertly balanced: he conducts duets between dark or densely patterned shapes and white or gray space and between his little victims and the mostly empty spaces that surround them.

Gorey could be a great single-panel gag artist when he wanted to be. The verse is often uproarious, and the artwork showcases his cartoonist’s gift for illustrating a joke in the most amusing way. “N is for Neville who died of ennui” takes an inherently hilarious notion—expiring from world-weariness, a concept only Gorey could dream up—and makes it even funnier by showing us nothing but the top of Neville’s bored little head, his black-dot eyes peering blankly at us out of an enormous window. (This was one of Gorey’s favorite scenes. When an interviewer noted one of the many paradoxical aspects of the man—“He delivers punch lines and sardonic commentary with ease, but rarely laughs”—Gorey observed, “I don’t set out to be funny. Obviously, if I find myself giggling about something, I’ll keep it in.…I must say I did think at the time that ‘N is for Neville who died of ennui’ was rather fetching.”)9The Gashlycrumb Tinies. (Simon and Schuster, 1963)

Gorey’s ironic distance absolves us of the moral obligation to empathize. It gives us license to chuckle at the messy end we know is in store for the dapper little gent in tweeds, eagerly opening his booby-trapped gift in “T is for Titus who flew into bits.” Sometimes it’s the cluelessness of the little dears that turns tragedy into slapstick: why is Olive, in “O is for Olive run through with an awl,” tossing such a nasty implement into the air? To see where it will land? In The Gashlycrumb Tinies, parents are nowhere to be seen, leaving children to their fates, which, nine times out of ten, the little ninnyhammers richly deserve.

Actually there is one parental figure in the book. The cover illustration depicts Death as a skeletal nanny surrounded by his charges. Like the child-snatching bogeyman of every parent’s worst nightmares, Death is only posing as the Tinies’ guardian. The book’s back cover reveals their fate: a cluster of headstones huddles where the children stood. This, presumably, is what happened “after the outing.” Death is ever present, even in the coziest domestic settings, just waiting for one dumb move (say, swallowing tacks), a freak accident (suffocating under a rug), or an Act of God (managing, somehow, to be devoured by mice). And it doesn’t make exceptions for youth or cuteness.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies broaches the subject of death in a children’s book, or at least in what looks like a children’s book. And it did so at a time when the Little Golden Books, which dominated kinderculture, were serving up a steady diet of treacle and mush. Seen in that light, it really does offer moral instruction after all. Gorey’s gift to his youngest readers is a book of ABCs that uses a variation on that schoolyard staple, the dead-baby joke, to teach them that death is part of life. “When you were a child, would you have relished The Gashlycrumb Tinies?” an interviewer asked. “Probably, yes,” was his predictable reply.10

* * *

Wonderfully weird as it is, grotesquely funny as it is, The Insect God is a slight work—another one-line joke and, at fourteen panels, one of Gorey’s shortest. A cautionary tale, told in rhyme, about the dangers of taking candy from strangers (and what could be stranger than man-size mantids who sacrifice humans to their six-legged deity?), The Insect God recounts the fate of little Millicent Frastley (one of Gorey’s funniest faux-English names).

We meet her in the park, where she’s playing unattended, “nibbling grass.” “There was no one with her to keep her from straying / Away in the shadows and oncoming dark.” (Adults in Goreyland are always neglectful.) A sinister “black motor” rolls up, looking like a funeral hearse on spoked wheels, and a “tiny green face” regards the startled mite. Out comes an arm with two elbows (Gorey has a flair for the telling detail) holding a tin of cinnamon balls; Millicent is tempted, and in a trice she’s snatched up and spirited away.

After long hours on the road, the insects and their victim arrive “at the foot of a vast and crumbling wall,” a moment Gorey stages with a superbly cinematic sense of visual drama: the car, little more than a black silhouette in the middle distance, is stopped before a dark, brooding monolith of a mansion, so colossal it reduces the vehicle to toylike proportions. All those hours spent watching silent movies have paid off: Gorey deftly intercuts a shot of the Frastleys, anguishing over what has become of Millicent, then returns us to the mansion’s ballroom, where the mirrors are “streaked with a luminous slime.” Leaping “through the air with buzzings and twangings,” the monstrous mantids “work themselves up to a ritual crime.” Their frenzy culminates in the stripping and stuffing of little Millicent into “a kind of pod,” after which she is, at last, “sacrificed to THE INSECT GOD.”

Brow-knitting analysis of a one-line joke runs the risk of becoming a joke itself. Still, the title is a giveaway: something’s going on with religion. Gorey’s insects resemble praying mantises; their blood sacrifice can be read as a sardonic parody of Christianity—an Aesop’s fable for unbelievers. Is Gorey’s lapsed Catholicism showing? To atheist eyes, the insects’ worship of an insect god calls to mind Voltaire’s quip that man created God in his own image.

Gorey, of course, was no help. The inspiration for The Insect God, he claimed, was some medieval woodcuts of insects he’d seen on cards or notepaper at the Metropolitan Museum. “Poor Millicent. It wasn’t her fault.”11

* * *

What, exactly, is The West Wing? That it’s one of Gorey’s bona fide masterpieces everyone seems to agree: the Gorey scholar Karen Wilkin thinks it’s one of his “most beautiful and poetic achievements”; Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, called it a “wordless masterwork.”12

Yes, but what is it? At first glance, it’s a picture book that tells its story in thirty “silent” panels, meaning: without a word of accompanying text. Gorey’s first experiment with wordless narrative, it was surely prompted by his fondness for playing with form. But he liked to toss critics a red herring by pointing out that the book was dedicated to Edmund Wilson, who had taken him to task for the awkwardness of his limericks in The Listing Attic. “Edmund Wilson castigated me wildly for them,” he told an interviewer. “That’s why when I finally dedicated a book to him, it had no text. I thought, ‘That will fix you, Edmund. Now what will you be able to say?’”13A visual poem in pen and ink, The West Wing is a series of scenes linked by the free-associated logic of dreams.b Nearly all the exquisitely rendered drawings depict rooms in what appears to be the usual Gorey manse, most of them empty yet all of them thick with atmosphere. We can’t shake the creeping sensation that something has happened, or is about to happen, or is happening before our unseeing eyes in the spirit realm. What’s going on in the fourth panel, where an open door in one bare, disused-looking room gives onto the open door in another? There’s a sense of communication between the two untenanted rooms; of something passing between them. The main character in The West Wing, as in all haunted-house stories, is the house itself.

Nowhere is Gorey’s synthesis of surrealism and the gothic more seamless. He has mastered the surrealist art, perfected by Magritte, of charging the most banal imagery with an occult electricity and of presenting the marvelous—a room full of ocean, its ruffled waters halfway up the walls; a boulder sitting on a Chippendale table—with jarring matter-of-factness. But he’s fluent, too, in his use of gothic and horror-movie tropes: a sheeted ghost glimpsed in a mirror, a mummy making its foot-dragging way down a hall, a flickering candle floating in midair.

The book’s title underscores its spookiness: the West, in religion, myth, and folklore, is the land of the setting sun—the abode of the dead. Since time immemorial, the sun’s nightly disappearance in the west has been seen as a descent into the afterworld. The Western Lands, in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, are where the departed live and gods and monsters dwell. Twilight is the Goreyest time of day, as noted earlier, because it’s “neither one thing nor the other”—not day, not night, but in between, a transitional state like dying, which it has come to symbolize. (The dying of the light in the west recurs in Gorey stories. In The Unstrung Harp, “there is a drowned sort of yellow light in the west, and the impression of desolation and melancholy is remarkable.”)

Twilight is a borderland, and “the border of borders is of course death,” Gorey told Peter Neumeyer.14 Then comes a revelation: “The title the book does not have, but which is there in my mind, is The Book of What Is in the Other World”—a chapter in the Egyptian Book of the Dead detailing the sun god Re’s descent into the underworld through a portal in the far west and his travels in the kingdom of the dead during the night.cIn a 1963 interview, Gorey left no doubt about the book’s meaning: “The West Wing,” he said, “is where you go after you’re dead.”15 That candle hanging in midair (held, we assume, by some spectral hand) leaves us, on the book’s last page, with a potent image of the frailty and brevity of human existence. Soon it will gutter and go out, an extinction foreshadowed by the act of closing the book, which has the effect of snuffing it. On the back cover, a skull-faced moon peers down on the mansion, whose stone facade and pitch-black windows give it the look of a sepulchre or a death’s head. The West Wing is Gorey’s gothic-surrealist Book of the Dead.

It’s also the purest expression of his belief that meaning is in the eye of the beholder and that the most successful works of art leave gaps for us to fill, avoiding the Jamesian pitfall of leaving “nothing left to think about, nothing left to question,” as Gorey put it.16The West Wing is nothing but gaps, a truism literalized in panel 16, which consists almost entirely of a densely crosshatched wall with an empty niche in it. Fill the niche, Gorey urges.

Mark Dery

Born to Be Posthumous