man in feathered fedora, mirrored shades
shopping cart of empty bottles and dreams.
pieces of morning punctuate each look’s
recognition/incorporation/ingestion
chemicals for better living.
great grey beard, great grey coat dripping,
to mid-calf, above which, incidentally, cut-off shorts.
They had arrived early for the reading.
“This review is driving me crazy,” Goshkin said, pen poised above manuscript draft.
“Oh,” Ruth looked up from her Kate Atkinson.
They sat at their favorite table, she facing the espresso machine and Goshkin a floor-to-ceiling window. Sometimes passing people seemed poems and sometimes performers entering and exiting within an existing-for-an-instant play. He would have meditated, but when a piece was percolating, his mind reformed sentences and weighed ideas.
“It’s always flattering to be asked,” he said. “And exciting to find where you get to. But…”
“I’ll look forward to seeing it.” She patted his hand, as if confirming he was there.
He had first been engaged by the children whose lights Gorey had delightedly snuffed by falls down stairs and assaults by bears, never permitting a drop of blood to sully his page. Later he had chuckled his way through Gorey’s porn, where no body part engaged another, but whose “wooden legs,” “singularly well-endowed sheepdog,” and scarlet, nine-legged, seven-armed sofa within windowless room, walls lined in polar bear fur, all action climaxing in screaming, got his point across. He had seen Gory in the line of EC Comics, Charles Addams cartoons, “sick” jokes, and Lennie Bruce, which had marked his passage through childhood and adolescence. He would not have expected to find himself again on this path as he neared 80, two heart attacks behind him, aware of the wire on which he teetered.
“So, Go-go, my man,” Large Victor said, stepping through the door, unhooking his bicycle helmet, ruddy-cheeked, “changing the world?”
“Tending my garden,” Goshkin said. “The world can take care of itself.”
“I have my doubts,” Edward said.
“One way or another,” Ruth said.
i.
Research had revealed how deliberately – or helplessly – Edward St. John Gorey (1925 – 2000)) had courted strangeness. He was tall and thin with a full beard. He wore necklaces and ten rings. He dressed in high-top sneakers and full-length coats, of which he owned 30, canvas to sable. He once saw 1000 movies in a single year. He saw virtually every performance of the New York City Ballet George Balanchine directed. He collected potato mashers, salt and pepper shakers, phone pole insulators, ginger jars, bocce balls, and photographs of dead children. He owned 30,000 books. He lived in cluttered one-room apartments in New York City and an attic in an aunt’s home on Cape Cod, before settling, with nine cats, into a shoddily shingled house in Yarmouth, with over grown lawn, poison ivy creeping through cracks in walls, and raccoons in his attic. He left the United States only once, in 1975, to visit Scotland. He was friendly (within limits), but may never have embraced anyone with passion. Most of his estate passed to the benefit of cats, dogs, bats, and other creatures.
Gorey wrote and illustrated a hundred books, usually set within a country that conveyed “England,” in a period vaguely spanning the late Edwardian through the Roaring ‘20s. He illustrated even more books than that written by others. He wrote and staged experimental plays. He won an Emmy for set design. He created the animated credits for PBS’s “Mystery.” His first books sold so poorly publisher after publisher dropped him; but his images became so popular they were used to market coffee mugs, greeting cards, lunch boxes and t-shirts.
Gorey’s books were collected in four anthologies: Amphigorey (1972); Amphigorey Two (1975); Amphigorey Also (1983); Amphigorey Again (2006). Nearly two-dozen of his interviews are available (Ascending Peculiarity. Karen Wilkin, ed. 2001). He was the subject of a comprehensive biography (Born to be Posthumous. Mark Dery. 2018) and a personal reminiscence (The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Alexander Theroux. 2000, reprinted 2011).
Now into Goshkin’s hands had fallen Malcolm Whyte’s Gorey Secret, which aimed to “uncover” his “creative process” by discovering his influences. A Gorey fan for a half-century – and publisher of a Gorey bibliography – Whyte believed that the more people knew of Gorey’s sources, the more pleasure they would take from him. For Whyte, the most significant of these sources were external – other artists and other creative works. He tended to avoid Gorey’s inner drives or to explore why these artists and these works had appealed, not others.
Whyte’s joy in Gorey’s work was contagious. He had become a fan before Gorey’d sold a t-shirt. He would clearly would have continued to be, if Gorey’s center for public dissemination had remained the counter of the Gotham Book Mart, where, indeed, it once was.
Whyte celebrated Gorey’s “clean open line work” which combined with his meticulous cross-hatching and shading to compose “miniature masterpieces.” He admired the economical sentences and precise language, witty balancing the erudite, nonsensical, and anachronistic. The pictures and words, wrote Whyte, masterfully conjoined, the prose “mov(ing) the story along while the art visually expands the scene,” enriching rather than replicating it. And by not explaining why the two-dozen books he discussed are his favorites, he implied any of them could be.
As someone whose own publishing company had succeeded by issuing literary classics illustrated by noted underground cartoonists in limited, high-quality editions, varied in packaging and collector-tempting doo-dads, Whyte was well-suited to call out Gorey’s craft: hand-printed texts; hand-colored art; attention to covers (front and back), binding, labeling, and packaging. And the bibliomaniac in Whyte could appreciate Gorey’s flip-, slice-, tunnel-, pop-up, paper doll-, and accordion-books, his toy theatres, shuffle-story card sets, and mini-hardcovers.
As for sources, Whyte identified the Bhagavad Gita, Taoism, Zen, American ballet, French silent films, Japanese woodblocks, Russian theater, true crime accounts, pulp fiction, children’s primers and rhyming games, family and personal history, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Edward Lear, Herman Melville, Thomas Merton, Pauline Reage, Bram Stoker, Dali, Hogarth, Matisse, Magritte, Odile Redon, 17th century German literature, 18th century British theater, 19th century pornography, and TIME magazine. (Others added Austen, Bacon, Balthus, Beckett, Borges, Derrida, Hamlet, Keaton (Buster), Murakami (Lady), Plato, and Twilight Zone.)
At Whyte’s observation that grapes, which appeared several times within a single Gorey volume, besides being a fertility symbol also made an excellent anti-oxidant, Goshkin chuckled. And when Whyte contributed to the trove of existing Goreyana an investigative chapter involving tigers and the actor/author Gardner McKay, Goshkin practically applauded.
ii.
A six- or seven-foot wide painting hung on the south wall. The central image was a leafless tree. Two arms rose from a short stump. Each arm held smaller branches and each of these smaller ones. Each arm of the tree cast a separate shadow, and, to the east, a ridge cast another. Or was it a wall? Or a train? From the length of the café, Goshkin could not tell. Storm clouds blew in from the right edge of the frame. Or were they blowing away?
Ruth laughed. Atkinson had been sending characters down different roads of plot, along which different bodies piled up. Just when it seemed she had insufficient pages to bring her characters together, she did.
Whyte was fun. He was educational. He had made Goshkin want to read more Gorey. But he left questions unanswered. Gorey-book-after-Gorey-book had led Whyte to the same conclusion. Which was barely a conclusion at all. One book “gives the reader a lot to think about.” One “leaves the reader thinking.” One “gives the reader pause.” One leaves “possibilities” “in a reader’s mind.” One “prods” the reader to wonder what comes next. This mob of prodded, pausing, thinking readers might have tempted an author to become a voice for them. But what Whyte thought remained unsaid.
Dory had not done much better. He said Gorey wrote “philosophical novel(s) in miniature,” or metaphysical myster(ies)” or “surrealist myster(ies)” or “philosophical myster(ies)” or that he provided “moral instruction” for Dadaists. Once Dory ventured that Gorey explored the “meaning-of-life-as-a-godless-cosmos-question” without setting forth the philosophy or solving the mysteries or setting forth the precepts of this instruction or answer to this question.
Dory spent more time trying to establish Gorey’s homosexuality. The reason for this effort was unclear to Goshkin. Dory neither made the issue personal or argued that identifying one more celebrated person as gay added to the cause for people, gay or straight. Gorey, himself, had dismissed the question. He was, he said, “Neither one thing or the other.” He was, he said, “Undersexed.”
Beyond the glass, a half-dozen long-legged, pony-tailed, whippet-thin freshwomen, in short-shorts and t-shirts, jogged in place, waiting for the light to change. Their health and hopes and the goals for which they raced seemed worlds away.
“I think it would be more interesting to know whether Gory ever masturbated,” Goshkin said. “And if so, what his fantasies were.”
“I’d say,” said Ruth, “his sexuality was totally sublimated in his work. Which was probably a good thing. Because, indications are, if he’d acted upon them, he’d be behind bars, where pens would have been hard to come by.”
Goshkin sipped his espresso and returned to his questions. Could Gorey’s work, like his rings, be worth no more than a passing glance? Did it provide no more guidance than his coats clues toward snappy dressing? Were his 100 books of no greater significance than his cats?
The best he could do at the moment was to note that about 95-percent of Gorey’s titles began with “The.” This, he thought, applied a definitiveness, an implication of one-and-onliness, whether the subject at hand was a “Listing Attic,” “Floating Elephant,” or “Glorious Nosebleed.” But take the basic noun, “attic” or “nosebleed,” apply the modifier which separated it from “The,” and uniqueness seemed already established. “A” or “An” would work as well. So this insistence on “The” seemed deliberate, as though once Gorey had begun that pattern of naming, he had felt compelled to continue. It marked terrain and reaffirmed existence, like a goldendoodle’s piss.
Which seemed an idea of limited usefulness.
iii.
Theroux had known Gorey for nearly 30 years. They were friends, fellow men of Harvard, and neighbors on Cape Cod.
He’d stated the issue clearly. Gorey’s work was “enjoyable… but is there a point other than amusement.” He believed there was. Gorey’s books, he wrote, “were epistemological fables,” demonstrating a belief that all life was “discomfiting,” that “most everything about human nature [was] absurd,” and everyone existed by warding off “despair.” That seemed a useful guide, thought Goshkin, through Gorey’s creeping presences haunting manor houses, journalists pondering slaughter, travelers vanishing on handcars – and all those children abandoned, swallowed, sacrificed to insect gods. With all the awfulnesses that stalked the world, Gorey hymned, why not these? Accept, warily smile, and turn another page.
To add weight to Gorey’s less than hefty works – and to display a degree of erudition that beefed up his own judgment’s authority – Theroux draped him in parallels to Auden, Beardsley, Strachey, and Thoreau, to which he applied, like Post-its, quotes from Cioran, Conrad, Henry James, Larkin, and Wallace Stevens. Less impressively, Theroux linked Gorey to the great and not-so. Gorey and Sammy Davis, Jr. wore rings and Gorey and Rod McKuen Keds. Neither Gorey nor Whistler signed their work. Neither Gorey nor Ho Chi Minh liked to discuss their mothers. Gorey shared Oscar Wilde’s height, and “Unlike the late godawful Lillian Hellman, [he] “didn’t go boating.”
To Goshkin, this judgment, jerry-rigged into Theroux’s text by a comparison-through dissimilarity, underscored his use of Gorey as a vehicle to deliver his own beliefs, a sleight-of-hand Goshkin approved. If an author had an interesting mind, he thought, why not display it? If his subject occasioned ideas, why not express them? Why pretend objective writing existed when every fact set down and paragraph constructed resulted from choices made because of who the author was?
Theroux used this license to set forth a charming, if oddball, fascination with a 1935 Gene Autry cowboy-sci-fi serial. He took the opportunity to deliver, at a decibel level far above Gorey’s, a scathing critique of America’s oil spills, breakfast cereals, politicians, sports heroes, TV habits, and secularization of Christmas. When Theroux toasted Gorey as a man “not to be beaten into the… dull, flat, craven, unadventurous servitude the world offers,” his tone was of someone who believed he has also resisted it. And when Theroux, a highly lauded but lowly selling author, roasted the press and public for ignoring the “profound,” while flattering “hustlers, churs, [and] opportunists,” given Gorey’s balance sheet, he seemed to speak solely from his own resentments.
Goshkin nibbled his biscotti. No Madeleine, it carried him only to the line: a man in a Denver sweatshirt, a woman in a Golden Bears hoodie. At that very moment, Goshkin wore five bracelets, silver, leather, beads and jewels, a black felt cowboy hat, pink skull t-shirt, leather biker pants. He felt a step outside the “dull” and “flat” himself. His royalty statements made Theroux a man to envy. He sensed a brotherhood. But he was not left with eyebrows unraised.
Among the national outrages Theroux decried was a lack of Protestants on the Supreme Court. (Fair enough, Goshkin thought.) But then, noting a public acceptance of calling Muslims “fanatics,” without even a nod toward the existence of Christian one, he asserted that decrying Jewish fanatics could get you jailed. (Hmmm, buzzed Goshkin, in which jurisdiction exactly?) And when Theroux asserted that an “ice cream peddler” had murdered Lizzie Borden’s parents and disparaged “dirty or flatulent” comics, he did not leave it at that. Instead he wrote the murderer was a “Jewish ice-cream peddler” and the offenders “dirty or flatulent Jewish comedians.” [Emp. Supp.]
Goshkin was surprised he had registered anti-Semitic tremblors. Oh, there had been girls in high schools who would not date Jews, and a fullback who said the only good thing about Jews was the holidays, and the country clubs and fraternities that would not admit them, and the colleges that would – but not too many. There had been Robert Cohen and Meyer Wolfsheim, and when, in 1968, he had interviewed for a job with HUD, the staff attorney who confided, “Forget it. We already have one.” And that had been HUD, not the State Department.
But he had never felt particularly battered or deprived. These were simply threads woven into his fabric, a fabric that did not include synagogue or donations to Israel or even the novels of Amos Oz. So he did not date Bunny Argyle. So he did not get into Williams. Change one thing or another, and he might not be sitting in the café with Ruth in what felt a perfect moment. So what the fuck? Had it been there all these years, a splinter working its way to the surface, only now breaking into his thinking and prose?
The line had changed. Two elderly lesbians preceded a man in olive cap and brown huaraches. Almost all tables were full. The microphone stand was up and the baroque music off. Goshkin felt himself slide further down the rabbit’s hole. (Rabbi’s hole?) Gorey now appeared almost the cliche WASP artist, albeit one with a well-curated Ox-bridge eccentric overlay. He seemed to have placed each words and line with the uptight correctness of the silver on a dining table serving duchesses and earls. Gorey’s last recorded vote was for Stevenson in ‘52. His work ignored the disrupted decades that followed. He seemed to have sought structure and repression to restrain life’s stink and passion.
The only Jew Goshkin noted among Gorey’s influences was Balthus – (on his mother’s side) – and Balthus had forever denied he was one. Gorey’s “best friends” included a couple named “Schneiderman”; but when it came to popular culture, among the dozens Gorey detested, Mel Brooks, Richard Dreyfuss, Dustin Hoffman, the Marx Brothers, Joan Rivers, and Barbra Streisand stood out. Goshkin dabbed his dripping nose with his napkin. He tried to stem his thoughts too. He could hear Gorey say he was neither particularly anti-Semitic or pro-Semitic. It seemed no more significant than whether he was gay.
“Do you think Theroux’s ‘Jewish” references were gratuitous or anti-Semitic?” he asked.
“Gratuitous and anti-Semitic,” Ruth said.
iv.
The reading was Myrna’s first since Steven’s death.
The chandeliers had been dimmed. The ice machine hummed.
That was one partner and one husband for Myrna, Goshkin thought.
He scanned the room. One wife for Donald. One husband for Nanette. Todd was losing Annie to Alzheimer’s. Biff’s new stents had vaulted him past his seven. Not to mention the new hips and new knees and removed cataracts and cancers in remission. When Ruth had seen her 80-year-old ailing internist, he had hugged her and said, “We are part of the same tribe.” Goshkin pressed closer to her, as if that would make them eternally adhere.
“When Albert Einstein died…,” Myrna began. She was not five-foot tall, within a beige sweater and blue slacks.
…my grandma asked,
“Where does all that smartness go?”
Goshkin believed the most significant fact about Gorey to have been his inability to establish an intimate relationship with anyone, man, woman or cat. This POV, he recognized, had been established by the miracle of his relationship with Ruth. They had met in an English class, separated, re-connected four years later. Remained. Deepened. Grown. That was the prism through which he judged all things, conjoined with a propensity to measure his life against others. Who had received how many Valentines in second grade. (Billy Frankfurt had blitzed him.) Whose posts garnered the most “Like”s at Facebook. (His blogs were regularly outpolled by photos of pot roast.) The habit spoke poorly of his level of enlightenment, and, yes, he was aware that measuring one’s quotient of enlightenment was itself a warning signal.
Still, he judged “Relationship” his best events. He was not un-embarrassed by his good fortune, but did not all gurus, regardless of denomination, toot how they managed bliss? This seemed a more desirable attainment than 100 books. Not to mention potato mashers.
The reading had reached the passing of Myrna’s poet-partner. The two of them huddled in their bed, she now asking herself,
…where goes all the scribbling,
the fetal poems too far from birth.[1]
Other writers had noted Gorey’s isolation but not with Goshkin’s emphasis – or curiosity. When he’d learned Gorey had suggested he’d tried sex and found it not worth repeating, he’d Googled, “What percentage of American men have sex once?” He’d found no answer, but, if you believed the self-reporting, less than one percent never had any. So, either way, Gorey was an outlier. This saddened Goshkin, which did surprise him. When he’d read a biography of Kafka, he’d nearly wept when, tubercular, dying, he’d lain down with Dora Diamant.
Down Shattuck Avenue, a siren slashed. The chill air stung. Am I out of my fucking mind, Goshkin thought. The night before he’d dreamed he’d been on a bus when he had crapped his pants. He had to get off before anyone identified the odor as his. He had to get home before being recognized. He walked and walked until he was lost. 40 blocks from where he was headed. Had the splinter which had worked its way to the surface been a tiny fragment of something greater lying within him still? Did he need to get to that before anything he said mattered?
“Hey! hey!” called Dwaine, a panhandler whose face had been melted by fire. “Kevin Durant or no Kevin Durant, when is the parade? I don’t want no fuckin’ parade. The last one kept me from church.”
Note
[1]. The author gratefully thanks Susan Kepner for allowing him to adapt and quote from her poem “Grandma, Albert Einstein, and You.”