Born to Be Posthumous. Mark Dery
Truth to tell, Mura was born Corynne Constance Wall in Brown-wood, Texas, to David and Lillian Wall (née Jones). (Mura is what muro, Spanish for “wall,” would be, presumably, if the noun were feminine.) Her Latina persona satisfied white America’s racial fantasy of a colorful yet unthreatening otherness—“a dignified American girl” who “has the gay manner of a Latin” (as a newspaper profile put it), “cultured” enough to sing opera yet still “Mex” enough to take audiences on a journey down Mexico way.43 That said, her passion for the musical traditions and cultures of Latin America was sincere. She toured South America, where “they absolutely loved her,” according to her daughter Yvonne “Kiki” Reynolds—testimony not only to her virtuosity but to her genuine rapport with her audiences as well, since she didn’t speak a word of Spanish. (She learned her Spanish-language songs phonetically.)
On July 2, 1937, Ed Gorey was in Austin, Texas, “getting married— quietly,” he told a friend in a letter.44 By October of that year, Ted and his mother were on their way to Florida. He plotted their road trip in green crayon on the map in his travel diary. As always, he confides next to nothing to his diary, despite being uprooted, yet again, from his home and friends and despite the emotional upheaval of his parents’ divorce and his grandfather’s death. (Benjamin St. John Garvey had died the day after Ted’s birthday in 1936, shortly after speaking to his grandson on the phone.)
Arriving in Miami in November of ’37, Ted and his mother moved in with Helen’s sister Ruth—then Ruth Garvey Reark—and her children, Joyce and John (called Jack). The Rearks were living in the house Gorey’s grandmother Mary Ellis Blocksom Garvey had bought after she and Benjamin divorced. The Goreys lived in the one-bedroom, one-bathroom “independent suite,” which had a screened porch of its own.45 (It’s worth noting that, for a boy on the cusp of puberty, sharing a bedroom with his mother may have been more than a little awkward.)
On first impression, Ted struck his Reark cousins as a cosseted creature—Little Lord Fauntleroy, if he’d been “raised in a high-rise in Chicago” and “doted on by females” is how Joyce puts it. “We picked on him some,” she allows, recalling that her aunt Helen was “rather appalled at my brother and me. My mother always thought [Ted’s mother] was overprotective…. Prue and Helen just doted on Ted. She didn’t think it was good—too much feminine influence. He needed to get away from Mama, maybe.” Joyce vividly remembers Aunt Helen solemnly instructing her niece and nephew that her little wonder’s IQ was 165. “I remember being a little resentful when we were told what his IQ was…. My first reaction was, ‘Well, I don’t think he’s that special!’”
Helen’s insistence that the Rearks regard her fair-haired prodigy with appropriate awe notwithstanding, Joyce has fond memories of Ted. “He was fun,” she says. “We played card games and we rode our bikes to school. Ted seemed to fit in [at Robert E. Lee Junior High].” He kept a baby alligator as a pet, which wasn’t unusual in Miami in those days, says Joyce. “They’re relatively harmless when they’re babies. You’d just put it in the canal when you were tired of it.”
Of Ted’s inner life during the five and a half months he lived in Miami we know next to nothing. Entering the hormone-addled years of adolescence, he showed no sign that his thoughts were turning to romance. As always, the objects of his affection were cats. His five-year diary reads like a case history of an obsession, with its “biographical sketch” of his cat Oscar and his breathless daily updates about Mrs. Reid’s newborn kittens.46 Cats, like books, were always there for Ted, offering uncomplicated affection and escape from the vexing complexities of human society.
But even cats could be a source of anxiety. The threat of euthanasia is ever present in his diary entries. He never knew if his kitten Goofy would have to be chloroformed because he couldn’t be housebroken or if Susie II, the cute little tiger cat who “would chase [a] ball like [a] dog and bring it back,” would have to be “put out of the way” after just four months because her “nervous system [was] broken down.”47 Diary entries solemnize the parade of little deaths. “One year ago today Bingo died,” writes Ted on March 21; a drawing of a cross on what appears to be a burial plot accompanies the entry. A year ago that day, “Bingo’s ear infection spread to brain, paralyzing front legs. Was put out of the way. Pretty broken up!”48
On April 18, 1938, having graduated from Robert E. Lee that March, Ted returned to Chicago. Helen rented rooms in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments in the city’s Old Town neighborhood, then moved, in the fall of ’39, to a high-rise apartment at 2620 North Lake-view.
This time they would stay put: apart from his time in the army, Ted lived there until he packed his bags for Harvard in September of ’46; Helen would call 2620 North Lakeview home until she moved to the Cape in the mid-’70s.
Chances are she picked that address because it was convenient—a walk of about a half dozen blocks—to the Francis W. Parker School, where, a year earlier, thirteen-year-old Ted had entered the ninth grade. It was there that Gorey’s sense of himself as an artist would take shape. At Parker, the outlines of the Gorey persona—eccentrically brilliant, quick with the offhand quip, charismatic and sociable yet unselfconsciously himself—would come into focus.
The Parker Gorey attended was housed in a picturesque pile in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. “The building looked like a Gorey,” says Paul Richard, a Parker alumnus (class of ’57) and, from 1967 to 2009, art critic for the Washington Post. There were “little secret compartments where you could hide in the different rooms,” he recalls, “and every classroom [was] a different shape and size. It had a kind of spooky quality, especially if you had an imagination.” It’s unthinkable, says Richard, that a kid like Gorey—fond of mysteries, drawn to the gothic—didn’t soak up the building’s cozy spookiness.
A private institution, the school was founded in 1901 by Colonel Francis Wayland Parker, an enlightened educator who was staunchly opposed to the notion of the K–12 system as an assembly line for mass-producing standardized minds. Happily for Gorey, the arts were central to the Parker curriculum, a by-product of the colonel’s belief that education must serve the whole child, fostering not only intellectual growth but civic engagement, aesthetic appreciation, and self-expression, too.
Gorey would have been Gorey even without Parker’s influence, but the school’s celebration of creativity, its embrace of interdisciplinary thinking, its foundational faith in the importance of making room for every style of mind to bloom—“Everything to help and nothing to hinder” was the colonel’s maxim—undoubtedly played a part in making Gorey the artist he was, encouraging his restless intelligence, emboldening him in his intellectual idiosyncrasies, nurturing his growing sense of himself as an artist.49
The teacher who, more than any other, brought out the nascent artist in students like Gorey was Parker’s self-appointed liaison to bohemia, Malcolm Hackett. A big man whose “strong, handsome face” was dominated, as a worshipful student recalled, by “deep-set eyes” and a bushy mustache, Hackett worked the van-Gogh-of-the-WPA shtick to the hilt, wearing lumberjack shirts and loose-fitting cotton pants and sandals at a time when teachers, even art teachers, wore suits and ties.50
Gorey’s signature getup, in his New York years, recalls Hackett’s insistence that “artist” isn’t just a job description but an all-consuming identity, too, reflected in the way you dress. Playfully quirky (as opposed to calculatedly shocking), the classic Gorey look was every bit as self-consciously “artistic” as Oscar Wilde’s famous “aesthetic lecturing costume” of velvet jacket and knee breeches. In fact, Gorey’s New York persona is a textbook illustration of the Wildean truism “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”51 (This holds true, in spades, for Gorey’s art.) Hackett urged his students to stretch their minds by seeking out the work of timeless masters like Titian, Goya, and Manet at the Art Institute and, at showcases for vanguard art such as the Arts Club of Chicago, the work of modernists like the Viennese expressionist Oskar Kokoschka and the morbid magical realist Ivan Albright. But no less important, he preached, was the gospel truth that art isn’t just something you