His eccentric appearance belied a shy, reserved nature. “Giving big parties and carrying on, listening to records of musicals and singing along to them” wasn’t Gorey’s style.Īs always, Gorey defied binaries. “He was flamboyant in a much more witty and bizarre way that normal queens weren’t,” says Osgood. Even so, he wasn’t some shrieking caricature of pre-Stonewall queerness. He affected a world-weariness and tossed off deadpan pronouncements with a knowing tone, an irony he underscored with broad, be-still-my-heart gestures-“all the flapping around he did,” a fellow dorm resident called it. Swanning around campus in his signature getup of sneakers and a long canvas coat with a sheepskin collar, fingers heavy with rings, Gorey was the odds-on favorite for campus bohemian, with the emphasis on odd. “One of the things that struck me about him and made me, in my philistine way, sort of giggle at him was one of his little fingernails was about three inches long. “Ted never stood in line for anything without a book in his hands,” says Osgood. He was standing in line to buy a ticket to a performance by the Martha Graham Company when he noticed a “tall, willowy man” with his nose in a little book. He was wearing rings on his fingers.” Larry Osgood, a year behind Ted, shared Montgomery’s double-take reaction the first time he saw Gorey.
“He seemed very, very tall, with his hair plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor. “I remember the first day Ted Gorey came into the dining hall I thought he was the oddest person I’d ever seen,” said George Montgomery. Insatiable in his cultural cravings, all-embracing in his tastes, unreserved in his opinions, O’Hara was in many ways Gorey’s intellectual double, down to the fanatical balletomania. At the same time, he shared Ted’s passion for pop culture, which for O’Hara meant the comic strip Blondie, hit songs by Sinatra and the big-band trumpeter Harry James, and, most of all, film: he was an ardent moviegoer, papering his bedroom walls with pictures of popcorn Venuses like Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth. Like Gorey, O’Hara was fluent in modern art, bristling with opinions on Picasso, Klee, Calder, and Kandinsky. By 1944, when he enlisted in the navy, he’d become “something of an expert on the latest developments in 20th-century avant-garde music, art, and literature,” mostly by way of his own autodidactic curriculum, Gooch writes. But the most obvious evidence that he and Gorey were cast in the same mold was O’Hara’s “drive for knowing about all the arts,” an impulse that “was as tireless as it was unfocused,” according to his biographer Brad Gooch, who adds that “he showed a genius, early on, for being in the know”-another Goreyan quality. He, too, was Irish Catholic, but whereas Ted had slipped the traces of a Catholic upbringing early on, O’Hara had all the post-traumatic baggage of the lapsed Catholic: “It’s well known that God and I don’t get along together,” he wisecracked in one of his poems. Like Gorey, he’d come to Harvard on the GI Bill. Brilliant, intellectually combative, lightning quick with a witty comeback, O’Hara was a virtuoso conversationalist who turned cocktail-party repartee into an improvisatory art.
Frank O’Hara, his upstairs neighbor in Mower B-21, would go on to fame as a leading light in the New York School of poets (which included John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, both Harvardians as well). In his first month at Harvard, Gorey met a fellow veteran and fledgling poet with whom he soon formed a two-man counterculture.
His roommates were Alan Lindsay and Bruce Martin McIntyre, about whom we know zilch, as he would say. Gorey’s new home was suite B-12, on the ground floor, a no-frills affair with two bedrooms giving onto a common study room with three desks and a fireplace.
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Mower, a small red-brick building completed in 1925, has its own courtyard, a patch of tree-shaded green that gives it a secluded feel. Edward Gorey, like all incoming freshmen, had been assigned to one of the residence halls around Harvard Yard.