Gorey and O'Hara quickly made their reputations as the campus dandies, evoking the looks and mannerisms of Oscar Wilde. They read novels by Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett, trolled used bookstores and furnished their campus apartment with white modern garden furniture, including a chaise longue and a coffee table made from a tombstone taken from Mount Auburn cemetery. Gorey was frequently spotted sitting atop their table, designing wallpaper -- a harbinger of the baroque Edwardiana to come.

After college, Gorey installed himself in New York. He worked in publishing as a book-jacket illustrator and became a permanent fur-coated, bearded and white-sneakered fixture at the New York State Theater; for nearly 30 years he missed nary a performance of the ballets of Balanchine, whom he referred to as his "god."

Gorey took quite a while before he saw any clear direction to his life's work. In 1998, he told the Boston Globe: "I wanted to have my own bookstore until I worked in one. Then I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones. I hoped to get into publishing, but at 28, my parents were still helping me out. Which wasn't good at all."

After the death of Balanchine, in 1983, Gorey saw little beauty left for him in New York, and that same year he relocated to a ramshackle farmhouse on Cape Cod, Mass., where he's lived ever since as a lifelong bachelor. His only permanent companionship is provided by a flock of cats and, according to visitors, poison ivy that grows through cracks in the walls. The house is stuffed with his various collections -- including "sandpaper drawings," a mixture of charcoal and sand popular with Victorian ladies; tiny teddy bears; a toilet with a tabletop next to the fireplace and, not surprisingly, photographs of dead children from crime scenes. He holds court at Jack's Outback, a cafe near his house. (One interviewer spotted a Gorey-esque placard above the tip jar that read, "Do not forget the widows and orphans.") He never travels -- not even to see productions or exhibits of his work, which have been put on with some regularity since 1978.

He seems to delight in engaging his interviewers with the unspeakable horrors of his life. For example, here he is in 1992, talking to the Boston Globe: "I'm suffering from bronchitis at the moment. Psychosomatic bronchitis, I'm sure. But nevertheless, it's bronchitis. Oh it's all too much, too grim, too lovely, too -- how should I put this? It's general chaos."

And in 1994, at age 69, to the New York Times, soon after he was told he had prostate cancer: "I thought, 'Oh gee, why haven't I burst into total screaming hysterics?'" His answer: "I'm the opposite of hypochondriacal. I'm not entirely enamored of the idea of living forever."

And in 1998 to Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times: "Oh well, you know. I'm just sitting here in an ever-increasing pile of debris. No, I'm just sitting here, coughing."

Gorey belongs on the short list of canonical 20th century artists. The problem is, he seems to be in a canon of one. This isn't his problem: It's the problem of all the rest of us who seem unable to fit "visual artist" and "writer" in the same breath, much less the same person. But the question Gorey raises is why we make such distinctions in the first place.

In the 1950s, when Gorey was establishing himself as a young artist, the New York school and abstract expressionism dominated the art world; art was a manly, gin-soaked profession for men like Jackson Pollock, who could swipe a canvas with the same power with which he swatted his wife. Illustration was a tiny art, a mere hobby, a thing for women, children and effete men -- best kept to fashion magazine illustration, children's books and book jackets (a field that Gorey himself participated in). There are some exceptions: Jean Cocteau illustrated his word portraits with calligraphic swirls, but his drawings were seen more as an embellishment than as a necessary part of the story. In this world, Gorey's closest contemporaries were the cartoonists: Charles Addams was another '50s artist who combined the macabre with high-brow ennui.

If no one else can fathom the work, Gorey reasoned, publish it yourself, which is exactly what he did with much of his writing at his own Fantod Press. (A fantod is described by Webster's as the "fidgets" and by Gorey as "the vapors, the nervous tizzies." Fantods have also shown up in his work as small, winged creatures stuffed in bell jars.) Today, an early edition can go for as much as $750; an original print for $5,000.

Not surprisingly, one of Gorey's early self-published volumes was the sexually explicit -- which means utterly inexplicit by current standards -- "The Curious Sofa." Indeed, in his work, pornography, like horror, is made all the more shocking by virtue of its taking place in the wings. In "The Curious Sofa," the imaginative romps and devices ("thumbfumble," the "Lithuanian Typewriter") are all the nastier for being absolutely indecipherable. It calls to mind the hullaballoo raised last year over a single line in Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full," where two lovers did "that thing with a cup."

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