Edward Gorey, like all
incoming freshmen, had been assigned to one of the residence halls
around Harvard Yard. 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. 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. His roommates were Alan Lindsay and Bruce
Martin McIntyre, about whom we know zilch, as he would say.
In his first month at Harvard, Gorey met a
fellow veteran and fledgling poet with whom he soon formed a two-man
counterculture. 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).
Brilliant, intellectually combative, lightning quick with a witty
comeback, O’Hara was a virtuoso conversationalist who turned
cocktail-party repartee into an improvisatory art.
Like Gorey, he’d come to
Harvard on the GI Bill. 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. 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. 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. Like
Gorey, O’Hara was fluent in modern art, bristling with opinions on
Picasso, Klee, Calder, and Kandinsky. 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. 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.
The two were soon
inseparable. They made a Mutt-and-Jeff pair on campus, O’Hara with his
domed forehead and bent, aquiline nose, broken by a childhood bully,
walking on his toes and stretching his neck to add an inch or two to his
five-foot-seven height, Gorey towering over him at six two, “tall and
spooky looking,” in the words of a schoolmate. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/edward-gorey-frank-ohara-and-harvards-gay-underground/
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