My ‘horror moments’ examine horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. They are published weekly on Thursdays and come out in series of ten articles focussing on a particular source e.g. ‘Wallace & Gromit,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘Kate Bush Songs’. Catch up with the current series on Edward Gorey here and browse the full back catalogue of horror moments here.
Those of a delicate disposition are advised to avoid fainting on this particular couch…
In today’s penultimate ‘horror moment’ in the current Edward Gorey series, we encounter a parody of sexually explicit literary memoirs. Welcome to The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary (1961). ‘Ogdred Weary’ is, of course, one of Edward Gorey’s many anagrammatical pseudonyms.
Gorey intended this particular book to be read adults only and was baffled when parents told him that their children had found it funny. To an extremely naïve mind, it’s just the tale of a young woman having a wonderful time at a house party and being introduced to an unusual piece of furniture. There is no explicit imagery, and I suppose you could get away with giving it to your kids — but I really wouldn’t advise it.
The joke of the book is that Gorey tests the boundaries of euphemism until they have entirely collapsed, putting the filthiest scenes imaginable not onto the page but into our mind’s eye. It opens with:
“Alice was eating grapes in the park when Herbert, an extremely well-endowed young man, introduced himself to her.”
What exactly is Herbert holding in his right hand as she eyes him slyly from the bench? What exactly is the taxi-cab driver smirking at as Herbert introduces Alice to something she ‘had never done before’ in the back seat? Note the hand in the taxi window holding up a single grape: eating grapes is a deliberately strained metaphor throughout the book.
Alice and Herbert arrive at the home of his aunt Lady Celia and they proceed to indulge in all sorts of jolly fun, from a game of ‘thumblefumble’ to perusing some ‘instructive chromolithographs.’ More and more guests join them.
As the story unfolds, Gorey seems to be daring us to keep pretending that there isn’t a wild orgy taking place just beyond the snapshots we are shown. It feels as if the punchline will be a reveal that this was all perfectly innocent all along and it was only our minds that were dirty…
Instead, the story ends with a different kind of twist. It starts to feel as if something nasty is being foreshadowed when Sir Egbert offers ‘to show them his famous sofa.’ Alice ‘felt a shudder of nameless apprehension,’ but her openminded curiosity compels her once again to follow where her hosts lead.
The sofa ‘stood in a windowless room lined with polar bear fur.’ It begins to dawn on us that there is something not just pornographic but criminal about its workings. Why else would it be stored so secretively in a soundproof room?
Just as we’re getting out head around what a nine-legged seven-armed sofa might look like or be useful for, Gorey gives us two terrifying final panels:
As Alice realises ‘what was about to happen’ and begins ‘to scream uncontrollable’ we are left with the tantalisingly innocent-looking end of the sofa and a discarded bunch of grapes, that motif that had represented Alice’s sexual awakening. We’ve moved beyond that kind of transgression now, Gorey seems to be saying, the true intentions of her new friends are far darker.
Far more overtly than The Insect God, The Curious Sofa plays into the idea that the upper classes are up to something wicked, that their orgiastic pleasures are always on the cusp of degenerating into violence. It’s interesting that, on the front cover, we can see feet poking out at unnatural angles from the sofa, are some of these from the same person? If so then their body has been unusually distorted.
The book as a whole illustrates a principle I have talked about in this newsletter before, that the unseen and unexplained is often far more frightening than the explicit. The word ‘obscene’ is itself sometimes thought to have come from Ancient Greek tragedies when murders were committed ‘ob scaena’ or off stage.
To stick with the classical theme, this question of ‘how much do we show’ lay at the heart of the absolute mess of a film that is Caligula (1979). This ‘erotic historical drama’ was originally conceived by screenwriter Gore Vidal and director Tinto Brass as an unflinching exploration of how power corrupts. Producer Bob Guccione had other ideas, He was the founder of the men’s magazine Penthouse, and decided that what people really wanted was more explicit sexual content. He shot additional scenes with adult performers and pasted them into the film with total disregard for narrative or artistic clarity. Thus a movie which stars Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell ended up spliced together with, well…porn.
To be fair, Caligula was already full of ahistorical excess and even Tinto Brass’ scenes often seemed to answer the question ‘how much do we show’ with ‘everything, and then some.’ It wasn’t enough, for example, that Caligula indiscriminately killed political prisoners, we have to see him beheading buried people with a giant…um…evil Roman lawnmower?
A better example of a horrifying killing machine from the ancient world is the Greek myth of Procrustes’ bed, a piece of frightening furniture that reminds me very much of The Curious Sofa. Procrustes is a villain who mocks the laws of hospitality by offering his guests a night’s rest on a special bed that will always fit the sleeper perfectly.
The twist is that the bed fits you because Procrustes either chops you down to fit it or pulls you apart to stretch you to size like a medieval rack. The hero Theseus finally puts an end to his reign of terror by fitting Procrustes to his own bed. In most versions of the tale, the narrator refrains from telling us whether he was too short or too long. Although we know a little more about what makes the bed so dangerous compared with Gorey’s sofa, the details of Procrustes’ end are left to our imaginations.
The Curious Sofa is Gorey’s send-up of lurid erotic memoirs like the work of the Marquis de Sade or Anne Desclos, which catalogue sex and violence in lurid detail. Gorey, who expressed an apathy towards sex throughout his life, found such novels interminably dull, objecting on artistic rather than moral grounds.
Gorey’s biographer, Mark Dery says of the tale ‘like so many horror stories, it’s conservative at heart, ending on a parochial-school note: immorality is sternly punished.’ I’m not sure I entirely agree with this, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide what moral, if any, we should draw. I think Gorey is primarily interested in the fun that can be had when you manipulate a reader’s curiosity. He’s using both the suggestion of sex and the suggestion of violence to test whether we really want to look beyond the prim little panels of the narrative. He is demonstrating how the unseen can be much more titillating and terrifying than the seen.
Gorey once joked “I think it’s really about a girl who’s got an obsession for grapes more than anything else.”
You can read the whole story here. Next week, what does the future hold? Misery, melancholy, and doom of course as we explore fortune telling, Edward Gorey style. Until then, happy nightmares everyone!
Horror moments are published on Thursdays and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.
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I am now obsessed with hoping that Alice was screaming at what was happening to other people rather than what was happening to her; i mean, probably bad either way but since they're complete strangers still & I nonsensically feel like Alice and I are fellow travelers by this point ...
Plus trying to figure out if the arms and legs referred to people on the sofa, and if the machinery chopped them up woodchipper style or opened a gate to another dimension from which some demon devoured them, and/or if it got poor Alice too, if that last instance.
All of which goes to confirm the power of hinting, I suppose!
Classic Gorey! I love how much he only hints at things. I remember watching an extra once where Alan Arkin explained that for Wait Until Dark he realized it amps up the horror if you leave certain things unsaid and unseen. That advice has stayed with me over the years and that sense of foreboding brought about by the unknown is something I try to emulate in my own stories...
As for Procrustes I can only say, judging by that urn, he seems like he was an incredibly ahem, well-formed young man 👀👀