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.
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.