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G is for Gorey
E Is for Edward: A Centennial Celebration of the Mischievous Mind of Edward Gorey
By Gregory Hischak
Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 384 pp., $60
In his youth, the future author, illustrator, costume designer, and balletomane Edward St. John Gorey (1925-2000) was possessed of a fondness for insects, going so far as to rescue the earwigs inadvertently introduced into the Gorey household as they clung to bouquet flowers and filler plants. This sort of behavior is not unknown in creative types — think of Blake, Maeterlinck, Durrell, Nabokov, or the Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, who as a child was known to leave lumps of sugar on the windowsills, so that the houseflies would “have strength for the winter.”
Somewhere in this absurdity, sinister and twee in equal measure, a salutary lesson just might be lurking.
And like many of his fellow authors and artists, Gorey’s regard for all creeping things that creep upon the earth did not wane with the coming of adulthood. “I am really more and more tolerant to all insect life, as life goes on,” he wrote to a friend later in life, and the prospect of setting out ant traps in his home on Cape Cod filled him with a stomach-churning mixture of dread and pity.
Such tender feelings towards hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta constitutes grist for the psychoanalytical mill. Might his cherished earwigs and other minibeasts — the likes of which would later appear in masterpieces like the hilarious The Bug Book (1959) and the sinister The Insect God (1963) — have been unconscious symbols of fears, repressed thoughts, or unwanted aspects of the self? Alternatively, might his gentleness towards them been a way of embracing a sense of otherness, through creatures that represent the Unheimlich, the uncanny? But we are not here to psychoanalyze our subject, wary as we are of attempts to subject the dead, or the living for that matter, to the questionable theories of depth psychology.
Besides, Edward Gorey would be a particularly challenging case study. There was always something preternaturally unreal about Gorey, who felt, in his words, that “other people exist in a way I don’t,” and that “I look like a real person, but underneath I am not real at all.” He would sign his letters “Ted (I think),” and admitted that there “is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe that I do.”
This does not mean that Gorey suffered from something like Cotard’s syndrome, and genuinely thought of himself as a walking corpse, but rather that he was a man very much out of time and place, his morbid art so influenced by Victorian and Edwardian motifs that when he passed away at the turn of the millennium, not a few readers of his obituary expressed astonishment, having been under the impression that he belonged to an extinct generation and had been dead already for decades, if not longer. There is a reason that Mark Derry gave his 2018 Gorey biography the altogether fitting title Born to Be Posthumous.
While we cannot pretend to understand the inner workings of Gorey’s enigmatic mind, we do have his works, which remain as popular as ever. How often have we, in our household, with our rather old-fashioned sensibilities, read and re-read The Unstrung Harp, The Doubtful Guest, The Beastly Baby, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Epileptic Bicycle, and The Raging Tide: Or, The Black Doll’s Imbroglio. And how often have we, in our balletomaniacal household, pored over The Gilded Bat, The Lavender Leotard, and Scènes de Ballet. Clearly we are not alone.
The centenary of his birth has witnessed a profusion of published works commemorating that most un-American of American artists, including Carol Verburg’s Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey: Rare Drawings, Scripts, and Stories, Tom Fitzharris’s From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey, and most recently Gregory Hischak’s E Is for Edward: A Centennial Celebration of the Mischievous Mind of Edward Gorey, the latter of which, aside from being gorgeously produced and appealingly irreverent, is an excellent place for Gorey neophytes to begin their exploration of his macabre artistic and literary universe, though it is also worthwhile for Gorey connoisseurs, who will find a wealth of hitherto unavailable material. And what better time is there than now, with autumn in full swing and the wind soughing through the trees, bringing down a shower of dead leaves, to enjoy that uniquely uncanny Gorey atmosphere?
Mr. Hischak, presently the Director of the Edward Gorey House and an accomplished writer and book artist in his own right, has organized the retrospective in the manner of a guided tour through various exhibits at the artist’s museum in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, a welcome approach for those of us who have not had the privilege to make it out to Gorey’s beloved “Elephant House” in Old Yarmouth.
There are chapters on Gorey’s childhood, his love for animals, his obsession with Golden Age of Detective Fiction (many if not most readers will recognize Gorey from his 1980 intro to PBS Mystery!), his mania for George Balanchine’s minimalist compositions at the New York City Ballet, his sense of fashion, and his nonsense verse, the best since Edward Lear, after whom he fashioned much of his personal and professional aesthetic.
We learn about his preferred drawing nibs, namely Gillot Tit Quill nibs, which went out of production in the 1980s, leaving Gorey bereft and forced to content himself with the far inferior Hunt #104 nibs. (One should not underestimate the importance of finding the right nib; the cartoonists Ronald Searle and André François were known to scour the flea markets of Paris in search of acceptable nibs, and it seems Gorey never fully recovered from the loss of his prized crow-quill nibs and the exquisite hairlines they made possible.)
The influence of French silent films like Léonce Perret’s L’Enfant de Paris (1913) on Gorey’s books is given an extended treatment; as Hischak writes, “Stylistically, his drawings tend to follow the visual motifs of early silent film, with a rigid preference for the medium-shot tableau and the avoidance of establishing shots or close-ups.” And sure enough, Gorey’s 1961 triumph The Hapless Child is like the storyboard for the greatest silent film never made. And, crucially, the impact Balanchine had on Gorey is thoroughly explored:
Ambiguity built atop a linear footprint defines Balanchine’s and Gorey’s work equally. As a draftsman, Gorey builds his art atop interlocking and overlaying lines — all conforming to a solid foundational graphic premise. As a storyteller, he uses familiar characters for the basis of his tales — the orphan, the innocent, the cad, the suspect, the goddess-maiden-vamp — all recognizable archetypes that allow the reader to settle in with some expectation from which one is quickly led, not unpleasantly, astray.
Particularly noteworthy in this respect is The Deranged Cousin (1971), which tells the story of the unconventional lives and untimely deaths of Rose Marshmary, Mary Rosemarsh, and Marsh Maryrose, is a sort of “mash-up of a Little Golden Book and a magnificent Balanchine pas de trios,” notable for the “euphoria of interlocked strokes that weave madly around the rigidly elastic trio,” producing something that “works both as dance and as Nonsense.”
The secret to Gorey’s success, and for reason of the sheer relish with which so many continue to devour his one hundred and sixteen books, is not so much his mastery of line, or his ingenious nonsense verse, but the unforgettable atmosphere he conjured up, the tone that he himself described as “sinister cozy.” Gorey created his own universe, a mash-up of Victorian and Edwardian motifs and manners, with an eerie ambience alone worth the price of admission.
Hischak correctly identifies The West Wing (1963), originally titled The Book of What Is in the Other World, as the apotheosis of Gorey’s art, a collection of thirty haunting images, devoid of any captions, that nonetheless amount to a sort of narrative. Described in Hischak’s retrospective as “an album of dreamlike menace,” The West Wing offers a haunting vision of a liminal space that is “not real life, and not afterlife, but the rooms and halls you move through to get from one to the other.”
Edward Gorey’s body of work was mercifully devoid of anything remotely political. The closest one gets to topical content is The Loathsome Couple (1977), inspired by the Moors Murders of the 1960s, or perhaps the wrought-iron sign reading Eintritt Frei! in The Evil Garden (1966), suggestive of the gateway into Auschwitz. Gorey was averse to the technological and cultural developments of the 20th century, and sought solace in an alternate version of the past over which he could exert control. I am reminded of the words of yet another talented twentieth century writer and illustrator, Max Beerbohm, who likewise found refuge in the past:
Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, selecting and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all of them art interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared — all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There is nothing to be done about it — nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.
Gorey was not content, however, merely to contemplate the past and form grand theories about it. With his impossibly refined aesthetic sensibilities, he borrowed from the literature of the Victorians, the illustrative arts of the fin-de-siècle Decadents, the fashion of the Edwardians, the ballets of the Romanovs, the murder mysteries of the interwar period, the ukiyo-e woodblock prints of Edo Japan, and the classics of silent cinema, and conjured up an entire universe out of them, one all his own, but one in which his devoted readers are fortunate enough to share.
Edward Gorey, aka Ogdred Weary, Dogear Wryde, Regera Dowdy, Groeda Weyrd, Wardore Edgy, and all the other more or less anagrammatical names under which he produced his works, was famously uncomfortable with the notion of readers or critics searching for hidden significations in his work, warning that “when people are finding meaning in things — beware.”
Still, looking at the frontispiece to possibly his finest collection of works, Amphigorey Again, it is hard not to perceive some kind of message. A woman in a flapper-style dress sits aside a fetid bog, beneath a curiously upturned crescent moon, surrounded by mustachioed Edwardian male figures perched on the vignette’s decorative frame as they juggle, dangle a yo-yo, launch a paper airplane, and play a cup-and-ball game. The captions reads: Frivolity, at the edge of a Moral Swamp, hears Hymn Singing in the Distance and dons the Galoshes of Remorse.
Somewhere in this absurdity, sinister and twee in equal measure, a salutary lesson just might be lurking. It all depends on your interpretation of that mysterious hymn drifting from beyond the reaches of the moral swamp besides which we, in our plastic and fluorescent modern-day world barren of ghosts and poetry and atmosphere, are obliged to live. Regardless, we remain free to visit Gorey’s far more atmospheric world, whensoever we like, and make of it what we will.
READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:
Brain Rot and the Crisis of Digital Late Modernity
A Mighty Fortissimo: Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka
The Ahistorical Nonsense of the BBC’s King & Conqueror
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