Mail Bonding—Collaborations
1967–72
Gorey and Peter Neumeyer on the buoy in Barnstable Harbor, sometime between September ’68 and October ’69. (Photograph by Harry Stanton. Used by permission of Peter Neumeyer. This photograph first appeared in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter Neumeyer, Pomegranate, 2011.)
NURTURED BY BROWN’S TIRELESS PROMOTION, the Gorey cult grew steadily in the ’60s and ’70s. His little books helped spread the gospel, as did his freelance illustrations, which never stopped rolling off his one-man assembly line. In 1967 alone, while teaching “Children’s Picture Books” at the School of Visual Arts, he turned out covers and interior illustrations for The Christmas Bower by Polly Redford, an anticonsumerism parable that required a flock of exotic birds, handled with painstaking ornithological exactitude; Son of the Martini Cookbook by Jane Trahey and Daren Pierce, a boozy humor title that found the usual Gorey characters getting blotto at chic ’60s cocktail parties; and Brer Rabbit and His Tricks, Ennis Rees’s retelling of the classic folktales accompanied by Gorey drawings done with an uncharacteristically frisky line and fleshed out, in watercolor, with an equally out-of-character palette of goldenrod and terra-cotta.
That year Gorey published just one title of his own, The Utter Zoo. The third of his five abecedaria, it is a descendant of the medieval bestiary (fantastical compendia of beasts—real, rumored, and mythological—that crossed natural history with Christian allegory). As well, it owes a debt to poetic bestiaries such as Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, Lear’s alphabet books, and maybe even Dr. Seuss’s zany If I Ran the Zoo (1950), with its Tizzle-Topped Tufted Mazurkas and Wild Bippo-No-Bunguses.
There are parallels to modern art, too: looked at from the right angle, Gorey’s arrangements of spiderwebby line, white space, and stippled or crosshatched solids are reminiscent of abstract compositions by Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. If the comparison seems strained, consider this aperçu from a review of Amphigorey: “Developmentally, Gorey has been moving away from the more overt (though not unsubtle) humor of the first book collected here, The Unstrung Harp, toward the sort of white-on-white, black-on-black statements of minimal art.”1
As for the text, The Utter Zoo is wordplay for wordplay’s sake at its whimsical best. We meet all manner of Goreyesque beasts whose names roll around on the tongue as satisfyingly as gobstoppers: the fitful Epitwee; the Ippagoggy, which subsists on paste and glue; the Yawfle, a heap of hair with beady eyes that stares unblinkingly at nothing.a
Beneath the Learian nonsense, there’s a psychological subtext to The Utter Zoo. Many of the chimerical creatures share personality traits with the author: some are shy and reclusive (“The Boggerslosh conceals itself / In back of bottles on a shelf”; the Dawbis “shuns the gaze of passers-by”); some face the world with the same inscrutable affect Gorey wore in journalistic photos (“The Fidknop is devoid of feeling”; the Mork has “no expression on its face”); some stuff their homes full of hoarded curios (“The Gawdge is understood to save / All sorts of objects in its cave”). One, the euphoniously named Ombledroom, sports a Goreyesque earring in one ear and is “vast and…visible by night,” like our large, attention-getting friend in fur coat and Keds at ballet intermissions. Most affecting of all is the Zote, the only one of its kind, as Gorey surely was. And then there’s the title, with its echoes of “too utterly utter,” the phrase used to mock Wildean aesthetes; it makes us wonder if this book about weird beings is also about those who see themselves as Other.
Fascinatingly, Gorey wrote a review that same year, for the Chicago Tribune, of a book called Animal Gardens, Emily Hahn’s study of the cultural politics of zoos. The only book review he ever published, it offers convincing evidence that he would have made an able critic if he’d turned his hand to reviewing books instead of writing them. His review goes straight to the heart of the matter: animal rights. Zoos, he argues, are a cruel kindness. Boredom takes its toll on wild things in captivity; forcing them to perform makes them anxious; permitting the public to feed them can be fatal, since, “innocently or not,” animals are sometimes poisoned.2 Yet for all their faults, zoos may be many species’ last, best hope for survival, Gorey concedes. “Human greed, cruelty and stupidity have wiped out numerous species in the past,” he writes. “As the world’s human population grows, more and more of the animals’ natural habitats will be polluted and destroyed, and they will be able to survive only in zoos.”3
The idea of animal rights wouldn’t enter the public conversation until 1975, when the philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. Well in advance of social trends, Gorey reveals a deep sympathy for nonhuman beings.
* * *
Actually, Gorey did produce another book in ’67, though it was a collaborative effort. Published, like The Utter Zoo, by Meredith Press, Fletcher and Zenobia was Gorey’s rewrite of a story by the illustrator Victoria Chess. She “had written a version expressly so that she could illustrate it,” Gorey recalled. The publisher “loved the drawings but felt the text was unsatisfactory. So they asked me to write her a text. I kept the plot but transformed Zenobia from a human being into a doll. It was too spooky having a real live person hatched from an egg.”4
Fletcher and Zenobia is the magical-realist tale of a cat named Fletcher who finds himself stranded in a skyscrapingly tall tree, which he’d scrambled up “in a moment of thoughtless abandon.”5 (A very Gorey phrase.) A quirky, headstrong antique doll named Zenobia hatches out of a papier-mâché egg, they dance the night away in the treetops, and the two friends fly away “to the great world” astride a giant moth. Mirroring Chess’s art, with its riotous detail and eye-popping palette, Gorey’s text is richly descriptive, almost hallucinatory in its supersaturated colors and gustatory delights: “Zenobia had baked a lemon cake with five layers, which she covered with raspberry icing and walnuts and decorated with green and blue candles.”
With its lyrical, dreamy air, the book is unlike anything in Gorey’s oeuvre, not only because it, like its 1971 sequel, Fletcher and Zenobia Save the Circus, was illustrated by another artist but also because the narrative scaffolding isn’t his. Still, his voice seeps into the story. When we hear echoes of an unhappy childhood—Zenobia was traumatized by her former owner, “an unfeeling child” named Mabel, who, “you will not be surprised to learn[,]…had fat wrists”—we know we’re hearing Gorey.
* * *
“On the whole, I enjoy collaborating with people,” Gorey told an interviewer who asked about the Fletcher and Zenobia books. “They usually produce the text, and I do the drawings without consulting them.”6
In the summer of ’68, he met the collaborator of a lifetime, Peter Neumeyer, with whom he would consult—intensely. The two men crammed the creation of three children’s books into thirteen months, from September ’68 to October ’69: Donald and the…, Donald Has a Difficulty, and Why We Have Day and Night (published, respectively, in 1969, ’70, and ’70 by Addison-Wesley, Gorey’s own Fantod Press, and Young Scott Books). Gorey found Neumeyer more congenial to his mind than anyone he’d ever met; an intellectual intimacy sprang up between the two almost instantly, fueled by postcards and letters that flew thick and fast.b
Neumeyer, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was writing a textbook for freshman English classes. Harry Stanton, his editor at Addison-Wesley, visited him at home to discuss the book. Returning from the kitchen with glasses of bourbon, Neumeyer found Stanton brandishing a spiral-bound watercolor pad he’d noticed on his desk. “Peter, forget about the textbook. Let’s do children’s books.”7
The pad in Stanton’s hand was a picture book Neumeyer had written and illustrated to amuse his three young sons: Donald and the…, a deadpan account of a little boy captivated by a white worm that turns out to be a maggot, which metamorphoses, as maggots will, into a housefly with “beautiful luminous wings.”8 Not exactly your average bedtime story, but Stanton’s superiors signed off on the idea, with the caveat that Neumeyer’s amateur watercolors should be replaced by the work of a professional illustrator. Someone recalled Gorey’s unforgettable covers for Anchor, and the deal was done.
Stanton thought writer and illustrator should meet, so he took them sailing on the Cape, off Barnstable, in his little boat. “For the most part, Ted and I sat stone-cold silent, bow and stern, stumped for easy banter,” Neumeyer recalled.9 He broke the ice—inadvertently—by dislocating Gorey’s shoulder. They were stepping off the dinghy onto the pier when the boat shot out from under Gorey and Neumeyer grabbed him, saving him from a dunk in the bay but leaving him with “his left shoulder protruding from his back like the broken wing of a bird.” Waiting in the emergency room at the Hyannis hospital, they struck up a lively conversation over the first drafts of Gorey’s illustrations, which Stanton happened to have in his car. That conversation lasted thirteen months.
Neumeyer, who had a PhD in English, was widely and deeply read but wore his learning lightly. (Donald and the…was inspired partly by John Clare’s benign tolerance of flies, which the eighteenth-century writer regarded as “the small or dwarfish portion of our own family,” and partly by Uncle Toby in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, who shoos a fly out a window with the benediction, “Go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”)10 Intellectually curious, with a discursive style of mind, he was the perfect dance partner for Gorey. Their two-hundred-something-page correspondence—seventy-five letters and more than sixty postcards, stretching over thirteen months—records “the rapid growth of a deep and mutual friendship,” says Neumeyer.11 As well, it chronicles a collaboration of uncommon inventiveness kindled by a shared delight in each other’s wide-ranging, playful intellects. Gorey’s exuberance expressed itself not only in lengthy missives but also in charmingly illustrated envelopes—works of art in which finely drawn, delicately painted bats, slugs, and lizardlike creatures disport themselves, clutching banners emblazoned with Neumeyer’s Medford, Massachusetts, address.
The letters double back, always, to the books they’re working on, punctuated, for comic relief, by mutual expressions of annoyance at the vexations of their editor, Harry Stanton. (His “fatal defect,” Gorey thought, was his “mad urge to think all the time, and roll things around in his mind, until they disintegrate into crumbs.”)12 But their intellectual curiosity—the joy of poking around in the magpie nests of each other’s minds—leads them, inevitably, down fascinating conversational byways, such as their shared fondness for Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk, an eccentric omnium-gatherum about everything and nothing by the seventeenth-century English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne.
Gorey treats his letters as comic monologues, diary entries, philosophical dialogues, commonplace books. He’s frequently funny: “It slipped my mind, the surface of which is notoriously smooth and unmarked, like a blancmange.”13 But prone to the blues: “Early or rather earlier in the day I was feeling madly euphoric with the absolutely splendid futility of everything, but now I am depressed, and want to have a good cry. Perhaps I am hungry.”14 Angst is his constant companion: “I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.”15 Yet he manages to take “life in stride and with good cheer,” in Neumeyer’s words.16 He has a surrealist’s eye for the strangeness of the everyday: “When you see a glove lying in the street do you think that, somewhere, someone has lost a hand?”17 And the weirdness of the body, regarded with an alienated eye: “But is one familiar with one’s thumbs? I mean if one were suddenly confronted with them, detached as it were, would one recognize them? In looking at my own, they do not somehow seem terribly identifiable.”18
He’s deeply moved by art and literature and has the analytical powers of a gifted critic. An exhibition of Francis Bacon’s work leaves him “swooning at the sheer beauty of the painting in them,” so much so that he can imagine “being able to live with the triptych where something horrid has taken place in the middle panel; all that gore and even the zipper on the bag are superbly painted.”19 He abhors the “ghastly self-indulgence” and “slimy soul-searching” of The Catcher in the Rye but is powerfully affected by the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, perhaps too much so: “I must say the more doom-and-gloom ones strike all too many chords in my tiny head, and I get overcome.”20
One of the biggest revelations in the Gorey-Neumeyer letters is what Gorey called “E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art,” as revealing a statement of his aesthetic philosophy as we’re ever going to get.21 Simply put, it’s “the theory…that anything that is art…is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”22 Then, too, things “that on the surface…are so obviously” about one thing make it “very difficult to see that they are really about something else entirely.”23 He finds a helpful passage in an anthology of Japanese court poetry, “something to the effect that there must be a something which is above and beyond…what the poem says and the words that say it if the poem is to be a good one…”24
E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art isn’t so simple. It owes something to his Taoist rejection of the either/or epistemology of Western philosophy. And to his Derridean-Beckettian awareness of the limits of language. And to his Asian-Barthesian belief in the importance of ambiguity and paradox as spaces where readers can play with a text, making their own meanings. And to his surrealist sense that “there is another world, but it is in this one” (Paul Éluard). Yet above and beyond all that, there’s still something mysterious in his Great Simple Theory, an elusive idea or maybe just an inexpressible quality that’s more than the sum of these philosophical parts. In a postcard to Neumeyer, Gorey quotes Plato’s Gorgias: “There is no truth; if there were, it could not be known; if known, it could not be communicated.”25
Another striking thing about the Gorey we meet in the Neumeyer letters is just how deeply, searchingly spiritual and metaphysical he is. He quotes from the philosopher George Santayana and the Bhagavad Gita; is thoughtful about Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose writings on Eastern religion and philosophy were popular in the ’60s; and tells a lovely story about kite flying that perfectly captures the dogma-free lightness of his thought:
And then today, when the wind was more fitful, at the risk of sounding remarkably silly, though I don’t think to you, the kite at the end of the string was all sorts of things: a marvelous metaphor (not the right word but…) for art (?) in that from the movements of the visible object one can deduce the invisible ones of the wind, a remark that could hardly be phrased less elegantly; then obviously, but nonetheless touchingly on that account I felt, the kite as a bird, and from that the bird as a soul…with confused bits of the Chuang-Tzu/butterfly notion,c to the point of wondering who is the flyer, who the flown (dear me, I am getting tackier and tackier in my expression).26
Most startling of all, the Gorey of the Neumeyer letters is acutely self-analytical and, at times, nakedly vulnerable. “Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person,” he confides.27 (Why, he doesn’t say.) This is a Gorey we’ve barely glimpsed until now—except in a few of the Lurie letters, and then only through the veil of the ironic, Wildean persona he often affected.
The Gorey-Neumeyer friendship was one of almost telepathic creative rapport and, atypically for men of that era, emotional openness. Of the two men, Gorey emerges as the more confessional—a shockingly out-of-character turn for someone who describes himself in one letter as one of those “emotionally impoverished types.”28 In another, he admits, “I find any direct expression of my feelings not difficult, but impossible, so you will have to know without one [that] they are about our having met and our working together now and in the future.”29 Of course what he did right there was express his feelings by leaving blanks for Neumeyer to fill in. Soon enough, though, he drops his guard, confiding, “You know far more about me than anyone else in the world,” and adding elsewhere, “I guess that even more than I think of you as a friend, I think of you as my brother.”30
As for Neumeyer, he was “too congested in spirit,” he confessed, “to answer with the freeness” Gorey’s profession of “kinship” required, but he assured his friend, “Your existence has made something of this world that [it] hadn’t the possibility of before.”31 Decades later, he was less reserved, freely admitting in a 2010 interview that his friendship with Gorey “was irreplaceable, in my estimation, and was very warm and very loving, and will always mean a great deal to me.”32
For a little over a year, the two men inhabited a bubble of reciprocal inspiration—the shared consciousness of creative collaborators that the novelist William S. Burroughs and the painter Brion Gysin called “the third mind.”33 Gorey is convinced that “us is more exciting and worthwhile than anything I might be doing on my own.”34 In a later letter, he says, “I can’t think of a word to identify what we seem to have spontaneously created between us; the temptation to visualize a creepy but lovable monster must be resisted.”35
In the end, it couldn’t be resisted: as the friendship deepens, a mythical beast called the Stoej-gnpf takes center stage in Gorey’s envelope art. It’s a close relative of the creature from The Nursery Frieze. Hippo-shaped yet sleekly froglike in its more acrobatic moments, with a black pelt and the usual beady Gorey eyes, it lumbers along on all fours or swings from a trapeze or scoots along on roller skates or gazes dolefully, like Hamlet, at a skull. The name is an anagram of the two men’s initials (Edward St. John Gorey and Peter Florian Olivier Neumeyer), and, as its name suggests, the creature is a totem—the droll embodiment of a rare friendship, sometimes moody, often high-spirited, always mysterious. It puts a “creepy but lovable” face on their shared creative unconscious.
For those with a tendency toward shyness or reserve, the epistolary form can be liberating. Letter writing, with its combination of distance and intimacy, the solitary and the social, had a disinhibiting effect on Gorey, eliciting analyses of himself and his art that cut far closer to the bone than anything he said in his interviews. He confides his anxieties, his insecurities, his enduring passions, his everyday pleasures, his philosophies of life and art. And he does so in a way that suggests another, truer Ted behind the Wildean aesthete, the eccentric litterateur, the Puckish observer of the human comedy. Is this the Real Gorey? Or just one more aspect of a man who contained multitudes?
“Much of what I know of Ted, I learned from these letters,” says Neumeyer. “However, to suggest that Gorey ‘revealed’ his inner self in these letters would be an overstatement. Just who Edward Gorey’s inner self might have been remains highly conjectural.”36 He wonders if even the man himself unriddled that riddle. “Quotidian ‘reality’ was problematic for Ted,” he notes, “so he was not entirely joking when he signed one letter ‘Ted (I think)’ and wrote in another, ‘There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe I do.’” Neumeyer, for his part, “never doubted Ted’s presence.”37 Reading Gorey’s letters forty-plus years later brings back “his generosity, his humor, and—yes—his genius.” Brief though it was, their friendship ran deep, he believes. “I still insist that we each found the other necessary, and we each spoke as true to his own heart as he was able at the time.”38
“After little more than a year, the correspondence dwindled as abruptly as it began,” Neumeyer recalls.39 Perhaps they simply couldn’t sustain the pace and intensity of their correspondence. Gorey was overwhelmed by his many freelance-illustration deadlines; Neumeyer had taken a job at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and was juggling family responsibilities and a heavy course load. Whatever the reason, the two men drifted apart. “We talked by phone, but then after a time, we completely lost touch,” remembers Neumeyer, who was eighty-seven at the time of this writing. “I’m sorry about that. Was then; am now. I truly can’t assign or even guess at a ‘reason.’ Some things appear without reason, and that’s how it went.”40
Just as suddenly as it had appeared on that late-summer day in 1968, the Stoej-gnpf vanished, as rare things will.
* * *
The books that came out of the Gorey-Neumeyer collaboration have an indescribable something about them—a whiff of metaphysical mystery, maybe—despite story lines that seem almost nonexistent if you synopsize them: Donald befriends a “white worm” that turns out to be a fly larva; Donald gets a splinter in his calf, and his mother removes it; four kids grope around in the dark, wondering why night falls, until their big brother explains it to them.
Still, there’s an enchanting oddness to the books that derives, in large part, from the fact that they’re children’s books by two men who weren’t entirely sure what a children’s book was and didn’t much care. “I truly can’t recall Ted ever once having used the word ‘child,’” Neumeyer recalled, “let alone the words ‘children’s book.’…Of all the people I’ve known, nobody has been less interested in children.…[H]e didn’t talk or think about ‘creating books for children,’ as I recall.”41
“The next morning Donald jumped out of bed to see his worm.” Donald and the… (Addison-Wesley, 1969)
The Donald books, and Why We Have Day and Night, are more about mood and a way of looking at the world than plot, and Gorey’s drawings, which are among his best, enrich them immeasurably, imbuing the story—that “certain thing” the book “is presumably about”—with the other, imponderable thing they’re really about. It’s E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art in action.
Technically, Gorey’s illustrations for the Donald books are tours de force. Working in a Beardsleyesque vein rich in references to Japonism, chinoiserie, and Victoriana, he produced some of his most intricately filigreed drawings ever. The tablecloth covering the little table where Donald keeps the jar with his pet “worm” in it is a marvel, with its alternating bands of meanders, scrolls, and other Greek-revival motifs. Even the inside covers are stunning—eye-buzzing exercises in pattern-on-pattern whose juxtaposition of Victorian wallpaper, friezes, and tilework showcase Gorey’s command of the pen-and-ink medium. His decision, in Why We Have Day and Night, to render the illustrations in scratchboardlike white on black is pure genius. When he introduces a splash of radiant orange, it has the effect of a cymbal crash.
Gorey’s drawings are full of visual witticisms, some of them so subtle you only catch them on second or third reading. On the front cover of Donald and the…, Donald stands beside one of those Ming vases the Victorians loved; a googly-eyed Chinese dragon adorns it. On the back cover, Donald and his mother are amazed to see Donald’s seafaring father with the dragon perched on his shoulder. In Donald Has a Difficulty, he gets a splinter while pushing with might and main against a tree. It’s an exercise in futility, just the sort of thing a little kid would do. Closing the book, we see, on the back cover, the unbudgeable tree…toppled.
Neumeyer didn’t think Donald and the… “was about much of anything,” but Gorey encouraged him to take it seriously, he recalls, investing it “with meaning beyond what I saw…”42 “My words are very simple. And Gorey…‘loads every rift with ore,’” he told an interviewer, quoting Keats on the importance of freighting every line with meaning. “He just takes the text and runs with it.…I mean, [there are] stories within the story that are hidden. So it becomes an entirely different story, and he doesn’t need to change a word…”43
* * *
In an April ’69 letter to Neumeyer, Gorey lamented the hamster-wheel horrors of the freelance life. “I am working like mad, which has put me into a sort of continuing stupor, so that I keep myself half-thinking of work whatever else I am doing at the time,” he wrote.44 He worried about fainting “dead away from exhaustion and troubled sleep,” adding, “I get all wound up, and have the most gharstly dreams…”
Chronic fatigue notwithstanding, his voracious consumption of culture (books, movies, the ballet) continued unabated. Neumeyer marveled at his ability to “do more things in one day than seems possible,” calling him “a man with sixty-hour days.”45 In ’68, the year he met Neumeyer, Gorey published two of his own books, The Other Statue (with Simon and Schuster) and The Blue Aspic (with Meredith Press), and illustrated six by other authors, most memorably his swooningly beautiful interpretation of The Jumblies by Edward Lear, published by Young Scott.
At first glance, The Other Statue looks like another one of Gorey’s country-manor whodunits: Lord Wherewithal has been murdered by thieves intent on making off with the Lisping family’s oldest heirloom, the Lisping Elbow, despite its being “made of wax and of no value to anyone else”—the proverbial senseless crime, taken to surrealist extremes. But just when we think we’re settling into well-worn Agatha Christie territory, we find ourselves in a comedy of menace like one of Harold Pinter’s absurdist plays.
The Other Statue sends up social mores. The book is dedicated to Jane Austen—“absolutely my favorite author in the whole world,” Gorey once claimed.46 His satire, however, is far more sardonic than Austen’s comedies of manners. In keeping with his dim view of men of God, one of the creepiest characters in The Other Statue is a clergyman with little pig eyes who lurks “in a remote corner of the shrubbery” and preaches heresy, not piety, “at a bethel in the slums.” The devious governess, Miss Underfold, stands conventional morality on its head, too: wearing a hat festooned with black lilies, dancing at a club called the Soiled Dove, she turns the symbolism of doves and lilies—purity and innocence—upside down. The bearded, fur-coated Gorey look-alike Dr. Belgravius shares “a curious discovery” with his nephew while ogling the bare buttocks of a male statue; later, we see the two men passing a poster bearing the Latin legend NIHIL OBSTAT, meaning “nothing contrary to faith or morals”—the Catholic Church’s term for a text that has secured the censor’s approval. In this context, the phrase has an ironic ring.
Announced, on its cover, as part of a never-completed series called The Secrets, The Other Statue leaves us with nothing but secrets. For no known reason, little Augustus’s “stuffed twisby” is stolen and disemboweled, joining Hortense, Charlotte Sophia’s dismembered doll in The Hapless Child, as one of Gorey’s symbols of the miseries of childhood. Miss Quartermourning loses a slice of cucumber from her sandwich, a tragedy of Wildean proportions, and, in one of those haikulike lines Gorey manages to infuse with a world of meaning, “a sudden gust came up from nowhere and rushed through the trees”—an image that somehow captures the inexpressible sadness of being alive. The harder we stare at his eerily beautiful drawing of a grove of trees at dusk, the more their leaves seem to rustle on the page, animated by countless tiny pen strokes.
Gorey’s command of his medium—his pinprick stippling and spider-silk cross-hatching, his exquisite sense of compositional balance—is on display as well in The Blue Aspic and The Jumblies (and, a year later, in his equally masterful treatment of another Lear title, The Dong with the Luminous Nose, also published by Young Scott). In The Blue Aspic, his delirious drawing of the prima donna Ortenzia Caviglia in the role of Tsi-Nan-Fu is at once a fond homage to the Japanese wood-block tradition he loved and a witty study in ironic Orientalism. The decorative pattern on Caviglia’s kimono pays tribute to the Japanese tradition of tenkokud stamps, and the stage set’s elaborately sculpted clouds and curlicue waves recall the highly stylized depictions of nature in ukiyo-e prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai. In his illustrations for The Dong with the Luminous Nose, Gorey goes further, nicking his storm-tossed waves, with their talons of foam, from Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
“As Tsi-Nan-Fu Caviglia had her greatest triumph.” The Blue Aspic. (Meredith Press, 1968)
The Blue Aspic is a tragicomedy about idol worship gone wrong. (The time, as always, is somewhere between 1890 and 1930.) Jasper Ankle, a pathetic nebbish whose only distinguishing characteristic is his rabid fandom, stalks the opera singer Ortenzia Caviglia, the object of his adoration. Gorey underscores the perverse symbiosis of worshipper and idol by giving them the same surname. (Caviglia is Italian for “ankle.”) He crosscuts between their intertwined lives, juxtaposing Caviglia’s ascent to fame and fortune with Jasper’s spiral into misery and madness. In the end, Ankle is driven to kill what he can’t have, ritually stabbing Caviglia in the throat.
Written long before celebrity stalkers like Mark David Chapman (the colorless schmuck who gunned down John Lennon) were tabloid fixtures, The Blue Aspic reminds us that fan is, after all, short for fanatic. Gorey, Balanchine’s most obsessive fan, is making a joke about the neurotic roots of fandom at his own expense. (The book is dedicated to Larry Osgood, who thinks he may have been the one who introduced Gorey to the NYCB.) But the story can also be read as a half joking, half melancholy meditation on unrequited love, especially that immature fixation we call a crush.
All Gorey’s romantic entanglements were crushes, as far as we know; he seemed to prefer real-life soap opera to sex. Whatever romantic yearnings or erotic dreams he had were sublimated into his ballet mania. His greatest love was Balanchine’s dances, whose fleeting sublimity could be possessed more fully than any lover, secure forever in his memory while demanding nothing more than spectatorship.
* * *
Gorey turned forty-three in 1968. He was in demand as a freelance illustrator and beginning to earn critical recognition as an artist and author, if that year’s show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is any indication. He’d had a show in December of ’65 at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland—Original Drawings by Edward Gorey—but this was his first exhibition at a major museum. The Minneapolis Institute gave Drawings and Books by Edward Gorey, which opened on September 18 and ran through October 27, the full-court press.
Yet like most artists, he was still prey to self-doubt. Rhoda Levine, whose Three Ladies Beside the Sea Gorey had illustrated, had a new book in the works and was determined that he would do the drawings. Set in contemporary suburbia, He Was There from the Day We Moved In is the story of a big, lovable galoot of a sheepdog that comes, unannounced, with a boy’s new house. The book is far afield in subject, style, and setting from Gorey’s home turf. In the published version, which came out in ’68, his line has a hesitant, diffident quality, unlike the confident, sharply incised draftsmanship on display in the Neumeyer books. Tinting his line drawings with wan watercolor washes, he renders the characters in a quasirealistic, semicartoony style that can’t quite decide which it wants to be.
The assignment was an awkward fit. When Gorey met Levine and her publisher, Harlin Quist, to discuss the book, things went badly off the rails. Harlin Quist Books was gaining a reputation for innovative children’s books showcasing some of the hippest illustrators in the States and Europe. Quist was going places and knew it. They ordered drinks in a deserted bar on Madison Avenue; Gorey had wine. “We were sitting there,” Levine recalls, “and Harlin is sort of talking about publishing the book, and Ted drank that much wine”—a smidgen, she indicates, with two fingers—“and he started to cry.…There were tears in his eyes, running down his cheeks, and I said, ‘Ted, what’s the matter?’ and he said, ‘What’s the matter? I can only draw in one way.’ I was so stunned.…I said, ‘So could William Blake. So could Henry Fuseli.’” Quist was mortified and hustled everyone out of the bar and into taxis. In Levine’s recollection, the two men never dealt with each other directly again. “Ted, when he would bring the drawings, he’d kind of slip them under Harlin’s door.”
Gorey’s creative energies, in any event, were undiminished. Nineteen sixty-nine saw the publication of his second Lear title, The Dong with the Luminous Nose, and two books of his own, The Iron Tonic and The Epiplectic Bicycle, not to mention Donald and the…. His illustrations for The Jumblies and The Dong with the Luminous Nose are among his finest, a heartfelt tribute to the Victorian fantasist who was one of his oldest, deepest influences.e They’re also among his quirkiest. Not only are the egg-shaped, spindly-legged minikins scurrying about in both books utterly unlike the dour Victorian-Edwardians who populate Gorey’s own books, but the landscapes are also “similarly atypical,” notes Karen Wilkin, who contends they’re “among the most inventive, tonally complex” drawings in his body of work.47
It’s clear Gorey felt a kinship with Lear (1812–88), whose Victorian surrealism celebrates the outsider. Best known for “The Owl and the Pussycat,” Lear “more than anyone else tossed aside the didactic tone and moral-instruction agendas of the reading materials that 19th-century parents favored for their children,” notes Joseph Stanton, delighting young readers with his nonsense alphabets, fantastical beings, and ear-tickling coinages such as “scroobious pip” and “runcible spoon.”48 Gorey followed his lead into darker corners of the unconscious, giving the limerick and the abecedarium an ironic-gothic spin and creating a funny-grotesque bestiary all his own, teeming with Fantods and Figbashes, Wuggly Umps and Ombledrooms.
But beyond those artistic similarities lie intriguing parallels between the two men’s lives. Lear suffered from bouts of melancholia—“the Morbids,” he called them—as did Gorey, to a lesser degree. Lear, like Gorey, was unlucky in love and lived alone; in Gorey fashion, his boon companion was a cat, a stump-tailed tabby named Foss. Lear fell passionately in love with a dear male friend who wasn’t that way inclined; their friendship survived, but Lear spent forty sorrowful years tortured by one-sided passion.
All surrealist whimsy on the surface, Lear’s nonsense often has a melancholy underside. Like The Blue Aspic, The Dong with a Luminous Nose is a tale of unrequited love. The Dong—a forlorn little chap in a billowing white overcoat, as drawn by Gorey—falls head over heels for the Jumbly Girl, only to have his heart broken when she sails away. He spends the rest of his nights seeking—in vain—“to meet with his Jumbly Girl again,” searching high and low by the light of his luminous nose. Circumstances conspire against the Dong, as they did against Lear’s “unnatural” passion.
Whether Lear’s solitary life and thwarted passions touched something in Gorey we don’t know, but he must have been aware that Lear was gay, since his biographer Vivien Noakes is unequivocal on that point in Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, which Gorey owned (along with thirty-one other books by or about Lear). An asthmatic and an epileptic as well as an unconsummated homosexual, Lear had a keen sense of himself as an outsider, as did Gorey.
He would surely have agreed with Gorey’s oft-stated belief that all the best nonsense is shadowed by sadness. Despite being more optimist than pessimist, Gorey was prone to occasional bouts of existential despair. “Every now and then I do think life is a crock,” he said. “Basically, it’s really just awful. I do think it’s stupidity that makes the world go round.”49 Consequently, “if you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point. I’m trying to think if there’s sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children—oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that’s true, there really isn’t. And there’s probably no happy nonsense.”50
That same year, Gorey produced a nonsense book that, while not happy nonsense in the sunny, funny sense, is frolicsome, in a manic sort of way. Drawn in a kooky style that suits its tone perfectly, The Epiplectic Bicycle (Dodd, Mead) is a gallimaufry of slapstick, head-scratching non sequiturs, and mock moral instruction. Note, by the way, that it’s “epiplectic,” not “epileptic,” a common mistake. Epiplectic is the adjectival form of epiplexis, a rhetorical tactic in which a reproachful question is posed as a means of goading listeners into agreement.
The title encourages us to read The Epiplectic Bicycle as a work of moral instruction for Dadaists, though on the other hand Gorey may just be leading us down the garden path—like the bicycle of the title, a machine with a mind of its own that takes a little boy and girl for a ride through a dreamlike landscape plagued by lightning strikes, alligator attacks, and other Acts of God. The story begins on “the day after Tuesday and the day before Wednesday”—in other words, in a timeless time, perhaps the nonexistence before birth—and ends with the unsettled-looking children contemplating their deaths, perplexingly evidenced by an obelisk “raised to their memory 173 years ago.” Was their bicycle ride symbolic of life’s journey? Are they ghosts who don’t know they’re ghosts? As always, Gorey is about as much help as the oracular black bird that warns the children to “beware of this and that.”
His last book of the ’60s, The Iron Tonic; or, a Winter Afternoon in Lonely Valley (Albondocani Press), is as moody and cinematic as The Epiplectic Bicycle is hopped up and cartoony. Beginning in a “grey hotel” for the “aged or unwell”—a departure lounge for the afterlife, notable for its institutional grimnessf—The Iron Tonic is composed of a series of outdoor scenes, most of them long shots. In each “still,” a detail is revealed through what Peter Neumeyer calls “monocular inserts, making the pictures have a movement and dimension kindred to film.”
A winter nocturne just fourteen pages long, The Iron Tonic drifts, dreamily, from strollers marooned in a sea of snow to a woman addressed by God in “a voice both ungenteel and loud” to three people in a graveyard who regret that “the monuments above the dead / Are too eroded to be read.” The rhymed couplets play variations on well-known Gorey tropes—toppling statues, forlorn orphans, Fortean objects falling from the sky—but the illustrations perform a somber, pensive counterpoint that gives the book an elegiac feeling.
The Iron Tonic. (Albondocani, 1969)
The drawings are among his most beautiful, especially the scene in which a figure stands marooned in the snow-cloaked wilds of Lonely Valley, taking in the white vastness and the bare black branches of the trees while “a fugitive and lurid gleam / Obliquely gilds the gliding stream.” Gorey once said he was “really quite obsessed with landscape” but didn’t “know how to deal with it”;51 The Iron Tonic gives the lie to such protestations.g Of course his landscapes are highly stylized, like the Japanese woodcuts he admired. “I’ve never really attempted to create any form from nature,” he said. “I often think, ‘Oh, wouldn’t this vista make a lovely landscape drawing.’ But I wouldn’t dream of attempting it.”52 His are Taoist landscapes: the spiky trees in The Iron Tonic, their black branches like gothic tracery against the surrounding whiteness; the “ancient mound” rising out of the snow like a breaching whale; and the “absolutely useless stone” adrift in the dark hint at the presence of li, the underlying order of things that expresses itself, paradoxically, in the nonlinear patterns and asymmetry of nature. Like Gorey’s other serious works—The Object-Lesson, The Willowdale Handcar, The West Wing, and The Remembered Visit—The Iron Tonic is thick with philosophical mystery. And, as always, the source of that mystery is nowhere in the book.
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The ’70s made Gorey a household name, at least in households where PBS was the channel of choice and Sunday breakfast was unthinkable without the New York Times. The years that traced the arc of his ascent spanned ’72, when Amphigorey hit bookstore shelves, through ’77, when Dracula opened on Broadway with Gorey’s scene-stealing sets, to 1980, when the PBS program Mystery! debuted, captivating viewers with its animated Gorey titles.
He rang in the ’70s by publishing three books he’d begun in 1969: The Chinese Obelisks, The Osbick Bird (both Fantod Press productions), and The Sopping Thursday, his first outing with the Gotham Book Mart imprint, marking the beginning of a relationship that would last until 2001, with the posthumous publication of Thoughtful Alphabet VIII (The Morning After Christmas, 4 AM). Obelisks, Gorey’s fourth abecedarium, is the only one of his books in which he plays the lead role: a fur-coated, sneaker-shod Author—not Artist, tellingly—who goes for a walk…and ends up dead, naturally, struck down by an urn “dislodged from the sky” by a thunderclap. The Sopping Thursday is a mystery of transcendent banality involving the disappearance of an umbrella (and, far less consequentially in Goreyland, an infant). Gorey’s parade of black silhouettes—parasols, ornate wrought-iron fences—against a gray downpour perfectly captures the ennui of a rainy day, its dreariness driven home by the drip-drip repetition of mind-numbing declarations such as “Last night it did not seem as if today it would be raining.”
All told, Gorey produced twenty-three of his little books in the ’70s, not counting the omnibuses Amphigorey and Amphigorey Too in ’72 and ’75, postcard collections (Scènes de Ballet in ’76, Alms for Oblivion in ’78, and Interpretive Series: Dogear Wryde Postcards in ’79), Gorey Posters (published by Abrams in ’79), and the assemble-it-yourself Dracula: A Toy Theatre (Scribner, 1979).
Nineteen seventy-one witnessed the arrival of Story for Sara (Albondocani Press), a perverse little cautionary tale by the protosurrealist Alphonse Allais, and The Salt Herring (Gotham Book Mart), a diverting exercise in pointlessness (a man swings a dried herring from a string, end of story) by Charles Cros, like Allais a nineteenth-century French precursor of the modernist avant-garde. Gorey translated both books in addition to illustrating them. Hot on their heels came two notable works, The Deranged Cousins and [The Untitled Book], along with a slighter effort, The Eleventh Episode. Written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Raddory Gewe, Episode is The Hapless Child redux. In this version, the victim gets the upper hand: after dispatching—with a pin—a masher who, like the drunken brute who terrorized Charlotte Sophia, “intended harm,” an ingenue flees “to places ever more remote,” where she spends her days “in painting Scenes from Life on trays.” Gorey supplies the moral: “‘Life is distracting and uncertain,’ / She said and went to draw the curtain.”
Seventy-two brought Leaves from a Mislaid Album (Gotham Book Mart), a gallery of portraits of furtive sleuths, slinky vamps, willowy maidens praying by moonlight, and a portentous man in black clutching one of Gorey’s calling cards, whose whiteness seems to glow against his dark garb. Issued as a collection of cards, Leaves can be “read” in any order, but however they’re shuffled Gorey’s wordless illustrations give off a psychic mustiness redolent of gothic novels, murder mysteries, and the photo albums of old and inbred families with skeletons in the closet.
Published that same year, The Awdrey-Gore Legacy (Dodd, Mead), by D. Awdrey-Gore, is another deconstructed narrative that invites the reader to play author, reconstructing it any which way. It’s Gorey’s fond parody of Agatha Christie, all red herrings—arsenical buns, blowgun darts, the “curate/vicar/dean/bishop” who is also an escaped lunatic, the lady novelist in mannish tweeds who has a “passion for…other ladies”—and no solution. (Or is there? The last clue is a postcard inscribed I DID IT. E. G. DEADWORRY—the author of the book’s “introductory note” and, yes, another of Gorey’s anagrammatic pseudonyms.)
The following year, Gorey published his affectionately irreverent tribute to the NYCB, The Lavender Leotard, and his (as yet unfilmed) screenplay, The Black Doll (both Gotham Book Mart), as well as A Limerick (Salt-Works Press), a one-line joke, a mere four panels long, about the unhappy end of Little Zooks, “of whom no one was fond”; The Abandoned Sock, another inquiry (like The Inanimate Tragedy and Les Passementeries Horribles) into the secret lives of objects, in this case a sock that seeks its fortune in the wide, wide world, having decided that life with its mate is “tedious and unpleasant”; The Disrespectful Summons, a sermon on the evils of witchcraft that would gladden the heart of Cotton Mather (the witch, Miss Squill, is cast into the Flaming Pit); and The Lost Lions, in which the hunky, mustachioed movie star Hamish, “a beautiful young man who liked being out of doors,” finds true love not in one of his devoted fans but in the lions he raises—until they’re shipped off to Ohio for the winter, leaving him staring disconsolately into the snowbound wilds of New Jersey. (The last three titles were released as Fantod IV: 3 Books from Fantod Press.)
Categor y (Gotham Book Mart), a throwaway collection of loopy, antic cats romping through wordless tableaux, was his lone publication under his own name in ’74, but he made up for lost time in ’75, knocking out L’Heure Bleue (Fantod Press) and his fifth alphabet book, The Glorious Nosebleed (Dodd, Mead), whose every line ends in an adverb, as in: “He exposed himself Lewdly,” the caption for a drawing of a bowler-hatted chap in an Eton collar flashing a little boy. Les Passementeries Horribles (Albondocani Press) and The Broken Spoke (Dodd, Mead) came next, in ’76. In the former—another of Gorey’s “object-oriented” works, in which things play leading roles—unsuspecting Victorian-Edwardians are menaced by overgrown ornamental tassels. The Broken Spoke consists of sixteen whimsical “cycling cards from the pen of Dogear Wryde” depicting such affecting scenes as “The Crumbath Cyclery by Moonlight” and “Innocence, on the Bicycle of Propriety, Carrying the Urn of Reputation Safely over the Abyss of Indiscretion.” In ’77, The Loathsome Couple (Dodd, Mead) appeared, followed in ’78 by The Green Beads (Albondocani Press), about Little Tancred, who meets “a disturbed person whose sex was unclear” and who leads Tancred on a wild-goose chase for the, er, family jewels. It was Gorey’s last picture book of the ’70s.
* * *
Among Gorey’s most memorable titles of the decade (in addition to those discussed elsewhere in these pages—The Osbick Bird, The Lavender Leotard, The Black Doll, The Lost Lions, and L’Heure Bleue) were The Deranged Cousins, [The Untitled Book], and The Loathsome Couple.
A tale of murder, religious mania, and the perils of beachcombing, The Deranged Cousins chronicles the misadventures of three orphans, Rose Marshmary, Mary Rosemarsh, and Marsh Maryrose (the man of the trio and an obvious Gorey surrogate, the ghost of a Harvard H still visible in the stitched outline on his sweater). During a stroll along the shore, Rose and Mary quarrel over a bed slat they’ve found, and Mary deals Rose a fatal blow with a brown china doorknob. Things go from bad to worse: Mary descends into morbid religiosity, and Marsh expires after drinking “the dregs of a bottle of vanilla extract he discovered in the mud.”
Dedicated to “Eleanor and Skee, a souvenir of Labor Day 1965,” Cousins was inspired by a ramble along the shore in Barnstable. (“Needless to remark, nothing happened after we took the walk,” Gorey hastened to add when he and Dick Cavett discussed the book, although they really did find a bed slat, a doorknob, and a bottle of vanilla extract, he said.)53 The Deranged Cousins is a darkly funny caricature of his affectionate, easygoing relationship with the Garvey sisters.
But it’s equally about Cape Cod’s “low-tide dolor,” as the poet Robert Lowell described the distinctive mood of coastal Massachusetts.54 It’s Gorey’s only book set on the Cape, and his camera eye captures the characteristic features of its low-lying landscape, from its salt marshes to its low-tide muck to its scrublands. The ocean is an agent of fate: its cast-off oddments sow strife among the cousins, setting events on their doomed course, and Mary is swept away in the end by an “unusually high tide.” To Cape Codders, the ocean’s changeable moods are indistinguishable from Acts of God, an ever-present reminder that the deep can swallow you up, even if you’re a “religious maniac” like Mary.
* * *
Credited to Edward Pig, [The Untitled Book] is a little ditty, sung in a nonsense tongue, about the collapse of meaning. Throughout the book’s sixteen panels, Gorey’s “camera” frames a fixed shot, as in Feuillade’s tableaux, of the same flagstone-paved yard. In the darkened window of a nearby house, an unsmiling boy appears—a Puritan, judging by his boy’s frock, with its frilly collar. He watches impassively while an ant plays ring-around-the-rosy with various Gorey totems—a frog, a bat, a pair of stuffed whatsits. “Flappity flippity, / Saragashum; Thip, / thap, / thoo,” chants the gibberish text. Without warning, a big black thingamajig streaks, cometlike, out of the sky, sending the playmates scurrying. The boy is left alone to contemplate the empty yard.
The book’s theme, argues Selma G. Lanes in her study of children’s literature, Through the Looking Glass, is the “attempt at divining some rudimentary pattern from the world’s unreason.”55 If so, the moral of Gorey’s story is that all such attempts are doomed to failure. Unlike The Nursery Frieze, whose seemingly meaningless mumbo jumbo turns out to be composed of bona fide words, the text of [The Untitled Book] is pure gibberish. Moreover, Gorey eschews rhyme, his usual strategy for imposing order on nonsense. The results are far from the Victorian surrealism of Lear and Carroll and closer to the Dadaist sound poetry of Hugo Ball and Lucky’s word-salad monologue in Waiting for Godot. Even the title implies a loss of faith in language; like Gorey’s signature exclamation, “O, the of it all!” it uses erasure to express the inexpressible.
(Interestingly, Gorey was painstaking in his choice of just the right meaningless, made-up words for [The Untitled Book]. In a rough draft of the text, we see him working his way through “gumbletendum, gumbletendus, splotterbendus, sopplecorum, lopsicorum, lorum, ipsifendum, ipsibendum, ipsilorum, ipsiborum,” before settling on “ipsifendus.”56 The last five words, by the way, are clearly inspired by lorem ipsum, the Latinate gobbledygook graphic designers use to create dummy page layouts.)
Of all the books he wrote, Gorey counted [The Untitled Book] among his favorites because, like The Nursery Frieze and The Object-Lesson, it made “the least obvious sense.”57 Lanes calls it “a perfectly rounded little dance-drama in which nameless threats come, are seen, and neither conquer nor are conquered. It is so self-contained and tightly choreographed a work that, its alien reality notwithstanding, it is curiously satisfying.”58 Irwin Terry thinks it may well be Gorey’s “most perfect book,” combining “beautiful artwork, language, nonsense, and pure ‘absurdist art’ sensibilities.…Each panel is rendered with infinite detail, yet all 16 drawings…show the exact same courtyard that was redrawn (with weather variations) for each illustration. This technical tour de force is the backdrop for the ‘drama’ that takes place within the scenes. I always have Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre running through my head when I read this book, which makes me feel like I am ‘looking at music.’”59
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There’s one title in which Gorey treats the subject of murdered children not with the usual camp-gothic irony but with a pathos spiked with pitch-black humor. That book is The Loathsome Couple. It’s the only Gorey title in the true-crime genre, and it’s light-years away from the Firbankian wit or tea-cozy gothic of his other books. The events in question were the so-called Moors Murders, in which a pair of sullen, dead-eyed psychopaths, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, raped and killed five children, ages ten to seventeen, near Manchester, England, between July of 1963 and October of 1965, then buried their bodies on the desolate, fog-haunted Saddleworth Moor. In one case they forced a ten-year-old girl to pose for pornographic photos, then tape-recorded her heart-rending screams and pleas as they tortured her to death. Even if you’re a true-crime aficionado, as Gorey was, the tawdry awfulness of the crimes makes you want to scrub your mind with bleach.
Gorey had followed the story in the papers. “That disturbed me dreadfully, even after years of reading crime stories,” he recalled. “I’m all for elegant, goofy murder. This upset me, and it became the one text I felt compelled to write.”60 The book’s dedication to William Roughead, whose reassuringly Sherlock Holmesian accounts of nineteenth-century crimes Gorey loved, serves as a kind of talisman—a piece of the “sinister-slash-cozy” stuff he usually cuddled up with, brandished against the charmless horrors to come.
By transporting the subject to his familiar Victorian-Edwardian milieu, Gorey holds it at arm’s length, creating an aesthetic distance that enables him to extract a queasy humor from his tale. Never has evil been more banal, from the killers’ dispiritingly inept attempts at lovemaking (“When they tried to make love, their strenuous and prolonged efforts came to nothing”) to their celebratory meal after murdering, “in various ways,” little Eepie Carpetrod, a ghastly repast of “cornflakes and treacle, turnip sandwiches, and artificial grape soda.” Often, the imagery is nearly lost in a blizzard of cross-hatching. “I purposely made the drawings as…unpleasant, uncharming as I could,” he said.61
“When they tried to make love, their strenuous and prolonged efforts came to nothing.” The Loathsome Couple. (Dodd, Mead, 1977)
Readers found the book every bit as charmless as he’d hoped. When Gorey’s literary agent, Candida Donadio,h submitted the manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, then an editor at Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb was aghast, observing that it wasn’t funny (a masterpiece of understatement). “Well, Bob,” Gorey rejoined, “it wasn’t supposed to be funny.”62 When it was published, by Dodd, Mead, in 1977, some bookstores returned it. One sent “a very revealing letter saying, ‘We think this book is absolutely revolting. Everyone in the store has read it and we refuse to carry it!’”63
Uncharacteristically, it was a book he felt he had to do, almost against his will. “I resisted writing it for quite some time, and it really is one of those things I had to get off my chest,” he told an interviewer.64 Elsewhere, he said, “That was the rare story where I felt I was working out feeling on the page.”65 But what was he working out? If you believe the lazy cliché, infanticide was his life’s work. “I saw in them a lot of myself,” he later admitted, noting, in the same interview, “I’ve been murdering children in books for years.”66
Gorey’s blandly matter-of-fact narration and the existential cluelessness of his blank-faced characters strip away the mythic aura that surrounds serial killers. Hopeless bunglers who fail at everything, from love to child killing (in the sense that their subsequent murders are “never as exhilarating as the first one had been”), Harold Snedleigh and his partner in crime, Mona Gritch, are revealed for the gray nonentities they are.i Of course, the less they look like monsters, the more they look like you and me. And vice versa.
* * *
All this time, Gorey was simultaneously churning out illustrations for newspapers, magazines, and books by other authors. Some projects, such as Donald Has a Difficulty and Why We Have Day and Night, both published in 1970, gave full rein to his talents as a literary collaborator and master of visual subtext whose illustrations added parallel narratives. But whether the job was a true meeting of the minds or just another gig to pay the bills, he eschewed hackwork, using all but the most throwaway assignments as opportunities for trying on new styles and, while he was at it, stretching the definition of what was and wasn’t Goreyesque.
Gorey’s last dance with Ciardi, Someone Could Win a Polar Bear (1970), finds him playing against type: his depiction, on the book’s front cover, of a tyke effortlessly hoisting an enormous white bear aloft against a canary yellow background is done in a scribbly style that looks as if it had been drawn in grease pencil. Gorey’s rough line captures the naive charm of a grade-schooler’s crayon drawing.
Ciardi was one of Gorey’s tent-pole clients—Old Faithfuls whose reliable patronage cushions a freelancer from the feast-or-famine cycles that make self-employment so ulcerating. John Bellairs, a writer of young-adult novels—gothic thrillers and supernatural mysteries with a coming-of-age twist—was another.
Gorey provided dust jackets, paperback covers, and in many cases frontispieces for twenty-two Bellairs (or Bellairs-inspired) novels, beginning in 1973 with The House with a Clock in Its Walls. But the real gems are the back covers, brooding landscapes reminiscent of German Romanticism. The tumbledown castle subsiding into the heath on The Secret of the Underground Room and the thicket of trees huddled in a snowy field under a lemon-meringue sunset on The Lamp from the Warlock’s Tomb are beautifully handled. Generations of middle-school readers discovered Gorey through Bellairs’s books.
Younger readers encountered him in Florence Parry Heide’s Treehorn series, about the magical-realist misadventures of a little boy (named Treehorn, improbably enough), which Gorey illustrated in the fine-lined, boldly patterned style of the Donald books. Artist and author were well matched. Heide’s omniscient narrator recounts Treehorn’s antic adventures—his inexplicable dwindling in The Shrinking of Treehorn (1971); his discovery, in Treehorn’s Treasure (1981), that money really does grow on trees; his encounter with a sleep-deprived genie in Treehorn’s Wish (1984)—in an emotionally flat, matter-of-fact manner reminiscent of Gorey’s authorial voice. Tuned to the sixty-cycle hum of mental life in ’70s suburbia, her deadpan storytelling goes hand in glove with the flattened affect of Gorey’s characters, with their pinprick eyes and perpetually fretful eyebrows. Heide’s adults, who talk past each other and are hilariously oblivious to Treehorn’s exclamations about genies and money trees, are the neglectful parents we’ve met in Gorey stories, updated for the “me” generation.
Gorey’s illustrations for Heide’s books are virtuoso improvisations on the theme of pattern on pattern. In one eye-jangling scene in Treehorn’s Wish, Gorey plays syncopated visual rhythms on the competing plaids of the kitchen tablecloth and Dad’s slacks and jacket, Treehorn’s pin-striped pants and rugby shirt, Mom’s argyle skirt, the parallel lines of the spindles in the chair backs, and the carpet’s mod, orb-weaver-on-LSD motif.
Treehorn’s Wish. (Holiday House, 1984)
Speaking of mod, Gorey is at ease in Treehorn’s swinging ’70s in a way that he wasn’t in He Was There from the Day We Moved In. Jarring as it is to see Gorey characters in go-go boots and flares, he’s clearly having fun with the contemporary fashion and decor. When Treehorn’s teacher sends him to the principal, we note the mass-produced abstract painting near the secretary’s desk, a black curlicue on a white background. Naturally, the principal, a strenuously groovy dude in a double-breasted suit who spouts power-of-positive-thinking platitudes, has a bigger painting of a bigger black curlicue on his office wall.
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With its mod ascots, TVs (TVs! In a Gorey drawing!), and suit-coat lapels so wide they could double as ailerons, The Shrinking of Treehorn reminds us, with a jolt, that outside the bell-jar world where Gorey lived most of his imaginative life, the ’70s were in full swing.
In New York City, that meant white flight, rising crime, urban decay, and a budget crisis that in 1975 would push the city to the brink of bankruptcy. New York in the ’70s meant open-air drug bazaars; subway cars whose interiors were tattooed, floor to ceiling, with graffiti; backstreets riddled with abandoned cars, their carcasses picked clean and left to rust. It meant walking down the middle of the street because you didn’t want to make it easy for the muggers lurking in doorways. If you were female, it meant asking cabbies to wait until you were safely inside your apartment building, even if it was only a fifteen-foot walk from the curb. The heroin trade flourished. Sanitation strikes made the city an all-you-can-eat buffet for vermin. “In the 1970s New York was so shoddy, so dangerous, so black and Puerto Rican, that the rest of white America pulled up its skirts and ran off in the opposite direction,” says Edmund White in City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s.67
Which was just fine by the aspiring Jackson Pollocks, wannabe Lou Reeds, William S. Burroughs epigones, freaks, gays, and hustlers who had moved to the city to get away from Middle America. Rents were low, especially in the disused industrial lofts of SoHo—an essential prerequisite for a thriving bohemia. And thrive it did, giving rise to the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, the performance art showcased at the Kitchen, the experimental theater staged at La MaMa, the underground movies shown at art houses such as the Thalia, the emerging punk scene at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, and the hip-hop culture taking root in the South Bronx.
Gay New York was flourishing, too. Having burst out of the closet in ’69 with the Stonewall riots and successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in ’73, gays exulted in their newfound pride and sense of community at Christopher Street bars, on the dance floor at Studio 54, and, more covertly, in leather bars, bathhouses, and the derelict, decaying West Side Piers. David Bowie, bisexual chic, Cabaret (1972), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), disco, the Village People, and The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), coauthored by White, helped hoist queer culture into mainstream visibility (if not acceptance, as Anita Bryant’s antigay Save Our Children campaign made clear). At last, the young gay men who came of age in the ’70s, and who had spent their childhoods in the shadow of the Lavender Scare, being bullied on schoolyards and reviled in the media, were free to be out and proud.
Did Gorey, who had made the rounds on the Third Avenue bird circuit and visited the odd gay bar in the Village in the early ’50s, ever wander down to Christopher Street? It’s hard to imagine him in the louche milieu of the Stonewall Inn. Although TV would later initiate him into the delights of disposable culture, Gorey was resolutely a creature of high culture in his New York years, steeped in Balanchine’s ballets, silent movies, nineteenth-century novels, and his own Victorian-Edwardian, gothic-surrealist fantasies. He moved, wraithlike, through the ’70s as he had the ’60s, seemingly untouched by the social turbulence and cultural frisson of the times. Vietnam, Kent State, Stonewall, Watergate, gay lib, disco, feminism, Son of Sam, the New York Dolls, punk rock, the black and Latino culture all around him in New York: none of these pivotal events, social phenomena, or tabloid names receives so much as a mention in any of Gorey’s letters or interviews.68 As always, he went his own catlike way, unperturbed by current events, impervious to prevailing attitudes. (He did, however, get both his ears pierced in ’77 or thereabouts—a daring move made possible by the mainstreaming of gay fashion statements, although even gay men drew the line at one pierced ear. “I’ve been meaning to do it for about 25 years and never got up the nerve till now,” he told an interviewer from People magazine.)69
There are a few sidelong glances at the ’70s—specifically, the gay culture of the era—in Gorey’s work from that time. National Lampoon, the wildly irreverent humor magazine dedicated to the principle that nothing is sacred, let Gorey run long on his tether; he exercised his editorial freedom by submitting out-of-character cartoons like the gags published under the title “The Happy Ending” in the magazine’s March 1973 issue. Two of the twelve single-panel cartoons are gay-themed; neither, curiously, was chosen for inclusion in the Amphigorey collections.
One shows a long-haired, epicene young man with bedroom eyes standing behind a mailbox; he’s getting the eyeball from a foppish older gent with a man purse slung over his shoulder. “New York at last,” the caption reads, “with a face that made long-distance trucks grind to a screaming halt, and what had been, until forty-three hours ago, the biggest basket in North Dakota.” The slang and insider references require some unpacking: “long-distance trucks” may be a winking reference to “the trucks,” as they were known—the big rigs parked under the elevated highway on the city’s West Side. Before AIDS swung its scythe, gay men would meet for anonymous sex in the dark, cavernous interiors of the Mack trucks’ unlocked trailers. As for “the biggest basket in North Dakota,” a “basket,” in the gay slang of the day, was a man’s genitalia, clearly outlined in tight-fitting pants. The well-endowed young hustler may have been the pride of North Dakota, Gorey suggests, but he’s got plenty of competition in the Big Apple. It’s amazingly knowing stuff for a man who gave—or appeared to give—the gay lifestyle a wide berth.
Gorey’s work intersected with the gay underground of the ’70s more dramatically in The Story of Harold (1975), for which he provided the cover and six interior illustrations. A novel of “sadism and bisexuality, tenderness and human love” (in the words of its cover blurb), it’s by “the famous children’s book author you all know,” Terry Andrews. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s because “Terry Andrews” was really George Selden, author of the much-loved children’s classic The Cricket in Times Square. The novel is a semiautobiographical account of Andrews’s bouts of S&M sex with a married man, his bizarre liaisons with a masochist, and his friendship with an emotionally disturbed little boy.
Edmund White believes Harold is “the earliest document that renders the feel of Downtown Village gay life in the 1970s—the mix of high culture and perverse sex, the sudden transformation, say, from a night at the opera to an early morning at the baths,” shot through with “the Sade-like conviction that sexual urges are to be elaborated rather than psychoanalyzed…”70
What Gorey made of a novel whose narrator rhapsodizes about the delights of fisting (inserting his fist up his partner’s anus), rimming (tonguing someone’s anus), and the “endless love-making” that turns him into a “phallic Frankenstein…pure cock from head to toe,” we’ll never know.71 At a cursory glance, his illustrations look innocuous; they seem to sidestep the book’s X-rated passages, focusing entirely on the harmless antics of the little boy, whom Gorey depicts as a pint-size Edwardian gentleman, derby, waistcoat, and all. Look closer, though, and you’ll see Gorey’s salacious sight gags everywhere: in the phalluses hiding in the decorative motif garlanding the planter beside Harold (not to mention the tubes of K-Y Jelly on the nearby coffee table) to the minuscule but still unmistakable penises lurking in the crown molding in another illustration to the nudge, nudge-wink, wink resemblance, in a scene set in a gym, of the free weights to upthrusting members with bulging testicles. The cultural historian M. G. Lord, who was friends with Selden, says the author got a kick out of spotting the hidden penises in Gorey’s illustrations. “To him,” she says, “they were like the ‘Nina’s in a Hirschfeld.”72
It’s interesting to note that the man who once claimed to “blush crimson at the other end of the phone” when people who’d read The Curious Sofa tried to inveigle him into illustrating pornographic novels had no qualms, when a gay publisher approached him about reprinting The Story of Harold, about being associated with the book.73
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Gorey’s career gathered speed in ’72 with the release of Amphigorey. The collection was one of Andreas Brown’s brainstorms. He’d been plying William Targ, an editor at Putnam, with first editions of Gorey titles in a scheme to “get him hooked,” he later admitted.74 Reeling in his catch, Brown proposed an anthology of Gorey’s increasingly scarce little books, whetting the editor’s appetite with talk of windfall profits. Seduced, Targ offered Gorey a $5,000 advance, and the deal was done. Amphigorey “grew out of a genuine need,” Brown recalled in 2003. “His audience, primarily, back in the ’60s and ’70s, was young people, college and university students, and as his early books became rarer and rarer—they would sell for 50 or a hundred dollars apiece, even then—the students simply couldn’t afford them. So I went to Edward, very cautiously, and explained [that the anthology Brown had in mind] would make all these books more readily available to his younger clientele.”75 It took all his wiles to convince Gorey, who was allergic to self-promotion, that an affordable omnibus of his hard-to-find books would be a gift to his growing fandom, not to mention rocket fuel for his career.j
Once convinced, however, Gorey took the bit in his mouth, designing every aspect of the book, from its hand-lettered text (including the copyright page) to its layout to its whimsical covers, where fat, sassy Gorey cats gambol in, on, under, and around the letters of the title (a pun, by the way, on amphigory, a piece of nonsense writing, typically in verse). Out in time for the Christmas season, the book was a runaway success. The New York Times chose it as one of the year’s five noteworthy art books, hailing “the macabre drolleries of one of the finest illustrators around,” and the American Institute of Graphic Arts designated it one of the year’s fifty best-designed volumes.76 By the following October, the book had sold forty thousand copies, “largely through college bookstores,” the New York Times reported, and had “just gone back to press for 50,000 more.”77 “It looks as if the Gorey cult might soon become a small mob,” the Times writer thought. By ’75, the book was in its eighth printing.
“The book has never gone out of print since 1972,” says Brown. “I imagine there are a quarter of a million copies that have been put into print, maybe more, and it dramatically changed Edward’s life in the sense that, for the first time, the mainstream retail book industry carried Edward Gorey in their stores. They were no longer these peculiar…little books that didn’t fit on the regular shelf and you didn’t know whether to put it in the children’s department or adult literature or humor.”78 In Brown’s educated guess, “millions became addicted as a result of that book.”
a Gorey’s whimsical, often comic-grotesque names, most of them preposterously British-sounding, owe an obvious debt to Lear. But do they also take a page from Dickens, the unchallenged master of allegorical, allusive, and deliciously onomatopoetic names? Gorey liked the darker Dickens—Our Mutual Friend (“because it’s so scary”), Bleak House, Great Expectations (“with Miss Havisham brooding in the cobwebbed room”)—and must have savored names like Melvin Twemlow (Our Mutual Friend), Woolwich Bagnet (Bleak House), and Uncle Pumblechook (Great Expectations). (See Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin [New York: Harcourt, 2001], 83.) It’s interesting to note, in light of Gorey’s fondness for Victorian epitaphs, that Dickens, who shared Gorey’s habit of strolling in graveyards, wasn’t above borrowing a juicy name from a headstone.
b Edited by Neumeyer and published by Pomegranate in 2011, their correspondence is collected in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer.
c Chuang Tzu was a Taoist sage who lived circa 399–295 BCE. Gorey is referring to his famous philosophical tale of waking after dreaming he was a butterfly only to wonder if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
d Tenkoku seals, hand-carved stone seals inscribed with pictographs representing the user’s identity, are a time-honored tradition in Japan.
e The flap copy for the 1968 Young Scott edition of The Jumblies quotes Gorey: “‘The Jumblies’…was taught to me by my grandfather when I was four or five, and it has always been one of my favorites.”
f Fascinatingly, Gorey’s rendering of the “grey hotel” on the book’s first page bears a strong resemblance to the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane, in Kankakee, Illinois, as it appears in postcard photos circa 1906–9, when Gorey’s grandmother Mary Garvey was institutionalized there.
g The book is dedicated, interestingly, “to the memory of Helen St. John Garvey”—the great-grandmother (1834–1907) from whom he got his artistic talent, according to family lore. She specialized in landscapes.
h Though he appears to have mentioned her in only one interview, the legendary—and legendarily hard-driving—Candida Donadio of Donadio & Olson was from around 1961 on Gorey’s literary agent. Known as a tough negotiator with a keen eye for literary game-changers, Donadio sold Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. Her client roster included those authors as well as Thomas Pynchon, Nelson Algren, John Cheever, Jessica Mitford, and Mario Puzo, among other marquee names. In the 1991 article in which Gorey mentions Donadio, the author ticks off the other professional relationships in Gorey’s life: “For almost thirty years, he has had the same editor (Peter Weed [at various publishing houses, it bears noting]), the same agent (Canada [sic] Donadio), the same artist’s rep (John Locke), and for over twenty years, ever since Andreas Brown acquired the Gotham Book Mart, the same co-publisher and gallery.…Clifford Ross…handles Gorey’s film, television, and subsidiary rights.” Cliff Henderson, “E Is for Edward Who Draws in His Room,” Arts and Entertainment, October 1991, 20.
i What are we to make of the fact that The Loathsome Couple is also Gorey’s only romance novel, a tale of star-crossed lovers? The term lover probably overstates the case; Harold and Mona meet at “a Self-Institute lecture on the Evils of the Decimal System,” where they “immediately [recognize] their affinity.” Their bond, as with many partners in serial murder, is an unwholesome symbiosis that has little to do with genuine affection. Still, it’s the only Gorey story with an adult relationship at the center of it, and, as with his own short-lived affairs, it’s a dismal failure.
j Interviewed for a Gorey profile in the British newspaper the Independent, Brown talked about Gorey’s resistance to the Amphigorey format. “Edward’s concern was that in making an anthology, the little books would be transposed into a larger format, putting several pictures on a page. And that would destroy the rhythm—which he’d very carefully constructed—of moving through the story, page by page, frame by frame, caption by caption, so it was almost like looking at a silent film. Well, we finally persuaded him, much against his better judgment…” See Philip Glassborow and Susan Ragan, “A Life in Full: All the Gorey Details,” Independent on Sunday, March 23, 2003, 26–32.
The books were indeed a commercial success, as Brown predicted, but Gorey was right: the format doesn’t do justice to his intent and seriously diminishes the impact of his little books. Moreover, the quality of the reproductions is notably inferior to that of the originals (a state of affairs put right in recent years by Pomegranate’s fine reprints of some of the titles included in the Amphigoreys). Readers who only know Gorey from the omnibuses will be struck, on reading him in the format he intended, by his pacing—the filmlike visual rhythms Brown mentions—and by the rich illustrative detail, much diminished in the Amphigorey collections.