“Awake in the Dark of Night Thinking Gorey Thoughts”
Edward Gorey, circa 1999. (Photograph by Brennan Cavanaugh)
PERPETUAL BLOSSOMING NOTWITHSTANDING, Goreyphiles lamented that his amateur-hour theatricals, as they saw them, were distracting him from his real work. “When I’m in six weeks of rehearsal and three weeks of production, I don’t do a thing the other part of the day,” he conceded to public-radio host Christopher Lydon.1 Lydon was regretful: “So we’re losing Gorey books because of this?”
We were. Gorey confirmed in a 1997 interview that he hadn’t done what he ironically referred to as a “major book”—a squawk of self-mocking laughter underscored the preposterousness of the phrase—“since The Raging Tide in 1987, I guess.”2 (Nineteen eighty-seven, as we know, was the year he mounted Lost Shoelaces, inaugurating his theatrical career on the Cape.) Even so, he noted, he had “whipped up a lot of little stuff over the past couple of years.”
The diminutive defies us to take it seriously. As in his theatricals, the throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks air of his “little stuff” bespeaks a desire to wriggle out of the straitjacket of a style that was starting to cramp his imagination. Gorey abhorred the thought of repeating himself. Beginning in the early ’80s, in his waning days in New York, and continuing through his years on Strawberry Lane, he embraced his inner dabbler. Experimenting with styles and formats far afield from the meticulous, crosshatched draftsmanship of defining works like The Doubtful Guest, he gave free rein to his love affair with form and genre.
In much of his literary output from this period, he abandons narrative for the childish pleasures of novelty genres that blur the line between book and game or book and toy. “The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve tended to like things you can fiddle around with,” he said in 1995.3 Many of the titles from this time are designed to be played with as much as read.
In Mélange Funeste (Dreadful mixture; Gotham Book Mart, 1981), he explored the possibilities of the “slice” book, so called because its pages are sliced crosswise into thirds, enabling the reader to mix and match parts of an illustration by turning sections of a page. By flipping this segment or that, the reader of Mélange Funeste is able to reassemble the heads, torsos, and legs of a desiccated corpse, an ingenue, a mustachioed gent, and one of those catsuited burglars from Feuillade’s Les Vampires, among others, into a seemingly endless number of chimeras—a gamelike gimmick that transposes the surrealist game exquisite corpse into the book medium.
Les Échanges Malandreux (very loosely, The awkward exchanges; Metacom Press, 1984) makes use of a similar device: each page is divided into four hand-sewn “gathers of folded pages,” as Irwin Terry calls them.4 By turning the leaves in the quadrants, the reader is able to create disjointed dialogues, all with the stiff syntax and baffling non sequiturs of the nonnative speaker. The top two panels feature various figures; questions and answers are printed on the right and left sheaves at the bottom. A typical combination yields an Edwardian motorist in a floor-length fur coat and goggles asking a sickly creature in a wheelchair, “Has anyone looked under the stairs?” to which the invalid replies, unaccountably, “I have forgotten you.”
We hear echoes, here, of those stock dialogues in foreign-language phrase books whose robotic unnaturalness gives them a surrealist air, and of English as She Is Spoke (1855), an unintentionally hilarious conversational guide written by a Portuguese man who didn’t speak a lick of English. Between the laugh lines, though, Gorey seems to be saying something about the limits of language—specifically, the impossibility of translation in anything but the most hopelessly inexact sense.
Gorey exploited the interactive technology of the pop-up book in The Dwindling Party (Random House, 1982), which uses flaps and pull tabs to immerse the reader in a country-manor mystery where child-devouring grottoes and leviathans lurking in the moat pick off the MacFizzet family one by one. In E. D. Ward, a Mercurial Bear (Gotham Book Mart, 1983), he tried his hand at the paper-doll dress-up book. Officially by Dogear Wryde, this “paper pastime” enabled readers to dress a teddy bear (of indeterminate gender) in a variety of men’s and women’s costumes, from a lace-sleeved granny dress to a suit of armor to a corset and tutu to a letterman’s sweater.5
He indulged his fancy for miniature books in The Eclectic Abecedarium (Anne & David Bromer, 1983), a tiny tome measuring 1-1⁄16 by 1-5⁄16 inches, hand-bound by a master bookbinder. A fondly mocking “homage to Mrs. Barbauld”—meaning Anna Lætitia Barbauld, the eighteenth-century woman of letters whose serious consideration of the needs and desires of young readers revolutionized children’s literature—The Eclectic Abecedarium parodies both the earnest didacticism and small format, designed for little hands, of Barbauld titles such as Lessons for Children (circa 1778) as well as the crude woodcut illustrations and singsong couplets of nineteenth-century chapbooks such as Pleasing Rhymes, for Children. Some of Gorey’s maxims are eminently practical (“Don’t try to cram / The dog with Jam”); some shudder at the terrors of religion (“There is an Eye / Up in the sky”); some give off a whiff of weltschmerz (“Beyond the Glass / We see life pass”).
In The Tunnel Calamity, Gorey resurrected a Victorian parlor amusement known as the peep-show or tunnel book, so called because one of the most popular applications of the optical novelty depicted the world’s first subaquatic tunnel, the Thames Tunnel, completed in 1843. Gorey’s Tunnel employs the same design as its nineteenth-century precursors: a series of die-cut panels joined together, accordion-style, between two covers. Expanded to their full length and viewed through a peephole in the front cover, the overlapping panels produce the illusion of depth. The Tunnel Calamity brings to life an alarming manifestation in the tunnel between East Shoetree and West Radish on St. Frumble’s Day—an unexpected sighting of the fearsome Uluus, long thought to be extinct. In the distance, the Black Doll can just be seen, sitting in an oculus.
Such titles don’t compare, in pen-and-ink virtuosity or literary substance, to classic works like The Object-Lesson, The West Wing, and The Iron Tonic. But Gorey’s ingenuity in marrying the quirky formats of children’s genres such as the pop-up book and antique novelties such as the peep-show book to literary devices scavenged from Dada, surrealism, and Oulipo gives them a charm all their own—an inspired inconsequentiality.
Then, too, despite their tossed-off feel, Gorey’s experiments with form in the last two decades of his life were, in their unserious way, philosophical investigations. By requiring the reader’s physical participation—mixing and matching the sections of a trisected page, fiddling with flaps and pull tabs, peering through a peephole—Gorey draws our attention to the reader’s role in making meaning. These books underscore his long-standing belief in what Roland Barthes called the writerly text, which invites us to fill in its gaps, read between its lines.
At the same time, such titles dramatize the extent to which the theater had taken center stage in Gorey’s imaginative life: pop-up books like The Dwindling Party, exquisite corpses between two covers such as Mélange Funeste, and peep-show books like The Tunnel Calamity turn the act of reading into a theatrical event in which the book performs the narrative. In the immersive, wordless Tunnel Calamity, the reader’s roving eye creates the story line in the same way that camera movement constructs film narrative. The peephole beckons us through the fourth wall onto the stage set; the more we manipulate the book’s concertinalike structure, the more narrative detail it reveals.
Clearly Gorey is attempting to translate that “wonderful open thing that the theater does” into the book medium. But his late-life flirtations with interactivity are also manifestations of his commitment, going back decades, to the aesthetic of open-endedness. Experiments in indeterminacy like The Raging Tide, The Helpless Doorknob: A Shuffled Story (publisher unknown, 1989), and The Dripping Faucet (Metacom Press, 1989) take to playful extremes his desire to turn the traditional narrative into a garden of forking paths—a nonlinear text whose interactive nature makes a coauthor of every reader, ensuring new narrative twists with every reading.
The deck of twenty illustrated cards that comprise The Helpless Doorknob can be reshuffled to yield, by Gorey’s count, 2,432,902,069,736,640,000 Agatha Christie–esque mysteries. Most if not all of the combinations juxtapose unremarkable occurrences with ominous goings-on, producing that Goreyesque blend of the droll and the disquieting, somewhere between Feuillade and Magritte: “Agatha taught Adolphus to dance the one-step.” “Adela flung Angela’s baby from an upstairs window.” “Angus concealed a lemon behind a cushion.” “A disguised person came to one of the side doors.”
By comparison, The Raging Tide looks conventional enough: it arrives in the familiar guise of one of Gorey’s thirty-page books (though it’s bigger than most) and has no sliced pages, pop-ups, or peepholes to bedevil us. But that’s where any similarity to a conventional picture book ends. A tour de force of pattern-on-pattern composition, it’s easily one of Gorey’s most surrealist titles. The action—to talk of plot seems absurd—consists of a slapstick melee fought with dish mops, loofahs, mourning pins, and antimacassars in a landscape littered with giant severed thumbs (inspired, quite possibly, by the nineteenth-century French cartoonist J. J. Grandville’s engraving The Finger of God). The combatants are Gorey’s faceless comic-grotesques, Figbash and the hairy whatsit Skrump and the shrouded Naeelah and Hooglyboo, a teddy bear with a broken arm and an amputated leg: “Skrump flung a damp sponge at Naeelah.” “Figbash scattered cracker crumbs on Hooglyboo.” And so forth. There’s no more rhyme or reason to their Dadaist battle royal than there is to Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s quarrel in Through the Looking-Glass.
Then, too, the self-deconstructing design of the book makes a hash of causality, not to mention meaning. Each of the book’s two-page tableaux offers the option of proceeding to one page or another (though rarely the next): “If you loathe prunes more than you do turnips, turn to 22. If it is the other way around, turn to 21.” Fittingly, the book offers a choice of two endings: in one of The Raging Tide’s alternative universes, “everyone went joyously to an early grave”; in the other, “they all lived miserably for ever after.” Naturally, the Black Doll is nowhere to be found, except on the book’s cover.
Gorey grew more, not less, experimental in his later decades. The Dripping Faucet, which, true to its subtitle, can be manipulated to create as many as Fourteen Hundred & Fifty Eight Tiny, Tedious, & Terrible Tales, recalls the Oulipian writer Raymond Queneau’s iconoclastic slice book, Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (One hundred thousand billion poems, 1961), a collection of ten sonnets whose lines are printed on individual strips, enabling the reader to replace any sentence with the corresponding one in any of the other poems. (Gorey knew Queneau’s work, and the system of paper flaps used in The Dripping Faucet is markedly similar to the one used in Cent Mille Milliards.) The Helpless Doorknob calls to mind Vladimir Nabokov’s Gordian knot of a novel Pale Fire, a satirical metafiction written in the form of a 999-line poem by the (imaginary) poet John Shade, accompanied by an exhaustive exegesis by the (equally imaginary) critic Charles Kinbote. Nabokov lets the reader chart her own course through the text; the book “can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, jumping between the comments and the poem,” notes the literary theorist Espen Aarseth—a navigational freedom replicated in the manifold possibilities of The Helpless Doorknob. (Doorknob may, in fact, have been inspired by Pale Fire. Kinbote digresses at length about the kingdom of Zembla, a fictionalized version of the Russian archipelago Novaya Zemlya. By curious coincidence, one of the cards in Gorey’s book of changes announces, “Alfred returned from Novaya Zemlya.”)
Gorey’s texts “you can fiddle around with” also invite comparison to the Web-like “hyperfictions” of Robert Coover, whose narrative branchings, made possible by hypertext software, entreat the reader to choose this plotline or that. They remind us, too, of postmodern metafictions such as Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch, which encourages readers to do just that—hopscotch through its 155 chapters as directed by a Table of Instructions or simply by following their own noses through the narrative.
Gorey, it turns out, was the Benjamin Button of avant-gardism, evolving backwards from the twee aestheticism of his Harvard period into the Edwardian surrealism of his New York era and, finally, into the gleeful Dadaism of his white-haired years, when he opened the throttle of a radicalism more commonly associated with youth.
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In his last two decades, Gorey pared down his style. During his minimalist period, as he called it—a phase that encompassed The Dancing Rock by Ogdred Weary, The Floating Elephant by Dogear Wryde, and The Pointless Book; or, Nature & Art by Garrod Weedy (all 1993, the first two released by an unknown publisher, the third by Fantod Press)—he did away with text altogether and stripped illustration to its barest bones. Perhaps it was the cost of his all-consuming affair with the theater, which left little time for hours of painstaking cross-hatching. Or maybe it was the result of dimming eyesight and diminished technique—the collateral damage of old age. Whatever the reason, his characters became more caricatured, at times almost cartoonish, in comparison to the more realistic portraiture of his New York period. Gone was the spiderweb delicacy of his classic style, replaced by a thicker, bolder line. Gone, too, were the eye-buzzing pattern-on-pattern compositions and dizzily detailed wallpaper of his heyday, exchanged for monochrome backdrops.
Dancing Rock and Floating Elephant are flip books—or, rather, a flip book, since the two titles are printed back-to-back: riffle the pages one way, a rock makes its way across the page; flip them in the other direction, an elephant traverses the blank expanse. The rendering, in either case, is rudimentary. Yet it’s practically baroque compared to the stick figures acting out French words (Horreur! Au secours! Tralala!) in La Balade Troublante (The disturbing stroll; Fantod Press, 1991) or the chicken scratches and curlicues of The Pointless Book. (Gorey claimed, with a perfectly straight face, that The Pointless Book was his “ultimate philosophical statement,” a wordless mini-manifesto that “says everything about the relationship in literature between nature and art”—a remark that’s either a wry reminder of Gorey’s Derridean disbelief in the epistemological claims of language or a bit of conceptual leg pulling—or both. Irwin Terry, the Gorey collector, thinks it was “an exercise in seeing just how mad his devotees really were. I will go so far as to say I got mad at Mr. Gorey when this book arrived in the mail.”)6
In his postcard sets Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf. and Q.R.V. Hikuptah as well as his series of broadsides, Thoughtful Alphabets (all 1996, publishers unknown), Gorey abandoned his inkwell entirely, creating loosely joined collages of details snipped from nineteenth-century engravings (or, more likely, from some of the many Dover clip art books he owned). In the Alphabets, cutlery, cardiovascular organs, and other oddments form swirling debris clouds; enigmatic phrases, each word beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet, hover around them: “Hopeless Infatuation. Jellied Kelp. Listless Meandering. Nameless Orgies…” In the Q.R.V. cards, Gorey turns an Ernstian eye to nineteenth-century advertising, anatomical diagrams, and natural-history texts, grafting a centipede onto a coffin that’s marching along on trousered legs; perching an unborn bird on a bush that looks suspiciously like a network of capillaries.
Alexander Theroux claims that Gorey admitted he’d “lost his talent around 1990. He was doing a drawing once and said that.”7 In Terry’s view, the turning point is The Just Dessert (Fantod Press, 1997), which for him marks “a decided turn in Mr. Gorey’s signature drawing style.”8 An abecedarium whose kooky, cartoonish drawings pay waggish homage to nineteenth-century primers, its “illustrations are simpler and less refined” than Gorey’s previous work, a shift he attributes to the artist’s age and “increasing interest in theater work.” Not only did Gorey’s theatricals rob Peter to pay Paul, demanding long hours of rehearsal that might otherwise have been spent at the drawing board, but they may have influenced his aesthetic as well, Terry speculates. “The characters in The Just Dessert strongly resemble Mr. Gorey’s handmade puppets,” he points out, “and the format of the drawings” suggests “a puppet stage.”
The Headless Bust. (Harcourt Brace, 1999)
Yet Gorey was dipping his toe, at least, into a simpler style as early as ’83 in The Eclectic Abecedarium, whose hand-drawn, faux-naïf “woodcuts” anticipate those of The Just Dessert. By ’92, in The Doleful Domesticity and The Grand Passion (both Fantod Press), Gorey is crossing the artless crudity of his faux-woodcut aesthetic with a cartoony silliness. He employs a variation on this style in his last two books, The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas and The Headless Bust: A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium (1997 and ’99, both Harcourt Brace). A striking departure from the Gorey of The Doubtful Guest and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, his late style is notable for its featureless mauve backgrounds and perfunctory approach to ornament: carpets and tablecloths are covered, as usual, with busy patterns, but they’re rendered in a loose, sketchy manner. Gorey’s cross-hatching has a burlap coarseness, far from the fine weave he used to use, and his characters’ pinprick eyes have morphed, somewhat alarmingly, into cartoony bug eyes.
Not everyone was taken with Gorey’s new style. “What really distinguishes Gorey are his meticulous, mock-lugubrious drawings,” a reviewer contended in the Harvard Crimson. “His handwriting imitates printing, his close hatching resembles lithography, and his creatures, even his houseplants, pose like silent-movie actors. The combination of care and whimsy in his illustrations is delightful, even wonderful. Unfortunately, the comparative crudeness of the drawings in The Headless Bust is immediately noticeable. The lines are thicker, and the awkward delicacy of his figures is diluted.”9
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Even as Gorey’s interest in crosshatching his life away was waning, mainstream recognition of his work was on the rise—not that he gave a stuffed fantod. As Clifford Ross told the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff in 1992, “Edward has kept himself protected from success. I was telling him on the phone about some of the projects we were working on for him, but he wasn’t responding. Finally he said, ‘Oh, I suppose that means now I can die.’ Sometimes with him nothing happens, because nothing is exactly what he wants to happen.”10 “I really don’t think I was ever terribly ambitious” was Gorey’s way of dispatching the subject.
And the more I go along, the more I think how awful it would be to be rich and famous. I’d love to be rich, but being famous—I think if you ever give any thought to it, then you say, “Well, you know, I’m not famous enough. Why don’t I have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum?” And this way you drive yourself absolutely crackers. So I try not to think about it.…More and more, I think you should have absolutely no expectations and do everything for its own sake. That way you won’t be hit in the head quite so frequently. I firmly believe what someone said—that life is what happens when you’re making plans.11
The Met never called, but he was at least demifamous. “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” Schiff’s lengthy profile in the November 9, 1992, issue of the New Yorker, introduced him to a generation too young to remember Dracula. A month later, on December 21, a Gorey cover graced the magazine at long last—belated compensation for that sniffy rejection letter he received in 1950, informing him that his characters were “too strange” while “the ideas, we think, are not funny” but that there might be hope if he turned his hand to “drawings of a less eccentric nature.” Forty-two years later, the world had caught up with Edward Gorey; what had seemed too strange, too eccentric, too perversely unfunny for a world of Avon ladies and Oldsmobiles and firm-jawed men in gray flannel suits at last made perfect sense.
In the ’90s, one of those periodic swells of interest was lapping at Gorey’s shores. People kept mounting productions of Gorey revues: Amphigorey [Also]: A Musicale at the Perry Street Theatre in Manhattan, in 1994; Amphoragorey at the Provincetown Repertory Theatre, in 1999; The Gorey Details: A Musicale at Century Center Theater in New York, in 2000.a A revered figure in the world of book-cover illustration, he could afford to pick and choose what little commercial work he still took on. In ’93, Harcourt reprinted Amphigorey Also, another Gorey omnibus, originally published by Congdon & Weed in ’83. In ’96, The World of Edward Gorey, the first book-length study of his work, appeared. It featured a wide-ranging interview by Clifford Ross, a critical essay by Karen Wilkin situating Gorey’s work in an art-historical context, and an abundance of illustrations—pages from his sketchbooks, Anchor covers, exquisitely colored costume and set designs for The Mikado, plates from published (and, teasingly, unpublished) works.
But the leading indicator of Gorey’s growing significance as a point of cultural reference was the increasing use by arts reviewers of “Edward Gorey–like” or, better yet, “Goreyesque” as a descriptor. Soon enough, pop culture certified his iconic status by paying him consumer capitalism’s highest compliment: appropriation—theft with kid gloves on. The man whose utterly original vision sprang, paradoxically, from a “strong sense of imitation,” one that led him to “filch blatantly from all over the place, because it will ultimately be mine,” had lived long enough to see himself imitated.
Foremost among the filchers was the movie director Tim Burton, whose brand of morbid whimsy owes an obvious debt to Gorey, as does his somber palette. Shadowed by cross-hatching and deformed by the dream logic of German expressionism, Burton’s stop-motion feature The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) crosses Gorey with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The star of the film, Jack Skellington, is an elegant skeleton in black tie who bears a more than passing resemblance to the dapper, top-hatted Death on the cover of The Gashlycrumb Tinies. The writhing, half ruined brick buildings and forced perspectives of Halloweentown, where Jack lives, are Burton’s nod to Gorey and to the British cartoonist Ronald Searle. “We tried to put a lot of Gorey-type textures on our sets,” the director, Henry Selick, confirmed.12 “We took sets and actually spread clay on them or plaster and then inscribed lines all over them to give it that sort of etched, textured feel—to make it look almost like a living illustration.”13
Burton’s animated movies often take shape on his sketch pad. He is an artist himself, and his cartoony, loose-lined illustrations for The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (1997), a collection of gloomily amusing doggerel, suggest a cross between Gorey, Searle, and Quentin Blake. His humor is broader, and often more grisly, than Gorey’s, and his twee-goth aesthetic is decidedly un-Goreyish in its weakness for B-movie camp and Boomer irony. Even so, Nightmare and Oyster Boy, as well as later stop-motion movies such as Corpse Bride (2005) and Frankenweenie (2012), testify to Gorey’s enduring influence on his aesthetic (his assiduous omission, in interviews, of any mention of Gorey notwithstanding). “Lurking alongside Tim Burton’s monstrous creations is the inescapable specter of…Edward Gorey,” writes Eden Lee Lackner in her essay “A Monstrous Childhood: Edward Gorey’s Influence on Tim Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy.” “From Burton’s preference for thin lines and a certain sparseness of detail in his illustrations—often suggesting rather than fully delineating each characteristic—to his playfully macabre plotlines and themes, Gorey is always there.”14
Gorey is there, too, in the 1997 video for “Perfect Drug,” an angsty, edgy song by the electroindustrial band Nine Inch Nails. Directed by Mark Romanek, the short film transports the group’s singer, Trent Reznor, to a goth’s idea of an absinthe delirium, a punk-Edwardian gloomscape submerged in blue, black, and green. Dropped clues to Gorey’s influence are everywhere: women in Victorian mourning veils stand on a windblown hill; a trio of top-hatted men are gathered on a windswept moor; a toppled obelisk lies in pieces. Reznor mopes around a haunted mansion in an Edwardian getup, listening disconsolately to a gramophone and drowning his sorrows in absinthe. There’s a sculpture of a colossal hand, recalling the gargantuan thumbs in The Raging Tide; some spooky topiary straight out of Gorey’s 1989 book Tragédies Topiares; and, jutting out from behind an enormous urn, the legs of some ill-fated mite, like the “foot inside a stripéd sock” protruding “from underneath a rock” in The Evil Garden. The story, such as it is, seems to have something to do with a dead child, whose melancholy portrait we see in an antique locket.
The fashion world, too, acknowledged Gorey’s influence. In his books, he’d always lavished on period costume the same devoted attention he paid to interior decoration and architectural style. Then, too, he was a fashion plate in his New York years, a surefire head turner in his Edwardian beatnik getup, immortalized in Bill Cunningham’s New York Times column about well-dressed New Yorkers.
In her 1996 fall-winter collection, “Bloomsbury,” the designer Anna Sui returned the compliment. Sui was drawn to Gorey and his work by her interest in “the ’70s ’20s,” as she calls them: the rediscovery, by pop-culture tastemakers in the economically turbulent, socially permissive ’70s, of the economically turbulent, socially permissive ’20s—a retro fixation that bore fruit in movies like Cabaret, The Sting, and The Great Gatsby. For Sui, Gorey was the missing link between the two decades. “I was here in New York when Dracula was on Broadway,” she recalls. “That was during the punk days, and of course everyone was really into vampires at that point, so [Gorey] was one of our folk heroes. When I was in school in the ’70s at Parsons, I had some friends who were so obsessed with him that they used to follow him around. I would always hear about how eccentric his dress was, with his big raccoon coat.…[He] was really of that moment, for a lot of us.” Sui pored over Gorey’s books, soaking up his black-and-white crosshatched aesthetic as well as his impeccable renderings of period fashions.
But the most devoted of Gorey’s votaries in the 1990s was Daniel Handler, known to millions of young readers as Lemony Snicket, author of the thirteen ironic-gothic young-adult mystery novels that comprise A Series of Unfortunate Events. The first two books in the series, The Bad Beginning and The Reptile Room, were published in September of 1999. Handler sent copies of each to Gorey “with a note saying how much I admired his work and how I hoped he forgave me all I stole from him. He never replied and died not long after, so I’ve always said that I like to believe that I killed him.”15
Whether Gorey ever read the books is anyone’s guess, but if he did, he was surely struck by Handler’s fond appropriation of his Victorian–Edwardian–Jazz Age setting, macabre subject matter, ironic tone, black humor, and antiquated, Latinate vocabulary. Even Handler’s decision to write under a kooky pseudonym, and to create an enigmatic persona to go with it, was inspired by Gorey.
Intriguingly, Handler was seduced not by Gorey’s drawings, as most readers are, but by his literary style and voice. “Obviously, the strange world of his illustrations filtered through,” he says, “but I always think that how I managed to find a space on the map of children’s literature where there was room to set up camp is because I stole from someone who’s usually the victim of the theft of his illustrations, but I stole how he wrote his captions.” In other words, Handler saw Gorey as Gorey saw himself: as a writer first.
Handler’s a rare bird in this regard. As the literary critic Michael Dirda points out, “Nearly everyone…speaks admiringly of the artist’s meticulous crosshatching and melodramatic, gothicky vision.…Not enough praise, however, has been awarded to Gorey’s superb prose: he possesses the ear of a great parodist, and indeed virtually all his albums are pastiches of some previous genre.…The perfectly balanced periodic sentences owe something to the laconic campiness of Ronald Firbank and to the affectless dialogue and humor of Ivy Compton-Burnett.”16
Handler’s alter ego, Lemony Snicket, narrates A Series of Unfortunate Events in a voice modeled on Gorey’s, at once arch and deadpan, sincere yet leg pulling. “It seems very romantic but very cynical; it seems ironic but it’s not campy,” says Handler of Gorey’s tone. “The first time the Lemony Snicket books were reviewed in the New York Times, they called Snicket the love child of Edward Gorey and Dorothy Parker, and I thought, ‘My life is now complete; I’m exactly where I wanted to be my entire life!’”17
The same year that A Series of Unfortunate Events debuted, a British “dark cabaret” trio called the Tiger Lillies had begun setting to music a big cardboard box full of unpublished prose and poetry that Gorey had mailed to the group. He’d heard their musical treatment of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter and thought their comic-grotesque aesthetic was, as the Lillies’ lead singer, Martyn Jacques, recalls, “the cat’s pajamas.”18 When Gorey proposed they collaborate, Jacques, who was already a devotee, leapt at the chance. He set to work composing songs for Gorey’s lyrics in the Tiger Lillies’ patented style—his quavering, camp-gothic falsetto backed by accordion-driven music that’s equal parts Victorian music hall and Weimar nightclub.
“We were going to do a show together, and just a couple of days before I flew out [of the UK to meet Gorey on the Cape], he died,” says Jacques. “I cried. I’d spent several months practicing so I could sing him the songs. I’d imagined myself sitting there at dinner with him, singing him a song, and then we’d talk about it, and then we’d move on to the next one, like that. I’d learned them all, practiced them all; I was really upset.”b
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When Gorey published a regular-size edition of Q.R.V. in 1990, through Fantod Press, he’d expanded the title to Q.R.V. The Universal Solvent. Q.R.V.—which made its first appearance in an earlier version of the same title, a miniature book published by the booksellers Anne and David Bromer in 1989—is Gorey’s surrealist take on nineteenth-century nostrums such as Effervescent Brain Salt and Burdock Blood Bitters. By turns sinister, salubrious, and silly, it not only “pickles beets and bleaches sheets,” it prolongs life and bends your mind into the bargain, inducing hallucinations of “felons hurling melons.”19
In like fashion, the universal solvent, a legendary substance sought by alchemists, possessed miraculous medicinal properties. Some thought it was nothing less than the fabled philosopher’s stone, which had the power to transmute lead into gold and bestow immortality. In keeping with alchemy’s pre-Enlightenment dream of attaining hermetic wisdom through a kind of allegorical science, the stone symbolized spiritual perfection, as Gorey would have known from his copy of Alchemy: The Secret Art by Stanislas Klossowski de Rola.
Spiritual and religious themes swim beneath the surface of the Q.R.V. postcard series, Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf. and Q.R.V. Hikuptah, published in ’96. Behind the surrealist silliness, an autumnal mood suffuses them—a dying of the light, made even more melancholy by death-of-God ruminations. Gorey shows his hand in the title of Q.R.V. Hikuptah: the foreign-sounding word is one of the ancient names for Egypt, meaning “mansion of the soul of the god Ptah,” the creator god of the ancient Egyptians and patron of craftsmen.20 Like Gorey, Ptah was bald and bearded; also like Gorey, he was closely associated with funerary rites and the afterworld. Did Gorey see himself, at seventy-one, as having one foot in the grave?
In Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf., he seems to be settling scores with God, whom he rejected a lifetime ago when he threw up at mass. “Do you suppose God really knows / What He has done to me?” runs the first card’s gibing couplet. “Yet if it’s true, what can I do / But take to Q.R.V.?”21 In another, he resigns himself to life in a clockwork world abandoned by its maker: “With God Almighty being flighty, / And absent frequently, / It’s up to you to make it through / The day—with Q.R.V.”22
Gorey would surely have let loose with a mortified groan if he’d lived to hear Andreas Brown observe, “His work is an exploration of the existence of God, of man’s attempt to try to locate and define God.”23 Yet overblown as Brown’s claim sounds, Gorey is wrestling, in his loopy, Learian way, with the same meaning-of-life-in-a-godless-cosmos questions that plagued existentialists such as Sartre and Camus. Of course, being Gorey, he alludes to his dark night of the soul obliquely, in deceptively silly singsong couplets. Still, thoughts of fleeting time, fading memories, lost love, illness, and age seem to be weighing on his mind in 1996, if the Q.R.V. cards and Thoughtful Alphabets are any indicator. “All is on fire, fear, and desire, / Remorse and misery, / Illness and rage, revenge and age, / And also Q.R.V.,” he writes in Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf.24
“He was troubled by insomnia,” Mel Gussow later reported, “awake in the dark of night thinking Gorey thoughts.”25 The season of his life was right for such musings: he’d turned seventy the previous year and had suffered a heart attack in ’94, the same year he learned—all in a single week, mind you—that he had prostate cancer and diabetes. “I figured I was going to be dead in a week, so I began to think about it a lot,” he said in a ’96 interview.26 Naturally, he told no one: both Skee and Rick Jones learned of his maladies from a passing mention in a New York Times profile.
a Under way in Gorey’s last months, The Gorey Details: A Musicale opened after his death on October 16, 2000.
b When Jacques’s songs finally saw the light of day, they’d been reborn as a collaboration between the Tiger Lillies and the Kronos Quartet, a contemporary classical ensemble. Released in 2003, The Gorey End received a Grammy nomination for best classical crossover album.