In order to beat back the kudzulike overgrowth of endnotes, I’ve employed the following convention: the first time a source is quoted in any given paragraph, the quoted matter is accompanied by an endnote. If the next quotation in that paragraph is from the same page of the same source, no endnote is used. Only when a quotation from a new page or source appears in that paragraph is a new endnote introduced. In those instances where confusion is likely to arise from the appearance in a single paragraph of quotations from a single author but different sources—say, a lecture by Alison Lurie and my unpublished interview with her—I’ve broken my rule of not citing interview quotations.
1 Edmund Wilson, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” in The Bit Between My Teeth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 479.
2 Neil Gaiman, e-mail message to the author, January 26, 2011.
3 Entry for “Girl Anachronism,” Dresden Dolls Wiki, http://dresdendolls.wikia.com/wiki/Girl_Anachronism.
4 “Allow Us to Explain…,” Edwardian Ball website, https://www.edwardianball.com/about-the-ball.
5 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 123.
6 Alison Bechdel, “My 10 Favorite Books: Alison Bechdel,” New York Times, February 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/t-magazine/entertainment/my-10-favorite-books-alison-bechdel.html.
7 Maria Russodec, “A Book That Started with Its Pictures: Ransom Riggs Is Inspired by Vintage Snapshots,” New York Times, December 30, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/books/ransom-riggs-is-inspired-by-vintage-snapshots.html.
8 Deborah Netburn, “Found Photography Drives ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,’” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/05/miss-peregrines-home-for-peculiar-children-ransom-riggs.html.
9 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 152.
10 Daniel Grant, “Illustrators Risk the Stigma of ‘Second-Class’ Artists,” Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 1989, https://www.csmonitor.com/1989/1010/umag.html.
11 Tobi Tobias, “Balletgorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 23.
12 Lisa Solod, “Edward Gorey: The Boston Magazine Interview,” Boston, September 1980, 90.
13 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” New Yorker, November 9, 1992, 84.
14 Thomas Curwen, “Light from a Dark Star: Before the Current Rise of Graphic Novels, There Was Edward Gorey, Whose Tales and Drawings Still Baffle—and Attract—New Fans,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2004, http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/18/entertainment/ca-curwen18/3.
15 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 86.
16 Mark Dery, “Self-Dissection: A Conversation with Satirical English Author Will Self,” Boing Boing, January 21, 2015, http://boingboing.net/2015/01/21/self-dissection-a-conversatio.html.
17 Edward Gorey, The Listing Attic, in Amphigorey: Fifteen Books (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972), n.p.
18 “Classical Japanese literature”: Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 26. “To work in that way”: Tobias, “Balletgorey,” 23.
19 Edward Gorey, “Miscellaneous Quotes,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 239.
20 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 1.
21 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 35.
22 Ibid.
23 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 110.
24 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, quoted in Alan Watts, What Is Tao? (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2000), 22.
25 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 123.
26 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 90.
27 Ibid., 92.
28 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 123.
29 “[The] comic macabre”: Mel Gussow, “Edward Gorey, Artist and Author Who Turned the Macabre into a Career, Dies at 75,” New York Times, April 17, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/17/arts/edward-gorey-artist-and-author-who-turned-the-macabre-into-a-career-dies-at-75.html. “Morbid whimsy”: Aimee Ortiz, “Edward Gorey: Writer, Artist, and a Most Puzzling Man,” Christian Science Monitor, February 22, 2013, http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2013/0222/Edward-Gorey-writer-artist-and-a-most-puzzling-man-video. “The elusive whimsy”: Michael Dirda, Classics for Pleasure (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007), 33. “[The] whimsically macabre”: Robert Cooke Goolrick, “A Gorey Story,” New Times, March 19, 1976, 54.
30 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 77.
31 Karen Wilkin, “Edward Gorey: An Introduction,” in Ascending Peculiarity, xx.
32 Edward Gorey, “The Doubtful Interview,” in Gorey Posters (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 7.
33 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” New Yorker, 84.
34 Ken Morton interviewed by Christopher Seufert in “Edward Gorey Documentary Rough Cut Sample Featuring Ken Morton (His Cousin),” from Christopher Seufert, The Last Days of Edward Gorey: A Documentary by Christopher Seufert, posted on YouTube by Seufert on March 21, 2014, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqE0x8clKEA, and subsequently removed.
35 Edward Gorey interviewed by Dick Cooke on The Dick Cooke Show, a Cape Cod–based weekly public-access cable TV program, circa 1996. DVD copy of videotape provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
36 D. Keith Mano, “Edward Gorey Inhabits an Odd World of Tiny Drawings, Fussy Cats, and ‘Doomed Enterprises,’” People 10, no. 1 (July 3, 1978), 72.
37 Claire Golding, “Edward Gorey’s Work Is No Day at the Beach,” Cape Cod Antiques & Arts, August 1993, 21.
38 “Looking out the window”: Edward Gorey, “Edward Gorey: Proust Questionnaire,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 185. “Never could understand”: Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, rev. ed. (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2011), 157.
39 J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (New York: Harper & Bros., 1928), 286.
40 Myrna Oliver, “Edward Gorey: Dark-Humored Writer and Illustrator,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 2000, http://articles.latimes.com/2000/apr/18/local/me-20939.
41 Gorey, “Miscellaneous Quotes,” 240.
42 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 96.
43 Ibid., 95.
44 Theroux, Strange Case, 2000 ed., 27.
45 Curwen, “Light from a Dark Star,” 4.
46 Quoted ibid., 2.
1 Jan Hodenfield, “And ‘G’ Is for Gorey Who Here Tells His Story,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 5.
2 Karen Wilkin, “Edward Gorey: An Introduction,” in Ascending Peculiarity, ix.
3 “Did not grow up”: Hodenfield, “And ‘G’ Is for Gorey,” 5. “Happier than I imagine”: Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” The Lion and the Unicorn 2, no. 1 (1978), 22.
4 Dick Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 55.
5 Edward Gorey interviewed by Faith Elliott, November 30, 1976, in Gorey’s apartment at 36 East 38th Street, New York City. Unpublished. Audio recording provided to the author.
6 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 7.
7 Edward Gorey interviewed by Christopher Lydon for The Connection, November 26, 1998, WBUR (Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate). Audio recording provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
8 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 76.
9 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 125.
10 Ibid.
11 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 143.
12 At least that’s what he told Dick Cavett in a 1977 interview (see Ascending Peculiarity, 57). Oddly, he told Jane Merrill Filstrup, in an interview published the following year, that his “first drawing” was “done at age three and a half” (see Ascending Peculiarity, 75). Given Gorey’s precocity in other areas, not to mention the crudity of the drawing, the earlier date seems more likely.
13 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 75.
14 Ibid.
15 Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show,” 54.
16 “‘Tried to Drive Me Insane,’ Wife Asserts in Suit; Phone Man Kept Her in Sanitarium Until Reason Fled, She Declares,” Chicago Examiner, February 17, 1914, 2.
17 Lisa Solod, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 96.
18 Edward Gorey, “Edward Gorey: Proust Questionnaire,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 182.
19 Gorey, Elliott interview.
20 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 106.
21 Gorey, Elliott interview.
22 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, rev. ed. (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2011), 84.
23 Edward Gorey to his mother, Helen Garvey Gorey, n.d., 1932. The letter in question was exhibited in Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey / G Is for Gorey—C Is for Chicago: The Collection of Thomas Michalak, two exhibitions that ran simultaneously from February 15 to June 15, 2014, at the Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago. Quote transcribed by my research assistant, Elizabeth Tamny.
24 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 113.
25 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 151.
26 See Elizabeth M. Tamny, “What’s Gorey’s Story? The Formative Years of a Very Peculiar Man,” Chicago Reader, November 11, 2005, 30.
27 Simon Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 166.
28 A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1998), 242.
29 See Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 52.
30 Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 153, 156.
31 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 113.
32 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 156.
33 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 113.
34 Annie Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll: A Talk with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 207.
35 Theroux, Strange Case, 2000 ed., 7.
36 Ibid., 65.
37 Board of Education, City of Chicago, Registration Card, April 16, 1934, digital scan obtained from Chicago Public Schools, Department of Compliance, Former Student Records, May 31, 2012.
38 Edward Gorey, letter to Jane Langton, February 20, 1998, Jane Langton Papers, Lincoln Town Archives, Lincoln, MA.
39 “Ted Gorey Report Card, Grade 6 1934–35, Room Teacher Viola Therman,” archived in “Howard School, Wilmette, Illinois, 6 and 7 grades, 1934–1937,” G Is for Gorey—C Is for Chicago, http://www.lib.luc.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/gorey/education/howard-school-wilmette-illin.
40 Theroux, Strange Case, 2000 ed., 32.
41 Cliff Henderson, “E Is for Edward Who Draws in His Room,” Arts and Entertainment Magazine, October 1991, 18.
42 Radio Guide, June 1, 1935, “Programs for Wednesday, May 29,” archived at the Internet Archive, http://archive.org/stream/radio-guide-1935-06-01/radio-guide-1935-06-01_djvu.txt.
43 Donna Grace, “Charm Secrets by Entertainer,” Windsor Daily Star, July 5, 1940, n.p.
44 Edward Leo Gorey, letter to John Boettiger, September 26, 1937, John Boettiger Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY.
45 Joyce Garvey LaMar, e-mail message to the author, July 17, 2012.
46 Edward Gorey, five-year diary, entry for February 18, 1938. Reviewed at the Edward Gorey House.
47 Gorey, five-year diary, July 2, 1939.
48 Gorey, five-year diary, March 21, 1938.
49 Dan Frank, “Colonel Francis Parker,” an essay by Francis W. Parker’s principal on the My Hero website, July 24, 2012, https://myhero.com/Colonel_Parker?iframe=true.
50 Donald Stanley Vogel, The Boardinghouse: The Artist Community House, Chicago 1936–37 (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1995), 5.
51 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, in The Annotated Oscar Wilde, ed. H. Montgomery Hyde (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1982), 355.
52 Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin, The World of Edward Gorey (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 33.
53 Ibid.
54 Paul Richard, e-mail message to the author, October 4, 2011.
55 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 143.
56 Ross and Wilkin, The World of Edward Gorey, 11.
57 Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” in Poetry 3, no. 6 (March 1914), 191, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=12840.
58 Albers, Joan Mitchell, 88.
59 Vogel, The Boardinghouse, 80.
60 See Albers, Joan Mitchell, 89.
61 “Email Exchange Between Connie Joerns and Tom Michalak 11.7.13.,” quoted in “Edward Gorey at the Francis W. Parker School,” G Is for Gorey—C Is for Chicago, http://www.lib.luc.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/gorey/education/edward-gorey-at-the-francis-w-.
62 Albers, Joan Mitchell, 90.
63 Ibid.
64 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 49.
65 “Socialites on Top Again,” Parker Weekly 29, no. 12 (January 22, 1940), 1.
66 Quoted in “Edward Gorey at the Francis W. Parker School 2,” G Is for Gorey—C Is for Chicago, http://www.lib.luc.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/gorey/education/parker-2.
67 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 102.
68 Edward Gorey, Harvard College National Scholarship Application, January 26, 1942, in Edward Gorey student records, Office of the Registrar, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University.
69 Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” 161.
70 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 84.
71 Ibid.
72 Edward Gorey, foreword to Costumes by Karinska, by Toni Bentley (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), n.p. The show Gorey saw is undoubtedly the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s Wednesday afternoon (2:30 p.m.) performance on January 3, 1940, at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre; the program, in order, consisted of Rouge et Noir, Bacchanale, and Shéhérazade.
73 Edward Gorey, “The Doubtful Interview,” in Gorey Posters (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 6.
74 Gorey, foreword, Costumes by Karinska, n.p.
75 Ibid.
76 Grace Robert, The Borzoi Book of Ballets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), 258.
77 Albers, Joan Mitchell, 89.
78 Gorey, Harvard College National Scholarship application.
79 Edward Gorey, Harvard College application for admission, February 6, 1942, in Edward Gorey student records, Harvard University.
80 Quoted in Ariel Swartley, “Henry James’ Boston,” Globe Magazine (Boston), August 12, 1984, 10–45.
81 Herbert W. Smith, Harvard College National Scholarship application, school record form, January 28, 1942, 1–6.
82 Helen Gorey, letter to the Committee on Admission, Harvard College, September 6, 1946, in Edward Gorey student records, Harvard University.
83 Ibid.
84 Edward Gorey, letter to Bea Moss (née Rosen), addressed to “Darling,” n.d., in “Unpublished Gorey (letters to Bea Moss)” folder, Edward Gorey Collection, San Diego State University Library Special Collections.
85 Gorey, letter to Moss, addressed to “Dear Beatrix the-light-of-my-life,” n.d., San Diego State University Library Special Collections.
86 Gorey, letter to Moss, addressed to “Beatrix my beloved,” n.d., San Diego State University Library Special Collections.
87 Ibid.
88 Edward Gorey, “I Love Lucia,” Vogue, May 1986, 180.
89 David Leon Higdon, “E. F. Benson,” in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 84.
90 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 84.
91 Gorey, “Dear Beatrix the-light-of-my-life.”
92 “The Army Specialized Training Program: A Brief Survey of the Essential Facts,” Journal of Educational Sociology 16, no. 9 (May 1943), 543.
93 Edward Gorey, Harvard College Application to Register, July 5, 1946, in Edward Gorey student records, Harvard University.
1 Ronald L. Ives, “Dugway Tales,” Western Folklore 6, no. 1 (January 1947), 54.
2 Ibid., 53.
3 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 113.
4 Edward Gorey, “The Doubtful Interview,” in Gorey Posters (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 5.
5 Janet “Jan” Brandt, unpublished book report on Ascending Peculiarity for her book group e-mailed to the author. She wrote the report before her husband, William E. “Bill” Brandt, died; he reviewed it and offered insights and information, which she incorporated.
6 All quotations from William E. Brandt are from his undated, unpaginated, unpublished memoir, relevant excerpts of which were photocopied and mailed to the author by Jan Brandt.
7 Brandt, unpublished memoir.
8 Edward Gorey interviewed by the Boston-based TV and radio interviewer Christopher Lydon, circa 1992. Unedited audiotape. Copy of tape provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
9 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 21.
10 Edward Gorey, Les Serpents de Papier de Soie, n.d., 1. Photocopy of typed manuscript of unpublished Gorey play provided to the author by Jan Brandt.
11 “How unutterably mad!”: Edward Gorey, A Scene from a Play, March 28, 1945, 4. Photocopy of typed manuscript of unpublished Gorey play provided to the author by Jan Brandt. “How hideously un-chic”: Ibid., 6. “Divine!”: Ibid.
12 Edward Gorey, L’Aüs et L’Auscultatrice, n.d., 3. Photocopy of typed manuscript of unpublished Gorey play provided to the author by Jan Brandt.
13 Gorey’s handwritten notes to Brandt on the cover pages of the only plays he dated, A Scene from a Play and Les Aztèques, read “March 28, 1945,” and “July 14, 1945,” respectively. It seems likely that he inscribed the typescripts immediately after finishing them or at least shortly thereafter, though there’s no way to be certain. So those two plays, at least, were written after February 22, 1945, when he turned twenty; whether he wrote any of the others before that date we don’t know.
14 Gorey, Les Serpents, 1.
15 An auscultatrice is “a nun appointed to listen to all conversation between the other nuns and their friends or visitors,” according to Alexander Spiers, A New French-English General Dictionary (Paris: Librairie Européenne de Baudry/Mesnil-Dramard, 1908), 64. As for aüs, the Belgian-American writer Luc Sante, who is fluent in French, defined it in an April 21, 2015, tweet to me as a slang term for a nuisance customer who won’t buy anything. Knowing Gorey’s fondness for wordplay, I’m inclined to believe he chose the words for their alliterative qualities rather than their meanings. In its rhymes and rhythms, the phrase recalls Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility—perhaps no accident, given Gorey’s devotion to Austen.
16 Edward Gorey, Les Aztèques, July 14, 1945, 15, 47. Photocopy of typed manuscript of unpublished Gorey play provided to the author by Jan Brandt.
17 G. K. Chesterton, “The Miser and His Friends,” quoted in The Universe According to G. K. Chesterton: A Dictionary of the Mad, Mundane, and Metaphysical, ed. Dale Ahlquist (Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 2011), 4.
18 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 8.
19 Jim Woolf, “Army: Nerve Agent Near Dead Utah Sheep in ’68; Feds Admit Nerve Agent Near Sheep,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1998, PDF archived on the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission website, 4, http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML0037/ML003729062.pdf.
20 Dick Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 60–61.
21 Edward Gorey, letter to Bill Brandt, April 17, 1947, 4, William E. Brandt Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman.
22 Ibid., 2.
23 Edward Gorey, Veteran Application for Rooms, July 9, 1946, in Edward Gorey student records, Office of the Registrar, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University.
24 Quoted in Andrew J. Diamond, Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 1.
25 Christopher Lydon, “The Connection,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 224.
26 David Streitfeld, “The Gorey Details,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 178.
27 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 113.
1 Quoted in Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 6.
2 Ibid., 47.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 115.
5 Ibid.
6 Larry Osgood, interview with the author at Osgood’s home in Germantown, New York, April 28, 2011.
7 Gooch, City Poet, 115.
8 Ibid., 114–15.
9 “The greatest influence”: Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 57. “Reluctant to admit”: Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 123–24.
10 Published in New York in 1971 by Albondocani Press, Early Stories collects “The Wavering Disciple” and “A Study in Opal” with four illustrations by Gorey.
11 Tobi Tobias, “Balletgorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 23.
12 Quoted in Michael Dirda, Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 180.
13 Ronald Firbank, Vainglory, in The Complete Ronald Firbank (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1961), 149.
14 Quoted in Dirda, Bound to Please, 181.
15 Ibid., 180.
16 Carl Van Vechten, Excavations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 172.
17 Ronald Firbank, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1929), n.p., archived on the Project Gutenberg website, http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/firbankr-cardinalpirelli/firbankr-cardinalpirelli-00-h.html.
18 David Van Leer, The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (New York: Routledge, 1995), 27.
19 Lisa Solod, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 102.
20 Alfred Hower, Freshman Advisor’s Report, January 10, 1947, in Edward Gorey student records, Office of the Registrar, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University.
21 Helen Gorey, letter to Judson Shaplin, assistant dean of Harvard College, dated “Saturday, March 1st,” 2, in Edward Gorey student records, Harvard University.
22 Ibid., 1.
23 Roel van den Oever, Mama’s Boy: Momism and Homophobia in Postwar American Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1.
24 Gooch, City Poet, 115.
25 Edward Gorey, letter to Edmund Wilson, July 28, 1954, Edmund Wilson Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
26 Gooch, City Poet, 107.
27 Ibid., 117.
28 “They were a counterculture”: Quoted in Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 152. “Improvised self-elected class”: Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage, 1983), 117.
29 “Way of seeing”: Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 106. “My life has been concerned”: Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 121.
30 Edward Gorey, letter to Bill Brandt, April 17, 1947, 1, William E. Brandt Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman. All quotations from Gorey letters to Brandt are from letters found in the Brandt Papers.
31 Dick Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 58.
32 “Dim proceedings”: Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 113. “Absolutely atrocious”: Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 47.
33 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 79–80.
34 François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1919), archived at Bartleby.com, http://www.bartleby.com/100/738.html.
35 Edward Gorey, untitled article on the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld, n.d., 6, Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
36 Ibid., 4.
37 Ibid., 2.
38 Ibid., 8.
39 “Incurable pessimism,” “passion and suffering,” “polite glaciality”: Gorey, untitled article on the Maximes, 9. “I read books”: Theroux, Strange Case, 2000 ed., 26–27.
40 Edward Gorey, fourth part of a novel, Paint Me Black Angels, December 14, 1947, 3, Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
41 Gorey, letter to Brandt, April 17, 1947, 1.
42 Gorey, letter to Brandt, April 17, 1947, 3.
43 Donald Hall, letter to the author, February 9, 2011, 1.
44 Quoted in Gooch, City Poet, 117.
45 Gorey, letter to Brandt, November 10, 1947, 1.
46 Ibid.
47 Gorey, untitled article on the Maximes, 6.
48 Donald Hall, “English C, 1947,” in John Ciardi: Measure of the Man, ed. Vince Clemente (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987), 53.
49 Edward Cifelli, John Ciardi: A Biography (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998), 297.
50 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 28.
51 John Ciardi, letter to Donald Allen, in Homage to Frank O’Hara, ed. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur, rev. ed. (Bolinas, CA: Big Sky Books, 1988), 19.
52 Cifelli, John Ciardi, 145.
53 Quoted in Gooch, City Poet, 120.
54 Edward Gorey, “The Colours of Disillusion,” October 27, 1947, 1–10, Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
55 Ibid.
56 Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 114–15, 116.
57 Edward Gorey, “A Wet Sunday, Vendée, Whatever Year Scott’s Novel Was Translated,” April 14, 1949, n.p., Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
58 Gooch, City Poet, 117.
59 Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Vintage, 1970), 294.
60 Gooch, City Poet, 131.
61 Phil Thomas, “Gorey Writes First, Draws Later,” Gettysburg Times, January 9, 1984, 7.
62 Gooch, City Poet, 118.
63 Ibid.
64 Elizabeth Hollander, “The End of the Line: Rory Dagweed Succumbs,” Goodbye, n.d., n.p., https://web.archive.org/web/20010217224104/http://www.goodbyemag.com//mar00/gorey.html/.
65 Edward Gorey interviewed by Faith Elliott, November 30, 1976, in Gorey’s apartment at 36 East 38th Street, New York City. Unpublished. Audio provided to author.
66 W. E. Farbstein, “Debunking Expedition,” Collier’s Weekly, n.p., n.d., magazine clipping included in Helen Gorey, letter to Edward Gorey, n.d., Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
67 Gooch, City Poet, 133.
68 Ibid., 115.
69 Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, “Ifan Kyrle Fletcher,” in Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques, ed. Mervyn Horder (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1977), 25.
70 Unedited footage of ABC reporter Margaret Osmer interviewing Gorey in 1978 about his fur coats. Digital copy of videotape provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
71 Gooch, City Poet, 121.
72 Ibid., 135.
73 Ivy Compton-Burnett, A Heritage and Its History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 10.
74 Gooch, City Poet, 136.
75 Ibid., 133.
76 Ibid., 132.
77 Ibid., 133.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 116.
81 Larry Osgood, e-mail message to the author, January 6, 2013.
82 Larry Osgood, e-mail message to the author, November 21, 2012.
83 Osgood, interview with the author.
84 Edward Gorey, letter to Consuelo Joerns, December 30, 1948, 1, Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
85 Ibid., 2.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Student’s Status, August 1, 1949, 2, in Edward Gorey student records, Harvard University.
89 “I’ve never been one for a messy clinch” (untitled poem), n.p., Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
90 Gorey, letter to Brandt, January 30, 1951, 3.
91 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 102.
92 Ibid., 97.
93 Ibid., 102.
94 Ibid., 103.
95 Ibid., 105.
96 Ibid.
97 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 149.
98 John Ashbery, e-mail message to the author, March 2, 2011. Ashbery requested that the following credit/permission line be appended to this endnote: “Quotations/excerpts from unpublished correspondence with John Ashbery used in this volume are copyright © 2011 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author.”
99 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 148.
100 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 119.
101 Franklyn B. Modell, letter to Edward Gorey, April 27, 1950, 1, Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
102 David Remnick, “The New Yorker in the Forties,” New Yorker, April 28, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-new-yorker-in-the-forties.
103 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 85.
104 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 115.
105 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, rev. ed. (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2011), 37.
106 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 96.
107 Ibid., 105.
108 Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 21.
109 Gooch, City Poet, 140.
110 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 115.
111 Frank O’Hara, “For Edward Gorey,” in Early Writing, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1977), 65.
112 Gooch, City Poet, 123–24.
1 Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin, The World of Edward Gorey (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 33.
2 Joseph P. Kahn, “It Was a Dark and Gorey Night,” Boston Globe, December 17, 1998, C4.
3 Steven Heller, “Edward Gorey’s Cover Story,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 232.
4 D. Keith Mano, “Edward Gorey Inhabits an Odd World of Tiny Drawings, Fussy Cats, and ‘Doomed Enterprises,’” People 10, no. 1 (July 3, 1978), https://people.com/archive/edward-gorey-inhabits-an-odd-world-of-tiny-drawings-fussy-cats-and-doomed-enterprises-vol-10-no-1/.
5 Edward Gorey, letter to Bill Brandt, January 30, 1951, 2, William E. Brandt Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman. All quotations from Gorey letters to Brandt are from letters found in the Brandt Papers.
6 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 12.
7 Gorey, letter to Brandt, January 30, 1951, 2.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Nicholas Wroe, “Young at Heart,” The Guardian, October 24, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview15.
11 Alison Lurie, “Of Curious, Beastly & Doubtful Days: Alison Lurie on Edward ‘Ted’ Gorey,” transcript of remarks delivered at the Edward Gorey House’s Seventh Annual Auction and Goreyfest, October 4, 2008, http://www.goreyography.com/north/north.htm.
12 Alison Lurie, interview with the author.
13 Lurie, “Of Curious, Beastly & Doubtful Days.”
14 Lurie, interview with the author.
15 Lurie, “Of Curious, Beastly & Doubtful Days.”
16 Ibid.
17 Lurie, interview with the author.
18 Ibid.
19 Lurie, “Of Curious, Beastly & Doubtful Days.”
20 Gorey, letter to Brandt, January 30, 1951, 1.
21 Ibid.
22 Harvard Advocate 133, no. 6 (Commencement Issue, 1950), and Harvard Advocate 133, no. 7 (Registration Issue, 1950), respectively.
23 John Updike, foreword to Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey, by Kevin McDermott (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2003), n.p.
24 Gorey, letter to Brandt, January 30, 1951, 3.
25 Ibid.
26 Edward M. Cifelli, The Selected Letters of John Ciardi (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 71.
27 Merrill Moore, letter to Helen Gorey, April 21, 1953, 2, Merrill Moore Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. All quotations from Moore’s correspondence with Helen Gorey, Edward Leo Gorey, and Edward Gorey are taken from this collection.
28 Moore, telegram to Edward Gorey, December 2, 1951.
29 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 154.
30 Alison Lurie, “A Memoir,” in V. R. Lang: Poems & Plays; With a Memoir by Alison Lurie, by V. R. Lang and Alison Lurie (New York: Random House, 1975), 13.
31 Nora Sayre, “The Poets’ Theatre: A Memoir of the Fifties,” Grand Street 3, no. 3 (Spring 1984), 98.
32 Ibid., 92.
33 Ibid., 98.
34 Lurie, “A Memoir,” 14.
35 Oscar Wilde, The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde, ed. Alvin Redman (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1959), 64.
36 Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 147.
37 Lurie, “A Memoir,” 60.
38 Gooch, City Poet, 148.
39 Oscar Wilde’s Wit & Wisdom: A Book of Quotations (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 1.
40 Lurie, “A Memoir,” 71.
41 Lurie, “Of Curious, Beastly & Doubtful Days.”
42 Sayre, “The Poets’ Theatre,” 95.
43 Ibid.
44 Edward Gorey, Amabel, or The Partition of Poland, written in February–May 1952, n.p., typewritten copy of unpublished play, Felicia Lamport Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
45 Sarah A. Dolgonos, “Behind the Macabre: In Memoriam of Edward Gorey,” Harvard Crimson, June 5, 2000, 2, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2000/6/5/behind-the-macabre-ponce-asked-what/?page=2.
46 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 116.
47 Theroux, Strange Case, 10.
48 Moore, letter to Edward Gorey, October 22, 1951, 2.
49 Edward Gorey, letter to Alison Lurie, June 22, 1952, 2, Alison Lurie Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. All quotations from Gorey’s correspondence with Lurie are taken from the Lurie Papers at Cornell.
50 Theroux, Strange Case, 12.
51 Society Notebook, Chicago Daily Tribune, October 22, 1952, B1.
52 Edward Leo Gorey, letter to Merrill Moore, April 24, 1953, 1.
53 Judith Cass, Recorded at Random, Chicago Daily Tribune, December 17, 1952, B7.
54 Gorey, letter to Lurie, June 22, 1952, 1.
55 Ibid., 2.
56 Jason Epstein, interview with the author at Epstein’s home in Manhattan, March 29, 2011.
57 Carol Stevens, “An American Original,” Print, January–February 1988, 51.
58 Heller, “Edward Gorey’s Cover Story,” 232.
59 Clifford Ross, “Interview with Edward Gorey,” in The World of Edward Gorey, 33, 36.
1 Edward Gorey, audiotape of an interview with Ed Pinsent, the edited version of which appeared in Speak magazine in fall 1997 as “A Gorey Encounter” and was subsequently republished in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001). Pinsent provided me with a digital copy of the interview tape.
2 Edward Gorey, letter to Merrill Moore dated “Tuesday night” (in 1953, most likely March), 1, Merrill Moore Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
3 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 28.
4 Carol Stevens, “An American Original,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 130.
5 Steven Heller, “Edward Gorey’s Cover Story,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 234.
6 Ibid., 233.
7 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 76.
8 Clifford Ross, “Interview with Edward Gorey,” in The World of Edward Gorey, by Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 28.
9 Heller, “Edward Gorey’s Cover Story,” 235.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 236.
12 Steven Heller, Edward Gorey: His Book Cover Art & Design (Portland, OR: Pomegranate, 2015), 17.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 154.
16 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, October 2, 1968, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 19.
17 Andreas Brown dismisses the idea that Warhol and Gorey ever crossed paths at Doubleday—or anywhere else, for that matter. “They never, ever communicated or had any association that I know of,” he said. See “Warhol & Collecting Books,” Andreas Brown interviewed by Kathryn Price, curator of collections at the Williams College Museum of Art, August 6, 2015, archived on the Williams College YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL6TBUl8MGM.
Yet a 1977 profile asserts that Gorey rubbed elbows with Warhol at Doubleday in the early ’50s and that “years later, he was surprised by Warhol, who recognized him on the street in New York, greeting him as a celebrity of equal rank in bohemian circles.” (See Craig Little, “Gorey,” Packet, October 30, 1977, 19. They had, at least, shared a marquee: Warhol appeared in the November 1952 issue of Harper’s that featured Gorey’s debut on the cover of a national magazine; Warhol’s pen-and-ink drawing, done in the jittery, blotted-line style popularized by Ben Shahn, accompanies Shirley Jackson’s short story “Journey with a Lady.”
18 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 155.
19 Louis Menand, “Pulp’s Big Moment: How Emily Brontë Met Mickey Spillane,” New Yorker, January 5, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/pulps-big-moment.
20 Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 66–67.
21 “Edward Gorey,” Print, January–February 1958, 44.
22 Menand, “Pulp’s Big Moment.”
23 Heller, “Edward Gorey’s Cover Story,” 235.
24 Gorey “became very well known” for his James covers, he said, the irony of which was not lost on the man who claimed to hate James “more than anyone else in the world except for Picasso.” “But your covers for James are fairly astute interpretations,” Heller protested. “Well,” said Gorey, “everybody thought, ‘Oh, how sensitive you are to Henry James,’ and I thought, ‘Oh sure, kids.’ If it’s because I hate him so much, that’s probably true.” See Heller, “Edward Gorey’s Cover Story,” 236.
25 Thomas Garvey, “Edward Gorey and the Glass Closet: A Moral Fable,” Hub Review, March 19, 2011, http://hubreview.blogspot.com/2011/03/imaginary-frontispiece-with-author-in.html. All Thomas Garvey quotations are taken from this page.
26 Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 34.
27 Edward Gorey, letter to Alison Lurie dated “Monday, lunch” (December 1953), 3, Alison Lurie Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. All quotations from Gorey’s correspondence with Lurie are taken from the Lurie Papers at Cornell.
28 Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 194.
29 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Friday evening” (September 10, 1953), 2.
30 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley and Toronto: Crossing Press, 1982), 221.
31 Kevin Cook, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 47.
32 Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems, ed. Mark Ford (New York: Borzoi / Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 61.
33 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday evening” (August 1953), 1.
34 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Wednesday noon” (September 30, 1953), 1.
35 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Thursday noon” (November 6, 1953), 2.
36 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Monday lunch” (December 1953), 1.
37 Ibid., 2.
38 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon, shortly after five” (March 1953), 2.
39 Tobi Tobias, “Balletgorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 14.
40 Haskel Frankel, “Edward Gorey: Professionally Preoccupied with Death,” Herald Tribune, August 25, 1963, 8.
41 Marilyn Stasio, “A Gorey Story,” Oui, April 1979, 85.
42 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 20.
43 Stasio, “A Gorey Story,” 130.
44 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon, shortly after five,” 2.
45 Alden Mudge, “Edward Gorey: Take a Walk on the Dark Side of the Season,” BookPage, November 1998, https://bookpage.com/interviews/7968-edward-gorey#.WiA-YEtrz66.
46 The San Remo Café, a bar at 189 Bleecker Street that closed in 1967, was a popular watering hole for writers, painters, musicians, and other bohemian scenemakers. William S. Burroughs drank there. Gore Vidal put the moves on Jack Kerouac there, then took him back to the Chelsea Hotel for a roll in the hay. Leonard Bernstein, Delmore Schwartz, Miles Davis, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and, as it happens, Frank O’Hara were often seen there. It drew a mixed crowd but struck the actor Judith Malina as having a “gay and intellectual” vibe. See Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen, Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 154.
Though Gorey told Lurie he hadn’t set foot in the place since he “came to rest” in Manhattan, there’s evidence to suggest he went there at least once with Frank O’Hara and Joan Mitchell. Did he ever rub elbows with boldfaced names such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Baldwin, or Bernstein? Fascinating to imagine.
1 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 118.
2 Quoted in Andreas Brown, “2012 Hall of Fame Inductee: Edward Gorey,” Society of Illustrators website, https://www.societyillustrators.org/edward-gorey.
3 Edward Gorey, letter to Alison Lurie, January 7, 1957, 1, Alison Lurie Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. All quotations from Gorey’s correspondence with Lurie are taken from the Lurie Papers at Cornell.
4 Kevin Kelly, “Edward Gorey: An Artist in ‘the Nonsense Tradition,’” Boston Globe, August 16, 1992, B28.
5 Antioch Jensen, “Edward Gorey Glory,” Maine Antique Digest, March 2011, 32C.
6 Edward Gorey, “Edward Gorey: Proust Questionnaire,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 187.
7 Haskel Frankel, “Edward Gorey: Professionally Preoccupied with Death,” Herald Tribune, August 25, 1963, 8.
8 In an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, Robert Greskovic shed some light on his friend’s cryptic utterance. “The exclamation, something of a favorite of Gorey’s during the nearly three decades I was acquainted with him, was perhaps a conflation of ‘phooey’ and ‘pshaw’ and maybe a dog’s sneezing,” he writes. “[He] used this expression to dismiss any number of things, particularly something about himself, especially if it bordered on gushing enthusiasm.” See Robert Greskovic, “Home Sweet Museum,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2002, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1025226629964498880.
9 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 141.
10 Tobi Tobias, “Balletgorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 15.
11 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 120.
12 Tobias, “Balletgorey,” 15.
13 Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 219.
14 Quoted in Gooch, City Poet, 219.
15 Quoted in “George Balanchine,” New York City Ballet website, http://www.nycballet.com/Explore/Our-History/George-Balanchine.aspx.
16 Kirsten Bodensteiner, “George Balanchine and Agon,” ArtsEdge, http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/students/features/master-work/balanchine-agon.
17 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 123.
18 Gayle Kassing, History of Dance: An Interactive Arts Approach (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2007), 196.
19 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 82.
20 Tobias, “Balletgorey,” 14.
21 Ibid., 18.
22 Tobi Tobias, “On Balanchine’s ‘Ivesiana,’” Seeing Things (Tobias’s blog), May 3, 2013, http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/2013/05/on-balanchines-ivesiana.html.
23 Tobias, “Balletgorey,” 18.
24 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 46.
25 Ibid., 47.
26 Arlene Croce, “The Tiresias Factor,” New Yorker, May 28, 1990, 53.
27 Allegra Kent, “An Exchange of Letters, Packages, Moonstones and Mailbox Entertainment,” Dance Magazine, July 2000, 66.
28 Ibid.
29 Allegra Kent, Once a Dancer…: An Autobiography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 264.
30 Croce, “The Tiresias Factor,” 53.
31 Gorey, “Proust Questionnaire,” 185.
32 W. G. Rogers, Wise Men Fish Here: The Story of Frances Steloff and the Gotham Book Mart (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 161.
33 Bowie seems to have been a Gorey fan. After his death, in a Guardian column collecting readers’ accounts of their close encounters with Bowie, a contributor identified only as “BookmanJB” describes meeting Bowie at a party in the Greenwich Village apartment of Jimmy Destri, keyboardist for the New Wave band Blondie. They hit it off, and BookmanJB was frequently summoned to Bowie’s New York apartment for wide-ranging conversations over dinner, often literary in nature, always intensely intellectual. “We became good friends,” he writes. “He came to my birthday party that year and gave me a signed first edition of an Edward Gorey book, which he, David, inscribed to me. I still have it.” See James Walsh and Marta Bausells, “‘Wherever One Went with Him, There Was a Seismic Shift’: The readers who met David Bowie,” The Guardian, January 18, 2016, https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/18/david-bowie-readers-memories.
34 Lynn Gilbert and Gaylen Moore, Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped Our Times (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1981), 9.
35 Brown, “2012 Hall of Fame Inductee.”
36 Christine Temin, “The Eccentric World of Edward Gorey,” Boston Globe, November 22, 1979, A61.
37 Andreas Brown, foreword to The Black Doll: A Silent Screenplay by Edward Gorey with an Interview by Annie Nocenti, by Edward Gorey (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2009), 4.
38 Annie Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll: A Talk with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 200.
39 Ibid.
40 Annie Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll: A Talk with Edward Gorey,” in The Black Doll, 12.
41 Ibid.
42 Christopher Lydon, “The Connection,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 216.
43 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 31–32.
44 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 33.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 230.
47 Ibid., 148.
48 Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll,” in The Black Doll, 21.
49 Simon Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 158.
50 Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 200.
51 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 138.
52 In light of the many ways in which their aesthetics, philosophical outlooks, and sensibilities overlapped, it seems only fitting that Gorey should end up illustrating some of Beckett’s books, as he did when the Gotham Book Mart published All Strange Away (1976) and Beginning to End (1988). When Beckett received his copy of All Strange Away with Gorey’s illustrations, he was much pleased, pronouncing it “a beautiful edition.” See the Fathoms from Anywhere: A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition website, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/beckett/career/allstrange/manuscripts.html.
53 Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” 158.
54 Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 198.
55 Ibid., 212.
56 Ibid., 198.
57 Quoted in Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 33.
58 Irwin Terry, “Fantomas,” Goreyana, February 12, 2011, http://goreyana.blogspot.com/2011/02/fantomas.html.
59 Ibid.
1 Edward Gorey, letter to Edmund Wilson, July 28, 1954, Edmund Wilson Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
2 Edward Gorey, letter to Alison Lurie dated “Saturday evening” (August 1953), 1, Alison Lurie Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. All quotations from Gorey’s correspondence with Lurie are taken from the Lurie Papers at Cornell.
3 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Wednesday evening” (March 10, 1954), 1.
4 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 147.
5 Edmund Wilson, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” in The Bit Between My Teeth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 481.
6 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 43–44.
7 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 145.
8 Jean Martin, “The Mind’s Eye: Writers Who Draw,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 90.
9 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 27.
10 Peter L. Stern & Company, Inc., http://www.sternrarebooks.com/pages/books/21714P/edward-gorey/the-listing-attic.
11 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon” (December 1954), 2.
12 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Wednesday night” (January 19, 1954), 2.
13 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Sunday afternoon” (circa spring 1954), 2.
14 “About the Society,” American Society for Psychical Research website, http://www.aspr.com/who.htm.
15 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon” (February 13, 1954), 1.
16 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 160.
17 Ibid.
18 Rick Poynor, “A Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image,” February 15, 2013, Design Observer, http://designobserver.com/feature/a-dictionary-of-surrealism-and-the-graphic-image/37685.
19 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Wednesday evening” (March 10, 1954), 1.
20 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday evening” (February 12, 1955), 2.
21 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Sunday afternoon” (May 2, 1955), 1.
22 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon” (August 1955), 2.
23 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 85.
24 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “2 October 57,” 2.
25 Simon Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 169.
26 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 85.
27 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 61.
28 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon” (August 1955), 1.
29 Christopher Lydon, “The Connection,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 226.
30 Alison Lurie, “Of Curious, Beastly & Doubtful Days: Alison Lurie on Edward ‘Ted’ Gorey,” transcript of remarks delivered at the Edward Gorey House’s Seventh Annual Auction and Goreyfest, October 4, 2008, http://www.goreyography.com/north/north.htm.
31 Alison Lurie, “On Edward Gorey (1925–2000),” New York Review of Books, May 25, 2000, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/05/25/on-edward-gorey-19252000/.
32 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “29 December 1957,” 1.
33 Kevin Shortsleeve, unpublished phone interview with Maurice Sendak, February 12, 2002, 7. Now a professor of English at Christopher Newport University, Shortsleeve was then a graduate student at the University of Florida. He spoke with Sendak as part of his research for his master’s thesis on Gorey and his relationship to children’s literature. This and all subsequent excerpts from Professor Shortsleeve’s interview are quoted by permission of the Maurice Sendak Foundation.
34 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 76.
35 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “29 December 1957,” 1.
36 Wilson, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” 483.
37 Lydon, “The Connection,” 226.
38 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 43.
39 Quoted in Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 213–14.
40 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 42.
41 Wilson, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” 483–84.
42 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “20 January 1958,” 1.
43 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “6 Feb 58,” 2.
44 Ibid.
45 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “1 April 1958,” 1.
1 Edward Gorey, letter to Alison Lurie dated “19 September 58,” 1. Alison Lurie Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. All quotations from Gorey’s correspondence with Lurie are taken from the Lurie Papers at Cornell.
2 “Children’s book thing”: Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Tuesday morning” (1959), 1. “In a state of total frazzle”: Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “19 March 1959,” 1.
3 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “3 August 1959,” 1.
4 “The Child as a Human,” Newsweek, September 7, 1959, 80.
5 Steven Heller, “Edward Gorey’s Cover Story,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 236–37.
6 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon, March 12th, 1960,” 1.
7 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “3 August 1959,” 1.
8 Leonard S. Marcus, introduction to The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), xxxiv.
9 Edmund Wilson, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” in The Bit Between My Teeth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 479.
10 Ibid., 479–82.
11 Ibid., 484.
12 Ibid., 482, 479.
13 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon, March 12th” (1960), 2.
14 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “18 September 1960,” 2.
15 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 30.
16 Quoted in Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 152.
17 Edward Lear, “Nonsense Alphabet” (1845), Poets.org, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/nonsense-alphabet.
18 Kevin Shortsleeve, unpublished phone interview with Maurice Sendak, February 12, 2002, 4–5.
19 George R. Bodmer, “The Post-Modern Alphabet: Extending the Limits of the Contemporary Alphabet Book, from Seuss to Gorey,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 14, no. 3 (Fall 1989), 116.
20 Ibid., 117.
21 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 45.
22 The predatory gay pedophile—a stock bogeyman in the American unconscious—reappears in another Gorey alphabet book, The Glorious Nosebleed (1975). In the vignette for the letter L, a bowler-hatted chap flashes a nonplussed Little Lord Fauntleroy. “He exposed himself Lewdly,” the caption reads. As a little boy, Gorey was striking, with intense blue eyes and delicate features. Could his professed asexuality—or repressed homosexuality, or whatever it was—never mind his lifelong distaste for the Catholic Church, have been the result of sexual molestation during his brief time in Catholic school?
There isn’t a shred of evidence to support this speculation, but given the epidemic of child sex abuse by priests, it’s hardly beyond the realm of possibility. According to the Chicago Tribune, allegations of child sex abuse against “more than 65 priests” in the city’s archdiocese were substantiated by documents released by the Church. (Most of these incidents occurred before 1988. See Manya Brachear Pashman, Christy Gutowski, and Todd Lighty, “Papers Detail Decades of Sex Abuse by Priests,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2014, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-01-21/news/chi-chicago-priest-abuse-20140121_1_abusive-priests-secret-church-documents-john-de-la-salle.)
On the other hand, Larry Osgood is convinced that Ted’s life-changingly unpleasant initiation into the mysteries of sex happened in his late teens. Whatever the case, one thing is certain: clergymen are inevitably sinister figures in Goreyland.
24 “Maurice Sendak: On Life, Death, and Children’s Lit,” interview with Sendak on the NPR program Fresh Air, originally broadcast September 20, 2011, and archived at http://www.npr.org/2011/12/29/144077273/maurice-sendak-on-life-death-and-childrens-lit.
25 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 8.
26 Ibid., 13.
27 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 227.
28 Ibid., 228.
29 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 5.
30 Ibid., 8.
31 Fascinatingly, two versions of the book’s jacket, both finished, together with a couple of illustrations from the manuscript, did materialize. They turned up in a collection of materials selected by Andreas Brown from the archives of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust and lent to the Gorey House for its 2016 exhibit Artifacts from the Archives.
The book, whose full title is The Interesting List of Real/Imaginary} {People/Places/Things, was almost certainly conceived as a version of the book Gorey proposed to Peter Neumeyer in an October 4, 1968, letter. Tentatively titled Donald Makes a List, the idea, Gorey notes, is “obviously inspired by…the Borges one, but then I am always one for filching technical inspiration, as the result never bears any relation whatever to the original.” See Floating Worlds, 45.
“The Borges one” was the (entirely fictitious) taxonomy cited by Borges in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” Supposedly quoted from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, it organizes the animal kingdom into such whimsical categories as “those that belong to the emperor,” “mermaids,” “stray dogs,” “those that are included in this classification,” “those that tremble as if they were mad,” “those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush,” “those that have just broken the flower vase,” and “those that at a distance resemble flies.” See Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 231.
The idea had come to Gorey as a result of Neumeyer’s having suggested he might like Borges. Never one to pass up a potential literary pleasure, he “rested not,” he wrote, “until I had everything in English, which proved so thwarting because they kept reprinting the same things, and then I managed to get a few more things by resorting to French, and finally, despite three years of high school Spanish twenty-five years ago, the collected works in Spanish and a Spanish dictionary, which await a period of settled calm to be deciphered in,” he wrote Neumeyer. “In Other Inquisitions, ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’ contains a list of animals which I am determined to illustrate someday; it may well be the best list of anything ever made…” See Floating Worlds, 38.
33 Lisa Solod, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 108.
34 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 5.
35 Ibid., 9.
36 Ibid., 8.
37 Selma G. Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 110.
38 Ibid., 51.
39 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 13.
40 Patricia Cohen, “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are,” New York Times, September 9, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/arts/design/10sendak.html.
41 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 13.
42 Ibid., 8.
43 Ibid., 13–14.
44 Ted Drozdowski, “The Welcome Guest,” Boston Phoenix, August 21, 1992, 7.
45 Ron Miller, “Edward Gorey, 1925–2000,” Mystery! website, http://23.21.192.150/mystery/gorey.html.
46 Andrew M. Goldstein, “Children’s Book Icon Tomi Ungerer on His Radical, Anti-Authoritarian Career,” Artspace, January 15, 2015, http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/meet_the_artist/tomi-underer-interview-52564.
47 Joseph Stanton, Looking for Edward Gorey (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Art Gallery, 2011), 83.
48 Quoted in Howard Fulweiler, Here a Captive Heart Busted: Studies in the Sentimental Journey of Modern Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), 65.
49 Ellen Barry, “Dark Streak Marked Life of Prolific Author,” Boston Globe, April 17, 2000, C5.
50 Karen Wilkin, “Mr. Earbrass Jots Down a Few Visual Notes: The World of Edward Gorey,” in The World of Edward Gorey, by Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 63.
51 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 32.
52 Apparently, The Hapless Child came full circle with its origins when “some nit made a movie of [it],” according to Gorey in one of his letters to Peter Neumeyer. Writing in November of ’68, he says he is going to see a screening of the film, which he notes was made “ages ago.” In a later letter, he reports, “The short, semi-animated film the young man made from [The Hapless Child] had its merits: quite straightforward, bits of Beethoven, someone I can’t remember, and some of the more sinister sawing away at the strings from Vivaldi’s Seasons; he did however leave out the supernatural element, if that is what it is, entirely.” By “supernatural element,” Gorey must have meant the devilish imp in each scene, a revealing remark that supports Stanton’s theory that the evil sprites are intervening in human affairs, steering the unhappy course of Charlotte Sophia’s life. See Floating Worlds, 117, 127.
53 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 77.
54 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 86.
55 Gorey, as we know, was well familiar with the literature of Victorian sensationalism. The Edward Gorey Personal Library, at San Diego State University, includes copies of scholarly studies such as Thomas Boyle’s Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism and Louis James’s Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England.
Thus it seems likely that the startling similarity between the ending of The Curious Sofa and a bizarre scene in a “blood,” as penny dreadfuls were alternatively known, is more than mere coincidence. In his classic work of Victorian sociology, London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew mentions a costermonger who routinely read bloods aloud to his illiterate workmates. One choice passage “took their fancy wonderfully,” the man recalled; Mayhew gives us chapter and verse:
With glowing cheeks, flashing eyes, and palpitating bosom, Venetia Trelawney rushed back into the refreshment-room, where she threw herself into one of the arm-chairs.…But scarcely had she thus sunk down upon the flocculent cushion, when a sharp click, as of some mechanism giving way, met her ears; and at the same instant her wrists were caught in manacles which sprang out of the arms of the treacherous chair, while two steel bands started from the richly carved back and grasped her shoulders. A shriek burst from her lips—she struggled violently, but all to no purpose: for she was a captive—and powerless!
See “The Literature of Costermongers,” in Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, The Street-Folk, archived at the Tufts Digital Library, https://dl.tufts.edu/catalog/tei/tufts:MS004.002.052.001.00001/chapter/c4s19.
So uncannily similar is Venetia’s fate to Alice’s that it’s difficult not to believe that Gorey borrowed a few cogwheels, at least, from the penny dreadful in question when he was making up Sir Egbert’s diabolical sofa.
57 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 40.
58 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 103.
59 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 39.
60 Ibid.
61 “Alison Lurie, “Of Curious, Beastly & Doubtful Days: Alison Lurie on Edward ‘Ted’ Gorey,” transcript of remarks delivered at the Edward Gorey House’s Seventh Annual Auction and Goreyfest, October 4, 2008, http://www.goreyography.com/north/north.htm.
62 Solod, “Edward Gorey,” 102–3.
63 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 40.
64 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 78.
65 Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, October 28, 1961, 19.
66 Heller, “Edward Gorey’s Cover Story,” 237.
1 Dick Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 62.
2 Edward Gorey, letter to Alison Lurie dated “Friday evening” (September 10, 1953), 1, Alison Lurie Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. All quotations from Gorey’s correspondence with Lurie are taken from the Lurie Papers at Cornell.
3 Ibid., 2.
4 Alison Lurie, “Of Curious, Beastly & Doubtful Days: Alison Lurie on Edward ‘Ted’ Gorey,” transcript of remarks delivered at the Edward Gorey House’s Seventh Annual Auction and Goreyfest, October 4, 2008, http://www.goreyography.com/north/north.htm.
5 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 146.
6 Lillian Gish and her sister, Dorothy, were occasional, much-revered guests at Bill Everson’s screenings of their films. The Gishes had been movie stars since movies began, to borrow the headline of Lillian’s obituary in the New York Times: Dorothy’s comic gifts made her shine in silent comedies directed by Griffith protégés, while Lillian captivated audiences with her unlikely combination of porcelain-doll features, feminine vulnerability, and strong-willed resourcefulness in Griffith classics such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), and Broken Blossoms (1919). It’s all but certain that Gorey met the Gish sisters, since he “worshipped” Lillian, he told Neumeyer, and wouldn’t have missed a screening of her films.
7 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 145.
8 Haskel Frankel, “Edward Gorey: Professionally Preoccupied with Death,” Herald Tribune, August 25, 1963, 8.
9 Scott Baldauf, “Edward Gorey: Portrait of the Artist in Chilling Color,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 174.
10 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 76.
11 Robert Cooke Goolrick, “A Gorey Story,” New Times, March 19, 1976, 58.
12 “Most beautiful”: Karen Wilkin, “Edward Gorey: Mildly Unsettling,” in Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2009), 26. “Wordless masterwork”: Mel Gussow, “Edward Gorey, Artist and Author Who Turned the Macabre into a Career, Dies at 75,” New York Times, April 17, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/17/arts/edward-gorey-artist-and-author-who-turned-the-macabre-into-a-career-dies-at-75.html?pagewanted=all.
13 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 48.
14 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 55.
15 Frankel, “Edward Gorey,” 8.
16 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 154.
17 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 11–12.
18 Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2015), 74.
19 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 35–36.
20 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (New York: Bantam Dell, 2006), 72.
21 Celia Catlett Anderson and Marilyn Fain, Nonsense Literature for Children: Aesop to Seuss (Hamden, CT: Library Professional Publications, 1989), 171–72.
22 Edward Leo Gorey, letter to Corinna Mura, July 31, 1962, 2.
23 Anna Kisselgoff, “The City Ballet Fan Extraordinaire,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 9.
1 Toni Bentley, e-mail message to the author, November 7, 2012.
2 Peter Anastos, e-mail message to the author, August 16, 2012.
3 Ibid.
4 Anna Kisselgoff, “The City Ballet Fan Extraordinaire,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 7.
5 Tobi Tobias, “Balletgorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 16.
6 Edward Gorey, “The Doubtful Interview,” in Gorey Posters (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 6.
7 Edmund White, “The Man Who Understood Balanchine,” New York Times, November 8, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/08/bookend/bookend.html.
8 Tobias, “Balletgorey,” 15–16.
9 Quoted in Alex Behr, “On The Dream World of Dion McGregor,” Tin House, Summer 2011, archived on Behr’s Writing in the Ether blog, https://alexbehr.wordpress.com/essay-on-the-dream-world-of-dion-mcgregor/.
10 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 55.
11 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 42.
12 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 43.
13 Kisselgoff, “The City Ballet Fan,” 6.
14 Entry for “opera hat (in British),” online version of Collins English Dictionary, http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/opera-hat#opera-hat_1.
15 Entry for “velleity,” Dictionary.com website, http://www.dictionary.com/browse/velleity.
16 Although The Sinking Spell says “copyright 1964 by Edward Gorey” on its copyright page, it wasn’t published until 1965, according to Gorey bibliographer Henry Toledano. See Toledano, Goreyography (San Francisco: Word Play Publications, 1996), 32.
17 Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2008), 19.
18 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 74.
19 Ibid.
20 Edward Gorey, SVA CE Bulletin, Fall 1967, School of Visual Arts Archives, New York.
21 Edward Gorey, illustration-class, archived in “Freelancing,” G Is for Gorey—C Is for Chicago, http://www.lib.luc.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/gorey/freelancing.
22 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 124.
23 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 76.
24 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 177.
25 Cynthia Rose, “The Gorey Details,” Harpers & Queen, November 1978, 308.
26 Peter Neumeyer, letter to Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds, 29.
27 Peter Schwenger, “The Dream Narratives of Debris,” SubStance 32, no. 1 (2003), 80.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 79.
30 Selma G. Lanes, Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature (Boston: David R. Godine, 2004), 111.
31 Quoted in Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Routledge, 2000), 119.
32 Theroux, Strange Case, 53.
33 Ibid., 29.
34 Tobias, “Balletgorey,” 18.
35 Peter Stoneley, A Queer History of the Ballet (New York: Routledge, 2007), 127.
36 Ibid., 90.
37 Clifford Ross, “Interview with Edward Gorey,” in The World of Edward Gorey, by Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 33.
38 D. T. Siebert, Mortality’s Muse: The Fine Art of Dying (Newark: University of Delaware Press), 39.
39 “Warhol & Collecting Books,” Andreas Brown interviewed by Kathryn Price, curator of collections at Williams College Museum of Art, August 6, 2015, archived on the Williams College YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL6TBUl8MGM.
40 Ibid.
41 Thomas Curwen, “Light from a Dark Star: Before the Current Rise of Graphic Novels, There Was Edward Gorey, Whose Tales and Drawings Still Baffle—and Attract—New Fans,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2004, http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/18/entertainment/ca-curwen18.
42 Theroux, Strange Case, 2.
43 Gotham Book Mart and Gallery leaflet announcing “annual Edward Gorey Holiday Exhibit,” 2004, private collection of the author.
44 Carol Stevens, “An American Original,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 131.
45 Edward Gorey interviewed by Marion Vuilleumier for the Cape Cod public-access program Books and the World, 1982. Audiotape recording and transcript provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
1 Elizabeth Janeway, review of Amphigorey, by Edward Gorey, New York Times Book Review, October 29, 1972, 6.
2 Edward Gorey, “The Real Zoo Story,” review of Animal Gardens, by Emily Hahn, Chicago Tribune, November 5, 1967, 17.
3 Ibid., 18.
4 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), 26, 28.
5 Victoria Chess and Edward Gorey, Fletcher and Zenobia (New York: New York Review Children’s Collection, 2016), n.p.
6 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 28.
7 Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 9.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 11.
10 Quoted ibid., 7.
11 Floating Worlds, 8.
12 Ibid., 134.
13 Ibid., 147.
14 Ibid., 210
15 Ibid., 130.
16 Ibid., 16.
17 Ibid., 186.
18 Ibid., 84.
19 Ibid., 134.
20 Ibid., 158, 124.
21 Ibid., 39.
22 Ibid., 39, 42.
23 Ibid., 39.
24 Ibid., 201.
25 Ibid., 18.
26 Ibid., 73–74.
27 Ibid., 60.
28 Ibid., 187.
29 Ibid., 37.
30 Ibid., 105, 111.
31 Ibid., 115, 151.
32 Peter Neumeyer interviewed by Susan Resnik for San Diego State University Oral Histories, April 12–14, 2010, 133, https://library.sdsu.edu/sites/default/files/NeumeyerTranscript.pdf.
33 See William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (New York: Grove Press, 1982).
34 Floating Worlds, 85.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 7.
37 Ibid., 20.
38 Peter F. Neumeyer, e-mail message to the author, March 4, 2012.
39 Floating Worlds, 8.
40 Peter F. Neumeyer, e-mail message to the author, March 23, 2012.
41 Kevin Shortsleeve, “Interview with Peter Neumeyer on Edward Gorey,” February 5–11, 2002, 1. Unpublished manuscript provided to the author by e-mail.
42 Neumeyer, Resnik interview, 126.
43 Ibid., 128–30.
44 Floating Worlds, 19.
45 Ibid., 16–17.
46 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 44.
47 Karen Wilkin, “Mr. Earbrass Jots Down a Few Visual Notes: The World of Edward Gorey,” in The World of Edward Gorey, by Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 51.
48 Joseph Stanton, Looking for Edward Gorey (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Art Gallery, 2011), 90.
49 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 147.
50 Ibid., 147–48.
51 Simon Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 160.
52 Clifford Ross, “Interview with Edward Gorey,” in The World of Edward Gorey, 11.
53 Dick Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 59.
54 Quoted in Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (Tucson, AZ: Schaffner Press, 2003), 243.
55 Selma G. Lanes, Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature (Boston: David R. Godine, 2004), 110.
56 Karen Wilkin, Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2009), 80.
57 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 42.
58 Lanes, Through the Looking Glass, 111.
59 Irwin Terry, “Three Books from Fantod Press III,” Goreyana, April 10, 2009, http://goreyana.blogspot.com/2009/04/three-books-from-fantod-press-iii.html.
60 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 124.
61 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 40.
62 Amy Benfer, “Edward Gorey: No One Sheds Light on Darkness from Quite the Same Perspective as This Cape Cod Specialist in Morbid, Fine-Lined Jocularity,” Salon, February 15, 2000, http://www.salon.com/2000/02/15/gorey.
63 Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” 164.
64 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 40.
65 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 25.
66 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 41.
67 Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 210.
68 “The black and Latino culture all around him in New York”: This is as good a time as any to acknowledge the whiteness of Gorey’s art, a reflection of the whiteness of his world. Raised in a segregated America, in a city divided by what was (and still is) a de facto apartheid regime, growing up Irish Catholic on one side and country-club WASP on the other, sustained by a cultural diet that consisted almost entirely of art, literature, movies, and music produced by whites for whites, Gorey lived in a world without a single black face (unless I missed it). He seems to have had little if any interaction with people of color, moving in all-white circles: at Harvard, among the gay literati; in New York, among the Balanchinian cultists at the State Theater and the cinephiles at Everson’s screenings; on Cape Cod, among his Yarmouth Port coterie.
Like all of us, Gorey was a product of a time, a place, and his parents. Speaking of whom, his mother was too bourgeois to be crudely racist, but she wasn’t exactly progressive in her attitude toward persons of a dusky hue, either. An offhanded remark in one of her letters to Ted at Harvard speaks volumes: “Have you ever noticed the ads in Ebony magazine? I was hysterical over them—Ed had a copy out here and I was looking at it—they have all the same ads that the other magazines do, only they put in colored people. The colored elevator operator in Ed’s building asked him if when he was through with Ee-bōny he would let her have it.” (See Helen Garvey Gorey, letter to Edward Gorey, n.d., circa fall 1949, Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.) Helen’s mockery of a looking-glass reality where “colored people” mimic the white world—to her a kind of reverse minstrelsy that is clownishly funny on its face—drips with amused condescension.
How much of this half conscious, lightheartedly “benign” racism rubbed off on Gorey we don’t know. Ken Morton told me in an e-mail dated November 21, 2017, that he “never witnessed [Ted] speaking about race at all, in any context, positively, negatively, or neutrally. I think his views on race boil[ed] down to a kind of lack of awareness or obliviousness.” Of course that blind spot, equal parts obliviousness and insensitivity, is a distinguishing characteristic of white privilege, as it’s come to be called. Seen in a contemporary light, at a moment when Trumpism has emboldened white supremacists and activist voices like Black Lives Matter are demanding a racial justice long deferred, the whiteness of Gorey’s worldview—a truism evinced not only by his art but also by his literary and musical tastes—is striking.
70 D. Keith Mano, “Edward Gorey Inhabits an Odd World of Tiny Drawings, Fussy Cats, and ‘Doomed Enterprises,’” People 10, no. 1 (July 3, 1978), 72.
71 Edmund White, “The Story of Harold by Terry Andrews,” in “My Private Passion,” The Guardian, February 17, 2001, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/feb/17/classics.features.
72 Terry Andrews, The Story of Harold (New York: Equinox Books / Avon, 1975), 254.
73 M. G. Lord, e-mail message to the author, May 3, 2018. I’m entirely in Lord’s debt for her phallus-spotting abilities; somehow, Gorey’s in-joke snuck right by me.
74 Carol Stevens, “An American Original,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 134.
75 Robert Cooke Goolrick, “A Gorey Story,” New Times, March 19, 1976, 54.
76 Philip Glassborow, “A Life in Full: All the Gorey Details,” The Independent on Sunday, March 23, 2003, 26–32.
77 “1972—A Selection of Noteworthy Titles,” New York Times, December 3, 1972, 60.
78 “Paper Back Talk,” New York Times, October 12, 1975, 301.
79 Andreas Brown interviewed on “Afternoon Play: The Gorey Details,” BBC Radio 4 FM, March 27, 2003, http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/3dac4cad956e4d2c9572f345ad064637.
1 John Wulp, “The Nantucket Stage Company,” chap. 13 in My Life, http://media.wix.com/ugd/29b477_d0aab61ced6f4a9db8c1ebd89125a360.pdf.
2 Mel Gussow, “Gorey Goes Batty,” New York Times Magazine, October 16, 1977, 78.
3 Stephen Fife, Best Revenge: How the Theatre Saved My Life and Has Been Killing Me Ever Since (Seattle: Cune Press, 2004), 184.
4 Mel Gussow, “Broadway Again Blooms on Nantucket,” New York Times, July 9, 1973, 41.
5 Edward Gorey [Wardore Edgy], Movies, SoHo Weekly News, May 30, 1974, 24.
6 Edward Gorey [Wardore Edgy], Movies, SoHo Weekly News, March 28, 1974, 16.
7 Edward Gorey [Wardore Edgy], Movies, SoHo Weekly News, March 14, 1974, 16.
8 Ibid.
9 Gorey [Wardore Edgy], Movies, SoHo Weekly News, March 28, 1974, 16.
10 Gorey [Wardore Edgy], Movies, SoHo Weekly News, May 30, 1974, 24.
11 Gorey [Wardore Edgy], Movies, SoHo Weekly News, March 14, 1974, 16.
12 Quoted in Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin, The World of Edward Gorey (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 181.
13 Glen Emil, “The Envelope Art of Edward Gorey: Gorey’s Mailed Art from 1948 to 1974,” Goreyography, September 9, 2012, https://www.goreyography.com/west/articles/egh2012.html.
14 Susan Sheehan, “Envelope Art,” New Yorker, July 8, 2002, 60.
15 Ibid.
16 Emil, “Envelope Art of Edward Gorey.”
17 Color photocopies of twenty-six of the fifty envelopes Gorey mailed to Fitzharris were included in a 2012 exhibition at the Edward Gorey House, The Envelope Art of Edward Gorey: Gorey’s Mailed Art from 1948 to 1974. Fitzharris’s name was replaced with an anagrammatic pseudonym, Hart Sifmoritz, and his address was altered, presumably to protect his privacy, though why that should have been required after nearly forty years is a mystery.
18 Ross and Wilkin, The World of Edward Gorey, 181.
19 Raymond Chandler, The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909–1959, ed. Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 142–43.
20 Gorey’s passport records his arrival in Scotland on August 28, 1975, at Glasgow’s Prestwick airport and his departure from the UK via Heathrow, in London, on September 23, 1975.
21 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 119.
22 Skee Morton, letter to the author, August 21, 2012.
23 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” New Yorker, November 9, 1992, 89.
24 Paul Gardner, “A Pain in the Neck,” New York, September 19, 1977, 68.
25 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 26.
26 Don McDonagh, “Gorey Sets Spice Eglevsky ‘Swan Lake,’” New York Times, November 3, 1975, 49.
27 Arlene Croce, “Dissidents,” New Yorker, May 2, 1977, 136.
28 The collaborative nature of the theater, like that of the movies, sometimes makes it difficult to assign credit—or blame—to specific individuals. Officially, Dracula’s scenery and costumes were by Gorey. Yet Dennis Rosa claimed, in an interview for this book, that the idea of adding a touch of blood red to each scene was his, not Gorey’s. “I had already decided that not only was it going to be black and white,” he told me, but also that “I wanted to add some color to it, and I thought it would be fun to add red—like, blood red.” John Wulp confirmed in my interview with him that the idea was indeed Rosa’s. That said, Gorey’s long-standing technique of adding a single brightly colored element to an otherwise monochromatic illustration, a gimmick he’d been using since the days of his Anchor covers, in the early 1950s, suggests that he was readily receptive to the idea, at the very least, and came up with clever ways of incorporating it into each scene.
29 Carol Stevens, “An American Original,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 132.
30 Gussow, “Gorey Goes Batty,” 78.
31 Ibid., 74.
32 David Ansen, “Dracula Lives!,” Newsweek, October 31, 1977, 75.
33 T. E. Kalem, “Kinky Count,” Time, October 31, 1977, 93.
34 “Faggot nonsense”: Quoted in David Bahr, “Bright Light of Broadway,” The Advocate, January 22, 2002, 67. “Homosexuals in the theater!”: Quoted in Harris M. Miller II, “Proper Priorities,” Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1985, http://articles.latimes.com/1985-04-14/entertainment/ca-8612_1_critic-theater-remarks.
35 Bahr, “Bright Light of Broadway,” 67.
36 John Simon, “Dingbat,” New York, November 7, 1977, 75.
37 Ibid.
38 Dick Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 63–64.
39 Ron Miller, “Edward Gorey, 1925–2000,” Mystery! website, http://23.21.192.150/mystery/gorey.html.
40 Edward Gorey interviewed by Dick Cooke on The Dick Cooke Show, a Cape Cod–based weekly public-access cable TV program, circa 1996. DVD copy of videotape provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
41 “‘Dracula’ to Close Jan. 6,” New York Times, December 13, 1979, C17.
42 Carol Stevens, “An American Original,” Print, January–February 1988, 61, 63.
43 D. Keith Mano, “Edward Gorey Inhabits an Odd World of Tiny Drawings, Fussy Cats, and ‘Doomed Enterprises,’” People 10, no. 1 (July 3, 1978), 70.
44 Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show,” 55.
45 Bill Cunningham, “Portrait of the Artist as a Furry Creature,” New York Times, January 11, 1978, 13.
46 Quoted in Irwin Terry, “The Fur Designs of Edward Gorey,” Goreyana, October 14, 2012, http://goreyana.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-fur-designs-of-edward-gorey.html.
47 Angela Taylor, “From Alixandre: Big Names, Sleek Shapes,” New York Times, May 20, 1979, 56.
48 Georgia Dullea, “Gorey Turns His Talent to Window Shudders,” New York Times, June 3, 1978, Style section, 16.
49 Faith Elliott, e-mail message to the author, October 23, 2012.
50 Robert Cooke Goolrick, “A Gorey Story,” New Times, March 19, 1976, 54, 56.
51 Joan Kron, “Going Batty,” New York Times, January 19, 1978, C3.
52 Mel Gussow, “‘Gorey Stories’ Are Exquisite Playlets,” New York Times, December 15, 1977, C19.
53 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 33, 34, 36.
54 John Corry, “‘Gorey Stories’ Could Drive an Author and a Director Batty,” New York Times, June 23, 1978, C2.
55 Quoted in Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1970s Broadway Musicals (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 414.
56 Carol Stevens, “An American Original,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 134.
57 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 122.
58 Ibid.
59 Skee Morton, e-mail message to the author, March 30, 2014.
60 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 151.
61 Lisa Solod, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 95.
62 Ibid., 96.
63 Hoke Norris, “Chicago: Critic at Large,” Chicago Sun-Times, Book Week section, September 19, 1965, 6.
1 Derek Lamb, “The MYSTERY! of Edward Gorey,” ANIMATIONWorld, July 1, 2000, http://www.awn.com/animationworld/mystery-edward-gorey.
2 Edward Gorey interviewed by Christopher Seufert for The Last Days of Edward Gorey: A Documentary by Christopher Seufert, August 1999. Copy of unedited video footage provided to the author by Seufert.
3 Lamb, “The MYSTERY! of Edward Gorey.”
4 Gorey, Seufert interview.
5 Ron Miller, Mystery!: A Celebration Paperback (San Francisco: KQED Books, 1996), 6.
6 Sadly, few of Lamb’s animations of Gorey’s art survive in the latest redesign of the Mystery! title sequence. The opening now consists of a digital animation of a stylized book, its pages riffled by an invisible hand. A few snippets of the original Lamb-Gorey animations flash by at blink-and-you’ll-miss-them speed; the only Gorey element that spends more than a split second on-screen is part of the Mystery! logo—a grinning Gorey skull on a headstone, flashing a wink at the viewer. Happily, the original animations survive, albeit in blurry form, on YouTube.
7 “Fantods: Viewer Complaints, 1984,” file folder at WGBH media archives, WGBH, Boston.
8 Alastair Macaulay, “Ballet in London: NYCB and the Royal Go Toe to Toe,” New York Times, March 17, 2008, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/ballet-in-london-nycb-and-the-royal-go-toe-to-toe/.
9 Amanda Vaill, Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins (New York: Broadway Books, 2006), 269.
10 “Eliot’s ‘Cats’ Enjoys Spurt of New Interest,” New York Times, October 8, 1982, http://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/08/theater/eliot-s-cats-enjoys-spurt-of-new-interest.html.
11 Edward Gorey interviewed by Marion Vuilleumier for the Cape Cod public-access program Books and the World, 1982. Audiotape recording and transcript provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
12 T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 1.
13 Karen Wilkin, “Edward Gorey: An Introduction,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), xx.
14 Paul Gardner, “A Pain in the Neck,” New York, September 19, 1977, 68.
15 John Wulp, “John Wulp by John Wulp,” in John Wulp (New Caanan, CT: CommonPlace Publishing, 2003), 76.
16 John Wulp, “NYU,” in My Life, 1, http://media.wix.com/ugd/29b477_cd30bbdb68b14c98a6b71ce685c9ae04.pdf.
17 Robert Croan, “Updated ‘Mikado’ Is Found Wanting,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 20, 1983, 15.
18 Duchamp: A Biography
19 Jennifer Dunning, “Performance Pays Tribute to Balanchine,” New York Times, May 1, 1983, http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/01/nyregion/performance-pays-tribute-to-balanchine.html.
20 Clifford Ross, “Interview with Edward Gorey,” in The World of Edward Gorey, by Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 33.
21 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 31–32.
22 Dick Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 61–62.
23 Edward Gorey interviewed by Dick Cooke on The Dick Cooke Show, a Cape Cod–based weekly public-access cable TV program, circa 1996. DVD copy of videotape provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
24 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 43–44.
25 Christopher Lydon, “The Connection,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 225.
1 Tobi Tobias, “Balletgorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 16.
2 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 139.
3 Andreas Brown, “2012 Hall of Fame Inductee: Edward Gorey,” Society of Illustrators website, https://www.societyillustrators.org/edward-gorey.
4 Kevin McDermott, “The House,” in Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey, by Kevin McDermott (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2003), n.p.
5 Elizabeth Morton, “Before It Was the Gorey House,” Yarmouth Register, June 28, 2012, 9.
6 David Streitfeld, “The Gorey Details,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 176.
7 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 51.
8 Mel Gussow, “At Home with Edward Gorey: A Little Blood Goes a Long Way,” New York Times, April 21, 1994, C1.
9 Mel Gussow, “In ‘Tinned Lettuce,’ a New Body of Gorey Tales,” New York Times, May 1, 1985, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/01/theater/in-tinned-lettuce-a-new-body-of-gorey-tales.html?ref=edward_gorey.
10 Edward Gorey interviewed by Marian Etoile Watson for the New York–based WNEW-TV/Channel 5 program 10 O’Clock Weekend News, 1985, archived on Mark Robinson’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rrzaif-DT4.
11 Gussow, “In ‘Tinned Lettuce.’”
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Jane MacDonald interviewed by Christopher Seufert for The Last Days of Edward Gorey: A Documentary by Christopher Seufert, n.d. Unedited transcript provided to the author by Seufert.
15 McDermott, preface to Elephant House, n.p.
16 Irwin Terry, e-mail message to the author, September 29, 2015.
17 Gussow, “In ‘Tinned Lettuce.’”
18 Ron Miller, Mystery!: A Celebration Paperback (San Francisco: KQED Books, 1996), 7.
19 This quotation, transcribed from an article about Gorey, seems to have come unstuck from its citation. To date, an exhaustive search hasn’t recovered the source of the passage quoted. Nonetheless, the substance of it—that bemused audience members sometimes left before a performance was over and that Gorey’s hearty enjoyment of his entertainments was undiminished by such defections—is corroborated by Edward’s own remarks in published profiles and by comments from the Gorey players in my interviews with them.
20 Edward Gorey interviewed by Dick Cooke on The Dick Cooke Show, a Cape Cod–based weekly public-access cable TV program, circa 1996. DVD copy of videotape provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
21 Ibid.
22 Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin, The World of Edward Gorey (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 184.
23 Claire Golding, “Edward Gorey’s Work Is No Day at the Beach,” Cape Cod Antiques & Arts, August 1993, 21.
24 Jack Braginton-Smith interviewed by Christopher Seufert for The Last Days of Edward Gorey: A Documentary by Christopher Seufert, circa summer 2002. Unedited audiotape provided to the author by Seufert.
25 Ibid.
26 Walpole, an eighteenth-century aesthete, wrote the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764); it was inspired by his vision, on waking from a dream, of a giant armored fist on the staircase. Very Gorey. Also very Gorey was Walpole’s manor, a fantasy castle that sparked the Gothic revival of the 1800s. From the outside, it’s a Gothic wedding cake, all white stucco battlements and pinnacles; on the inside, it’s a “rococo gothick” fantasia, with ornate vaulted ceilings and serpentine passageways inspired by Gothic cathedrals and medieval tombs.
27 Braginton-Smith, Seufert interview.
28 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, rev. ed. (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2011), 117.
29 John Madera, “Bookforum talks to Alexander Theroux,” Bookforum, December 23, 2011, http://www.bookforum.com/interview/8796.
30 Theroux, Strange Case, rev. ed., 20.
31 Ibid., 31–32.
32 Theroux’s most glaring error is his assertion, on page 166 of the revised edition, that Gorey’s ashes “were strewn over the waters at Barnstable Harbor on a day overcast and gray and hammering with rain”; in fact, it was a radiantly sunny day without a cloud in the sky. There are others: on page 135 of the same edition, Theroux cites “When in doubt, twirl” as “one of [Gorey’s] more well-known and often-repeated quotes”; in fact, that aphorism belongs to the choreographer Ted Shawn, as Gorey himself noted in the original quotation.
33 Discussing The Strange Case, an interviewer asked Theroux, “What kind of source material did you have?…Did you keep notes over the years?” He replied that the source material for firsthand quotes was “nothing but talking to him and my own reveries,” which suggests that he relied not on tape-recorded interviews but on his recollections—an iffy proposition for anyone but a mnemonist. See Tom Spurgeon, “Alexander Theroux on Edward Gorey,” The Comics Reporter, February 22, 2011, http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/index/cr_interview_alexander_theroux_on_edward_gorey/.
34 Theroux, Strange Case, rev. ed., 28.
35 Ibid., 32–33.
36 Ibid., 43.
37 Ibid., 97.
38 Ibid., 103.
39 Ibid., 118, 123.
40 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 106.
41 Golding, “Edward Gorey’s Work Is No Day at the Beach,” 21.
42 Edward Gorey interviewed by Christopher Seufert for The Last Days of Edward Gorey: A Documentary by Christopher Seufert. Copy of unedited audiotape provided to the author by Seufert.
43 Johnny Ryan, e-mail message to the author, April 25, 2014.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Simon Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 161.
48 Gussow, “At Home with Edward Gorey,” C4.
49 Craig Little, “Edward Gorey Finds Designs in Fantasy,” Cape Cod Times, December 24, 1979, 15.
50 Gussow, “At Home with Edward Gorey,” C4.
51 McDermott, “The Television Room,” in Elephant House, n.p.
52 Golding, “Edward Gorey’s Work Is No Day at the Beach,” 21.
53 Gorey, Seufert interview.
54 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 138.
55 Edward Gorey interviewed by Martha Teichner for Out of the Inkwell segment, CBS News Sunday Morning, April 20, 1997. Digital copy of VHS tape provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
56 Leo Seligsohn, “A Merrily Sinister Life of His Own Design,” Providence Sunday Journal, June 25, 1978, E2.
57 Ken Morton interviewed by Mindy Todd on The Point for the Cape Cod–based NPR affiliate WCAI, February 27, 2014, http://capeandislands.org/post/edward-gorey-lives-documentary#stream/0.
58 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 138.
59 Golding, “Edward Gorey’s Work Is No Day at the Beach,” 21.
60 McDermott, “The Kitchen,” in Elephant House, n.p.
61 McDermott, preface to Elephant House, n.p.
62 Jean Martin, “The Mind’s Eye: Writers Who Draw,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 89.
63 Clifford Ross, “Interview with Edward Gorey,” in The World of Edward Gorey, by Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 29.
64 Martin, “Mind’s Eye,” 88.
65 Gorey, Teichner interview.
66 Gussow, “At Home with Edward Gorey,” C4.
67 Martin, “Mind’s Eye,” 89.
68 McDermott, “The Studio,” in Elephant House, n.p.
69 Christopher Seufert to Jack Braginton-Smith in his interview with Braginton-Smith.
70 Christine Davenne, Cabinets of Wonder (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2012), 204.
71 John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 115.
72 Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 232.
73 “‘Desperate and childless’ woman”: April Benson, “Collecting as Pleasure and Pain,” New York Times, December 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/29/why-we-collect-stuff/collecting-as-pleasure-and-pain. “Invests in objects”: Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 10.
74 I asked the developmental psychologist Uta Frith, a pioneering researcher of autism (specifically, Asperger’s syndrome), if Gorey’s flattened affect and peculiar social style—his cool, aloof air in crowds; his lack of physical demonstrativeness; his avoidance of the sort of how’s-the-family chitchat most people use to establish rapport—placed him on the autism spectrum. Her answer was “a resounding no.” Noting, as a disclaimer, the difficulties of posthumous diagnosis, she enumerated the reasons she felt confident saying that Gorey was in all likelihood not autistic: “1. Gorey’s hallmark irony is incompatible with autism. 2. A keen eye for subtle cues is incompatible with autism.” As for his “cool, aloof style, uninterested in chitchat,” this could, in theory, be a consequence of autism, she allowed, “but there can be more than one reason for aloofness. Some personalities are more introverted and hence seem aloof. Some don’t show emotions as much as others, perhaps [because of] their upbringing…or being cagey and wishing to avoid invasion of their privacy.” See Uta Frith, e-mail message to the author, March 6, 2012.
Steve Silberman, the author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, had an interesting take on why Gorey might be perceived as autistic, even if he wasn’t. “There’s no clear boundary to the spectrum,” he told me. “As Lorna Wing, the cognitive psychologist who coined the term [Asperger’s syndrome], says, the spectrum shades imperceptibly into eccentric normality”—a description that fits Gorey to a T. See Steve Silberman, e-mail message to the author, March 23, 2012.
76 Carol Verburg interviewed by Christopher Seufert for The Last Days of Edward Gorey, September 2001. Transcript provided to the author by Seufert.
77 Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion, 233.
78 Ed Pinsent, “A Gorey Encounter,” Speak, Fall 1997, 47.
79 Ibid.
80 Gorey, Teichner interview.
81 McDermott, “The Entrance Room,” in Elephant House, n.p.
82 Gorey, Teichner interview.
83 McDermott, “The Entrance Room,” n.p.
84 Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Point Reyes, CA: Imperfect Publishing, 2008), 7.
85 Leonard Koren, “The Beauty of Wabi Sabi,” Daily Good, April 23, 2013, http://www.dailygood.org/story/418/the-beauty-of-wabi-sabi-leonard-koren/.
86 McDermott, “The Living Room,” in Elephant House, n.p.
87 Edward Gorey, “Edward Gorey: Proust Questionnaire,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 187.
88 Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” 149.
89 Edward Gorey, “Miscellaneous Quotes,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 240.
90 Quoted in S[arane] Alexandrian, Surrealist Art (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1970), 141.
91 Marcel Jean, History of Surrealist Painting (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 251.
92 Gorey, Teichner interview.
93 Ibid.
94 Julien Levy, Surrealism (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995), 102.
95 McDermott, “The Alcove,” in Elephant House, n.p.
96 Gorey, Teichner interview.
97 Tom Haines, “E Is for Edward Who Died on the Cape,” Boston Globe, June 9, 2002, M5.
98 Fascinatingly, the Black Doll turns out to have been based on a homemade figurine Gorey once owned. “A friend of mine made the original Black Doll—which, I believe, I left in a hotel room somewhere,” he said in a 1998 interview. (See Ascending Peculiarity, 205.) According to the Edward Gorey House website, Gorey learned in ’42 that a friend—Connie Joerns—was making a doll for him; when he saw it in its half finished state, he insisted that she leave it faceless and armless. (See “The Black Doll Doll,” The Gorey Store, http://www.goreystore.com/shop/accessories/edward-gorey-black-doll-doll.) “It disappeared in the ’40s and it’s never been seen again,” he said. Yet it clearly left such an indelible imprint on his imagination that it lived on in his art for the rest of his life.
99 John Updike, foreword to Elephant House, n.p.
100 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 187.
101 Ibid., 188.
102 Theroux, Strange Case, 2000 ed., 20.
103 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 112.
1 Christopher Lydon, “The Connection,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 220.
2 Ed Pinsent, “A Gorey Encounter,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 189.
3 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 48.
4 Annie Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll: A Talk with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 206.
5 Eric Edwards interviewed by Christopher Seufert for The Last Days of Edward Gorey: A Documentary by Christopher Seufert, September 2001. Unedited transcript provided to the author by Seufert.
6 Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll,” 207.
7 Ibid., 206.
8 Carol Verburg, Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod ([San Francisco?]: Boom Books, 2011), 13.
9 Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll,” 206.
10 Edward Gorey interviewed by the Boston-based TV and radio interviewer Christopher Lydon, circa 1992. Unedited audiotape. Copy of tape provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
11 Ibid.
12 Edward Gorey, “A Design for Staging the ‘Horace’ of Corneille in the Spirit of the Play,” December 6, 1947, 3, Edward Gorey Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
13 Ibid., 4.
14 Verburg, Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod, 26.
15 Ibid., 27.
16 Patti Hartigan, “As Gorey as Ever: Macabre Artist Delights in Sending Shivers Down People’s Spines,” Boston Globe, September 3, 1990, Living section, 37.
17 Verburg, Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod, 23.
18 Edwards, Seufert interview.
19 Jane MacDonald interviewed by Christopher Seufert for The Last Days of Edward Gorey: A Documentary by Christopher Seufert, n.d. Unedited audiotape provided to the author by Seufert.
20 Jane MacDonald interview with the author in Chatham, Massachusetts, circa 2010.
21 George Liles, “Quirky Language Fills ‘Elephants,’” Sunday Cape Cod Times, August 19, 1990, 52.
22 George Liles, “Gorey’s Salome Takes Wrong Turn,” Cape Cod Times, February 6, 1995, B6.
23 Pinsent, “A Gorey Encounter,” 190.
24 Lydon, “The Connection,” 221.
25 Ibid., 222.
26 Gorey, Lydon interview.
27 Carol Verburg interviewed by Christopher Seufert for The Last Days of Edward Gorey: A Documentary by Christopher Seufert, September 2001. Transcript provided to the author by Seufert.
28 MacDonald, Seufert interview.
29 Verburg, Seufert interview.
30 Carol Verburg, phone interview with the author, April 29, 2011.
31 Verburg, Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod, 19.
32 Verburg, Seufert interview.
33 Verburg, interview with the author.
34 Verburg, Seufert interview.
35 This is Gorey at his most hopelessly, hilariously obscure. “Poopies Dallying” refers to Hamlet’s observation, in the so-called First Quarto edition of the play (an early pirated copy, judged spurious by scholars), “I could interpret the love you beare, if I saw the poopies dallying.” (See William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, ed. Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey [New York: Routledge, 1992], 75.) “Hamlet means to say that Ophelia’s love is no better than a puppet show,” writes the Shakespearean scholar Friedrich Karl Elze, “and that he should be able to act as its interpreter if he could see the puppets, i.e., Ophelia and her lover, dallying or making love.…[I]t is to be gathered that there must be some indecent double entendre in the expression ‘the puppets dallying,’ which is still unexplained…” Also see Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Hamlet, ed. Karl Elze (Halle, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1882), 192.
36 Verburg, Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod, 17.
37 Verburg, Seufert interview.
1 Edward Gorey interviewed by Christopher Lydon for The Connection, November 26, 1998, WBUR (Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate). Audio recording provided to the author by Christopher Seufert.
2 David Streitfeld, “The Gorey Details,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 181.
3 Simon Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 170.
4 Irwin Terry, “Les Échanges Malandreux,” Goreyana, March 12, 2010, http://goreyana.blogspot.com/2010/03/les-echanges-malandreux.html.
5 Was E. D. Ward’s “mercurial” nature an allusion to another Edward’s sense of gender and sexuality as fluid? Clearly Gorey was in touch with his feminine side, from his campy affectations—the flapping hands, the swooping vocal style—to his remark, in a letter to Peter Neumeyer, that Herbert Read’s novel The Green Child didn’t grab him because “it is so exclusively masculine/active/positive/whatever in tone and concept, etc. that I am a- (as opposed to un-) sympathetic towards it temperamentally.” See Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 203.
And then there’s his frequent use of female pseudonyms: Mrs. Regera Dowdy, author of The Pious Infant and translator of The Evil Garden; Madame Groeda Weyrd, the fortune-teller famed for her Fantod Pack of oracular cards; Miss D. Awdrey-Gore, the Agatha Christie–esque mystery novelist; Addée Gorrwy, the Postcard Poetess, whose epigraphs enhance The Raging Tide and The Broken Spoke; and Dora Greydew, Girl Detective, the Nancy Drewish heroine of a series by Edgar E. Wordy.
In that last regard, Gorey is part of a well-established tradition of male artists playing with gender and identity by adopting female alter egos, of which Marcel Duchamp, all dolled up and lipsticked as Rrose Sélavy in photos by Man Ray, and Andy Warhol, bewigged and heavily made-up in self-portraits in drag, are only the best-known examples.
It’s interesting to note, too, that Gorey often cast male members of his Cape Cod troupe in female roles: Vincent Myette played Salomé in Gorey’s production of the Oscar Wilde play, and the heavily bearded, broad-in-the-beam Joe Richards was called on to play female characters on several occasions. Apparently Gorey got a kick out of Richards’s performances: “To my favorite female impersonator,” he wrote in a book he signed for the actor.
7 Irwin Terry, “The Pointless Book,” Goreyana, October 16, 2010, http://goreyana.blogspot.com/2010/10/pointless-book.html.
8 Tom Spurgeon, “Alexander Theroux on Edward Gorey,” Comics Reporter, February 22, 2011, http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/index/cr_interview_alexander_theroux_on_edward_gorey/.
9 Irwin Terry, “The Just Dessert,” Goreyana, June 11, 2011, http://goreyana.blogspot.com/2011/06/just-dessert.html.
10 Annie Bourneuf, “Gorey Loses His Touch,” Harvard Crimson, October 15, 1999, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1999/10/15/gorey-loses-his-touch-pthe-headless/?page=2.
11 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 140.
12 Ibid., 142.
13 Paul A. Woods, Tim Burton: A Child’s Garden of Nightmares (London: Plexus Publishing, 2002), 105.
14 Henry Selick interviewed in The Making of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, a behind-the-scenes TV special that aired on CBS in October of 1993, archived on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLw-Fo8uhis.
15 Eden Lee Lackner, “A Monstrous Childhood: Edward Gorey’s Influence on Tim Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy,” in The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 115.
16 Daniel Handler, e-mail message to the author, August 22, 2016.
17 Michael Dirda, “The World of Edward Gorey,” Smithsonian, June 1997, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/review-of-the-world-of-edward-gorey-138218026/#HQYc2sO3lFK0fh4e.99.
18 Daniel Handler interviewed by Christopher Seufert for The Last Days of Edward Gorey: A Documentary by Christopher Seufert, archived on Seufert’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIOut8ZWgPA.
19 Martyn Jacques interviewed on the NPR program Day to Day, October 28, 2003, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1481865.
20 Edward Gorey, Q.R.V. Hikuptah and Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf., in The Betrayed Confidence Revisited (Portland, OR: Pomegranate, 2014), 95, 85.
21 Alan Henderson Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 2.
22 Gorey, Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf., 78.
23 Ibid., 83.
24 Thomas Curwen, “Light from a Dark Star: Before the Current Rise of Graphic Novels,There was Edward Gorey, Whose Tales and Drawings Still Baffle—and Attract—New Fans,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2004, http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/18/entertainment/ca-curwen18/4.
25 Gorey, Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf., 79.
26 Mel Gussow, “Edward Gorey, Artist and Author Who Turned the Macabre into a Career, Dies at 75,” New York Times, April 17, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/17/arts/edward-gorey-artist-and-author-who-turned-the-macabre-into-a-career-dies-at-75.html.
27 Ron Miller, “Edward Gorey, 1925–2000,” Mystery! website, http://23.21.192.150/mystery/gorey.html.
1 Kevin Kelly, “Edward Gorey: An Artist in ‘the Nonsense Tradition,’” Boston Globe, August 16, 1992, B28.
2 Mel Gussow, “At Home with Edward Gorey: A Little Blood Goes a Long Way,” New York Times, April 21, 1994, C4.
3 Ron Miller, “Edward Gorey, 1925–2000,” Mystery! website, http://23.21.192.150/mystery/gorey.html.
4 My speculations about Gorey’s heart condition, here and throughout this chapter, are based on an extensive conversation with Dr. David A. Brogno, a cardiovascular-disease physician who has taught clinical medicine at Columbia University and been an attending physician in interventional cardiology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.
5 Skee Morton, e-mail message to the author, February 7, 2012.
6 Kevin McDermott, “The Bathroom,” in Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2003), n.p.
7 Morton, e-mail message, February 7, 2012.
8 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 45.
9 Skee Morton, e-mail message to the author, August 26, 2016.
10 Again, this assertion is based directly on my conversation with the cardiovascular surgeon Dr. David A. Brogno. Briefed on Gorey’s medical history and provided with a copy of his death certificate, Dr. Brogno was unequivocal about the life-prolonging benefits, in Gorey’s case, of an implantable defibrillator.
11 Miller, “Edward Gorey, 1925–2000.”
12 Henry Allen, “For Years, G Was for Gorey,” Washington Post, April 19, 2000, C1.
13 Ibid.
14 Quoted in David Langford, “Obituary: Edward Gorey,” The Guardian, April 20, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/apr/20/guardianobituaries.books.
15 Probate of Will for Edward Gorey, docket number 00P0672EP-1, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Trial Court, Probate, and Family Court Department, Barnstable Division, May 24, 2000, n.p.
16 Petition to Amend Charitable Trust Under Will, docket number 00P-672EP1, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Trial Court, Probate, and Family Court Department, Barnstable Division, May 11, 2005, 3.
17 McDermott, preface to Elephant House, n.p.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 “Ever-increasing pile of debris”: Mary McNamara, “Dead Letter Writer: Edward Gorey’s Macabre Wit Comes to Life in a Westside Stage Show and Exhibition,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1998, http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/29/entertainment/ca-37314.
21 Mel Gussow, “Master of the Macabre, Both Prolific and Dead,” New York Times, October 16, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/16/arts/16GORE.html.
22 Affidavit in Support of Approval of the First Intermediate Account of Trustees, docket number COP-0672-EP1, NYC 138813v3 62778-4, May 11, 2005, 3.
23 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 125.
24 “A lovely sunny warm day”: Skee Morton, e-mail message to the author, August 16, 2016. “Overcast and gray”: Theroux, Strange Case, 67.
25 Morton, e-mail message, August 16, 2016.
26 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 7.
27 Skee Morton, e-mail message to the author, October 31, 2016.
28 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” New Yorker, November 9, 1992, 89.
29 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 7.
30 Edward Gorey, “Edward Gorey: Proust Questionnaire,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 182.
31 Annie Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll: A Talk with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 199.
32 Lisa Solod, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 102.
33 Ibid., 105.
34 Ibid., 101.
35 Lisa Solod, “The Boston Magazine Interview: Edward Gorey,” Boston, September 1980, 90.
36 Ibid., 91.
37 Ibid.
38 Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 1.
39 Solod, “The Boston Magazine Interview,” 91.
40 White, City Boy, 119.
41 Guy Trebay, e-mail message to the author, February 8, 2011.
42 Oscar Wilde, The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde, ed. Alvin Redman (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1959), 54.
43 Dick Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 59–60.
44 Christopher Seufert interviewed by Mindy Todd on The Point for the Cape Cod–based NPR affiliate WCAI, February 27, 2014, http://capeandislands.org/post/edward-gorey-lives-documentary#stream/0.