Edward [St. John] Gorey, the inimitable artist, writer and designer known for his enigmatic tales of whimsy and dread, died April 15th at the age of 75. Gorey had suffered a heart attack three days earlier, on Wednesday, before expiring at a hospital the following Saturday in Hyannis, Massachusetts. His meticulous, elgantly crafted work occupied a singular niche in American arts and literature; He was so unique that booksellers across the country never really found an appropriate category for his work.
Gorey will be best remembered for his dark, dryly humorous books like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which describes the horrible deaths of little boys and girls -- one for each letter of the alphabet. But he also gained an audience through his work in the theater (his costume and set designs for the Broadway production of "Dracula" won him a Tony award in 1978) and on projects like the animated sequence that introduces the PBS series Mystery! Although Gorey seemed indifferent at times to fame, his work was much too strong to fall into obscurity. If the artist remained a cult favorite instead of a household name, he had a wide range of admirers -- from college students who know only the Gashlycrumb poster to fanatics who scour used bookstores in the hopes of scoring Gorey-illustrated paperbacks.
Gorey was born February 25, 1925, the son of a journalist and an overbearing mother who worked as a government clerk. His family moved frequently, but Gorey rejected the idea that there was anything traumatic about his youth. "I like to think of myself as a pale, pathetic, solitary child," Gorey was quoted as saying in The New York Times. "But it was not true." He claimed to have begun drawing when he was just one and a half years old, although he hastened to add that the results were weak; his rendition of a train, he concluded, looked more like little sausages.
By the age of 3 1/2, Gore had taught himself to read -- "no one knows how" -- and began developing a passion for books that stayed with him for his entire life. At 5, Gorey read Dracula and Alice in Wonderland; at 7, he had read Frankenstein; and at 8, he had read the entire oeuvre of Victor Hugo. These works, then, were likely the seeds of his macabre visions, not a gloomy disposition forged from an unhappy childhood.
At Francis W. Parker High, a progressive private school in Chicago, Gorey's flamboyant persona and wide-ranging talents made him stand out even among overachievers. Consuelo Joernes, who would often hang out with Gorey in the art room at Parker, remained a close friend of the artist for most of his life. Then and now, Joernes was dazzled by Gorey's wide range of artistic endeavors. She told the [Comics Journal] that when she was out from school for a period after an appendectomy, Gorey would stop after class and construct dolls with her. "If he saw a parked car," she added, "he'd put the doll in the open window with a note," typically bearing some kind of cryptic message.
Gorey went on to the Art Institute of Chicago for a year before being drafted into the army in 1943, serving as a company clerk at the Dugway proving ground in Utah. Upon his discharge three years later, he enrolled at Harvard, where he again earned a reputation as a highly versatile and eccentric talent. Gorey's influence permanently altered the disposition of his roommate, the poet Frank O'Hara, who entered Harvard an earnest young man and gradually came to embrace nonsense like his friend. (visitors to their apartment noted that it was furnished with white garden chairs and tables). Other members of their artistic circle included the poets John Ashberry and Kenneth Koch. All were instrumental in the in the formation of the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, which gave Gorey an outlet for his skills as a designer and director.
According to Brad Gooch, the author of the O'Hara biography City Poet, the group could be construed as an "early and elitist form of 'counterculture'." His book quotes the photographer George Marshall as calling Gorey "the oddest person I've ever seen. He was very tall, with his hair plastered down across the bangs, like a Roman Emperor."
Although Gorey majored in French literature at Harvard, his appetite for books, paintings, music, film and television transcended any distinction between high and low art. He claimed to have been influenced by just about every form of cultural product he encountered -- from artistic movements like Dada and surrealism to silent movies, Agatha Christie novels, and soap operas. His favorite artist may have been Matisse, but he watched reruns of Cheers and Golden Girls with equal fervor. Gorey, said the writer Alexander Theroux, was the only person he knew who "could talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then segue into Ralph Waldo Emerson... he was completely intellectually confident."
If Gorey never had any doubt about his interests, there was still the thorny issue of making a living. For several years after graduating from Harvard in 1950, he lacked a clear vision of what he would do with his life. "I wanted to have a bookstore until I worked in one," he told The Boston Globe in 1988. "Then I thought I'd be a librarian, until I met some crazy ones."
With financial support from his family, Gorey moved from Boston to New York City and took a job in the art department at Doubleday Books in 1953. He would work there for the next seven years, honing his skills designing Doubleday's Anchor line of classic trade paperbacks. The work, then and now, was remarkable, bearing hand-crafted typography and ornamentation that were renowned for their perfection.
Gorey also began working on his own books at Doubleday at night, but his artistic vision was puzzling to those who expected broad humor from what looked like books for children. When he submitted The Loathsome Couple -- a tale of two inept lovers who get their thrills from killing young children before they are discovered and sent to prison to die -- to Simon and Schuster, it was turned down, reportedly because it wasn't funny. According to a profile of Gorey on Salon.com earlier this year, the artist replied, "Well... it wasn't supposed to be funny; what a peculiar reaction."
The lukewarm response to his work prompted Gorey to form his own imprint, Fantod Press, to publish his work. His first book, The Unstrung Harp, was released in 1953, followed by The Doubtful Guest in 1958. By selling his work directly to bookstores, Gorey gained some allies in the independent booksellers who championed his work. The most important such figure was Andreas Brown, who owned the Gotham Book Mart in New York City and established it as a clearing house for Gorey books, merchandise and ephemera over the years. Gorey also got an early boost from a 1959 review by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker which compared him to Ronald Searle and Max Earnst; visually, Wilson wrote, "he is really becoming a master."
After his stint at Doubleday, Gorey worked as an editor and art director at the Looming Glass publishing house from 1959 unntil 1962, when the company dissolved. After a short-lived stint at Bobbs-Merrill, Gorey-- increasingly in demand for freelance work -- began making his living as an illustrator. His own creations did not reach a wider audience until the publication of the first of the three Gorey anthologies, Amphigorey, in 1972 by Putnam. Its sequel, Amphigorey Too, was published in 1974, followed by Amphigorey Also in 1983. All told, Gorey wrote about 100 books in his career and illustrated 60 others [which included John Bellairs' The House with a Clock in Its Walls and many of his books' jackets and frontispieces].
The initial resistance to Gorey's work, from both the publishing world as well as the public, was the product of several factors. To a casual observer, the work could seem impenetrable. Gorey's love of hidden (or even non-existent) meanings were complemented by his pervasive cross-hatching, which often obscured his art even further.
"The way I write, since I leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I'm doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader's mind," he explained in a 1992 New Yorker profile. He hated writers, like Henry James ("the worst writer in the English language"), who "are completely exhaustive about whatever it is that they're writing about until you're just left thinkin, 'O.K., you've nailed me to the chair, that's it, there's nothing left to think about, there's nothing to question."
"So much of life is inexplicable," he added. "inexplicable things happen to me, things that are so inexplicable that I'm not even sure that something happened. And you suddenly think, Well, if that could happen, anything could happen. ...The things that happen to you are usually the things that you haven't thought of or that come absolutely out of nowhere. And all you can do is cope with them when they come up."
Additionally, Gorey apparently had little interest in self-promotion. He disliked the casual chatter that accompanied social gatherings, as well as feeling of "being nowhere" that he felt when traveling from one place to the next. Even at his own exhibitions, Gorey was typically a no-show. And while he had a coterie of supporters who worked to get wider recognition for his work, they often found him frustratingly indifferent to their efforts. His friend Clifford Ross, who interviewed the artist for the 1996 monograph The World of Edward Gorey, told The New Yorker that "sometimes with him nothing happens, because nothing is exactly what he wants to happen."
"More and more, I think you should have no expectations and should just do everything for its own sake," explained Gorey. "That way, you won't be hit in the head quite so frequently."
Of course, the work itself, while delightful to some, is disturbing to others. Many of the victims in Gorey's illustrated tales are children who encounter horrible, unprovoked fates. The young protagonist of The Hapless Child is a girl whose short, miserable life comes to an end when her father accidentally runs her over, and, in a final irony, fails to recognize her emaciated visage. A more reprehensible character is The Beastly Baby, a bloated and thoroughly detestable infant who is abandoned by his parents and carried off by a bird.
Why were so many of his ill-fated characters children? "I use children a lot because they are so vulnerable," Gorey explained. "Children are pathetic and quite frequently not very terribly likable." He also noted that what others saw as a preoccupation with the violent and the macabre was merely an interest in "everyday life."
If Gorey's characters trudge toward their death in an absurd world, the flip side of the dread-filled atmosphere is humor and playfulness. The esoteric nature of the humor often escaped the notice of readers who mistakenly viewed Gorey as simply a descendant from the Gothic tradition in art and literature ("If you're doing nonsense," Gorey stated, "it has to be awful.") Still, Gorey's penchant for rhymes, silly words, and general nonsense stands in sharp contrast to the bleak events in his stories. These are even Gorey-like figures, clad in fur and sporting bushy beards, who lurk on the margins of the scenery. Such playful inclusions also extended to the reconfiguring of his own name in his work, often in the context of fictional authors (E.G. Deadworry, Drew Dogyear) whose names were anagrams of Edward Gorey.
Many of Gorey's friends and colleagues were quick to point out that the artist himself was anything but the gloomy, melancholy figure as imagined by most people. To be sure, said Theroux, he loved solitude, loathed gushing compliments, and had an anti-social streak that stemmed from a "dim, sour view of the human race." But neither was he a recluse; he was regular at a café near his home, Jack's Outback, and was generous with his time, giving interviews without hesitation. "He was jovial and effervescent and loved to laugh," Andreas Brown told The New York Times.
For many years, Gorey went back and forth between a cluttered Manhattan apartment and his more isolated Cape Cod home. The primary feature of the city that kept Gorey's interest was the New York City Ballet; when the ballet season ended each year, Gorey would leave the city. For 30 years, he atteneded nearly every performance. But when the legendary choreographer George Balanchine died in 1983, Gorey considered it just cause for leaving the city entirely.
He settled in a 200-year-old house in Yarmouth Port that was overrun by cats, rocks, and his voluminous collection of books and recordings. Gorey also suspected that the place was haunted, telling The New York Times in 1994 that he had no other explanation for the disappearance of his Teddy bear collection. He also related an incident in which several of his cats turned their heads simultaneously in the same direction, as though an unseen visitor had entered the room.
Still, Gorey was content living there and giving the cats (many of whom were strays before being taken in) equal rights as tenants. In keeping with his Taoist philosophy, he placidly accepted their destruction of his furniture and occasionally even his artwork. The fact that his constant companions didn't talk, Gorey said, was "sort of a plus."
"There have been winters up here where I saw hardly anyone, and I don't remember feeling particularly bothered by it," he told The New Yorker. "I'm much better off if people come to me than me go to them."
If such comments seem to bolster the perception of Gorey as a loner, his status as a lifelong bachelor only added to the myth. Cats excepted, he lived alone ever since leaving Harvard in 1950. He described himself to The New Yorker as "reasonably undersexed," and when asked if head ever been in love, replied that "I thought I was in love a couple of times, but it was only infatuation. ...After some pointless involvement that was far more trouble than it was worth, I'd think, 'Oh God, I hope I don't get infatuated with anybody ever again.' And it's been 16,17 years, so I think I'm safe."
Gorey was well known in the Cape Cod community and beyond for his theater productions. Locally, he staged annual productions of his work which combined live action and puppets (Gorey even acted a few times, but his final performance was so vigorous that he threw his back out). Over the years, other troupes have also adapted various Gorey pieces; Gorey Stories, was staged in New York in 1978, in addition to Tinned Lettuce and a stage version of Amphigorey. Most recently, Carol Verburg (who produced the Cape Cod events) directed a version of Wallpaper in conjunction with the Cartoon Art Museum's Gorey exhibition in late 1999.
"Of all the people I've known, he was unambiguously a genius," said Verburg, agreeing with Theroux's assessment of the artist. "When people say, 'How did he do so much? How could he talk so articulately on any subject?' ...the answer I keep coming back to is that, he was just a genius. He wasn't like the rest of us."
His most visable theatrical triumph was probably the Tony Award-winning design work he did for the Broadway version of Dracula. According to Theroux, when the curtains came up on opening night, "it was the only time I've ever seen that the set got applauded."
As time went by, Gorey said that he fretted less and less over his work. "I used to spend a lot of time anguishing over these things," he said in an interview with the online publication Bookpage in 1998. "I've found I prefer not to suffer when I'm working. Now I think first ideas are as good as endless revisions. Of course most of my drawing is considerably more meticulous."
In his later years, Gorey was troubled by health problems that included prostate cancer, diabetes and insomnia. But he met his cancer diagnosis with typical equanimity: "I thought, 'Oh, gee, why haven't I burst into total screaming hysterics?" he told the Times. "I'm the opposite of hypochondriacal. I'm not entirely enamored of the idea of living forever."
As for the list of immediate survivors, it reads like the conclusion to a Gorey tale: there are none.
