Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

Gorey believed in the mutability and the inscrutability of things and in the deceptiveness of appearances. “You are a noted macabre, of sorts,” an interviewer observed, prompting Gorey to reply, “It sort of annoys me to be stuck with that. I don’t think that’s what I do exactly. I know I do it, but what I’m really doing is something else entirely. It just looks like I’m doing that.”20 Pressed to explain what, exactly, he was doing, Gorey was characteristically evasive: “I don’t know what it is I’m doing; but it’s not that, despite all evidence to the contrary.”21

It’s the closest thing to a skeleton key he ever gave us. Apply it to his work, and you can hear the tumblers click. Take death, his all-consuming obsession. Or is it? Despite the lugubrious atmosphere and morbid wit of his art and writing, Gorey uses death to talk about its opposite, life. In his determinedly frivolous way, he’s asking deep questions: What’s the meaning of existence? Is there an order to things in a godless cosmos? Do we really have free will? Gorey once observed that his “mission in life” was “to make everybody as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like”—as succinct a definition of the philosopher’s role as ever there was.22

Gorey inclined naturally toward the Taoist view that philosophical dualisms hang in interdependent, yin-yang balance. And while his innate suspicion of anything resembling cant and pretension would undoubtedly have produced a pained “Oh, gawd!” if he’d dipped into one of Derrida’s notoriously impenetrable books, he had more in common with the French philosopher than he knew. Derrida, too, questioned the notion of hierarchical oppositions, using the analytical method he called deconstruction to expose the fact that, within the closed system of language, the “superior” term in such philosophical pairs exists only in contrast to its “inferior” opposite, not in any absolute sense. Or, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, “When people see some things as beautiful, / other things become ugly. / When people see some things as good, / other things become bad.”23 Better yet, as Gorey put it: “I admire work that is neither one thing nor the other, really.”24

Revealingly, there’s an almost word-for-word echo, here, of the dismissive quip he tossed at the interviewer who asked him, point-blank, what his sexual preference was: “I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.”25 The close harmony of these two answers invites the speculation that his aesthetic preference for things that aren’t either/or but rather both/and—as well as his fondness for ambiguity and indirection, puns and pseudonyms, and, most of all, mysteries—may have had personal roots.

“What I’m trying to say,” he told the journalist who pressed him on the question of his sexuality, “is that I am a person before I am anything else.”26 In the end, isn’t it a hobgoblin of little minds, this attempt to skewer a mercurial intelligence like Gorey’s on the pin of language? “Explaining something makes it go away,” he maintained. “Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable.”27

The paradoxical, yin-yang nature of the man and his art bedeviled critics’ attempts to sum up his sensibility in a glib one-liner, a point underscored by the train of oxymoronic catchphrases that trails behind Gorey. Writers trying to transfix that elusive thing, the Goreyesque, reach instinctively for phrases that conjoin like and unlike, describing his work as embodying “[the] comic macabre,” “morbid whimsy,” “the elusive whimsy of children’s nonsense…with the discreet charm of black comedy,” and “[the] whimsically macabre.”28 (Where would we be without the long-suffering “whimsy”?)

Gorey didn’t fit neatly into philosophical binaries: goth or Golden Girls fan? “Genuine eccentric” or (his words) “a bit of a put-on”?29 Unaffectedly who he was or, as he once confided, “not real at all, just a fake persona”?30 Commercial illustrator or fine artist? Children’s book author or confirmed pedophobe who found children “quite frequently not terribly likeable”?31

We can even see the quintessential Gorey look—Harvard scarf, immense fur coat, sneakers, and jeans, accessorized with a Victorian beard and a profusion of jewelry—as a sly rejoinder to black-or-white binaries, resolving Wildean aesthete and Harvardian, New York balletomane and Cape Cod beachcomber in an unnamable style that one journalist called “half bongo-drum beatnik, half fin-de-siècle dandy.”32 The effect, as the eye moves from the flowing white beard of a nineteenth-century litterateur to the elegant fur coat to land, anticlimactically, on scuffed white Keds, is a kind of sight gag—a goofy plunge from highbrow to low, with the sneakers as punch line.

Goths who knocked on Gorey’s door, in his semiretired final decade on Cape Cod, were crestfallen to be greeted not by a palely loitering Victorian in a Wildean fur coat but by an avuncular gent in a polo shirt and, during the summer, those mortifying short shorts old guys insist on wearing. Gorey refused to play to type: in his driveway, where you’d expect to find a decommissioned hearse, sat a cheery yellow Volkswagen Beetle and, later, a shockingly suburban Volkswagen Golf (though it was black, at least). Not for him the sinister suavity of Vincent Price or the open-casket affect of Morticia Addams; Gorey alternated between the languorous air of the aesthete, all world-weary sighs and theatrically aghast “Oh, dear”s, and a Midwestern affability born of his Chicago roots, most evident in the bobby-soxer slang that peppered his speech (“zippy,” “zingy,” “goody,” “jeepers”).

For an auteur of crosshatched horrors who collected postmortem photographs of Victorian children, Gorey was disappointingly normal. “His work and his personality [were] enormously separate from one another,” says Ken Morton, his first cousin once removed. “His day-to-day life was fairly frivolous and lazy and laid-back. It was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a bunch of cats hanging on his shoulders and maybe reading a book at the same time or doing a crossword puzzle.”33

* * *

As Morton points out, Gorey’s everyday life wasn’t terribly Goreyesque. When he wasn’t hunched over his drawing board, he was cycling through routines so ritualized they verged on the obsessive. His virtually unbroken record of attendance at the New York City Ballet, from 1956 to 1979, is only the best known of his compulsions. “I’m a terrible creature of habit,” he admitted.34 “I do the same thing over and over and over and over. I tend to go to pieces if my routine is broken.”35

The routines that filled his days added up to an existence that, by his own avowal, was essentially “featureless.”36 Gorey was a bookworm. Waiting in line, killing time before the curtain went up at the ballet, even walking down the street, he went through life with his nose in a book. (His library, at the time of his death, comprised more than twenty-one thousand volumes.) He was a movie junkie, taking in as many as a thousand films a year. Of course, he spent countless hours lost in George Balanchine’s dances.

Not exactly the stuff of pulse-racing biography. This, after all, is the man who, when asked what his favorite journey was, replied, “Looking out the window”; who “never could understand why people always feel they love to climb up Mount Everest when you know it’s quite dangerous getting out of bed.”37 And if his uneventful life makes him an unlikely biographical subject, his tendency to snap shut, oyster-tight, when interviewers probed too deep makes him an especially uncooperative one. An only child, he was solitary by nature and single by choice. He had good friends, but whether he had any close friends is an open question. With rare exception, he was silent as a tomb on personal matters—his childhood, his parents, his love life. Even those who’d known him for decades doubted they truly knew him.

Gorey was inscrutable because he didn’t want to be scruted. He was a master of misdirection, adroit at dodging the direct question (about his art, his sexuality). His theatrical persona was part of that strategy of concealment. (Freddy English, a member of his Harvard circle, always felt that behind the Victorian beard, the flowing coats, and “the millions of rings,” Ted, as Gorey was known to his friends, was “a nice Midwestern boy” who “got himself done up in this drag.”)

In 1983, I came face-to-face with that persona. I was twenty-three, fresh out of college and newly arrived in New York, working as a clerk at the Gotham Book Mart. The store’s owner, Andreas Brown, was the architect of Gorey’s ascent to mainstream-cult status, publishing his books, mounting exhibitions of his illustrations, inking deals for merchandise based on his characters. Now and then, Gorey dropped by, usually to sign a limited edition of a newly published title. I was running down a book for a customer when a tall man with a beard worthy of Walt Whitman swept down the aisle. He was chattering away in a stage voice of almost self-parodic campiness, and his costume was equally outlandish, a traffic-stopping getup of Keds, rings on each finger, and clanking amulets, topped off with a floor-length fur coat dyed the radioactive yellow of Easter Peeps. Taking in this improbable apparition, I wondered who was inside the disguise.

This book is the answer to that question.

Gorey is grist for the biographer’s mill after all, not only because he was an artist of uncommon gifts but because he was a world-class eccentric to boot. If his life looked, from the outside, like an exercise in well-rutted routines, its inner truth recalls the universe as characterized by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane: not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.38 To be sure, he lived much of his life on the page, in the worlds he conjured up with pen and ink, and did most of his adventuring between his ears. In large part, the art is the life. But Gorey’s work also gives us a spyhole into his mind (as does his conversation and his correspondence).

And what a mind: poetic, playful, darkly nonsensical à la Lewis Carroll, exuberantly silly as Edward Lear, generally nonchalant but prone to melancholy in the sleepless watches of insomniac nights, surrealist, Taoist, Dadaist, mysterious, mercurial, giddy with leaps of logic and free-associated connections, rich in spontaneous insights, childlike in the unselfconsciousness of his pet peeves, hilarious in the self-contradicting capriciousness of his likes and dislikes. Gorey charms us by virtue of his inimitable Goreyness—the million little idiosyncrasies that made him who he was. And he was always who he was—utterly, unaffectedly himself; a species of one, like his character Figbash, or the Zote in The Utter Zoo, or better yet the Doubtful Guest, his enigmatic alter ego in the book of the same name, a furry, sneaker-shod enfant terrible who turns an Edwardian household upside down.

That’s as good a personification as any. Gorey was a dubious character, particularly in the eyes of children’s book publishers and Comstockian guardians of childhood innocence. But he was also doubtful in the sense that he was fraught with doubts: about his art (“To take my work seriously would be the height of folly”39), his fellow Homo sapiens (“I just don’t think humanity is the ultimate end”40), free will (“You never really choose anything. It’s all presented to you, and then you have alternatives”41), God, romantic love, language, the Meaning of Life, you name it. On occasion, he even doubted his own existence: “I’ve always had a rather strong sense of unreality. I feel other people exist in a way that I don’t.”42

Then, too, Gorey was a Doubtful Guest in the sense that he seemed as if he’d been born in the wrong time, maybe even on the wrong planet. By all accounts, he regarded the human condition with a kind of wry, anthropologist-from-Mars mixture of amusement and bemusement. “In one way I’ve never related to people or understood why they behave the way they do,” he confessed.43

How to get to the bottom of a man whose mind was intricate as Chinese boxes? In the pages to come, we’ll use the tools of psychobiography to make sense of Gorey’s relationships with his absent father and smothering mother and of the lifelong effects of growing up an only child with a prodigious intellect (as measured by the numerous IQ tests he endured). Gay history, queer theory, and critical analyses of Wildean aestheticism and the sensibility of camp will be indispensable, too, in unraveling his tangled feelings about his sexuality, his stance vis-à-vis gay culture, and the “queerness” (or not) of his work. A familiarity with the ideas underpinning surrealism will help us unpack his art, and a close study of nonsense (as a literary genre) will shed light on his writing. An understanding of Balanchine, Borges, and Beckett will come in handy, as will an appreciation of Asian art and philosophy (especially Taoism), the visual eloquence of silent film, the mind-set of the Anglophile, and the psychology of the obsessive collector (not just of objects but of ideas and images, too).

Yet no matter how carefully we prowl the lawn for footprints or scour the Persian rug for bloodstains, like the sleuths in the Agatha Christie whodunits he loved so much, the Mystery of Edward St. John Gorey is, ultimately, uncrackable. “Each Gorey drawing and each Gorey tale is a mystery that ends—meaningfully—with the absence of meaning,” Thomas Curwen observed in the Los Angeles Times. “He would never presume to know, and if he did, he would never tell.”44 “Always be circumspect. Disdain explanation,” wrote Gorey in a postcard to Andreas Brown.45 The deeper we go into the hedge maze, the more stealthily we try the doorknobs in the rambling manor’s abandoned west wing, the more elusive he seems. Not that it matters: with Gorey, never getting there is half the fun.

a Publishers, dates of publication, and related details can be found, with a few exceptions, in “A Gorey Bibliography” at the end of this book. Quoted matter isn’t cited in endnotes for the simple reason that nearly all Gorey’s books are unpaginated; even so, readers shouldn’t have much trouble tracking down quotations, since few Gorey titles are longer than thirty pages.

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