Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Days melt into months; months dissolve into years. Catching sight of one of those fiendish little imps last seen in The Hapless Child, Drusilla remembers Mr. Crague. Hunting for the envelope linings she’d promised to send, she happens on an old newspaper, which informs her that he died “the autumn after she had been abroad.” In a flashback, we see him slumped in the garden where the trio had tea. “When she found the pretty pieces of paper, she felt very sad and neglectful. The wind came and took them through an open window; she watched them blow away.”

  In one of his letters to Peter Neumeyer, Gorey reveals that The Remembered Visit, subtitled A Story Taken from Life, was indeed “a story from real life, the germ anyway.”18 Dedicated to Consuelo Joerns, the book was inspired by Joerns’s encounter with the English actor and stage designer Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966). “The visit itself took place when Connie was introduced to…Craig in the south of France,” Gorey writes, “and the paper collection is true.” A pioneer of symbolism in scenic design, Craig used movable colored screens in conjunction with richly tinted lighting to create dramatic visual harmonies.

  Following the surrealists’ lead, Gorey produced the story by channeling his unconscious. “At the risk of sounding potty,” he tells Neumeyer, “the sentence ‘Mr Crague asked Drusilla if she liked paper’ was something I felt strongly at the time I was incapable of, that it came from somewhere else.”19 He notes that it’s not in his “usual vein” and speculates that it has something to do with innocence. (There’s the whispered hint of a Humbert-Lolita flirtation in Crague’s comment, which echoes the old come-on “Would you like to come upstairs to see my etchings?”)

  Perhaps The Remembered Visit isn’t really about anything in the conventional narrative sense. Rather, it evokes a mood—a sense of longing and, most of all, the ache of regret, a feeling that sneaks up on us as the years go by.

  * * *

  In the fall of ’65, Gorey taught a course called “Advanced Children’s Book Illustration” at the School of Visual Arts, a college of art and design on East 23rd Street. SVA stressed professional experience over academic credentials, recruiting its faculty from artists working in commercial fields.

  Gorey returned to SVA in the fall of ’66 to teach two sessions of “Advanced Children’s Book Illustration” and again in the fall and spring of ’67 to teach “Children’s Picture Books” (“A workshop for those who want to write and illustrate their own books, with emphasis on the development of ideas and on creative individuality”).20 He’s listed among the faculty in the 1968–69 course catalog as well, but what course he taught, or whether he just guest-lectured, we don’t know.

  Nor do we know whether he was driven to teach, as so many freelancers are, by the need to bolster his income. Likewise, we have no inkling of what kind of professor he was. It’s hard to imagine Gorey, who by his own admission tended “to be very inconsequential and trail off,” running a classroom. But SVA invited him back, so he must’ve passed muster.

  To announce his 1965 course, Gorey produced a brochure, wittily designed in the form of a book jacket. The course name is given on the spine, and Gorey’s thumbnail biography, along with details about the class’s meeting time and so forth, appears on the back. A course description, included on the jacket flaps, is worth quoting at length:

  The course will emphasize the creative and imaginative aspects of illustrating—and writing—children’s books and give practical experience in techniques, media, design, and typography. Included will be an informal history of children’s books, their illustrations, and their illustrators, and a survey of the field now, ranging from the picture book for the youngest child to the novel for the young adult, from the most popular work to the most sophisticated. The course will deal, also, with the nature of illustration, its various kinds and purposes, its relationship to text, and the two conceived as an entity.…The main work of the course will be illustrating and designing a complete book.21

  Gorey’s emphasis on the interrelationship of text and image (“the two conceived as an entity”) goes to the heart of his approach to illustration, which was rooted in a deep understanding of the way words and images can form a whole greater than its parts. “I think my drawing is not terribly good at best, but I do know how to illustrate a book better than most,” he once observed. “Illustrations shouldn’t be smaller than the book—that’s why you couldn’t possibly illustrate Jane Austen. At the same time, they shouldn’t be larger. Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for Salome make Oscar Wilde seem in a way rather idiotic. The drawings are so powerful they create their own world, and one more interesting than Mr. Wilde’s. They are a perfectly terrible job of illustration, demolishing the text they are attached to.”22

  On the front cover of Gorey’s brochure is a stick-thin man jauntily attired in a seersucker jacket and broad-brimmed straw hat; a defeated-looking corvid roosts on his head. He’s perched on the capybara-potamus from The Nursery Frieze, which is lumbering along with the same look of wide-eyed unease it wore in that book.

  The creature was Gorey’s totem animal in those days. His business card from that period depicts an identical pair of the beasts trotting past each other, caught in the moment of their conjunction. BOOK DESIGN reads the word balloon—more of a banner, really—unfurling from one creature; EDWARD GOREY says the other.

  Significantly, Gorey chose not to identify himself as an illustrator, a job title he may have seen as too limiting. His training in book design at Doubleday and his bibliophile’s fascination with books as objects converged in a vision of the book as a medium for creative expression and formal innovation. “My training caused me to be very conscious of what constituted a book, so I have always been very careful in coordinating the parts of my books, putting them together,” he said in a 1978 interview.b “I naturally think in terms of how many pages there will be, how the pages turn, and so forth.”23 Gorey saw every detail of book production, no matter how mundane, as an invitation to design—a philosophy that, when given full rein, yielded benchmarks of the book designer’s art, elegant yet economical, as in his 1972 omnibus, Amphigorey.

  * * *

  Nineteen sixty-six brought up a bumper crop of Goreys.

  The December issue of the men’s magazine Esquire featured “A Chthonian Christmas,” the sort of holiday feature Gorey was often asked to do—to his undying vexation, no doubt, given his detestation of holidays. This was the golden age of magazines, and Esquire was riding high, its ad-fat issues overstuffed with the innovative New Journalism of zeitgeist dowsers such as Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, fiction by heavy hitters such as Norman Mailer and John Cheever, and celebrity profiles. At 360 pages, the December 1966 issue had an editorial budget that could easily afford witty frivolities like the Fantod Pack, the Gorey tarot that was part of “A Chthonian Christmas.”

  “A Chthonian Christmas”—the Goreyan adjective means “of, or relating to, the underworld”—includes eight Gorey cartoons. In one vignette, a trio of children find Father sprawled beside the hearth, throttled with a Christmas stocking. In another, a man, confronted by the December days left on his wall calendar, eyes his gas range speculatively. Behind the black humor, we detect a whiff of the loneliness that’s only made bleaker by other people’s holiday cheer.

  The centerpiece of “A Chthonian Christmas” is a two-page gallery displaying the Fantod Pack, a set of twenty tarot cards designed and illustrated by Gorey.c As late as 1969, his interest in esoteric matters was still going strong. “In answer to your queries,” he wrote Peter Neumeyer that January, “of course I believe in graphology, also palmistry, the I Ching, the tarot, astrology, and all those other delicious things you can find in places like thesaurusi (can that be the plural? No, it can’t, it must be thesauri), which turn out to mean prognostication by means of snail tracks or something.”24 (As noted earlier, Gorey’s “belief” wasn’t a literal faith in the oracle’s prophetic powers. The Taoist in him thought it might be one of many ways of tapping into the Tao, while hi
s inner surrealist hoped it might prove useful in accessing the unconscious.)

  Gorey didn’t intend the Fantod Pack to be taken all that seriously, but like most of his jokes it hints at hidden truths. After all, he chose the images that make up his Major Arcana, handpicking them from the visual lexicon of characters, objects, plants and animals, and landscapes that recur in his work. (The Major Arcana are the tarot’s trump cards.)

  Like Magritte’s surrealist painting The Key to Dreams (1930), the Fantod Pack is an inventory of unlike things whose only connection is their role in the artist’s personal mythology: urns (“The Urn”); the bearded, fur-coated, hypermasculine gent (“The Ancestor”); dead, dying, and ill-used children (“The Child,” a grinning skeleton tot pulling a wooden animal on wheels); the Black Doll (which, unlike the other nineteen trumps, bears no title and has no explanation beyond “In the words of the old rhyme: What most you fear / Is coming near”).

  On the back of each card, Figbash—the Doubtful Guest’s curious cousin, an inscrutable creature with a long-beaked, featureless face; a squat, short-legged body; and impossibly long arms—rides a unicycle while balancing a platter on his upraised hands. On the platter sit a skull, a chalice, and a candle, barely more than a stump but still burning—memento mori rich in occult associations, though their spookiness is undercut by Figbash’s antics.

  “The Bundle.” The Fantod Pack. (Gotham Book Mart, 1995)

  Each of the Fantod Pack’s cryptic images dares us to uncover its meaning. But one card, “The Bundle,” suggests that the key to Gorey’s dreams will always elude us. A bulky package tied up with a latticework of ropes, it calls to mind The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (1920), a surrealist object created by the photographer Man Ray in homage to Ducasse’s deathless line, in his novel, Les Chants de Maldoror, “beautiful as the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”d In Ray’s case, we know what’s inside the lumpy blanket tied with twine: a sewing machine. The contents of Gorey’s bundle, on the other hand, are unknowable.

  To those who believe that “eroticism is all-pervasive, almost claustrophobic, in his little books,” as the author of one magazine profile asserted, “The Bundle” will invite the obvious Freudian reading: a stifled sexuality, kept tightly under wraps.25 At the same time, it has a huddled, abject look; its outline strongly suggests a shrouded figure with its head on its knees—the universal posture of despair. Like the rest of Gorey’s “great secrets,” it’s an arcanum whose purpose is to remain arcane.

  * * *

  True to its name, The Inanimate Tragedy (Fantod Press, 1966) is a tragedy—a farcical tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless—of Death and Distraction, Destruction and Debauchery, as its Greek chorus puts it. The Greek chorus, in this case, is a thicket of overemoting pins and needles, part of a cast of commonplace objects that also includes a marble, a thumbtack, a pair of buttons, a bit of knotted string, and a “No. 37 Pen point.”

  Joseph Stanton, in his essay for the exhibition catalog Looking for Edward Gorey, reads The Inanimate Tragedy as a fatalistic “tragedy of manners” that lampoons human society as a war of all against all in which “intrigue and gossip undermine reputations and destroy lives.” Things end badly, in a comedy of terrors. Grappling on the brink of the Yawning Chasm, the villains of the tale, the Knotted String and the Four-Holed Button, lose their footing and plummet into the crevasse. Lemminglike, the other characters follow them over the brink: the Two-Holed Button flings itself into the Chasm, quickly followed by the Pins and Needles. For no good reason, the “Half-Inch Thumbtack” drops dead.

  There’s no causal relationship between any of the scenes in The Inanimate Tragedy, and much of the action lacks any discernible motivation (though the fact that we’re discussing the dramatic motivations of thumbtacks and buttons is a testimonial to Gorey’s absurdist wit). Yet Gorey manages, through the measured repetition of motifs (gossip, plotting, the Two-Holed Button’s high-strung reactions, the chorus’s interjections), to give his desktop drama a Sophoclean fatefulness.

  Where are we? Somewhere on surrealism’s topography of the unconscious, where the tools and toys of everyday existence come uncannily to life. The featureless waste where most of the action takes place—a white nothingness bifurcated by a horizon line—recalls Yves Tanguy’s moonscapes, littered with cosmic debris, and the lonely stretch of Catalonian beach where Salvador Dalí’s limp watches washed ashore.

  But can mundane things such as thumbtacks and buttons be reborn as surrealist objects? No doubt, especially if they blur the line between animate and inanimate. Peter Neumeyer told Gorey that he found the book not only “surreal” but also “cold and steely—quite chilling I think—in its suggestion of a depopulated world” reminiscent of the uncanny dreamscapes of “Lewis Carroll, early still life surrealists with pots and pans, or Fernand Léger cogs and wheels.”26

  Nonsense literature turns an irreverent eye on the system that structures our understanding of our societies, ourselves, even our realities: language. The Inanimate Tragedy isn’t nonsense, but its inscrutable story unfolds in a series of non sequiturs that obscure as much as they reveal. It reminds the literary theorist Peter Schwenger of the leaps of illogic that characterize “the most jumbled dreams” and of the psychologist Jean Piaget’s “description of children’s narratives where ‘causal relationships are rarely expressed, but are generally indicated by a simple juxtaposition of the related terms.’”27 In his essay “The Dream Narratives of Debris,” Schwenger writes,

  The large cast of characters [in The Inanimate Tragedy is] playing out a drama to which we do not have access. It’s not just that we don’t have the answers; we don’t even know the questions.…Yet every frame of this drama seems to be fraught with significance, even while the frames don’t always link up with one another. Not only are the characters of this tragedy bits of debris; narrative elements themselves have become a kind of bric-a-brac that can be willfully shuffled…28

  For Schwenger, The Inanimate Tragedy is at once “a sly satire of narrative, especially its more melodramatic nineteenth-century versions,” and a postmodern critique of narrative’s claim that it tells us “the truth,” whether that truth is the hard fact of nonfiction, the representational truth of literary realism, or simply the causality that gives a story its shape and meaning.29 Gorey raids the grab bag of conventional fiction for his plot devices—“reversals, mistaken identities, miscommunications and secrets”—but divorces them “from the specious promise of ‘truth,’” Schwenger argues. “In place of truth he gives us play, a play beyond the rules of the game, or rather a play with the rules of the game.”

  * * *

  The Inanimate Tragedy was published in Three Books from the Fantod Press, a paperback collection issued in a yellow envelope that also included The Pious Infant and The Evil Garden. (Printed in an edition of five hundred copies, it was the first of four such collections bearing that name.)

  In The Pious Infant, Gorey is once again in mock-moralistic mode, with wickedly funny results. Told in prose and shorter by half than his thirty-page norm, it’s a merciless parody of Puritan children’s literature, inspired by A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671–72) by the Puritan divine James Janeway, an enormously popular book in its day. Gorey’s hero, Little Henry Clump, is a model of plaster-saint piety, scolding other boys for “sliding on the ice” on Sunday (“Oh, what a shame it is for you to idle on the Sabbath instead of reading your Bibles!”) and taking care to blot out, in books, any “frivolous mention of the Deity.” But the Lord moves in mysterious ways: God expresses his love for Little Henry by buffeting him with a freak hailstorm. The child sickens and dies but goes to his reward: “Henry Clump’s little body turned to dust in the grave, but his soul went up to God.”

  Gorey’s parody uses the Calvinist gloom and grim didacticism of the original to mock the guilt, hypocrisy, and hell-haunted t
errors that fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism has inflicted on generations of American children. How close to home that critique struck we don’t know, though it’s difficult to imagine that the dry chuckle of irreligious sentiment that echoes through Gorey’s work doesn’t have something to do with his parents’ abortive attempts to raise him as a Catholic.

  Amusingly, Gorey once played the role of devil’s advocate in real life. Chris Garvey, the son of Gorey’s cousin William Garvey, recalls the time he and Ted talked about the Faith of Our Fathers. “I was going to Catholic school at the time,” he says, “and I had made up a play altar and was playing at being a priest, and we talked a little bit about religion, and I probably gave him some Catholic-school answers, and he said, ‘Oh my God, you’re the pious infant!’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s a book I wrote and it’s like you’ve come to life!’”

  * * *

  Gorey rarely mentioned Aubrey Beardsley, but the magnificent orchestration of black and white in The Evil Garden strongly resembles Beardsley’s dramatic, Japonism-influenced drawings for The Yellow Book magazine, which Gorey knew.

  The bold interplay of inky black and stark white that made Beardsley’s work so arresting in the 1890s was his ingenious solution to the limitations of photomechanical printing, which reproduced all lines and solids in the same tone value; intermediate shades had to be suggested through stippling, cross-hatching, or striated lines. In The Evil Garden, Gorey utilizes a nearly identical technique for his scenery but renders his characters in an almost diagrammatic style that recalls the ligne claire (clear line) aesthetic of the Belgian cartoonist Hergé (whose Tintin comics Gorey collected).