Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  “The next morning Donald jumped out of bed to see his worm.” Donald and the… (Addison-Wesley, 1969)

  The Donald books, and Why We Have Day and Night, are more about mood and a way of looking at the world than plot, and Gorey’s drawings, which are among his best, enrich them immeasurably, imbuing the story—that “certain thing” the book “is presumably about”—with the other, imponderable thing they’re really about. It’s E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art in action.

  Technically, Gorey’s illustrations for the Donald books are tours de force. Working in a Beardsleyesque vein rich in references to Japonism, chinoiserie, and Victoriana, he produced some of his most intricately filigreed drawings ever. The tablecloth covering the little table where Donald keeps the jar with his pet “worm” in it is a marvel, with its alternating bands of meanders, scrolls, and other Greek-revival motifs. Even the inside covers are stunning—eye-buzzing exercises in pattern-on-pattern whose juxtaposition of Victorian wallpaper, friezes, and tilework showcase Gorey’s command of the pen-and-ink medium. His decision, in Why We Have Day and Night, to render the illustrations in scratchboardlike white on black is pure genius. When he introduces a splash of radiant orange, it has the effect of a cymbal crash.

  Gorey’s drawings are full of visual witticisms, some of them so subtle you only catch them on second or third reading. On the front cover of Donald and the…, Donald stands beside one of those Ming vases the Victorians loved; a googly-eyed Chinese dragon adorns it. On the back cover, Donald and his mother are amazed to see Donald’s seafaring father with the dragon perched on his shoulder. In Donald Has a Difficulty, he gets a splinter while pushing with might and main against a tree. It’s an exercise in futility, just the sort of thing a little kid would do. Closing the book, we see, on the back cover, the unbudgeable tree…toppled.

  Neumeyer didn’t think Donald and the… “was about much of anything,” but Gorey encouraged him to take it seriously, he recalls, investing it “with meaning beyond what I saw…”42 “My words are very simple. And Gorey…‘loads every rift with ore,’” he told an interviewer, quoting Keats on the importance of freighting every line with meaning. “He just takes the text and runs with it.…I mean, [there are] stories within the story that are hidden. So it becomes an entirely different story, and he doesn’t need to change a word…”43

  * * *

  In an April ’69 letter to Neumeyer, Gorey lamented the hamster-wheel horrors of the freelance life. “I am working like mad, which has put me into a sort of continuing stupor, so that I keep myself half-thinking of work whatever else I am doing at the time,” he wrote.44 He worried about fainting “dead away from exhaustion and troubled sleep,” adding, “I get all wound up, and have the most gharstly dreams…”

  Chronic fatigue notwithstanding, his voracious consumption of culture (books, movies, the ballet) continued unabated. Neumeyer marveled at his ability to “do more things in one day than seems possible,” calling him “a man with sixty-hour days.”45 In ’68, the year he met Neumeyer, Gorey published two of his own books, The Other Statue (with Simon and Schuster) and The Blue Aspic (with Meredith Press), and illustrated six by other authors, most memorably his swooningly beautiful interpretation of The Jumblies by Edward Lear, published by Young Scott.

  At first glance, The Other Statue looks like another one of Gorey’s country-manor whodunits: Lord Wherewithal has been murdered by thieves intent on making off with the Lisping family’s oldest heirloom, the Lisping Elbow, despite its being “made of wax and of no value to anyone else”—the proverbial senseless crime, taken to surrealist extremes. But just when we think we’re settling into well-worn Agatha Christie territory, we find ourselves in a comedy of menace like one of Harold Pinter’s absurdist plays.

  The Other Statue sends up social mores. The book is dedicated to Jane Austen—“absolutely my favorite author in the whole world,” Gorey once claimed.46 His satire, however, is far more sardonic than Austen’s comedies of manners. In keeping with his dim view of men of God, one of the creepiest characters in The Other Statue is a clergyman with little pig eyes who lurks “in a remote corner of the shrubbery” and preaches heresy, not piety, “at a bethel in the slums.” The devious governess, Miss Underfold, stands conventional morality on its head, too: wearing a hat festooned with black lilies, dancing at a club called the Soiled Dove, she turns the symbolism of doves and lilies—purity and innocence—upside down. The bearded, fur-coated Gorey look-alike Dr. Belgravius shares “a curious discovery” with his nephew while ogling the bare buttocks of a male statue; later, we see the two men passing a poster bearing the Latin legend NIHIL OBSTAT, meaning “nothing contrary to faith or morals”—the Catholic Church’s term for a text that has secured the censor’s approval. In this context, the phrase has an ironic ring.

  Announced, on its cover, as part of a never-completed series called The Secrets, The Other Statue leaves us with nothing but secrets. For no known reason, little Augustus’s “stuffed twisby” is stolen and disemboweled, joining Hortense, Charlotte Sophia’s dismembered doll in The Hapless Child, as one of Gorey’s symbols of the miseries of childhood. Miss Quartermourning loses a slice of cucumber from her sandwich, a tragedy of Wildean proportions, and, in one of those haikulike lines Gorey manages to infuse with a world of meaning, “a sudden gust came up from nowhere and rushed through the trees”—an image that somehow captures the inexpressible sadness of being alive. The harder we stare at his eerily beautiful drawing of a grove of trees at dusk, the more their leaves seem to rustle on the page, animated by countless tiny pen strokes.

  Gorey’s command of his medium—his pinprick stippling and spider-silk cross-hatching, his exquisite sense of compositional balance—is on display as well in The Blue Aspic and The Jumblies (and, a year later, in his equally masterful treatment of another Lear title, The Dong with the Luminous Nose, also published by Young Scott). In The Blue Aspic, his delirious drawing of the prima donna Ortenzia Caviglia in the role of Tsi-Nan-Fu is at once a fond homage to the Japanese wood-block tradition he loved and a witty study in ironic Orientalism. The decorative pattern on Caviglia’s kimono pays tribute to the Japanese tradition of tenkokud stamps, and the stage set’s elaborately sculpted clouds and curlicue waves recall the highly stylized depictions of nature in ukiyo-e prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai. In his illustrations for The Dong with the Luminous Nose, Gorey goes further, nicking his storm-tossed waves, with their talons of foam, from Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

  “As Tsi-Nan-Fu Caviglia had her greatest triumph.” The Blue Aspic. (Meredith Press, 1968)

  The Blue Aspic is a tragicomedy about idol worship gone wrong. (The time, as always, is somewhere between 1890 and 1930.) Jasper Ankle, a pathetic nebbish whose only distinguishing characteristic is his rabid fandom, stalks the opera singer Ortenzia Caviglia, the object of his adoration. Gorey underscores the perverse symbiosis of worshipper and idol by giving them the same surname. (Caviglia is Italian for “ankle.”) He crosscuts between their intertwined lives, juxtaposing Caviglia’s ascent to fame and fortune with Jasper’s spiral into misery and madness. In the end, Ankle is driven to kill what he can’t have, ritually stabbing Caviglia in the throat.

  Written long before celebrity stalkers like Mark David Chapman (the colorless schmuck who gunned down John Lennon) were tabloid fixtures, The Blue Aspic reminds us that fan is, after all, short for fanatic. Gorey, Balanchine’s most obsessive fan, is making a joke about the neurotic roots of fandom at his own expense. (The book is dedicated to Larry Osgood, who thinks he may have been the one who introduced Gorey to the NYCB.) But the story can also be read as a half joking, half melancholy meditation on unrequited love, especially that immature fixation we call a crush.

  All Gorey’s romantic entanglements were crushes, as far as we know; he seemed to prefer real-life soap opera to sex. Whatever romantic yearnings or erotic dreams he had were sublimated into his ballet mania. His greatest love was Balanchine’s dances, whose flee
ting sublimity could be possessed more fully than any lover, secure forever in his memory while demanding nothing more than spectatorship.

  * * *

  Gorey turned forty-three in 1968. He was in demand as a freelance illustrator and beginning to earn critical recognition as an artist and author, if that year’s show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is any indication. He’d had a show in December of ’65 at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland—Original Drawings by Edward Gorey—but this was his first exhibition at a major museum. The Minneapolis Institute gave Drawings and Books by Edward Gorey, which opened on September 18 and ran through October 27, the full-court press.

  Yet like most artists, he was still prey to self-doubt. Rhoda Levine, whose Three Ladies Beside the Sea Gorey had illustrated, had a new book in the works and was determined that he would do the drawings. Set in contemporary suburbia, He Was There from the Day We Moved In is the story of a big, lovable galoot of a sheepdog that comes, unannounced, with a boy’s new house. The book is far afield in subject, style, and setting from Gorey’s home turf. In the published version, which came out in ’68, his line has a hesitant, diffident quality, unlike the confident, sharply incised draftsmanship on display in the Neumeyer books. Tinting his line drawings with wan watercolor washes, he renders the characters in a quasirealistic, semicartoony style that can’t quite decide which it wants to be.

  The assignment was an awkward fit. When Gorey met Levine and her publisher, Harlin Quist, to discuss the book, things went badly off the rails. Harlin Quist Books was gaining a reputation for innovative children’s books showcasing some of the hippest illustrators in the States and Europe. Quist was going places and knew it. They ordered drinks in a deserted bar on Madison Avenue; Gorey had wine. “We were sitting there,” Levine recalls, “and Harlin is sort of talking about publishing the book, and Ted drank that much wine”—a smidgen, she indicates, with two fingers—“and he started to cry.…There were tears in his eyes, running down his cheeks, and I said, ‘Ted, what’s the matter?’ and he said, ‘What’s the matter? I can only draw in one way.’ I was so stunned.…I said, ‘So could William Blake. So could Henry Fuseli.’” Quist was mortified and hustled everyone out of the bar and into taxis. In Levine’s recollection, the two men never dealt with each other directly again. “Ted, when he would bring the drawings, he’d kind of slip them under Harlin’s door.”

  Gorey’s creative energies, in any event, were undiminished. Nineteen sixty-nine saw the publication of his second Lear title, The Dong with the Luminous Nose, and two books of his own, The Iron Tonic and The Epiplectic Bicycle, not to mention Donald and the…. His illustrations for The Jumblies and The Dong with the Luminous Nose are among his finest, a heartfelt tribute to the Victorian fantasist who was one of his oldest, deepest influences.e They’re also among his quirkiest. Not only are the egg-shaped, spindly-legged minikins scurrying about in both books utterly unlike the dour Victorian-Edwardians who populate Gorey’s own books, but the landscapes are also “similarly atypical,” notes Karen Wilkin, who contends they’re “among the most inventive, tonally complex” drawings in his body of work.47

  It’s clear Gorey felt a kinship with Lear (1812–88), whose Victorian surrealism celebrates the outsider. Best known for “The Owl and the Pussycat,” Lear “more than anyone else tossed aside the didactic tone and moral-instruction agendas of the reading materials that 19th-century parents favored for their children,” notes Joseph Stanton, delighting young readers with his nonsense alphabets, fantastical beings, and ear-tickling coinages such as “scroobious pip” and “runcible spoon.”48 Gorey followed his lead into darker corners of the unconscious, giving the limerick and the abecedarium an ironic-gothic spin and creating a funny-grotesque bestiary all his own, teeming with Fantods and Figbashes, Wuggly Umps and Ombledrooms.

  But beyond those artistic similarities lie intriguing parallels between the two men’s lives. Lear suffered from bouts of melancholia—“the Morbids,” he called them—as did Gorey, to a lesser degree. Lear, like Gorey, was unlucky in love and lived alone; in Gorey fashion, his boon companion was a cat, a stump-tailed tabby named Foss. Lear fell passionately in love with a dear male friend who wasn’t that way inclined; their friendship survived, but Lear spent forty sorrowful years tortured by one-sided passion.

  All surrealist whimsy on the surface, Lear’s nonsense often has a melancholy underside. Like The Blue Aspic, The Dong with a Luminous Nose is a tale of unrequited love. The Dong—a forlorn little chap in a billowing white overcoat, as drawn by Gorey—falls head over heels for the Jumbly Girl, only to have his heart broken when she sails away. He spends the rest of his nights seeking—in vain—“to meet with his Jumbly Girl again,” searching high and low by the light of his luminous nose. Circumstances conspire against the Dong, as they did against Lear’s “unnatural” passion.

  Whether Lear’s solitary life and thwarted passions touched something in Gorey we don’t know, but he must have been aware that Lear was gay, since his biographer Vivien Noakes is unequivocal on that point in Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, which Gorey owned (along with thirty-one other books by or about Lear). An asthmatic and an epileptic as well as an unconsummated homosexual, Lear had a keen sense of himself as an outsider, as did Gorey.

  He would surely have agreed with Gorey’s oft-stated belief that all the best nonsense is shadowed by sadness. Despite being more optimist than pessimist, Gorey was prone to occasional bouts of existential despair. “Every now and then I do think life is a crock,” he said. “Basically, it’s really just awful. I do think it’s stupidity that makes the world go round.”49 Consequently, “if you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point. I’m trying to think if there’s sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children—oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that’s true, there really isn’t. And there’s probably no happy nonsense.”50

  That same year, Gorey produced a nonsense book that, while not happy nonsense in the sunny, funny sense, is frolicsome, in a manic sort of way. Drawn in a kooky style that suits its tone perfectly, The Epiplectic Bicycle (Dodd, Mead) is a gallimaufry of slapstick, head-scratching non sequiturs, and mock moral instruction. Note, by the way, that it’s “epiplectic,” not “epileptic,” a common mistake. Epiplectic is the adjectival form of epiplexis, a rhetorical tactic in which a reproachful question is posed as a means of goading listeners into agreement.

  The title encourages us to read The Epiplectic Bicycle as a work of moral instruction for Dadaists, though on the other hand Gorey may just be leading us down the garden path—like the bicycle of the title, a machine with a mind of its own that takes a little boy and girl for a ride through a dreamlike landscape plagued by lightning strikes, alligator attacks, and other Acts of God. The story begins on “the day after Tuesday and the day before Wednesday”—in other words, in a timeless time, perhaps the nonexistence before birth—and ends with the unsettled-looking children contemplating their deaths, perplexingly evidenced by an obelisk “raised to their memory 173 years ago.” Was their bicycle ride symbolic of life’s journey? Are they ghosts who don’t know they’re ghosts? As always, Gorey is about as much help as the oracular black bird that warns the children to “beware of this and that.”

  His last book of the ’60s, The Iron Tonic; or, a Winter Afternoon in Lonely Valley (Albondocani Press), is as moody and cinematic as The Epiplectic Bicycle is hopped up and cartoony. Beginning in a “grey hotel” for the “aged or unwell”—a departure lounge for the afterlife, notable for its institutional grimnessf—The Iron Tonic is composed of a series of outdoor scenes, most of them long shots. In each “still,” a detail is revealed through what Peter Neumeyer calls “monocular inserts, making the pictures have a movement and dimension kindred to film.”

  A winter nocturne just fourteen pages long, The Iron Tonic drifts, dreamily, from strollers marooned in a sea of snow to a woman addressed by God in “a v
oice both ungenteel and loud” to three people in a graveyard who regret that “the monuments above the dead / Are too eroded to be read.” The rhymed couplets play variations on well-known Gorey tropes—toppling statues, forlorn orphans, Fortean objects falling from the sky—but the illustrations perform a somber, pensive counterpoint that gives the book an elegiac feeling.

  The Iron Tonic. (Albondocani, 1969)

  The drawings are among his most beautiful, especially the scene in which a figure stands marooned in the snow-cloaked wilds of Lonely Valley, taking in the white vastness and the bare black branches of the trees while “a fugitive and lurid gleam / Obliquely gilds the gliding stream.” Gorey once said he was “really quite obsessed with landscape” but didn’t “know how to deal with it”;51 The Iron Tonic gives the lie to such protestations.g Of course his landscapes are highly stylized, like the Japanese woodcuts he admired. “I’ve never really attempted to create any form from nature,” he said. “I often think, ‘Oh, wouldn’t this vista make a lovely landscape drawing.’ But I wouldn’t dream of attempting it.”52 His are Taoist landscapes: the spiky trees in The Iron Tonic, their black branches like gothic tracery against the surrounding whiteness; the “ancient mound” rising out of the snow like a breaching whale; and the “absolutely useless stone” adrift in the dark hint at the presence of li, the underlying order of things that expresses itself, paradoxically, in the nonlinear patterns and asymmetry of nature. Like Gorey’s other serious works—The Object-Lesson, The Willowdale Handcar, The West Wing, and The Remembered Visit—The Iron Tonic is thick with philosophical mystery. And, as always, the source of that mystery is nowhere in the book.