by Mark Dery
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The ’70s made Gorey a household name, at least in households where PBS was the channel of choice and Sunday breakfast was unthinkable without the New York Times. The years that traced the arc of his ascent spanned ’72, when Amphigorey hit bookstore shelves, through ’77, when Dracula opened on Broadway with Gorey’s scene-stealing sets, to 1980, when the PBS program Mystery! debuted, captivating viewers with its animated Gorey titles.
He rang in the ’70s by publishing three books he’d begun in 1969: The Chinese Obelisks, The Osbick Bird (both Fantod Press productions), and The Sopping Thursday, his first outing with the Gotham Book Mart imprint, marking the beginning of a relationship that would last until 2001, with the posthumous publication of Thoughtful Alphabet VIII (The Morning After Christmas, 4 AM). Obelisks, Gorey’s fourth abecedarium, is the only one of his books in which he plays the lead role: a fur-coated, sneaker-shod Author—not Artist, tellingly—who goes for a walk…and ends up dead, naturally, struck down by an urn “dislodged from the sky” by a thunderclap. The Sopping Thursday is a mystery of transcendent banality involving the disappearance of an umbrella (and, far less consequentially in Goreyland, an infant). Gorey’s parade of black silhouettes—parasols, ornate wrought-iron fences—against a gray downpour perfectly captures the ennui of a rainy day, its dreariness driven home by the drip-drip repetition of mind-numbing declarations such as “Last night it did not seem as if today it would be raining.”
All told, Gorey produced twenty-three of his little books in the ’70s, not counting the omnibuses Amphigorey and Amphigorey Too in ’72 and ’75, postcard collections (Scènes de Ballet in ’76, Alms for Oblivion in ’78, and Interpretive Series: Dogear Wryde Postcards in ’79), Gorey Posters (published by Abrams in ’79), and the assemble-it-yourself Dracula: A Toy Theatre (Scribner, 1979).
Nineteen seventy-one witnessed the arrival of Story for Sara (Albondocani Press), a perverse little cautionary tale by the protosurrealist Alphonse Allais, and The Salt Herring (Gotham Book Mart), a diverting exercise in pointlessness (a man swings a dried herring from a string, end of story) by Charles Cros, like Allais a nineteenth-century French precursor of the modernist avant-garde. Gorey translated both books in addition to illustrating them. Hot on their heels came two notable works, The Deranged Cousins and [The Untitled Book], along with a slighter effort, The Eleventh Episode. Written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Raddory Gewe, Episode is The Hapless Child redux. In this version, the victim gets the upper hand: after dispatching—with a pin—a masher who, like the drunken brute who terrorized Charlotte Sophia, “intended harm,” an ingenue flees “to places ever more remote,” where she spends her days “in painting Scenes from Life on trays.” Gorey supplies the moral: “‘Life is distracting and uncertain,’ / She said and went to draw the curtain.”
Seventy-two brought Leaves from a Mislaid Album (Gotham Book Mart), a gallery of portraits of furtive sleuths, slinky vamps, willowy maidens praying by moonlight, and a portentous man in black clutching one of Gorey’s calling cards, whose whiteness seems to glow against his dark garb. Issued as a collection of cards, Leaves can be “read” in any order, but however they’re shuffled Gorey’s wordless illustrations give off a psychic mustiness redolent of gothic novels, murder mysteries, and the photo albums of old and inbred families with skeletons in the closet.
Published that same year, The Awdrey-Gore Legacy (Dodd, Mead), by D. Awdrey-Gore, is another deconstructed narrative that invites the reader to play author, reconstructing it any which way. It’s Gorey’s fond parody of Agatha Christie, all red herrings—arsenical buns, blowgun darts, the “curate/vicar/dean/bishop” who is also an escaped lunatic, the lady novelist in mannish tweeds who has a “passion for…other ladies”—and no solution. (Or is there? The last clue is a postcard inscribed I DID IT. E. G. DEADWORRY—the author of the book’s “introductory note” and, yes, another of Gorey’s anagrammatic pseudonyms.)
The following year, Gorey published his affectionately irreverent tribute to the NYCB, The Lavender Leotard, and his (as yet unfilmed) screenplay, The Black Doll (both Gotham Book Mart), as well as A Limerick (Salt-Works Press), a one-line joke, a mere four panels long, about the unhappy end of Little Zooks, “of whom no one was fond”; The Abandoned Sock, another inquiry (like The Inanimate Tragedy and Les Passementeries Horribles) into the secret lives of objects, in this case a sock that seeks its fortune in the wide, wide world, having decided that life with its mate is “tedious and unpleasant”; The Disrespectful Summons, a sermon on the evils of witchcraft that would gladden the heart of Cotton Mather (the witch, Miss Squill, is cast into the Flaming Pit); and The Lost Lions, in which the hunky, mustachioed movie star Hamish, “a beautiful young man who liked being out of doors,” finds true love not in one of his devoted fans but in the lions he raises—until they’re shipped off to Ohio for the winter, leaving him staring disconsolately into the snowbound wilds of New Jersey. (The last three titles were released as Fantod IV: 3 Books from Fantod Press.)
Categor y (Gotham Book Mart), a throwaway collection of loopy, antic cats romping through wordless tableaux, was his lone publication under his own name in ’74, but he made up for lost time in ’75, knocking out L’Heure Bleue (Fantod Press) and his fifth alphabet book, The Glorious Nosebleed (Dodd, Mead), whose every line ends in an adverb, as in: “He exposed himself Lewdly,” the caption for a drawing of a bowler-hatted chap in an Eton collar flashing a little boy. Les Passementeries Horribles (Albondocani Press) and The Broken Spoke (Dodd, Mead) came next, in ’76. In the former—another of Gorey’s “object-oriented” works, in which things play leading roles—unsuspecting Victorian-Edwardians are menaced by overgrown ornamental tassels. The Broken Spoke consists of sixteen whimsical “cycling cards from the pen of Dogear Wryde” depicting such affecting scenes as “The Crumbath Cyclery by Moonlight” and “Innocence, on the Bicycle of Propriety, Carrying the Urn of Reputation Safely over the Abyss of Indiscretion.” In ’77, The Loathsome Couple (Dodd, Mead) appeared, followed in ’78 by The Green Beads (Albondocani Press), about Little Tancred, who meets “a disturbed person whose sex was unclear” and who leads Tancred on a wild-goose chase for the, er, family jewels. It was Gorey’s last picture book of the ’70s.
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Among Gorey’s most memorable titles of the decade (in addition to those discussed elsewhere in these pages—The Osbick Bird, The Lavender Leotard, The Black Doll, The Lost Lions, and L’Heure Bleue) were The Deranged Cousins, [The Untitled Book], and The Loathsome Couple.
A tale of murder, religious mania, and the perils of beachcombing, The Deranged Cousins chronicles the misadventures of three orphans, Rose Marshmary, Mary Rosemarsh, and Marsh Maryrose (the man of the trio and an obvious Gorey surrogate, the ghost of a Harvard H still visible in the stitched outline on his sweater). During a stroll along the shore, Rose and Mary quarrel over a bed slat they’ve found, and Mary deals Rose a fatal blow with a brown china doorknob. Things go from bad to worse: Mary descends into morbid religiosity, and Marsh expires after drinking “the dregs of a bottle of vanilla extract he discovered in the mud.”
Dedicated to “Eleanor and Skee, a souvenir of Labor Day 1965,” Cousins was inspired by a ramble along the shore in Barnstable. (“Needless to remark, nothing happened after we took the walk,” Gorey hastened to add when he and Dick Cavett discussed the book, although they really did find a bed slat, a doorknob, and a bottle of vanilla extract, he said.)53 The Deranged Cousins is a darkly funny caricature of his affectionate, easygoing relationship with the Garvey sisters.
But it’s equally about Cape Cod’s “low-tide dolor,” as the poet Robert Lowell described the distinctive mood of coastal Massachusetts.54 It’s Gorey’s only book set on the Cape, and his camera eye captures the characteristic features of its low-lying landscape, from its salt marshes to its low-tide muck to its scrublands. The ocean is an agent of fate: its cast-off oddments sow strife among the cousins, setting events on their doomed course, and Mary is
swept away in the end by an “unusually high tide.” To Cape Codders, the ocean’s changeable moods are indistinguishable from Acts of God, an ever-present reminder that the deep can swallow you up, even if you’re a “religious maniac” like Mary.
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Credited to Edward Pig, [The Untitled Book] is a little ditty, sung in a nonsense tongue, about the collapse of meaning. Throughout the book’s sixteen panels, Gorey’s “camera” frames a fixed shot, as in Feuillade’s tableaux, of the same flagstone-paved yard. In the darkened window of a nearby house, an unsmiling boy appears—a Puritan, judging by his boy’s frock, with its frilly collar. He watches impassively while an ant plays ring-around-the-rosy with various Gorey totems—a frog, a bat, a pair of stuffed whatsits. “Flappity flippity, / Saragashum; Thip, / thap, / thoo,” chants the gibberish text. Without warning, a big black thingamajig streaks, cometlike, out of the sky, sending the playmates scurrying. The boy is left alone to contemplate the empty yard.
The book’s theme, argues Selma G. Lanes in her study of children’s literature, Through the Looking Glass, is the “attempt at divining some rudimentary pattern from the world’s unreason.”55 If so, the moral of Gorey’s story is that all such attempts are doomed to failure. Unlike The Nursery Frieze, whose seemingly meaningless mumbo jumbo turns out to be composed of bona fide words, the text of [The Untitled Book] is pure gibberish. Moreover, Gorey eschews rhyme, his usual strategy for imposing order on nonsense. The results are far from the Victorian surrealism of Lear and Carroll and closer to the Dadaist sound poetry of Hugo Ball and Lucky’s word-salad monologue in Waiting for Godot. Even the title implies a loss of faith in language; like Gorey’s signature exclamation, “O, the of it all!” it uses erasure to express the inexpressible.
(Interestingly, Gorey was painstaking in his choice of just the right meaningless, made-up words for [The Untitled Book]. In a rough draft of the text, we see him working his way through “gumbletendum, gumbletendus, splotterbendus, sopplecorum, lopsicorum, lorum, ipsifendum, ipsibendum, ipsilorum, ipsiborum,” before settling on “ipsifendus.”56 The last five words, by the way, are clearly inspired by lorem ipsum, the Latinate gobbledygook graphic designers use to create dummy page layouts.)
Of all the books he wrote, Gorey counted [The Untitled Book] among his favorites because, like The Nursery Frieze and The Object-Lesson, it made “the least obvious sense.”57 Lanes calls it “a perfectly rounded little dance-drama in which nameless threats come, are seen, and neither conquer nor are conquered. It is so self-contained and tightly choreographed a work that, its alien reality notwithstanding, it is curiously satisfying.”58 Irwin Terry thinks it may well be Gorey’s “most perfect book,” combining “beautiful artwork, language, nonsense, and pure ‘absurdist art’ sensibilities.…Each panel is rendered with infinite detail, yet all 16 drawings…show the exact same courtyard that was redrawn (with weather variations) for each illustration. This technical tour de force is the backdrop for the ‘drama’ that takes place within the scenes. I always have Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre running through my head when I read this book, which makes me feel like I am ‘looking at music.’”59
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There’s one title in which Gorey treats the subject of murdered children not with the usual camp-gothic irony but with a pathos spiked with pitch-black humor. That book is The Loathsome Couple. It’s the only Gorey title in the true-crime genre, and it’s light-years away from the Firbankian wit or tea-cozy gothic of his other books. The events in question were the so-called Moors Murders, in which a pair of sullen, dead-eyed psychopaths, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, raped and killed five children, ages ten to seventeen, near Manchester, England, between July of 1963 and October of 1965, then buried their bodies on the desolate, fog-haunted Saddleworth Moor. In one case they forced a ten-year-old girl to pose for pornographic photos, then tape-recorded her heart-rending screams and pleas as they tortured her to death. Even if you’re a true-crime aficionado, as Gorey was, the tawdry awfulness of the crimes makes you want to scrub your mind with bleach.
Gorey had followed the story in the papers. “That disturbed me dreadfully, even after years of reading crime stories,” he recalled. “I’m all for elegant, goofy murder. This upset me, and it became the one text I felt compelled to write.”60 The book’s dedication to William Roughead, whose reassuringly Sherlock Holmesian accounts of nineteenth-century crimes Gorey loved, serves as a kind of talisman—a piece of the “sinister-slash-cozy” stuff he usually cuddled up with, brandished against the charmless horrors to come.
By transporting the subject to his familiar Victorian-Edwardian milieu, Gorey holds it at arm’s length, creating an aesthetic distance that enables him to extract a queasy humor from his tale. Never has evil been more banal, from the killers’ dispiritingly inept attempts at lovemaking (“When they tried to make love, their strenuous and prolonged efforts came to nothing”) to their celebratory meal after murdering, “in various ways,” little Eepie Carpetrod, a ghastly repast of “cornflakes and treacle, turnip sandwiches, and artificial grape soda.” Often, the imagery is nearly lost in a blizzard of cross-hatching. “I purposely made the drawings as…unpleasant, uncharming as I could,” he said.61
“When they tried to make love, their strenuous and prolonged efforts came to nothing.” The Loathsome Couple. (Dodd, Mead, 1977)
Readers found the book every bit as charmless as he’d hoped. When Gorey’s literary agent, Candida Donadio,h submitted the manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, then an editor at Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb was aghast, observing that it wasn’t funny (a masterpiece of understatement). “Well, Bob,” Gorey rejoined, “it wasn’t supposed to be funny.”62 When it was published, by Dodd, Mead, in 1977, some bookstores returned it. One sent “a very revealing letter saying, ‘We think this book is absolutely revolting. Everyone in the store has read it and we refuse to carry it!’”63
Uncharacteristically, it was a book he felt he had to do, almost against his will. “I resisted writing it for quite some time, and it really is one of those things I had to get off my chest,” he told an interviewer.64 Elsewhere, he said, “That was the rare story where I felt I was working out feeling on the page.”65 But what was he working out? If you believe the lazy cliché, infanticide was his life’s work. “I saw in them a lot of myself,” he later admitted, noting, in the same interview, “I’ve been murdering children in books for years.”66
Gorey’s blandly matter-of-fact narration and the existential cluelessness of his blank-faced characters strip away the mythic aura that surrounds serial killers. Hopeless bunglers who fail at everything, from love to child killing (in the sense that their subsequent murders are “never as exhilarating as the first one had been”), Harold Snedleigh and his partner in crime, Mona Gritch, are revealed for the gray nonentities they are.i Of course, the less they look like monsters, the more they look like you and me. And vice versa.
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All this time, Gorey was simultaneously churning out illustrations for newspapers, magazines, and books by other authors. Some projects, such as Donald Has a Difficulty and Why We Have Day and Night, both published in 1970, gave full rein to his talents as a literary collaborator and master of visual subtext whose illustrations added parallel narratives. But whether the job was a true meeting of the minds or just another gig to pay the bills, he eschewed hackwork, using all but the most throwaway assignments as opportunities for trying on new styles and, while he was at it, stretching the definition of what was and wasn’t Goreyesque.
Gorey’s last dance with Ciardi, Someone Could Win a Polar Bear (1970), finds him playing against type: his depiction, on the book’s front cover, of a tyke effortlessly hoisting an enormous white bear aloft against a canary yellow background is done in a scribbly style that looks as if it had been drawn in grease pencil. Gorey’s rough line captures the naive charm of a grade-schooler’s crayon drawing.
Ciardi was one of Gorey’s tent-pole clients—Old Faithfuls whose reliable patrona
ge cushions a freelancer from the feast-or-famine cycles that make self-employment so ulcerating. John Bellairs, a writer of young-adult novels—gothic thrillers and supernatural mysteries with a coming-of-age twist—was another.
Gorey provided dust jackets, paperback covers, and in many cases frontispieces for twenty-two Bellairs (or Bellairs-inspired) novels, beginning in 1973 with The House with a Clock in Its Walls. But the real gems are the back covers, brooding landscapes reminiscent of German Romanticism. The tumbledown castle subsiding into the heath on The Secret of the Underground Room and the thicket of trees huddled in a snowy field under a lemon-meringue sunset on The Lamp from the Warlock’s Tomb are beautifully handled. Generations of middle-school readers discovered Gorey through Bellairs’s books.
Younger readers encountered him in Florence Parry Heide’s Treehorn series, about the magical-realist misadventures of a little boy (named Treehorn, improbably enough), which Gorey illustrated in the fine-lined, boldly patterned style of the Donald books. Artist and author were well matched. Heide’s omniscient narrator recounts Treehorn’s antic adventures—his inexplicable dwindling in The Shrinking of Treehorn (1971); his discovery, in Treehorn’s Treasure (1981), that money really does grow on trees; his encounter with a sleep-deprived genie in Treehorn’s Wish (1984)—in an emotionally flat, matter-of-fact manner reminiscent of Gorey’s authorial voice. Tuned to the sixty-cycle hum of mental life in ’70s suburbia, her deadpan storytelling goes hand in glove with the flattened affect of Gorey’s characters, with their pinprick eyes and perpetually fretful eyebrows. Heide’s adults, who talk past each other and are hilariously oblivious to Treehorn’s exclamations about genies and money trees, are the neglectful parents we’ve met in Gorey stories, updated for the “me” generation.
