Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Burton’s animated movies often take shape on his sketch pad. He is an artist himself, and his cartoony, loose-lined illustrations for The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (1997), a collection of gloomily amusing doggerel, suggest a cross between Gorey, Searle, and Quentin Blake. His humor is broader, and often more grisly, than Gorey’s, and his twee-goth aesthetic is decidedly un-Goreyish in its weakness for B-movie camp and Boomer irony. Even so, Nightmare and Oyster Boy, as well as later stop-motion movies such as Corpse Bride (2005) and Frankenweenie (2012), testify to Gorey’s enduring influence on his aesthetic (his assiduous omission, in interviews, of any mention of Gorey notwithstanding). “Lurking alongside Tim Burton’s monstrous creations is the inescapable specter of…Edward Gorey,” writes Eden Lee Lackner in her essay “A Monstrous Childhood: Edward Gorey’s Influence on Tim Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy.” “From Burton’s preference for thin lines and a certain sparseness of detail in his illustrations—often suggesting rather than fully delineating each characteristic—to his playfully macabre plotlines and themes, Gorey is always there.”14

  Gorey is there, too, in the 1997 video for “Perfect Drug,” an angsty, edgy song by the electroindustrial band Nine Inch Nails. Directed by Mark Romanek, the short film transports the group’s singer, Trent Reznor, to a goth’s idea of an absinthe delirium, a punk-Edwardian gloomscape submerged in blue, black, and green. Dropped clues to Gorey’s influence are everywhere: women in Victorian mourning veils stand on a windblown hill; a trio of top-hatted men are gathered on a windswept moor; a toppled obelisk lies in pieces. Reznor mopes around a haunted mansion in an Edwardian getup, listening disconsolately to a gramophone and drowning his sorrows in absinthe. There’s a sculpture of a colossal hand, recalling the gargantuan thumbs in The Raging Tide; some spooky topiary straight out of Gorey’s 1989 book Tragédies Topiares; and, jutting out from behind an enormous urn, the legs of some ill-fated mite, like the “foot inside a stripéd sock” protruding “from underneath a rock” in The Evil Garden. The story, such as it is, seems to have something to do with a dead child, whose melancholy portrait we see in an antique locket.

  The fashion world, too, acknowledged Gorey’s influence. In his books, he’d always lavished on period costume the same devoted attention he paid to interior decoration and architectural style. Then, too, he was a fashion plate in his New York years, a surefire head turner in his Edwardian beatnik getup, immortalized in Bill Cunningham’s New York Times column about well-dressed New Yorkers.

  In her 1996 fall-winter collection, “Bloomsbury,” the designer Anna Sui returned the compliment. Sui was drawn to Gorey and his work by her interest in “the ’70s ’20s,” as she calls them: the rediscovery, by pop-culture tastemakers in the economically turbulent, socially permissive ’70s, of the economically turbulent, socially permissive ’20s—a retro fixation that bore fruit in movies like Cabaret, The Sting, and The Great Gatsby. For Sui, Gorey was the missing link between the two decades. “I was here in New York when Dracula was on Broadway,” she recalls. “That was during the punk days, and of course everyone was really into vampires at that point, so [Gorey] was one of our folk heroes. When I was in school in the ’70s at Parsons, I had some friends who were so obsessed with him that they used to follow him around. I would always hear about how eccentric his dress was, with his big raccoon coat.…[He] was really of that moment, for a lot of us.” Sui pored over Gorey’s books, soaking up his black-and-white crosshatched aesthetic as well as his impeccable renderings of period fashions.

  But the most devoted of Gorey’s votaries in the 1990s was Daniel Handler, known to millions of young readers as Lemony Snicket, author of the thirteen ironic-gothic young-adult mystery novels that comprise A Series of Unfortunate Events. The first two books in the series, The Bad Beginning and The Reptile Room, were published in September of 1999. Handler sent copies of each to Gorey “with a note saying how much I admired his work and how I hoped he forgave me all I stole from him. He never replied and died not long after, so I’ve always said that I like to believe that I killed him.”15

  Whether Gorey ever read the books is anyone’s guess, but if he did, he was surely struck by Handler’s fond appropriation of his Victorian–Edwardian–Jazz Age setting, macabre subject matter, ironic tone, black humor, and antiquated, Latinate vocabulary. Even Handler’s decision to write under a kooky pseudonym, and to create an enigmatic persona to go with it, was inspired by Gorey.

  Intriguingly, Handler was seduced not by Gorey’s drawings, as most readers are, but by his literary style and voice. “Obviously, the strange world of his illustrations filtered through,” he says, “but I always think that how I managed to find a space on the map of children’s literature where there was room to set up camp is because I stole from someone who’s usually the victim of the theft of his illustrations, but I stole how he wrote his captions.” In other words, Handler saw Gorey as Gorey saw himself: as a writer first.

  Handler’s a rare bird in this regard. As the literary critic Michael Dirda points out, “Nearly everyone…speaks admiringly of the artist’s meticulous crosshatching and melodramatic, gothicky vision.…Not enough praise, however, has been awarded to Gorey’s superb prose: he possesses the ear of a great parodist, and indeed virtually all his albums are pastiches of some previous genre.…The perfectly balanced periodic sentences owe something to the laconic campiness of Ronald Firbank and to the affectless dialogue and humor of Ivy Compton-Burnett.”16

  Handler’s alter ego, Lemony Snicket, narrates A Series of Unfortunate Events in a voice modeled on Gorey’s, at once arch and deadpan, sincere yet leg pulling. “It seems very romantic but very cynical; it seems ironic but it’s not campy,” says Handler of Gorey’s tone. “The first time the Lemony Snicket books were reviewed in the New York Times, they called Snicket the love child of Edward Gorey and Dorothy Parker, and I thought, ‘My life is now complete; I’m exactly where I wanted to be my entire life!’”17

  The same year that A Series of Unfortunate Events debuted, a British “dark cabaret” trio called the Tiger Lillies had begun setting to music a big cardboard box full of unpublished prose and poetry that Gorey had mailed to the group. He’d heard their musical treatment of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter and thought their comic-grotesque aesthetic was, as the Lillies’ lead singer, Martyn Jacques, recalls, “the cat’s pajamas.”18 When Gorey proposed they collaborate, Jacques, who was already a devotee, leapt at the chance. He set to work composing songs for Gorey’s lyrics in the Tiger Lillies’ patented style—his quavering, camp-gothic falsetto backed by accordion-driven music that’s equal parts Victorian music hall and Weimar nightclub.

  “We were going to do a show together, and just a couple of days before I flew out [of the UK to meet Gorey on the Cape], he died,” says Jacques. “I cried. I’d spent several months practicing so I could sing him the songs. I’d imagined myself sitting there at dinner with him, singing him a song, and then we’d talk about it, and then we’d move on to the next one, like that. I’d learned them all, practiced them all; I was really upset.”b

  * * *

  When Gorey published a regular-size edition of Q.R.V. in 1990, through Fantod Press, he’d expanded the title to Q.R.V. The Universal Solvent. Q.R.V.—which made its first appearance in an earlier version of the same title, a miniature book published by the booksellers Anne and David Bromer in 1989—is Gorey’s surrealist take on nineteenth-century nostrums such as Effervescent Brain Salt and Burdock Blood Bitters. By turns sinister, salubrious, and silly, it not only “pickles beets and bleaches sheets,” it prolongs life and bends your mind into the bargain, inducing hallucinations of “felons hurling melons.”19

  In like fashion, the universal solvent, a legendary substance sought by alchemists, possessed miraculous medicinal properties. Some thought it was nothing less than the fabled philosopher’s stone, which had the power to transmute lead into gold and bestow immortality. In keeping with alchemy’s pre-Enlightenment
dream of attaining hermetic wisdom through a kind of allegorical science, the stone symbolized spiritual perfection, as Gorey would have known from his copy of Alchemy: The Secret Art by Stanislas Klossowski de Rola.

  Spiritual and religious themes swim beneath the surface of the Q.R.V. postcard series, Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf. and Q.R.V. Hikuptah, published in ’96. Behind the surrealist silliness, an autumnal mood suffuses them—a dying of the light, made even more melancholy by death-of-God ruminations. Gorey shows his hand in the title of Q.R.V. Hikuptah: the foreign-sounding word is one of the ancient names for Egypt, meaning “mansion of the soul of the god Ptah,” the creator god of the ancient Egyptians and patron of craftsmen.20 Like Gorey, Ptah was bald and bearded; also like Gorey, he was closely associated with funerary rites and the afterworld. Did Gorey see himself, at seventy-one, as having one foot in the grave?

  In Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf., he seems to be settling scores with God, whom he rejected a lifetime ago when he threw up at mass. “Do you suppose God really knows / What He has done to me?” runs the first card’s gibing couplet. “Yet if it’s true, what can I do / But take to Q.R.V.?”21 In another, he resigns himself to life in a clockwork world abandoned by its maker: “With God Almighty being flighty, / And absent frequently, / It’s up to you to make it through / The day—with Q.R.V.”22

  Gorey would surely have let loose with a mortified groan if he’d lived to hear Andreas Brown observe, “His work is an exploration of the existence of God, of man’s attempt to try to locate and define God.”23 Yet overblown as Brown’s claim sounds, Gorey is wrestling, in his loopy, Learian way, with the same meaning-of-life-in-a-godless-cosmos questions that plagued existentialists such as Sartre and Camus. Of course, being Gorey, he alludes to his dark night of the soul obliquely, in deceptively silly singsong couplets. Still, thoughts of fleeting time, fading memories, lost love, illness, and age seem to be weighing on his mind in 1996, if the Q.R.V. cards and Thoughtful Alphabets are any indicator. “All is on fire, fear, and desire, / Remorse and misery, / Illness and rage, revenge and age, / And also Q.R.V.,” he writes in Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf.24

  “He was troubled by insomnia,” Mel Gussow later reported, “awake in the dark of night thinking Gorey thoughts.”25 The season of his life was right for such musings: he’d turned seventy the previous year and had suffered a heart attack in ’94, the same year he learned—all in a single week, mind you—that he had prostate cancer and diabetes. “I figured I was going to be dead in a week, so I began to think about it a lot,” he said in a ’96 interview.26 Naturally, he told no one: both Skee and Rick Jones learned of his maladies from a passing mention in a New York Times profile.

  a Under way in Gorey’s last months, The Gorey Details: A Musicale opened after his death on October 16, 2000.

  b When Jacques’s songs finally saw the light of day, they’d been reborn as a collaboration between the Tiger Lillies and the Kronos Quartet, a contemporary classical ensemble. Released in 2003, The Gorey End received a Grammy nomination for best classical crossover album.

  Chapter 17

  The Curtain Falls

  GOREY, AS WE KNOW, loved to melodramatize the horrors of everyday life. “I’m suffering from bronchitis at the moment,” he told an interviewer in 1992. “Psychosomatic bronchitis, I’m sure. But nevertheless, it’s bronchitis. Oh, it’s all too much, too grim, too lovely, too—how should I put this? It’s general chaos.”1

  Yet depending on his mood, he could be curiously indifferent to his own mortality. When he learned, in ’94, that he had prostate cancer and diabetes, and had suffered a heart attack without knowing it, he thought, “Oh gee, why haven’t I burst into total screaming hysterics?” The answer, he decided, was: “I’m the opposite of hypochondriacal. I’m not entirely enamored of the idea of living forever.”2 Happily, the diabetes turned out to be “very controllable,” and a monthly “shot in the fanny” kept his cancer in check, so he wasn’t too worried, or so he claimed in 1996.3 “I may not live forever but I feel perfectly fine all the time.”

  In truth, things were more complicated. His doctor had recommended a test in Boston (to determine his suitability for an implantable device to prevent future heart attacks, most likely).4 He asked Skee to drive him to the procedure, which required that he be sedated, then decided at the last minute—God only knows why—not to go through with it after all.5 “He had a fear of doctors and hospitals,” Kevin McDermott believes. “Near the end of his life his doctor gave him three options for dealing with his heart condition: have a pacemaker implanted, take a high dose of medicine and be monitored at the hospital, or, as a temporary measure, take a smaller dose of medication at home. Edward chose the third.”6

  In 1999, Gorey published what would turn out to be the last book released during his lifetime, The Headless Bust, “a melancholy meditation on the false millennium,” which did for New Year’s Eve what The Haunted Tea-Cosy, Gorey’s parody of A Christmas Carol, did for Christmas Eve. A wryly saturnine rebuke to New Year’s jollity, it’s the tale of Edmund Gravel, the Recluse of Lower Spigot—any resemblance to Edward Gorey, the recluse of Yarmouth Port, is entirely coincidental—who in the small hours of New Year’s morning receives a visitation from the Bahhum Bug, the man-size beetle who in The Haunted Tea-Cosy guided Gravel through a parade of cautionary visions. This time, Gravel and the Bahhum Bug are spirited away, in clouds that Gorey ominously likens to shrouds, to be shown the secret “shame, also disgrace,” behind the closed doors of other people’s lives: “a certain X—, / Who looked to be of neither sex, / Was charged”—like Oscar Wilde—“with gross indecency / Which everyone could plainly see”; and so forth. Most disconcertingly, there’s a big, black monument to the unknown—an omen, surely, of unhappy things to come in the New Year.

  Four months into the new millennium, death—the subject of so much of his work—came for Edward Gorey. It came not at the point of a rusty stiletto or in the jaws of predatory topiary or from the fatal effects of eating ill-mashed turnips or from being sucked dry by a leech, assaulted by bears, brained by falling masonry, flattened by an urn dislodged from the sky, or as a result of unendurable ennui.

  On Wednesday, the twelfth of April, 2000, he was struck down by a heart attack.

  He and Rick Jones were in the TV room. Jones was changing the battery in Gorey’s new cordless phone, a task that was beyond Edward’s home-repair know-how, or so he professed. Mission accomplished, Jones turned to him and said, “Edward, do you believe this battery cost twenty-two dollars?” Gorey, who was sitting on the couch, flung his head back with a groan, making Jones think he was feigning melodramatic horror at the scandalousness of the price. He wasn’t. Jones called 911, and the EMTs came almost instantly. They did all they could, but when the ambulance left, taking Gorey to Cape Cod Hospital, in Hyannis, it drove away slowly—never a good sign. “They weren’t in any rush to get to the hospital,” says Jones. Edward “was alive but not functioning at all.”

  “They said that if his body didn’t kick back in and start operating on its own within three days, there was not really any possibility that it was going to,” Carol Verburg remembers. She and Connie Joerns, who had come up from Martha’s Vineyard, where she lived, held a bedside vigil. Family and friends, Aubergine players among them, drifted in and out of Gorey’s hospital room. The three days ticked by, but he showed no signs of reviving. The attending physician asked the family if they wanted to respect his wish, expressed in a living will and a health-care proxy, that he not be kept alive by artificial means. They did. He was taken off life support and died several hours later.

  “Connie and I had each brought a copy of The Tale of Genji to read to him,” says Verburg. “We both stayed there all day, but then Rick [Jones] was having all the close friends over for dinner that night, and Connie left to clean up and get ready. I stayed and read to him the scene where the hero takes leave, decides to go into self-imposed exile, and looks around at the places that he’s been and thinks about how painful i
t is to leave but how necessary. Then I told Edward we’d be back after dinner. By the time I got to Rick’s house, the hospital had already called and said that Edward had died, apparently just moments after I left.” Skee recalled one of the nurses saying, “It was almost as if he wanted to be alone at the end.”7

  Edward St. John Gorey died at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 15, 2000. He was seventy-five. The cause of death, according to his death certificate, was cardiac arrest brought on by ventricular fibrillation, a serious disturbance in cardiac rhythm in which the heart stops pumping—the result, in Gorey’s case, of his chronic ischemic cardiomyopathy (the weakening and enlargement of the left ventricle). Alexander Theroux claims in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey that Gorey’s doctor had told him just six days earlier to check into Cape Cod Hospital for five days’ observation. Following his long-standing habit of ignoring things he found disagreeable, Gorey turned a deaf ear to his doctor’s advice and went about his business.8

  Skee Morton can’t confirm Theroux’s account of events. More to the point, she thinks it’s “very unlikely” that Ted would’ve discussed his health-care issues with Theroux, given that he didn’t confide in her or any of his close friends when it came to such matters.9 One thing is clear: the “pacemaker” (McDermott) Gorey chose not to have implanted—more accurately, an implantable defibrillator, which uses electrical pulses to jolt the heart back into its normal rhythm when arrhythmias occur—would almost certainly have given him a few more years, perhaps many more.10