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"Life," Edward Gorey replies when asked what frightens him. "Everything
about life...I turned 70 this year," he says, his voice dripping with irony,"and
my first impulse was to change my name and embark on an entirely new career,
and then after a few minutes I thought, what do I think I'm going to do?"
For the past 40 years, the Yarmouthport author and illustrator has been
publishing his little books of nonsense verse, illustrated alphabets and
skewed short stories that seem to come from a different place and time,
and he knows it's too late to stop now.
"I have something like 75 books that I've written that I haven't illustrated,"
he says. "Well, obviously, I'm not going to get around to more than two
or three of them, ever. Until you get to be a certain age you think, oh,
I'll just go on. I remember when I first started writing I thought, my
God, I'll never get another idea. Now I could kill myself whenever I get
another idea."
Gorey's outlook on life is adequately represented in his work, which is
both terrifying and hilarious, disquieting and enlightening, manna for
a devoted following of eggheads and fright fans alike. Brooding, spooky
and funny, Gorey's intricately textured drawings occupy a dimension in
time and space where literally anything can, and usually does, happen.
The black lines are delicate and graceful on their own, but when they gang
up together forge a thick, maniacal tangle of shadow and darkness.
This meticulous rendered black and white world -- a psychologist once told
him it's the way schizophrenic people often draw -- masks a cunning smile
and an elbow to the ribs, a whimsy that can invoke creatures called zotes,
crunks and ulps or an entire book filled with prunes masquerading as people.
Things creep into corners and hide behind bottles, dogs speak in delicate
ribbons of dialogue and little girls sink to the bottom of the ocean.
In Les Passementeries Horribles, people and pets are stalked by bizarre
yarn creatures. Many people perish but seldom do we see more than a hint
of a corpse, perhaps just a twisted left foot protruding from behind a
chaise. Gorey's work is too funny to be Gothic, yet too fastidious and
well done to be a cartoon.
His books, some 75 in all, continue to be reissued and original editions
are much sought after by collectors; many of them have been collected in
three amazing anthologies, Amphigorey, Amphigorey Too, and Amphigorey Also.
Yet his wide, soft mouth frowns and his unruly, snow-white beard crumples
when it's suggested he has had a successful career.
"I wouldn't say I've been successful yet, really. I'm a recognizable name
to a lot of people who have never even looked at one of my books. When
most people come up to me, it's usually because they've seen the credits
on Mystery." Although seen by millions, Gorey can't say if his designs
for the title animation of the PBS program have helped or hindered his
career.
"When people talk about careers my mind glazes over." Gorey is successful
in getting across this themes, which usually involve a kind of playful
cruelty. Awful things are made to seem ridiculous and even comical, with
ominous, darkly ironic pen and ink illustrations of melancholy, often obtuse
characters engaging in a host of strange and bizarre behavior: Obsessed
opera fans appear out of snowbanks and stab divas; bicycles become the
window to the soul; and, quite often, all manner of nefarious things happen
to children.
Since the 1950s, children have been the principal vehicles for Gorey's
peculiar sense of humor, appearing as little innocents or devilish imps
with faces that bespeak a lifetime -- albeit a short one -- of pain, suffering
and practical jokes. Gorey's children have been sucked dry by leeches,
run over by relatives, and kidnapped by fantastic beds. They are disposed
of in dozens of awful and amusing ways, yet the author reports, somewhat
incredulously, that even in these politically correct times, he's never
been criticized for his portrayal of children.
"It's obviously much more poignant to do things to children," he explains.
Children are an integral element of Gorey's style, illustrating his inventive
and often poetic texts with their strictly Victorian perspective on life.
Children, he says, are "a kind of a Victorian convention, Dickens and so
forth. They're very useful for satire and parody."
Gorey is actually a lot like his drawings, vaguely dignified, at once familiar
and yet unnerving. He may look like a kindly old man, with his thick, white
beard and lanky frame, but a closer look reveals the two gold earrings,
one in each lobe, and the carved Mexican double-sided frog hanging from
his neck. Still, there's nothing sinister about him, and he is, in fact,
charming when he wants to be, and talkative; just ask him about movies.
"Get me on movies...wind me up and I never stop!" he declaims after a brief
explanation of why he loathed Pulp Fiction.Although rooted in his opinions,
Gorey isn't nearly as crusty in person as he sounds in print. Neither is
he a recluse, although he says he has spent only three hours in the past
three years in New York City, a place where he was a fixture for more than
two decades. These days, he appears twice a day, for breakfast and lunch,
at Yarmouthport's Jack's Out Back restaurant, just down the road
from his home.
On a recent fall afternoon he showed up dressed in jeans and a denim shirt,
his fingers heavy with bronze rings of African design, an Ethiopian Coptic
cross around his neck and a notebook and paperback novel and clutched under
his arm. He'd walked on the advice of his doctor as a treatment for his
arthritis.
The text in Gorey's work holds import equal to the art. Although he's illustrated
the work of others -- most notably T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical
Cats -- and done hundreds of drawings for books and magazines, Gorey is
at his best when his drawings illustrate his own words.The formats vary,
from short, punchy narratives such as The Loathsome Couple, about two wayward
criminals who find an approximation of love, to philosophical exchanges
like L'heure Bleue.
Always, the texts are lettered by Gorey's careful, precise hand in a style
with just enough flourish to give it an Old World ambience. One of Gorey's
favorite formats is the alphabet. The letters of the alphabet are a kind
of comfortable cloak to him, like one of his huge fur overcoats, and he's
illustrated many, perhaps dozens; some using names, others with adverbs,
whimsical creatures and rhyming couplets.
"When in doubt," he says, "do an alphabet." "It's a great way to organize
your material. Of course, eventually you run up against X and Z and so
forth and just splash around."In 13 cheerful couplets, The Gashlycrumb
Tinies, his most famous alphabet, neatly dispatches 26 children, their
names aptly abecedarian:
A
is for Amy who fell down the stairs
B
is for Basil assaulted by bears
C
is for Clara who wasted away
D
is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh
Although it is Gorey's brilliant, often anachronistic drawings that capture
the attention, it is the rich, strange- sounding words that linger in the
imagination. The names he creates are as arcane as they are delightful:
the brother and sister in The Epileptic Bicycle are named Embley and Yewbert.
The Marchioness of Bunworry's emeralds are seized by the bicycle bandit.
Diva Ortenzia Caviglia is in the company of the Maharajah of Eschnapur
when she is murdered by Jasper Ankle in The Blue Aspic.
The words, Gorey says, always precede the pictures. Once he tried to begin
illustrating before he'd finished writing. "I got a few of the drawings
done as I remember and I could not finish the book," he recalls.Gorey sometimes
feels as if he is drowning in the past. "I've sort of lost track of the
modern world," he says. Rarely does anything more contemporary than a Nash
make an appearance in his work. His characters wrap themselves in great
coats and flowing turn-of-the-century gowns, starched collars and
spats, maintaining a tone that at once mimics and mocks Victorian conventions.
It isn't as if Gorey lives the life of a rustic, though; it's just another
one of the many ironies in his life, which he spends glued to the television
set, watching everything from the new fall shows to reruns of The Mary
Tyler Moore Show and other programs that he missed the first,second and
third time around. "I got hooked on Star Trek when they were on about the
10th revival of that," he says. "I've been [living on Cape Cod] all year
now for about 10 or 12 years, and once I wasn't going to New York I just
started sitting more and more in front of the TV set."
Gorey is as much at home with The X-Files, Dr. Who, and the films of Val
Lewton as he is with Balanchine, Degas and African tribal masks. This eclecticism
informs his work but seldom trespasses into it. As a child, he read voraciously,
especially the adventure novels featuring the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, Hardy
Boys and Nancy Drew, which were among his earliest influences.
"I really was very much influenced by silent movies," he clarifies. "I
hasten to add that I'm not quite that old. But I had friends in film societies
and got very much into silent film when I was in New York all those years.
So basically I think I'm sort of a cross between silent films and a whole
series of books for children."
Gorey first came to New York in 1953, taking a job in the art department
of Doubleday Books after doing some freelance work for the company. He'd
graduated from Harvard in 1950, staying on in Boston long enough to get
involved in the Poet's Theater with Frank O'Hara and others. He wrote skits
and directed, but dropped any ideas of working in the theater when he moved
to New York, where he would find Broadway success more than 20 years later.
Born in 1925, Gorey grew up in Chicago and spent a semester at the Art
Institute of Chicago before being drafted in 1943. After being discharged
he studied at Harvard, earning a bachelor of arts degree.
"I've been drawing since I was one and a half," Gorey says. "Not very well,you
understand, but I sort of always drew. I don't think I took it any more
serious than anyone else did. But I just somehow kept on doing it after
mostpeople give up."
The job at Doubleday lasted seven years. He's only held two other regular
jobs, at the Looking Glass Library at Random House and at publishers Bobbs
Merrill. Since 1963, Gorey has worked on his own. "I was freelancing after
my last job and never had time to look for another one after that," he
says.
All the while Gorey was quietly publishing his small, unusual volumes.
The Unstrung Harp, the first, came out in 1953, about nine months after
he moved to New York. Gorey recalls visiting a remainders store on 42nd
Street where copies of his first two books were "practically piled to the
ceiling for 99 cents a piece." He bought 50 copies of each.
"I don't know why I did that, because I didn't know 50 people, much less
50 people who wanted my book. But needless to say I have one battered copy
left and I have no idea where those 50 copies went." Today, those books
fetch as much as $300 on the collector's Market.
Like most of his work, the early books were simple, short tales and alphabets
illustrated in pen and ink. "It was obviously much easier to get published
in black and white than color," Gorey recalls. He's stayed with the format
most of his career, with some notable departures, such as a series of color
postcards under the name Dogear Wryde, one of Gorey's many pen names, all
of which are anagrams of his real name: D. Awdrey- Gore, E.G. Deadworry,
Ogdred Weary.
Stage success came with Dracula in 1978, for which Gorey designed sets
and won a Tony award for his costumes. Amphigorey, The Musical, an adaptation
of some of his books, wasn't as successful but brought his work, in a very
different format, to a whole new audience. "I would have done more theater
if anybody'd asked me, but nobody did," Gorey says.
"After I got out of the Army I wrote plays. I wasn't involved in the theater
or anything, but for some reason Istarted writing plays. Fortunately I
think they've all disappeared." In the 1970s Gorey's family bought a house
in Barnstable, and he moved there more or less full-time in the early 1980s.
In 1985, he purchased the rambling 19th century house near the Yarmouth
town green on Route 6A, where he lives with his six cats, a collection
of rocks and shelf upon shelf of books, records, video tapes and CDs.
In New York, Gorey was almost a fixture in some places. He can't remember
spending an evening at home while living in the city. "I was always at
something, either the ballet or a movie, opera, concert, you name it. Sometimes
two or three in an evening." He once calculated that he was once watched
more than 1,000 movies in one year.He misses little of that on Cape Cod.
"I just sort of decided it was the place I wanted to live, for no particular
reason at all. I don't think I'd choose the Cape now. It's that sort of
suburban quality; it's not really a suburb of anyplace and yet it is."
Gorey's interest in theater has kept him busy during his years on the Cape.
Lately he's been working with the Theater on the Bay in Bourne, where he
directed one play last year and is currently writing an original production
slated to debut the weekend after Thanksgiving.
"It's not a play exactly," he explains, stretching out the last word as
if it were elastic band. "I prefer to call it entertainment." The story
revolves around a family reunion at Christmas, and is one way that some
of those 75 or so unpublished stories will find an audience. "It's as much
about Christmas as nothing. Christmas gets mentioned, but it's a vehicle.
It's getting more and more complicated. I don't know how the cast is ever
going to memorize it."
Gorey always has several projects going. He's been putting in some time
on illustrations for Cautionary Versus For Children, in the works for more
than a decade. One of his first self- published books, The Beastly
Baby, a subject close to his heart, has just been reissued for the
first time in 30 years by Peter Weed Books.
He even talks about illustrating Poe; the sheer audacity and cheekiness
of reinterpreting something that's been flogged to death obviously appealing
to his sense of irony. "I think," he says, a long, high-pitched sigh escaping
his lips, "it would be sort of fun to do Poe in a different way than
anyone else has ever done it."
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