Born to Be Posthumous Read online

  Yet no matter how carefully we prowl the lawn for footprints or scour the Persian rug for bloodstains, like the sleuths in the Agatha Christie whodunits he loved so much, the Mystery of Edward St. John Gorey is, ultimately, uncrackable. “Each Gorey drawing and each Gorey tale is a mystery that ends—meaningfully—with the absence of meaning,” Thomas Curwen observed in the Los Angeles Times. “He would never presume to know, and if he did, he would never tell.”44 “Always be circumspect. Disdain explanation,” wrote Gorey in a postcard to Andreas Brown.45 The deeper we go into the hedge maze, the more stealthily we try the doorknobs in the rambling manor’s abandoned west wing, the more elusive he seems. Not that it matters: with Gorey, never getting there is half the fun.

  a Publishers, dates of publication, and related details can be found, with a few exceptions, in “A Gorey Bibliography” at the end of this book. Quoted matter isn’t cited in endnotes for the simple reason that nearly all Gorey’s books are unpaginated; even so, readers shouldn’t have much trouble tracking down quotations, since few Gorey titles are longer than thirty pages.

  Chapter 1

  A Suspiciously Normal Childhood

  Chicago, 1925–44

  Ted Gorey, age two, with his mother, Helen Garvey Gorey, 1927.

  (Elizabeth Morton, private collection)

  HIS WAS “A PERFECTLY ordinary childhood,” Gorey always insisted.1 “The facts of my life are so few, tedious, and irrelevant to anything else,” he once told an interviewer—no doubt with one of the full-body sighs he used as a melodramatic flourish—“there is no point in going into them.”2

  The facts: Edward St. John Gorey was born on February 22, 1925, at St. Luke’s Hospital, Chicago. Father: Edward Leo Gorey, twenty-seven, newspaperman. Got his start as a police reporter, covering local crime. From 1920 to 1933, worked the politics beat for Hearst’s Chicago Evening American, climbing by ’31 to the position of political editor. Later, publicist; still later, aide to an alderman, as Chicago calls the powerful ward representatives who sit on its city council. Mother: Helen Garvey Gorey, thirty-two, stay-at-home mom. Both parents were of Irish descent, though the Garveys—moneyed, Republican, Episcopalian—were the lace-curtain variety, several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder from the working-class, Democrat, devoutly Catholic Goreys. (Disapproving noises were heard, on the Garvey side, when they married—cluckings about Helen marrying beneath her station.) Ted—as the younger Edward was known—was a bright kid, well adjusted, well liked. Bookworm, culture vulture, aspiring artist. Attended high school at Francis W. Parker, a progressive private school founded on Deweyite principles. Drafted into the army in ’44. Off to Harvard in ’46.

  Even Gorey seemed regretful that his origins didn’t live up to his myth, lamenting that he “did not grow up in a large Victorian house” and noting, with half joking dismay, that his childhood was “happier than I imagine. I look back and think, ‘Oh poetic me,’ but it simply was not true. I was out playing Kick-the-Can along with everybody else.”3

  Of course, he was adroit at throwing sleuths off the scent. When an interviewer sniffed around the subject of his childhood, he led his interlocutor off into the tall grass of a digression or swatted the question aside with a deadpan quip: asked what he was like as a child, Gorey replied, “Small.”4 When all else failed, he pled amnesia. “What’s past is past,” he declared, closing the door on the subject.5

  But the past is never past, not in the dark room of the subconscious, where our childhood memories become more vivid, not less, with age, and certainly not in gothic fiction, where the past we’ve repressed always comes back to haunt us. And much of Gorey’s fiction, whatever else it is—existentialist, absurdist, surrealist—is inescapably gothic. It’s all about the past, from its period settings to its archaic language to the obvious fact that Gorey uses obsolete genres (the Puritan primer, the Dickensian tearjerker, the silent-movie melodrama) to tell his stories.

  Gorey’s own story, it turns out, is as full of unsolved riddles and buried secrets as any good mystery, though his childhood looks suspiciously normal at first glance.

  It wasn’t.

  * * *

  How normal is teaching yourself to read at the age of three and a half, then cutting your eyeteeth on Victorian novels? Gorey lived up to the myth of the precocious only child, plowing through Dracula and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass—in the same month, even—between the ages of five and seven, with Frankenstein close on their heels. Dracula scared him to death, he said. By the age of eight, he’d read the collected works of Victor Hugo, he claimed, a herculean labor that perplexed even Gorey himself, retrospectively. “Chloroform!” was his adult verdict. “But I can still remember a Hugo being forcefully removed from my tiny hands when I was about eight so I could eat my supper.”6

  Gorey’s infatuation with Dracula and Frankenstein at an age when most of us are struggling with Charlotte’s Web was an augury: the gothic sensibility is deeply embossed on his work. His encounter with Dracula was especially prophetic, not only because the bat-winged shadow of the gothic would flap across his aesthetic but also because he would owe the sanguinary count his greatest commercial success. Gorey’s costume and set design for the Broadway production of the play based on Bram Stoker’s novel made him the toast of Manhattan theater circles in 1977 and bought him a house on Cape Cod.

  No less important for a budding visual intelligence were the illustrations in the books he read as a child. “We [had] a wonderful horrid thing called Child Stories from Dickens, which was illustrated with chromolithographs,” he recalled. “It was all the deaths: Little Nell, [Smike] from Nicholas Nickleby. I remember it with horror.”7

  He fell in love with Ernest Shepard’s wry, fine-lined drawings for A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and the sharp-nibbed precision of Tenniel’s illustrations for the Alice books. Little wonder, then, that he grew up to be the sort of artist who is all about line. “Line drawing is where my talent lies,” he said in a 1978 interview.8 What strikes the eye before anything else, in Gorey’s work, is his mesmerizing pen-and-ink technique. Look close, and you can almost see the pullulation of a million little strokes. You’ve seen this texture somewhere before, the tight mesh of crisscrossed lines. And then it hits you: the man is doing hand-drawn engraving. What you’re looking at, in all that impossibly uniform stippling and cross-hatching, is the fastidious mimicry, by hand, of effects usually achieved with engravers’ tools: gravers, rockers, roulettes, burnishers. Gorey is a counterfeiter of sorts, fooling us into thinking his drawings are engravings, obviously of Victorian or Edwardian vintage, undoubtedly by an Englishman long dead.

  According to Gorey, “the Victorian and Edwardian aspect” of his work had its origins in “all those 19th-century novels I’ve read and [in] 19th-century wood engraving and illustration.”9 But there was a more elusive quality that seduced him as well, “the strange overtone” nineteenth-century illustrations have taken on over time.10 The Victorian era bore witness to the birth of the mass media, inundating British society with a flood of mass-produced images. Many of those images are still floating around, in one form or another, and Gorey was drawn to the uncanniness of all those transmissions from a dead world—specifically, to their unsettling combination of coziness and creepiness, which Freud called the unheimlich (literally, “unhomelike”).

  It was that same quality, he thought, that seduced the surrealist artist Max Ernst, who with the aid of scissors and paste conjured up dreamlike vignettes from Victorian and Edwardian scientific journals, natural-history magazines, mail-order catalogs, and pulp literature. Gorey was profoundly influenced by Ernst’s wordless, plotless “collage novels,” of which Une Semaine de Bonté (A week of kindness, 1934) is the best known. Seamlessly assembled from black-and-white engravings, Ernst’s images look like scenes from silent movies shot on some back lot of the unconscious: a bat-winged woman weeps on a divan, oblivious to the sea monster beside her; a tiger-headed man brandishes a severe
d head, fresh from the guillotine. “I was very much taken with [nineteenth-century illustrations], in the same way that I presume Max Ernst was,” said Gorey. “I mean, all those things that Ernst used in his collages can’t have looked that sinister to people in the 19th century who were just leafing through ladies’ magazines and catalogues. And, of course, now they look nothing but sinister, no matter what. Even the most innocuous Christmas annual is filled with the most lugubrious, sinister engravings.”11

  * * *

  Gorey started drawing even earlier than he started reading, at the age of one and a half.12 “My first drawing was of the trains that used to pass by my grandparents’ house,” he remembered.13 Benjamin St. John Garvey and Prue (as Ted’s stepgrandmother, Helen Greene Garvey, was known to the family) lived in Winthrop Harbor, an affluent suburb north of Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan. Their house was on a bluff, overlooking the Chicago and North Western railroad tracks. Describing his infant effort, he recalled, “The composition was of various sausage shapes. There was a sausage for the railway car, sausages for the wheels, and little sausages for the windows.”14

  Gorey, who saw much more of his mother’s side of the family than he did his father’s, seems to have had fond memories of his visits to Winthrop Harbor: family photos show him squatting by an ornamental pond, peering at a flotilla of lily pads; trotting alongside his grandfather as he mows the lawn.

  All of which has the makings of what Gorey assured interviewers was a disappointingly “typical sort of Middle-Western childhood.”15 Before his birth, however, his grandparents starred in a gothic set piece—a messy divorce—that must have scandalized the Garvey clan, especially since the Chicago papers gave it front-page play. (Benjamin was vice president of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company, and his marital melodrama made good copy.) Whether any sense of things hushed up crept into the corners of Gorey’s consciousness, we don’t know, though it’s tempting to locate the sense of things repressed that pervades his work—the furtive glances, the averted gazes—in the grown-ups’ whisperings about scenes played out behind closed doors.

  Gorey’s grandmother Mary Ellis Blocksom Garvey had divorced his grandfather in 1915; it was the unhappy denouement of a marriage buffeted by accusations of madness and counteraccusations of forced stays in sanitariums, where Gorey’s grandmother was restrained in a straitjacket and left to languish in solitary confinement, she claimed. “TRIED TO DRIVE ME INSANE,” WIFE ASSERTS IN SUIT, the Chicago Examiner blared. PHONE MAN KEPT HER IN SANITARIUM UNTIL REASON FLED, SHE DECLARES.16

  The divorce sowed discord among the Garvey children. Ted’s cousin Elizabeth Morton (known by her nickname Skeea) remembers him talking about his mother and her siblings fighting. Skee’s sister, Eleanor Garvey, thinks “it was a fairly volatile family.”

  Asked by an interviewer if he was an only child, Gorey said, “Yes. And in childhood I loved reading 19th-century novels in which the families had 12 kids.”17 Then, in the next breath: “I think it’s just as well, though, that I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I saw in my own family that my mother and her two brothers and two sisters were always fighting. There were so many ambivalent feelings. And then my grandmother would go insane and disappear for long periods of time.” (Madness and madhouses recur throughout Gorey’s work: an asylum broods on a desolate hill in The Object-Lesson; the protagonists of The Willowdale Handcar spy a mysterious personage who may or may not be the missing Nellie Flim “walking in the grounds of the Weedhaven Laughing Academy”; Madame Trepidovska, the ballet teacher in The Gilded Bat, loses her reason and “must be removed to a private lunatic asylum”; Jasper Ankle, the unhinged opera fan who stalks Madame Caviglia in The Blue Aspic, is “committed to an asylum where no gramophone [is] available”; Miss D. Awdrey-Gore, the reclusive mystery writer memorialized in The Awdrey-Gore Legacy, may or may not have gone to ground in “a private lunatic asylum”; and on and on.)

  In later life, Gorey adopted Eleanor and Skee as surrogate siblings. “I felt as if I were his little sister,” says Skee. “Since we never had a brother, and he never had any siblings…” She trails off, the depth of feeling in her voice unmistakable. “I think that’s why he liked being here, ’cause it was like having sisters,” she decides. (By “here,” she means Cape Cod, where Gorey spent summers with his Garvey cousins from 1948 on, moving there for good in 1983.) Cousins are the most frequent familial relations in Gorey’s stories; make of that what you will.

  The childhood Gorey insisted was “happier than I imagine” was troubled by tensions in his parents’ marriage, too. Class frictions between the Garveys’ aspirational WASPiness and the Goreys’ cloth-cap Irishness complicated things. Who knows how Ted negotiated the transition from his well-heeled grandparents’ suburban idyll, in Winthrop Harbor, to the corner-pub world of his Gorey relatives?

  Unsurprisingly, the group psychology of families—relations between husbands and wives, the interactions of parents and children—is fraught in Goreyland. Parents are absent or hilariously absentminded, like Drusilla’s parents in The Remembered Visit, who, “for some reason or other, went on an excursion without her” one morning and never returned. Of course, neglectful parents are vastly preferable to the heartless type, a more plentiful species in Gorey stories. In The Listing Attic, we meet the “headstrong young woman in Ealing” who “threw her two weeks’ old child at the ceiling…to be rid of a strange, overpowering feeling”; the Duke of Daguerrodargue, who orders the servants to dispose of the puny pink newborn that nearly killed his wife in childbirth; and the “Edwardian father named Udgeon, / whose offspring provoked him to dudgeon,” so much so that he’d “chase them around with a bludgeon.”

  Kids growing up in households where adults are inscrutable and unpredictable learn that keeping their mouths shut and their expressions blank is the shortest route to self-preservation. (Burying your nose in a book is another way of making yourself invisible.) Gorey’s people are almost entirely expressionless, their mouths tight-lipped little dashes; they barely make eye contact and shrink from displays of affection. Conversation consists mostly of non sequiturs; awkward silences hang in the air. Alienation and flattened affect are the norm.

  The only truly happy relationships in Gorey’s books are between people and animals: Emblus Fingby and his feathered friend in The Osbick Bird, Hamish and his lions in The Lost Lions, Mr. and Mrs. Fibley and the dog they regard as a surrogate child when their infant disappears from her cradle in The Retrieved Locket. None of which is at all surprising: Gorey’s fondness for his cats was at least as deep as his affection for his closest human friends, probably deeper. Asked by Vanity Fair, “What or who is the greatest love of your life?” he replied, “Cats.”18 Perhaps the warmest bonds are between animals, as in The Bug Book, the only Gorey title with an unequivocally happy ending. In it, a pair of blue bugs who live in a teacup with a chip in the rim are “on the friendliest possible terms” with some red bugs and yellow bugs, calling on each other constantly and throwing delightful parties. They’re all cousins, of course.

  * * *

  In 1931, another not entirely ordinary incident ruffled the placid surface of Gorey’s “perfectly ordinary” childhood. He was six, but his precociousness enabled him to skip first grade and enroll as a second grader. The school in question was a parochial school; Gorey had been baptized Catholic. Saint Whatever-It-Was (no one knows which of Chicago’s parochial schools he attended) was loathe at first sight. “I hated going to church and I do remember I threw up once in church,” he recalled. “I didn’t make my First Communion because I got chicken pox or measles or something and that sort of ended my bout with the Catholic church.”19

  The temptation to see Gorey’s suspiciously well-timed illness as a verdict on the faith is tempting, especially in light of his terse response to the question, “Are you a religious man?”: “No.”20 His brief spell in Catholic school didn’t leave him with the usual psychological stigmata, he claimed—“I’m not a ‘lapsed Catholic�
�� like so many people I know who apparently were influenced forever by it”—but it does seem to have put him off organized religion for good.21

  A subtle anticlerical strain runs through Gorey’s work: cocaine-addled curates beat children to death, nuns are possessed by demons, unfortunate things happen to vicars. In Goreyland, immoderate religiosity is soundly punished: Little Henry Clump, the “pious infant” of Gorey’s 1966 book of the same name, is pelted by giant hailstones, succumbs to a fatal cold, and lies moldering in his grave, all of which make the narrator’s assurance that Henry has gone to his reward sound like a laugh line for atheists. Saint Melissa the Mottled, a book Gorey wrote in 1949 but never got around to illustrating (Bloomsbury published it posthumously, with images filched from his other books), is a gothic hagiography about a nun noted not for good works but for Miracles of Destruction. Given to dark designs involving blowgun darts, Melissa graduates, in time, to “supernatural triflings” such as the withering of the Duke of Dimgreen’s arm and a seagull attack on two young girls. In death, she becomes the patron saint of ruinous randomness. She’s just the sort of saint you’d dream up if you believed, as Gorey did, that “life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.”22