Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey
The definitive biography of Edward Gorey, the eccentric master of macabre nonsense.’A genius book about a bookish genius’ Daniel Handler, author of A Series of Unfortunate EventsFrom The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth.But who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known – in the late 1940s, no less – to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes – but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose?He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, Born to be Posthumous draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey.
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William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018 Copyright © Mark Dery 2018 Mark Dery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Quotations and excerpts from unpublished correspondence with John Ashbery used in this volume are copyright © 2011 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author. Illustrations and excerpts from the works of Edward Gorey are used by arrangement with the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover design by Jim Tierney Cover photograph by Richard Corman All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008329815 Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008329822 Version: 2018-10-24
Contents
1 Cover
2 Title
5 Introduction: A Good Mystery
6 Chapter 1: A Suspiciously Normal Childhood
8 Chapter 3: “Terribly Intellectual and Avant-Garde and All That Jazz”
10 Chapter 5: “Like a Captive Balloon, Motionless Between Sky and Earth”
11 Chapter 6: Hobbies Odd—Ballet, the Gotham Book Mart, Silent Film, Feuillade
12 Chapter 7: Épater le Bourgeois
13 Chapter 8: “Working Perversely to Please Himself”
14 Chapter 9: Nursery Crimes—The Gashlycrumb Tinies and Other Outrages
15 Chapter 10: Worshipping in Balanchine’s Temple
16 Chapter 11: Mail Bonding—Collaborations
19 Chapter 14: Strawberry Lane Forever
20 Chapter 15: Flapping Ankles, Crazed Teacups, and Other Entertainments
21 Chapter 16: “Awake in the Dark of Night Thinking Gorey Thoughts”
22 Chapter 17: The Curtain Falls
26 Notes
For Margot Mifflin, whose wild surmise—“What about a Gorey biography?”—begat this book. Without her unwavering support, generous beyond measure, it would have remained just that: a gleam in her eye. I owe her this—and more than tongue can tell.
Don Bachardy, Portrait of Edward Gorey (1974), graphite on paper. (Don Bachardy and Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California. Image provided by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.)
EDWARD GOREY WAS BORN to be posthumous. After he died, struck down by a heart attack in 2000, a joke made the rounds among his fans: During his lifetime, most people assumed he was British, Victorian, and dead. Finally, at least one of the above was true.
In fact, he was born in Chicago in 1925. And although he was an ardent Anglophile, he never traveled in England, despite passing through the place on his one trip across the pond. He was, however, intrigued by death; it was his enduring theme. He returned to it time and again in his little picture books, deadpan accounts of murder, disaster, and discreet depravity with suitably disquieting titles: The Fatal Lozenge, The Evil Garden, The Hapless Child. Children are victims, more often than not, in Gorey stories: at its christening, a baby is drowned in the baptismal font; one hollow-eyed tyke dies of ennui; another is devoured by mice. The setting is unmistakably British, an atmosphere heightened by Gorey’s insistence on British spelling; the time is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian, and Jazz Age all at once. Cars start with cranks, music squawks out of gramophones, and boater-hatted men in Eton collars knock croquet balls around the lawn while sloe-eyed vamps look on.
Gorey wrote in verse, for the most part, in a style suggestive of a weirder Edward Lear or a curiouser Lewis Carroll. His point of view is comically jaundiced; his tone a kind of high-camp macabre. And those illustrations! Drawn in the six-by-seven-inch format of the published page, they’re a marvel of pen-and-ink draftsmanship: minutely detailed renderings of cobblestoned streets, no two cobbles alike; Victorian wallpaper writhing with serpentine patterns. Gorey’s machinelike cross-hatching would have been the envy of the nineteenth-century printmaker Gustave Doré or John Tenniel, illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s
