Born to be posthumous The eccentric life and mysterious genius of Edward Gorey

Edward GOREY - who concocted the famous opening credits for the PBS "Mystery!" series - was himself a tantalizing mystery, one that Mark Dery, in an over-ample new biography, sets out to solve, only to acknowledge at the end that it can't be done. Well, every human being is a mystery, and none of us can be "solved," but Gorey certainly invites the discussion - by the life choices he made, by the nature of his accomplishments and by his provocative self-presentations. ("Part of me is genuinely eccentric," he acknowledged, "part of me is a bit of a put-on. But 1 know what I'm doing.") There are mysteries within the mystery, and for Dery the mystery that matters most is that of Gorey's sexuality - he gnaws away at it relentlessly throughout the 400-odd pages of his narrative. Was Gorey straight? Not very likely. Was he gay? Probably, but not actively. Did he have any sexual life at all? Was he asexual? Gorey himself addressed the question in an interview he gave to Boston magazine late in life. "1 am fortunate in that 1 am apparently reasonably undersexed or something. I've never said that 1 was gay and I've never said that 1 wasn't." Responding to the direct question "What are your sexual preferences?" he replied: "Well, I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. I suppose I'm gay. But I don't identify with it much." Dery makes much of the fact that when the interview was reprinted after Gorey's death, the final two sentences were suppressed, but by the time this particular reader had reached Page 410 of "Born to Be Posthumous," he was so tired of the endless speculation that he wouldn't have perked up if it turned out that Gorey's interests lay in extraterrestrials. Gorey himself clearly got tired of the issue. "I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is," he said, "but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems." There had certainly been no sexual intimacy between the young Ted and his greatest friend (and roommate) at Harvard, the very gay poet Frank O'Hara, or his other great poet-friend there, John Ashbery. It was another close Harvard friend, Larry Osgood, to whom Gorey confessed "that he once had a sexual experience in his late teens, I think. And he hadn't liked it. And that was that. He wasn't going to do that again." According to Dery, "one of the great unsolved mysteries of Gorey's life is what, exactly, happened at that first (and, by all accounts, last) attempt at sex, which put him off the idea forever. It's Gorey's Rosebud moment, the experience that made him who he was." Here we have Dery at his most off the wall. Surely, many - most? all? - teenagers have had mortifying sexual experiences and haven't been traumatized forever. Gorey did acknowledge that something important was missing from his life, writing to his great friend Alison Lurie when he was 28 that he "ought to be having a few direct emotional experiences, however small." What he did have, by his own account, were "infatuations." "I thought I was in love a couple of times," he said when he was in his late 60s, "but I rather think it was only infatuation. It bothered me briefly, buti always got over it. I mean for a while I'd think, after some perfectly pointless involvement that was far more trouble than it was worth - I'd think, 'Oh God, I hope I don't get infatuated with anybody ever again.' " A more fundamental issue than his presumed asexuality, it seems to me, was his resistance to, or immunity from, emotional intimacy. Dery puts it this way: "He had good friends, but whether he had any close friends is an open question," and he quotes Ashbery as saying, "I feel that he was somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, funloving level." Jason Epstein, who launched Gorey's brilliant career at Anchor Books, remarked of his tiny stuffed apartment, "There was no room for two in that apartment - or in that life." Perhaps the closest Gorey ever came to intimacy was with Peter Neumeyer, an editor-writer with whom he collaborated on three children's books beginning in 1968. Theirs was a true meeting of minds, as we realize from their almost feverish published correspondence, "Floating Worlds." "You know far more about me than anyone else in the world," Gorey wrote to Neumeyer. But surely it was the fact that the relationship was primarily epistolary that made it possible for him to express himself so openly. And it lasted only a year or so. Even with this intellectual crush, Gorey needed to withdraw from the pressures of intimacy. Nor was he remotely touchy-feely - a locution he would have abominated - apparently shrinking even from handshakes and hugs. When Dery asked Skee Morton (Gorey's cousin, in whose house on Cape Cod he lived on and off for years), "Did you ever see him hug anyone?," she answered, "He hugged me at my father's funeral. I think that's the only time." Carol Verbürg, a Cape Cod friend, said, "Physical contact... was notin Edward's repertoire. His level of physical contact was cat level." He certainly was more at ease with cats than with people: He had five of them - down from six - at the time of his death. "Of all his characters, his cats are the only ones who look truly happy," Dery acutely remarks. People perplexed him. "In one way," he said, "I've never related to people or understood why they behave the way they do. ... I think life is the pits." Gorey liked to say that he had a "perfectly ordinary childhood." "I was out playing Kick-the-Can along with everybody else," he said, perhaps a touch disingenuously. But not many kids in Chicago had learned to read before they were 4, and had made their way through "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" and Dickens and a load of Victor Hugo before they were 8. Or had astronomical I.Q.s. Or drew their first picture at 1 ½ ("very funny little sausagey drawings, which are meant to be railway cars"). Nor did many Midwestern kids born in 1925 have a grandmother who had created a scandal when she divorced her husband, vice president of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company, to the accompaniment of headlines. ("TRIED TO DRIVE ME INSANE" and "PHONE MAN KEPT HER IN SANITARIUM UNTIL REASON FLED.") As Gorey put it, "My grandmother would go insane and disappear for long periods of time." No wonder asylums turn up in so many of his tales. And no surprise that one of the cousins remarked, "It was a fairly volatile family." Volatile in other ways as well. Dery goes into far too much detail tracking the endless, clearly compulsive changes of residence the Gorey family undertook throughout his childhood, climaxed by his moving to Florida with his mother when he was 12, some time after his parents were divorced. Soon, though, he was back at school in Chicago. By the time he was 19, he had had at least 11 different addresses and had attended five different grammar schools. "Sometimes we just moved a block away into another apartment; it was all very weird." His parents simply weren't compatible. Dad (Edward Leo Gorey) was a crime reporter for The Chicago Evening American, Mom (Helen Garvey Gorey) was a mom. Both parents, Dery tells us, "were of Irish descent, though the Garveys - moneyed, Republican, Episcopalian - were the lacecurtain variety, several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder from the working-class, Democrat, devoutly Catholic Goreys." By the standards of the day, Helen had married beneath herself. Soon after the divorce, Dad - who by now was publicity director of the Drake and Blackstone hotels - had married a Latina nightclub singer, Corinna Mura (born the far-from-Latina Corynne Constance Wall), whom we can see in "Casablanca," singing "Tango delle Rose" in Rick's Café. In time, this marriage crumbled too, and then, in 1952, 15 years after their divorce, Ed and Helen remarried. (One day that year, Skee Morton recalled, Ted said to her, "Oh, incidentally, my parents got married again today.") He was never close to his father, didn't speak of him and only rarely saw him. Whereas his tangled relationship with his difficult mother never untangled: "We were far closer than I really wished most of the time, and we fought a good deal right up until the time she died, at the age of 86. She was a very strong-minded lady." One constant throughout Gorey's peripatetic school years was his drawing. He was always making cartoons and designing things for yearbooks, and his great good luck was attending the Francis W. Parker School, an advanced, liberal place that encouraged individual thinking and creative work. It was there that he met his lifelong friend Connie (Consuelo) Joerns and palled around with Joan Mitchell, on her way to becoming a world-famous Abstract Expressionist artist - they liked each other while scorning each other's art. (Gorey made it very clear that whatever he may have been, it was certainly not a painter.) In his application for a Harvard National Scholarship, after emphasizing his interest in looking at and making art, he lists his other preoccupations: music, ballet, theater and movies. And books. His application lists 69 books he had read in the current year, ranging from Homer and Plato to Joyce and P. G. Wodehouse - all these apart from the innumerable mysteries he read (and would read throughout his life), including "my favorite author in all the world," Agatha Christie. (When she died, he reports thinking, "I can't go on.") This passion for detective novels may be the one cultural impulse he shared with his equally addicted parents. Accepted by Harvard, he postponed matriculating until his situation with the draft was clarified. The United States was well into the war, and he was, indeed, drafted in May 1943. Four months of basic training at Camp Roberts in central California ("God's garbage pit"); then assignment - given his record-breaking intelligence tests - to learn Japanese; then, when that program was shut down, assignment to Dugway Proving Ground, in the Great Salt Lake Desert, to become a company clerk: typing, sorting mail, keeping the company books and, he reported, staying "sloshed on tequila." And writing plays, which Dery convincingly labels "self-indulgent juvenilia." The dialogue is over the top of the top: "Have you ever danced naked before a lesbian sodden with absinthe?" But here also are his lifelong Anglophilia, "love of nonsensical titles, preposterous names (Centaurea Teep, Mrs. Firedamp), even more preposterous place names (Galloping Fronds, Crumbling Outset) and absurd deaths." And here are more resonant themes that will recur through the next 50 years: "the melancholy of lost time ... the stealthy tiptoe of our approaching mortality ... and of course, angst, ennui, the banal horrors of everyday life, arbitrary and unpredictable turns of events, cruelty to children (a governess kills her charge's pet canary), the cruelty of children (a little girl bashes her big sister's head in with a silver salver) and murder most foul." Gorey had practically no formal art instruction - a few classes here and there - and Harvard was as much a social experience as an educational one: He majored in French, he says, to give himself an excuse to read all of French literature, having read everything he needed to in English. His favorite writers were and remained Austen, Trollope, E. F. Benson (the Lucia novels) and Arthur Waley's adaptation of Lady Murasaki ("Genji" was a lifelong obsession). For a couple of years after graduating, he hung around Boston, mostly working in bookshops. Unlike so many literary young men and women of his moment, he didn't rush to travel through postwar Europe. (Despite his lifelong passion for things English, he went abroad only once: to the Scottish islands for a couple of weeks, after falling in love with the PowellPressburger movie "I Know Where I'm Going." There was a layover in Heathrow, the closest he ever got to seeing England itself.) He mounted a well-attended show of watercolors in Cambridge, and he helped to found and was deeply involved with the Poets' Theatre there, which staged plays by O'Hara, Ashbery, Richard Eberhart, Archibald MacLeish, Yeats, Lorca and Beckett (the first American staging of "All That Fall") and presented Dylan Thomas's first American reading of "Under Milk Wood." He contributed two plays of his own, as well as designing sets and everything else that needed designing. He was beginning to sell drawings to various publications, and in late 1952 sold his first cover art to a major magazine, Harper's. But essentially he was treading water - and he was 27. And then a college friend, Barbara Zimmerman - married to Jason Epstein, a young publishing whiz at Doubleday - suggested to her husband that Ted would be the perfect person to create the jacket art for Anchor Books, the new line of quality paperbacks Jason was launching. Gorey dithered - "At first I said no, but then I thought, 'I'm not really surviving very noticeably in Boston, so I'll move to New York, much as I hate the place.' " And so at the start of 1953 he moved, "and embarked on what is laughingly called my career." By now Gorey had more or less perfected his eccentric image: the full beard (possibly to hide a weak chin), the scarves, the rings, the sneakers, the full-length coats, which would morph into the fur coats that would identify him throughout the remainder of his 34 years in New York. With his old friend Connie Joerns serendipitously a co-worker, he stayed at Anchor for seven years, not only producing the art for 50 or so covers (all hand-lettered) but art-directing: doing layouts, pasting up mechanicals, setting type, all of which he learned on the job. Dery can be good on Gorey's art: "His contrapuntal use of white space, solid black shapes, and fine-lined shading produces beautifully balanced compositions that make us want to linger on each scene, exploring every nook and cranny. At times, he lights his scene as if it were a movie set or a stage, spotlighting the central figure amid the surrounding shadows." And he recognizes that the Anchor covers could be startling in their implications. No one saw this more clearly than Gorey's friend Maurice Sendak, who recalled a cover illustration Gorey did for Melville's novel "Redburn" featuring a prominently crotched male observer staring at three rough-tradish sailors. "The jacket," Sendak remarked, "summed up completely the kind of confused homosexuality of that novel." In due course, Epstein left Doubleday and Anchor behind, and Gorey followed, by now having achieved some visibility with the miniature picture-and-text volumes on which his fame and reputation ultimately rest. The first, in 1953, was "The Unstrung Harp," a long (for Gorey) account of the agonies undergone by a novelist Dery describes as of "the hand-wringingly neurotic variety." We find here already the fine line and fiendishly demanding crosshatching that would distinguish most of the hundred-odd books to follow. Then, a few years later, beginning with "The Doubtful Guest," came a burst of superb oddities that no one knew quite what to make of but which took hold with a growing number of connoisseurs of ... oddities. "The Fatal Lozenge," "The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary" (it was far from pornographic), "The Hapless Child," the haunting "The Willowdale Handcar" (three friends disappear into the mouth of a tunnel and fail to emerge) and half a dozen books that, as it happens, I published at Simon & Schuster, including the eerie "The West Wing" (no text), "The Gilded Bat" (tragic tale of a ballerina) and what is perhaps Gorey's most famous work, "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," an abecedarian (alphabet to you) book that in 26 grim spreads carries us from "Amy who fell down the stairs" through "Neville who died of ennui" to "Zillah who drank too much gin." Dery makes much of the question of whether works like these should have been published as children's books, but there was no way that could have happened in the relatively bland days of the 1950s. Gorey did, however, illustrate a number of other writers' books for children. My dealings with Ted were impersonal, although we had a nodding acquaintance from performances we both attended at the New York City Ballet. It was City Ballet that consumed him throughout his New York years. He had grown up on the Ballets Russes and Martha Graham, but soon after buying his first ticket for City Ballet, in 1953, he became a passionate devotee of Balanchine's art. Famously, he attended every performance the company gave during its New York seasons - eight performances a week - skipping a few "Nutcrackers" only at the very last. To him, as to many of us, Balanchine was the greatest figure in all the arts of our time, and it was Balanchine who kept him anchored in N ew York. After Balanchine died, and disliking the city after 34 years of living in it as much as he had to begin with, Gorey decamped permanently to Cape Cod, where he had bought the house in which he lived until his death. Mark Dery, alas, knows practically nothing about ballet and ballet history. Everything he tells us is clearly received wisdom at best. He is equally weak in other areas. He refers frequently to Gorey's love for silent film (which he identifies as one of a "pantheon of canonically gay tastes"), but his knowledge of silent film is as thin as his knowledge of ballet. (D.W. Griffith's hardly obscure "Orphans of the Storm," for instance, is not about "children in peril." The Gish sisters are beautiful young women fending off wicked men.) Other mistakes of Dery's are less factual and more the result of misunderstandings and a hyperbolic and dramatizing vision of cultural life. He sees things in terms of cults, cliques, inner circles, smart sets - a kind of outsider resentment. Yes, Gorey had pals who would join him in the lobby at intermission - or he would join them. Given his height and elaborate way of dressing he was more visible than other people, but there was nothing exclusionary or self-asserting about his manner. His views were firm, but his nature was modest. (Dery even ascribes "a cult following" to Gorey's beloved movie "I Know Where I'm Going." No. It came out in 1945, it got great reviews and a lot of people fell in love with it - and still love it. That's not a cult.) Nor was "seeing a Balanchine premiere an indispensable part of being culturally au courant, of understanding the Zeitgeist"; it was something you did because Balanchine was so important to you that you couldn't wait to see his latest effort. But then Dery is a selfproclaimed "cultural critic," and cultural critics tend to deal in zeitgeists, not art. For those in New York in search of Gorey's work, the place to go was the famous Midtown bookstore the Gotham Book Mart ("Wise Men Fish Here"). There, piled up next to the cash register, could be found his latest productions, and there he was championed by the original owner, the imperious Frances Steloff, and her successor, Andreas Brown, who eventually took charge of Gorey's business affairs. It was Brown who insisted on putting together the very popular "Amphigorey" anthologies that, even if the crowded format diminished the subtle effects of the individual volumes, brought Gorey out of the cold and, along the way, made him a considerable amount of money. And it was Brown who, when a theater producer wanted to translate Gorey's modest Cape Cod production of "Dracula" to Broadway, strong-armed Ted into agreeing, exacting a huge advance plus "points" (that is, a percentage of the profits) and thereby making him financially secure for life. Gratifying, of course, but Gorey hated the fact that the "Edward Gorey Production of Dracula" simply enlarged his original set designs rather than substituting newly designed ones appropriate to the larger scale. When he first saw them, he told Dick Cavett in an extended interview, "I practically had cardiac arrest, is what I practically had." (The Tony he won for "Dracula" - for costumes, bizarrely, not sets - he gave to a friend.) Brown's merchandising of Gorey products presses on successfully today, with calendars, bookmarks, T-shirts, postcards, mugs - you name it! - widely available. Dery, however, takes potshots at Brown and his co-trustee of the now very rich Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, especially for their handling of the immense Gorey archive. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Brown would not sit for an official interview for "Born to Be Posthumous." Nor did the two friends to whom Gorey left $100,000 each in his will: Connie Joerns and the dance critic Robert Greskovic, whom Dery barely mentions. And yet he boasts in his "note on sources" of the "more than 78 in-depth interviews with people who'd known Gorey, each of which was recorded and transcribed to ensure accuracy." What does he think biographers do? He's also proud of having "tracked down the addresses Gorey called home during his Chicago boyhood." If only he hadn't! At times his passion for detail is just bewildering. Did we need to know that Bobbs-Merrill, the publishing house where Gorey spent a "dreary" year, was located at 3 West 57th Street? Dery isn't an experienced biographer, so it's understandable that he stumbles. But he is an experienced writer, and although parts of his Gorey book are persuasively written - as are the bulk of the essays in his collection, "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" - the new book is so swamped in clichés that I kept being reminded of the famous pieces Frank Sullivan wrote for The New Yorker about a fictional Mr. Arbuthnot, "the cliché expert." People in the Dery universe pound the pavement and keep an eye peeled, books both fly off the racks and roll off the presses, letters fly thick and fast, things speak volumes, are grist for the Freudian mills and do a landoffice business (in no time flat). And, speaking of The New Yorker, Dery seems fixated on it - why else, when referring to a profile of Gorey by Stephen Schiff, does he identify him nine times as writing in the magazine? And speaking yet again of The New Yorker, why doesn't Dery capitalize its "The"? Where, indeed, are the copy editors at his generally excellent publisher, Little, Brown? By the mid-80s, once Gorey was permanently installed in his house in Yarmouth Port, his books had become somewhat predictable and thin - more manner than content. "Gone," Dery accurately reports, "was the spiderweb delicacy of his classic style, replaced by a thicker, bolder line. Gone, too, were the eye-buzzing patternon-pattern compositions and dizzily detailed wallpaper of his heyday, exchanged for monochrome backdrops." One gets the feeling that he was going through the motions. Alexander Theroux, author of the interesting if factually precarious "The Strange Case of Edward Gorey," told an interviewer that, in around 1990, Gorey had told him that "he'd lost his talent." But he was enjoying his life. His enduring fascination with theater had gripped him again, and he was the driving force behind countless amateur plays, puppet shows and revues that absorbed most of his time and energy and gave him endless pleasure - sometimes more pleasure than they gave his local audiences. His tastes in his later years were if anything wider and seemingly more than ever incompatible with one another. Genji and Mozart and Balanchine, yes, but also "Buffy" and "Golden Girls" and "All My Children." As for movies, he venerated the glorious silent serials of Feuillade and the masterpieces of Ozu and Naruse but he also indulged happily in the most graphic splatter films. When asked whether these popular tastes reflected "a scholarly interest in American pop culture," he answered, "No, I just like trash." Similarly, his highly personal collections, mostly culled from yard sales, extended to worn stuffed animals, telephone pole insulators, rocks and old machinery ("I just like rusted iron"). As for success, after "Dracula" he said, "I began to realize what it would be like to be rich and famous, but I've decided unhunh." In this, he uncannily resembles Paul Taylor. In other words, he un-self-consciously and firmly lived by his own lights - a perfect example of the "inner-directed man" of David Riesman's "The Lonely Crowd." An admiring Dick Cavett put it this way: "You have done exactly, as I see it, what you want to do." To which Gorey, true to form, replied: "Well, I guess I have. But only because I didn't really see any way of doing anything else." He even died his own way, stubbornly refusing to take standard precautionary measures that would almost certainly have postponed the heart attack that killed him in 2000. His way baffled a lot of people, because there weren't a lot of people like him. Chris Seufert, who filmed him for a documentary, said: "My background in anthropology really was appropriate. My sense, shooting him, was that he was indeed the last of a disappearing race. ... But the thing with Edward was, there was no race. He was the most one-of-a-kind person you'd ever meet." His mother, candid as always, summed things up this way: "But then, Ted always did puzzle me." 'I've never related to people or understood why they behave the way they do. I think life is the pits.' ROBERT GOTTLIEB'S most recent books are "Avid Reader," a memoir, and "Near-Death Experiences ... and Others," a collection of essays.

*Starred Review* So distinctive that his name has been adjectivized Goreyesque Edward Gorey (1925-2000) added a striking personal image and very definite tastes to unique drawing and writing styles to become a cultural icon. He strode the streets of Manhattan in full beard, ankle-length fur coat, and well-worn Keds, beringed and otherwise bejewelled, for decades, often en route to and from virtually every performance of the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine's direction (the choreographer was, Gorey said, sort of like God ). He collected cats (several, not multitudes), books (more than several), art (mostly graphic), and objets utiles (useful objects, such as glass insulators). This all figured in his art and best-loved creations, small illustrated books, whose usually verse texts were abecedaria and elliptical, inconclusive, rather morbid, and whose pictures showed stoic figures in period clothing from 1890-1925 in surroundings fraught with minuscule patterns in garments, decoration, and shading. Bearing titles like The Glorious Nosebleed (1974) and The Deranged Cousins (1971), they are sui generis although inspired, probably, by the surrealism of Magritte and the silent-film serials of Louis Feuillade (Fantômas,1913-14; Les Vampires, 1915-16). Peculiar to a T, Gorey and his work are eccentric in the most congenial and appealing way, and cultural critic Dery gives them a book that matches them in ingratiation, fascination, and artfulness.--Ray Olson Copyright 2018 Booklist

Avant-garde writer and artist Edward Gorey comes across as almost odder, if less adventurous, than his characters in this atmospheric biography. Gorey, a native Chicagoan and an Anglophile, innovated by looking back to vintage British illustrations, stocking his drawings with bearded gentlemen, bustled ladies, flappers, and crepuscular mansions; his groundbreaking short picture books featured droll send-ups of Victorian melodrama, replete with dying children, bizarre creatures invading parlors, and dark figures haunting lonely landscapes. Culture critic Dery (Flame Wars) shrewdly plumbs Gorey's work, which inspired goth fashions, Tim Burton movies, and Lemony Snicket's children's books. In his telling, Gorey's personality is also a showy exterior with an enigmatic interior: Gorey sported a bristling beard, long fur coats, jewelry, and Wildean mannerisms; though he was prone to at times having "all-consuming crush[es]" on men, he proclaimed himself asexual. Gorey's uneventful, solitary life can be less than exciting, and the narrative sometimes bogs down in his collections and love of George Balanchine's ballets. Fans will like the immersion in Gorey-ana, but others may feel that this colorful protagonist lacks a compelling plot. Photos. Andrew Stuart, Stuart Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.