Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  We meet her in the park, where she’s playing unattended, “nibbling grass.” “There was no one with her to keep her from straying / Away in the shadows and oncoming dark.” (Adults in Goreyland are always neglectful.) A sinister “black motor” rolls up, looking like a funeral hearse on spoked wheels, and a “tiny green face” regards the startled mite. Out comes an arm with two elbows (Gorey has a flair for the telling detail) holding a tin of cinnamon balls; Millicent is tempted, and in a trice she’s snatched up and spirited away.

  After long hours on the road, the insects and their victim arrive “at the foot of a vast and crumbling wall,” a moment Gorey stages with a superbly cinematic sense of visual drama: the car, little more than a black silhouette in the middle distance, is stopped before a dark, brooding monolith of a mansion, so colossal it reduces the vehicle to toylike proportions. All those hours spent watching silent movies have paid off: Gorey deftly intercuts a shot of the Frastleys, anguishing over what has become of Millicent, then returns us to the mansion’s ballroom, where the mirrors are “streaked with a luminous slime.” Leaping “through the air with buzzings and twangings,” the monstrous mantids “work themselves up to a ritual crime.” Their frenzy culminates in the stripping and stuffing of little Millicent into “a kind of pod,” after which she is, at last, “sacrificed to THE INSECT GOD.”

  Brow-knitting analysis of a one-line joke runs the risk of becoming a joke itself. Still, the title is a giveaway: something’s going on with religion. Gorey’s insects resemble praying mantises; their blood sacrifice can be read as a sardonic parody of Christianity—an Aesop’s fable for unbelievers. Is Gorey’s lapsed Catholicism showing? To atheist eyes, the insects’ worship of an insect god calls to mind Voltaire’s quip that man created God in his own image.

  Gorey, of course, was no help. The inspiration for The Insect God, he claimed, was some medieval woodcuts of insects he’d seen on cards or notepaper at the Metropolitan Museum. “Poor Millicent. It wasn’t her fault.”11

  * * *

  What, exactly, is The West Wing? That it’s one of Gorey’s bona fide masterpieces everyone seems to agree: the Gorey scholar Karen Wilkin thinks it’s one of his “most beautiful and poetic achievements”; Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, called it a “wordless masterwork.”12

  Yes, but what is it? At first glance, it’s a picture book that tells its story in thirty “silent” panels, meaning: without a word of accompanying text. Gorey’s first experiment with wordless narrative, it was surely prompted by his fondness for playing with form. But he liked to toss critics a red herring by pointing out that the book was dedicated to Edmund Wilson, who had taken him to task for the awkwardness of his limericks in The Listing Attic. “Edmund Wilson castigated me wildly for them,” he told an interviewer. “That’s why when I finally dedicated a book to him, it had no text. I thought, ‘That will fix you, Edmund. Now what will you be able to say?’”13

  A visual poem in pen and ink, The West Wing is a series of scenes linked by the free-associated logic of dreams.b Nearly all the exquisitely rendered drawings depict rooms in what appears to be the usual Gorey manse, most of them empty yet all of them thick with atmosphere. We can’t shake the creeping sensation that something has happened, or is about to happen, or is happening before our unseeing eyes in the spirit realm. What’s going on in the fourth panel, where an open door in one bare, disused-looking room gives onto the open door in another? There’s a sense of communication between the two untenanted rooms; of something passing between them. The main character in The West Wing, as in all haunted-house stories, is the house itself.

  The West Wing. (Simon and Schuster, 1963)

  Nowhere is Gorey’s synthesis of surrealism and the gothic more seamless. He has mastered the surrealist art, perfected by Magritte, of charging the most banal imagery with an occult electricity and of presenting the marvelous—a room full of ocean, its ruffled waters halfway up the walls; a boulder sitting on a Chippendale table—with jarring matter-of-factness. But he’s fluent, too, in his use of gothic and horror-movie tropes: a sheeted ghost glimpsed in a mirror, a mummy making its foot-dragging way down a hall, a flickering candle floating in midair.

  The book’s title underscores its spookiness: the West, in religion, myth, and folklore, is the land of the setting sun—the abode of the dead. Since time immemorial, the sun’s nightly disappearance in the west has been seen as a descent into the afterworld. The Western Lands, in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, are where the departed live and gods and monsters dwell. Twilight is the Goreyest time of day, as noted earlier, because it’s “neither one thing nor the other”—not day, not night, but in between, a transitional state like dying, which it has come to symbolize. (The dying of the light in the west recurs in Gorey stories. In The Unstrung Harp, “there is a drowned sort of yellow light in the west, and the impression of desolation and melancholy is remarkable.”)

  Twilight is a borderland, and “the border of borders is of course death,” Gorey told Peter Neumeyer.14 Then comes a revelation: “The title the book does not have, but which is there in my mind, is The Book of What Is in the Other World”—a chapter in the Egyptian Book of the Dead detailing the sun god Re’s descent into the underworld through a portal in the far west and his travels in the kingdom of the dead during the night.c

  In a 1963 interview, Gorey left no doubt about the book’s meaning: “The West Wing,” he said, “is where you go after you’re dead.”15 That candle hanging in midair (held, we assume, by some spectral hand) leaves us, on the book’s last page, with a potent image of the frailty and brevity of human existence. Soon it will gutter and go out, an extinction foreshadowed by the act of closing the book, which has the effect of snuffing it. On the back cover, a skull-faced moon peers down on the mansion, whose stone facade and pitch-black windows give it the look of a sepulchre or a death’s head. The West Wing is Gorey’s gothic-surrealist Book of the Dead.

  It’s also the purest expression of his belief that meaning is in the eye of the beholder and that the most successful works of art leave gaps for us to fill, avoiding the Jamesian pitfall of leaving “nothing left to think about, nothing left to question,” as Gorey put it.16 The West Wing is nothing but gaps, a truism literalized in panel 16, which consists almost entirely of a densely crosshatched wall with an empty niche in it. Fill the niche, Gorey urges.

  * * *

  All this time, Gorey was holding down his day job at Bobbs-Merrill and juggling freelance assignments such as his illustrations for Let’s Kill Uncle (1963) by Rohan O’Grady, a deliciously sinister novel about a ten-year-old orphan’s plot to do away with his fiendish uncle before he (the uncle) can murder him (the orphan) for his inheritance—just the sort of thing that would appeal to Gorey, who once observed, “When I was 12, I read a book called A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. In it, good-natured pirates rescue some kids from a hurricane. But in the end the kids are responsible for having the pirates hanged. That killed the myth about innocent children for me. It was the sort of book you never forget, and you never feel the same because of it. I didn’t need Lord of the Flies as a paradigm.”17

  On a lighter note, he illustrated Three Ladies Beside the Sea (1963) by the opera director Rhoda Levine, who dabbled in children’s fiction when the mood struck her. Told in quatrains, Three Ladies is a bittersweet mystery story (of a sort): why, Edith and Catherine wonder, does their friend Alice spend her life literally out on a limb—perched in the branches of a spindly, leafless tree, scanning the skies? “I am looking out there for a bird I saw once, / Who sang to me as he flew by” is Alice’s poignant explanation, which may or may not be a veiled reference to lost love. There’s a windswept Cape Cod melancholy to some of the drawings, especially the scene in which we see Alice, who has at last come down from her tree, standing by the water’s edge, gazing out to sea. On the sand nearby lies a single tiny seashell, an emblem of loneliness.

  Interestingly, Alice’s first appearance, spra
wled in the spidery branches of her tree, is a visual echo of the scene in The Blue Aspic in which the unhinged opera fan Jasper Ankle escapes from the insane asylum by climbing a tree overhanging the wall. Karen Wilkin makes a convincing case for the image as an allusion to the Paul Klee etching Virgin in the Tree—yet more evidence of Gorey’s wide-ranging tastes and photographic eye.

  Gorey’s prolific streak continued, in ’63, with his book The Wuggly Ump, published by Lippincott. It’s another one-line joke, but a hilarious one, a relentlessly perky parody of the “sunny, funny nonsense for children” that made him shudder. According to Gorey, it was the only one of his books that was published as a children’s book, but adults are quick to catch on to its mockery of the hyperventilating cheeriness of bad kiddie lit. Drawn in a suspiciously whimsical style and narrated in chipper couplets, The Wuggly Ump begins with a juvenile trio gamboling among the posies. It consists of two girls and a boy, a recurring configuration in Gorey’s work, perhaps in fond memory of Cape Cod summers with Skee and Eleanor Garvey. (His most obvious homage to that inseparable trio is The Deranged Cousins, inspired by a beachcombing ramble with the Garvey sisters.) The sky is bright turquoise; the children are wreathed in smiles—a rare thing in Goreyland. “Sing tirraloo, sing tirralay,” they chirp. “The Wuggly Ump lives far away.”

  Of course, all confidence is false confidence in Gorey’s cosmos: the Ump, it turns out, is too close for comfort—on the next page, in fact. Gorey’s answer to Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, it looks like a cross between an overgrown rat and a dinosaur and wears its bear-trap maw in a perpetual toothy grin, which makes it look both goofy and frightful. The Ump subsists on “umbrellas, gunny sacks, / Brass doorknobs, mud, and carpet tacks,” but clearly wouldn’t scruple at a juicy child. (“Enumeration or lists of things form an essential part of Nonsense,” Elizabeth Sewell notes in her landmark study The Field of Nonsense. Both Lear and Carroll were fond of lists, she reminds us, the more absurdly miscellaneous the better—a tendency that encourages the bizarre juxtapositions beloved by the surrealists.)18

  Soon enough, bright-smiling death is at the door and, in a jiffy, the children are in the monster’s belly. But Gorey’s satire of the grammar-school catechism of pep and positivity follows the script to a T: the children, like all good children in midcentury children’s books, look on the sunny side of life, even if they’ve been swallowed whole. “Sing glogalimp, sing glugalump,” they warble cheerily “from deep inside the Wuggly Ump.”

  Gorey claimed that The Wuggly Ump, like The Insect God, was the result of his “imitative” tendencies rather than the desire to say something. “I tend to be very imitative, so if I see something I like, I think, ‘Oh, I’d love to do something like that,’” he said in a 1977 interview. “The original impetus may be totally goofy. I remember, and I really still don’t know what the connection is, The Wuggly Ump started from a book about that size. I don’t know what the text said because it was in German; it was by Christian Morgenstern. But it was a little Easter book with rabbits and eggs and God knows what else.d What that has to do with The Wuggly Ump, do not ask me.”19

  Of course, some would argue, as the Duchess does in Alice, that “everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”20 In their essay “Nonsense and the Didactic Tradition,” Celia Catlett Anderson and Marilyn Fain Apseloff locate The Wuggly Ump (“a masterpiece satire on children’s verse”) in the tradition of nonsense poems characterized by an “absurdly understated reaction to serious disasters.”21 The children’s comments on the Ump’s nasty habits and ferocious aspect are hilariously discreet in that upper-class English way: “How most unpleasing, to be sure!” As Anderson and Apseloff point out, “It is a type of humor that has proved very popular in the twentieth century. Generated at times by the fact that some things are so horrific they can be dealt with only with laughter, nonsense attacks didacticism and simplistic piety in a manner similar to that used in the theater of the absurd.” If the twentieth century teaches us anything, it’s that the monster isn’t always slain in life’s theater of the absurd, and even if he is, he often devours a lot of innocents first—a very Gorey moral indeed.

  * * *

  The Wuggly Ump’s dedication reads, “For my parents.” We don’t know if it’s an oblique comment on Gorey’s upbringing; he could be arbitrary, dedicating whatever he happened to be working on to some obscure personage without implying any relationship between story and dedicatee. (In what may be the best dedication in literary history, he dedicated his 1983 anthology, Amphigorey Also, to “the dog at Gay Head, 27.iv.83,” referring to the clay cliffs at Gay Head, a beach on Martha’s Vineyard. A close second is his dedication of The Abandoned Sock, for no other reason than the sound of the name, to “Velveola Souveraine,” a brand of soap popular around World War I.)

  Nonetheless, the timing of the dedication suggests that it must have some significance: the book came out the year Edward Leo Gorey died of cancer of the liver, the collateral damage of one too many nights carousing with the gentlemen of the press and Chicago pols. He was sixty-five.

  We have no idea what Ted’s relationship with his father was like near the end of Ed’s life; he makes next to no mention of either parent in his correspondence and was evasive when asked about them in interviews and casual conversation. “They were very unlike,” says Skee Morton, of Ted and Ed. “He did go back to Chicago when his father was dying. He had cancer and I think it went downhill quite quickly.”

  Touchingly, Ed claims bragging rights to his son’s accomplishments in a July ’62 letter to Corinna, reporting with manifest pride that Ted is now “Art Director and production manager and book designer for Bobbs-Merrill.”22 He promises to send her copies of the forthcoming Ciardi titles and one of Ted’s own, a children’s book—The Wuggly Ump, most likely. Writing in his jokey, toastmaster mode, he reminisces about Ted’s recent visit, for Father’s Day, just after he (Ed) got out of the hospital. The elder Gorey cracks wise about his eccentric offspring’s “luxuriant red beard” and his habit of pairing Brooks Brothers outfits with “old beat-up white sneakers.” To the very end, Edward Leo Gorey seemed as baffled as ever by his son.

  As for Gorey’s feelings toward his father, the card called “The Ancestor” in his parodic tarot, The Fantod Pack, may offer a clue. It depicts the archetypal Gorey father figure, a Victorian-Edwardian gent in the mandatory beard and fur-collared overcoat, secure in his social status and hirsute manliness. But where his face should be, above the beard and mustache, is nothing, a featureless blank. He’s a cipher—the Dad Who Was Never There.

  Gorey in his attic room at the Garveys’ summer house in Barnstable, Cape Cod, 1961. (Photograph by Eleanor Garvey. Elizabeth Morton, private collection.)

  Whether Edward Leo’s passing had much of an effect on Ted, and whether he made his peace with his father before he died, is, like so many intimate matters in Gorey’s life, shrouded in mystery, as they say. More consequential in the long run was his firing from Bobbs-Merrill and his self-reinvention as a full-time freelance illustrator and book designer (and, of course, author).

  With the newfound freedom of being self-employed came the joy of spending more than half the year on the Cape, far from the Manhattan he abominated, in the rambling old house the Garveys had bought in Barnstable, on Millway Road. “Virtually, my life is arranged around the New York City Ballet,” Gorey told an interviewer. “I leave New York to work at Cape Cod the day the season closes and I arrive back the day before it opens.”23

  He’d wanted to buy into the Garvey house, but ironing out the legal details proved to be too much of a headache, so it was agreed that Ted would help furnish it with his antique-shop finds. He claimed the attic as his own, sleeping and working in a little chamber—the proverbial garret—just off the low-ceilinged, heavy-beamed main room.

  Illuminated by a single small window, it has the feel of a ship’s fo’c’sle. Like so many other writers, Gorey seemed to prefer spaces that concentrate the mind and mini
mize distractions. (His studio in the house he bought in 1980, in the nearby village of Yarmouth Port, would have made a monk’s cell feel spacious.) Most artists need natural light to work by, the more the better; Gorey’s willingness to sacrifice light for glorified closets that shut out the world underscores his point that he thought of himself as a writer first. (Of course there was another reason that Gorey, unlike most artists, didn’t require natural light or a space bigger than a broom closet: he didn’t draw from life. Instead he relied on his prodigious imagination and vast library, especially Dover books such as Victorian Cottage Residences, Children of the Past in Photographic Portraits, and Victorian and Edwardian Fashion, to bring Goreyland to life.)

  Nineteen sixty-three marked a turning point in Gorey’s artistic life. He’d published four books, one of which, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, would come to be seen as his signature work, the epitome of the Goreyesque, and another of which, The West Wing, would be recognized as a masterpiece. Yet another, The Wuggly Ump, would be hailed in retrospect as a salvo in the postwar revolution in children’s books, a cultural insurgency whose advance guard included Seuss, Sendak, Ungerer, Silverstein, Beverly Cleary, and Roald Dahl, among others. In hindsight, the scene in The Wuggly Ump in which the children slurp up their “wholesome bowls of milk and bread” reads as an eye roll at the mush publishers were serving America’s kids.

  “The main audience in those days for children’s books was the school and library market, and we felt that they probably wanted more wholesome books,” says Ann Beneduce, who as an assistant editor at Lippincott worked with Gorey on The Wuggly Ump and the Ciardi titles he illustrated. “He opened the door to a whole realm of illustration that was there but was not being catered to.”