Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Eric Edwards recalls a hilarious exchange between Gorey and Cathy Smith, who was puppeteering a pair of clothespins in the Théâtricule version of The Bug Book. “Edward was really quite annoyed, because we weren’t putting enough emotion into these clothespins,” he says. “Cathy was jiggling this clothespin for all it’s worth, and Edward would say, ‘I want to see this clothespin emote,’ and Cathy goes, ‘Edward, they’re only clothespins!’”18

  Jane MacDonald, who’d spent years mastering the art of “filling out a character and giving it everything [it] needs to become real,” was bemused, at first, by Gorey’s demand that puppets—even clothespins—emote but human actors deliver their lines in a deadpan, declamatory style.19 His characters had—at least apparently—no more psychological depth than Lear’s or Lewis Carroll’s or the stock types in silent movies because Gorey, as always, is paradoxical: “He wanted the interior that was never spoken, so there was actorly work to be done there” after all, says MacDonald.20 The ideal Gorey actor managed the neat trick of hinting obliquely while revealing next to nothing. “Everything the surface could express he wanted; the rest was secret. That’s his whole thing: he liked what was withheld.” Unlike the Freudian repressed, Gorey’s repressed stays repressed, just beneath the surface of everyday life, irradiating it with mystery. “He wanted everybody to leave with questions.”

  They did. Some simply left: on more than one occasion, half the audience decamped at intermission, baffled beyond endurance. Cathy Smith recalls, “Theater people would say things like, ‘Have you ever thought about pace? Are you trying to bore the audience?’” George Liles, a reviewer for the Cape Cod Times, warned “those not familiar with Gorey” that Stuffed Elephants, performed in 1990 at the Woods Hole Community Hall, consisted largely of “a lot of unhinged characters wandering about in gardens, peering perplexedly in and out of windows, haunted by vague memories.”21 Still, the show’s twenty little vignettes about “kidnapping, pederasty, incest, murder, and boredom” were “grim and prim and full of foreboding nonsense,” he conceded. “Parents briefly grieve the loss of a child, but it passes quickly, and they shrug and go dancing.” He was especially taken with the company’s treatment of The Nursery Frieze, performed in the dark by players equipped with those little toy wheels that spin, throwing off sparks, when you pump a plunger.

  By contrast, Liles was less than charmed by Le Théâtricule Stoïque’s adaptation of Stuart Walker’s 1917 “portmanteau play,” Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil, when he saw it at the Theatre on the Bay in Bourne in 1995: “The puppet show is a shrill and pointless little drama that begins with the provocative title and then goes downhill.”22 The whole thing was “a plodding and self-indulgent exercise,” he decreed.

  Gorey settled the score, after a fashion, with Epistolary Play. An eye-rolling retort to A. R. Gurney’s schlocky Love Letters, which he loathed, it was also a wry comment on middlebrow theatergoers—the “I laughed, I cried” demographic, whose appetite for sentimental flapdoodle, with a side serving of pseudosophistication, encourages the worst in commercial theater. “It’s like a disease,” he said of the Gurney warhorse in 1997, the year his takeoff on it premiered at the Cotuit Center for the Arts.23 A chronicle of two intertwined lives, told in letters, Love Letters is a perennial favorite with actors, since the dialogue is read, not memorized; cash-strapped community theaters love it, too, since it requires a cast of only two and little more than a suggestion of a set. As a result, Gorey groaned, “it gets done about five times a year” on the Cape, “whose population is well under 200,000.”

  Driven to distraction by Gurney’s “perfectly appalling piece of gibberish,” he decided to dash off a play for two players reading letters aloud. “Well, needless to remark, it ran totally and completely amok,” he admitted.24 Instead of two characters, Gorey’s Epistolary Play has sixteen, played by two overworked actors, not to mention an “incredibly complicated plot” that went “absolutely nowhere” in the usual convoluted manner.25 He recalled audience members wandering dazedly up after performances, asking if they could have a copy of the script to read, which he took to mean, “I couldn’t follow this! I’m exhausted!”

  Gorey seemed airily unconcerned about audience reactions or even whether there was an audience. “I went to a play in Provincetown and there were two people there—and Edward—in the whole theater, and it was a good-sized theater,” Rick Jones recalls. “He laughed away and enjoyed himself, had no care whatsoever—he had his own private theater and loved it.” On the other hand, there were audience members who got it, says Jill Erickson, who joined the troupe in 1994. They were the ones who “came repeatedly because they wanted to see what we were going to do on any given night.”

  As it happens, it’s that very unpredictability—the ever-evolving nature of a live, collaborative art form like the stage play, so dramatically unlike the static, solitary art of pen-and-ink drawing—that glued Gorey to his seat night after night. Staging his entertainments was “very satisfying in a way that doing a book isn’t,” he said. “No matter how many performances you see of it, it’s sort of different every time. With a book,…it may strike you differently, you know, at one time or another, but it doesn’t have the kind of wonderful open thing that the theater does.”26

  Unbound from the page, refracted through the idiosyncratic sensibilities of his actors, Gorey’s work took on a life of its own, a sea change that charmed him. “Edward sits in his little room and does this all by himself,” Genie Stevens observes. “It must’ve been fairly enthralling to see a group of people bring his two-dimensional characters to life, before his eyes.” In fact, Gorey was so captivated by the experience that he tinkered incessantly with his scripts, adding bits of dialogue and driving his actors half mad in the process. “He liked to invent everything as it went along and invent it all over again the next day, if time permitted,” Verburg recalls.27

  Challenging as they were, Gorey’s entertainments attracted a small but fervent following. They enjoyed their most rhapsodic reception in October of ’98, when the troupe performed English Soup at Storyopolis, a bookstore and art gallery in Los Angeles, on Halloween weekend. (It was the first and only time the troupe left the Cape. Gorey, naturally, refused to travel.) “It was phenomenal,” recalls Jamie Wolf, who served as stage manager for the West Coast shows. “We ended up booking two more shows [at Storyopolis]; we did five shows in three days. The cover of the LA Times Magazine was Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies. We had people like Dweezil Zappa in the audience. Smashing Pumpkins showed up. I was hanging out, getting ready for the first rehearsal, and I realized I was with Gabriel Byrne.”

  The company played to standing-room-only crowds. “People expected something dark and creepy and all of the actors came out in white, the stage was totally white,” says Wolf. “It was not at all what they were expecting—which was really good; it was what Edward liked. It took the audience the whole play to understand what they were seeing.” But by the time the curtain fell, they “understood that they’d just had an evening with Edward Gorey. They were expecting ‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears…’ and they didn’t get any of that.”

  The troupe’s rapturous reception in LA turns out, in retrospect, to have been the capstone of Gorey’s theatrical career. Jane MacDonald believes his work for the stage was just coming into its own, and after “seeing the impact and the receptivity for him and his work” at Storyopolis, she thinks it would have reached a wider audience if its momentum hadn’t been cut short by Gorey’s death a year and a half later.28 Gorey’s puppet shows would have been perfect for TV, she believes. To be sure, Le Théâtricule Stoïque would never have played Sesame Street or bumped Cirque du Soleil off the Vegas marquees. But Gorey’s writing for the stage had evolved, evincing a growing awareness of what made for good theater. His “original vision,” realized in Lost Shoelaces, was “very two-dimensional, very book-derived,” says Verburg.29 By Flapping Ankles (1991) and Crazed Teacu
ps (1992), both performed by the Provincetown Theatre Company at the Provincetown Inn, he was responding to actors’ and audiences’ reactions, she points out, writing “pieces that were somewhat more theatrical in a conventional sense, although without ever leaving his fundamentally episodic, kaleidoscopic, juxtaposed-rather-than-connected approach to making art.”30

  Sadly, his breakthrough work didn’t see the light of day until after his death. Two days after he died, Verburg, who was staying at Strawberry Lane to keep an eye on Gorey’s five cats, took a distraught call from the composer Daniel Wolf. He’d only just learned of Gorey’s death, days after finishing the score for something called The White Canoe: An Opera Seria for Hand Puppets.a

  Wolf had written Gorey in 1999, asking if he was interested in collaborating on a piece of musical theater for puppets. Gorey’s answer was The White Canoe, a libretto based on “A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” a lachrymose piece of verse by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852). The poem takes its title from a vast marsh that in Moore’s day sprawled over southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. An uncanny place, the Dismal Samp inspired tales of haunts; Moore spun the local lore into an eerie, atmospheric poem about a young man who, driven mad by the death of his beloved, goes looking for her in the trackless wastes of the swamp and is never seen again.

  “I spent that grim summer rehearsing with Le Théâtricule Stoïque,” Verburg recalls in Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod, “sewing puppet costumes, trying to guess what Edward meant by such cryptic marginal notes as ‘Spirits of the swamp: insects: Loie Fullerb sleeves’ and ‘alligators have tails.’”31 On September 1, 2000, five months after Gorey’s death, The White Canoe opened at Freedom Hall in Cotuit.

  Verburg still thinks it was the best thing he wrote for the theater, reconciling his eclectic interests with “enough dramatic structure to make the piece really successful.”32 The show “represented a real triumph of his constantly shifting approach to theater, all the different things he tried: the parodies, the meaningless things, the books that he dramatized,” she says. “By The White Canoe, he knew what he was doing, and that broke my heart, because he really got it, [but] didn’t get to see it and we didn’t get to go on from there.”33

  Apart from a handful of reviews in local papers such as the Cape Cod Times and scattered mentions in his later interviews, Gorey’s entertainments have received scant notice and virtually no in-depth analysis. This has largely to do with the decision by the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, which oversees his copyright, not to publish his plays. Why the trustees haven’t seen fit to do so is unclear, though there is the perception, in some quarters, that Gorey’s entertainments were silly little fribbles, the self-indulgent diversions of the semiretired. Since only a half dozen or so of the Théâtricule’s performances survive, captured on video by Christopher Seufert, it’s difficult to judge the merits of Gorey’s theatricals in the context of his larger oeuvre.

  Are they “so avant-garde, so completely original” that they’ll be recognized one day as “a seminal theatrical movement,” as Verburg contends?34 It’s a tall claim to make for such a slight body of work. More to the point, it’s unfair to burden Gorey’s studiously frivolous little bagatelles with the historical significance of a trailblazing movement. Does Omlet; or, Poopies Dallying,35 a puppet play stitched together from Gorey’s “favorite nonsensical bits of early pirate Hamlets” (Verburg), really belong on the timeline of experimental theater, alongside Richard Foreman’s raw, confrontational Ontological-Hysteric Theater and the postmodern spectacles of Robert Wilson?36 Yet if we view Gorey’s works for the stage as a wonderfully stunted branch of the genealogical tree that yielded the closet drama and the verse play, we can give them their due as a kooky, irrepressibly Goreyan portmanteau of poetry and theater without overinflating their importance in relation to his more enduring work as an author and illustrator.

  For his part, Gorey was unquestionably invigorated by his rediscovery of the theater at a time when his commercial illustration had become mere drudge work. By all accounts, he found the opportunity to experiment—to play—with words and images and ideas in a medium associated with amateurishness, and in a location far from anywhere, giddily liberating. Both the setting and the shoestring unpretentiousness of community theater ensured that his efforts would be written off by the smart set as mere dabbling, which suited him just fine. “After half a century, he was going back to what he had done in college—this position…of having nothing expected of him and nobody particularly paying attention, judging in any high-stakes way the work that he was doing,” says Verburg. “He was completely free to experiment. By this time, his position as a New York artist involved things like, ‘Will you please sign ten thousand book plates?’ which was mind-crushingly boring for him. So he blossomed all over again, which I think is the story of Edward’s life—he was perpetually blossoming all over again because of his ceaseless curiosity and boundless intellect and imagination.”37

  a Opera seria (Italian for “serious opera,” as opposed to opera buffa, “comic opera”) appeared in Naples in the late seventeenth century; Alessandro Scarlatti is perhaps its best-known practitioner. Works in this genre featured expository sections sung in a recitative, or “talky,” style, alternating with dramatic arias sung in the highly ornamented bel canto style, often by castrati.

  b Loie Fuller (1862–1928), a contemporary of Isadora Duncan, was the most famous protomodernist dancer of her day. Her delirious Serpentine Dance, performed in a billowing, translucent costume of China silk under innovative colored lighting (which she invented), made her the darling of belle époque Paris, an inspiration to Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec.

  Chapter 16

  “Awake in the Dark of Night Thinking Gorey Thoughts”

  Edward Gorey, circa 1999. (Photograph by Brennan Cavanaugh)

  PERPETUAL BLOSSOMING NOTWITHSTANDING, Goreyphiles lamented that his amateur-hour theatricals, as they saw them, were distracting him from his real work. “When I’m in six weeks of rehearsal and three weeks of production, I don’t do a thing the other part of the day,” he conceded to public-radio host Christopher Lydon.1 Lydon was regretful: “So we’re losing Gorey books because of this?”

  We were. Gorey confirmed in a 1997 interview that he hadn’t done what he ironically referred to as a “major book”—a squawk of self-mocking laughter underscored the preposterousness of the phrase—“since The Raging Tide in 1987, I guess.”2 (Nineteen eighty-seven, as we know, was the year he mounted Lost Shoelaces, inaugurating his theatrical career on the Cape.) Even so, he noted, he had “whipped up a lot of little stuff over the past couple of years.”

  The diminutive defies us to take it seriously. As in his theatricals, the throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks air of his “little stuff” bespeaks a desire to wriggle out of the straitjacket of a style that was starting to cramp his imagination. Gorey abhorred the thought of repeating himself. Beginning in the early ’80s, in his waning days in New York, and continuing through his years on Strawberry Lane, he embraced his inner dabbler. Experimenting with styles and formats far afield from the meticulous, crosshatched draftsmanship of defining works like The Doubtful Guest, he gave free rein to his love affair with form and genre.

  In much of his literary output from this period, he abandons narrative for the childish pleasures of novelty genres that blur the line between book and game or book and toy. “The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve tended to like things you can fiddle around with,” he said in 1995.3 Many of the titles from this time are designed to be played with as much as read.

  In Mélange Funeste (Dreadful mixture; Gotham Book Mart, 1981), he explored the possibilities of the “slice” book, so called because its pages are sliced crosswise into thirds, enabling the reader to mix and match parts of an illustration by turning sections of a page. By flipping this segment or that, the reader of Mélange Funeste is able to reassemble the heads, torsos, and legs of a desiccated corpse, an i
ngenue, a mustachioed gent, and one of those catsuited burglars from Feuillade’s Les Vampires, among others, into a seemingly endless number of chimeras—a gamelike gimmick that transposes the surrealist game exquisite corpse into the book medium.

  Les Échanges Malandreux (very loosely, The awkward exchanges; Metacom Press, 1984) makes use of a similar device: each page is divided into four hand-sewn “gathers of folded pages,” as Irwin Terry calls them.4 By turning the leaves in the quadrants, the reader is able to create disjointed dialogues, all with the stiff syntax and baffling non sequiturs of the nonnative speaker. The top two panels feature various figures; questions and answers are printed on the right and left sheaves at the bottom. A typical combination yields an Edwardian motorist in a floor-length fur coat and goggles asking a sickly creature in a wheelchair, “Has anyone looked under the stairs?” to which the invalid replies, unaccountably, “I have forgotten you.”

  We hear echoes, here, of those stock dialogues in foreign-language phrase books whose robotic unnaturalness gives them a surrealist air, and of English as She Is Spoke (1855), an unintentionally hilarious conversational guide written by a Portuguese man who didn’t speak a lick of English. Between the laugh lines, though, Gorey seems to be saying something about the limits of language—specifically, the impossibility of translation in anything but the most hopelessly inexact sense.