Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  Gorey exploited the interactive technology of the pop-up book in The Dwindling Party (Random House, 1982), which uses flaps and pull tabs to immerse the reader in a country-manor mystery where child-devouring grottoes and leviathans lurking in the moat pick off the MacFizzet family one by one. In E. D. Ward, a Mercurial Bear (Gotham Book Mart, 1983), he tried his hand at the paper-doll dress-up book. Officially by Dogear Wryde, this “paper pastime” enabled readers to dress a teddy bear (of indeterminate gender) in a variety of men’s and women’s costumes, from a lace-sleeved granny dress to a suit of armor to a corset and tutu to a letterman’s sweater.5

  He indulged his fancy for miniature books in The Eclectic Abecedarium (Anne & David Bromer, 1983), a tiny tome measuring 1-1⁄16 by 1-5⁄16 inches, hand-bound by a master bookbinder. A fondly mocking “homage to Mrs. Barbauld”—meaning Anna Lætitia Barbauld, the eighteenth-century woman of letters whose serious consideration of the needs and desires of young readers revolutionized children’s literature—The Eclectic Abecedarium parodies both the earnest didacticism and small format, designed for little hands, of Barbauld titles such as Lessons for Children (circa 1778) as well as the crude woodcut illustrations and singsong couplets of nineteenth-century chapbooks such as Pleasing Rhymes, for Children. Some of Gorey’s maxims are eminently practical (“Don’t try to cram / The dog with Jam”); some shudder at the terrors of religion (“There is an Eye / Up in the sky”); some give off a whiff of weltschmerz (“Beyond the Glass / We see life pass”).

  In The Tunnel Calamity, Gorey resurrected a Victorian parlor amusement known as the peep-show or tunnel book, so called because one of the most popular applications of the optical novelty depicted the world’s first subaquatic tunnel, the Thames Tunnel, completed in 1843. Gorey’s Tunnel employs the same design as its nineteenth-century precursors: a series of die-cut panels joined together, accordion-style, between two covers. Expanded to their full length and viewed through a peephole in the front cover, the overlapping panels produce the illusion of depth. The Tunnel Calamity brings to life an alarming manifestation in the tunnel between East Shoetree and West Radish on St. Frumble’s Day—an unexpected sighting of the fearsome Uluus, long thought to be extinct. In the distance, the Black Doll can just be seen, sitting in an oculus.

  Such titles don’t compare, in pen-and-ink virtuosity or literary substance, to classic works like The Object-Lesson, The West Wing, and The Iron Tonic. But Gorey’s ingenuity in marrying the quirky formats of children’s genres such as the pop-up book and antique novelties such as the peep-show book to literary devices scavenged from Dada, surrealism, and Oulipo gives them a charm all their own—an inspired inconsequentiality.

  Then, too, despite their tossed-off feel, Gorey’s experiments with form in the last two decades of his life were, in their unserious way, philosophical investigations. By requiring the reader’s physical participation—mixing and matching the sections of a trisected page, fiddling with flaps and pull tabs, peering through a peephole—Gorey draws our attention to the reader’s role in making meaning. These books underscore his long-standing belief in what Roland Barthes called the writerly text, which invites us to fill in its gaps, read between its lines.

  At the same time, such titles dramatize the extent to which the theater had taken center stage in Gorey’s imaginative life: pop-up books like The Dwindling Party, exquisite corpses between two covers such as Mélange Funeste, and peep-show books like The Tunnel Calamity turn the act of reading into a theatrical event in which the book performs the narrative. In the immersive, wordless Tunnel Calamity, the reader’s roving eye creates the story line in the same way that camera movement constructs film narrative. The peephole beckons us through the fourth wall onto the stage set; the more we manipulate the book’s concertinalike structure, the more narrative detail it reveals.

  Clearly Gorey is attempting to translate that “wonderful open thing that the theater does” into the book medium. But his late-life flirtations with interactivity are also manifestations of his commitment, going back decades, to the aesthetic of open-endedness. Experiments in indeterminacy like The Raging Tide, The Helpless Doorknob: A Shuffled Story (publisher unknown, 1989), and The Dripping Faucet (Metacom Press, 1989) take to playful extremes his desire to turn the traditional narrative into a garden of forking paths—a nonlinear text whose interactive nature makes a coauthor of every reader, ensuring new narrative twists with every reading.

  The deck of twenty illustrated cards that comprise The Helpless Doorknob can be reshuffled to yield, by Gorey’s count, 2,432,902,069,736,640,000 Agatha Christie–esque mysteries. Most if not all of the combinations juxtapose unremarkable occurrences with ominous goings-on, producing that Goreyesque blend of the droll and the disquieting, somewhere between Feuillade and Magritte: “Agatha taught Adolphus to dance the one-step.” “Adela flung Angela’s baby from an upstairs window.” “Angus concealed a lemon behind a cushion.” “A disguised person came to one of the side doors.”

  By comparison, The Raging Tide looks conventional enough: it arrives in the familiar guise of one of Gorey’s thirty-page books (though it’s bigger than most) and has no sliced pages, pop-ups, or peepholes to bedevil us. But that’s where any similarity to a conventional picture book ends. A tour de force of pattern-on-pattern composition, it’s easily one of Gorey’s most surrealist titles. The action—to talk of plot seems absurd—consists of a slapstick melee fought with dish mops, loofahs, mourning pins, and antimacassars in a landscape littered with giant severed thumbs (inspired, quite possibly, by the nineteenth-century French cartoonist J. J. Grandville’s engraving The Finger of God). The combatants are Gorey’s faceless comic-grotesques, Figbash and the hairy whatsit Skrump and the shrouded Naeelah and Hooglyboo, a teddy bear with a broken arm and an amputated leg: “Skrump flung a damp sponge at Naeelah.” “Figbash scattered cracker crumbs on Hooglyboo.” And so forth. There’s no more rhyme or reason to their Dadaist battle royal than there is to Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s quarrel in Through the Looking-Glass.

  Then, too, the self-deconstructing design of the book makes a hash of causality, not to mention meaning. Each of the book’s two-page tableaux offers the option of proceeding to one page or another (though rarely the next): “If you loathe prunes more than you do turnips, turn to 22. If it is the other way around, turn to 21.” Fittingly, the book offers a choice of two endings: in one of The Raging Tide’s alternative universes, “everyone went joyously to an early grave”; in the other, “they all lived miserably for ever after.” Naturally, the Black Doll is nowhere to be found, except on the book’s cover.

  Gorey grew more, not less, experimental in his later decades. The Dripping Faucet, which, true to its subtitle, can be manipulated to create as many as Fourteen Hundred & Fifty Eight Tiny, Tedious, & Terrible Tales, recalls the Oulipian writer Raymond Queneau’s iconoclastic slice book, Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (One hundred thousand billion poems, 1961), a collection of ten sonnets whose lines are printed on individual strips, enabling the reader to replace any sentence with the corresponding one in any of the other poems. (Gorey knew Queneau’s work, and the system of paper flaps used in The Dripping Faucet is markedly similar to the one used in Cent Mille Milliards.) The Helpless Doorknob calls to mind Vladimir Nabokov’s Gordian knot of a novel Pale Fire, a satirical metafiction written in the form of a 999-line poem by the (imaginary) poet John Shade, accompanied by an exhaustive exegesis by the (equally imaginary) critic Charles Kinbote. Nabokov lets the reader chart her own course through the text; the book “can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, jumping between the comments and the poem,” notes the literary theorist Espen Aarseth—a navigational freedom replicated in the manifold possibilities of The Helpless Doorknob. (Doorknob may, in fact, have been inspired by Pale Fire. Kinbote digresses at length about the kingdom of Zembla, a fictionalized version of the Russian archipelago Novaya Zemlya. By curious coincidence, one of the cards in Gorey’s book of changes announces
, “Alfred returned from Novaya Zemlya.”)

  Gorey’s texts “you can fiddle around with” also invite comparison to the Web-like “hyperfictions” of Robert Coover, whose narrative branchings, made possible by hypertext software, entreat the reader to choose this plotline or that. They remind us, too, of postmodern metafictions such as Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch, which encourages readers to do just that—hopscotch through its 155 chapters as directed by a Table of Instructions or simply by following their own noses through the narrative.

  Gorey, it turns out, was the Benjamin Button of avant-gardism, evolving backwards from the twee aestheticism of his Harvard period into the Edwardian surrealism of his New York era and, finally, into the gleeful Dadaism of his white-haired years, when he opened the throttle of a radicalism more commonly associated with youth.

  * * *

  In his last two decades, Gorey pared down his style. During his minimalist period, as he called it—a phase that encompassed The Dancing Rock by Ogdred Weary, The Floating Elephant by Dogear Wryde, and The Pointless Book; or, Nature & Art by Garrod Weedy (all 1993, the first two released by an unknown publisher, the third by Fantod Press)—he did away with text altogether and stripped illustration to its barest bones. Perhaps it was the cost of his all-consuming affair with the theater, which left little time for hours of painstaking cross-hatching. Or maybe it was the result of dimming eyesight and diminished technique—the collateral damage of old age. Whatever the reason, his characters became more caricatured, at times almost cartoonish, in comparison to the more realistic portraiture of his New York period. Gone was the spiderweb delicacy of his classic style, replaced by a thicker, bolder line. Gone, too, were the eye-buzzing pattern-on-pattern compositions and dizzily detailed wallpaper of his heyday, exchanged for monochrome backdrops.

  Dancing Rock and Floating Elephant are flip books—or, rather, a flip book, since the two titles are printed back-to-back: riffle the pages one way, a rock makes its way across the page; flip them in the other direction, an elephant traverses the blank expanse. The rendering, in either case, is rudimentary. Yet it’s practically baroque compared to the stick figures acting out French words (Horreur! Au secours! Tralala!) in La Balade Troublante (The disturbing stroll; Fantod Press, 1991) or the chicken scratches and curlicues of The Pointless Book. (Gorey claimed, with a perfectly straight face, that The Pointless Book was his “ultimate philosophical statement,” a wordless mini-manifesto that “says everything about the relationship in literature between nature and art”—a remark that’s either a wry reminder of Gorey’s Derridean disbelief in the epistemological claims of language or a bit of conceptual leg pulling—or both. Irwin Terry, the Gorey collector, thinks it was “an exercise in seeing just how mad his devotees really were. I will go so far as to say I got mad at Mr. Gorey when this book arrived in the mail.”)6

  In his postcard sets Q.R.V. Unwmkd. Imperf. and Q.R.V. Hikuptah as well as his series of broadsides, Thoughtful Alphabets (all 1996, publishers unknown), Gorey abandoned his inkwell entirely, creating loosely joined collages of details snipped from nineteenth-century engravings (or, more likely, from some of the many Dover clip art books he owned). In the Alphabets, cutlery, cardiovascular organs, and other oddments form swirling debris clouds; enigmatic phrases, each word beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet, hover around them: “Hopeless Infatuation. Jellied Kelp. Listless Meandering. Nameless Orgies…” In the Q.R.V. cards, Gorey turns an Ernstian eye to nineteenth-century advertising, anatomical diagrams, and natural-history texts, grafting a centipede onto a coffin that’s marching along on trousered legs; perching an unborn bird on a bush that looks suspiciously like a network of capillaries.

  Alexander Theroux claims that Gorey admitted he’d “lost his talent around 1990. He was doing a drawing once and said that.”7 In Terry’s view, the turning point is The Just Dessert (Fantod Press, 1997), which for him marks “a decided turn in Mr. Gorey’s signature drawing style.”8 An abecedarium whose kooky, cartoonish drawings pay waggish homage to nineteenth-century primers, its “illustrations are simpler and less refined” than Gorey’s previous work, a shift he attributes to the artist’s age and “increasing interest in theater work.” Not only did Gorey’s theatricals rob Peter to pay Paul, demanding long hours of rehearsal that might otherwise have been spent at the drawing board, but they may have influenced his aesthetic as well, Terry speculates. “The characters in The Just Dessert strongly resemble Mr. Gorey’s handmade puppets,” he points out, “and the format of the drawings” suggests “a puppet stage.”

  The Headless Bust. (Harcourt Brace, 1999)

  Yet Gorey was dipping his toe, at least, into a simpler style as early as ’83 in The Eclectic Abecedarium, whose hand-drawn, faux-naïf “woodcuts” anticipate those of The Just Dessert. By ’92, in The Doleful Domesticity and The Grand Passion (both Fantod Press), Gorey is crossing the artless crudity of his faux-woodcut aesthetic with a cartoony silliness. He employs a variation on this style in his last two books, The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas and The Headless Bust: A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium (1997 and ’99, both Harcourt Brace). A striking departure from the Gorey of The Doubtful Guest and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, his late style is notable for its featureless mauve backgrounds and perfunctory approach to ornament: carpets and tablecloths are covered, as usual, with busy patterns, but they’re rendered in a loose, sketchy manner. Gorey’s cross-hatching has a burlap coarseness, far from the fine weave he used to use, and his characters’ pinprick eyes have morphed, somewhat alarmingly, into cartoony bug eyes.

  Not everyone was taken with Gorey’s new style. “What really distinguishes Gorey are his meticulous, mock-lugubrious drawings,” a reviewer contended in the Harvard Crimson. “His handwriting imitates printing, his close hatching resembles lithography, and his creatures, even his houseplants, pose like silent-movie actors. The combination of care and whimsy in his illustrations is delightful, even wonderful. Unfortunately, the comparative crudeness of the drawings in The Headless Bust is immediately noticeable. The lines are thicker, and the awkward delicacy of his figures is diluted.”9

  * * *

  Even as Gorey’s interest in crosshatching his life away was waning, mainstream recognition of his work was on the rise—not that he gave a stuffed fantod. As Clifford Ross told the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff in 1992, “Edward has kept himself protected from success. I was telling him on the phone about some of the projects we were working on for him, but he wasn’t responding. Finally he said, ‘Oh, I suppose that means now I can die.’ Sometimes with him nothing happens, because nothing is exactly what he wants to happen.”10 “I really don’t think I was ever terribly ambitious” was Gorey’s way of dispatching the subject.

  And the more I go along, the more I think how awful it would be to be rich and famous. I’d love to be rich, but being famous—I think if you ever give any thought to it, then you say, “Well, you know, I’m not famous enough. Why don’t I have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum?” And this way you drive yourself absolutely crackers. So I try not to think about it.…More and more, I think you should have absolutely no expectations and do everything for its own sake. That way you won’t be hit in the head quite so frequently. I firmly believe what someone said—that life is what happens when you’re making plans.11

  The Met never called, but he was at least demifamous. “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” Schiff’s lengthy profile in the November 9, 1992, issue of the New Yorker, introduced him to a generation too young to remember Dracula. A month later, on December 21, a Gorey cover graced the magazine at long last—belated compensation for that sniffy rejection letter he received in 1950, informing him that his characters were “too strange” while “the ideas, we think, are not funny” but that there might be hope if he turned his hand to “drawings of a less eccentric nature.” Forty-two years later, the world had caught up with Edward Gorey; what had seemed too strange,
too eccentric, too perversely unfunny for a world of Avon ladies and Oldsmobiles and firm-jawed men in gray flannel suits at last made perfect sense.

  In the ’90s, one of those periodic swells of interest was lapping at Gorey’s shores. People kept mounting productions of Gorey revues: Amphigorey [Also]: A Musicale at the Perry Street Theatre in Manhattan, in 1994; Amphoragorey at the Provincetown Repertory Theatre, in 1999; The Gorey Details: A Musicale at Century Center Theater in New York, in 2000.a A revered figure in the world of book-cover illustration, he could afford to pick and choose what little commercial work he still took on. In ’93, Harcourt reprinted Amphigorey Also, another Gorey omnibus, originally published by Congdon & Weed in ’83. In ’96, The World of Edward Gorey, the first book-length study of his work, appeared. It featured a wide-ranging interview by Clifford Ross, a critical essay by Karen Wilkin situating Gorey’s work in an art-historical context, and an abundance of illustrations—pages from his sketchbooks, Anchor covers, exquisitely colored costume and set designs for The Mikado, plates from published (and, teasingly, unpublished) works.

  But the leading indicator of Gorey’s growing significance as a point of cultural reference was the increasing use by arts reviewers of “Edward Gorey–like” or, better yet, “Goreyesque” as a descriptor. Soon enough, pop culture certified his iconic status by paying him consumer capitalism’s highest compliment: appropriation—theft with kid gloves on. The man whose utterly original vision sprang, paradoxically, from a “strong sense of imitation,” one that led him to “filch blatantly from all over the place, because it will ultimately be mine,” had lived long enough to see himself imitated.

  Foremost among the filchers was the movie director Tim Burton, whose brand of morbid whimsy owes an obvious debt to Gorey, as does his somber palette. Shadowed by cross-hatching and deformed by the dream logic of German expressionism, Burton’s stop-motion feature The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) crosses Gorey with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The star of the film, Jack Skellington, is an elegant skeleton in black tie who bears a more than passing resemblance to the dapper, top-hatted Death on the cover of The Gashlycrumb Tinies. The writhing, half ruined brick buildings and forced perspectives of Halloweentown, where Jack lives, are Burton’s nod to Gorey and to the British cartoonist Ronald Searle. “We tried to put a lot of Gorey-type textures on our sets,” the director, Henry Selick, confirmed.12 “We took sets and actually spread clay on them or plaster and then inscribed lines all over them to give it that sort of etched, textured feel—to make it look almost like a living illustration.”13