by Mark Dery
An interviewer once asked Gorey, “Your work is often concerned with death; what’s your own attitude toward death?” He replied, “I hope it comes painlessly and quickly.”11 An answered prayer. Or maybe just the perfectly scripted end to a theatrical life.
* * *
The obituaries came thick and fast. In some cases, Gorey got front-page treatment. His family was staggered to discover how big a celebrity Cousin Ted was. Skee recalls, “A half page in the New York Times”—“Two obituaries in the New York Times,” Ken corrects. “The front page of the London Times,” continues Skee, “People magazine, the Los Angeles Times. We just thought, wow.”
Anglophile that he was, Gorey would’ve been pleased by the accolades he received in the British papers, not just in the London Times but in the Independent, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph as well. The Francophile in him would’ve gotten at least a modicum of pleasure (modified by mortification) out of Le Monde’s insistence that he’d created a language as inventive as Lewis Carroll’s or Lear’s with the extravagance of Joyce and the profundity of Beckett. And he would have been drily amused by the New Yorker’s wreath-laying: a Gorey illustration of ’20s ingenues with bedroom eyes frolicking with topiary creatures come to life, accompanied by the caption, “Postscript: Edward Gorey (1925–2000).” Henry Allen, writing in the Washington Post, perceptively framed Gorey as a “narrative illustrator” who “reached deeper into the educated American psyche” than the cartoonist with whom he was often paired, Charles Addams.12 “Not only did he defy the clamorous Doris Day optimism rampant at the start of his career” in the 1950s, wrote Allen, “but he also vivisected the beast of Victorian and Edwardian society, which still lingers as an example for moral and social rectitude. He set almost all his work in England. No doubt he understood how powerful that particular public-television dream remains in the American imagination—a sort of psychic theme park.”13 A Reuters story reporting Gorey’s death noted, with fittingly sinister suggestiveness, “It was not clear if there were any survivors.”14
There were, however, beneficiaries. Gorey’s personal estate was estimated, in the probate of his will, at $2,250,000.15 Of that, he left tidy sums of $100,000 each to Connie Joerns and Robert Greskovic, dance critic for the Wall Street Journal and a member of Gorey’s intermission clique at the State Theater. To the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, whose visionary director A. Everett “Chick” Austin had sponsored George Balanchine’s immigration to America, in 1933, he bequeathed his art collection, which was every bit as eclectic as you’d expect: photographs by Atget, drawings by Balthus, lithographs by the French postimpressionist Pierre Bonnard, a drawing done in 1558 by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, prints by Dubuffet, Delacroix, Klee, Miró, Munch, and Goya (from his mordant Los Caprichos, naturally), a painting titled Dandelions in a Blue Tin by the reclusive modernist-primitivist Albert York, to whom Gorey had dedicated The Prune People II (Albondocani Press, 1985), and, touchingly, a landscape by Edward Lear. It wasn’t all highbrow stuff, though: the sandpaper drawings he’d hunted down in antiques shops were included, too, as were cartoons by the English absurdist Glen Baxter and the zany New Yorker stalwart George Booth.
But his largest bequest was to nonhuman beings. Gorey’s will mandated the creation of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, whose primary purpose is to use any income generated by his “literary and artistic property” in the service of animal welfare.16 This, after all, is the man who insisted on saving earwigs when family members discovered them on bouquets and who had qualms about putting out poison bait for ants. It was this Taoist mind-set that led him to create a charitable trust that supports such organizations as the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee; the Xerces Society in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to invertebrate conservation; and Bat Conservation International in Austin, Texas.
As coexecutor, along with Clifford Ross and Gorey’s attorney, R. Andrew Boose, of Gorey’s will, Andreas Brown moved swiftly to “secure the property,” as Kevin McDermott puts it.17 The day Gorey died, Brown contacted McDermott, who was then working for the Gotham on various Gorey-related matters. “It would be necessary to remove valuable art and other objects from the house immediately,” McDermott recalls, “and then begin the arduous task of sorting through the massive accumulation of Gorey’s life.”18 A week after Gorey’s death, McDermott took the pensive, quietly affecting photos collected in Elephant House, painstakingly documenting the museumlike environment Gorey had created, with its many little installations. “I realized the uniqueness of Edward’s home would soon be gone and that it needed to be preserved in some way,” he says.19
Brown made the trip from Manhattan to Yarmouth Port “almost every weekend during the year after Edward died,” Rick Jones recalls, excavating manuscripts, original art, notebooks, and, tantalizingly, unpublished work from what Gorey had called the “ever-increasing pile of debris” he’d lived in.20 Brown discovered “hundreds of stories and sketches, some finished, some unfinished,” the New York Times reported—“a trove of [Goreyana], with ample material for many future books and for plays based on his work.”21 This precious detritus, along with iconic artifacts such as his drawing board and memorabilia that had been lovingly preserved by Helen Gorey—childhood drawings, family photo albums, even baby shoes and a bib (MADE BY EDWARD’S AUNT RUTH, BECAUSE APPARENTLY HE DROOLED A LOT, as a placard in the Edward Gorey House’s 2016 show, Artifacts from the Archives, informed)—was transferred by Brown to a storage unit in the New York City area, where it still reposes, inaccessible to scholars but occasionally on loan for exhibits at the Gorey House, which opened its doors to the public in 2002.
Among the gems Brown unearthed was the seemingly complete manuscript of a previously unknown book from around the time of The Unstrung Harp, done in Gorey’s early, Earbrass style—The Angel, The Automobilist, & Eighteen Others. Another jaw-dropper consisted of a number of pages from an unfinished manuscript for something called Poobelle; or, The Guinea-Pig’s Revenge (circa mid-’50s), a perversely funny little parable about the perils of mistreating your pet, drawn in a style that at times recalls Garth Williams’s furry, soft-focus rendering.
A legal document filed in 2007 by Boose on behalf of the trust describes the Gorey archive, “including his original drawings and other works of art and the original manuscripts for many of his literary works,” as consisting of “more than 10,000 items,” valued by an appraiser for Christie’s auction house “at a gross fair market value of more than $4.6 million.”22 Whether this hoard of Goreyana locked away in a New York City storage unit has been inventoried, and whether the “ample material for many future books and for plays based on his work” will ever come to light, is known only to Boose and Brown, Ross having resigned his position as trustee in late 2000.
* * *
The aftermath of Gorey’s death was suitably Goreyesque, marked by portentous events and mysterious developments. The weekend after he died, Jane—the small but imperious queen of his clutter of cats—spent long hours curled up on his empty bed. Photographing in the musty, cobwebby “hidden room”—a disused chamber on the second floor, its doorway concealed by a bookcase—McDermott noticed a bust of Charles Dickens on the windowsill, facing out, toward the Yarmouth Port common. He snapped it. Weeks later, when he printed the photo, he was startled to see Gorey’s bearded face reflected in the rain-speckled window. It was Dickens’s, of course, but when he showed the image to Gorey’s friends and family, they, too, “saw him clearly in the reflection,” McDermott writes in Elephant House. “Perhaps Edward was leaving us something as mysterious as the message written on the card found in the empty tea urn at the end of The Object Lesson—the single word ‘farewell.’”
And then there was the business with the lights.
In the chaotic days after Gorey’s death, Brown asked Carol Verburg to stay at Strawberry Lane to look after the cats. “I am a person who doesn’t believe in ghosts and has never had any experience with ghosts,” she says. “In h
is house, I begged him to haunt me and he didn’t. But I would be standing in the bathroom and the light would suddenly go out. This happened all over the house, wherever I was: the light would suddenly go out and then it would go back on again after a while. I finally just stood there and said, ‘Edward, is this you? Look, if you’re trying to tell me something, would you turn the light out now?’ Nothing. ‘Is there something you want me to do?’ Nothing. I asked all the questions I could think of, and nothing happened, and then I said, ‘So is this thing with the lights just totally random and meaningless and has nothing to do with you at all?’ And then the light went out. It was just so Edward!”
Queerest of all, though, was the Mysterious Affair of the Misplaced Ashes. Gorey was cremated. In accordance with his wishes, some of his ashes were shipped to Woodland Cemetery in Ironton, Ohio, the ancestral hometown of the American branch of the Garvey tree (whose roots were anchored in Limerick, Ireland—the perfect punch line to Gorey’s life story, given his close association with that poetic form). There, in the Garvey family plot, his mother and aunt Isabel were already at their ease, alongside his great-grandparents Benjamin and Helen Amelia St. John Garvey (the maker of “Very Superior Pencil Sketches”), and his great-great-grandmother Charlotte Sophia St. John, mother of Helen Amelia (and namesake of the ill-fated mite in The Hapless Child). An interment card in Woodland’s files records the burial of Gorey’s cremated remains in lot 32, section 7—the Garvey plot—on July 15, 2000. Yet no gravestone marks the spot where Gorey’s cremains were purportedly interred. A funeral director in Yarmouth Port ordered a price quote on a headstone from the Buckeye Monument Company in Ironton but never purchased it. Had Gorey gotten the memorial he deserved (surmounted, naturally, by one of those enormous Victorian urns he was so fond of), it would have borne one of the two inscriptions he offered when Richard Dyer asked him, in 1984, what his epitaph would be. “[T]wo of my expressions spring to mind: ‘Oh, the of it all’ and ‘Not really,’” he said.a “That’s right, ‘Oh, the of it all’ without anything in the middle; just leave the middle out. And, yes, I think, ‘Not really.’”23 In the end, though, it’s only fitting that the man whose art was an art of the unseen and the unspoken, and whose enigmatic life was Freud’s idea of an Agatha Christie mystery, is buried (if he’s buried at all) in an unmarked grave.
As for the rest of his ashes, some were cast over the waters of Barnstable Harbor near the lighthouse on Sandy Neck by a boatload of friends and family. It was September 10, “a lovely sunny warm day,” as Skee recalls it—not “overcast and gray and hammering with rain,” as Theroux has it in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, a bit of meteorological humbug that, while appropriately Goreyesque, is belied by Skee’s memories, not to mention family photos.24 “There were so many other people in boats enjoying it that we had to go quite far out to find a private, secluded sandbar,” she remembers.”25 Some of Gorey’s ashes were scattered; others were placed on a wreath of branches taken from the southern magnolia outside his studio window and set adrift, to float out to sea on the sun-dappled waters. (“It was low tide, still going out,” says Skee. “We planned it that way.”) With the family’s blessing, Rick Jones set a few handfuls aside to be mingled with the ashes of Gorey’s cats when all five—Jane, George, Thomas, Alice, and Weedon—had died, then strewn in the wilds of 8 Strawberry Lane, following Edward’s offhanded directive to just “throw me in the yard.” (Gorey’s closest friends did exactly that at a “Gathering for a Scattering” on June 25, 2011, after Jane, the last holdout, had gone to her reward.)
Shortly after Gorey’s death, there had been a memorial soiree at Strawberry Hill, billed as “A Gathering…of the friends of Edward Gorey.” On June 5 of 2000, friends and family gathered in Herbert Senn and Helen Pond’s chapel turned glorious parlor to celebrate Edward’s art and life. People sipped drinks. An ensemble played the music he loved best, pieces by baroque composers such as Handel, Bach, and Purcell.
Appropriately, there was a whiff of mystery in the air. People who’d known Gorey for years were surprised to meet emissaries from hidden corners of his life, friends he’d never so much as mentioned. “Being a solitary person, he gave his full focus to whoever he was with,” says Carol Verburg. “Whatever you were interested in, he knew something about it, so that he had a different friendship with each person that he was friends with. That became really quite startling after he died. There was no group of people who felt that they all knew him in the same way; rather, each little set of people or individual felt that they knew him in a different way…”
* * *
But did anyone really know him? Did he even want to be known?
“You know far more about me than anyone else in the world,” he told Peter Neumeyer in a 1968 letter.26 Yet as noted earlier, even Neumeyer doubted that he truly knew Gorey. He wasn’t alone in that sentiment. “I never thought I really knew Ted,” says Skee Morton. “I was always aware that we saw only one side of him and that there were others that we knew little or nothing about.”27 Mel Schierman, too, felt their “friendship was long, comfortable, accepting, but Ted never revealed himself.” Gorey’s flamboyant persona was a weapon of mass distraction, he thinks, a shy, secretive man’s way of misdirecting the world’s attention. “It was not an aesthetic—it was protection,” says Schierman. “‘Look at the rings; don’t look at me. Look; don’t ask, don’t probe.’” When that ruse failed, Gorey barricaded himself behind a book—a tactic that not only afforded refuge from social situations but also broadcast the message, loud and clear, that he was unavailable. The beard was another mask. So were the pseudonyms. That Ashbery quotation from so long ago comes reverberating back: “He was somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, fun-loving level.…I had the impression that he had constructed defenses against real intimacy, maybe as a result of early disappointments in friendship/affection.”
Interviewers who attempted to lift the curtain on Gorey’s inner life were greeted with monosyllables. Attempts to make sense of his art were discouraged on the grounds that, too often, such inquiries lead to pop-psych poking and prodding. “Gorey is miserable discussing his work,” Stephen Schiff observed in his New Yorker profile. “His eyes dart. Gradually, he withdraws into a silence punctuated by ‘tsk’s and groans.”28
The title of Theroux’s book says it all: Gorey was indeed a strange case—and an uncrackable one. The man who loved mysteries was himself a mystery—even to himself, it seems. “He was not entirely joking,” Neumeyer thought, “when he signed one letter ‘Ted (I think)’ and wrote in another, ‘There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe that I do.’”29 It’s one of Gorey’s most cryptic remarks. What can he mean? Is the Taoist-deconstructionist in him saying that the self is a fiction—a “center of narrative gravity,” as the philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett calls it, narrated into existence by the voice in our heads? “Our tales are spun, but for the most part, we don’t spin them; they spin us,” Dennett writes in Consciousness Explained. “Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.”
Maybe Gorey’s fundamental unknowability lies in the fact he was “neither one thing nor the other, particularly”; adamantly this and the next minute just as emphatically that, tongue firmly in cheek the whole time, as if to mock the very idea of binary oppositions. Asked in the Proust questionnaire what his current state of mind was, he replied, “Changeable.”30 Water, emblem of mutability and symbol of the Tao—the ever-changing, unpredictable “watercourse way”—was his element, he told Neumeyer, an observation that casts a revealing light on his oft-repeated admission that he was “a great one for drift.”31
The man was a walking paradox. But of all the contradictions he contained, his sexuality was surely the most puzzling. Everyone who encountered him assumed he was gay, yet he maintained, to his dying day, that he was a neutral. Nonetheless, his crushes, as we know, wer
e entirely male. Was he, like some gay men of his generation, simply someone who wished he hadn’t been born that way? Is that what he meant when he told Lisa Solod of Boston magazine that he was “fortunate” to be “apparently reasonably undersexed or something”?32 Expatiating, in another interview, on his fatalistic philosophy, he questioned the idea of free will, opining, “You never really choose anything. It’s all presented to you, and then you have alternatives. You don’t choose the subject matter of anything you write. You don’t choose the people you fall in love with.”33 That last sentence echoes with regret.
The question of Gorey’s sexuality has all the makings of a good mystery. Consider the Curious Case of the Missing Admission. In the Solod interview, as reproduced in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, he responds to the pointed question “What are your sexual preferences?” with the legendary dodge, “Well, I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.”34 But in the original, unexpurgated version of the article, as it appeared in Boston magazine, he adds, “I suppose I’m gay. But I don’t really identify with it much. [laughs].”35
Kevin McDermott, who worked for Andreas Brown during the editing of Ascending Peculiarity, was “disheartened” by the deletion of that all-important afterthought, a smoking gun if ever there was one. The decision, he claims, was Brown’s. As a gay man who was much younger than Gorey, McDermott thought it was “a brave thing he was doing there, as a man of that generation—finally saying it. And then he qualified it, which I think is totally appropriate because that’s probably true; when he said he was asexual, I’ll take him at his word.” Why Brown excised it McDermott has no idea. Maybe he was “concerned that Edward wouldn’t be taken seriously as an artist because he was a gay artist,” he speculates.