Born to Be Posthumous

by Mark Dery

  7 Haskel Frankel, “Edward Gorey: Professionally Preoccupied with Death,” Herald Tribune, August 25, 1963, 8.

  8 In an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, Robert Greskovic shed some light on his friend’s cryptic utterance. “The exclamation, something of a favorite of Gorey’s during the nearly three decades I was acquainted with him, was perhaps a conflation of ‘phooey’ and ‘pshaw’ and maybe a dog’s sneezing,” he writes. “[He] used this expression to dismiss any number of things, particularly something about himself, especially if it bordered on gushing enthusiasm.” See Robert Greskovic, “Home Sweet Museum,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2002, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1025226629964498880.

  9 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 141.

  10 Tobi Tobias, “Balletgorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 15.

  11 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 120.

  12 Tobias, “Balletgorey,” 15.

  13 Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 219.

  14 Quoted in Gooch, City Poet, 219.

  15 Quoted in “George Balanchine,” New York City Ballet website, http://www.nycballet.com/Explore/Our-History/George-Balanchine.aspx.

  16 Kirsten Bodensteiner, “George Balanchine and Agon,” ArtsEdge, http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/students/features/master-work/balanchine-agon.

  17 Dyer, “Poison Penman,” 123.

  18 Gayle Kassing, History of Dance: An Interactive Arts Approach (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2007), 196.

  19 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 82.

  20 Tobias, “Balletgorey,” 14.

  21 Ibid., 18.

  22 Tobi Tobias, “On Balanchine’s ‘Ivesiana,’” Seeing Things (Tobias’s blog), May 3, 2013, http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/2013/05/on-balanchines-ivesiana.html.

  23 Tobias, “Balletgorey,” 18.

  24 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 46.

  25 Ibid., 47.

  26 Arlene Croce, “The Tiresias Factor,” New Yorker, May 28, 1990, 53.

  27 Allegra Kent, “An Exchange of Letters, Packages, Moonstones and Mailbox Entertainment,” Dance Magazine, July 2000, 66.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Allegra Kent, Once a Dancer…: An Autobiography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 264.

  30 Croce, “The Tiresias Factor,” 53.

  31 Gorey, “Proust Questionnaire,” 185.

  32 W. G. Rogers, Wise Men Fish Here: The Story of Frances Steloff and the Gotham Book Mart (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 161.

  33 Bowie seems to have been a Gorey fan. After his death, in a Guardian column collecting readers’ accounts of their close encounters with Bowie, a contributor identified only as “BookmanJB” describes meeting Bowie at a party in the Greenwich Village apartment of Jimmy Destri, keyboardist for the New Wave band Blondie. They hit it off, and BookmanJB was frequently summoned to Bowie’s New York apartment for wide-ranging conversations over dinner, often literary in nature, always intensely intellectual. “We became good friends,” he writes. “He came to my birthday party that year and gave me a signed first edition of an Edward Gorey book, which he, David, inscribed to me. I still have it.” See James Walsh and Marta Bausells, “‘Wherever One Went with Him, There Was a Seismic Shift’: The readers who met David Bowie,” The Guardian, January 18, 2016, https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/18/david-bowie-readers-memories.

  34 Lynn Gilbert and Gaylen Moore, Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped Our Times (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1981), 9.

  35 Brown, “2012 Hall of Fame Inductee.”

  36 Christine Temin, “The Eccentric World of Edward Gorey,” Boston Globe, November 22, 1979, A61.

  37 Andreas Brown, foreword to The Black Doll: A Silent Screenplay by Edward Gorey with an Interview by Annie Nocenti, by Edward Gorey (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2009), 4.

  38 Annie Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll: A Talk with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 200.

  39 Ibid.

  40 Annie Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll: A Talk with Edward Gorey,” in The Black Doll, 12.

  41 Ibid.

  42 Christopher Lydon, “The Connection,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 216.

  43 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 31–32.

  44 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 33.

  45 Ibid.

  46 Ibid., 230.

  47 Ibid., 148.

  48 Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll,” in The Black Doll, 21.

  49 Simon Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 158.

  50 Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 200.

  51 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 138.

  52 In light of the many ways in which their aesthetics, philosophical outlooks, and sensibilities overlapped, it seems only fitting that Gorey should end up illustrating some of Beckett’s books, as he did when the Gotham Book Mart published All Strange Away (1976) and Beginning to End (1988). When Beckett received his copy of All Strange Away with Gorey’s illustrations, he was much pleased, pronouncing it “a beautiful edition.” See the Fathoms from Anywhere: A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition website, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/beckett/career/allstrange/manuscripts.html.

  53 Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” 158.

  54 Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 198.

  55 Ibid., 212.

  56 Ibid., 198.

  57 Quoted in Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 33.

  58 Irwin Terry, “Fantomas,” Goreyana, February 12, 2011, http://goreyana.blogspot.com/2011/02/fantomas.html.

  59 Ibid.

  Chapter 7. Épater le Bourgeois: 1954–58

  1 Edward Gorey, letter to Edmund Wilson, July 28, 1954, Edmund Wilson Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  2 Edward Gorey, letter to Alison Lurie dated “Saturday evening” (August 1953), 1, Alison Lurie Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. All quotations from Gorey’s correspondence with Lurie are taken from the Lurie Papers at Cornell.

  3 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Wednesday evening” (March 10, 1954), 1.

  4 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 147.

  5 Edmund Wilson, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” in The Bit Between My Teeth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 481.

  6 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 43–44.

  7 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 145.

  8 Jean Martin, “The Mind’s Eye: Writers Who Draw,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 90.

  9 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 27.

  10 Peter L. Stern & Company, Inc., http://www.sternrarebooks.com/pages/books/21714P/edward-gorey/the-listing-attic.

  11 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon” (December 1954), 2.

  12 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Wednesday night” (January 19, 1954), 2.

  13 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Sunday afternoon” (circa spring 1954), 2.

  14 “About the Society,” American Society for Psychical Research website, http://www.aspr.com/who.htm.

  15
Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon” (February 13, 1954), 1.

  16 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 160.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Rick Poynor, “A Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image,” February 15, 2013, Design Observer, http://designobserver.com/feature/a-dictionary-of-surrealism-and-the-graphic-image/37685.

  19 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Wednesday evening” (March 10, 1954), 1.

  20 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday evening” (February 12, 1955), 2.

  21 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Sunday afternoon” (May 2, 1955), 1.

  22 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon” (August 1955), 2.

  23 Jane Merrill Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey at the Gotham Book Mart,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 85.

  24 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “2 October 57,” 2.

  25 Simon Henwood, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 169.

  26 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 85.

  27 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 61.

  28 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon” (August 1955), 1.

  29 Christopher Lydon, “The Connection,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 226.

  30 Alison Lurie, “Of Curious, Beastly & Doubtful Days: Alison Lurie on Edward ‘Ted’ Gorey,” transcript of remarks delivered at the Edward Gorey House’s Seventh Annual Auction and Goreyfest, October 4, 2008, http://www.goreyography.com/north/north.htm.

  31 Alison Lurie, “On Edward Gorey (1925–2000),” New York Review of Books, May 25, 2000, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/05/25/on-edward-gorey-19252000/.

  32 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “29 December 1957,” 1.

  33 Kevin Shortsleeve, unpublished phone interview with Maurice Sendak, February 12, 2002, 7. Now a professor of English at Christopher Newport University, Shortsleeve was then a graduate student at the University of Florida. He spoke with Sendak as part of his research for his master’s thesis on Gorey and his relationship to children’s literature. This and all subsequent excerpts from Professor Shortsleeve’s interview are quoted by permission of the Maurice Sendak Foundation.

  34 Filstrup, “An Interview with Edward St. John Gorey,” 76.

  35 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “29 December 1957,” 1.

  36 Wilson, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” 483.

  37 Lydon, “The Connection,” 226.

  38 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 43.

  39 Quoted in Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 213–14.

  40 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 42.

  41 Wilson, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” 483–84.

  42 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “20 January 1958,” 1.

  43 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “6 Feb 58,” 2.

  44 Ibid.

  45 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “1 April 1958,” 1.

  Chapter 8. “Working Perversely to Please Himself”: 1959–63

  1 Edward Gorey, letter to Alison Lurie dated “19 September 58,” 1. Alison Lurie Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. All quotations from Gorey’s correspondence with Lurie are taken from the Lurie Papers at Cornell.

  2 “Children’s book thing”: Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Tuesday morning” (1959), 1. “In a state of total frazzle”: Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “19 March 1959,” 1.

  3 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “3 August 1959,” 1.

  4 “The Child as a Human,” Newsweek, September 7, 1959, 80.

  5 Steven Heller, “Edward Gorey’s Cover Story,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 236–37.

  6 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon, March 12th, 1960,” 1.

  7 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “3 August 1959,” 1.

  8 Leonard S. Marcus, introduction to The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), xxxiv.

  9 Edmund Wilson, “The Albums of Edward Gorey,” in The Bit Between My Teeth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 479.

  10 Ibid., 479–82.

  11 Ibid., 484.

  12 Ibid., 482, 479.

  13 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “Saturday afternoon, March 12th” (1960), 2.

  14 Gorey, letter to Lurie dated “18 September 1960,” 2.

  15 Robert Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 30.

  16 Quoted in Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 152.

  17 Edward Lear, “Nonsense Alphabet” (1845), Poets.org, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/nonsense-alphabet.

  18 Kevin Shortsleeve, unpublished phone interview with Maurice Sendak, February 12, 2002, 4–5.

  19 George R. Bodmer, “The Post-Modern Alphabet: Extending the Limits of the Contemporary Alphabet Book, from Seuss to Gorey,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 14, no. 3 (Fall 1989), 116.

  20 Ibid., 117.

  21 Dahlin, “Conversations with Writers,” 45.

  22 The predatory gay pedophile—a stock bogeyman in the American unconscious—reappears in another Gorey alphabet book, The Glorious Nosebleed (1975). In the vignette for the letter L, a bowler-hatted chap flashes a nonplussed Little Lord Fauntleroy. “He exposed himself Lewdly,” the caption reads. As a little boy, Gorey was striking, with intense blue eyes and delicate features. Could his professed asexuality—or repressed homosexuality, or whatever it was—never mind his lifelong distaste for the Catholic Church, have been the result of sexual molestation during his brief time in Catholic school?

  There isn’t a shred of evidence to support this speculation, but given the epidemic of child sex abuse by priests, it’s hardly beyond the realm of possibility. According to the Chicago Tribune, allegations of child sex abuse against “more than 65 priests” in the city’s archdiocese were substantiated by documents released by the Church. (Most of these incidents occurred before 1988. See Manya Brachear Pashman, Christy Gutowski, and Todd Lighty, “Papers Detail Decades of Sex Abuse by Priests,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2014, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-01-21/news/chi-chicago-priest-abuse-20140121_1_abusive-priests-secret-church-documents-john-de-la-salle.)

  On the other hand, Larry Osgood is convinced that Ted’s life-changingly unpleasant initiation into the mysteries of sex happened in his late teens. Whatever the case, one thing is certain: clergymen are inevitably sinister figures in Goreyland.

  24 “Maurice Sendak: On Life, Death, and Children’s Lit,” interview with Sendak on the NPR program Fresh Air, originally broadcast September 20, 2011, and archived at http://www.npr.org/2011/12/29/144077273/maurice-sendak-on-life-death-and-childrens-lit.

  25 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 8.

  26 Ibid., 13.

  27 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 227.

  28 Ibid., 228.

  29 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 5.

  30 Ibid., 8.

  31 Fascinatingly, two versions of the book’s jacket, both finished, together with a couple of illustrations from the manuscript, did materialize. They turned up in a collection of materials selected by Andreas Brown from the archives of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust and lent to the Gorey House for its 2016 exhibit Artifacts from the Archives.

  The book, whose full title is The Interesting List of Real/Imaginary} {People/Places/Things, was almost certainly conceived as a version of the book Gorey proposed to Peter Neumeyer in an October 4, 1968, letter. Tentatively titled Donald Makes a List, the idea, Gorey notes, is “obviously inspired by…the Borges one, but then I am always one for filching technical inspiration, as the result never bears any relation whatever to the original.�
�� See Floating Worlds, 45.

  “The Borges one” was the (entirely fictitious) taxonomy cited by Borges in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” Supposedly quoted from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, it organizes the animal kingdom into such whimsical categories as “those that belong to the emperor,” “mermaids,” “stray dogs,” “those that are included in this classification,” “those that tremble as if they were mad,” “those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush,” “those that have just broken the flower vase,” and “those that at a distance resemble flies.” See Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 231.

  The idea had come to Gorey as a result of Neumeyer’s having suggested he might like Borges. Never one to pass up a potential literary pleasure, he “rested not,” he wrote, “until I had everything in English, which proved so thwarting because they kept reprinting the same things, and then I managed to get a few more things by resorting to French, and finally, despite three years of high school Spanish twenty-five years ago, the collected works in Spanish and a Spanish dictionary, which await a period of settled calm to be deciphered in,” he wrote Neumeyer. “In Other Inquisitions, ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’ contains a list of animals which I am determined to illustrate someday; it may well be the best list of anything ever made…” See Floating Worlds, 38.

  33 Lisa Solod, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 108.

  34 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 5.

  35 Ibid., 9.

  36 Ibid., 8.

  37 Selma G. Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 110.

  38 Ibid., 51.

  39 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 13.

  40 Patricia Cohen, “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are,” New York Times, September 9, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/arts/design/10sendak.html.

  41 Shortsleeve, Sendak interview, 13.

  42 Ibid., 8.

  43 Ibid., 13–14.

  44 Ted Drozdowski, “The Welcome Guest,” Boston Phoenix, August 21, 1992, 7.

  45 Ron Miller, “Edward Gorey, 1925–2000,” Mystery! website, http://23.21.192.150/mystery/gorey.html.