Mark Dery - Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

Don Bachardy, Portrait of Edward Gorey (1974), graphite on paper. (Don Bachardy and Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California. Image provided by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.)

EDWARD GOREY WAS BORN to be posthumous. After he died, struck down by a heart attack in 2000, a joke made the rounds among his fans: During his lifetime, most people assumed he was British, Victorian, and dead. Finally, at least one of the above was true.

In fact, he was born in Chicago in 1925. And although he was an ardent Anglophile, he never traveled in England, despite passing through the place on his one trip across the pond. He was, however, intrigued by death; it was his enduring theme. He returned to it time and again in his little picture books, deadpan accounts of murder, disaster, and discreet depravity with suitably disquieting titles: The Fatal Lozenge, The Evil Garden, The Hapless Child. Children are victims, more often than not, in Gorey stories: at its christening, a baby is drowned in the baptismal font; one hollow-eyed tyke dies of ennui; another is devoured by mice. The setting is unmistakably British, an atmosphere heightened by Goreys insistence on British spelling; the time is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian, and Jazz Age all at once. Cars start with cranks, music squawks out of gramophones, and boater-hatted men in Eton collars knock croquet balls around the lawn while sloe-eyed vamps look on.

Gorey wrote in verse, for the most part, in a style suggestive of a weirder Edward Lear or a curiouser Lewis Carroll. His point of view is comically jaundiced; his tone a kind of high-camp macabre. And those illustrations! Drawn in the six-by-seven-inch format of the published page, theyre a marvel of pen-and-ink draftsmanship: minutely detailed renderings of cobblestoned streets, no two cobbles alike; Victorian wallpaper writhing with serpentine patterns. Goreys machinelike cross-hatching would have been the envy of the nineteenth-century printmaker Gustave Dor or John Tenniel, illustrator of Lewis Carrolls Alice books. Hand-drawn antique engravings is what they are.

Gorey first blipped across the cultural radar in 1959, when the literary critic Edmund Wilson introduced New Yorker readers to his work. I find that I cannot remember to have seen a single printed word about the books of Edward Gorey, Wilson wrote, noting that the artist has been working quite perversely to please himself, and has created a whole little world, equally amusing and somber, nostalgic and claustrophobic, at the same time poetic and poisoned.

That little world has won itself a mainstream cult (to put it oxymoronically). Millions know Goreys work without knowing it. Whether they noticed his name in the credits or not, Boomers and Gen-Xers who grew up with the PBS series Mystery! remember the dark whimsy of Goreys animated intro: the lady fainting dead away with a melodramatic wail; the sleuths tiptoeing through pea-soup fog; cocktail partiers feigning obliviousness while a stiff subsides in a lake. Then, too, every Tim Burton fan is a Gorey fan at heart. Burton owes Gorey a considerable debt, most obviously in his animated movies The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride. Likewise, the millions of kids who devoured A Series of Unfortunate Events, the young-adult mystery novels by Lemony Snicket, were seduced by a narrator whose arch persona was consciously modeled on Goreys. Daniel Handlerthe man behind the nom de plumecalls it the flneur. When I was first writing A Series of Unfortunate Events, he says, I was wandering around everywhere saying, I am a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey, and everyone said, Whos that? That was in 1999. Now, everyone says, Thats right, you are a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey!

Neil Gaimans dark-fantasy novella Coraline bears Goreys stamp, too. A devout fan since childhood, when he fell for Goreys illustrations in The Shrinking of Treehorn by Florence Parry Heide, Gaiman has an original Gorey hanging on his bedroom wall, a drawing of children gathered around a sick bed.

His influence is percolating out of the goth, neo-Victorian, and dark-fantasy subcultures into pop culture at large. The market for Gorey books, calendars, and gift cards is insatiable, buoying indie publishers like Pomegranate, which is resurrecting his out-of-print titles. Since his death, his work has inspired a half dozen ballets, an avant-garde jazz album, and a loosely biographical play, Gorey: The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey (2016). Of course, theres no surer sign that youve arrived than a Simpsons homage. Narrated in verse, in a toffee-nosed English accent, and rendered in Goreys gloomy palette and spidery line, the goofy-creepy playlet A Simpsons Shows Too Short Story (2012) indicates just how deeply his work has seeped into the pop unconscious.

But the leading indicator of Goreys influence is his transformation into an adjective. Among critics and trend-story reporters, Goreyesque has become shorthand for a postmodern twist on the gothicanything that shakes it up with a shot of black comedy, a jigger of irony, and a dash of high camp to produce something droll, disquieting, and morbidly funny.

But is that all were talking about when we talk about Gorey? An aesthetic? A style? The way we wear our bowler hats?

Truth to tell, we hardly know him.

Goreys work offers an amusingly ironic, fatalistic way of viewing the human comedy as well as a code for signaling a conscientious objection to the present. Handler attributes Goreys enduring appeal to the sophisticated understatement and wit of his hand-cranked world, dark though it may bea sensibility that stands in sharp contrast to the Trumpian vulgarity of our times. The Gorey worldviewthat a well-timed scathing remark might shame an uncouth person into acting betterseems worthy to me, says Handler.