posted on 01 Jan 2019

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

This is the first full length biography of Edward (Ted) Gorey and the author-illustrator’s flamboyant persona and his increasingly well-established cult status seems to provide the perfect recipe for a successful biography. But actually, Mark Dery has to work pretty hard to winkle out enough material to justify the quite bulky 400 pages the book runs to. Why is this, you might reasonably ask. Well, despite being ostentatiously camp, unorthodox in his behaviour and the creator of a virtually new hybrid of illustration, poetry and prose – Gorey was in fact a very difficult man to pin-down and to document.

The first thing to say is that he was, by instinct, quite a private man and was never very forthcoming about anything much during the limited number of interviews he did for various magazines or broadcast media. He was also famously suspicious of relationships and much preferred to do without them – he even refused to ever confirm he was gay but, as you might expect from what I’ve already said, also refused to confirm he wasn’t.

Add to all this the fact that he was very much a man of habit who liked his life to continue in an essentially orderly way and you can see why a biographer is likely to struggle to inject the necessary pace into a book that definitely starts to flag noticeably by the midway point. Having said that, however, there’s still plenty here to enjoy and I personally discovered quite a lot about a milieu I knew very little about.

Gorey had few friends and few substantial sexual relationships but that’s not to say he didn’t have the occasional obsession with men – frequently with someone wholly inappropriate who would inevitably let him down in some way. I was intrigued by his first close friendship with the poet Frank O’Hara who he met when he first arrived at Harvard – the two of them, although very different in temperament, were for a time inseparable. O’Hara, himself gay, was discovering his sexuality and his identity as a writer but was, by comparison with the ostentatiously camp Gorey, hidebound by a social conservatism that he was desperate to escape from. In many ways Gorey gave him the key to his future identity but this only hastened their inevitable separation.

Gorey’s public persona, his dress sense and his flamboyance at this time owed a substantial amount to his love of Oscar Wilde and his (to me) unaccountable admiration for the mannered, posturing author, Ronald Firbank. But fortunately, it wasn’t all style over substance. For much of his life he sustained a friendship with the author, Alison Lurie who acted as a confidant to the often troubled Gorey and he also moved in circles that included the likes of Susan Sontag who was able to articulate the artistic substance behind the notion of ‘camp’. 

When he eventually moved to New York, Gorey found work in a publisher’s art department and here he was able to indulge his fascination for ballet and especially his adoration of choreographer George Balanchine who he idolised throughout the dancer’s whole career. He was, all the time, developing his own specific style of book production with illustrations that we now see as immediately recognisable as ‘Goreyesque’ and which owe a substantial amount to his love for artists like Edward Ardizonne and a dark imagination that might have come directly from Poe in one of his more dyspeptic moods.

The book raises the interesting question about whether these small fabulously illustrated books with their dark storylines of death, destruction and random mishaps are really only for adults or whether they can also be seen as children’s books. Gorey wasn’t fond of children and was ambiguous on this issue – at times seeming to deny they are ‘children’s books’ and at other times suggesting that children would love them because they enjoy being – and need to be – frightened. In this respect he has a lot in common with that other great illustrator, Maurice Sendak who also believed very much in the notion that children were more than able to cope with so-called ‘dark’ material.

Eventually Gorey’s skills as an artist led to his breakthrough into a more mainstream audience and ironically it wasn’t his books that took him there but the theatre – and especially his scene sets for a production of Dracula that would result in him finally having a degree of financial security that would enable him to become self-employed and ultimately leave New York for Cape Cod where he lived the rest of his life as an ‘ordinary’ member of the community – his days of ostentatious dress largely behind him. He died of a heart attack in 2000 at the age of 75 and lies in an unmarked grave:

“In the end, it’s only fitting that the man whose 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.”

I suggested earlier in this review that in Dery’s hands Gorey’s enigmatic life story rather runs out of steam, especially in the second half and I think that’s because the focus falls more heavily on the huge number of books the author turns out during his mature years. For me, Dery starts to produce something more like an annotated critical catalogue of the books than a biography and I didn’t really want or need that. I do recognise however that for some readers this will be welcomed and my disappointment that the focus slips off the man and onto the books may well say more about my expectations than about any real weakness in the biography. You’ll have to make your own mind up about that.

 

Terry Potter

January 2019