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By Amy Benfer

Feb. 15, 2000 |   Pity the poor books editors in the 1950s when confronted with yet another manuscript by the persistent Edward Gorey. Back then no one knew quite what to call his small gems with their manic pen-and-ink illustrations of overstuffed drawing rooms, set somewhere between the Edwardian era and the 1920s, and with punch lines taken from the unspeakable horror of their well-dressed characters' untimely demises.

Gorey's work was not at first met with open arms by the publishing world -- to put it mildly. Today, however, with his cult of devotees numbering in the millions, his first efforts are collected in three bestselling anthologies: "Amphigorey," "Amphigorey, Too" and "Amphigorey Also." And Harcourt Brace, a longtime publisher of Gorey's work, has recently reissued many of his early books, including his first, "The Unstrung Harp" (1953), and the classic "pornographic work," "The Curious Sofa," which was published under the anagrammatic name "Ogdred Weary" and contains the immortal line: "Still later Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan."

Portfolio A Gorey Gallery A selection of drawings by Edward Gorey. (Click to display images in a new browser window. Best viewed with browsers higher than 3.0)

Putting Elsie's fate out of your mind for a moment, imagine what it was like for Gorey to try to put himself over before he'd become the macabre sensation he is today. Consider the reaction of Robert Gottlieb -- then at Simon & Schuster and later the editor of the New Yorker -- when Gorey's agent presented him with "The Loathsome Couple," a tale based on the story of a British couple who murdered several children, only to be caught when they dropped photographs depicting their handiwork on a crowded bus. (The book’s frontispiece declares, "This book may prove to be its author's most unpleasant ever.") Gottlieb rejected the book on the grounds that it wasn't funny. An astonished Gorey replied, "Well, Bob, it wasn't supposed to be funny; what a peculiar reaction."

But, of course, "The Loathsome Couple" is hysterically funny. You will be forgiven for finding the juxtaposition of child murders with helpless laughter outrageously blasphemous. The humor in this story comes from the sheer blandness of it all. Mona and Harold, the hapless villains, move from their dismal childhoods to dismal adulthoods of petty crime, to an unsuccessful union (they "fumble with each other in a cold woodshed" after a crime film, and when they attempt to make love, their "strenuous and prolonged efforts came to nothing") to embarking on their "life's work" -- luring small children to their deaths in a rented "remote and undesirable villa." To celebrate their first kill, Harold and Mona dine on "cornflakes and treacle, turnip sandwiches and artificial grape soda."

The problem would persist throughout Gorey's career. Is he writing humor? Are dead people funny? Maybe it's literature: Gorey's prose reads by turns like haiku, or Dadaist automatic writing, and employs more words from the OED than Joyce's does. But his books are illustrated, recalling the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Georges Barbier and Goya. Does that make it art? And they're small, borrowing the nonsense of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, coupled with the grim infanticides of the Brothers Grimm. Could they be books for children?

Perhaps a primal clue to Gorey's perspicacity and morbid taste can be found in his choice of childhood reading material: He read "Dracula" at age 5, "Frankenstein" at age 7 and all of the works of Victor Hugo by age 8. "Of course," he admitted to the Washington Post in 1978, "I was bored by a lot of [Frankenstein]. It hadn't occurred to me that I could skip anything."

As he grew to adulthood and his works rose to their odd and just prominence, Gorey's own life was often the focus of persistent myths. Two such myths: that he was A) British and B) dead were put to rest with Stephen Schiff's 1992 profile of Gorey in the New Yorker. Still, it's not hard to see why it took more than a copyright date to dispel this particular lore, since his work so frequently evokes other lands in other times. In truth he has traveled abroad only once, to the outer Scottish Isles, whose Gorey-like names -- the Orkneys, the Shetlands and the Outer Hebrides -- must have provided some enticement.

Gorey was not born in England, but in Chicago, in 1925. His father was a Catholic newspaperman; his mother, an Episcopalian. They divorced when he was 11, and remarried when Edward was 27. In between marriages to his mother, Gorey's father provided him with a rather glamorous stepmother -- Corrina Mura, the chanteuse who sang "La Marseillaise" in "Casablanca."

Gorey's grandmother had once supported the family by drawing greeting cards, a profession befitting a woman of Edwardian persuasion. Gorey's first drawings -- pictures of passing trains -- came at age one-and-a-half, though he told the Christian Science Monitor that he found them highly unimpressive: "I hasten to add they showed no talent whatsoever. They looked like irregular sausages."

Recalling his youth, Gorey once remarked to the Washington Post, "I think of myself as being sensitive and pale and wan. But I wasn't at all. I was out there playing kick-the-can." In high school, according to Consuelo Jourgensen, a friend, "He painted his toenails green and walked barefoot down Michigan Avenue, which was rather shocking in those days."

After a one-semester stint at the Chicago Art Institute (the only formal art training he's had), Gorey spent three years in the U.S. Army as a clerk for Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, a testing ground for mortars and poison gas.

At 20, he showed up as a French literature major at Harvard, where he had the distinction of corrupting a fellow mad genius, the future poet Frank O'Hara. Brad Gooch documents their madcap college days in "City Poet," his 1995 biography of O'Hara. The photographer, George Marshall, said Gorey, who was given to wearing capes and numerous rings, was the "oddest person I've ever seen. He was very tall, with his hair plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor."

Next page | "It's all too much, too grim, too lovely. It's general chaos"