William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018 Copyright © Mark Dery 2018 Mark Dery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Quotations and excerpts from unpublished correspondence with John Ashbery used in this volume are copyright © 2011 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author. Illustrations and excerpts from the works of Edward Gorey are used by arrangement with the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover design by Jim Tierney Cover photograph by Richard Corman All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008329815 Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008329822 Version: 2018-10-24
Contents
1 Cover
2 Title
5 Introduction: A Good Mystery
6 Chapter 1: A Suspiciously Normal Childhood
8 Chapter 3: “Terribly Intellectual and Avant-Garde and All That Jazz”
10 Chapter 5: “Like a Captive Balloon, Motionless Between Sky and Earth”
11 Chapter 6: Hobbies Odd—Ballet, the Gotham Book Mart, Silent Film, Feuillade
12 Chapter 7: Épater le Bourgeois
13 Chapter 8: “Working Perversely to Please Himself”
14 Chapter 9: Nursery Crimes—The Gashlycrumb Tinies and Other Outrages
15 Chapter 10: Worshipping in Balanchine’s Temple
16 Chapter 11: Mail Bonding—Collaborations
19 Chapter 14: Strawberry Lane Forever
20 Chapter 15: Flapping Ankles, Crazed Teacups, and Other Entertainments
21 Chapter 16: “Awake in the Dark of Night Thinking Gorey Thoughts”
22 Chapter 17: The Curtain Falls
26 Notes
1 Cover
2 Title
For Margot Mifflin, whose wild surmise—“What about a Gorey biography?”—begat this book. Without her unwavering support, generous beyond measure, it would have remained just that: a gleam in her eye. I owe her this—and more than tongue can tell.
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 Gorey’s insistence on British spelling; the time is vaguely