Yet no matter how carefully we prowl the lawn for footprints or scour the Persian rug for bloodstains, like the sleuths in the Agatha Christie whodunits he loved so much, the Mystery of Edward St. John Gorey is, ultimately, uncrackable. “Each Gorey drawing and each Gorey tale is a mystery that ends—meaningfully—with the absence of meaning,” Thomas Curwen observed in the Los Angeles Times. “He would never presume to know, and if he did, he would never tell.”44 “Always be circumspect. Disdain explanation,” wrote Gorey in a postcard to Andreas Brown.45 The deeper we go into the hedge maze, the more stealthily we try the doorknobs in the rambling manor’s abandoned west wing, the more elusive he seems. Not that it matters: with Gorey, never getting there is half the fun.
a Publishers, dates of publication, and related details can be found, with a few exceptions, in “A Gorey Bibliography” at the end of this book. Quoted matter isn’t cited in endnotes for the simple reason that nearly all Gorey’s books are unpaginated; even so, readers shouldn’t have much trouble tracking down quotations, since few Gorey titles are longer than thirty pages.
A Suspiciously Normal Childhood
Chicago, 1925–44
Ted Gorey, age two, with his mother, Helen Garvey Gorey, 1927.
(Elizabeth Morton, private collection)
HIS WAS “A PERFECTLY ordinary childhood,” Gorey always insisted.1 “The facts of my life are so few, tedious, and irrelevant to anything else,” he once told an interviewer—no doubt with one of the full-body sighs he used as a melodramatic flourish—“there is no point in going into them.”2
The facts: Edward St. John Gorey was born on February 22, 1925, at St. Luke’s Hospital, Chicago. Father: Edward Leo Gorey, twenty-seven, newspaperman. Got his start as a police reporter, covering local crime. From 1920 to 1933, worked the politics beat for Hearst’s Chicago Evening American, climbing by ’31 to the position of political editor. Later, publicist; still later, aide to an alderman, as Chicago calls the powerful ward representatives who sit on its city council. Mother: Helen Garvey Gorey, thirty-two, stay-at-home mom. Both parents were of Irish descent, though the Garveys—moneyed, Republican, Episcopalian—were the lace-curtain variety, several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder from the working-class, Democrat, devoutly Catholic Goreys. (Disapproving noises were heard, on the Garvey side, when they married—cluckings about Helen marrying beneath her station.) Ted—as the younger Edward was known—was a bright kid, well adjusted, well liked. Bookworm, culture vulture, aspiring artist. Attended high school at Francis W. Parker, a progressive private school founded on Deweyite principles. Drafted into the army in ’44. Off to Harvard in ’46.
Even Gorey seemed regretful that his origins didn’t live up to his myth, lamenting that he “did not grow up in a large Victorian house” and noting, with half joking dismay, that his childhood was “happier than I imagine. I look back and think, ‘Oh poetic me,’ but it simply was not true. I was out playing Kick-the-Can along with everybody else.”3
Of course, he was adroit at throwing sleuths off the scent. When an interviewer sniffed around the subject of his childhood, he led his interlocutor off into the tall grass of a digression or swatted the question aside with a deadpan quip: asked what he was like as a child, Gorey replied, “Small.”4 When all else failed, he pled amnesia. “What’s past is past,” he declared, closing the door on the subject.5
But the past is never past, not in the dark room of the subconscious, where our childhood memories become more vivid, not less, with age, and certainly not in gothic fiction, where the past we’ve repressed always comes back to haunt us. And much of Gorey’s fiction, whatever else it is—existentialist, absurdist, surrealist—is inescapably gothic. It’s all about the past, from its period settings to its archaic language to the obvious fact that Gorey uses obsolete genres (the Puritan primer, the Dickensian tearjerker, the silent-movie melodrama) to tell his stories.
Gorey’s own story, it turns out, is as full of unsolved riddles and buried secrets as any good mystery, though his childhood looks suspiciously normal at first glance.
It wasn’t.
* * *
How normal is teaching yourself to read at the age of three and a half, then cutting your eyeteeth on Victorian novels? Gorey lived up to the myth of the precocious only child, plowing through Dracula and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass—in the same month, even—between the ages of five and seven, with Frankenstein close on their heels. Dracula scared him to death, he said. By the age of eight, he’d read the collected works of Victor Hugo, he claimed, a herculean labor that perplexed even Gorey himself, retrospectively. “Chloroform!” was his adult verdict. “But I can still remember a Hugo being forcefully removed from my tiny hands when I was about eight so I could eat my supper.”6
Gorey’s infatuation with Dracula and Frankenstein at an age when most of us are struggling with Charlotte’s Web was an augury: the gothic sensibility is deeply embossed on his work. His encounter with Dracula was especially prophetic, not only because the bat-winged shadow of the gothic would flap across his aesthetic but also because he would owe the sanguinary count his greatest commercial success. Gorey’s costume and set design for the Broadway production of the play based on Bram Stoker’s novel made him the toast of Manhattan theater circles in 1977 and bought him a house on Cape Cod.
No less important for a budding visual intelligence were the illustrations in the books he read as a child. “We [had] a wonderful horrid thing called Child Stories from Dickens, which was illustrated with chromolithographs,” he recalled. “It was all the deaths: Little Nell, [Smike] from Nicholas Nickleby. I remember it with horror.”7
He fell in love with Ernest Shepard’s wry, fine-lined drawings for A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and the sharp-nibbed precision of Tenniel’s illustrations for the Alice books. Little wonder, then, that he grew up to be the sort of artist who is all about line. “Line drawing is where my talent lies,” he said in a 1978 interview.8 What strikes the eye before anything else, in Gorey’s work, is his mesmerizing pen-and-ink technique. Look close, and you can almost see the pullulation of a million little strokes. You’ve seen this texture somewhere before, the tight mesh of crisscrossed lines. And then it hits you: the man is doing hand-drawn engraving. What you’re looking