The Edward Gorey Centennial

Born 100 years ago today: illustrator, author, designer Edward Gorey (1925-2000).

While primarily celebrated for his book illustrations, Gorey did cross over into stage and screen success briefly in the late 1970s. He designed the sets and costumes and the program for the 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula starring Frank Langella (adapted into a film in 1979). He won a Tony for the costumes, and was nominated for the sets, but apparently was never tempted to do it again. In 1978, there was an animated TV special Edward Gorey’s Halloween based on his illustrations featuring the voices of Michael Gross, George S. Irving, Carole Shelley (of Pigeon Sisters fame) and others. And in 1980, he designed the animated credit sequence for the PBS show Mystery hosted by Vincent Price.

If you perceive a gathering theme (Dracula, Halloween, Mystery) you are to be commended. As an artist, Gorey determined to reflect both parts of his name. The Edwardian and Victorian ages obsessed him, and his sensibility was dark, if not graphically gory. He was a major influence on the sub-culture we now call Goth. Gorey’s maternal great-grandmother Helen St. John Garvey (1834-1907), with whom he shared a middle name, had been an greeting card illustrator during that era, and she seems to have inspired him. Largely self-taught (though he had one semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) he was obsessed with images and customs of the 19th and early 20th century, especially as depicted in pop culture. He loved images of funerals, locked room mysteries, caskets, bats. His characters often had a consumptive, ghostly quality, with sunken, staring eyes surrounded by black circles, as though the life were ebbing out of them. They also tended to be light and graceful. They looked as though they could be carried aloft by the wind. He loved to draw ballerinas, and himself loved the ballet. It is a world of pince-nez and parasols, mutton chops and meerschaums. I am an especial fan of his intricate, obsessive cross-hatching. When I see that in certain artists, I feel like their personality has been recorded. It’s like the vibrations of a violinist, the battement of a dancer, preserved, like those frozen fossils in Pompei.

Gorey was born a decade after Charles Addams, and though the men were motivated by similar subjects, their styles and sensibilities were very different. But I find myself exercised by the mystery of what inspired their macabre obsessions. Gorey’s own books strongly reflect the influence of the classic nonsense writers Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and surely these loomed over his childhood. He seems to have loved French silent serials like Fantomas (1913) and Les Vampires (1915-16). His father had been a crime reporter, this surely impacted him (ever see a crime scene photo? You can’t unsee them). His stepmother was Corinna Mura (1910-1965), the lady who sings “La Marseillaise” in the movie Casablanca. Gorey himself grew up in Chicago, served (on the home front) in World War Two, and then attended Harvard, where his roommate was the art critic and poet Frank O’Hara. Their group of friends, which also included John Ashbery and Alison Lurie, founded a group called the Poet’s Theatre in the early ’50s.

Mostly, Gorey is known and celebrated for his contributions to the book world. He illustrated over 500 books in the second half of the 20th century, over 100 of which he’d written himself. Among his best known are The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963), basically a grimly humorous nursery rhyme based on the alphabet, where each letter relates the horrible death of a different child; as well as the 1972 collection Amphigorey; and his 1982 illustrated edition of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which came out at the same time as Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical Cats.

Gorey is one of my wife’s favorite illustrators. She has collected his books since she was a child and when I first starting dating her she had an Amphigorey poster hanging over her bed. Here is her shelf of Gorey books:

The Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts (where Gorey held many an amateur theatrical in his last years) is now a museum devoted to the artist, and as you can imagine they are celebrating today in a big way. The official website is here.