For Gorey, Archduke Ferdinand still lives, unshot; the Hindenburg is safe at any height. His small books, text and illustration by the author, are inhabited by line-drawn folk out of some Oxford photograph, class of 1903—folk who die lingering deaths or are eaten by monsters. It's extremely peculiar work, like a rare case of dengue fever—and about as cheering. Real upbeat stuff.
Yet Gorey's grand obsession with the boater-hatted past is an idea whose moment has come. Certain Gorey first editions—all 30 pages or so—can run more than $200. And since Dracula, that fang-in-cheek Broadway smash hit (set and costume design by Gorey), he has blossomed like a century plant. A 19th-century plant. Each Gorey set reproduces the meticulous penstroke cross-hatching of his books—black and white only. The Dracula scenery looks campy, ghoulish: It's altogether effective. The theatergoer feels immured in an ominous cartoon and half expects thought balloons to soap-bubble out of his own mouth. The costumes last month won Gorey a Tony.
At 53, no one could call the artist-author precocious: It's been a long haul. Only compulsion and fine, foolish genius have driven Gorey back, then back again, to the drawing board. In late October or so the musical adaptation of his oeuvre—Gorey Stories—will open on Broadway. Those who saw the play off-Broadway last December are enthusiastic.
"I think Dracula is really a fluke," Gorey says. "It's an enormous success, but no one predicted it. Gorey Stories got its start three years ago at the University of Kentucky. Then it just happened to get brought up here to New York to the WPA Theater. I'll design sets and costumes, but, again, I had nothing to do with this initially. Everything is happening at once. This time next year, I suppose, it'll all have disappeared." Yes, but...On the off-mischance, Gorey put together a merchandising group that he calls, with characteristic optimism, Doomed Enterprises. DE has been marketing a Dracula T-shirt, a Dracula tote bag, Dracula wallpaper. ("I own 90 percent of it. Doomed Enterprises is me basically.") Charles Schulz of the macabre, that's what Edward Gorey might turn out to be. Imagine a Peanuts where Charlie Brown, hacking and feverish, dies of TB. Where Linus' blanket, made of flammable fabric, chars him to panatela ash. And Snoopy comes down with the mange.
Gorey was born in Chicago: It lingers in his voice. He has that distinctive Chicago "a." He'll say "hehpy" instead of "happy." His father was a Hearst newspaperman who died in 1963. His parents split when he was 11, then remarried 16 years later. Gorey admits to being an obnoxious child: "Mostly, anyway. I skipped some grades in school. My father was Catholic; my mother was Episcopal. They tried to raise me as a Catholic and I went to Catholic school for a year. But then I got measles, mumps or something. I suspect it was psychosomatic. I used to throw up in church regularly. Looking back on my childhood, I seem to have had no motivations whatever."
After high school and some time in Chicago's Art Institute, he was drafted. He fought the Axis for about 60 minutes per day as a clerk at Dugway Proving Ground near Salt Lake City. "There was this one company: It had all of three people. One man was in jail, one was in the hospital and one was AWOL for the entire time I was there. But every morning I had to type out this idiot report on the company's progress." Harvard came next. "God knows, I didn't get much out of college," he says, except a B.A. degree. He then killed two years around Boston, which almost killed him in return: He was near starvation—"I never had to live on peanut butter and bananas, but close." So Gorey went to New York, where starvation has some social éclat. He worked in the art department at Doubleday while creating his finicky little manic-depressant books. His artwork usually measures 4 inches by 4 inches, his books a bit more. "When I began, I went too far with my books occasionally." The Beastly Baby is a morbid example. "I've given that up. It gets harder and harder to outrage the world. I sometimes think, what more can anybody possibly do?"
Well, one can wear a massive fur coat (raccoon, beaver, mink, sable or wolf—he has them all) and, uh, tennis shoes. Even before Edward Gorey became famous, he was as noticeable as Truman Capote on the Boston Bruins' bench. In full winter dress, obese coat and minute feet, Gorey would show up nightly at the New York City Ballet. He resembled a walking brandy snifter. He still does in cold weather. He has a scraggly beard, which seems on loan from some less fashionable fur-bearer. Rings, too: more decoration on one hand than a 5-year-old would have after he found the Band-Aid box. "I've been totally eccentric for an awful long time," Gorey admits. "But I'm not nearly so much now because everybody's caught up with me." In the last year he has worn simple gold wire earrings: It looks as if an inept secretary stapled each lobe. "I've been meaning to do it for about 25 years and never got up nerve till now," he says. In this private livery he still turns out for the ballet. Gorey has attended virtually every City Ballet performance since 1956. "I'm very hidebound," Gorey says. "I do the same thing over and over and over and over. I tend to go to pieces if my routine is broken."
He has never been married. For 16 years or so he has sublet a one-room apartment from five irritable cats in the Murray Hill section of New York. They consider him just so much impractical furniture. Eau de chat scents the air. A visitor who sits long enough will have sufficient cat hair on his clothing to knit a secondhand tabby of his own. No wonder Gorey wears fur. "I talk to my cats a lot now," he says. "That prevents me from talking to myself." Yet the apartment is pleasant; it has a genteel touch—many first editions, excellent ballet posters, a statue of Christ that looks like Gorey. There's a narrow floor-level bed, the wall behind it serves as a headrest when he reads. The place hasn't been painted in years. Gorey has become sort of a public recluse. He explains, "I have very little social life, because the only people I have time to see are the ones I'm going to the ballet with. There are 400 or 500 people that I see all the time, everywhere." (They call him Ted.)
Only a man of ritual could have the patience to do all those bacillus-thin, crotchety, tic-tac-toe penscratchings. But for Gorey the text comes first. There is the skulking suspicion that characters die, and in some wonderfully hideous manner, just to complete one of Gorey's bizarre couplets. If not reason, fate has rhyme at least. Great-Uncle Franz, beside the lake, / Is being strangled by a snake. Now suppose Great-Uncle had been driving his car—par, bar, far, no. Jar. Seal him in a jar? Scar? Possibilities there. Got it: tar. "Is slowly sinking in the tar." A nice glublike ring to that. Does Gorey reject this flip interpretation of his work? He does not: "I think you have to rely on chance an awful lot. I don't really believe in free will. I've always been a firm believer in a line from a Patrick White novel, 'Life is full of alternatives, but no choice.' " The snake or the tar pit: marvelous.
Gorey would make W. C. Fields sound like Father of the Year. His Beastly Baby starts, "Once upon a time there was a baby. It was worse than other babies.... Dangerous objects were left about in the hope that it would do itself an injury, preferably fatal." Gorey children are swallowed by huge cats or carried off by large bugs. In his work the infant mortality rate is higher than it was in 1556. When questioned about this enthusiasm for infanticide, Gorey says, "I don't really know any babies. I've never known any babies. I don't have any relationship to children. A lot of my books I've intended for children primarily, but nobody would ever publish them as children's books. Children are pathetic and quite frequently not terribly likable."
A pose, perhaps? More than perhaps. There is humor in exaggeration, even morbid exaggeration. Accurate parody, after all, implies a profound understanding of the subject parodied. Enemies share such deep complicity. Dark satire is, in fact, Gorey's unique sort of compassion. Still, a fan expects certain bizarre tones: Gorey is trapped by his own success. After his popular paperback collections Amphigorey and Amphigorey Too were published, he was no longer just a cult figure. Then Dracula: That big bat signal over Gotham City meant recognition at last. This isn't the right moment for Gorey to change to genial, sweet, "hehpy" endings.
The author has slouched again: His head is in a good position for root canal work. His success must be enormously embarrassing: It contradicts his invincible pessimism. Yet he will try. "I'm sort of depressed all the time in a mildly jolly way. My life is a total shambles at the present and I don't see that it's going to get any better. It'll probably get worse. After all, I'm older, I'm not as resilient as I was. But on the other hand, in a sense it's so awful why worry about it? I think you get what you want in this life. Or half the time I think you don't get it, and half the time you do. Anyhow, it doesn't make much difference either way. It's all the same. I'll keep working, but obviously death will cut me off..."
A new culture hero. Or victim. With just the barest, the shyest aptitude for self-promotion. Give Edward Gorey time enough, he'll have the nation's children burying their dolls in the backyard. Doomed Enterprises will license a Barbie and Ken embalmer's set. One can imagine the author's epitaph:
EDWARD ST. JOHN GOREY
b. 1925 d. Horribly
"Grim fate brought him to this sad, low condition,
But remember his headstone is a signed first edition."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
