BOOKS
Edward Gorey’s Discreet “Something”
Artist, writer, delightfully sinister, an Edwardian mystery
BY DAVID EHRENSTEIN
“I’m neither one thing
nor the other particularly.
I am fortunate in
that I am apparently
reasonably undersexed or something,”
Edward Gorey once declared
of himself.
Or is it selves?
For in his marvelous new biography
“Born To Be Posthumous:
The Eccentric Life and Mysterious
Genius of Edward Gorey,” author
Mark Dery shows how this prodigious
illustrator of what might be
called the tenderly sinister liked
to maintain a soupcon of mystery
about himself and his complex
personality as much as his art. Assuming
the aspect of an Edwardian
gentleman, Gorey struck the
perfect pose of the dandy — physically
present but mentally in “a
world of his own.” The problem was
Edward Gorey wasn’t living in the
19th century.
Gorey was, whether he liked it or
not, a man of the 20th century. Rareifi
ed on the surface, he was, just
beneath it, popular with a general
public well outside the confi nes
of the baroque aestheticism that
was his stock-in-trade. And while
he was well-versed in the life and
times of Oscar Wilde, Gorey would
never have been sent to Reading
Gaol for gross indecency or end his
life in exile and social disgrace as
Wilde did. Gorey ended his life in
considerabe comfort on Cape Cod
putting on puppet shows for children
— not Wilde-like at all.
Life changed radically for the
same-sex oriented over the course
of Gorey’s time — even though he
didn’t see himself as part of of that
time or even all that gay.
“I’ve never said that I was gay
and I’ve never said that I wasn’t,”
Gory once declared with typical
ambiguity. “What I’m trying to say
is that I am a person before I am
anything else.”
He added, “Well, I’m neither one
thing nor the other particularly. I
suppose I’m gay. But I don’t identify
with it much.”
In other words, Edward St. John
Mark Dery’s marvelous biography “Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius
of Edward Gorey” shows the prodigious illustrator to be a man who liked to maintain an air of mystery
about his life.
Gorey (1925-2000) felt it was possible
to be “out” and “stay in the
closet” at the same time. In this,
he’s in some ways a representative
fi gure of what might be called the
transitional era of gay American
life — that period following World
War II when homosexuality was a
psychiatric category whose practitioners
were subject to arrest if
caught at it, lavender scares popping
up in institutions of higher
WILLIAM COLLINS
learning where being a homosexual
was less welcome than being
a communist. Gay wasn’t a topic
for polite conversation. Yet as long
as it wasn’t named it could fl ourish
within the polite silence of the
status quo. Andy Warhol achieved
phenomenal success in this curious
context. He was what would
later be called openly gay in life
and art. He even made s fi lm called
“Blow Job,” discreetly depicting a
male hustler getting oral sex (the
party of the second part remaining
off-screen — the fi lm being a
medium close-up of the hustler’s
face), yet this wasn’t talked about
at the time.
Likewise, the sexuality of the far
more decorous Gorey was undisturbed
in this Don’t Ask/ Don’t Tell
era. Stonewall changed all that —
making gay a discussable mainstream
topic. But it didn’t change
things for Gorey. To those in the
know, his sensibility was clearly
gay, but his sexual life was as covert
as his self was overt.
As Dery writes, “To nearly everyone
who met him... his sexuality
was a secret hidden in plain sight.
There was the bitchy wit. The fl uttery
hand gestures. The fl amboyant
dress, fl oor-sweeping fur coats,
pierced ears, beringed fi ngers, and
pendants and necklaces, the more
the better, jingling and jangling.”
But even setting this sartorial
extravagance aside, Gorey’s gayness
blazed away like a fi ve-alarm
fi re for those who didn’t need Susan
Sontag’s help in comprehending
“camp.” To underscore this
point, “Born To Be Posthumous”
includes a rare picture of a shaven
Gorey taken during his stint in the
army (where he found relief from
its dull routines in his discovery of
the comic novels of E.F. Benson),
The result fi nds him resembling
none other than Christine Jorgensen.
No, Edward Gorey wasn’t
transgender. But he was what one
might call transcultured — an
American whose work was steeped
in England and France while refl
ecting next to nothing about the
land of his birth. Because of this
cross-cultural sophistication, his
fl at Midwestern accent came as a
shock to admirers meeting him for
the fi rst time
Few American artists, outside of
Henry James are as European in
outlook as Gorey. His illustrated
chapbooks, whose titles include
“The Hapless Child,” “The Doubtful
Guest,” “The Curious Sofa,”
“The Willowdale Handcar,” The
➤ EDWARD GOREY, continued on p.33
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