➤ EDWARD GOREY, from p.32
Beastly Baby,” and, most dramatically,
“The Gashlycrumb Tinies,”
were carefully designed to ape everything
English and antique with
bone-dry comic undertoness. The
result is Agatha Christie Meets
Noël Coward in every way even
though he only visited the UK once
in his life. But the Great Britain
of Gorey’s imagination was fully
equipped with stories, characters,
and above all images that Dery
aptly cites as suggesting that their
creator was a cross between Sebastian
Flyte (“Brideshead Revisited”)
and Holly Golightly (“Breakfast at
Tiffany’s”). In other words, Gorey
was an artistic fantasy come to life
— a self-created individual enveloped
in the aura of a literary fi ction.
Or, as Gorey put it, “I write
about everyday life.”
The birth of Gorey’s sensibility
is hard to pin down, He fi rst read
“Dracula” when he was eight, but
few children who love the morbid
make it as much a part of their life
as Gorey did. Most eight year-olds
have never heard of Bram Stoker
and more likely have encountered
the Count in the cinematic form
of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee.
Gorey’s love of “Dracula” (which
reached its apex late in his career)
and his taste for the macabre was
but one part of his artistic and personal
life.
Dery sees the fi rst full-fl owering
of the Gorey persona at Harvard
where he roomed with poet Frank
O’Hara. They decorated their digs
with white lawn furniture and an
unmarked gravestone and spent
many an evening languidly trading
bon mots listening to Marlene
Dietrich records with similarly
inclined friends, including poet
John Ashbery.
As Dery points out, Gorey gradually
assumed “a pose that incorporated
elements of the aesthete,
the idler, the dandy, the wit, the
connoisseur of gossip, and the
puckish ironist, wryly amused by
life’s absurdities, steeped in the
aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and in
the ennui-stricken social satire of
the ‘20s and ‘30s English novelists
such as Ronald Firbank and Ivy
Compton-Burnett, both of whom
➤ EDWARD GOREY, continued on p.44
DOUBLEDAY ANCHOR
Edward Gorey’s book jacket for Herman Melville’s “Redburn.”
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