Edward Gorey Was Eerily Prescient

In late September, the Order of the Good Death, a group of academics, artists and death professionals, held its annual Death Salon, which this year took place at Mount Auburn cemetery in Boston. Among the events was a tribute to Edward Gorey, the artist and author of such illustrated books — fiercely beloved by certain dark-hearted children, and adults too — as “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” and “The Doubtful Guest.”

“The dress code was ‘haute macabre,'” said Megan Rosenbloom, the co-founder and director of Death Salon. “Just to have a little fun.”

There were artifacts and ephemera from the Edward Gorey House, on Cape Cod. Several attendees came as Gorey characters, including two who recreated “A Dull Afternoon,” his drawing of Victorian-era women on a lawn playing catch with a human skull.

That Gorey would be celebrated at such a funereal event is hardly surprising. These days, the artist, who died in 2000 at age 75, is often called the Granddaddy of Goth, celebrated as much for his eccentric persona as his meticulously crosshatched pen-and-ink drawings.

“There’s an absurdity to Gorey’s work that resonates with people,” Rosenbloom said. “It helps people deal with the uncontrollable nature of death.”

Whether through his sets for the 1977 Broadway revival of “Dracula” or his animated introduction to the PBS series “Mystery!” or his more than 100 slim and strange books, sometimes called children’s literature but more often unclassifiable, Gorey created a genre all his own.

Goreyland favors Victorian and Edwardian settings and costumes, is darkly comic to the point of absurdism and is hard to categorize except with hyphenated terms like camp-macabre, ironic-gothic or dark-whimsy.

The style has been popularized to greater commercial effect by authors Neil Gaiman and Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) — both admitted Goreyphiles — and the films of Tim Burton, whose “Corpse Bride” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas” bear the stamp of Gorey’s aesthetic. Fashion designer Anna Sui is a Gorey acolyte as well.

This Halloween, Gorey fans paid tribute to the man who stored a mummy’s head in the closet of his Manhattan apartment and counted as his most intimate life partner a herd of cats: dressing up as his characters, performing his work or just engaging in acts of Goreyesque weirdness.

What would Gorey have made of his status as an All Hallows’ Eve grand ghoul had he been alive to see it?

“That would have given Gorey himself the fantods,” said Mark Dery, using one of the antiquated words the artist loved to collect and trot out in his books. (It means a state of uneasiness.) “Gorey shrank from the obvious. Gorey is deep.”

A cultural critic and author, Dery has written a new biography, “Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey” (Little, Brown). He spent seven years on the project, time he needed to wrap his head around “the panoramic sweep” of his subject’s mind.

For Dery, and for anyone else, plunging into Goreyland means becoming acquainted with Diaghilev’s “Ballets Russes,” French silent films, the surrealist collage novels of Max Ernst, Victorian children’s literature, the ancient Japanese novel “The Tale of Genji,” and so forth. It means looking through a pre-Stonewall lens, when many gay men and women led closeted lives and their sexuality did not necessarily figure in their expressed personal politics. It means trying to solve the riddle of a man who was outwardly gregarious — “As beguiling a conversationalist as Oscar Wilde,” as Dery put it — and flamboyantly fashionable, walking the streets of New York in the 1960s and ‘70s in floor-sweeping fur coats that caught the attention of the photographer Bill Cunningham, yet forever enigmatic.

“Gorey was supremely skilled in the art of evasion and misdirection,” Dery said. When pressed about his sexuality, or probed about his childhood as an intellectually gifted only son in Chicago, “he would respond with a long anecdote about the use of wallpaper in the TV series ‘Knots Landing.'”

Perhaps the biggest challenge of writing a Gorey biography is that Gorey, by his own admission, was a man to whom nothing happened. By all accounts, he had no real love affairs as an adult and his sex life was almost nonexistent.

Despite being a lifelong Anglophile, he made just one brief visit to Scotland and England, his only trip abroad. He took the self-administered Proust Questionnaire for Vanity Fair and wrote that the greatest love of his life was “cats” and his favorite journey was “looking out the window.”

Instead, Gorey appears to have spent much of his life with his nose between the covers of a book. An obsessive cinephile, he claimed to have seen 1,000 movies one year.

When Gorey was not in the cinema or reading, he was watching George Balanchine’s ballets, around which he based his entire schedule for nearly three decades, rarely missing a single performance. (Gorey’s permanent move from New York to Cape Cod, in the mid-1980s, coincided with the death of Balanchine: “an act of aestheticism worthy of Oscar Wilde,” as Stephen Schiff wrote in a 1992 New Yorker profile.)

“The New York City Ballet was his Vatican. And George Balanchine he called his god,” said Dery, describing the breed of urbane, voracious devotee of high culture that is increasingly vanishing from Manhattan. “He journeyed vastly between his ears. He was the Magellan of the imagination. So that’s where you have to look for the life. On the psychic geography of his unconscious.”

Gorey’s work has imprinted itself on the consciousness of generations of oddballs and bookworms, who have found in his offbeat world a measure of existential solace. For A.N. Devers, a writer and rare-books dealer, Gorey’s books, which she discovered through a cool high school friend, pointed the way out of her conformist suburban Virginia town.

“I don’t think I quite understood him then. I just knew that he was getting at something ludicrous about life,” Devers said. “Gorey seemed like an outlet.” Years later, living in New York, Devers attended an auction of the artist’s fur coats and won a Lorraine mink stroller, an unexpected turn of events she wrote about for The Paris Review. (As previously reported by The New York Times, she has also bought a green-tartan kilt belonging to Sylvia Plath.) After the auction, a man in the elevator, a fellow bidder and Goreyphile, told Devers, “You must live up to this coat!”

Speaking by phone from her home in London, she said: “I wore it a lot in the New York City winters when I would get invited to parties. It ended up being a really fun party favor.” The coat was one of the few items Devers hand-carried on the plane to England when she moved there, prized too much to entrust it to shippers.

“To me, it had special powers,” she said.

Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist whose graphic memoir “Fun Home” was the basis for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, said she “was really fortunate to discover Gorey as a little kid,” in her parents’ book of poems by John Ciardi (he did the illustrations). Later, as a teenager struggling with her sexual identity, Bechdel found one of the Amphigoreys, the omnibus collections that introduced Gorey to a wider readership starting in the 1970s, and the latent queerness she read in his work resonated.

“I think part of what was so entrancing for me when I was 17 and found his work was it touched on some weird sexuality I was sensing in myself but hadn’t acknowledged,” Bechdel said. Gorey himself never really acknowledged his own sexuality. To Schiff, he described himself as “reasonably undersexed.” To another interview’s probing question about his sexual orientation, he said, “I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.” Later in the interview he added: “What I am trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else.”

While today’s LGBTQ community may read that as a closeted gay man from an earlier generation refusing to come out, “it’s far more complicated than that,” Dery said.

The few romantic feelings Gorey confessed to in letters to friends, most of them for other men and best described as infatuations, show him as someone for whom the messiness of human relationships was much too much. Perhaps for that or other reasons he kept himself buttoned up. Dery honored that.

“I wanted to allow Gorey his self-definition, and his self-definition is essentially not to define himself,” he said. “I wanted to allow Gorey his mystery.”

Still, Dery hopes the biography in part will “elevate Gorey to his rightful place in the pantheon of gay letters,” especially in regards to the postwar revolution in children’s literature, which included other gay figures like Maurice Sendak (“Where the Wild Things Are”), Louise Fitzhugh (“Harriet the Spy”) and Tomie dePaola (“Strega Nona”).

Gorey never published a best seller and remains a special taste, but he influenced the larger culture considerably, and through multiple generations.

You can see Gorey in Burton’s 1993 film, “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” or in the “Series of Unfortunate Events” books, first published in 1999, or in the current teen drama “Riverdale,” with its camp sensibility and cobalt blues and grays — a perfectly Gorey palette. Or most topically in a recent viral comic strip called “The Ghastlygun Tinies,” a satirical commentary on school shootings that is the first success Mad magazine has had in years.

Gorey, it seems, is reassuringly never in or out of fashion, but always there lurking, like a spirit.

“He completely hewed to his own weird path,” Bechdel said. “I found that so inspirational. He had this one strange thing that he did, and he did it so beautifully.”