Mark Dery

The Publisher Says: From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth.

But who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known—in the late 1940s, no less—to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose?

He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.

Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, Born to be Posthumous draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. SIX TIMES. ULTIMATELY A LIBRARIAN BOUGHT ME A SALE KINDLEBOOK. (True story!)

My Review: There are few things my elder sister and I agree on. One of them is that Edward Gorey's a bloody genius, and about as hilarious as it's possible to be. (We also both love Jo Walton, so it's not as though she's a waste of space. Entirely, anyway.)

That's what Edward Gorey's superpower is, though. He speaks to a certain inner weirdo in some people, a rebellious streak that demands the sheer nonsensical pointlessness of Life be acknowledged and celebrated. Poor Xerxes...a Gashlycrumb Tiny I truly felt for.

Now that Gorey's safely dead, what's the skinny on his narrow gay ass? Welllll...not that fascinating, if I'm honest. He was exactly as you'd expect someone who could think up a child called "Xerxes" would be. Strange, a misfit, completely and utterly himself because he *designed* himself with great care. His artwork was justly celebrated for its technical merit...by three or four people. Weirdness exacts costs from the weirdo. Gorey was famous...if you know who he is. I'm never sad or sorry that I know who he is, unlike many famous people. But Gorey's talent as an artist was never the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum of Snooty Stuff or the Obscene Wealth Collection.

Unlike most of the art you'll see in those cultural institutions, you've seen a Gorey image. (If you're reading this blog, you have.) The Mystery! series opening sequence? Gorey. The 1950s Anchor Books images? Gorey. Over 100 of his own books, popular culture objects. He was a niche force, but a force nonetheless.

However, Dery's exhaustively researched biography goes into some detail about the skinny on Gorey's sexual nature. I think, like Greta Garbo, he wanted to be left alone. He never, ever once said he was gay. He lived through Stonewall...long after it was entirely okay with most people to come out as gay, he didn't.

Because he wasn't.

He said, in an interview collected in Ascending Peculiarity, "I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something ... I've never said that I was gay and I've never said that I wasn't ... what I'm trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else ... " That, mes amis, is a clear statement of being. He was what we, in 2022, call "asexual." That doesn't prevent him from presenting himself in a striking and deeply queer-coded manner. But if the twenty-first century has taught me anything, it's that people are who and what they say they are. Gorey? Asexual, and presenting himself as a strange misfit. And that is all there is to it.

I wasn't pleased by Author Dery's claiming of him for the gay men of the world solely because we have his own words on the subject and they are not, despite the fact they could easily and safely have been, "I am gay." So. He wasn't. Yes, let's claim him as an ikon of the QUILTBAG spectrum! Yes, let's celebrate his Otherness, his determined design of his Otherness, and the glorious art that came out of it..."There's so little heartless work around," said Gorey. "So I feel I am filling a small but necessary gap."

But let's not posthumously (!) reassign his stripe on the flag for our own need to possess him. Let's celebrate the way he said he was with the gratitude and laughter and little frisson of unnerved nerves that he designed it to evoke in his viewers.… (más)

You could easily define me as an “Anything Gorey” kind of a guy, and this well-designed book was pretty satisfying from both an informational and a visual angle. There was a rich variety of black and white illustrations as well as photos all through the book. And even though I’ve been reading about Edward St. John Gorey for many years now, I still learned a great deal from this book. Possibly my only complaint is the author’s over-the-top fascination with what was Gorey’s sexual orientation, gay or asexual. For myself, I could care less but Mark Dery can’t leave the subject alone, returning to it again and again.

This is a full biography, from Gorey’s birth in February of 1925 to his April death in 2000, and while Dery isn’t a memorable writer, he does cover the material very thoroughly. It was a treat to learn so much more about someone that I thought a had a pretty full picture of. A picture that so often involved full-length fur coats, dirty tennis shoes, tons of rings covering his fingers, and that distinctive beard.

The book quotes Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket. “When I was first writing A Series of Unfortunate Events,” he says, “I was wandering around everywhere saying, I am a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey,” and everyone said, “Who’s that?” That was in 1999. “Now, everyone says, ‘That’s right you are a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey.’”

Here, so you’ll go away from this review with some knowledge.

His roommate at Harvard was Frank O’Hara.
He loved Agatha Christie.
His speech was peppered with midwestern words like zippy, zingy, goody, and jeepers.
He was a bookworm and was always reading in any line he had to be a part of.
His beard hid that he was a chinless wonder, according to Dery.
He considered working in publishing or opening a bookstore.
“I wanted to have my own bookstore until I worked in one.”
He hated Henry James for explaining things to death in his writing.
He loved horror films.
He drove a bright yellow VW Beetle with OGDRED on the plate.
He once said of death, “I hope it comes painlessly and quickly.”

If you want to know more, simply read the book.… (más)

I wanted so badly to like this a lot more than I did. I like Gorey’s work and I was curious to learn more about him, especially since I’ve seen stuff floating around that he was ace. And then, while reading, there was so much else about him that resonated: his determined individuality, his gothic leanings, a fair bit of his attitudes in general. He really felt like a kindred spirit in a lot of ways, or at least someone who could and should be a role model for what Dery calls, “the weirdos.”

And, like, I don’t really read biographies, that’s not generally my thing at all, but this one didn’t seem … great? Dery’s writing’s good and he’s done a lot of research and thinking, that’s clear. He mentions stuff that was going on concurrently with periods of Gorey’s life, like New York gay culture and the crime-ridden Chicago he grew up in, and links that to what Gorey was doing (or not doing, as the case may be), and there’s also a lot of space devoted to Gorey’s books, what their content can tell us about Gorey’s inner life, and the evolution of his work over time. All good things, right?

Except that Dery’s stance is very curious and I’m having a hard time parsing the reasons why I feel that. There’s the literary analysis, of course, which Dery stretches as far as he can manage and occasionally then some. (Love of detail and precision? Good. Frequent gay subtext? Works for me. Tall bearded men always being self-insert characters? Um.) And there are similar stretches based on actual known details, starting with “Gorey worked in small windowless rooms, which must be psychologically meaningful and not just because he didn’t want distraction”, moving through, “Gorey didn’t want to talk about his private life and history so clearly he had a traumatic childhood”, and ending with Gorey as a queer man, which is a whole other paragraph. There’s also some weirdness about Gorey’s writing and art being so great and so unique and Gorey being such an individual that everyone knew a different side of him, that is so unusual and nobody else has different personalities in different contexts ever.

And now, the queer stuff. This is the most curious part of a curious stance. I don’t know if Dery’s gay and doing something similar to me here, wanting a cultural figure to share your orientation so much you’ll overlook other valid options*, or if he’s straight and slightly clueless, but, um. Well. There’s no denying that Gorey was romantically interested in men, embraced camp, had gay friends and queer characters, and had some stereotypically gay interests**. He also described himself as “asexual” and “undersexed” and there’s no evidence he ever had more than one bout of unpleasant adolescent sex and maybe made out a few times. To me that reads as homoromantic ace/demi. To Dery at various points, that’s “closeted gay man who just won’t talk about sex because he’s of a certain generation”, “gay man so traumatized by bad sex he swore off it”, and “probably asexual gay man”, and yes, that’s not consistent and yes, there are lots of uses of “asexual” that do not jive with current usage. Which is weird because Dery’s done his research into gay culture during Gorey’s lifetime but he seems not to have cared much about what asexuality even is? He just discounts that it’s even possible for Gorey to have be ace—until the last chapter, where he backtracks.

Sigh.

To be fair, Dery’s still pretty level and factual and doesn’t make totally unsubstantiated claims. It’s just that he doesn’t totally support them either and there are definitely instances where his reading of the facts and my reading of them didn’t line up. (I’m inclined to take Gorey at face value. Dery’s inclined to say, “but that could be an act, maybe he didn’t mean it”.) And yes, I get that it’s hard to write a bio of someone who was very private and I think Dery’s done a good job considering, it’s just … between the assumptions and the odd tone and his treatment of Gorey’s sexuality and presentation I found it lacking. And off-putting. And disappointing and sometimes frustrating.

I’m glad I read it and I did learn a good deal, and I’d even still rec this to people who’re interested but with a very strong suggestion to read it critically and make up your own mind about who Gorey was. Don’t necessarily stick to Dery’s version of him.

*and yes, I fully admit that I really, really want Gorey to have been ace

** I also find it off-putting that Dery bases a lot of his evidence for Gorey being gay on “well, he fits the stereotype” and “if he wasn’t gay, why was he drawing homoerotic subtext?”

Warnings: If you’re gay or gay-friendly, be prepared for stereotyping. If you’re aspec or aspec-friendly, be prepared for mild erasure. Use of the f-slur in quotes, and of phrases like “the gays” and “the homosexual” in ways that suggest Dery’s tried to capture historical mindsets. I think the n-word popped up in a quote at one point too, but I don’t have the book with me to check.

6/10… (más)