E IS FOR EDWARD
A Centennial Celebration of the Mischievous Mind of Edward Gorey
by Gregory Hischak
Black Dog & Leventhal
384 pages, $60.
EDWARD St. John Gorey (1925–2000) was born in Chicago, the only child of a crime-reporter father and a doting mother. A precocious youth, he had little art training beyond high school. Yet he’d go on to have a celebrated career and a lasting influence. In celebration of what would’ve been Gorey’s 100th birthday, Gregory Hischak, curator of the Edward Gorey House since 2020, and the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, which manages his creative legacy, have collaborated on E Is for Edward: a fittingly overstuffed tribute to the prolific artist.
Men in Gorey’s world wear tight collars and buttoned-up suits, faces obscured by beards and mustaches. But his nude statues reveal well-defined legs, curiously expressive toes, and muscular rear-ends. Gorey never laid claim to a gay identity, so the House follows suit. “The Gorey House doesn’t delve into queerness, as a soft rule,” Hischak explains. But surely Gorey was suggesting something about his sexuality with his flamboyant style of dress. He adopted a uniform of full-length furs paired with jeans and canvas sneakers. He went from secondhand furs to custom coats, clasping them closed at the neck with his silver-ringed fingers. Whose eye was he trying to catch? He eventually left all 21 furs in cold storage when he decamped to Cape Cod, and they were auctioned off after his death. His trust now directs profits to animal-welfare organizations.
The book draws from exhibits at the Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, museum, formerly the artist’s residence, once crammed with flea-market treasures and mewling cats upsetting pots of ink. Gorey christened the ramshackle, money-sucking home—purchased through the success of his sets and costumes for Broadway’s Dracula—the “Elephant House.” Hischak writes: “If the structure of this book feels wonky, it’s because a kitchen was constantly in the way of the narrative.” (For a more serious look at Gorey’s life, he points to Mark Dery’s 2018 biography Born to Be Posthumous.)
Of Gorey’s relationship to the zeitgeist, Hischak writes that he was “so far behind that he [was]ahead.” Influenced by nonsense, Surrealism, Japanese design, 19th-century engravings, and the darkly upholstered interiors of Edwardian homes, Gorey’s work also reflects the suspense of Agatha Christie mysteries. Silent films shaped not just the look of some of his heroines—kohl-eyed femmes fatales—but his stories’ framing: no establishing shots, no close-ups.
Financial success as a commercial illustrator gave Gorey the stability to pursue his passion projects. E Is for Edward highlights lesser-known gems from his 116 books, including 28 slender volumes (most under thirty pages) self-published between 1962 and 2000 under his own Fantod Press (an archaic word meaning a state of uneasiness). The book also touches on Gorey’s fabric arts (handmade dolls filled with rice, sometimes devoured by the house’s resident mice), costume design, experimental theater, and ephemera, such as a list of quotes that delighted him. (From his Aunt Betty: “I think there’s something obscene about socks on a table.”) The book’s large format gives readers the chance to appreciate Gorey’s cross-hatched drawings up close. We learn of his preference for the razor-sharp points of Gillott’s Tit Quill nibs, which he stockpiled after they went out of production in the 1980s.
Recurring motifs intensify the mystery of Gorey’s stories. Figures appear in isolation. Objects fall from the sky. Strangers arrive uninvited. “A typical Gorey family is plagued with amnesia, vanishings, and death,” Hischak writes. Children are preyed on by strangers or fall victim to freak accidents—eaten by lions or carried away by birds. Hischak points to the long shadow of the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping as a possible influence. A definite influence on Gorey’s work is the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine. Gorey was a superfan, worshipping “Mr. B.” from afar. Note how often Gorey’s figures stand in one of ballet’s five positions, lending them a kind of performative gravitas. As in dance, Gorey’s stories suggest; they do not explicitly say—he felt doing so spoiled what made something interesting.
The writing in E Is for Edward feels delightfully off the cuff—breezy and effortless—as if Hischak, happy to be a cheerful servant to genius, were simply pointing out things that delight him. Yet the curator in him wonders about the calling cards in Gorey’s work, whether he listened to music while he drew, and the stories behind some of the books’ obscure dedications. “At some point,” Hischak writes, “some entirely new director/curator … using the very same material … will write an entirely different book.” That may be true, but this one is a superb birthday gift to an artist unlike any other.
Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Manhattan newspaper The Village Star-Revue.
