Elegant Enigmas

by Sheila Connolly

The Boston Globe reports that there is a new exhibit of Edward Gorey's works opening at the Boston Athenaeum this week, entitled "Elegant Enigmas."

Gorey lived much of his later life in a small house in Yarmouth Port on Cape Cod, and the house is now a museum–it's one of my local favorites, and I've been there many times (the fact that there's an excellent restaurant and a used bookstore nearby may have something to do with that). Curiously, the Athenaeum exhibit was organized by the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania–another one of my all-time favorite small museums.

The Gorey House is an unprepossessing and shabby little house, filled with items that Gorey collected. A lot of items. They crowd the shelves and windowsills and any other surface available (I wouldn't want to be responsible for dusting there!). I hadn't realized that many of the items in the house appear in various of Gorey's books, and some visitors make a game of looking for them.

I don't know if or when I'll see the exhibit, so I can't comment on the vision that dictated the selection of the things on display. But it was at the Gorey House, surrounded by Gorey's chosen talismans, that I had an epiphany.

Most of you are probably familiar with Gorey's drawing style, which is distinctive and easily recognized. Mystery fans will know the animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery! (The animation was done by Derek Lamb.) Others my recognize his whimsical creatures in all sorts of odd places (and there's one living on my refrigerator right now!).



But my lightbulb moment was about style. It didn't happen the first time, or even the second time, I visited the house. But one sunny afternoon, as I was wandering around, making a deliberate effort to look carefully at all the "things," I realized I was looking at all the building blocks of Gorey's visual style. I'm not sure which came first–whether Gorey surrounded himself with possessions he liked, or whether he liked them because they reminded him of his art–but looking around I realized what a single-minded focus Gorey had, and how consistent he was.

I'm not talking about specific motifs or objects that he used or reused. I'm talking about a sense of line and shape and form that links all the bits and pieces together. I won't bore you with art-speak, although in another life I was an art historian, but if I had to summarize the recurring forms, I would call them "round."

Okay, that's vastly oversimplified. But stop and look at his drawings: how many sharp edges do you see? Things flow, things bend and sway. And they're all connected, as though all the people, and even the animals, belong to the same family, tribe, or species.

Which leads me (finally!) to the question, "how do we define style?" Please don't say, "I know it when I see it," even though it's often true. Individuals–visual artists or writers–have a personal style, one that is identifiably theirs. Gorey's work provides a great example: the influences are so clear and open. They flow seamlessly from the little world he created around himself into his sketches. And he take such obvious pleasure in that consistency that it's hard not to like him. You can see what and how he saw.

Artists use line, color, three-dimensional modeling, lighting, to create their work. Writers use words to define character, pacing, conflict, to create theirs. You wouldn't confuse Gorey's art with, say, a Rembrandt sketch, any more than you would confuse Robert Parker's prose with Dickens'.

Gorey didn't ignore the written word, and his delightful sense of whimsey carries over there too. Titles of his works include "The Doubtful Guest," "The Wuggly Ump," "The Epiplectic Bicycle," "The Sopping Thursday," "Dancing Cats and Neglected Murderesses," "The Unknown Vegetable"–I could go on, but I'll give you the pleasure of looking them up for yourselves. He also had a lot of fun with pseudonyms, which were often anagrams of his own name: Ogdred Weary, Raddory Gewe, Dogear Wryde, or E. G. Deadworry, to name a few.

By the way, his birthday is February 22nd. I don't think he'd mind if we celebrate a little early.

The Mysterious Edward Gorey

by Julia Buckley

I first fell in love with Edward Gorey art back when MYSTERY appeared on PBS. Notice in this clip that MYSTERY was hosted by Vincent Price? I watched it even before Price hosted--Gene Shalit spoke the introductory words when the show aired in 1980. Then Price became the host, from 1980-1989, and finally the great Diana Rigg, who was the final host. Afterward MYSTERY aired with no host at all, which was, I think, a shame.

In 2008 MYSTERY became MASTERPIECE MYSTERY, hosted by Alan Cumming, and the Gorey introduction (with memorable theme song by Normand Roger) was dropped.

Still, when I think of MYSTERY, I think of Gorey and those wonderful title sequences.

It wasn't only MYSTERY that made Gorey famous, but his work is as recognizable on that show as it is in the various books, posters, and cards that bear his distinctive images. Gorey is a wonderful example of dark humor, and he created faux Gothic worlds, seemingly Edwardian or Victorian worlds, in which very mysterious and creepy things happened. Many fans assumed Gorey was English, but he was, in fact, born in Chicago, Illinois, and briefly attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1977 Gorey won a Tony Award for set design--appropriately for the play DRACULA. He loved ballet, cats, books and television.

One of my favorite Gorey works is called THE GASHLYCRUMB TINIES, a book that was eventually made into a poster (and a poster which, in my own stab at dark humor, I once hung in my classroom). It tells the tale of a group of schoolchildren who all gradually died, some of quite dreadful causes. Gorey told the tale as a way of remembering the alphabet, but in true Gorey style, he tells it in rhyming couplets: "A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs; B is for Basil, assaulted by bears." My personal favorite is Neville, who dies of ennui. :)

Last year my husband bought me a Gorey calendar which, month by month, tells the story of THE DOUBTFUL GUEST, a strange creature who shows up one day and doesn't leave. "When they answered the bell on that wild winter night, there was no one expected and no one in sight; then they saw something standing on top of an urn; his peculiar appearance gave them quite a turn . . ." The guest himself looks like a cross between a penguin and a short man cartoon, done in Gorey's distinctive, moody style. The family's travails with the "guest" become funnier and funnier, despite the gloom of the setting.

The same is true of the Gorey pop-up book my children had when they were small. It was called THE DWINDLING PARTY, and as with the TINIES, it told the tale of a group that grew smaller and smaller as all sorts of scary monsters consumed them one by one. It was deliciously funny and not at all scary to my six-year-old son, who enjoyed reading it repeatedly.

Perhaps Gorey's work was described best by Gorey himself, who called it "literary nonsense."

(Image: Wikipedia).