Book
Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Genius and Mysterious Life of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery
Synopsis
A rigorously-researched and documented biography of writer and illustrator Edward Gorey, who was known for his macabre and darkly comic books, book covers, design of the animated introductory sequences for PBS’s Mystery! series, set and costume design for a Broadway production of Dracula, and as inspirational hero to weirdos everywhere.
Notes
It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive biography than this book, as Dery establishes his bona fides in the introduction and then goes on to exhaustively cover every key event in Gorey’s life from birth to death, with extensive footnotes referencing personal interviews, letters, and excerpts from just about everything ever written about the man. It’s both an academic work of biography and of art criticism, as he gives an insightful synopsis of Gorey’s “little books,” occasionally offering a summation but often sticking to the author’s desire to leave plenty of room for ambiguity.
My main complaint is that it’s often tedious and dry reading, feeling more like an academic assignment instead of an attempt to bring a reclusive artist to life. But this is tempered as much as possible by personal accounts from friends and family, or by descriptions of Gorey’s works that show a thorough appreciation of how they work and why they resonate. It is undeniable that Dery gets Gorey. At least as much as is possible for anyone to.
But that leads to the other criticism that’s inherent to this book and its subject, which is that Gorey actively dismissed any attempts to define him or his work, and he insisted that the books, like himself, remain ambiguous. Dery not only acknowledges this dichotomy in the introduction, but he makes it a recurring theme of the entire book. He repeats Gorey’s quote “I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.”
I have a couple of minor quibbles with the book, mainly that it, like its subject, is so entrenched in the New York art scene that it sometimes comes across as eye-rollingly pretentious. It left me with a sense of “never meet your heroes,” since I got the impression I’d probably have found Gorey insufferable if I’d met him in person.
And I think it leaned a little too heavily on the premise that Gorey’s repressed or denied homosexuality is evident in every aspect of his life and his work, even though Gorey himself refused to define himself as gay or straight. As Dery acknowledges, with a modern understanding of identity politics, gender, and sexuality, it’s likely that Gorey might’ve fit more closely with the identity of “asexual” (and homoromantic). Regardless, Dery does make a convincing case that camp and themes of sublimated homosexuality run throughout Gorey’s work, even if it still seems a bit reductive to me. I think I prefer the idea that Dery presents in the conclusion, which is that Gorey was so thoroughly queer throughout his life that he defied any attempts to put a label on any aspect of himself.
Personally, I can remember “discovering” Gorey’s work while digging through Oxford Books in Atlanta with my mother, and being immediately obsessed with the little books they had on display. They were already too expensive for me to buy them individually, but I did get a copy of Amphigorey that had an enormous impact on me. I’d forgotten exactly how much impact, until I was reading this biography and reminded of pages and images that stuck with me, even if I was never able to explain exactly why. I consider The Willowdale Handcar and the gleefully suggestive absurdity of The Curious Sofa as being as much a part of defining my sense of humor as Monty Python and Mystery Science Theater 3000 were.
Verdict
I can’t imagine a better biography of Edward Gorey in terms of showing a real insight into his work, the influences on his work, and as much of his personal life as he’d allow anyone to know. It’s not always fun to read, but it was fantastic for helping me better understand the “little books” that were so influential to me.