In a new biography, a fresh glimpse into the world of macabre illustrator and real-life character Edward Gorey

Book review

In the early 1980s, I bartended at an Edward Gorey exhibit at New York’s Gotham Book Mart, serving some of the foulest red wine known to humankind. Somehow people managed to drink it. (One repeat customer liked hers mixed with orange juice.) Still, I was embarrassed to hand a glass to a patron whose gray-green eyes were so beautiful they left me dumbstruck.

After he wandered off to chat with Gorey, I realized I’d just served Mikhail Baryshnikov.

It was a classic Gorey moment: the poisonous booze, the buzz of the crowd, the ballet dancer.

Edward St. John Gorey (1925-2000) was the creator of macabre, deadpan mini-epics (“The Hapless Child,” “The Doubtful Guest”) that he illustrated in a painstaking pseudo-Victorian/Edwardian style that sometimes took brief detours into the Roaring Twenties (“The Curious Sofa”). His aim, he once said, was “to make everybody as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.”

He was a man of unusual appearance, best summed up by choreographer Jerome Robbins: “At first all you can see of him is his beard and mustache, then you start to see his eyes and teeth and some of his expressions; then you notice all the rings he wears and finally the fact that although he wears a rather elegant fur-lined coat his feet are shod in worn out sneakers.”

Gorey has found a superb biographer in Mark Dery, a Gotham Book Mart employee who arrived after my time. Dery nails it in “Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey” when he says that Gorey’s approach to illustration was “rooted in a deep understanding of the way words and images can form a whole greater than its parts.” He’s also on the mark when he proposes that Gorey was “a man full of locked rooms whose art is about what isn’t said and isn’t shown.”

Gorey, who grew up in Chicago, liked to say he’d had “a perfectly normal childhood.” But Dery doesn’t buy it. Gorey, he points out, started drawing before he was 2 and taught himself to read at age 3. He zipped through Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and Louis Carroll’s Alice books between ages 5 and 7. By 8 he’d read the collected works of Victor Hugo.

Gorey’s parents divorced when he was 11, and he had a grandmother who “would go insane and disappear for long periods of time.” In high school, the teenage Gorey “painted his toenails green and went for a walk, barefoot, down Michigan Avenue.”

Clearly something odd was brewing in this kid. Over the next 60 years, everyone who crossed his path tried to figure out what it was.

Gorey’s own theory was that he was “fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something.” More germane was Gorey’s tenuous sense of connection to the human race. He didn’t relate to himself all that well either. “I look like a real person,” he confessed, “but underneath I am not real at all. It’s just a fake persona.”

Dery details Gorey’s Harvard education, his New York years (with their stage-design and publishing triumphs) and his late-life Cape Cod retreat, making clear that Gorey was the ultimate culture vulture, ingesting vast amounts of ballet, literature, silent film and art, while occasionally wondering if he “ought to be having a few direct emotional experiences, however small.” Few people gained entry into his small midtown-Manhattan living quarters, crammed with books, curios and cats, and one friend concluded, “There was no room for two in that apartment — or in that life.”

Gorey’s evasive manner gave rise to wild speculation. One “fervent fan” even bought into the rumor that Gorey had two left hands. But the mystery of what made him tick, Dery says, isn’t likely to be solved. Instead, it’s best to focus on his work itself, which Dery presents with considerable panache. (“The Deranged Cousins,” he quips, is “a tale of murder, religious mania, and the perils of beachcombing.”)

Some enigmas aren’t meant to be solved — but they can be usefully illuminated. That’s just what Dery does in this excellent book.

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“Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey” by Mark Dery; Little, Brown; 512 pp., $35