April 24, 2020 • 34 mins
We talked about Gorey in 2017. Based just on his art, you might imagine Edward Gorey as a dour Englishman, with the peak of his career sometime in the 1920s or '30s, whose childhood was marked with a series of tragic deaths. But Gorey was none of these things.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, listeners. This episode is part of our new playlist
to help everybody get through these times we're living in.
It's our host faves playlist. Yeah, these are just some
of our personal favorites, ones that we had a particular
affinity for, and because these are stressful and trying times,
we tried to stick to the ones that weren't quite
(00:22):
as dour. So hopefully they'll give you a little lift.
Stay safe. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
(00:45):
Once you have read some of Edward Gorey's books, it
is almost impossible to mistake his work for anyone else's,
unless maybe they are intentionally working in the style of
Edward gory His black and white pen and illustrations look
almost like engravings. They're just full of hatching and cross hatching.
The words are lettered by hand, and the stories a
(01:08):
lot of times unfold through either rhyming couplets or limericks
or some of their verse. The plots a lot of
times and really ambiguously, or they never resolve at all.
It's this gloomy, foreboding, typically Edwardian world that's populated by
bats and cats and odd creatures and grown ups who
(01:29):
are usually in very glamorous clothing, and a lot of
children who somehow come to harm. And one of one
of his most well known books, which is an alphabet
book called The Gashly cramb Tiny's m is for Maud
who was swept out to see n is for Neville
who died of anu. The other Tinys are and assaulted
(01:52):
by bears, their sucks dry by leeches, they're run through
with all's it's all very darkly whimsical. So if don't
know much about Edward Gorey's life, you might imagine the
person who did this to be a dour Englishman with
the peak of his career, maybe sometime in the nineteen
twenties or thirties, whose own childhood was marked with a
(02:14):
series of tragic deaths. But Edward Gorey was none of
those things. No, he's delightful. He's who were going to
talk about today. Edward Gorey, nicknamed Ted, was born Edward St.
John Gory on February twenty second in Chicago, Illinois. He
was the only child of Edward Leo Gory and Helen Garvey,
(02:37):
who divorced when he was eleven. His father later remarried
singer and guitarist Karina Mura, who was most well known
for being the guitar player at Rick's Cafe America in
the movie Casablanca. Gory's parents remarried one another in nineteen
fifty two. Already it's kind of whimsical and cooky, I know.
(02:57):
The family had predominantly Irish roots, with ancestors on both
sides immigrating to the United States in the mid to
late nineteenth century. Although his father was Roman Catholic and
his mother was Episcopalian, Gory himself wasn't particularly religious, and
later on in his life he would say that if
he was anything, he was a Taoist. He was also
(03:18):
quite precocious, and he started drawing before he was even
two years old. His oldest surviving drawing, called the Sausage Train,
is of the trains that passed by his grandparents house
in Chicago, and he drew that when he was about
eighteen months old. This is full of oblong shapes that
are recognizably trains, but they were also very definitely drawn
(03:39):
by a small child, So it's not like he just
whipped out realistic drawings and people went, Wunderkin, No, I
mean it's uh. It is starting startlingly adept for an
eighteen month old, but still obviously a child's drawing. By three,
Edward Gorey had taught himself to read, and by five
or six, sometimes he said, he would say seven and
(04:00):
reviews buried a little bit. He had read two books
whose influence on his own work is really obvious, Alice
in Wonderland and Dracula. So if you ever read an
Edward Gory book and said, man, this is like if
Alice in Wonderland had a baby with Dracula, you were
exactly right. That was right. And although Gory described his
upbringing as very ordinary Midwestern childhood, in reality he moved
(04:24):
around a lot. By the time he left for college,
he had had at least twelve different addresses, including staying
with relatives in Florida for a brief stretch after his
parents divorce. He was overall a good student, and he
was bright enough that he skipped first grade, but sometimes
after changing schools, his work would waver a little as
(04:45):
he adjusted to a new environment. By eighth grade, Gory
was drawing illustrations for the school yearbook, as well as
participating in typing club, art club, Shakespeare Club, and glee club,
along with serving as assembly president. He also sometime in
those years learned to play the piano. The most stable
(05:06):
period of Gory's education before college was when he was
at Chicago's Francis W. Parker School. He enrolled there in
the ninth grade and he graduated on June five, and
while there he was clearly interested in art, hanging out
with a click of other artistically inclined students and participating
in his first school art show in nineteen thirty nine. Reportedly,
(05:30):
his senior yearbook had no photo of him, but a
blank spot where he'd draw himself in when people asked.
Gory was offered several college scholarships when he graduated from
high school, but World War Two was underway by the
time he got out of school and he was drafted
into the United States Army. He was only able to
take a couple of classes at the Art Institute of
(05:51):
Chicago before reporting for duty. From nineteen forty three until
after the end of the war, he served stateside as
a clerk, spending most of those years at Dugway Proving
Grounds in Utah. This was a testing ground for biological
and chemical weapons and their countermeasures. Gorey did not talk
a whole lot about his World War Two service, although
(06:13):
when it did come up in interviews, he virtually always
mentioned the Dugway Sheep incident, which took place much later.
That was a nineteen sixty eight incident in which thousands
of sheep were killed in western Utah, purportedly by nerve
agents from the facility. But it was while in the
military that Gory started writing plays as a way to
(06:33):
occupy his time. After being discharged from the army, Gorey
enrolled at Harvard, which was paid for by the g
I Bill, where he majored not in art but in
French literature. Even though he wasn't majoring in art, he
continued to both write and draw. He published poems and
stories in the campus magazine's signature, as well as illustrating
(06:55):
for the magazine and for other publications. At Harvard, Gorey
became friends and for a couple of years roommates with
poet Frank O'Hara. They decked out their dorm suite with
rented furniture and they made it into their own little salon.
Poet Donald Hall, another Harvard graduate, is quoted in Harvard Magazine,
is saying quote, they gave the best parties. O'Hara was
(07:17):
definitely the bigger partier of the two young men, though,
so they eventually drifted apart a bit. Uh and this
would be an ongoing theme in Gory's life. He was
charming and generous once you got close to him, but
he often preferred to be more solitary than social. Gory
graduated from Harvard in nine fifty and he stayed in Cambridge,
Massachusetts for a couple of years after that, working in
(07:39):
bookstores and helping to start the Poets Theater. The Poets
Theaters founders and original members were all students are recent
graduates from Harvard, including Alison Lurie, John Ashbury, and Donald Hall.
They would stage their own and revival works of poetic drama.
Even though he had been writing poems and since high
school and plays since his time in the Army, a
(08:02):
lot of Gory's work with the Poets Theater was more
as an artist and a designer for both the stage
and the productions, programs and promotional materials. You can still
see like scans of old programs that he drew in
these years. Immediately after he graduated, gory stayed in Massachusetts
for a couple of years, mainly working part time in bookstores,
(08:23):
before he made the move to New York City, and
that marked a huge shift in his life and career.
And we're going to talk about that more after we
pause for a sponsor break. While Edward Gorey liked his
work with the Poets Theater, he wasn't able to support
(08:46):
himself working part time at Cambridge Bookstores. In late nineteen two,
he designed a couple of book covers as a freelancer
for Barbara's Zimmerman and Jason Epstein, who he knew from Harvard.
Epstein soon offered him a job at the art department
at Double Day Anchor in New York City. He started
out doing paste up and corrections of other people's work
(09:08):
and eventually started designing book covers. He was good at it,
and he was efficient, which left him time to work
on his own projects and to do additional work as
a commercial illustrator. In his own work, he was primarily
drawing in black and white because he knew from his
day job that it would be hard to find a
publisher for full color illustrated books at the time, but
(09:29):
the covers that he was drawing while at Anchor usually
were in color, often with subtle, muted tones. There are
people who have written whole papers about Edward Gorey's use
of color on the book covers he was drawing for publishers,
especially since his own his own books are so often
in black and white. Gory's first book, which was The
(09:51):
Unstrung Harp or Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel, came out
in ninety three. This is about a frustrated man trying
to write a novel on the closest to an autobiographical work,
probably of of all of his work. The Listing Addict
followed in nineteen fifty four. Neither of these books sold
particularly well, though, and later on Gorey bought up copies
(10:13):
that he found on remainder tables to give them his
friend to France as presents. Soon after moving to New York,
Gorey found one of his truly great loves, and that
was the New York City Ballet under the helm of
its founder, George Balancheen. Gorey had been to the ballet
before he had gone as a child in Chicago, but
after attending a few performances in the nineteen nineteen fifty
(10:36):
three season, he started attending more and more of Balanchine's productions,
until starting in nineteen fifty six, he was attending literally
every performance. This took dedication, apart from the obvious that
that is a lot of ballet to his hand. At
Christmas time, it meant attending nearly forty performances of The Nutcracker.
(11:00):
I read an interview with him where the interviewer was like,
please explain this to me, how are you able to
sit through thirty nine performances of The Nutcracker. Here's why
I'm laughing so hard. I feel like should one day
someone attempted to write a biography of me, they would
be like, and she saw Star Wars thirty seven times
(11:21):
in the theater, So I understand a little bit. How
you could go see The Nutcracker forty times in a row. Well,
it was forty times in a row for like years
and years in a row. Like he did it every season,
and then he saved all of his ticket stubs from
all of these trips to the ballet. He loved the
ballet so much that he wrote The Lavender Leotard, or
(11:44):
Going a Lot to the New York City Ballet. Then
this initially came out in play bill as part of
the celebration for the Ballet's fiftieth anniversary. When The Lavender
Leotard came out as its own standalone book, Edward Gory
hand painted covers for its first run addition, because the
printer had not been able to match the exact right
(12:05):
shade of lavender. This is how dedicated he was to
the New York City Ballet. I love him so much.
Gory wrote one other book explicitly about ballet during his career,
The Gilded Bat, which came out in nineteen sixty six,
but the influence of ballet is clear in his other
works as well. The people he draws often have turned
out toes elongated, extended poses, and even when something terrible
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is happening, to them a sort of graceful presence on
the page. On nights when Gory wasn't going to the
New York City Ballet, he was often at the opera
or the movies, and he became a very recognizable presence
around New York City. He typically wore a full length
fur coat over jeans the shirt and converse sneakers, and
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he wore a lot of very heavy jewelry, especially rings,
a lot of which was made out of iron or brass.
He was a very recognizable person, so if you want
to throw together a fine Halloween costume, go as Edward Gorey.
It's a pretty easy one to put together, and it's
kind of nerdy and cool. He also started accumulating the
books that would eventually grow into his own personal library
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during this time. He loved to read, and he tended
to come back home with a book anytime he left
the house. A particular favorite was Agatha Christie, who he
had been reading and rereading since childhood. He also loved
Jane Austen, describing her as his idol. Another favorite was
Anthony Trollop, although he did not revisit Trollop's work very
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much as he got older, and he also loved poetry,
particularly the work of W. H. Auden. He did not
love everything he read, though, and he was very candid
about authors and actors and anyone else that he did
not particularly like, So he made no secret of the
fact that he despised nearly everything by Henry James in
(13:55):
spite of the fact that he had drawn the cover
art for some of Henry James's books. There's a little
sign in the Edward Gory House today that says, please
know Henry James and the Edward Gory House. I love
it so much. Gory's New York City apartment also became
home to a number of cats, many of them named
after characters in Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh century Japanese novel The
(14:19):
Tale of Genji, another lifelong favorite work of literature. Throughout
this time in New York City, Gory was writing and
illustrating his own books. Even though most people remember him
for his art, he really thought of himself as a
writer first. With every line, he would think, can this
make a drawing? But he didn't actually start illustrating until
(14:40):
he was satisfied with the words, and he revised as
he went. He would get one sentence exactly right before
he moved on to the next one. In seven Double
Day published Gory's The Doubtful Guest, which carries a lot
of the hallmarks of his later work. A peculiar guest
who looks a little like a penguin shows up, but
a man him inhabited by a family that looks somewhere
(15:02):
between Victorian and Edwardian. Whatever it is, the guest is
ill mannered and weird, and it has been bothering the
family for seventeen years. At the end of the book,
The Very Strange The object Lesson came out a year later.
I tried to figure out how to sum up the
object Lesson in a sentence. It's not really possible. It
(15:23):
involves like some tongs and prosthetic leg It's there's just there's.
It's very surreal. It's one of the things that people
point to when they talk about surrealist influences on Edward Gory.
So in ninety nine, The Doubtful Guest caught the eye
of Edmund Wilson. He wrote about it in an article
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called the Albums of Edward Gory in the December issue
of The New Yorker. This brought Edward Gory a lot
more attention than he had before, and it was the
first time a lot of people had ever heard of him,
although at this point he was creating so many book
covers for Double Day Anchor that they had almost certainly
seen something he had drawn before nineteen fifty nine was
(16:07):
also when Gorey left Double Day Anchor to serve as
art director at looking Glass Library, which set out to
repackage classic works for children. In addition to being the
art director, he helped select some of the twenty eight
books that were ultimately published, and he did illustrations for
a few of them. The most famous was his illustrated
War of the Worlds, which came out in nineteen sixty.
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He also illustrated a book of ghost stories called The
Haunted looking Glass, and he also chose the stories themselves
for that one. Looking Glass Library folded in nineteen sixty two,
and Gory started doing some work for other publishers as
well as working freelance, including designing advertisements. He also started
granting permission for his existing illustrations to be used in
(16:51):
other work. One example from later in his career is
an end of life planning booklet called Before I Go
You Should Know My Funeral and Final Lands, which was
distributed by Funeral Consumers Alliance. It sort of seems perfect
for Edward Gorey to have a great tease. Also in
nineteen sixty two, the much beloved The Gashly Crumb Tinese
(17:13):
debuted as part of a three volume work called The
Vinegar Works three Volumes of Moral Instruction, which also included
The Insect God and The West Wing. The Gashly Crumb
Chinese has never been out of print. That same year,
nineteen sixty two, was a big year Edward Gorey and
Francis Stelloff launched the Fantad Press. Stellof was founder of
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the Gotham Bookmark, which was a bookstore in Literary Haven
that had become the primary distribution point for a lot
of Corey's work. Gotham Bookmark is where Gory sat to
hand paint all those copies of the Lavender Leotard, and
when it opened an art gallery in nineteen sixty seven,
he was one of its first exhibitors. Gory and Steeloff
launched Fantad Press together because Gory had trouble finding a
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publisher for a lot of what he had written, and
he wanted a way to publish it himself. The press's
first book was The Beastly Baby, which was the first
word Gory had ever tried to publish. It was one
of the many books that came out under a pseudonym
that was an anagram or near anagram of Gorey's own
name in this case, Agdred Weary. The Beastly Baby features
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a big, sticky, shrieking, gurgling baby that does horrible things
like burning the upholstery with acid. According to Gory, it
made people so angry that mothers tore it up and
mailed the pieces back to him. I have always contended
that seeing this book as a kid is one of
the reasons I never wanted children. In the late nineteen sixties,
Gory started spending more time on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, transporting
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his cats with him back and forth between there in
New York City. He was always in New York during
ballet season, but eventually he would move out to the
Cape permanently. We were going to talk about that after
another QUI sponsor break. Edward Gorey had relatives who lived
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on Cape Cod, so he had visited there from time
to time over the years. As he started to spend
more time there in the sixties and seventies, he got
involved in local theaters all along the Cape, designing promotional
materials and costumes, staging work of his own, some of
it quite experimental. He continued to do some of the
same work in New York City as well. In three
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Gorey designed the set for a production of Dracula that
was to be staged on Nantucket, off the coast of
Cape cod. When he was drawing for books, Gorey usually
worked at about the same size as the finished printed product.
For this set, which looks like a black and white
cross hatched illustration from one of his books, he drew
larger images that were then blown up for the stage.
(19:58):
This same staging opened on Broadway on October twenty nine,
seventy seven, where it ran until January of nine eight.
It was nominated for three Tony Awards, one for the
sets in the costumes, which which Gorey had also designed,
and he was also It was also nominated for Best Revival.
Gory won the Tony for his costume work, and the
(20:20):
production also won the Tony for Best Revival. But I
always really bothered him that the sets had not won
as well. They are quite striking. It's one of those
things that happens, where are you shrug where it doesn't
make sense. We see it all the time. Apparently it
rankled him. I can understand that a musical adaptation of
(20:41):
Gory's own work, Gory Stories, appeared on Broadway in v
eight after getting its start at the University of Kentucky,
and Gory adored this production, which had a brief run
off Broadway in January and February, along with sixteen previews.
It officially opened on Broadway on October and it closed
(21:01):
the very same night. The New York Times and Daily
News had been on strike for months, and it just
had not gotten much publicity. There's there are, of course,
other stagings of Gory's work or place he was related with,
but Dracula on Broadway and gory Stories are the two
Broadway productions. Gory spent more and more time on Cape
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Cod in the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties.
He started easing up on his patronage of the New
York City Ballet as George Balanchine started passing some of
his leadership onto his successors. When Balantine died in three,
Gory decided it was time to think about leaving New
York entirely. At first, he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, where
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he stayed in a house belonging to relatives. Then he
moved into a two hundred year old sea captain's home
in yarmouthport that he'd bought with his Dracula royalties, and
he nicknamed it the Elephant House. The Elephant House became
home to Gory, his cat and his collections for the
rest of his life. In terms of cats, he typically
(22:04):
had five or six. He thought six cats were a
lot harder to keep up with than five, and seven
was far too many. This is exactly my numbers. Six
is where I'm maxed out. Five is kind of perfect. Yeah.
He had a whole thing about when when there are
six cats they somehow form this phalanx of cat and
(22:26):
then five is like not not having so much of
a supernatural level of combined cat intelligence. But seven is
right out in my experience. This is all entirely accurate. Uh.
And for collections, moving from a tiny New York apartment
to an entire house meant that he could spend his
weekends poking around yard sales and looking for treasures, and
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he collected all kinds of things. There were, of course, books,
of which he had approximately twenty five thousand by the
end of his life, but also cheese graters, salt and
pepper shakers, knickknacks, interesting rocks, toys, games, art, including some
terrifically bad art, on and on. He was often inspired
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by the Japanese concept of wabi sabi, which ties to
beauty found in the simple, the impermanent, and the mundane.
His time on Cape cod really contributed to the perception
that Edward Gorey was a recluse in New York City.
He had gone out almost every night, especially when the
ballet was performing, always wearing this very recognizable fur coat
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and jewelry. But after he moved into the Elephant House
he stayed whole a lot more. In addition to working,
he read a vast number of books, and he also
watched a whole lot of TV. He spoke often for
his love of things like Dr Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
and daytime soap operas. Gorey's work is also on TV.
(23:54):
In he worked with Derek Lamb to animate the Introduction
to Mystery from Boston Public Television, which for some people
was their first introduction to Edward Gory's work. Often, while
he was watching all this television, he'd make little bean
bag creatures filled with rice, recognizable animals like bats, frogs,
and elephants, as well as characters like fig Bash. A
(24:17):
long armed Creature from the Raging Tide or the Black
Dolls Inmbroglio, who would later also have his own alphabet book.
Some of this perception that Edward Gorey was reclusive came
from interviews as well. He could be quite charming and
gregarious in interviews, but really only if the interviewer was
asking him interesting questions. If you sat down with Edward
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Gorey with a list of boring, predictable, obvious questions, you
might get a bunch of one word or evasive answers
in response, especially if other interviewers before you had already
asked those same boring, predictable, obvious things. So if you
walked into an interview with Edward Gorey and you asked
him why do you like to draw such maccab pictures?
(25:01):
When he had been asked that question and also hated
being called macab in the first place, you might get
the impression he didn't like talking to people. To add
to all this solitude and curmudge, Linus Gory always lived
alone and he never had a serious romantic relationship. Combined
(25:21):
with an often campy way of speaking and presenting himself,
this led people naturally to wonder about his sexual orientation.
In interview with Boston magazine, Lisa's Salad asked him what
his sexual preferences were, and he answered, quote, well, I'm
neither one thing nor the other. Particularly later in that
same interview, she asked, is the sexlessness of your books
(25:44):
a product of your a sexuality? And he answered I
would say so, although every now and then someone will
say my books are seething with repressed sexuality. These ideas
came up in other interviews as well. For example, in
four he told Richard die of Boston Globe Magazine quote,
sometimes I asked myself why I never ended up with
(26:04):
somebody for the rest of my life, and then I
realized that obviously I didn't want to, or I would have.
So it's definitely true that Gory led a solitary life,
particularly once he moved to Cape cod and he tended
not to answer the door, or the phone or the mail,
although that led to him feeling guilty about unopened piles
of fan mail, which he once called thank you for
(26:26):
being you crap. He didn't like to be flattered or
fussed over or bothered. He didn't want to talk about
interpretations of his work because he liked the idea of
people's imaginations having their own possibilities. I'm just putting it
out there. I will read thank you for being you
crap any day of the week. At the same time,
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though it is really not accurate to think of Edward
Gorey as a hermit or a recluse. He gave most
of those little being bag creatures that he made a
way to his friends, even as he developed a cult
fan follow He was listed in the phone book, and
he was generous with his time when fans ran into
him out in public. If he literally knocked on the door,
(27:07):
he might not answer it, but if he did answer it,
expecting it to be someone he knew, he would talk
to you. He ate out almost every day, with Jack's
Outback Restaurant being a particular favorite. He did a lot
of work that required him to be social, particularly working
with community theaters all up and down Cape Cod staging plays,
(27:27):
and working on sets and costumes. Edward Gorey wrote and
published books continually from nineteen fifty three all the way
to the end of his life. He created more than
one hundred books of his own, and also designed the
covers for hundreds of others, as well as handling the
design and typography for at least a hundred more. His
(27:48):
illustrations accompanied the writings of T. S. Eliott, John Updyke,
Lewis Carroll, Virginia, Wolf, H. G. Wells, bram Stoker, and
Gilbert and Sullivan, among others. My introduction to T. S.
Eliot was actually an addition of Old Possums Book of
Practical Cats illustrated by Edward Gorey, which Edward Gorey's cats
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are a lot friendlier and goofier than maybe anything else
that he drew, Like, they often have these big doofy
smiles on their faces, and they look really loungey and cuddly,
and so I got this impression that T. S. Eliot
was like a uh, a little snug bug. Yeah. And
then I got to college and I had to read
(28:30):
The Waste Land, and I was like, what is the
where are the kiddies? I still have that book. So,
because Gory's original books are illustrated and they often feature
children as characters, and because about twenty of these original
books are alphabet books, sometimes people think of him as
(28:51):
a children's author, And because terrible things often are happening
to these children's these children in the books. He's also
often imagined to have hated children, but really, in his
adult life he didn't know any children. He didn't have
any anti antipathy for them at all. At every time
this came up in an interview, he consistently would be like, no,
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I don't actually know any kids. While many of his
books were suitable for most ages, others had a decidedly
adult twist. For example, he illustrated the recently Deflowered Girl
The Right Thing to Say on Every Dubious Occasion, published
under the pseudonym of Miss Hyacinth Phipps. It's a faux
(29:33):
advice manual written by mel Juffey for what ladies should
say after being the flowered in a variety of odd
and sometimes awful situations. Gorey also wrote an illustrated The
Curious Sofa of pornographic work by augdred Weary, which contains
no nudity or explicit language, but also points the imagination
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in a very particular direction. Today, many but not all
of Corey's books are available in collect shins with names
like Amfiguory and AM Figory two. The first of these
came out in nineteen seventy two. Although Gory himself preferred
his books as they were originally printed and bound, today
a lot of them are out of print. Outside of
(30:13):
these collections, you can definitely find a lot of standalone
books too, but there are things that are in those
collections that it's it's hard to find in any other way.
Gory died on April fifteenth, two thousand, at the age
of seventy five, following a heart attack that he had
had a few days before. He was cremated, with part
of his ashes sent to be buried with his family.
(30:35):
Part floated out to sea on a raft made of
branches from the magnolia tree that grows outside of Elephant House,
in a small part saved to be scattered in the
yard where the cats were to be buried after the
last of their deaths. He left most of his estate
to the Edward Gory Charitable Trust, which funds animal welfare organizations.
Edward Gorey was actually really interested in animal welfare, particularly
(30:58):
cats and bats, and in general uh the welfare of animals.
He actually gave up wearing all those famous fur coats
as he became more interested in animal where welfare. Later
on in his life, when a family of raccoons invaded
the Elephant House, he let them keep living there, almost
as penance for having worn a raccoon coat for so long.
(31:21):
By the time he died, he had amassed a collection
of twenty one fur coats, which the found The Foundation
started off selling at a rate of one per year,
and then sold the rest at auction in as a fundraiser.
In two thousand two, the Highland Street Foundation purchased the
Edward Gory Home, and today it is the Edward Gory
House Museum, which is open seasonally. Edward Gorey's influence continued
(31:45):
to grow in the last decades of his life and
after his death. In an article in The New York Times,
Daniel Handler, the author of a series of Unfortunate Events,
which was published under the name Lemony Snicket, said quote, well,
I was first writing a series of Unfortunate event events.
I was wandering around everywhere saying I am a complete
(32:06):
rip off of Edward Gory and everyone said, here's that. Now,
everyone says, that's right, you are a complete rip off
of Edward Gorey. Uh. That delights me. Daniel Handler dragging
himself cracks me up a little bit. The first volume
of that series of books came out the year before
Edward Gorey's death. Neil Gaiman had actually said that he
(32:29):
wanted Edward Gorey to illustrate his book Coral Line, but
Gory died the day that game and finished writing it.
I don't actually know if Tim Burton has ever specifically
cited Edward Gorey as an influence, but a lot of
people writing about Tim Burton make that connection. Well. The
style is very similar of his drawings, for sure. Um
(32:51):
So whether he said it or not, I think you
can't discount it. Like there's a very valid connection there. Uh.
And Tracy included this quote in her out to end
with quote for some reason, my mission in life is
to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we
should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what
the world is like. And that was Edward Gory is
(33:14):
quoted by Richard Dyer in Boston Globe Magazine in We'll
also put a link in our show notes just for
fun from the Great sadly no longer actively in production.
Uh website the toast called how to Tell if You're
in an Edward Gory book, which is delightful that is
(33:35):
Edward Gory. Thank you so much for joining us today
for this classic. If you have heard any kind of
email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during
the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It
might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email
address again. You can now reach us at History podcast
(33:56):
at i heart radio dot com, and we're all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
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Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
(34:18):
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, listeners. This episode is part of our new playlist
to help everybody get through these times we're living in.
It's our host faves playlist. Yeah, these are just some
of our personal favorites, ones that we had a particular
affinity for, and because these are stressful and trying times,
we tried to stick to the ones that weren't quite
(00:22):
as dour. So hopefully they'll give you a little lift.
Stay safe. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
(00:45):
Once you have read some of Edward Gorey's books, it
is almost impossible to mistake his work for anyone else's,
unless maybe they are intentionally working in the style of
Edward gory His black and white pen and illustrations look
almost like engravings. They're just full of hatching and cross hatching.
The words are lettered by hand, and the stories a
(01:08):
lot of times unfold through either rhyming couplets or limericks
or some of their verse. The plots a lot of
times and really ambiguously, or they never resolve at all.
It's this gloomy, foreboding, typically Edwardian world that's populated by
bats and cats and odd creatures and grown ups who
(01:29):
are usually in very glamorous clothing, and a lot of
children who somehow come to harm. And one of one
of his most well known books, which is an alphabet
book called The Gashly cramb Tiny's m is for Maud
who was swept out to see n is for Neville
who died of anu. The other Tinys are and assaulted
(01:52):
by bears, their sucks dry by leeches, they're run through
with all's it's all very darkly whimsical. So if don't
know much about Edward Gorey's life, you might imagine the
person who did this to be a dour Englishman with
the peak of his career, maybe sometime in the nineteen
twenties or thirties, whose own childhood was marked with a
(02:14):
series of tragic deaths. But Edward Gorey was none of
those things. No, he's delightful. He's who were going to
talk about today. Edward Gorey, nicknamed Ted, was born Edward St.
John Gory on February twenty second in Chicago, Illinois. He
was the only child of Edward Leo Gory and Helen Garvey,
(02:37):
who divorced when he was eleven. His father later remarried
singer and guitarist Karina Mura, who was most well known
for being the guitar player at Rick's Cafe America in
the movie Casablanca. Gory's parents remarried one another in nineteen
fifty two. Already it's kind of whimsical and cooky, I know.
(02:57):
The family had predominantly Irish roots, with ancestors on both
sides immigrating to the United States in the mid to
late nineteenth century. Although his father was Roman Catholic and
his mother was Episcopalian, Gory himself wasn't particularly religious, and
later on in his life he would say that if
he was anything, he was a Taoist. He was also
(03:18):
quite precocious, and he started drawing before he was even
two years old. His oldest surviving drawing, called the Sausage Train,
is of the trains that passed by his grandparents house
in Chicago, and he drew that when he was about
eighteen months old. This is full of oblong shapes that
are recognizably trains, but they were also very definitely drawn
(03:39):
by a small child, So it's not like he just
whipped out realistic drawings and people went, Wunderkin, No, I
mean it's uh. It is starting startlingly adept for an
eighteen month old, but still obviously a child's drawing. By three,
Edward Gorey had taught himself to read, and by five
or six, sometimes he said, he would say seven and
(04:00):
reviews buried a little bit. He had read two books
whose influence on his own work is really obvious, Alice
in Wonderland and Dracula. So if you ever read an
Edward Gory book and said, man, this is like if
Alice in Wonderland had a baby with Dracula, you were
exactly right. That was right. And although Gory described his
upbringing as very ordinary Midwestern childhood, in reality he moved
(04:24):
around a lot. By the time he left for college,
he had had at least twelve different addresses, including staying
with relatives in Florida for a brief stretch after his
parents divorce. He was overall a good student, and he
was bright enough that he skipped first grade, but sometimes
after changing schools, his work would waver a little as
(04:45):
he adjusted to a new environment. By eighth grade, Gory
was drawing illustrations for the school yearbook, as well as
participating in typing club, art club, Shakespeare Club, and glee club,
along with serving as assembly president. He also sometime in
those years learned to play the piano. The most stable
(05:06):
period of Gory's education before college was when he was
at Chicago's Francis W. Parker School. He enrolled there in
the ninth grade and he graduated on June five, and
while there he was clearly interested in art, hanging out
with a click of other artistically inclined students and participating
in his first school art show in nineteen thirty nine. Reportedly,
(05:30):
his senior yearbook had no photo of him, but a
blank spot where he'd draw himself in when people asked.
Gory was offered several college scholarships when he graduated from
high school, but World War Two was underway by the
time he got out of school and he was drafted
into the United States Army. He was only able to
take a couple of classes at the Art Institute of
(05:51):
Chicago before reporting for duty. From nineteen forty three until
after the end of the war, he served stateside as
a clerk, spending most of those years at Dugway Proving
Grounds in Utah. This was a testing ground for biological
and chemical weapons and their countermeasures. Gorey did not talk
a whole lot about his World War Two service, although
(06:13):
when it did come up in interviews, he virtually always
mentioned the Dugway Sheep incident, which took place much later.
That was a nineteen sixty eight incident in which thousands
of sheep were killed in western Utah, purportedly by nerve
agents from the facility. But it was while in the
military that Gory started writing plays as a way to
(06:33):
occupy his time. After being discharged from the army, Gorey
enrolled at Harvard, which was paid for by the g
I Bill, where he majored not in art but in
French literature. Even though he wasn't majoring in art, he
continued to both write and draw. He published poems and
stories in the campus magazine's signature, as well as illustrating
(06:55):
for the magazine and for other publications. At Harvard, Gorey
became friends and for a couple of years roommates with
poet Frank O'Hara. They decked out their dorm suite with
rented furniture and they made it into their own little salon.
Poet Donald Hall, another Harvard graduate, is quoted in Harvard Magazine,
is saying quote, they gave the best parties. O'Hara was
(07:17):
definitely the bigger partier of the two young men, though,
so they eventually drifted apart a bit. Uh and this
would be an ongoing theme in Gory's life. He was
charming and generous once you got close to him, but
he often preferred to be more solitary than social. Gory
graduated from Harvard in nine fifty and he stayed in Cambridge,
Massachusetts for a couple of years after that, working in
(07:39):
bookstores and helping to start the Poets Theater. The Poets
Theaters founders and original members were all students are recent
graduates from Harvard, including Alison Lurie, John Ashbury, and Donald Hall.
They would stage their own and revival works of poetic drama.
Even though he had been writing poems and since high
school and plays since his time in the Army, a
(08:02):
lot of Gory's work with the Poets Theater was more
as an artist and a designer for both the stage
and the productions, programs and promotional materials. You can still
see like scans of old programs that he drew in
these years. Immediately after he graduated, gory stayed in Massachusetts
for a couple of years, mainly working part time in bookstores,
(08:23):
before he made the move to New York City, and
that marked a huge shift in his life and career.
And we're going to talk about that more after we
pause for a sponsor break. While Edward Gorey liked his
work with the Poets Theater, he wasn't able to support
(08:46):
himself working part time at Cambridge Bookstores. In late nineteen two,
he designed a couple of book covers as a freelancer
for Barbara's Zimmerman and Jason Epstein, who he knew from Harvard.
Epstein soon offered him a job at the art department
at Double Day Anchor in New York City. He started
out doing paste up and corrections of other people's work
(09:08):
and eventually started designing book covers. He was good at it,
and he was efficient, which left him time to work
on his own projects and to do additional work as
a commercial illustrator. In his own work, he was primarily
drawing in black and white because he knew from his
day job that it would be hard to find a
publisher for full color illustrated books at the time, but
(09:29):
the covers that he was drawing while at Anchor usually
were in color, often with subtle, muted tones. There are
people who have written whole papers about Edward Gorey's use
of color on the book covers he was drawing for publishers,
especially since his own his own books are so often
in black and white. Gory's first book, which was The
(09:51):
Unstrung Harp or Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel, came out
in ninety three. This is about a frustrated man trying
to write a novel on the closest to an autobiographical work,
probably of of all of his work. The Listing Addict
followed in nineteen fifty four. Neither of these books sold
particularly well, though, and later on Gorey bought up copies
(10:13):
that he found on remainder tables to give them his
friend to France as presents. Soon after moving to New York,
Gorey found one of his truly great loves, and that
was the New York City Ballet under the helm of
its founder, George Balancheen. Gorey had been to the ballet
before he had gone as a child in Chicago, but
after attending a few performances in the nineteen nineteen fifty
(10:36):
three season, he started attending more and more of Balanchine's productions,
until starting in nineteen fifty six, he was attending literally
every performance. This took dedication, apart from the obvious that
that is a lot of ballet to his hand. At
Christmas time, it meant attending nearly forty performances of The Nutcracker.
(11:00):
I read an interview with him where the interviewer was like,
please explain this to me, how are you able to
sit through thirty nine performances of The Nutcracker. Here's why
I'm laughing so hard. I feel like should one day
someone attempted to write a biography of me, they would
be like, and she saw Star Wars thirty seven times
(11:21):
in the theater, So I understand a little bit. How
you could go see The Nutcracker forty times in a row. Well,
it was forty times in a row for like years
and years in a row. Like he did it every season,
and then he saved all of his ticket stubs from
all of these trips to the ballet. He loved the
ballet so much that he wrote The Lavender Leotard, or
(11:44):
Going a Lot to the New York City Ballet. Then
this initially came out in play bill as part of
the celebration for the Ballet's fiftieth anniversary. When The Lavender
Leotard came out as its own standalone book, Edward Gory
hand painted covers for its first run addition, because the
printer had not been able to match the exact right
(12:05):
shade of lavender. This is how dedicated he was to
the New York City Ballet. I love him so much.
Gory wrote one other book explicitly about ballet during his career,
The Gilded Bat, which came out in nineteen sixty six,
but the influence of ballet is clear in his other
works as well. The people he draws often have turned
out toes elongated, extended poses, and even when something terrible
(12:29):
is happening, to them a sort of graceful presence on
the page. On nights when Gory wasn't going to the
New York City Ballet, he was often at the opera
or the movies, and he became a very recognizable presence
around New York City. He typically wore a full length
fur coat over jeans the shirt and converse sneakers, and
(12:49):
he wore a lot of very heavy jewelry, especially rings,
a lot of which was made out of iron or brass.
He was a very recognizable person, so if you want
to throw together a fine Halloween costume, go as Edward Gorey.
It's a pretty easy one to put together, and it's
kind of nerdy and cool. He also started accumulating the
books that would eventually grow into his own personal library
(13:11):
during this time. He loved to read, and he tended
to come back home with a book anytime he left
the house. A particular favorite was Agatha Christie, who he
had been reading and rereading since childhood. He also loved
Jane Austen, describing her as his idol. Another favorite was
Anthony Trollop, although he did not revisit Trollop's work very
(13:32):
much as he got older, and he also loved poetry,
particularly the work of W. H. Auden. He did not
love everything he read, though, and he was very candid
about authors and actors and anyone else that he did
not particularly like, So he made no secret of the
fact that he despised nearly everything by Henry James in
(13:55):
spite of the fact that he had drawn the cover
art for some of Henry James's books. There's a little
sign in the Edward Gory House today that says, please
know Henry James and the Edward Gory House. I love
it so much. Gory's New York City apartment also became
home to a number of cats, many of them named
after characters in Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh century Japanese novel The
(14:19):
Tale of Genji, another lifelong favorite work of literature. Throughout
this time in New York City, Gory was writing and
illustrating his own books. Even though most people remember him
for his art, he really thought of himself as a
writer first. With every line, he would think, can this
make a drawing? But he didn't actually start illustrating until
(14:40):
he was satisfied with the words, and he revised as
he went. He would get one sentence exactly right before
he moved on to the next one. In seven Double
Day published Gory's The Doubtful Guest, which carries a lot
of the hallmarks of his later work. A peculiar guest
who looks a little like a penguin shows up, but
a man him inhabited by a family that looks somewhere
(15:02):
between Victorian and Edwardian. Whatever it is, the guest is
ill mannered and weird, and it has been bothering the
family for seventeen years. At the end of the book,
The Very Strange The object Lesson came out a year later.
I tried to figure out how to sum up the
object Lesson in a sentence. It's not really possible. It
(15:23):
involves like some tongs and prosthetic leg It's there's just there's.
It's very surreal. It's one of the things that people
point to when they talk about surrealist influences on Edward Gory.
So in ninety nine, The Doubtful Guest caught the eye
of Edmund Wilson. He wrote about it in an article
(15:44):
called the Albums of Edward Gory in the December issue
of The New Yorker. This brought Edward Gory a lot
more attention than he had before, and it was the
first time a lot of people had ever heard of him,
although at this point he was creating so many book
covers for Double Day Anchor that they had almost certainly
seen something he had drawn before nineteen fifty nine was
(16:07):
also when Gorey left Double Day Anchor to serve as
art director at looking Glass Library, which set out to
repackage classic works for children. In addition to being the
art director, he helped select some of the twenty eight
books that were ultimately published, and he did illustrations for
a few of them. The most famous was his illustrated
War of the Worlds, which came out in nineteen sixty.
(16:29):
He also illustrated a book of ghost stories called The
Haunted looking Glass, and he also chose the stories themselves
for that one. Looking Glass Library folded in nineteen sixty two,
and Gory started doing some work for other publishers as
well as working freelance, including designing advertisements. He also started
granting permission for his existing illustrations to be used in
(16:51):
other work. One example from later in his career is
an end of life planning booklet called Before I Go
You Should Know My Funeral and Final Lands, which was
distributed by Funeral Consumers Alliance. It sort of seems perfect
for Edward Gorey to have a great tease. Also in
nineteen sixty two, the much beloved The Gashly Crumb Tinese
(17:13):
debuted as part of a three volume work called The
Vinegar Works three Volumes of Moral Instruction, which also included
The Insect God and The West Wing. The Gashly Crumb
Chinese has never been out of print. That same year,
nineteen sixty two, was a big year Edward Gorey and
Francis Stelloff launched the Fantad Press. Stellof was founder of
(17:36):
the Gotham Bookmark, which was a bookstore in Literary Haven
that had become the primary distribution point for a lot
of Corey's work. Gotham Bookmark is where Gory sat to
hand paint all those copies of the Lavender Leotard, and
when it opened an art gallery in nineteen sixty seven,
he was one of its first exhibitors. Gory and Steeloff
launched Fantad Press together because Gory had trouble finding a
(17:59):
publisher for a lot of what he had written, and
he wanted a way to publish it himself. The press's
first book was The Beastly Baby, which was the first
word Gory had ever tried to publish. It was one
of the many books that came out under a pseudonym
that was an anagram or near anagram of Gorey's own
name in this case, Agdred Weary. The Beastly Baby features
(18:22):
a big, sticky, shrieking, gurgling baby that does horrible things
like burning the upholstery with acid. According to Gory, it
made people so angry that mothers tore it up and
mailed the pieces back to him. I have always contended
that seeing this book as a kid is one of
the reasons I never wanted children. In the late nineteen sixties,
Gory started spending more time on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, transporting
(18:47):
his cats with him back and forth between there in
New York City. He was always in New York during
ballet season, but eventually he would move out to the
Cape permanently. We were going to talk about that after
another QUI sponsor break. Edward Gorey had relatives who lived
(19:12):
on Cape Cod, so he had visited there from time
to time over the years. As he started to spend
more time there in the sixties and seventies, he got
involved in local theaters all along the Cape, designing promotional
materials and costumes, staging work of his own, some of
it quite experimental. He continued to do some of the
same work in New York City as well. In three
(19:35):
Gorey designed the set for a production of Dracula that
was to be staged on Nantucket, off the coast of
Cape cod. When he was drawing for books, Gorey usually
worked at about the same size as the finished printed product.
For this set, which looks like a black and white
cross hatched illustration from one of his books, he drew
larger images that were then blown up for the stage.
(19:58):
This same staging opened on Broadway on October twenty nine,
seventy seven, where it ran until January of nine eight.
It was nominated for three Tony Awards, one for the
sets in the costumes, which which Gorey had also designed,
and he was also It was also nominated for Best Revival.
Gory won the Tony for his costume work, and the
(20:20):
production also won the Tony for Best Revival. But I
always really bothered him that the sets had not won
as well. They are quite striking. It's one of those
things that happens, where are you shrug where it doesn't
make sense. We see it all the time. Apparently it
rankled him. I can understand that a musical adaptation of
(20:41):
Gory's own work, Gory Stories, appeared on Broadway in v
eight after getting its start at the University of Kentucky,
and Gory adored this production, which had a brief run
off Broadway in January and February, along with sixteen previews.
It officially opened on Broadway on October and it closed
(21:01):
the very same night. The New York Times and Daily
News had been on strike for months, and it just
had not gotten much publicity. There's there are, of course,
other stagings of Gory's work or place he was related with,
but Dracula on Broadway and gory Stories are the two
Broadway productions. Gory spent more and more time on Cape
(21:22):
Cod in the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties.
He started easing up on his patronage of the New
York City Ballet as George Balanchine started passing some of
his leadership onto his successors. When Balantine died in three,
Gory decided it was time to think about leaving New
York entirely. At first, he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, where
(21:44):
he stayed in a house belonging to relatives. Then he
moved into a two hundred year old sea captain's home
in yarmouthport that he'd bought with his Dracula royalties, and
he nicknamed it the Elephant House. The Elephant House became
home to Gory, his cat and his collections for the
rest of his life. In terms of cats, he typically
(22:04):
had five or six. He thought six cats were a
lot harder to keep up with than five, and seven
was far too many. This is exactly my numbers. Six
is where I'm maxed out. Five is kind of perfect. Yeah.
He had a whole thing about when when there are
six cats they somehow form this phalanx of cat and
(22:26):
then five is like not not having so much of
a supernatural level of combined cat intelligence. But seven is
right out in my experience. This is all entirely accurate. Uh.
And for collections, moving from a tiny New York apartment
to an entire house meant that he could spend his
weekends poking around yard sales and looking for treasures, and
(22:48):
he collected all kinds of things. There were, of course, books,
of which he had approximately twenty five thousand by the
end of his life, but also cheese graters, salt and
pepper shakers, knickknacks, interesting rocks, toys, games, art, including some
terrifically bad art, on and on. He was often inspired
(23:12):
by the Japanese concept of wabi sabi, which ties to
beauty found in the simple, the impermanent, and the mundane.
His time on Cape cod really contributed to the perception
that Edward Gorey was a recluse in New York City.
He had gone out almost every night, especially when the
ballet was performing, always wearing this very recognizable fur coat
(23:33):
and jewelry. But after he moved into the Elephant House
he stayed whole a lot more. In addition to working,
he read a vast number of books, and he also
watched a whole lot of TV. He spoke often for
his love of things like Dr Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
and daytime soap operas. Gorey's work is also on TV.
(23:54):
In he worked with Derek Lamb to animate the Introduction
to Mystery from Boston Public Television, which for some people
was their first introduction to Edward Gory's work. Often, while
he was watching all this television, he'd make little bean
bag creatures filled with rice, recognizable animals like bats, frogs,
and elephants, as well as characters like fig Bash. A
(24:17):
long armed Creature from the Raging Tide or the Black
Dolls Inmbroglio, who would later also have his own alphabet book.
Some of this perception that Edward Gorey was reclusive came
from interviews as well. He could be quite charming and
gregarious in interviews, but really only if the interviewer was
asking him interesting questions. If you sat down with Edward
(24:40):
Gorey with a list of boring, predictable, obvious questions, you
might get a bunch of one word or evasive answers
in response, especially if other interviewers before you had already
asked those same boring, predictable, obvious things. So if you
walked into an interview with Edward Gorey and you asked
him why do you like to draw such maccab pictures?
(25:01):
When he had been asked that question and also hated
being called macab in the first place, you might get
the impression he didn't like talking to people. To add
to all this solitude and curmudge, Linus Gory always lived
alone and he never had a serious romantic relationship. Combined
(25:21):
with an often campy way of speaking and presenting himself,
this led people naturally to wonder about his sexual orientation.
In interview with Boston magazine, Lisa's Salad asked him what
his sexual preferences were, and he answered, quote, well, I'm
neither one thing nor the other. Particularly later in that
same interview, she asked, is the sexlessness of your books
(25:44):
a product of your a sexuality? And he answered I
would say so, although every now and then someone will
say my books are seething with repressed sexuality. These ideas
came up in other interviews as well. For example, in
four he told Richard die of Boston Globe Magazine quote,
sometimes I asked myself why I never ended up with
(26:04):
somebody for the rest of my life, and then I
realized that obviously I didn't want to, or I would have.
So it's definitely true that Gory led a solitary life,
particularly once he moved to Cape cod and he tended
not to answer the door, or the phone or the mail,
although that led to him feeling guilty about unopened piles
of fan mail, which he once called thank you for
(26:26):
being you crap. He didn't like to be flattered or
fussed over or bothered. He didn't want to talk about
interpretations of his work because he liked the idea of
people's imaginations having their own possibilities. I'm just putting it
out there. I will read thank you for being you
crap any day of the week. At the same time,
(26:47):
though it is really not accurate to think of Edward
Gorey as a hermit or a recluse. He gave most
of those little being bag creatures that he made a
way to his friends, even as he developed a cult
fan follow He was listed in the phone book, and
he was generous with his time when fans ran into
him out in public. If he literally knocked on the door,
(27:07):
he might not answer it, but if he did answer it,
expecting it to be someone he knew, he would talk
to you. He ate out almost every day, with Jack's
Outback Restaurant being a particular favorite. He did a lot
of work that required him to be social, particularly working
with community theaters all up and down Cape Cod staging plays,
(27:27):
and working on sets and costumes. Edward Gorey wrote and
published books continually from nineteen fifty three all the way
to the end of his life. He created more than
one hundred books of his own, and also designed the
covers for hundreds of others, as well as handling the
design and typography for at least a hundred more. His
(27:48):
illustrations accompanied the writings of T. S. Eliott, John Updyke,
Lewis Carroll, Virginia, Wolf, H. G. Wells, bram Stoker, and
Gilbert and Sullivan, among others. My introduction to T. S.
Eliot was actually an addition of Old Possums Book of
Practical Cats illustrated by Edward Gorey, which Edward Gorey's cats
(28:09):
are a lot friendlier and goofier than maybe anything else
that he drew, Like, they often have these big doofy
smiles on their faces, and they look really loungey and cuddly,
and so I got this impression that T. S. Eliot
was like a uh, a little snug bug. Yeah. And
then I got to college and I had to read
(28:30):
The Waste Land, and I was like, what is the
where are the kiddies? I still have that book. So,
because Gory's original books are illustrated and they often feature
children as characters, and because about twenty of these original
books are alphabet books, sometimes people think of him as
(28:51):
a children's author, And because terrible things often are happening
to these children's these children in the books. He's also
often imagined to have hated children, but really, in his
adult life he didn't know any children. He didn't have
any anti antipathy for them at all. At every time
this came up in an interview, he consistently would be like, no,
(29:12):
I don't actually know any kids. While many of his
books were suitable for most ages, others had a decidedly
adult twist. For example, he illustrated the recently Deflowered Girl
The Right Thing to Say on Every Dubious Occasion, published
under the pseudonym of Miss Hyacinth Phipps. It's a faux
(29:33):
advice manual written by mel Juffey for what ladies should
say after being the flowered in a variety of odd
and sometimes awful situations. Gorey also wrote an illustrated The
Curious Sofa of pornographic work by augdred Weary, which contains
no nudity or explicit language, but also points the imagination
(29:53):
in a very particular direction. Today, many but not all
of Corey's books are available in collect shins with names
like Amfiguory and AM Figory two. The first of these
came out in nineteen seventy two. Although Gory himself preferred
his books as they were originally printed and bound, today
a lot of them are out of print. Outside of
(30:13):
these collections, you can definitely find a lot of standalone
books too, but there are things that are in those
collections that it's it's hard to find in any other way.
Gory died on April fifteenth, two thousand, at the age
of seventy five, following a heart attack that he had
had a few days before. He was cremated, with part
of his ashes sent to be buried with his family.
(30:35):
Part floated out to sea on a raft made of
branches from the magnolia tree that grows outside of Elephant House,
in a small part saved to be scattered in the
yard where the cats were to be buried after the
last of their deaths. He left most of his estate
to the Edward Gory Charitable Trust, which funds animal welfare organizations.
Edward Gorey was actually really interested in animal welfare, particularly
(30:58):
cats and bats, and in general uh the welfare of animals.
He actually gave up wearing all those famous fur coats
as he became more interested in animal where welfare. Later
on in his life, when a family of raccoons invaded
the Elephant House, he let them keep living there, almost
as penance for having worn a raccoon coat for so long.
(31:21):
By the time he died, he had amassed a collection
of twenty one fur coats, which the found The Foundation
started off selling at a rate of one per year,
and then sold the rest at auction in as a fundraiser.
In two thousand two, the Highland Street Foundation purchased the
Edward Gory Home, and today it is the Edward Gory
House Museum, which is open seasonally. Edward Gorey's influence continued
(31:45):
to grow in the last decades of his life and
after his death. In an article in The New York Times,
Daniel Handler, the author of a series of Unfortunate Events,
which was published under the name Lemony Snicket, said quote, well,
I was first writing a series of Unfortunate event events.
I was wandering around everywhere saying I am a complete
(32:06):
rip off of Edward Gory and everyone said, here's that. Now,
everyone says, that's right, you are a complete rip off
of Edward Gorey. Uh. That delights me. Daniel Handler dragging
himself cracks me up a little bit. The first volume
of that series of books came out the year before
Edward Gorey's death. Neil Gaiman had actually said that he
(32:29):
wanted Edward Gorey to illustrate his book Coral Line, but
Gory died the day that game and finished writing it.
I don't actually know if Tim Burton has ever specifically
cited Edward Gorey as an influence, but a lot of
people writing about Tim Burton make that connection. Well. The
style is very similar of his drawings, for sure. Um
(32:51):
So whether he said it or not, I think you
can't discount it. Like there's a very valid connection there. Uh.
And Tracy included this quote in her out to end
with quote for some reason, my mission in life is
to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we
should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what
the world is like. And that was Edward Gory is
(33:14):
quoted by Richard Dyer in Boston Globe Magazine in We'll
also put a link in our show notes just for
fun from the Great sadly no longer actively in production.
Uh website the toast called how to Tell if You're
in an Edward Gory book, which is delightful that is
(33:35):
Edward Gory. Thank you so much for joining us today
for this classic. If you have heard any kind of
email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during
the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It
might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email
address again. You can now reach us at History podcast
(33:56):
at i heart radio dot com, and we're all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
(34:18):
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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