Celebrating 100 Years of Edward Gorey
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I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. We're coming off a short series of episodes here in which we spoke to directors and screenwriters involved in this year's Oscar-nominated films. We had on Rommel Ross talking about Nickel Boys, James Mangold talking about A Complete Unknown, Peter Straughan talking about Conclave, and Winnie Holtzman talking about Wicked Part One.

Hopefully you listened to some of them. I recommend you listen to all of them. This week, however, we're back firmly in bookland on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of my all-time favorites, Edward Gorey.

Gorey was a writer of more than 100 books, all of which he also illustrated in his very distinctive style. Black and white, pen and ink drawings full of hatching and cross hatching. Those books are full of men and women in Edwardian and Victorian dress. Think top hats and heavy coats, as well as children who are almost always in peril.

Arguably his most famous work, The Gashly Crumptinies, is a book of 26 scenes proceeding from A to Z in which children meet just absolutely terrible ends. It starts with A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs, and B is for Basil, assaulted by bears, and ends with Y is for Yorick, whose head was knocked in, and Z is for Zilla, who drank too much gin.

I love the grim and ironic and more than a little funny Gashly Crumptineys, as do countless people the world over. Luckily, I have one of those people here today with me. Sadie Stein is an editor at the Book Review. Sadie, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

Sadie, we should absolutely start by talking about how we were each first introduced to Edward Gord. But first, I just want you to treat me like I know nothing about the man for the sake of our listeners. And how do you describe this person? How do you describe his work?

I've been thinking about it a lot because you say the words Edward Gorey and certain things come to mind. First of all, he has one of the ultimate great names, which already gets you halfway there. In fact, he was a junior. It was his real name, but his work is really Gorey.

He does these black and white drawings, which you have seen them on the cover of half your favorite children's books. You've seen his work. You've probably seen them, the opening credits of PBS's long running mystery. Yeah.

You have been surrounded by Edward Gorey. You have been swimming in the world of Edward Gorey your whole life, whether you know it or not. The ironic thing, I think, about Edward Gorey, even though you said his books are gory, is that they're actually not that gory. You don't...

see that much violence in his books, although violence is always on the edges of all of his books. It's always alluded to, but it's not something where you're seeing giant pools of blood or the like. No, exactly. It's this air of menace, which is just lurking in a really kind of gothic Victorian way about to snatch, especially at children. So the world is both cozy and creepy.

I want to hear if you can recall when you first encountered Edward Gorey.

It was probably either. I wouldn't have been allowed to watch PBS Mystery, but I feel like I saw the opening credits for sure. My grandfather watched it. So I probably stayed up and caught that. But the ones I really remember are Gashly Crum Tiny's, of course, which my best friend had. I

Her family was a big fan, and they had also all the compendiums, one of which I see you have here, the amphigore. Yes, I have two of them here. So...

We're referring to these big collections. And the reason that he had to have these collections is because he published his books in a very particular way, in a very particular format. And they were hard to get for a very long time. If you've never seen Listener, an original Edward Gorey book or a recreation of it, describe it to us, Sadie. What do they look like? He did a lot with form. Some of the books were like the size of matchbooks.

Others were large, but most of them were small hardbacks the size of children's books. And later they were put into these larger anthologies, one of which my friend's family, we were fascinated by it. We read it every chance we got.

And that was certainly an introduction. And then because this was the 80s, there was a lot of Edward Gorey merch around, which sounds strange now, but people had Edward Gorey cat cushions. It was very much part of the aesthetic for certain kinds of people.

And I feel like that was definitely a part of my life. And then when I got into kind of young reader books, some of my favorites had Edward Gorey covers. Wolves of Willoughby Chase and the other Joan Aiken books have a perfect match with Gorey's covers because they're steampunk and gothic. And they're both knowing and a real homage to

And then the John Belair's books, if you like The House with a Clock and Its Walls and all the sequels, again, you can't really separate his illustrations and covers from those terrific books. And how about you? When did you first discover Edward Gorey? So I definitely first encountered him when I didn't realize who he was. I think it was one of those John Belair's books and...

if you don't know John Belairs, he was a writer of Gothic mysteries for kids, largely 1973s. A House with a Clock in Its Walls was the first one that they worked on together. He also did

The Curse of the Blue Figurine, The Mummy, The Will, and The Crypt, and other books with equally awesome names. And so I read a bunch of those when I was a kid, and I thought the illustrations were creepy and memorable, but I had no idea who. It never, I think, would have occurred to me to look at who's the illustrator. The first time I really understood who he was in high school was

I had an English teacher who had a poster of the Gashly Crum Tinies up on his classroom wall, which now in retrospect, I find very hilarious. I didn't understand it at the time.

But it's very funny for a teacher to have an homage to child death up on their walls. And he explained to me what it was. I had never heard the word abecedarium. Is that what it is? Abecedarium? Yeah. They're those sort of books in which you learn the alphabet through a series of short phrases. I didn't know that word. What, you didn't know that word? No, I've learned a new word.

All right. So the Gashly Crum Tinies, which again goes A to Z and each of them has a kid and a terrible way that they die, is considered an ABC Dairy. So I'd heard that word for the first time. And then...

When I was in college, I took a class and the unstrung harp was assigned to us. The unstrung harp, Edward Gorey's first published book or first published book under his own name, at least. The subtitle is, or Mr. Earbrass writes a novel. Have you read the unstrung harp? I have. What is the unstrung harp about? If memory serves, it is about a mysterious harp. Is that what it's about? With no strings.

It's close, although not at all. The Unstrung Harp, that's my fault. I didn't prep you for that. The Unstrung Harp is about this man, Mr. Earbrass, who's a writer and his attempts to embark on a new novel. Writing is hard. Writing a novel is hard.

I don't think I ever want to do it. And part of the reason is I have read The Unstrung Heart many times. And Edward Gorey somehow in one of his first books gets across how painful and torturous and tedious and terrible it is to think of an idea, to write the book, to

to submit it to a publisher, to interact with the publishing industry, to do everything that sort of surrounds the publication of a book. And he does it in relatively short form. It's amazing.

And it's especially hard when you're trying to do it all with this harp with no strings. With this magic harp. Exactly. Very challenging. You have the terrible assignment of giving us a little biographical information about Edward Gorey, whose, again, 100th birthday we are celebrating this month. It's a

a great assignment because you have Edward Gorey, this famous eccentric, right? Who was alive into our lifetimes, who was known for wearing fur coats, long beard, huge ballet domain. He famously went to every performance of the New York City Ballet and a lot of rehearsals too, and was known for his circle of friends. But

Still, in a pre-internet age, seemed like a figure of some mystery, I would say. I think probably a lot of us just assumed he was British and didn't really think about it. But now, of course, everyone knows everything. And in fact, we know everything.

that Edward Ted Gorey was born in Chicago. His parents divorced and his stepmother, interesting aside, has a really memorable cameo in Casablanca playing Yolanda, who does a very stirring rendition of the Marseilles on her guitar. I was watching this weekend as I was phoning up on Edward Gorey, and it was an incredible coincidence. That was his stepmother.

And he did have some artistic people in his life. I think it was his great-grandmother who had drawn greeting cards, which he attributed with some of his talent. But in fact, he didn't have much formal art training. He did a couple of years in the Army, stayed in the States, and then went on to Harvard where, as you may well know, he was roommates with the poet Frank O'Hara.

And it was through this connection that he would become involved with a lot of people whom we came to associate with the New York school. And he became a little bit of a 20th century zealot at this point. So he moves to Manhattan. And from 1953 to 1960, he worked for the art department of Doubleday. And this is where he started illustrating some of the many covers that you've probably seen. And...

At this point, he becomes involved with an institution known as the Gotham Book Mart. The Gotham Book Mart, for those who don't remember, was a kind of institution in New York from 1920 to 2007.

And it had two quite legendary owners, both of whom made it more than a bookstore, although it was a good bookstore, but also kind of a salon for avant-garde writers and artists too. Each in turn lived above the shop. This is, like many, a real estate story.

Every New York store is a real estate store.

and didn't just publish 15 of his books in all their strange, unusual formats, which no conventional publisher, certainly not Doubleday, would have ever countenanced, but also hosted signings, which Gorey always showed up in his outfit. And they also sold all his merchandise, his T-shirts, his calendars, his Christmas cards, and everything.

Did showings of his work, which really helped establish him not just as a commercial illustrator, but as an avant-garde and some would say surrealist artist in his own right. He, as you say, in the early 50s, he started working for this imprint of Doubleday, Anchor Books, which was one of the not it wasn't the earliest, but it was one of the earliest sort of mass market paperback publishers, right?

And their thing was, we are going to publish really fancy literature, but in this paperback format. That was still relatively new to the American public. But you also have to remember that he was just a guy working in the art department. He was a full-time book designer and a very diligent one. He was so incredibly prolific. And his estate still has all this unpublished work. He was Joyce Carol Oates-like in his output.

And it's amazing when you look at the work because the line drawings, as you mentioned, are so intricate. It looks almost like plantalism sometimes, like it would have taken hundreds of hours. But he was either preternaturally disciplined or incredibly fast. And each one that I've ever seen, at least, is beautiful and complete in a way. Listeners, again, if you...

haven't seen any of these, I think you could do a quick Google search and find some of them. You could buy the Amphigori collections, but really the way you want to experience this is in the sort of small format that Gori intentionally designed his books to be. This is often text on the left, a drawing on the right, a

And then you're flipping in a rhythm that he planned, that he dictated. He wanted you to read it in a certain way. As wonderful as these paperback collections are that we have in front of us here, he was a little miffed when they were put out because they often had things

three panels on a page, which sort of messed up the whole intentionality that he put behind each of his books. I think, as you say, many people know him for PBS's Mystery, which was a brief animated intro to...

The Masterpiece Theater spinoff that was focused on British crime stories. And you know this, maybe you remember it. It's a bunch of detectives with flashlights and there's a woman on top of a railing making a sound as if she is fainting. Do you want to try to make that sound? Ah!

And he did this in the early 80s, possibly 1980. The decade before was really when Edward Gorey became famous to many Americans for a couple reasons. Number one, this first collection, Amphigore, which collects 15 books under one cover, hit shelves. That was in 1972. Number two, he became famous.

A Broadway set designer. He won a Tony for designing the sets for the Broadway production of Dracula. I was not alive. I've never seen it. I've only seen pictures. But imagine giant black and white Edward Gorey drawings that you're used to seeing, like close to the size of the palm of your hand, blown up to the size of a Broadway stage.

It sounds amazing. I mean, incredible. And there's this really good podcast from the BBC, which includes people from Gotham Bookmart and includes Frank Langella, who is in this production of Dracula. Highly recommended. Frank Langella starred in the Broadway production of Dracula. Famous stage actor, famous movie actor. He also starred, I think, a year or two later in another film version of Dracula. Edward Gorey won a Tony. He did not go to the Tony Awards.

Because he decided to go to the ballet instead. Because he was obsessed with the ballet.

He was the ultimate bellet-a-mane, and he did some incredible, obviously many incredible belletic drawings, which are worth seeking out. And you can still get a few of the vintage t-shirts that he did for the New York City Ballet. He did one for the Met, too. Talk to me about his love of ballet. I don't know the antecedents of it, but I know that from the time he moved to New York—

He never missed a show and his entire schedule revolved around it. And as he divided his time between Cape Cod and

and New York. But everything, of course, had to revolve around the New York City Ballet's schedule. He made a lot of money from the Broadway production of Dracula. And after that, he bought a house up in Cape Cod in Yarmouth Ports, where he would go to every summer. In the fall, in the winter, in the spring, he was here in New York. And he was at the ballet all the time because he was obsessed with ballet. He was obsessed with Balanchine. And then once the season was over,

He hustled out of town as quickly as he could. It's a good point that this was a really good moment for the New York City Ballet. I mean, if you were going to be a bellet-a-man, this was the place to be. We'll be right back. Time is luxury. That's why Polestar 3 is thoughtfully designed to make every minute you spend driving it the best time of your day. That means noise-canceling capabilities and 3D surround sound on Bowers & Wilkins speakers.

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Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined today by Sadie Stein, and we're talking about the world of Edward Gorey. So one thing I would like to hear about, a place I've never been, is the Edward Gorey House and Museum on Cape Cod, which I know you have visited several times, yes? Yes. I cannot stop talking about it whenever I get back. So this is the house that he bought after the

the success of Dracula. It's on Cape Cod. It's right around the corner from this amazing bookstore called Parnassus Book Service, not the other Parnassus. And it's a house that is, he lived there and it's still devoted to Edward Gorey. And it has a ton of his stuff there. So Edward Gorey, in his later years, once he left New York and he was able to have more space, had thousands of books,

lived with many cats and just had all this bric-a-brac all about. And so they've kept a bunch of it there. You can see all these matchbooks and all these candlesticks and all that stuff. But I go with my family and they have, it's so delightful. They have the scavenger hunt

that is perfect for kids. It's one of the best scavenger hunts at any museum or any house I've ever been to. It's great for kids of a certain sort. It's great for parents. I can say this as a parent. Hidden around the house are tableaus or references to

to each of the 26 deaths from the Gashly Crum Tinies. And so you get a piece of paper that reprints the Gashly Crum Tinies, and it's a checklist, and you have to go around and see if you can find G is for George, smothered by a rug. And I'll spoil this for you, because if you go, you have 25 other ones to find. But you have to look around, and then you see two little feet poking out from under a rug near the front of the house, and you can check off

G is for George. It's morbid, slightly sick, and absolutely delightful. I love it so much. You go in the back and there's a small TV where the opening credits for Mystery...

With an exclamation point. I always forget the exclamation point. Mystery is playing on a loop. And so you're walking around the house and you just keep hearing a woman go, oh, it's I just love it. I wish I could go there every year. It's a long detour, but well worth it. The Edward Gorey house is always full of people and people.

The fact that it's always full of people sort of made me think about this way that we talk about him, which I think you would agree is not entirely accurate. We use the phrase cult figure, cult movie, cult classic for so many things. I think we've actually lost track of what that word means. Edward Gorey.

Is he a cult figure or is he not a cult figure? It's weird because I feel like those are the words that spring to mind. You're like, oh, cult figure. But if that's a cult, it's like the biggest, best known cult in the entire world. Because I think everyone knows who he is. Everyone loves him. This is not a well-hidden subculture. But

But one thing that I think is neat is that it's not at all weakened by that. I think this is a case where he's not overexposed. He's beloved. One thing I do think, though, is that the more you learn about him, I don't want to say he's not intriguing because he's fascinating. He is indeed very eccentric, but

One thing that's striking about him is that he was apparently a really nice guy. There was nothing sinister about him. He was very generous to his fans. He loved to share book and movie recommendations with friends. He was a voracious correspondent. And that's what comes out when you start reading about him, just the affection people had. He was not reclusive. He loved cats. He loved ballet. He did wear fur coats, but...

These weren't affectations. This was just what he was passionate about. He wore his fur coats. He always wore white sneakers, white keds maybe. And often he had a ring on every finger. He was, would we call him flamboyantly dressed?

I think so. Yeah, he definitely committed to a strong look early on and stuck with it. He knew how to brand himself for sure. We've been talking a bunch about Edward Gorey. I'd love to talk about Edward Gorey's work because that is the thing that brought us to him first. Sadie, you love the Gashly Crum Tinies. Which is your favorite letter?

It's got to be us just because nepotism. But if we're going to talk about the Gashly Crum Tinies, actually, that's part of a trilogy. You'll recall the Vinegar Works, three volumes of moral instruction. And of those three, Gashly Crum Tinies is the most famous. But the insect god was actually always my favorite. But I've recently...

I have a little boy who's almost five, and I recently gave him this trilogy for Christmas. Some would say he's too young, but is there such a thing as too young? So you're saying your five-year-old is too young to read the line, K is for Kate who is struck with an axe? And I was wrong before. That's a lot of blood. You know what? That actually brought up an interesting conversation about the difference between an axe and a hatchet.

Okay. Who was having this conversation? It prompted him to ask what the difference was. Longer story, but it's highly educational, as you see. Do you think that the Gashly Crumptines is the piece of literature that introduced most people to the word ennui? It's certainly the one. And the question is all the different ways we probably pronounced it as kids.

I remember being corrected on it. So it made a really big impression on me by my friend's dad because we thought it was an annui, I think. And this sounds like a cool dad. Did he just go around correcting children's pronunciation? When necessary, which was apparently frequent. Yeah, he was very authoritative about stuff like that. My favorite, and let me know if you've read it, is called The Willowdale Hand Car.

So the Willowdale Hand Car is about a trio of people. And again, the style that we're talking about here is slightly Edwardian, slightly Victorian, a little jazz age thrown in. You see some sort of flapper looking women. So it's three people dressed very distinctively who live in this boring town of Willowdale and they see a railroad hand car on track and they decide to go for a trip.

And they encounter all sorts of odd little things. At 1017, the Turnip Valley Express rushed past. A frantic face was pressed against a window of the parlor car. So they're doing, they're traveling, they're seeing all these things. And then something happens to them. And that's the end of the book. It is so full of non sequiturs.

and mystery, I find myself returning to it again and again because of the mood that it sets. And again, these are very short books, but I'm obsessed with Gory. I'm obsessed with the Willowdale handcarve because...

They're just all slightly eerie in a way that I cannot explain. I do not understand why his use of precise times at 1017. I cannot explain why his use of very precise and fake names, the Turnip Valley Express, is.

Nellie's bow, Dick Hammerclaw. Why his use of language affects me in this way, but it affects me greatly. I love the Willowdale Hencar. Another one I was thinking about is the Iron Tonic or A Winter Afternoon in Lonely Valley. It's one of the country house ones, kind of very Agatha Christie with very sparse texts, but it has this thing which one critic referred to as the unexplained recurrence of an irrelevant object.

And this is, it is, it's a trope in his work where sometimes it says specific as the black doll, but often it's just a piece of furniture or something or a spittoon.

And it just shows up again and again. And I don't think it's supposed to have real meaning because he was such a devotee of nonsense writers like Edward Lear that I think it would probably be silly to imbue it with too much symbolism. But it's really fun. I think that's my problem. I'm looking for it to mean something where really it doesn't mean anything. And that's sort of the delight of it.

Can't it be everything to all people? I would describe both his writing and his drawing style as ornate and spare at the same time. Does that sound right? Like it's very, as you said, detailed and intricate, but there's so much empty space. Often it'll be one person alone in a landscape. Joan Acocella wrote a piece for The New Yorker in 2018 about Edward Gorey, and she quoted him saying,

I'm beginning to feel that if you create something, you're killing a lot of other things. And the way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections and very little is pinned down, I feel that I'm doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader's mind. There you are. Is that it? Is that the answer? I think that's the answer. And I think cult figure or not...

I think he's a genius. You think he's a genius? Yes. You don't think we use the word genius too much? We do, and I'm using it even so. This is the rare case where I think it applies because he created something wholly his own, something new. It changed the way we see the world. You can find a tremendous amount in it. I don't know if it meets the IQ scale definition, but culturally and in my personal pantheon, yes, I stand by it.

Sadie, I'd love to talk about one or two more books. I think one of his more famous ones is a book called The Doubtful Guest. And this is the story of a creature. Looks like a penguin. He's all black. Looks like a penguin wearing Keds, just like Edward Gorey often did. He's wearing a scarf. And he arrives at this mansion.

And this family doesn't know what to make of him. And he starts to cause chaos in their house. At one point, Gorey writes, And then at the end it says,

The guest had been there for, what, 17 years, right? Yeah. And shows no intention of going away. It came 17 years ago, and to this day, it has shown no intention of going away. There's a lot of rhyming in certain parts of, in certain Edward Gorey works. It is short, as many of his are. It is very funny, but it also feels like it has something to say about kids. There's a lot of people that read The Doubtful Guest, again, one of his more famous works,

as an allegory for what it means when a child comes into your life. Something he never experienced as a gay man who didn't really have any relationships throughout most of his life. Edmund Wilson actually wrote about the Doubtful Guest in The New Yorker in 1959, I think. And...

He talks not explicitly about the kids, but he talks about this kind of menacing Edwardian patriarch, bearded, who looks not unlike Gorey himself in a way. He's beferred and scary. And as you say, the children and adults coexist. And then the guest shows up until almost the age of legal emancipation. And...

is often morose, like Gory's kids, is sometimes mischievous, also like Gory's kids, and everyone just has to get used to it. He is also well-known, I think, for how many stories he has that put kids into...

Mortal danger. Often throughout his stories, you will have an infant or a child that something terrible will happen to. It's an odd theme to recur throughout one's oeuvre, but it sure does.

Yeah, some of it's just Victorian, lots of sickly orphans, etc. But it does seem to be, he does take a little too much relish in imperiling all these children. He apparently told another writer for the New Yorker wrote about him a lot. It's just so obvious. They're the easiest targets. True.

Is that a creepy thing to say? Yeah. Do you think this is why kids, and again, I think it's kids of a certain sort, but not every kid will cotton to Edward Gorey. But I feel like if you're a child of a certain sort, this is just right up your alley. Oh, kids love the Gothic. They love an orphan. They love dead parents. They love being in peril. And the coziness of knowing that it's in a book and the coziness of knowing that

You're probably going to come out on the other side. Although in his books, kids actually do die. They die all the time. But that's exciting, too, because usually you're spared that as a child. We have two pieces running in the New York Times Book Review on the occasion of Gori's 100th birthday. The first is from a writer and illustrator named Lisa Brown. She's worked on many things, including several books with her husband, Lemony Snicket, who I think people...

people are very familiar with. Sadie, you also worked on a piece about Gorey. This is a back page which is really devoted to the images from a terrific new compilation book. It's called From Ted to Tom, and it's called The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey. And this is a series of postcards all sent within the span of one year, I believe 1974 to 1975, sent to his friend Tom Fitzharris,

whom he met at an event at Gotham Book Mart, but they enjoyed a very lively correspondence. And Gorey sent these incredible envelopes, which, of course, Fitzharris kept. And a couple of the illustrations he includes, he was like, yeah, this was a rejected cover. Thought I might as well slip it in. And the colors are terrific, too, for those who think of him primarily as a pen and ink artist. It's fun to see him working with all this watercolor. But they're just terrific. It just shows him...

having fun, talking about books and movies and quotidian facts of his existence. He's extremely opinionated about movie actors, et cetera. And it's kind of another side to him. And as the correspondent, Tom, put it, Ted was always fun. And I think that comes across. And I highly recommend that you pick it up. Now, one of the things that was interesting to me about that book and about their relationship is

was that Edward Gorey never really traveled abroad, but he went on this one trip with Tom and they went to Scotland. And I thought of you when I read this because the reason that Edward Gorey went to Scotland is because he was obsessed with a movie that both of us hold in incredible high regard. What is that movie? Only the best movie ever made. What is that movie? I Know Where I'm Going. I Know Where I'm Going. Listeners, do you know the movie I Know Where I'm Going?

If you know it, you're obsessed with it. If you don't, you're in for a treat. And we won't spoil it, but it does take place on a fairly remote Scottish island. And if you are a fan of this movie, which is to say, if you've watched it, then you will become obsessed with the idea of traveling to the place where it's set, as indeed he was. I...

Boy, I would love to go to the Hebrides. Is that the Orkney Isles? The Hebrides? I don't know what they're all called. The Fair Isles? That's in the other Hebrides, I think. And one day you too can achieve this dream. I mean, just start corresponding with someone. Maybe someone who's listening right now. Illustrate some envelopes. The next thing you know...

There you are. Listeners, go watch I Know Where I'm Going. I think if you are a subscriber to the Criterion channel, it's on there. It's a movie by Powell and Pressburger, these two filmmakers who made The Red Shoes. They made The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a bunch of movies. This is a black and white movie set during World War II on the Scottish Isle. It's a romance.

It's so good. Sadie, it's been a delight to have you on. I'd love for you to end by reading just a delightful passage from Gori's book, The Fatal Lozenge.

The baby, lying meek and quiet upon the customary rug, has dreams about rampage and riot and will grow up to be a thug. Sadie, thank you once again for being on the Book Review Podcast. It's always a pleasure to have you here. I'm going to go and reread The Unstrung Harp right now. That was my conversation with Sadie Stein about the writer and artist Edward Gorey upon what would have been his 100th birthday.

Next week, we'll have our monthly book club discussion hosted by M.J. Franklin. He and his panel will be talking about Samantha Harvey's Orbital, the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.

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