Though he didn’t immediately occupy the derelict house he bought, to avoid displacing the raccoons until they were “ready.” Megan Rosenbloom, Death Salon’s director, hailed Gorey’s gallows humour in the face of “western death denial”, adding: “I get the same fuzzy feeling from Gorey as others do from Winnie the Pooh.”Īccording to legend, Gorey quit New York for the Cape “in protest” when ballet director George Balanchine, whose performances he never missed, died in 1983. In 2018 The Death Salon hosted a Gorey party in Mount Auburn cemetery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, featuring funeral directors and a “haute macabre” dress code. For those who know, his impact is incalculable.”Ī fanbase he may have embraced is the death positive movement. When I ask 30 students who he is, one person raises their hand. “His transgressive work marks a huge leap in nonsense, modernist and postmodernist literature that went unrecognised.
“People were afraid of him,” said Shortsleeve. Prof Shortsleeve credits the lack of mainstream success partly to that “conservative, pre-Stonewall era”, with “sanitised” literature and LGBT+ figures living “flamboyant”, coded lives hidden in plain sight.īilled on the cover as “pornographic’” yet containing no nudity, with “action” taking place in furtive glances and innuendo, the 1961 book was eagerly stocked by children’s bookstores wanting to repeat the success of Wuggly Ump – but was quickly removed. He graduated from Harvard in 1950, allegedly a member of its “gay underground” along with his roommate, the poet Frank O’Hara, during the rise of McCarthyism when LGBT+ communities were considered the “lavender menace”. “He left ambiguity, unfinished endings, essentially ‘white space’, in his work and life … letting people read between the lines and fill in themselves.”īorn in Chicago in 1925, the hardcore anglophile drew on 19th century, acid-tongued, LGBT+ British satirists and “literary nonsense” writers including Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, cautionary tales, Penny Dreadful comics and woodcut drawings.
“He was a man of mystery,” said Kevin Shortsleeve, associate professor of children’s literature at Christopher Newport University, Virginia, who considers Gorey on a par with Maurice Sendak, a contemporary Goreyphile who wrote the world-famous Where the Wild Things Are. In more recent times the elements of his art that reference sexuality and gender have been informing the work of younger artists.
‘He left ambiguity, unfinished endings in his work and life.’ Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images In 1980 Gorey told Boston magazine “I suppose I’m gay”, but said that he didn’t like the label, was “undersexed” and “a person before I am anything else.” Whether he identified as LGBT+ or asexual is a fierce debate between those who consider him a workaholic more interested in cats, and others, like Fun Home author Alison Bechdel, who revere his work’s iconic queerness, regardless of his personal preference. Gorey famously rejected classification: a gothic writer who wasn’t goth, a children’s author who didn’t write for children, a graphic novel genre founder who insisted he wrote “Victorian novels all scrunched up”. Past examples include author James Baldwin, astronaut Sally Ride, and this year, the Native and African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis.ĭery said: “To my mind, what made him inimical to becoming a mass phenomenon … and taking his place in the pantheon of US culture … is his profound queerness.” Last month they organised a letter-writing campaign to the US Postal Service, with Gorey now reaching “committee stage” for consideration as a celebrity stamp. The Edward Gorey House, a museum opened in his 200-year-old house in Yarmouth Port, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, after he died in 2000 aged 75, hopes to change that. “The people making culture are influenced by Gorey but … the ordinary folks who dine on a steady diet of Hollywood blockbusters and Marvel franchises might not be aware that they know Gorey without knowing him.” Looking through the Tunnel Calamity by Edward Gorey Photograph: filt3rtips/Stockimo/Alamy