Edward Gorey; Dark-Humored Writer and Illustrator

A is for AMY who fell down the stairs, B is for BASIL, assaulted by bears . . . U is for UNA who slipped down a drain . . . V is for VICTOR squashed under a train. . . .

--”The Gashlycrumb Tinies,”

by Edward Gorey

The gory Edward Gorey, beloved tongue-in-cheek writer, illustrator and contributor to “entertainments” that once earned him Broadway’s Tony award, has died at the age of 75.

Known for his macabre pen-and-ink drawings and eerily funny methods of killing off fictional children, Gorey died Saturday at Cape Cod Hospital, not far from the ramshackle farmhouse in Yarmouth Port, Mass., where he lived alone surrounded by books and cats. He had suffered a heart attack Wednesday.

Once asked why his prolific words and drawings focused on violence and horror, the plain-spoken Gorey replied: “I write about everyday life.”

When his “English Soup” theatrical “entertainment” made its West Coast debut at Storyopolis in Beverly Hills two years ago, Gorey was asked why so many children met untimely ends in his works.

“Oh well,” he told The Times, “children are the easiest targets.”

Gorey earned his Tony in 1978 for costuming “Dracula” for Broadway. But when he allowed a friend to take him to see it, he told The Times later, “I hated it. Here was an old-fashioned play being camped up mercilessly.”

But the writer who thrived on horror movies and TV mysteries did like the special effects, adding: “The bats were wonderful.”

Gorey designed sets and costumes for other productions, staged his own “Gorey Stories” and the off-Broadway play “Amphigorey,” and in recent years led a Cape Cod theater troupe performing his works. He also gained widespread fame for his illustration of the title sequence animation of the PBS television series “Mystery.”

Gorey’s gothic giddiness permeated the more than 90 books he wrote and 60 others he illustrated. An acquired taste, Gorey published much of his work under his own imprint, Fantod Press. The Victorian word “fantod,” meaning heebie-jeebies, perhaps describes the feeling evoked in his public.

In addition to his own writing, Gorey illustrated the books of such diverse authors as Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear and Virginia Woolf.

Gorey, an unabashed balletomane, designed his life around the schedule of the New York City Ballet for the 35 years or so he lived in Manhattan. He attended every performance in his signature fur coat, ski scarf and high-topped tennis shoes, and he considered choreographer George Balanchine “the greatest genius in the arts.” He also designed posters, tote bags and potholders to promote the ballet and wrote and illustrated a book about the company, “The Lavender Leotard,” published in 1973.

Gorey’s love of ballet had earlier emerged in the blacker 1966 book “The Gilded Bat,” describing the brief and tragic life of a ballerina named Maudie Splaytoe.

The names of characters and places Gorey sprinkled through his books were themselves a giggle--Mrs. Umlaut, Miss Squill and Mme. Trepidovska, who might inhabit Miss Underfoot’s Seminary or Bogus Corners or West Elbow.

“To take my work seriously,” he once cautioned readers wary of too many bizarre murders, “would be the height of folly.”

Gorey did not leave himself out of the fun. He punned his own name into anagrams and other pseudonyms, including Mrs. Regera Dowdy, Ogdred Weary, D. Awdrey-Gore, Wardore Edgy, E.D. Ward, Eduard Blutig, Raddory Gewe, Redway Grode, O. Mude, Edward Pig, Roy Grewdead and Drew Dogyear.

Many assumed Gorey had steeped himself in his antique drawing style featuring Edwardian characters in Victorian drawing rooms by living in England. In fact, he rarely left the United States.

Edward St. John Gorey was born in Chicago. He served in the Army during World War II and then studied French literature at Harvard. He took a few drawing courses at the Art Institute of Chicago but was largely a self-taught artist.

His style--often using rectangular patterns and short pen strokes--emerged “somewhere between my 18th and 21st year and it was more or less full-blown,” he once told The Times.

“Sometimes,” he said in 1986, “I think that my life would have been completely different if I had ever learned to draw.”

Gorey’s first novel, “The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel,” published in 1953, was a 30-page illustrated book featuring Clavius Frederick Earbrass dressed in fur coat and tennis shoes and looking much like the increasingly eccentric Gorey.

His style emerged more quickly than an audience, with publication four years later of his signature “The Doubtful Guest.” The short, surrealistic book features an elongated penguin in tennis shoes invading an Edwardian home and challenging the authority of the head of the household. With no mere human able to get rid of the uninvited guest, the penguin antihero stays on as a noisome nuisance.

Another favorite, published in 1969, has been “The Epiplectic Bicycle,” unusual among Gorey’s works because it features speaking characters. Both animals and humans debate a theme that runs through the Gorey books: childish fears that seem funny but can never be completely laughed away.

If Gorey’s books had trouble initially finding their audience and critical praise (perhaps because they were so hard to categorize as children’s books or humor or anything else), they did eventually become favorites and pricey collectors’ items. A major booster was the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, which exhibited Gorey’s work and touted his books from the beginning.

The Times’ reviewers echoed those around the literary world in generally praising Gorey’s varied and offbeat work. In 1980, Lisa Mitchell called Gorey’s “Dancing Cats and Neglected Murderesses” a “wee gem of brilliant, macabre whimsy.” A year later, when Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies” was reissued in hardcover, Nellie Koegan asked Times readers, “Who can resist these 10-syllable warnings of the dangers in a cruel and wicked world?” And in 1982, when Gorey’s diabolical pop-up book, “The Dwindling Party,” showed three-dimensional beasts successively dispatching members of the MacFizzet family, reviewer Barbara Karlin wrote, “Gorey’s verse is as macabre and clever as his methods of disposing of the MacFizzets.”

Gorey’s most recent books were “The Haunted Tea Cozy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas,” published in 1998, and “The Headless Bust: A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium” last year.

For the past decade or so, Gorey had confined himself largely to Cape Cod. Even in his New York period, from 1953 until 1988, he spent summers on the Cape, living in an aunt’s attic, cooking and driving for his relatives. Fun-loving and friendly, a collector of toys as well as books, he never married and often said he lived life more for cats than people.

Asked by a Times reporter in October 1998 what he had been up to, the writer, whose style has been variously described as Gothic Renaissance, Dickensian, Edwardian and latter-day Edward Lear, said characteristically: “Oh well, you know, I’m just living here in an ever-increasing pile of debris. . . . I never seem to do anything. It just sort of happens.”

Which, it seems, was the plot--or non-plot--of Gorey’s much-loved books.