Julie Phillips
“S is for Susan who perished of fits”: Mark Dery offers the first major biography of Edward Gorey.
Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey
, by Mark Dery, Little, Brown, 503 pages, $35
• • •
By his mid-twenties, the artist and illustrator Edward Gorey had already settled on his signature look: long fur coat, jeans, canvas high-tops, rings on all his fingers, and the full beard of a Victorian intellectual. His enigmatic illustrations of equally fur-coated and Firbankian men in parlors, long-skirted women, and hollow-eyed, doomed children (in
The Gashlycrumb Tinies, among other works) share his own gothic camp aesthetic. Among the obvious questions for a reader of Gorey’s biography are: Where in his psyche, or in the culture, did all those fey fainting ladies and ironic dead tots come from? And, not unrelatedly: Was Gorey gay?