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As Edward Imagined: A Story of Edward Gorey in Three Acts by Matthew Burgess (review)

2024; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 120; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.00045

2222-4319

Ben Screech,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Reviewed by: As Edward Imagined: A Story of Edward Gorey in Three Acts by Matthew Burgess Ben Screech As Edward Imagined: A Story of Edward Gorey in Three Acts. By Matthew Burgess; illustrated by Marc Majewski. Knopf. 2024. 48 pp. $19.99. ISBN 978–1–984893–80–2. The third in a trio of comparable graphic biographies by Matthew Burgess — previously of Corita Kent (Make Meatballs Sing: The Life and Art of Corita Kent, illustrated by Kara Cramer (Enchanted Lion Books, 2021)) and Keith Haring (Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring, illustrated by Josh Cochran (Enchanted Lion Books, 2020)) — his exposition of the life of American author and illustrator Edward Gorey (1925–2000) is as intriguing, alive, and colourful as its subject. As with the preceding Haring volume, As Edward Imagined focuses on an illustrator with a spare, line-based style — a signature aesthetic recognizable to viewers, even without necessarily having an explicit knowledge of the artist. Gorey's pencil cross-hatchings accompany his poems and short stories, which typically focus on macabre and Gothic themes. His most famous work is The Gashly-crumb Tinies (1963), a Victorian-style cautionary tale presented in the form of an alphabet book, wherein an unfortunate group of children meet various unpleasant ends, ranging in levels of violence from dying of ennui to being pierced by an awl. [End Page 158] This is the second Gorey biography in six years, the other being Mark Dery's Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (Collins, 2018). Burgess's choice of the medium of graphic biography (effectively illustrated by Marc Majewski's Quentin Blake-esque ink drawings) is, however, better suited to an author/illustrator like Gorey, where the weighting was always on the unsettling power of the works' visual components, in underscoring the beguiling nature of his odd, archaic language. The biography explores three phases or 'acts' of Gorey's life, the choice of term highlighting his inherent theatricality. Gorey's Dracula-obsessed Boston childhood, during which he 'dared to live the life he imagined' by 'painting his toenails green and strutting down a fancy street in bare feet' (p. 8), sets the scene for the ensuing 'acts'. We then see Gorey in his twenties and thirties living as an artist in New York City, creating his iconic books and eventually designing the set for Frank Langella's Dracula, while also attending every performance of the New York Ballet. The concluding 'act' takes place at his final home on Cape Cod, where he writes and illustrates some of his best-known, and increasingly dark, works (including the infamous Loathsome Couple (1977)), surrounded by multitudinous cats. Gorey's journey 'down the rabbit hole into Wonderland' (p. 6) in the book's early pages signifies his broader initiation into children's fiction, and it is in childhood that he begins to 'conjure his own spine-tingling stories' (p. 7) for his school-aged peers. What is consistently intriguing about Gorey is the disconnect between his fascination with both the stories of childhood and childhood itself, and his seeming lack of interest in or interaction with actual children. This is something that Dery's earlier biography also struggles to unpack, and perhaps a criticism of Burgess's work is the lack of questioning precisely who Gorey was writing for. Indeed, his work has often been dismissed as children's literature, yet Burgess suggests that no such readership should be posited — if anything, it is implied that Gorey first and foremost wrote for himself. Burgess shows how Gorey's time living in New York as a struggling young artist was as formative as his early discoveries of fiction. He astutely traces an alignment between Gorey's obsession with the New York Ballet (under George Balanchine's directorship in the 1970s and 1980s) and the kinetic style of some of his early picture-book characters, from the inept Mr Earbrass to the rambunctious cats in Dancing Cats and Neglected Murderesses. However, it was through his set design for the 1977 Broadway adaptation of Dracula, starring Frank Langella, that Gorey really made a name for himself. This section of...