A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. —The Gashlycrumb Tinies, 1963
When the inevitable question arose as to what lurking horrors could possibly explain his work, he was less forthcoming. He always politely acknowledged that it was reasonable to wonder, but bapped away intimations of early trauma. “I’m sure mine was happier than I imagine,” he told one interviewer who asked about his childhood. “I look back and think ‘Oh poetic me,’ but it simply was not true. I was out playing Kick-the-Can along with everybody else.”
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What still remains unexplored is Gorey’s Chicago childhood, the early years of an artist who was always in some ways writing about or for children, despite his oft-expressed disinterest in the creatures. What follows, as far as I know, is the first close look at it. Gleaned from old yearbooks, census data, newspaper clippings, and conversations with his family and friends, the particulars of his youth bring an understanding to his work that can’t be found in his later life.
You might link the lonely fates of Gorey’s children to his experience as an only child, especially as a child of divorced parents. But there’s also a lot of family in his books, in the background, like all that patterned wallpaper. More often than not the social context of his work is the family, extended and undifferentiated, such as the large Edwardian household of The Doubtful Guest or the family rushing to the boy’s bedside in The Stupid Joke. Who are all these people, alternately protecting and deserting the central offspring, and sometimes just milling around like penguins?
Edward Leo Gorey, a joiner in the extreme, appears to have been the antithesis of his fitfully reclusive, eccentric son. According to his stepdaughter, Kiki Reynolds, who lives in Las Vegas, he was a “very big Catholic” who “knew everybody”–he was even an honorary pallbearer at Mayor Cermak’s funeral. He comes across as a hard-drinking Hechtian character who would’ve had to have known everybody to have the jobs he did. Gorey, on the other hand, campaigned once for Adlai Stevenson then gave politics up completely. He was a Taoist who claimed church made him throw up. His father was a sports fan, but the only aspect of athletics his son appears to have enjoyed was a vague appreciation of sports photography. He shrank from anything smacking of PR. Gorey does not, however, give the impression of someone who flung away the Babbitty trappings of his youth in avant-garde disgust. He seems more like a cat who sniffed them and wandered away to its own interests. However, the man who hated sports did actually draw a couple of sports cartoons when he was a kid, and his father got them placed in the paper. They were among his first published work.
After Gorey’s father left, Gorey’s mother took her son on a car trip to visit family in Ohio and New York, eventually dropping him off with relatives in Miami, where he went to school for a few months and even had a pet baby alligator–an animal that turns up later in The Epipleptic Bicycle. Gorey was 11, the same age as Drusilla in The Remembered Visit when she’s sent abroad with her conspicuously absent parents.
