
LONG PERSONAL SIDEBAR (skip to review if you want to miss the high school stories):
In high school, we were supposed to write papers about our favorite poets for senior English class. I had long been a fan of Edward Gorey. I memorized the Gashlycrumb Tinies one night when Dad took my brother and me to a science fiction club meeting. We stayed downstairs playing Super Nintendo while the grownups geeked out upstairs, and that evening’s host had a Gashlycrumb Tinies poster hanging in the basement – the rest is history. So fast forward a few years, and I am a snotty soon-to-be English major who thinks I’m smarter than my AP English teacher (she pronounced Albert Camus “Cam-uss”). So when I found out that there were no books about Edward Gorey, rather than pick another poet to write about, I decided to make it all up.
This was back in the pre-computer days, children, so our assignment was to go to the library, research our poets using actual books, write one fact per notecard, and then write the source on the back of that notecard. Then we were supposed to use the facts to write the paper, and use the sources to make a bibliography. I made up all my facts. I made up all my sources. I made up Gorey’s entire history. AND (drum roll, please)…I got an A.
(I normally would never have done such a thing – I was a very good student! But I had senioritis REAL bad.)
So many many moons later, when Dad got me an actual biography of Mr. Gorey, I was delighted to dive in and see how wrong my high school self was.
ACTUAL REVIEW:
If you know any of Gorey’s works, you will not be surprised to find out just how odd the man himself was. He loved books and cats and ballet, which you can obviously see in his stuff. He was born in Chicago in 1925, he actually wore the full length fur coats so many of his characters wore, he loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he was gay! So many facts I didn’t know.
Though the subject himself is delightful, this book is a bit dry. Mark Dery obviously did his proper research, combing through decades of Gorey’s personal correspondence and interviews with old friends. He lived an interesting life and died at 75 of cardiac arrest, after having previously turned down his doctor’s earlier recommendation of a pacemaker. His family called him Ted. The ups and downs of Gorey’s publishing career are covered, as well as as much of his personal life as Dery could put together. But it’s all very scholarly, and not super engaging, despite the interesting subject. Gorey was delighted when he moved “far from the Manhattan he abominated.” Gonna need to start using that word a bunch more. He had “a prodigious intake of highbrow literature” and “a wide-ranging cultural diet.” On his application to Harvard, he attached an extra sheet for the question about books read during the past 12 months (I think he would have enjoyed CBR).
The un-approachability of the writing leads me to recommend this book only to die-hard Gorey fans (or those who just dig scholarly writing, I suppose), but I am very glad to have read it. I think this was my favorite Gorey quote mentioned in the book:
I’ve always had a rather strong sense of unreality. I feel other people exist in a way that I don’t.”
It sounds like he would have been tough to hang out with, but I’m glad we have so much of his work to enjoy.
(One other high school note – in an earlier English class, I had recited the Gashlycrumb Tinies when we had to do a poem in front of the class, and scared all my classmates. Ah, memories!)
You know, as long as you advertised it as fictional, you could write your own less dry biography of Gorey. Thoughts for the future.
I wonder if I still have that “research” paper…
Have you been to the Gorey Museum? It’s on Cape Cod and it is DELIGHTFUL.
Not yet, but it’s on my bucket list!
and FULL OF CATS!
I LOVE Gorey with all my weird heart. I want to get the Doubtful Guest creature as a tattoo and I have a little metal lunch case with the Gashlycrumb Tinies on it.
I think “with all my weird heart” should be the motto of the Gorey fan club. I used to have a set of his Christmas cards, including some with the Doubtful Guest, I think, and I always wondered what the card recipients thought. “What the hell is this festive weirdness?” Ha!
I very much admire your approach to research paper writing. It sounds way better than mine, which was to basically just paraphrase huge parts of Agatha Christie’s biography. I also got an A, I really shouldn’t have – my paper was at least four times longer than it should have been, massively dependent on only one single written source, and probably a overwritten mess.
Well, school is supposed to teach us what NOT to do as well as what TO do, right? So I think we were both successful there!
It was actually even worse, but the review was getting too long already. I didn’t actually do the notecards. We were supposed to turn in our stack of them (50? 100?) and I just…didn’t. But I was in class with my two high school best friends, and we did everything together. So the teacher assumed that if those two had turned in their notecards (which they did), then I MUST have, so she thought she lost them! I got full points for notecards I never filled out! I did feel a bit guilty for that part.
I REALLY want to see your paper!
I can’t tell you how many “interview (insert older person here” interviews I created whole-cloth throughout school. Go and knock on my neighbor’s door and ask them personal questions about their youth? no-o-o-o-oooo way. Just because I never got caught doesn’t mean that all of those teachers didn’t know what I was up to.
I’m so glad it wasn’t just me! And surely we got points for imagination and creative writing, right? I hope you had a lot of fun coming up with your neighbors’ histories. “Ms. Pfannenstiel was born in a circus tent, after an escaped rampaging zebra knocked her mother down and started early labor. Her whole life, she’s only ever worn black and white stripes…”