The Woeful Work of Edward Gorey: Epiplectic Bicycles, Loathsome Couples, and Hapless Children

O, the of it all.
-Gorey’s response when asked of his motto.

“It was the day after Tuesday and the day before Wednesday," begins Edward Gorey's enigmatic tale, The Epiplectic Bicycle (1969), in which two young children are involved in a series of seemingly unrelated and frivolous situations. Though not necessarily one of his best known books, that first line captures the prevailing tone of his almost fifty years as an author. One familiar with his work might agree that there is something inexplicably foreboding hidden in between Tuesday and Wednesday, that perhaps it is during this time that the once innocuous gardens and hallways in his illustrations become macabre and sinister. Gorey has a uniquely masterful approach to storytelling and his books, a reader might assume, begin well after they are supposed to; his greatest strength is what he fails to include, leaving the reader to make sense of his contradictions and banal details. When discussing his readers, though, it is difficult to distinguish who exactly they might be. Lacking the formalities of modern children's books that feature bright colors and soft images, Gorey's somber Victorian inspired drawings only contribute to the difficulty of deciphering his readership. There is an ambiguity, which on one hand places his oeuvre as exclusively for adults, claiming his work as either too sophisticated or too dangerous for children. On the other hand though, Gorey's numerous alphabet books and frequent use of rhyme suggest that child readers might find his books attractive, even if they don't fully understand the content. As Alexander Theroux writes, "Gorey's is an unclassifiable genre: not really children's books, neither comic books, nor art stills." This essay will address Gorey's work in a broad sense in order to figure out who his readers might be, with a focus on his books depicting bizarre or unfortunate children.

It is not uncommon for one familiar with Gorey's work to assume that he is both British and long dead. However, Gorey, a native of Chicago, spent almost all of his life in America before dieing of heart failure in April of 2000 at the age of seventy-five. When he was asked in an interview what his favorite journey was, he replied, almost poetically, "Looking out of a window." He traveled abroad only once, to Scotland in 1975, claiming that his greatest disapointment was not finding the Loch Ness monster. One might find the inspiration of Gorey's work by examining his life. Admittedly, a very precocious child, he taught himself to read at the age of three and had completed the works of Victor Hugo by the time he was eight. He was known to have been an avid reader throughout his life, but also made sure to keep up with the escapades of Erica Kane on All My Children. Gorey was a man marked by his eccentricities; an infamous recluse who preferred the company of cats over people, such an ardent supporter of the New York City Ballet that he went for twenty-three years without ever missing a performance, and a man who was as well versed in Japanese literature as he was in Petticoat Junction. Beginning his career as an artist, he worked for Doubleday, illustrating reprints of classics like Dracula and War of the Worlds. His first original book, The Unstrung Harp, was published in 1953, by Brown and Company. He published over a hundred of his own books and provided illustrations to authors such as Peter Nuemeyer and John Bellairs until the time of his death.

Gorey's work is distinctly unsettling and it is, perhaps, because of his vague sense of time and details that just miss our eye, hiding in our imaginations. Though his drawing style calls forth a Victorian/Edwardian tone, he often juxtaposes that with details that conjure notions of the 1920s, such as women wearing dark eyeliner and dressed as flappers. In The West Wing (1963) we are presented with foreboding images of hallways, open doors, and scattered shoes that suggest that we have just missed the action, that there is something lurking on the other side of the panel. Formal aspects aside, Theroux writes that "Gorey's entire canon is a long purgatory of muffled hysteria, danger, and strange attrition where endings are invariably inconclusive and always abrupt." He has created a world filled with threats, in which "legs protrude from ghoulish hedges, topiary threatens, and wallpaper intimidates." It almost seems no surprise that the object of these threats would most frequently be children. Tobi Tobias observed from Gorey's work that he has "a highly immediate feel for the vulnerabilities of childhood." The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963), possibly his most widely known book, depicts twenty-six children, for each letter of the alphabet, dying in rhyming verse with drawings set moments before their demise. "M is for Maud who was swept out to sea/ N is for Neville who died of ennui [. . .] Y is for Yorick whose head was knocked in/ Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin." Gorey's grim humor is made clear in these verses, and as readers we are able to accept the violence of his work as a result of the form in which it's presented.

Though not all of Gorey's work concerning violence against children is done in such a darkly humorous way. Gorey based the notably violent The Loathsome Couple (1977) from the gruesome Moors murders committed in England by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Of the murders Gorey has said that they "upset [him] dreadfully, even after years of reading crime stories" and that he felt compelled to write and illustrate a book about the event. In The Loathsome Couple the two killers begin their lives as rather unappealing children. "Harold Snedleigh was found beating a sick small animal to death with a rock when he was five years old;" "As a child Mona already had thick ankles and thin hair." They grow into insipid adults who meet at the "Self-Help Institute lecture on the Evils of the Decimal System." As is the case in most of Gorey's books, this lacks a complete narrative, and we are left with mundane details; "Following one particularly exciting [crime film], they fumbled with each other in a cold woodshed. After several years they secretly rented a remote and undesirable villa." Perhaps the reason that this book was perceived as so shocking (as well as humorous by some of Gorey’s more fiendish readers) is because it portrays violence against children in such a humdrum way. The line "They spent the better part of the night murdering the child in various ways," carries the same weight as "They sat down to a meal of cornflakes and treacle, turnip sandwiches, and artificial grape soda." The thing that separates this though, from almost all of his other books, is the fact that in the end the killers are punished, Harold and Mona are sent to prison and spend their rest of their lives in isolation.

During multiple interviews, Gorey has remarked that he believes his work to be
quite realistic. A belief, it seems, that has had quite a few opponents, and perhaps for valid reasons. His work hardly seems to depict any reality that I have ever seen, but what picture book does? In comparison to overly moralistic children's books where everything happens for a reason and everybody is happy at the end, I believe that Gorey's books do indeed provide their readers insight into the real world. Real life is not divided into perfect, cohesive narratives where every action serves a purpose and every detail is of consequence. Like so much of the dialogue in Gorey's work, everyday life is filled with mundane details. In truth, the children's books that provide purpose and cause and effect are much less like reality than the vast majority of Gorey's work where things are left largely unexplained. As far as violence is concerned, we live in a world where terrible violent things happen all the time. On the subject of children and violence, Theroux writes that "schoolyards throughout the country are in the national grids of some of the worst cruelty and nastiest torture imaginable." In The Loathsome Couple we are exposed to children as both victims and perpetrators (as young Harold beats the small animal) of violence. In The Hapless Child (1961) poor little Charlotte Sophia has her doll, Hortense, ripped apart by bullies at school. The Beastly Baby (1962) is seen hacking apart carpet and pouring acid onto a sofa. Gorey points out that children are not the innocent little creatures that we have tried to turn them into, but rather, they are fully capable of destruction on the same scale as adults. Three years after the arrest of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, eleven year old Mary Bell was convicted of killing two toddler aged children. While cases like Bell's are exceedingly rare, the point is, they still happen. The fact that children in Gorey's books are just as
guilty of violence as adults only seems to make classifying his work more difficult, and we are left to ponder its appropriateness for child readers.

Classifying the Unclassifiable

The complete ambiguity of Edward Gorey's work has placed him at the forefront of a genre that he solely occupies. Sharing stylistic elements with Charles Addams' famous New Yorker cartoon, The Addams Family, the comparisons end there as Gorey's work fails to deliver the playfulness and cohesion found in Addams'. Much of his work also borders on classic fairy tales due to his excessive use of violence and less-than-desirable endings. Kevin Shortsleeve compares aspects of The Loathsome Couple to Hansel and Gretel, begging the question, "is there really much of a difference between an 'undesirable villa' harboring child serial killers, as in Gorey's tale, and a secluded cottage harboring a witch who eats children, as in Grimm." While I agree with Shortsleeve's implied answer I don't think that Gorey's more child friendly books necessarily contain the morals found in fairy tales. I believe that the closest relatives of Gorey's work are nonsense and absurdism. "Gorey," writes Theroux, "who came into his essential intellectual life just about the time Sartre and Camus were popular on a worldwide scale, found almost everything about human nature absurd." One might find parallels between Gorey's L'Heure bleue, in which two interchangeable dog-like creatures have seemingly inane and nonsensical conversations at dusk, to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two interchangeable man-like creatures have seemingly inane and nonsensical conversations at dusk. Both texts (and like many of Gorey's other books) lack definition of time and space. Both take place at cusp between day and night, like the time in between Tuesday and Wednesday, there is something indiscernibly fantastical that allows for nonsense language and openly embraces it. Lines like "It seems to me a fate worse than sinking," to which the other dog replies, "But there isn't any other kind," has a vaguely profound meaning that one can't quite put their finger on. In each of the sixteen images in L'Heure bleue the dogs are in such different locations that it's hard to gauge exactly, or even approximately, how much time has elapsed. Likewise in Waiting for Godot, there is a discrepancy between what we are told and what has happened. The first act begins with a leafless tree, yet in the second act, which is said to take place the next day, the tree bears leaves, suggesting that the perception of time in Beckett's play is quite different from reality. Both stories, it seems, could continue indefinitely without resolution; the dogs will never cease to exchange illogical sentences, just as Godot will never come.

When read as absurd, Gorey's work almost seems coherent. After all, absurdism is the subversion of logic, and as absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote, it is "that which has no purpose, goal, or objective." However, though his work bears a resemblance to absurdism in terms of shared ideologies, it doesn't quite fit as exclusively absurdist. Gorey's work also shares similarities with that of Lewis Carroll's and Edward Lear's, the main distinction being the time in which their respective works were published. Had The Wuggly Ump (1963), Gorey's only book marketed specifically for children, been written one hundred years prior, it might have been remembered in the same vein as Carroll's Jabberwocky (1871). Sensibilities and ideas of childhood changed drastically in between the publication of the two aforementioned texts, what once was acceptable for child readers might have been considered 'unsafe' during Gorey's time.
I disagree with accusations that Gorey’s work as whole is unfit for children, it is not simply black and white. While I wouldn’t necessarily read a book like The Loathsome Couple to a toddler, there might me be something appealing about the rhyming verses in The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Though the biggest problem in Gorey's inability to achieve success as a children's author has mostly to do with the way that his books were marketed by publishers. Admittedly, Gorey did indeed intend for several of his books to be published for children and quite a few of them fit very well into that category. The Bug Book (1959), about a group of colorful bugs who overthrow their oppressor, and The Doubtful Guest (1957), about an unexpected visitor who stays long after it is welcome, share the same stylistic qualities as books like The Loathsome Couple, though they are rather unobjectionable and are presented in a way that young readers might enjoy. However, the vast majority of Gorey’s books can no longer be purchased as single volumes, but instead as anthologies—Amphigorey (1972), Amphigorey Too (1975), Amphigorey Also (1983), and Amphigorey Again (2006)—which place his more innocuous stories next to The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Tale by Ogdred Weary (1961), though fairly innocent itself, the title alone would turn most parents off from reading it as a bedtime story.

In attempting to discern Gorey’s readers he may be one of best sources of insight.
When asked in interviews who he thought his audience might be, his answers indicated that there was no common denominator, that children and adults alike appreciated his work, and even then it was hard to break the two groups down into more specific categories. It seems fitting that his readership is so diverse as so much of his work is open-ended. The missing details allow readers to project their own desires and fantasies on to his books, reinforcing their subjectivity. Edward Gorey has become somewhat of a myth, a man with such diverse and extreme interests, he is capable of appealing to almost anyone. Appropriately, like so many of his books, the search for his reader has never been resolved, not by fans, publishers, or the author himself, and as long as his work is so open to interpretation, it may never will.