A death-haunted world

‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil, assaulted by bears…’ The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet in dactylic couplets of the surreal fates visited on a succession of blameless tots, is probably Edward Gorey’s best-known work — and that work forms a pretty coherent whole. Dozens and dozens of tiny booklets, almost all intricately hand-crosshatched in black pen, darkly spoofing established genres, set in a Victorian-Edwardian world of sighing flappers, funerary urns and decaying stately homes. They are filled with surreal menace and random violence or moral horror — much of it offstage — and always played for laughs. The dreamlike, associative drift of Gorey’s work — is that an umbrella or a bat? — is linked by his biographer to the old surrealist game ‘Exquisite Corpse’. Well, quite.

Gorey has here and there been described as ‘Dr Seuss for Tim Burton fans’ and ‘the Charles Schulz of the macabre’, but he was in every way more wayward and interesting than that. He wrote almost impossible to classify little books — crunched-down Victorian novels — that seemed to belong in the children’s sections of bookshops but were quite unsuited to children, in whom he took little or no interest. He found a public only very slowly, and over many years — thanks, in large part, to till-point placement and Hello-Kitty-scale merchandising efforts by the Gotham Book Mart in New York.

As a rough contemporary, Maurice Sendak, described it, Dr Seuss knew ‘how to satisfy the customer’, and Sendak had no inkling of how to satisfy the customer but managed anyway; but ‘Ted had no intention of satisfying the customer’. He got there in the end though — working brilliantly and with great success as a commercial illustrator of book jackets, and getting famous in his own right with the anthology Amphigorey and its successors, and then his showstopping designs for a Broadway production of Dracula.