The Pensive Pen (Whether He Liked it or Not)

Edward Gorey is the illustrator whose work you have seen but whose name you might not know. An artistic eccentric who spent only one semester in art school and, at least at the beginning, self-published his work, Gorey has become well known for his intricate, nonsensical drawing and macabre humor. Personally, I have never liked his drawings, but after seeing a gallery of his works at the Portland Public Library yesterday, I have developed new interest and respect.

(There is more below the cut, because this ended up longer than I expected...)

First of all, I must caveat this little review: I first encountered Gorey as a child. Why is this a relevant? Edward Gorey is the perfect example of how making something simple or nonsensical does not necessarily make it for children. My family owned “The Jumblies,” a nonsense poem written by Edward Lear and illustrated by Gorey, and I avoided it, which might have been strange if all you knew was that I was addicted to the written word, but less so if you understood that children crave both beauty and sense. Gorey’s illustrations are not beautiful, and his stories make very little sense.

Gorey’s drawing style is iconic. You could pick his incredibly intricate pen drawings of stylized, generally unsmiling, Victorian people out from out of a crowd of illustrators and cartoonists with no trouble at all, and he had a remarkable gift for striking, lonely composition. His writing style was also deceptively simple. He wrote a few alphabet books; limericks; short, dark stories in illustrated sentences; books without words; pop-up books; tiny books. He was immensely prolific, seemed to love experimentation, and hated to be pigeonholed. “I am a person before everything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist… I am a person who does those things.”

I spent quite some time in front of the display at the library, reading every inscription and getting so close to the displays that I made the security guard a tad uneasy. First of all, I was unprepared for how small the drawings were. How did he get the lines so thin? Secondly, I just love originals. You can see the sheen of the ink, the faint lines where the penciled guides used to be. You can see that these are real pictures, that a real person doodled, and that is very heartening for an unpublished nobody. Thirdly, I was thinking. I really love thinking.

I thought about commercialized art, that is, the art that makes the artist money. Among illustrators, much stock is placed in style, since there is an unspoken understanding that style is a brand and is necessary for public recognition. On the other hand, style has been condemned by plenty of artists as the bane of growth and entirely the wrong thing to be aiming for when you work. Gorey had a very recognizable style, and it certainly worked for him, but, more importantly, he demonstrated the importance of being prolific. “Make work and put it out there,” is the key to the success of the modern artist, and Gorey, who drew seemingly constantly and self-published his work when no-one else would touch it, embodies that attitude and how successful it can be.

I thought about nonsense. I don’t really think that there is any such thing, personally. Everything fits somewhere. Even when someone thinks what they are talking about is frivolous, it still tells you something about the speaker, and I was trying to find Gorey in his endless parade of sad Victorians. “To take my works seriously would be the height of folly,” he said, but I persisted, through all the casual deaths and odd creatures. They call it, “dark humor,” when serious subjects are taken lightly, and there was certainly quite a bit of darkness taken lightly, but I was missing the humor.

I decided to research him when I got home. I didn’t. I watched Torchwood. I hated it, for much the same reason, I would discover, that Gorey’s work made me uneasy. I got up in the morning and researched the man.

 “When people are finding meanings in things- beware!” He said, and yet, he also said “all the things you can talk about in anyone’s work are the things that are least important… You can describe all the externals of a performance - everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core.”

Here are some more quotes I found:

• “What is your greatest regret?” asked a reporter. “That I don’t have one,” he replied.
• “Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring."
• “I’ve never had any intentions about anything. That is why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense."
• “I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success."
• “I have given up considering happiness as relevant.”

I am not an expert, but I suddenly think that the Edward Gorey, every now and then, because, after all, quotes are not necessarily summations of a person’s entire life, was quite sad.

I’m not sure how this changes my opinions of his works. They are still remarkable and inspiring, intricate, lovingly created, well composed. They are still examples of a body of work, creation, the translation of ideas into images. However, I can see him, now, contemplating dark subjects and dealing with them lightly in an attempt to prevent them from dragging him down. Contemplating them anyway because they do mean something, if only he could figure out what.

       Edward Gorey died April 15, 2000, after winning several awards for set design, illustration and artwork; writing more than ninety books and illustrating some sixty others; and inspiring a cult following of his own. He never married, having professed himself relatively uninterested in romance, so he left his money to several charitable organizations benefiting dogs, cats, bats and insects.

       I don't want you to leave thinking that he was gloomy, because eventhough his images often were, the people who knew him best declared that he was a curious, kind and adventurous soul, not above impromptu meetings with fans and fond of films. I find him fascinating.