A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/B is for Basil assaulted by bears/C is for Clare who wasted away/D is for Desmond... So begins the book that introduced me to Edward ‘Ted’ Gorey. I worked for a children’s charity back then and wasted no time in sharing the mischief of The Gashlycrumb Tinies with colleagues.

He was a celebrant of all things cat. But he really did not care for fruitcake...

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Gorey was the writer/illustrator of 100 plus books, counting Herman Hesse and Max Ernst among his fans, a Tony award winning set designer, a recluse who appeared in the phone book, a lover of Trollope and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, fond of the word ‘biscuity’ as a pejorative, and, much like an ancient Egyptian, a celebrant of all things cat. But he really did not care for fruitcake.
One biographer described him as being “rather like a saint who lives on pulses, lentil soup and alarming news.” This from a book I reclaimed from a dusty high shelf sandwiched between The Life And Works Of Hieronymus Bosch and Ordinary Differential Equations And Stability Theory: An Introduction. I suspect Gorey would have appreciated the neighbours.

It’s certainly easier to define what he wasn’t than to capture the essence of an artist fond of pen names and anagrams. (My favourite is Ogdred Weary but he used Dogear Wryde and Ms Regera Dowdy among myriad others.) He felt the Gothic prefix was the greatest myth about his work and it’s tricky here not to deploy lazy words like macabre or eerie or grim. But we’re dancing about architecture here, kiddo, so let’s step to the challenge.

His own view was that anything of artistic merit should be indescribable, and saw what he did in the nonsense tradition of Carroll and Lear. Gorey also bowed to Agatha Christie, Goya, and Buster Keaton, citing Keaton’s dictum: “We are all amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.”

Dracula at five
Agent of discomfort, student of terror, Viking of jeopardy, he told cautionary tales without a moral, majoring in the misfortunes of the timid – often some pie-faced orphan or winsome ingénue – in a perilous world, merciless even, which seemed more sympathetic, or simply less indifferent, to the misdeeds of international wallpaper thieves, marmalade tamperers and felonious monks (praise to you, Alexander Theroux).

Page 2 of The Unstrung Harp, his first book, published in 1953, reads: “On November 18th of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing ‘his new novel’. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply, but his mind will keep reverting to the last biscuit on the plate.”

Gorey loved Oreo cookies.
“It’s well we cannot hear the screams we make in other people’s dreams,” he wrote. Having read Dracula at five, Gorey declared himself to have been scared to death, but are his own books suitable for children? Fellow author Maurice Sendak thinks so while others more puritanical or readily vexed shudder at the notion. Not that Gorey ever defended what he did and why would he – aesthete, satirist, and dreamer (albeit a pessimist when it came to humanity); morality in monochrome was not how he framed the world.

“If you’re doing nonsense,” he said, “it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point…I’m trying to think if there’s sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children – oh how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that’s true, there really isn’t. And there’s probably no happy nonsense either.”

In some ways Gorey was counter counter-cultural. One finds a certain reserve in his books and a Victorian/Edwardian sense of place and time, even if this never existed anywhere but in his and, by dint, your imagination. He kept the lid on his psyche, unlike say Robert Crumb or Ralph Steadman, yet from its containment he somehow managed to be even more subversive of authority and social mores. He’d shrug and say, “I write about everyday life.”

And everyday death. Gorey left his money to several animal welfare charities, including one for bats, and was troubled by guilty feelings for having worn a raccoon fur coat much of his life. It had become his trademark but eventually he put it aside. The family of raccoons that moved uninvited into his attic had the last laugh though – he let them stay.

He once wrote to a friend: “I feel like a captive balloon, motionless between sky and earth. I want birds to bring me messages”. The Reuters news report of his death in 2000 hinted at the private nature of the man, as opposed to the artist, with the pay off: “It was not clear if there were any survivors.”
Glorious!

Yet I dare say the life force of the tinies in his abecedarium, however comic-cruel dispatched, shall outlive us all…squashed under a train/W is for Winnie embedded in ice/X is for Xerxes devoured by mice/Y is for Yorick whose head was knocked in/Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.