My family’s curious correspondence with Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey's friends apparently called him "Ted". But, in our family, he was always "Mr. Gorey". My father chanced on his works during a business trip, back when they were small, slight booklets that seemed handmade. With them came an entire world, curious and enticing, fashioned out of the finest and most meticulous pen strokes. It was focused on luckless protagonists with preposterous names, languorous figures who proved surprisingly gritty. Their startling encounters and unforeseen fates soon established a hold on my preteen mind.

Looking back, this is not surprising. I was a kid who worked in theatre, spending half of every day in a theatre school. Since the age of eleven, I had been portraying other children onstage. This surrounded me with ideas of glamour that, if not quite real, were certainly persuasive. Filled as it was with fantasy, costume and wit, Mr. Gorey's esoteric universe did not seem strange.

All the more since my theatrical world was not the same one as the sunny productions of local schools. Instead of joining my classmates in Oklahoma!, I was emoting in Lady Audley's Secret or The Diary of Anne Frank. I wasn't reading A Wrinkle in Time and Judy Blume, but grappling with Ionesco, Chekhov and Oscar Wilde. 

Mr. Gorey's books made him seem a fellow traveller. I saw his kohl-eyed vamps as shady White Russians and his muscular villains as figures out of Bram Stoker. Even his trailing aspidistras felt familiar – just like the herringbone suits in his characters' closets, they were the hallmarks of a period stage set. Maybe that's why it seemed logical to write him, once my father looked him up in a Manhattan phone book. 

Was I surprised when Mr. Gorey wrote me back? I don't recollect, but most probably not. Ours was a family who liked filling envelopes. We all wrote postcards, birthday letters, condolence notes, thank-yous and regular, chatty epistles. Almost everyone I knew had a pen pal. Once, when my dad opened a box of chocolates and found one missing, he grabbed his Underwood and wrote the head of the candy company. His typed rebuke (why was the workforce kept so hungry they were forced to pilfer bonbons?) was rewarded by a new and bigger box of chocolates.  

Mr. Gorey made himself a Proustian part of my postal history. He wrote on discreet, elegant, letter-size paper, almost always ivory or pale dove grey. The inks he favoured were sepia and navy blue and the pen he used had a small, blunt nib. As everyone now knows, he also liked to decorate envelopes. However fanciful their design might be, those I received always included his famous black doll.

What were his letters like? Like his stories and the little books he sent, they were florid and funny and full of deliberate effects. Mr. Gorey seemed to be insatiably curious, with catholic tastes that informed his literary style. He was a voracious reader and would cite both classic tomes and modern trash, differences in form or century notwithstanding. He once wrote that he had found "the definitive list of phobias". Another time, he sent me a recipe for grapefruit slices "bathed in" Coca-Cola. 

But any letter from Mr. G was instructive, because he was never, ever lazy with language. Always reaching for the mot juste, he cherished terms like "habituated", "diverting" and "gelatinous". He made words perform and took the time to make every letter an event. His missives were as lively as those of Dickens and, like his little stories, owed much to Ronald Firbank. 

Over time, we discussed a range of topics: the Moors murders, the benefits provided by a ha-ha, Gustave Doré's views about the London slums, Lillian Gish in The Wind, Japanese ghost behaviour in the Edo era, spirit photography, London's cheap bookstores, Rudolf Nureyev's feet, illicit dissections and why green wallpaper had killed Victorians. 

My own life at this time had a Gorey-esque cast. At fifteen, for instance, my parents sent me off to London by myself. I had earned the money through my theatre school, which "loaned out" their pupils to make commercials. I spent three happy weeks in an English hostel, quartered on the eighth floor of a nine-storey building. From here, I searched out genuine art by Aubrey Beardsley, talked my way into Scotland Yard's "Black Museum" and explored a then-almost-derelict East End. I also managed to meet another pen pal – the retired costume historian James Laver. An ex-museum staffer and theatrical bon vivant, Mr. Laver was an expert on dandies and the Decadents. 

When we met for tea in the Charing Cross Hotel, he invited me to dinner at his Greenwich home. This turned out to be a memorable evening, not least because of the Zulu dignitary who arrived with a leopard skin over his suit. To honour my interest in the Yellow Book era, dinner was also followed by a vintage absinthe. Served through the requisite slotted spoon and sugar cube, it was extraordinarily bitter – and extremely strong.

Mr Gorey liked to hear about such episodes. I wrote him about the streetlamp that ran on sewer fumes, the private museum of Teddy bears and toy theatres – even the Lava soap (largely pumice) that produced my grandma's youthful skin. I sent him the label of J. Collis Browne's Mixture, a morphine-and-peppermint-oil cure still popular in London. I wrote him a great deal about cemeteries and tombs, from English boneyards to the graves of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. When it came to things that no-one else cared about, I could always depend on Mr. Gorey. I could tell him how Pearl Bixby Wait got the whole idea of Jell-O from Orator Francis Woodward. 

To this day, many things Mr. Gorey told me – some true, many not – have remained stuck in my mind. (Notably, that someone called "Sebastian Chaveau" invented the marshmallow.) I've never tried to verify one of these assertions and I've avoided reading about their author. But, from time to time, something makes me think of him. Like a phrase I read last month in Daniil Harms' diary : "Poisoning children is cruel. But something has to be done about them!". 

When I moved to Cambridge for university, I took only a large, old-fashioned trunk. Into this went most of Mr. Gorey's letters. But, with the advent of new and exciting times, there they mostly stayed. Ultimately, this caused their Gorey-like disappearance. A friendly American family, who vaguely knew my parents, somehow landed in a nearby village. They had me to dinner and, when talk turned to my cramped lodgings, offered to store any of my excess possessions. So, stuffed with papers and books, my trunk found its way into their attic. I thought nothing more about it until, one day, I phoned them. Their number rang and rang ... and rang and rang… and rang. The family had vanished, along with my trunk and all its contents. Neither I nor my parents ever heard from them again.

Yet I see Mr. Gorey's hand every day. During my time at college, I had run something called The Saturday Morning Fun Club. This was a small association that screened vintage movies and, at one point, held a "Nostalgia Festival". Mr. Gorey, a near-fanatical fan of film, volunteered to draw a cover for the programme. His delicate design, which my father framed, has now followed me across several continents. As I recently heard a physicist say on the radio, "Life, as it turns out, is composed not of things but of relations." 

 

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