There Is No Happy Nonsense

Mark Dery reviews "From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey."

By Mark DeryMarch 8, 2025

• Art & Architecture

EDWARD GOREY (1925–2000), who would have turned 100 this year if he hadn’t been felled by a heart attack at the turn of the millennium, has all the cultish fans he needs but not nearly the critics he deserves. I pled the case for serious scholarly treatment in my biography Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (2018), but most writing about his work barely scratches the surface of his multivalent, dizzily intertextual work—with very few exceptions: Stephen Schiff’s landmark profile in The New Yorker; Gregory Hischak’s witty, perspicuous exhibition texts at the Edward Gorey House; the art critic Karen Wilkin’s historically informed commentary in her 2009 book Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey; Peter F. Neumeyer’s insightful introduction to 2011’s Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer.

The dismal state of serious Gorey criticism is attributable, in no small measure, to the stultifying influence of a certain species of Gorey devotee who tends to think of him as Garfield for goths. I’m thinking of critics who have moral-panic attacks at the mere mention of his queerness; collectors of his little picture books, beanbag creatures, and Gorey-branded gift shop merch more interested in their “fair market value” on Antiques Roadshow than their unsettling subtexts.

Too much writing about Gorey is amateurish drivel like Malcolm Whyte’s Gorey Secrets: Artistic and Literary Inspirations Behind Divers Books by Edward Gorey (2021). An avid collector of Goreyana, Whyte is the co-founder of the San Francisco–based Cartoon Art Museum and a publisher of gift books (including such timeless classics as Huggs & Cuddles: Teddy Bear Funbook [1985]). Gorey Secrets consists mostly of thinly sourced speculations about Gorey’s work, padded out with fannish gush and humble-braggy anecdotes about chummy moments with the Great Man (“Impulsively I responded, ‘Oh, poo!,’ to which he laughed out loud”). Some of Whyte’s conjectures are dubious in the extreme. For example, he asserts, with breezy authority (and without a shred of evidence) that “Gorey based The Gashlycrumb Tinies [1963] on [Agatha] Christie’s enduring tale And Then There Were None”—which is news to this biographer, whose research revealed Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter (1845) and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (1907) as the most obvious inspirations for Gorey’s best-known book. But Whyte isn’t a biographer. Or a book critic. Or an art historian. Or a scholar of children’s lit. He’s a collector writing for other collectors—the sort, it seems, who prefer to think of Gorey as a darker Dr. Seuss, “the master of the cutely macabre.”

To be sure, Gorey could be cartoonish. The bell jar world of his cozy-sinister stories, set in the England of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Bright Young Things eras and populated by vamps, shifty-eyed vicars, doubtful guests, deranged opera fans, and, famously, little dears whose absurd deaths are played for laughs (The Gashlycrumb Tinies), threatens at times to tip into goth kitsch. Gorey’s style and sensibility are so instantly recognizable, yet so uncategorizable, that, like David Lynch, he’s earned his own adjective: Goreyesque. The trouble with becoming an adjective, of course, is that it flattens you out, reduces you to a checklist of stylistic tics and well-worn themes that can quickly become the straitjacket of cliché—or, worse yet, self-parody.

Gorey was aware of those pitfalls. In the new collection From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey, he notes, on the back of a letter to his friend Tom Fitzharris, that “this envelope is pretty twee.” He’s referring to his illustration of a pair of quizzical-looking dogs with bandit-mask facial markings. Maybe it’s their matching letterman’s sweaters—each emblazoned with a “T,” for “Tom” and “Ted” (as Gorey was known to friends and family)—that push it into The Royal Tenenbaums–meets–Addams Family territory.

No doubt, Gorey veers perilously close, in some of the 100-odd books he wrote and illustrated, to sinister whimsy of the Tim Burton variety. Of course, it’s Burton who owes Gorey an aesthetic debt, not the other way ’round. The crisscross patterns incised on the expressionistic, dream-warped buildings of Halloween Town in the Burton-produced stop-motion feature The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) allude to Gorey’s obsessively crosshatched pen-and-ink style, inspired by 19th-century engravings. More generally, Burton strives for Gorey’s tone: a Buster Keaton deadpan that, when paired with plots straight out of Victorian penny dreadfuls, Golden Age murder mysteries, and silent movie melodramas and spiked with a jigger of dry wit (indebted to gay humorists such as E. F. Benson, Ronald Firbank, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom Gorey adored), yields the camp-macabre, ironic-gothic aesthetic critics call “Goreyesque.”

But there’s more to Gorey than an arch tone and a lugubrious mood. In books like The Object-Lesson (1958; about the plotless pointlessness of human existence), The Remembered Visit (1965; Proustian musings on lost time), The Loathsome Couple (1977; about our capacity for moral depravity), The Hapless Child (1961; about the Camusian absurdity of life’s plot twists), The Gilded Bat (1966; about the asceticism of a life consecrated to art), and The West Wing (1963; a meditation on mortality and the afterlife), Gorey crosses Beckettian existentialism with Edward Learian nonsense, Max Ernstian surrealism with English-country-manor mystery to evoke a sense of philosophical disquietude—existential Mystery with a capital M.

Gorey may have shrunk from intellectual pretension, throwing interviewers and reviewers off the scent by disdaining the quest for meaning in his work, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t profundity in his goth-surrealist, existentialist-Taoist nonsense. He was interested in “what lies on the other side of the limit” of language, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it. Following the surrealists’ lead, Gorey juxtaposed poetic texts, dreamlike images, wordless panels, and visual “silences”—the negative space known in Japanese aesthetics (another Gorey influence) as “ma”—to evoke the ineffable. “On the shore a bat, or possibly an umbrella, disengaged itself from the shrubbery,” reads a caption in The Object-Lesson, “causing those nearby to recollect the miseries of childhood.” In a landscape as bare as the set for Waiting for Godot (1953), a mysterious figure—a man in hat and topcoat, seen in silhouette—is walking. A bat (or umbrella) swoops through the air, winging its way over a stand of skeletal trees; their clawlike branches grab at the airborne whatever-it-is. The effect is one of autumnal melancholy, twilit reverie, premonitions of mortality, surrealist mystery—and, beyond all that, an inexpressible enigma, felt but not seen.

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Given the dearth of serious Gorey criticism, From Ted to Tom, the latest addition to the shelves of Goreyana, is a lost opportunity.

There’s no denying that it’s a thing of beauty. An art exhibition between two covers, From Ted to Tom collects the 50 exquisitely decorated envelopes Gorey sent Fitzharris from 1974 to 1975. Nearly all of them are adorned with drawings of two droll, stumpy-tailed dogs cutting capers—spinning plates, cavorting on unicycles, riding magic carpets, and the like. Gorey’s control of his spiderweb-fine line is total, his delicate watercolor washes repay his debt to Japanese masters of the wood-block print like Hiroshige and Hokusai, his compositions are perfectly balanced, and his visual wit never misses its mark.

Accompanying the illustrations are excerpts from Gorey’s letters and reproductions of the note cards he often tucked into the envelopes. The cards bear quotations that struck a chord in Gorey’s mind. “Lines from Paul Gauguin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Cage, and even The Duchess of Malfi all made appearances,” Fitzharris notes in his introduction to the book. As in his letters to Neumeyer, Gorey’s correspondence with Fitzharris has a commonplace-book feel to it. An omnivorous, insatiable reader (his library contained over 26,000 books at the time of his death), Gorey ventriloquized other writers, using their words to express, with calculated obliquity, the thoughts and feelings he was too “cryptic and indirect” to give voice to.

Gorey’s eclectic selections shed light on his inner life, otherwise well hidden. Some quotes touch on the bittersweet transience of life: “Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse / Without a rider on a road at night. / The mind sits listening and hears it pass.” (Wallace Stevens, “The Pure Good of Theory”). Others resonate with Gorey’s “Great Simple Theory About Art,” his Wittgensteinian faith in the eloquence of the unsaid: “[C]ertain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon” (Jorge Luis Borges). As for Fitzharris’s excerpts from the letters themselves, they’re mostly chitchat, though we do get the occasional keyhole peek at what’s behind all those locked doors in the Gorey psyche: “I always felt the great crippling factor of my outlook or whatever was that I could never make it anything but esthetic; if only because it makes me wonder if I ever feel anything at all. After all, the world is not a picture or a book or even a ballet performance, not really.”

In the main, though, Fitzharris is determinedly unrevealing. He is, by all accounts, an intensely private man: he’s been silent as the tomb on the subject of Gorey—he declined to be interviewed for my biography—and has chosen, in From Ted to Tom, to omit selected passages from the letters. That’s fine if you’re exchanging furtive glances with the other suspects in one of Gorey’s absurdist mysteries, but if you’re editing the epistolary record of your close (if relatively brief) friendship with an evasive, enigmatic artist whose work was all about “the repressed” (as Freud called it), not so much.

We learn that Fitzharris and Gorey “had dozens of interests in common,” especially “the ballet, his great passion,” but not (as I reveal in my biography) that Gorey’s clique of fellow balletomanes regarded the “quiet, clean-cut, ‘nice-looking Middle American–type younger guy’” as Ted’s latest crush. Fitzharris tells us that he and Gorey took a trip to Scotland, without mentioning that, at some point during the trip, they parted company. “When I asked him about the trip, he said [that] after two weeks or something Tom had gone off with a nurse,” Gorey’s cousin Skee Morton told me. “And so Ted went on alone.”

After that, there were no more letters. “Ted never said anything about anything,” a member of his ballet circle confided. “But there was a sense that [he] was sad about something.” In 1975, Putnam brought out Amphigorey Too, which collected 20 of Gorey’s little books. It was dedicated, wistfully, “For Tom Fitzharris.” That same year, Gorey published L’Heure Bleue (1975), a bittersweet valentine to his friendship with Fitzharris, starring the canine couple from the envelopes. In From Ted to Tom, the book gets a perfunctory mention, nothing more.

These things matter. An art critic, a literary scholar, or a historian of gay culture might have noted, as I did in a 2020 essay, that L’Heure Bleue is “an achingly beautiful contribution to the secret history of queer lives […] a nocturne on love and loneliness.” Yet despite its blue mood, Gorey’s book has given heart to gay men like Ted Abenheim, a Goreyphile who told me,

I was introduced to Gorey in the early ’70s when I was coming to terms with my sexuality. It wasn’t until I read L’Heure Bleue that I put two and two together: this was about a same-sex couple and could possibly be from Gorey’s experience. Then the aesthetic in all of his books started falling into place as I was putting together my own perceptions of gay life and how I fit in.

“[I]f you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point,” Gorey said. “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.”