Killing children is generally frowned upon, but Edward Gorey did it all the time. He squashed them with trains, fed them to bears, poisoned them with lye, forced them to swallow tacks, watched them waste away, and burned them in fires; on his watch, they died of everything from fits to flying into bits. In perhaps the most popular of Gorey’s eight abecedarian books, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” twenty-six children, beginning with Amy “who fell down the stairs” and ending with Zillah “who drank too much gin,” meet their demise one page at a time in perfect pentameter. That macabre sequence has been lovingly staged with dolls and paper cutouts as a scavenger hunt in the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod, the museum that occupies the Yarmouth property where he spent the last twenty years of his life.
Through the end of this year, the “Elephant House,” as Gorey called 8 Strawberry Lane, is also hosting a special exhibit on the artist’s young subjects. “Hapless Children: Drawings from Mr. Gorey’s Neighborhood” features art and prose from throughout Gorey’s prolific career: original pen-and-ink drawings from his more than a hundred novellas, volumes of poetry, plays, puppet shows, and nonsense collections, together with illustrations and covers for this magazine and for works by the likes of Muriel Spark, Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, T. S. Eliot, Gilbert and Sullivan, Edward Lear, and Samuel Beckett.
The exhibition’s title comes from Gorey’s book “The Hapless Child,” in which an orphan named Charlotte Sophia is sold into slavery, blinded, and then killed in the street. But the museum is also highlighting “The Beastly Baby,” in which a bloated infant who gurgles like a clogged drain and shrieks like nails on a chalkboard is carried off by an eagle, and “The Tuning Fork,” which tells the story of a young girl, Theoda, who drowns herself to get away from her family, only to posthumously enlist a sea creature in her effort to get revenge on them.
Gregory Hischak, the curator at the Gorey House, knows that these sound like unlikely plots for young readers, but he’s seen scores of children delight in Gorey’s books while touring the house and attending the museum’s summer festival—Fantastagorey Day—with mask-making, readings, puppet shows, and “unfortunate fortune telling.” “Edward was always convinced his work was children’s literature, but very few publishers agreed with him,” Hischak said. “His own childhood was very brief, and he grew up very fast, so as he got older he tended to get younger, too, surrounding himself with childish things.”
Gorey collected all sorts of objects at local flea markets and garage sales—books, of course, though also cheese graters, doorknobs, silverware, crosses, tassels, telephone insulators, keys, orbs—but he especially loved animal figurines and stuffed animals. Before the museum took over, Gorey’s bedroom was filled with modern plush toys, and the barn behind the fifteen-room house contained boxes of hundred-year-old corncob and peach-pit dolls. But, as few people outside of collectors know, Gorey did not just acquire toys; he also made them.
“He was a frantic sewer of small fabric arts,” Hischak told me. “I think the toys were born out of nervous energy, a device to keep his hands busy.” Most evenings, Gorey sewed and stuffed the toys by hand while watching VHS recordings of his favorite television shows: “Star Trek,” “Golden Girls,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “The X-Files,” and “Murder, She Wrote.” He used whatever fabric he happened to have around (blue denim, gold lamé, gray velvet, green gingham, pink satin, white cotton) and, once he cut out the shapes, he stitched them together by hand, then filled them with rice—preferably Uncle Ben’s, because it was the only brand that came with a spout for easy pouring.
The resulting creatures included some actual animals, like bats, elephants, frogs, and salamanders, but also some of Gorey’s own imaginary creations, like the penguin-ish “Doubtful Guest,” which appeared in one of the artist’s books wearing sneakers and a scarf and stayed for seventeen years without explaining itself, or the flexible, Gumbyesque “Figbash,” a typographic acrobat of sorts that the artist shaped into letters and numbers as needed. Gorey made hundreds of these toys over the years, sometimes in batches of identical fabric, with subtle variations on the shape of the head or the size of the limbs, but all floppy and friendly looking. Gorey gave the toys as gifts to family and friends, as well as to cast members of theatrical shows he was involved with, like the Nantucket Stage Company revival of “Dracula,” for which he designed the sets and costumes—ultimately winning a Tony for them, after the show moved to Broadway—and the Theatre on the Bay production of his own play “Stumbling Christmas.”
He made quite a few for the local theatres on Cape Cod to sell in their lobbies, as special souvenirs to help meet their budgets, and he’s rumored to have set up a table at the Wellfleet Flea Market and sold them himself some weekends. In a series of posts on his blog Goreyana, the collector Irwin Terry has documented a zoological park’s worth of the handmade creatures, assembling descriptions and photographs from auction houses, other collectors, and every inch of the Internet. But the full extent of Gorey’s entrepreneurship and beneficence is unknown; just last summer, the Gorey House received a donation from a family in Cambridge who had inherited a matching set of five rabbits made from American flag fabric. Nearly thirty years earlier, Gorey had given the “Patriotic Bunnies” to the Cahoon Art Museum, in Barnstable, for its Labor Day silent auction.
The Patriotic Bunnies came with a card; sometimes, though, the authenticity of the toys is hard to confirm because they have no such documentation. And, even when the provenance is clear, their future can be uncertain—according to Hischak, the toys are some of the trickiest ephemera the Gorey House handles. “They’re a curator’s nightmare,” he said. “We never know the dates they were made, they’re hard to display because they’re floppy and don’t sit, and mice love to eat them and bugs like to crawl into them and hatch eggs that destroy them. We keep ours in the freezer when they’re not being displayed.”
In the early days of Gorey’s career, thoroughly documented in Mark Dery’s recent biography “Born to Be Posthumous,” when the artist was struggling to get an editor interested in his work, he self-published his books. What the world came to know as Fantod Press was actually just Gorey’s own publishing effort, and all twenty-eight of the books that the press published were his, hidden behind a series of increasingly comical anagrams and aliases: first Ogdred Weary, then Mrs. Regera Dowdy, and later Eduard Blutig, O. Müde, Raddory Gewe, Edward Pig, Garrod Weedy, and Aedwyrd Gore. He bounced between a series of commercial publishers before finding a champion in Andreas Brown, at the Gotham Book Mart, who promoted Gorey’s books by the front register, exhibited his art in the store’s gallery, and even helped put together the “Amphigorey” anthologies, which sustained the artist financially.
Brown also oversaw the merchandising of Gorey’s work in other forms: shirts, postcards, calendars, coffee mugs, wallpaper, pillowcases, and, once he found out about the stuffed toys, those as well. When Brown learned that Gorey was letting the local theatres sell the toys for twenty-five dollars, he asked the artist to make a special line for the bookstore. At the Gotham Book Mart, the Manhattan varieties of Gorey’s critters sold for anywhere from three to ten times the price of the Cape Cod varieties, but they came with official-looking business-card-like tags that read, “Designed life-size / And sewn by hand / And filled with rice / By Edward Gorey.”
There were other commercial lines: a Doubtful Guest stuffed animal that sold with a special edition of that book, a Bah Humbug doll that sold with an edition of “The Headless Bust,” and a bespoke line of toys made by Toy Works, a company that operated out of a chicken house on White Feather Farm on Fiddlers Elbow Road, near Greenwich, New York. Already well known for its reproductions of early stuffed toys, in which nineteenth-century patterns were replicated with silk-screening, Toy Works had been contracted by Random House to make toys based on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “The Velveteen Rabbit” that were sold with those books. For just two years, starting in 1978, Toy Works also made a select run of Gorey toys. Cut from hand-printed fabric patterns, these bean-bag animals include a handsome bat with ruby-red eyes and a wingspan of over a foot; smug cats dressed in striped sweaters; rabbits in kilts and sporrans; bow-tie-wearing pigs that look ready for a dinner party; and frogs wearing lettered turtlenecks, as if members of an amphibian rugby team. A few of the Gorey Collection Toy Works animals were also sold as “Sew-It-Yourself” kits, which were less expensive but required consumers to do the work otherwise done by the three dozen or so employees at the chicken house.
After Gorey’s death from a heart attack, in 2000, Brown continued to oversee the manufacture and sale of all things Gorey, as one of the trustees of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust. John LaFleur, who ran the nonprofit that helped convert the Elephant House into a museum, arranged for a new line of Gorey cats with the Gund Manufacturing Company, which is famous for its teddy bears but has also served as the licensed toy maker of companies like Walt Disney and Sesame Workshop. “Andreas was wonderful and wonderfully particular,” LaFleur said. “I remember we won him over with the knitted sweaters the cats wear. They were really knit, and that pleased him. He insisted on quality and was particular about everything.” When one batch from Gund was produced with a slight variation on the cats’ whiskers, Brown would not stand for it: “Andreas thought they looked like Fu Manchus, so we had to destroy the whole run.” LaFleur cherishes his own collection of the prototypes and rejected designs from the Gund line. “We tried to do a Wuggly Ump once,” he recalled, referring to the dragon-size, Cheshire-cat-like creature that stalks and then eats three children in one of Gorey’s tales. That one didn’t work out.
Over the years, the number of collectors has grown while the supply of toys has shrunk. Eaten by mice, destroyed by moths, treated by children the way that children were treated in Gorey’s books, even the manufactured lines of toys are harder and harder to come by. Christine von der Linn, the director of illustration art at Swann Auction Galleries, has sold a handful of Gorey’s elephants, frogs, and salamanders, but never one of his rabbits; the toys are often part of larger consignments or collections that the auction house handles along with art work and books. “It’s rare to have both a visual and tactile portal into a writer’s creations,” she noted over e-mail. “Like a physical souvenir of his literary interiors and characters. You can practically picture him chuckling and smiling as he stuffed the little rice bits into the fingers while watching nighttime soap operas.”
Philip Salmon is the general manager of Bromer Booksellers, Inc., in Boston, which collaborated with Gorey on a set of miniature books, including a quasi-homage to the Congregationalist minister Isaac Watts’s “Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children.” Salmon said that, in more than twenty years of working in rare books, he’s only sold a few dozen of Gorey’s toys, including the commercial productions like the animals made by Toy Works. Those go for a few hundred dollars each; the homemade ones can go for more than a thousand. “The detail and the craftsmanship of the toys are like the art,” Salmon said. “They all have this really interesting level of detail and mystery.”
Goreyphiles, like Gorey creatures, come in all shapes and sizes. Hischak, the curator, says that the pandemic slowed traffic at the Gorey House, especially from international visitors, but, since the museum reopened this spring, the crowds are returning. Over Memorial Day weekend, more than two hundred tourists ducked in from the rain to learn more about the man whom some passionately adored while others knew only vaguely as the creator of the animated title sequence for PBS’s “Masterpiece Mystery!” (For those who cannot make the trek, the photographer Kevin McDermott’s wonderful book “Elephant House” is a room-by-room tour of the property, documented the week after Gorey’s death.)
“We get a lot of families and kids,” Hischak said. “I think once they hit the age of seven, and their empathy drains away, they absolutely love Edward’s work. Maybe six if they have an older sibling. Kids will go through the house three or four times to find all the Gashlycrumb Tinies, and then they want a copy of the book to take home.” That delight is not surprising to Hischak, who argues that the narrative voice in most of Gorey’s work is “a twelve-year-old—a very, very, very wise twelve-year-old.”
Gorey was an only child who never had children of his own and didn’t take much of an interest in them. (“I don’t have any relationship to children,” he once told an interviewer. “Children are pathetic and quite frequently not terribly likable.”) However, he worked with plenty of children’s-book authors, illustrating John Ciardi’s “You Know Who” and “The Monster Den,” Florence Parry Heide’s “Treehorn” trilogy, and Peter Neumeyer’s “Donald and the . . .” series. In “Hapless Children: Drawings from Mr. Gorey’s Neighborhood,” the Gorey House has tried to situate the artist more comfortably in the canon of children’s literature, linking his illustrations to his years teaching children’s-book design at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
As tall as a ladder, Gorey liked to wear long fur coats and a beard as thick as they were. He looked like a yeti, and could seem just as rare and solitary, though an exhibition like this one makes clear he had plenty of colleagues and literary peers. “Edward was part of a generation of children’s authors who dispensed with the idea of the happy ending as a given,” Hischak said, explaining that Gorey was friends with Maurice Sendak, the creator of “Where the Wild Things Are”; published “The Doubtful Guest” the same year that Theodor Seuss Geisel published “The Cat in the Hat”; and was born just a few years after his fellow-Midwesterner, the “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz.
A coincidence of dates and friendship may not amount to an argument for Gorey’s inclusion in the annals of children’s literature, but a close look at his work does. Gorey swam in one of the coldest but deepest currents of the genre, letting his creations engage in the sort of torture not seen in children’s literature since the Brothers Grimm—doing dastardly things to kids, but also taking seriously their fears and anxieties about bodily integrity, environmental danger, and parental neglect. The work, like the artist, was always one letter away from being gory, but that gap was enough to make them both beloved by readers of all ages. And, even though he never crafted a world like Narnia or Neverland, Gorey did create a cast of creatures as strange and marvellous as children themselves.
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