Thoughts on Edward Gorey

Today I am interested in Edward Gorey. He makes me think of so many things, and yet we never came near to meeting. He departed this life about ten years ago now, so meeting him anytime soon is unlikely. In his artwork, unmistakable even to those who are unfamiliar with the man himself, he flirts deliciously with the macabre. But it's okay. You always know which side of the dark whispery curtain is yours . . . for the time being.

My first experience of Gorey was as a child. My mother loved to watch the PBS series Mystery! My sisters and I would sometimes watch with her, though we most often watched the beginning of the program just so we could giggle and imitate the characters in the opening titles. To this day, the subject of Gorey's artwork will occasionally come up and we reminisce, though more with a chuckle now than a giggle now that we are adults. 

A very good friend who has also since left us once gave my eldest daughter a little booklet. It was the abecedarian book called The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Each leaf of the small book features a boy or a girl whose name began with a particular letter of the alphabet, and each of the small children meets gruesome or grizzly end, and the really awful thing is that you can't help but laugh, at least at some of them. Each in a single frame, they expire alphabetically, and they expire in rhyme. You do not see the child's actual demise in most cases, but it is the implication of what comes next that produces the chuckle.

Now, I know the reality is not funny at all, but like the child who loves monster, dinosaur, and ghost stories, which help to relieve some of the anxiety of the unknown in their little lives, I appreciate Gorey's taking the edge off the reality of human child mortality in mine. Think of it as a sort of psychological homeopathy, if you will. We fight like with like. The constant fear of losing one's little ones—undeniably real in our world, just open a newspaper—requires, for me at least, the occasional off-letting of steam, and humor, in this case, is the medium. After all, life is too serious to live it without a sense of humor.