Ravishment Most... Titillating

As it may well have been for countless other children growing up in North America, my first encounter with the work of Edward Gorey was through the macabre and cheeky introductory titles of PBS's "Mystery!" With its menacingly cloaked male figures skulking about with knives in hand and fainting damsels in distress fluttering across the screen ~ all accompanied by that oh-so-familiar saucy tango, it's not difficult to see why the wild imaginations of many generations have been so easily captured.

Gorey's life was no less fascinating.

Born in Chicago in 1925, young Gorey's parents divorced when he was eleven years old, but intriguingly remarried when he was 27. During the time of the split, one of his stepmothers earned fame as a caberet singer who had a featured part in the film Casablanca, his father enjoyed a stint as a journalist, and an aunt worked as an illustrator for greeting cards. It was from this relative Gorey claimed to have inherited his talent, for he was mainly self-taught. Indeed, he only spent one semester at the age of 18 studying art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, whereupon he left to spend two years in the Army at the age of 19. After his stint in the service, he went on to attend Harvard for four, studying French.

Young Gorey eventually found a job as a professional artist in the Art Department of Doubleday Anchor, illustrating covers and texts; publications bearing his work include Dracula by Bram Stoker, The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. And though his style was heavily gothic in a classically British Victorian and Edwardian manner ~ so much so that many, including myself, assumed he was English ~ he'd never once set foot on the land across the pond. He professed a deep and abiding love of ballet, attending every performance of the New York City Ballet for many years, and was an unabashed fan of The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Batman: The Animated Series, taping episodes and claiming their influence in his later art. And over the years, he gained a cult-like following for his own darkly humourous tomes, including The Doubtful Guest (1957), The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Tale by Ogdred Weary (1961), the infamous alphabet book Amphigorey (1972), and The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas (1998).

Here is a gorgeously animated version of The Tuning Fork (1983), wrought by Sara and set to lovely piano music by two of my favourite composers, Debussy and Chopin.









Making a home in Cape Cod and naming it "Elephant House," Gorey lived out the rest of his years in relative seclusion. He found immense pleasure in occasionally venturing out and taking on small jobs in the community, including working as a cameraman at a local cable station. He also studied computer art shortly before his death on April 15th, 2000, at the age of 75. While it's difficult to precisely quantify Gorey's immense influence on popular counterculture, it's almost too easy to pinpoint his undeniable touch in such worldwide phenomena as the Lemony Snicket series, Emily the Strange merchandise, and Tim Burton's films. Edward Gorey is a national treasure.


Exhilaratingly, I recently felt a magnificent bolt of ecstatic joy shoot up my spine when I happened upon this lost Gorey treasure online:

"A lot of the late Gorey’s work has been reprinted over the years, but his etiquette-book parody The Recently Deflowered Girl (1965) isn’t one of them (and it doesn’t seem likely to be). Copies go for around $100 on the antiquarian market. Luckily for us, someone at LiveJournal scanned the entire thing, but it was pulled, whether for drawing too much traffic or for copyright violation, we don’t know." Books Are People Too

Oh dear... it is wrong to covet, isn't it? After a bit of digging around and refusing to pay three digits for (still) a very cool book, I've just discovered ~ with squealing delight ~ that Gorey's The Recently Deflowered Girl: The Right Thing to Say on Every Dubious Occasion by Hyacinthe Phyppe is actually being reprinted and is set for release on November 10th at Amazon... and you can bet your sweet ass I'm pre-ordering my copy NOW!

In the meantime, here are a few tantalizing pages to whet your appetite for the deliriously funny, tongue-in-cheek book. Turns out a sweet virgin ought keep her wits about her at all times, especially in Chinatown...

Enjoy, my deliciously besmirched darlings.