what Edward Gorey knew

Cynthia Ozick, a Gorey show

I recently returned to the essays of Cynthia Ozick, which is some of the best literary criticism out there. I especially love her piece “What Henry James Knew’ which examines his strange modernism, his similarities with Kafka, his failures in his Drama career, and some of his relationships including with his ill sister. Here is a description of a photo of Alice James which pinpoints what a sharp and exquisite writer Ozick is.

She also highlights James’s loneliness in “Henry James’s Unborn Child”

“Not long after the names Archdean, Marcher and Bartram entered into his Notebook, he confessed, in a letter, to the “essential loneliness of my life”- the emphasis is his. “This loneliness,” he inquired, “what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper about me, at any rate, than anything else; deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my ‘discipline’, deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art.” Loneliness, he said, would be his final port.”

Some short stories I enjoyed lately are the title story of the collection ‘The Houseguest’ by Amparo Dávila, about a strange and ugly man who comes to stay in a woman’s house on the invitation of her husband, and ‘Moses and Gaspar’' about a man who has to take in two strange, cat like creatures belonging to his dead brother and how they ruin his life. It reminded me of a book of ‘world tales’ I had as a kid which included one about a man faced cat. I was so satisfied with these stories I haven’t read the rest of the collection yet. This week, Ludwig, my cat dropped a pot of dirt and a lamp on me and also tried to eat my Kandinsky poster.

I also loved the Fortune-teller by Muriel Spark, about an interaction between two clairvoyant women. It contains a very Spark-esque maxim ‘ “destination” none the less often answers for destiny’ and classic Spark morality - the narrator notices a so called Leninist speaking in a different voice to people she deems staff: ‘I always marvelled at the trouble she must have put into harbouring such a range of initial attitudes as she had for different people, when one alone would serve for all.”

I gave a novel a not so good review in the Telegraph this week. The book felt like part of a large and recent trend of humourless, melodramatic gothic which backtracks on Carter and Austen. There is a backlash against irony and humour- and a limited view of irony as a snide 2000s thing when I think irony in an overarching British context is quite a gentle, sweet and sly creature.

Last week in Leith, there was an art exhibition PHANTASMAGOREY dedicated to the artist and author Edward Gorey to celebrate his centenary. He was born in 1925( the same year Mrs Dalloway was published) which is important to remember as his work is often seen as cutely anachronistic rather than seeped in the era of his childhood; the slim, fan holding flappers, tennis players and gramophones, the Victorian era so recent you could smell it, the pervasive gloom of illness and death in a world before polio vaccines and one still recovering from the First World War and about to be thrown into the next . The melting of his style into the general culture makes him feel at the same time, quite contemporary, from Tim Burton films to those awful portraits of cats, birds and dogs in napoleonic era coats sold on Etsy and hanging on the dark turquoise walls of unappealing cocktail bars. The exhibition was a labour of love, blossoming from the fact the only place abroad Gorey ever visited was Scotland because of his favourite Powell and Pressburger film, I Know Where I'm Going! (Many of Gorey’s characters have the same side profile as Roger Livesey the film’s male lead.) There were no works by Gorey himself, but rather imitations of his work, or dilutions, with only a few good pieces of which one could say Gorey had an interesting influence on their unique productions- a watercolour by Louis Weir I really loved of sinister, Ellen Terry like dolls, one riding a Roman style chariot, toy soldiers, a pierrot with other heads emerging from its own like disgruntled marshmallows, all done in a clown palette of red, orange, blue. A deceptively simplistic landscape of lined hills by Mick Peter (Gorey’s line work was meticulous), a political cartoon of a reaper by Morten Morland. The rest were almost pure imitations of Gorey- (ex: a comic about a missing vicar) mixed with the overly twee( twee things are always a watering down of something more intriguing) including a photo of a goth girl wiping her eyes with blue polished fingertips, dozens of cat drawings, and an illustration of racoons in a Gorey palette and a fake sepia photo of lost Gorey titles. There was a photo of a man, dressed as Gorey and wearing a fur coat sewn with beanie baby bats and cats. Talk about cutisification. Gorey had so many cats in his New England house it probably smelled. He also had dozens of pet rocks, kept in bowls of water.

They lacked the grotesque and off-putting edge of Gorey’s work which made it so alluring and sadly made me think of someone putting ‘make an Edward Gorey drawing’ into an AI machine. I looked up a lot of the artists, and found their regular work very different from their pieces on display here, perhaps specifically made for this exhibition, which didn’t feel like a worthwhile thing to do but unintentionally reflected where we are culturally. I think having any old piece by cartoonist Edward Steed would have given more food for thought as his joyously depraved work is the only thing since Gorey which hits a similar sinister note.

I am really interested in the idea of influence, of how someone talented is able to take inspiration from someone else and transform it into their own, like Gorey able to capture through line and figure, the same eeriness of sentences in The Turn of the Screw. The show included a big list of Gorey’s influences- T.S Eliot, whose name was awkwardly misspelt with two L’s, ballet-he was dedicated to Balanchine’s work specifically-Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein,Ronald Firbank and so forth- conspicuously missing Jane Austen and Henry James (though the list had more dully, ‘Edwardians’ and ‘Victoriana’ whatever those mean) and also absent were less tasteful likes such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There were no extracts or images from any of the works listed, though fair enough, we know what some estates are like and this was a small show, but the presence of the list was nonetheless interesting and important because it shows not just the image the curators have of Gorey, but the difference between how someone like Gorey, consuming culture widely and voraciously and combining it with his life experience(or lack thereof, he was like Austen in more ways than one) brought something idiosyncratic into being, and the pure boring derivativeness of some works on display, specially commissioned or not, of which I ask myself, Why Bother?

What I consider failure and derivativeness is encouraged especially at this time in history because of capital (like the endless Secret Histories with sometimes word for word extractions from the original I have mentioned before), indeed many of the most derivative works in the show had red sold dots. Things are repeated until they are no longer desirable than discarded when consumers grow tired, and any sort of originality is treated with deep skepticism until/unless it proves profitable. Words like ‘genius’ are now tainted under a guise of anti-snobbishness, but really I think because it denotes something not endlessly producible and profitable by a large group of people.

Gorey offers a simple lesson to those worried about being too derivative - enjoyable consume as much culture as you can instead of just one or two sources! All art is born of other art, but the more you take in the more distinctive and genuine your creative outcome will be, and by just copying one other person, you are adding to capital not to Art.

In Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes Lermentov says to the composer Julian Castor “It is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from” . There was one accidental piece in the show, I think Gorey really would have loved however- this old green safe that was part of the wall which truly has his spirit. (that sold sticker, obviously, does not belong to the safe)

I got sent some interesting new Daunt books ( new Celia Dale!) they have some of the best covers out there, and also bought the newish selection of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry though it doesn’t include my favourite poem/ short story “In the Cupboard”. I am not sure I buy the term prose poem as it just feeds into a really conservative view of what a short story is, I want to delve into this idea soon as I have accumulated a anthologies of such.