NYT Reviews Mark Dery's Biography of 'Eccentric' and 'Mysterious' Edward Gorey
New York Times book critic Robert Gottlieb reads Mark Dery's new Edward Gorey biography, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey in one of the section's last articles of 2018. Gorey, who befriended poets like Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, "was himself a tantalizing mystery, one that Mark Dery, in an over-ample new biography, sets out to solve, only to acknowledge at the end that it can’t be done," Gottlieb explains. Taking it from there:
Well, every human being is a mystery, and none of us can be “solved,” but Gorey certainly invites the discussion — by the life choices he made, by the nature of his accomplishments and by his provocative self-presentations. (“Part of me is genuinely eccentric,” he acknowledged, “part of me is a bit of a put-on. But I know what I’m doing.”)
There are mysteries within the mystery, and for Dery the mystery that matters most is that of Gorey’s sexuality — he gnaws away at it relentlessly throughout the 400-odd pages of his narrative. Was Gorey straight? Not very likely. Was he gay? Probably, but not actively. Did he have any sexual life at all? Was he asexual? Gorey himself addressed the question in an interview he gave to Boston magazine late in life. “I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something. I’ve never said that I was gay and I’ve never said that I wasn’t.” Responding to the direct question “What are your sexual preferences?” he replied: “Well, I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly. I suppose I’m gay. But I don’t identify with it much.” Dery makes much of the fact that when the interview was reprinted after Gorey’s death, the final two sentences were suppressed, but by the time this particular reader had reached Page 410 of “Born to Be Posthumous,” he was so tired of the endless speculation that he wouldn’t have perked up if it turned out that Gorey’s interests lay in extraterrestrials.
Read more at the New York Times.