Gorey Loses His Touch

The Headless Bust:

A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium

By Edward Gorey

Harcourt Brace

64pp., $15

Following last year's publication of The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas, Edward Gorey '50 told an interviewer from Newsday, "I wouldn't buy [the book] as a present, but then apparently they're hoping for lots of people to." While the interviewer interpreted this comment as intended "impishly," I could as easily believe that Gorey meant what he said. Until then, the little books that Gorey writes and illustrates had been reliable delights; The Haunted Tea-Cosy stands out as the least interesting of his work. The Headless Bust is the sequel to The Haunted Tea-Cosy, continuing the story of Edmund Gravel and the Bahhumbug and marketed in the same way. Just as Harcourt Brace pushed The Haunted Tea-Cosy as a Christmas present, The Headless Bust has been positioned as a millennium gift-book, a dubious genre to be sure.

Gorey has said, "I was probably fully formed by the time I was 21 or 22." Indeed, his work, beginning with The Unstrung Harp of 1953, has been remarkably consistent: anachronistic, morbid and arcane from the first. Besides illustrating his books, Gorey's drawings grace countless engagement calendars and postcards, the animated opening sequence of PBS's "Mystery!" series, the covers of paperback classics published by Anchor Books in the '50s and '60s, dorm-room posters, and so on. If you do not think you have seen his work, you are probably wrong.

The chronological span of Gorey's work runs from the hornbook-inspired Eclectic Abecedarium through the Jazz Age-naughtiness of The Curious Sofa but will budge no further. An enthusiasm for the obsolete furnishes his rooms with daguerreotypes, gramophones and bell-pulls, and his diction matches the furniture-- his characters say things like "Mercy!" and "Drat!." Gorey's nonsense verse is the direct descendant of Edward Lear's and Lewis Carroll's, and, as it would be impossible to transplant Lear or Carroll to another era, Gorey inherits their Victorian world along with their spirit.

Gorey's taste for deadpan absurdity is sharpened by what he has called his "unreasonable interest in surrealism and Dada." He is a great fan of surrealist Max Ernst, and, just as Ernst rearranged 19th-century engravings into his own fantastic collages, Gorey recombines the elements of forgotten Victorian novels, reshuffling the set pieces and stock characters after his fancy. One of my favorites, The Object-Lesson, is constructed along these lines, piling delicious non sequitur on delicious non sequitur, like this: "It was already Thursday, but his lordship's artificial limb could not be found; therefore, having directed the servants to fill the baths, he seized the tongs and set out at once for the edge of the lake, where the Throbblefoot Spectre still loitered in a distraught manner."

But what really distinguishes Gorey are his meticulous, mock-lugubrious drawings. His handwriting imitates printing, his close hatching resembles lithography, and his creatures, even his houseplants, pose like silent-movie actors. The combination of care and whimsy in his illustrations is delightful, even wonderful. Unfortunately, the comparative crudeness of the drawings in The Headless Bust is immediately noticeable. The lines are thicker, and the awkward delicacy of his figures is diluted.

The story of The Headless Bust involves a starchy recluse, Edmund Gravel, and a giant beetle, the Bahhumbug. The Christmas party they threw in The Haunted Tea-Cosy winds down, another insect takes them to a provincial town and introduces the two to some peculiar characters. Returning home, they celebrate the turn-of-the-millenium over tea. Unfortunately, all this transpires through gawky verse, with a few amusing couplets interspersed.

The Headless Bust, along with The Haunted Tea-Cosy, made me giggle less than Gorey's other little books. I had to wonder, upon putting the book down, whether Gorey has grown tired of the very charms that are winning over more and more of the outside world.