Name: Laura's review of Born to Be Posthumous by Mark Dery
Item: Born to Be Posthumous
Rating: 2
Author: Laura

Mark Dery

From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth. But who was this man, who lived with over 20,000 books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known--in the late 1940s, no less--to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes--but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean drag? He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious. Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, BORN TO BE POSTHUMOUS draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey.

The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

Born to Be Posthumous

Laura

Typically, when a book compels me to come out of my review slump this strongly, it is not a good thing.

There’s a wonderful amount of information here about Edward Gorey. Dery does a phenomenal job at telling the story of Gorey chronologically and leaving no stone unturned. And because that is a big chunk of the book, and because it was so detailed, the book was saved from one-star hell.

While reading, I frequently found myself thinking of this review and how much I agreed with it. While the review is on a different book than this, the point stands- too often, we find ourselves believing that if we crack of the code of the author or artist’s sexuality, then we have unlocked the key to their personality. We have solved their mystery, in other words. I bring up this because it is apparent that Mark Dery thinks the key to understanding Edward Gorey is his homosexuality. And he brings it up frequently, leading us on Freudian goose chases that make one feel as if Dery is going insane in his quest to “prove” something already known. At one point, during which I had to set the book down, he attempts to claim that the lord’s missing artificial limb in the Gorey story The Object-Lesson was a sign of a castration complex. Later, when he tried to claim that the powder blue bugs in the Bug Book were emblematic of a same-sex relationship because they were colored blue I nearly ended the book altogether. 

In this work, we see two points come across. Gorey’s lapsed Catholicism and thus apparent (to Dery at least) hatred of the clergy and his homosexuality, both of which Edward Gorey never really explained or had little interest in himself. These points are beaten to death, and it got to the point where I was skipping Dery’s analysis of his work because I felt as though Dery was seeing what he wanted to see, as opposed to looking at Gorey’s work with a clean eye. Not only that, his analysis was chock-full of what I call, somewhat affectionately, “academic bullshit”. Overanalysis, abuse of Freud, use of phrases like “white male privilege” and “queer theory” and “heteronormative” made it difficult for me to take it seriously and is sure to alienate the lay reader. 

Above all, it seems like a joke that a biography of Edward Gorey would have so much speculation on an issue that bothered the man himself little, and one that he himself found tiring. The main turn off to this novel is Mark Dery himself. He seems content to pigeon-hole Edward Gorey as a gay writer, and because he is liberal “culture critic” writing in the 21st century, he cannot conceive of gay man whose sexuality is such a small part of his life. In fact, I wonder if he should have written this book at all. Certainly, it does not do much for me except as a history of Edward Gorey’s life.

Laura &
Born to Be Posthumous by Mark Dery

Reviews

Join the club

Laura &Born to Be Posthumous by Mark Dery

Reviews

Join the club

Laura &
Born to Be Posthumous by Mark Dery