Artist, illustrator and author Edward Gorey would have turned 100 this yr, and the lately revealed “From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey” is a becoming celebration of his wit and expertise.
The ebook reproduces, in gorgeous element, a sequence of fifty elaborately illustrated envelopes Gorey created within the mid-Seventies. However once I began studying “From Ted to Tom,” I felt confused – and a bit let down.
The ebook makes no point out of Gorey’s queerness. To me, it is a missed alternative to make clear how being homosexual could have fueled a few of his most private work.
The grasp of macabre
At this time, Edward Gorey is extensively recognized for his sprawling, macabre-yet-humorous physique of labor, which spans practically each medium.
There are dozens of his personal books, notably “The Doubtful Guest” and “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” in addition to cowl designs for a lot of others; units and costumes for the 1977 Tony Award-winning revival of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”; the opening credit score sequence for the PBS tv sequence “Mystery!”; “The Fantod Pack,” a deck of Tarot-like playing cards; and hand-sewn, surrealist dolls.
His tales typically characteristic adults and youngsters alike who meet premature ends by way of largely hilarious, unlikely accidents – and, sure, the occasional straight-up homicide. However they’re by no means gratuitous, nor do they glorify violence for violence’s sake.
As for his private life, Gorey could have been what right this moment we’d name asexual; Gorey himself used the time period “undersexed,” however he additionally acknowledged, when requested immediately about his sexuality, that he “supposed” he was homosexual.
Mark Dery’s 2018 Gorey biography, “Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey,” paperwork the artist’s participation in postwar homosexual life. The ebook particulars a handful of crushes Gorey had on numerous males, no less than one in every of which – a short affair with a person named Victor – concerned some bodily intimacy.
To no matter extent Gorey entertained intercourse or romance, it was with males. As Dery factors out, nevertheless, this reality largely goes unaddressed in discussions of the artist’s work.
An opportunity encounter
“From Ted to Tom” reinforces this silence.
The “Tom” is Tom Fitzharris, the creator of the ebook’s introduction and a few commentary on the ebook’s finish.
Within the introduction, Fitzharris explains that earlier than he met Gorey, he was already amassing the artist’s “small, exquisite books.”
After attending a gallery exhibit of Gorey’s work in 1974, Fitzharris mailed him one of many books from his assortment to request Gorey’s signature, together with a cryptic inquiry about two of the ebook’s characters. Gorey obliged and returned the ebook with a equally cryptic reply.
Quickly after this alternate, Fitzharris noticed Gorey on the road and launched himself. The 2 quickly started assembly usually “for dinner, the theater, coffee, and especially the ballet, his great passion,” one which Fitzharris shared. When Gorey left to summer season on Cape Cod, he started sending Fitzharris the envelopes collected in “From Ted to Tom.”
Copyright © 2025 by the Edward Gorey Charitable Belief. Courtesy of Tom Fitzharris.
Fitzharris shares virtually no details about himself within the ebook, and he has by no means commented publicly about his personal sexuality. Nevertheless, even his dry, minimalist narration can not conceal the depth of their connection.
Describing his first go to to Gorey’s condo, he writes: “I thought I’d be at Gorey’s for ten minutes, but I left two hours later.” Whether or not Fitzharris misplaced observe of time as the 2 explored their “dozens of shared interests” or just couldn’t tear himself away, when he lastly made it again to work, he was shocked that he nonetheless had a job.
The envelope as canvas
Given this voracious drive to create, it’s no shock that Gorey noticed an object as humble as a letter envelope as a inventive alternative. As Dery factors out, Gorey was additionally making his illustrated envelopes because the mail artwork motion was turning into widespread. Sparked by artist Ray Johnson within the Sixties – who, like Gorey, lived in New York Metropolis – it concerned artists utilizing the postal service to alternate artistic endeavors, utilizing it as an alternative choice to the business galleries and museums that artists had largely trusted.
The 50 envelopes reproduced in “From Ted to Tom” was not Gorey’s first dalliance with the envelope as canvas; he’d experimented with it six years earlier, whereas within the midst of a collaboration with creator and editor Peter Neumeyer, with whom he produced three youngsters’s books.
In his drawings to Neumeyer, Gorey largely appears to be having enjoyable taking part in round with a brand new formal problem: the best way to combine drawings with the prerequisite handle textual content in a satisfying approach.
As a result of I research how folks use photographs to make sense of the world, I couldn’t assist however discover key variations between the Neumeyer envelopes and people who Gorey despatched to Fitzharris.
The Fitzharris sequence is poised and polished from the leap. Gorey’s distinctive hand-lettering is crisp, exact and completely straight, every envelope an entire scene. Some scenes are extra advanced than others, however every is an entire thought.
Copyright © 2025 by the Edward Gorey Charitable Belief. Courtesy of Tom Fitzharris.
There’s one other notable distinction between the Neumeyer and Fitzharris envelopes. Whereas the previous encompasses a revolving forged of actual and imaginary creatures, the latter has two co-stars: two black-and-white canines, sides emblazoned with matching, serifed T’s.
In his introduction to the ebook, Fitzharris confirms that the animals characterize Gorey and him. Fitzharris can be clearly greater than the fortunate witness to a burst of inventive genius. He’s its muse.
Copyright © 2025 by the Edward Gorey Charitable Belief. Courtesy of Tom Fitzharris.
‘Pen pal’ or one thing extra?
No matter Gorey’s creative ambitions for the venture, it’s also a visible diary of kinds: an album of their shared experiences, their frequent pursuits and hobbies, and a doc of Gorey’s goings-on whereas they had been aside.
Take, for instance, an envelope that depicts the canine duo standing amid an unlimited assemblage of blue bottles, with Fitzharris’ handle displayed as labels.
“All the blue bottles are a recollection of a window full of them in one of the antique shops I stopped in after you left that Sunday,” Gorey wrote within the accompanying letter. “The sun coming through them is not reproducible, at least by me.”
Copyright © 2025 by the Edward Gorey Charitable Belief. Courtesy of Tom Fitzharris.
In the identical letter, Gorey struggles to convey the depth of his feeling upon receiving a current letter from Fitzharris.
“I used to maintain that if it couldn’t be put into words it didn’t exist; if anything I believe rather the opposite now. All of which is rather a strangled attempt to say that I appreciated your letter of the 23rd very much, but that I don’t know how to say so directly. Yes.”
What did Fitzharris’ letter say that moved Gorey a lot? What’s the that means of his singular, elliptical “yes”? Is it merely stylistic? Or is it a response?
We’ll probably by no means know. However evidently no matter Fitzharris mentioned moved him deeply.
There are different poignant scenes. In his notes to “From Ted to Tom,” Fitzharris takes credit score for introducing Gorey to the French phrase “heure bleue,” which interprets to “the blue hour” and refers back to the time of day simply after the solar units. Gorey’s delight is mirrored in a beautiful scene of quiet companionship.
Tom and Ted stand at a low fence or porch railing, sharing drinks and gazing up at a darkening sky as nightfall settles over thick foliage. For as soon as leaving nothing to the creativeness, he inscribes “HEURE BLEUE” subsequent to the picture in thick, daring letters – a uncommon act of captioning.
Copyright © 2025 by the Edward Gorey Charitable Belief. Courtesy of Tom Fitzharris
This uncommon relative directness continues into the accompanying letter. Although he can hardly bear admitting it, Gorey describes their current go to as “a happy day,” instantly qualifying the remark as a “revolting phrase.”
One “cannot help but think how seldom in life one knows one is having one at the time,” he continues. The phrasing is considerably innocuous. However I ponder how a lot pleasure Gorey should have felt – and the way robust his must convey it should have been – to beat the drive of his “revulsion.”
This push and pull between attraction to at least one one other and repulsion at one’s personal spontaneous emotion provides the dynamism that make the drawings in “From Ted to Tom” so compelling.
Regardless of this highly effective present, Fitzharris, who’s credited because the ebook’s editor, leaves the subject of Gorey’s sexuality untouched in each his introduction to the ebook and its finish notes, the place he supplies a information to a number of the private and cultural references in Gorey’s drawings and letters. The ebook’s again cowl refers to Fitzharris because the artist’s “pen pal.”
Denied entry to the underlying particulars driving this dynamism, the reader loses the possibility to replicate on the supply of this electrical present, its affect on his artwork, and the way Gorey’s struggles with intimacy and need, that are all too common, had been additionally undoubtedly formed by the problem of being homosexual in a deeply homophobic society.
Reasonably than limiting the understanding of his work, accounting for Gorey’s queerness invitations viewers of his artwork and readers of his work into deeper communion with the artist – and themselves.
Copyright © 2025 by the Edward Gorey Charitable Belief. Courtesy of Tom Fitzharris.
