The book artist Edward Gorey, when asked about his tastes in literature, would sometimes mention his mixed feelings about Thomas Mann: “I dutifully read ‘The Magic Mountain’ and felt as if I had t.b. for a year afterward.” As for Henry James: “Those endless sentences. I always pick up Henry James and I think, Oooh! This is wonderful! And then I will hear a little sound. And it’s the plug being pulled. . . . And the whole thing is going down the drain like the bathwater.” Why? Because, Gorey said, James (like Mann) explained too much: “I’m beginning to feel that if you create something, you’re killing a lot of other things. And the way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I am doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader’s mind.” He thought that he might have adopted this way of working from Chinese and Japanese art, to which he was devoted, and which are famous for acts of brevity. Many Gorey books are little more than thirty pages long: a series of illustrations, one per page, accompanied, at the lower margin or on the facing page, by maybe two or three lines of text, sometimes verse, sometimes prose.

In the white space that remained, Gorey felt, wit had room to flower. A beautiful example is his early book “The Doubtful Guest” (1957). Here, members of a respectable Victorian family are standing around one night, looking bored, when their doorbell rings. They open the door and find no one. But they scout around the porch, and finally, on the top of an urn at the end of the balustrade, they see something peculiar. It sort of resembles a penguin. On the other hand, it has fur and wears white sneakers. In any case, by the next page it is standing in the family’s foyer with its nose to the wallpaper, looking frightened but insistent, while they huddle in the next room, trying to figure out what to do. By the morning, the creature has made itself at home. An illustration shows us the family at the breakfast table, in their tight-fitting clothes, acting as though everything is perfectly fine, while the Guest, seated among them, and having finished what was on its plate, has begun eating the plate.

The next sixteen pages depict the unfolding of the creature’s unfortunate habits: how it tears chapters out of the family’s books and hides their bath towels and throws their pocket watches into the pond. At the end, we are told that the Guest has been with the family for seventeen years, and seems to have no intention of leaving. In the final drawing, we see the family, now gray-haired, staring at or away from this mysterious being as, still in its Keds, it sits on an elaborately tasselled ottoman, gazing straight ahead. It doesn’t look happy; it doesn’t look unhappy. It is just living its little life, as its hosts ceased to be able to do seventeen years ago. It wanted a home. It got one.

This is very funny, because, in the absence of any explanation, we are asked to imagine seventeen years of whispered conversations: “What shall we do?” “Should we call the constable?” “The vicar?” It’s not entirely funny, though. It’s poignant, too: a story of how something can suddenly appear in our lives—blood on the carpet, a letter without a return address—and, after that, nothing is ever the same. The novelist Alison Lurie, a friend of Gorey’s from their college days, said that she thought the subject of “The Doubtful Guest” (which the author dedicated to her) was her decision—inexplicable to Gorey—to have a child. Others felt that the book was simply a species of Surrealism, something like Max Ernst’s book “Une Semaine de Bonté” (“A Week of Kindness”), in which a collage of illustrations—harvested from Victorian encyclopedias, catalogues, and novels—hints at a mysterious narrative.

“It joined them at breakfast and presently ate / All the syrup and toast, and a part of a plate.” Edward Gorey, “The Doubtful Guest” (Doubleday), 1957

Gorey acknowledged his debt to the Surrealists:

I sit reading André Breton and think, “Yes, yes, you’re so right.” What appeals to me most is an idea expressed by [Paul] Éluard. He has a line about there being another world, but it’s in this one. And Raymond Queneau said the world is not what it seems—but it isn’t anything else, either. These two ideas are the bedrock of my approach. If a book is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.

But, however much Gorey owes to the Surrealists, I see in him, equally, their less fun-loving predecessors, the Symbolist poets and painters of the late nineteenth century: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Khnopff, Munch, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon. That strange world of theirs, caught in a kind of syncope, or dead halt, of feeling—open a Gorey volume on a winter afternoon, and that’s what you get.

There is a new book out on Gorey, the first biography, by the cultural critic Mark Dery, titled “Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey” (Little, Brown). Gorey was born in 1925, in Chicago, the only child of an unremarkable Irish-American couple. The father was a newspaperman, among other things. The mother was a beauty and an oppression. Gorey recalled that as an adult he’d say to her, “Oh, Mother, let’s face it. You dislike me sometimes as much as I dislike you.” “Oh no, dear,” she’d reply. “I’ve always loved you.”

He was an extraordinarily precocious child. He was reading, he said, by the age of three. When the grownups decided it was time to teach him how, he’d already figured it out. He claimed to have read all the works of Victor Hugo by the age of eight: “I still remember Victor Hugo being forcefully removed from my tiny hands . . . so I could eat my supper. They couldn’t get me to put him down.” On the city buses, he liked to simulate epileptic attacks. But don’t get him wrong, he said: “I think that’s a standard thing when you’re about twelve or thirteen.” When he was just entering his teens, his parents divorced. His father had run off with a night-club singer, Corinna Mura. (Mura appears briefly in “Casablanca,” as a chanteuse in Rick’s Café—the one who strums a guitar and sings “Tango delle Rose.”) When Gorey was twenty-seven, the father returned, and the parents remarried.

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Gorey had next to no art education. And, thanks to the Second World War, his college career was suspended soon after it began. He was drafted, and, from 1944 to 1946, found himself in Utah, as a clerk in an Army base set up to test chemical weapons. He later claimed that twelve thousand sheep mysteriously died there. Once the war ended, he went to Harvard, on the G.I. Bill. There he roomed for two years with the larky young poet Frank O’Hara, in a suite where, according to historians of the postwar arts in America, the two of them sat around on chaise longues, drinking cocktails and listening to Marlene Dietrich records. But they eventually drifted off into separate crowds, Gorey’s less wild. He stayed at Harvard for the regulation four years, majoring in French and ping-ponging between dean’s list and academic probation.

After graduation, he hung around Cambridge for a while, starting and abandoning novels, writing limericks and verse dramas, and doing illustrations for books and magazines. But he had no money and felt he was getting nowhere. Some of the experience of this time perhaps found its way into the first of his little books, “The Unstrung Harp” (1953), which tells the story of Mr. Earbrass, a novelist with a head shaped like a kielbasa, who starts writing a new book every other year, on November 18th. He hates all of them, not to speak of the process of writing them. Looking at the one he’s currently working on, he thinks: