An excerpt from Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer:
Indeed, I am not.
(Also, I may have once memorized The Gashlycrumb Tinies. But I've since forgotten most of it, and that's a different story altogether.)
Of the two men, Gorey emerges as the more avid correspondent, and the more confessional — a startlingly out-of-character turn, given the solitary artist’s notorious evasiveness in interviews and disinclination to answer mail or, for that matter, return calls. In Elephant House, a book of photographs of Gorey’s home, the photographer Kevin McDermott recalls “boxes of opened and unopened mail, much of it from fans,” surrounding Gorey’s sofa. Typically, Gorey replied to such letters, if he replied at all, with a postcard of his own design. Featuring a Gorey cat dozing on top of a mound of correspondence, it informed the recipient, “You’ve written me to no avail, because I never read my mail.” The novelist and critic Alexander Theroux notes, in his memoir of their friendship, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, that the artist’s “doors lacked knobs, and I am convinced they were intentionally left that way.” When the telephone rang, Gorey was often heard to shout, “I am not here.”
Indeed, I am not.
(Also, I may have once memorized The Gashlycrumb Tinies. But I've since forgotten most of it, and that's a different story altogether.)
