Light from a dark star

San Diego —  THE BATS ARE FLYING. The tall Edwardians are on parade. A woman shrieks. A child falls down, and sleepy-eyed students look up from their books.

“Dreams do come true.”

A piece of masonry splits the air. Dry salt herring dangles from the wall. Cats lounge. The moon looks sad, and someone is late for class.

“I wish he were still around -- we need him.”

A flashlight beam prowls the moors. A bottle of vanilla extract lies in the mud.

“Ed Gorey rocks da’ house.”

Indubitably.

Dead for more than four years and long since a cultural cliche, Edward Gorey shows no signs of letting up. Since March, he has been rocking the house at San Diego State University in an exhibit of work that has drawn mostly rave reviews -- if the one-liners scrawled in the exhibition book are to be believed.

“Dude, this is tight yo, so off the hook, my dog. You the chillest artist homie.”

Originally slated for a three-month run to close May 31, “From Prodigy to Polymath: The Singular Journey of Edward Gorey” has been given a not-so-typical extension through Aug. 6. Billed as “the largest public exhibition of Gorey work ever held,” this eclectic array of books, letters, quotations, journals, photographs, sketches and paraphernalia has been an introduction for some and a reintroduction for others to one of the most original artistic and literary minds in late 20th century America.

Let others write about the recent explosion in graphic novels -- the work of Dan Clowes, of Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware, to name a few who have ridden the coattails of Spiegelman, Crumb and Pekar -- but before all of them, there was Gorey. Only our relationship to his singular vision is slightly more complicated.

That Gorey should be both popular -- and unheralded -- is not entirely surprising. We are, after all, awash in Gorey things -- posters, ties, mugs, sweatshirts, lunch pails, greeting cards, calendars, watches, stuffed dolls and websites -- and then, of course, there are the books (more than 100 of them and illustrations for nearly 60 more), a Broadway production of “Edward Gorey’s Dracula” (for which he won a 1978 Tony Award for costume design) and one exceptionally memorable title sequence for PBS’ “Mystery!”

But in a day and age when political correctness has steadily dampened the pleasure of our darker instincts, Gorey’s work is difficult to explain, and popularity alone is not enough.

What meaning can be found in an A-B-C book that depicts children on the edge of their doom (“K is for Kate who was struck with an ax; L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks”) or in the tale of a baby with such disagreeable qualities that the parents simply wished it to disappear, or the story of the young Manchester couple who in the 1960s lured five children to their deaths?

Gorey never fails to challenge our finer sensibilities. Critics call him “macabre” and “gothic,” as if such characterizations might make him more approachable, but for his part, Gorey disdained these labels.

“I write about everyday life,” he said.

Montezuma MESA, the location of San Diego State University, is the picture of everyday life. The skies are often blue, the sun typically warm, and behind the overflowing bougainvilleas are funereal urns. A faint pallor lies behind the blush of youth.

Gorey is dead, but Gorey still lives, and Andreas Brown deserves the credit. Brown has the dual, if not improbable, distinction of being not only an alumnus of the university -- Class of ’55 -- but also a co-trustee of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, a responsibility he shares with Gorey’s attorney, R. Andrew Boose.

Ask Brown how this came about and he will tell you about his great grandfather, who settled in San Diego in the late 1860s. Ask when he entered the picture and Brown will take you back more than 40 years to the day he stood at the cash register of Gotham Book Mart in New York City, a onetime law student turned visiting bibliophile from Southern California, and found himself mesmerized by these “biscuity” books -- as writer Alexander Theroux once called them -- stacked nearby for 50 cents to a dollar and filled with the most intensely rendered illustrations and curious little captions like those in a silent movie.

“When I asked who the author was,” Brown recalls, the owner, Frances Steloff -- Miss Steloff, as she was known -- “told me he was a writer who brought them in on consignment.”

Soon Brown became an avid collector of this consignment writer, and almost 10 years later, he moved to Manhattan and was standing in Miss Steloff’s store when she arranged an impromptu meeting. Gorey was tall, balding, bearded and had a ring for almost every finger.

“When I told him how much I admired his work, he got a little nervous,” Brown says. “He was a little shy about that kind of thing.”

When Miss Steloff, who was in her 80s, sold the store to Brown in 1967, he had the chance to turn his appreciation into something more public and began to produce Gorey exhibitions and to publish some of Gorey’s books.

Fast-forward to 2003, when Brown was visiting his alma mater and speaking with the dean of the university library, Connie Vinita Dowell. She had ambitions to create in the library an intellectual hub on the campus, and Gorey -- as both a visual and literary celebrity -- was a perfect candidate for a show.

Together she and Brown brainstormed an exhibit and invited Cristina Favretto of Special Collections to curate. Brown sent boxes of material, and Dowell contacted Peter Neumeyer, a former children’s literature professor at the university, who wrote a few books that Gorey illustrated and was willing to lend some of his personal correspondence with Gorey.

Nearly 40 years after Gorey’s first major exhibition -- held at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland -- Gorey had returned to California.

SPEND time among the glass cases that snake between an old and a new wing of the university library, that lie in wait outside the president’s office and sit unsuspectingly in front of the special collections room, and you can’t help but draw a few conclusions about who Gorey was.

First, he had a perfectly normal childhood -- as normal, that is, as normal ever is.

Which is the great paradox: As much as we want Gorey’s life to reveal dark and strange truths about him, the reality is disappointing. In the first glass case is a photograph of Gorey as a child. Dressed in a coat and tie, his hair neatly combed, he gazes plaintively to the right, his face both delicate and sensitive. The year is 1932, and he looks like any other 7-year-old (except, of course, he is about to finish reading the complete works of Victor Hugo).

Second, Gorey knew from the beginning what he wanted to draw.

In another case stands a 1950 issue of the Harvard Advocate, with one of his first published drawings on the cover. Two gnomish-looking men with exceptionally large noses stand on the seashore with handkerchiefs in hand, waving goodbye to the sun on the horizon. “L’adieu,” the title reads, and in their eyes, accentuated with a line that suggests a wrinkle or a slight furrow, is an expression of the deepest melancholy.

Third, success was not instantaneous.

When Gorey went to New York in 1953, most illustrators worked in publishing. He started in the art department of Anchor/Doubleday Books and in his seven years there produced nearly 50 covers, refining his style with such flourishes as the insect-like spaceships for H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” and a rakishly posed figure for Andre Gide’s “Lafcadio’s Adventures.” He worked on his own books at night, published four and wasn’t discovered until 1959 by the New Yorker.

Fourth, Gorey’s art evolved from his own sense of playfulness.

“Everything Ted Gorey did was to entertain himself rather than to please the public,” novelist and friend Alison Lurie once told an interviewer. “He wasn’t trying to make money or write bestsellers. He was drawing and writing what amused and interested and excited him. And of course, that’s one way to create great work. It’s certainly a way to create individual and interesting work.”

One such amusement became his most endearing story. On a sketchpad, he called it “A Peculiar Visitor,” and in three doodles, we see the quick evolution of the beaked-nosed, sneaker-clad protagonist of “The Doubtful Guest.” In accompanying scribbles, we read that it has “a passion for grammar,” no, “a passion for the gramophone” and rhymingly, “... cannot bear to spend the night alone.”

Fifth, Gorey had an inordinate fondness for adverbs and abecedarians.

Like the great Oulipian writers, he chose the form and quickly challenged himself with its subversion. In “The Glorious Nosebleed,” he proved that a verb without a modifier is not worth predicating, and in a postcard to Brown, he offered a little advice: “Always be circumspect. Disdain explanation. Forget grandiose hopes. Invoke justice. Keep little. Make no orations. Pursue quietude. Repent. Stifle tears. Undergo vexation. Extend your zeal.”

Finally, success never spoiled him.

After leaving New York in 1986, he took up residence with his cats in a rambling 200-year-old farmhouse on Cape Cod, where he worked, watched television, drove a Volkswagen Golf with a vanity plate (“OGDRED,” for one of his many anagrammed pseudonyms) and was a regular for breakfast at Jack’s Outback.

In 1994, when Gorey was informed that he had diabetes and prostate cancer, he told an interviewer, “I’m not entirely enamored of the idea of living forever.” Six years later he died of a heart attack at age 75. In his obituary, Reuters reported that it was “not clear if there were any survivors.”

Whether we know Gorey’s work or not, we know Gorey’s work, so singular -- and perhaps, later, self-parodying -- was his vision: the cross-hatched wallpaper, the dark-eyed protagonists, the frolicking children, the neglected topiaries and the eternally smug felines.

Working in a small office with a postcard print of a Goya and a Matisse and an Indian sculpture of a tiger devouring a missionary, he channeled all that he knew and all that he read. His instruments of trade were a Strathmore illustration board -- two- or three-ply -- Pelikan ink and a pen point from Gilotte, and from them flowed his glorious nosebleed.

Influences included the great surrealists -- Rene Magritte, Max Ernst -- and the great storytellers -- Charles Dickens and Ivy Compton-Burnett -- and, of course, George Balanchine (“the great genius in the arts”). He was as conversant in the lives of the characters of “Cheers” as he was in the lives of the characters of the novels of Anthony Trollope. At the time of his death, estimates put his library at nearly 25,000 books with 5,000 to 10,000 CDs and LPs.

Although critics drew parallels between his work and that of Daumier and Magritte, Lear and Carroll, Joyce and Beckett, Gorey himself had more modest aspirations. “I feel that I am doing the minimum amount of damage to other possibilities that may take place in a reader’s head,” he said.

Gorey succeeds by such minimalism. He famously loathed Henry James -- but read everything he wrote -- for James’ overwhelming need to explain the smallest detail and leave nothing to the imagination. Conversely, he loved silent movies, dedicating one of his books to Lillian Gish (“I’m one of those people who feels the movies have been going downhill steadily since 1918”) and, most important, he was a champion of emptiness, of silence and of ... ellipses. His favorite line? “Oh, the of it all.”

“People wanted Edward to explain himself to them,” says Brown, but Gorey would frustrate them. He believed, according to Brown, that the “author’s job is to stimulate the imagination of the reader and let them tap into their own imaginative resources.”

Into that great stillness -- the delicious mystery of what lies on the other side of each unturned page -- Gorey lets us project our great wondering, and as he came to exult in his own imagination, we come to exult in ours.

“At the heart of all of Gorey, everything is about something else,” says Peter Neumeyer, who worked with Gorey on three books in the late 1960s. “He said that you always have to look through them for their meaning.”

TWO bats fly above the trees. A crescent moon slips into a darkened wood. A shoeless man, wearing a mask, flies with them, Chagall-like, an arm extended toward a slip of paper floating in the sky.

This pen-and-ink drawing comes with no story or date, but in the exhibit, “Other People’s Mail” is most conspicuous. Not because it’s large -- it’s only 10 inches by 7 3/4 -- but because it is so inexplicable, so definably Gorey, and its protagonists are so determinedly insouciant. Like a fairy tale, “Other People’s Mail” provides a sense of transcendence that is all the more powerful and satisfying for its flat affect, its openness to interpretation and lack of narrative guile.

Without asking, we accept in all of Gorey’s drawings and books so many unseen presences. The devil exists, a sock has a life, a garden is evil, strange creatures play and for every beginning there is, fortunately, an end -- a Z for every A. He is our Brothers Grimm, our Hans Christian Andersen, helping us understand our emotions, clarify our feelings and thoughts.

A woman in a feathered cap is caught in the branches of a tree. A slip of paper is in her outstretched hand. A dog on a leash jumps up for it, but its master, dressed in spats and a large fur coat with frogs, is oblivious. A slip of paper lies beneath his foot.

“He once said that he enjoyed exploring how people kill time,” Brown said. “Stop and think about that phrase, ‘kill time.’ It’s such a strange phrase. Edward was intrigued by that. He wanted to explore that ... because it showed the absurdity of human indulgence in frivolous pastimes.”

A connoisseur of popular culture, especially B movies, Gorey was fascinated by the meaning of idleness, for in that nothingness lie so many possibilities, and for Gorey, nothing was never nothing; his imagination saw to that.

A woman in feather cap, a flapper’s dress and shoulder gloves passes a slip of paper to a man whose back is to her. A winding path stops at a monument in the park where a shadowy figure waits, and above the wood is a turret where someone else is standing.

In his drawings and books, surrealism and existentialism meet head-on in a deeper attempt to find meaning. “If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives,” psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote in his own interpretation of fairy tales, “The Uses of Enchantment.”

If the search for meaning is the search for God, then we can accept the most surprising conclusion of all.

“His work is an exploration of the existence of God, of man’s attempt to try to locate and define God,” says Brown; only it is all about looking and never finding. Each Gorey drawing and each Gorey tale is a mystery that ends -- meaningfully -- with the absence of meaning. He would never presume to know, and if he did, he would never tell.

“For some reason, the mission in my life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible,” he said. “I think we should all be as uneasy as possible because that is what the world is like.”

How we approach life -- with the expectation of either overcoming its challenges or being defeated -- is an existential problem, and in his menacing worlds where vulnerability and capriciousness collide, Gorey reminds us that we can do more than shake our fists at the gods or propitiate them with reverence and supplication.

Spend time between the covers of his books -- or here in San Diego -- and you might feel compelled to thumb your nose at them. Either way, life works out the same.