Mr. Edward Gorey, as you will discover when you visit “The Gloomy Gallery,” an exhibition of his work at Harvard’s venerable Houghton Library, was far more in touch with his unconscious than most of us are. Death, terror, unnamable creatures, a gothic-type aura of the strange and the dangerous permeates the atmosphere of one large, dimly lit and itself somewhat intimidating room.
By any standard it’s a small exhibit: four display cases and some items on one wall. The first thing you see when you enter the gallery is signage that informs us Edward Gorey graduated from Harvard in 1950. Harvard and Gorey could be seen by some as the ultimate mismatch. But apparently it wasn’t, as traditional themes of the gothic show up regularly in his work. He learned a lot and tucked it away for future use.
Hardly a household name, Gorey has an established place on a continuum of off-beat illustrators who eagerly entered ambiguous and often unsettling territory. Like others in this category — John Tenniel, Charles Adams, Maurice Sendak — he was far more interested in distortions and surprise than in rendering exact copies of the real thing, whatever that thing happened to be.
After Harvard, Gorey became a working stiff, holding real jobs in the real world: book illustrator, book jacket designer, and theater designer. His stuff was for sale — and those within a certain circle of sophisticates bought it eagerly.
Using pen and ink Gorey produced not human beings or animals but various combinations of the two — often adding a third element, in all producing unnamable creatures who took form on the page, usually through an age-old technique called cross-hatching. These creatures were sui generis, never before seen (and probably never to be seen again). You can’t identify them as people or animals but partly both. You have the feeling that some of them might be slimy to the touch — or at least give off a repellant odor. For me, this makes them admirable but not loveable like Sendak’s “wild things,” whom you want to cuddle with. Gorey was drawn to the dangerous and unpleasant and his illustrations in children’s books give off a whiff of menace, as do the stories of Neil Gaiman and Roald Dahl — though not Alice in Wonderland, even as she constantly teetered on the edge of disaster.
I was drawn to a relatively tranquil pen-and-ink drawing of a man wearing a proper suit and a yellow tie. He’s holding a pen and is seated at a round table, writing something on a piece of paper. The man’s face is shaped more or less like a loaf of commercial bread. He has no mouth or eyes. His ear looks like a paper clip. It would be almost impossible to look at this image and not start asking questions.
The most appealing thing about Gorey is his eagerness to explore the depths of feelings and fears and turn them into art without turning us off. His pictures are often creepy without being gross. Some are downright whimsical, though whimsy obviously didn’t interest him as much as shock.
As for Edward Gorey the Harvard grad, his life’s story is hardly a surprise. He never married and was great friends with several homosexuals. With the money
he earned from his illustrations, books, and etc. he bought a house on the Upper Cape and lived there with six cats for the rest of his life. He died in 2000.
Harvard, under considerable scrutiny and in danger of making a lot of good people very angry, did not do much if anything to promote this odd and oddly disquieting exhibit. Gorey, I think, would find this predictable.
At Houghton Library, Quincy Street and Harvard Street, Cambridge, through Jan. 12, 2026
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