He loved Goya and Matisse, of course, but his most important influences were the surrealist artists, especially Max Ernst, whose sensibility was, like his, more literary than visual. Gorey s college major was in French literature, and his Harvard and New York coteries were all made up of poets and writers O Hara, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, George Plimpton, etc. Those who think of the twentieth century as beginning in 1945 will find it hard to grasp that this crowd were all the children of Edwardians. Movies and jazz were underground arts, hallowed for their freedom and expressiveness. In this milieu, Gorey s penchants for Victorian Gothicism and brocaded upholstery was particularly eclectic.
Great illustrators tend to retain a sense of the distinctiveness of word and image.
Drawings and text remain detachable from each other. One can imagine a set of alternative illustrations to Sendak s Where the Wild Things Are , for instance. Gorey was a fanatic about aesthetic continuity, lettering every one of his books, down to the ISBN, by hand. Rather than subordinating textual to visual concerns, as many comic-strip artists do, Gorey s thoroughness honors the totality of the printed object, down to its bibliographical minutiae. Gorey s books, carefully hand-lettered to look like archaic fonts, always honor the basic linguistic appetite for sequential coherence, even as they confound it.