On Edward Gorey and Peter Neumeyer

We are perhaps as well situated as we’ve ever been to solve the curiously tempting and elusive riddle of Edward Gorey. His illustrative style and design sensibility—a precious iteration of befuddlement and Gothicism—presage twenty-first-century trends in the comic arts, East and West. Of course, the very framing of such riddles—this artist over that artist, this presumed history over that untold history—is a suspect business, and Gorey disdained explanatory self-aggrandizements.

Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer is a trove of correspondence between Gorey and Neumeyer, a Harvard professor of children’s literature with whom Gorey collaborated on a few curio books that were brought out by a textbook publisher. In a gloriously realized edition, the correspondence—postcards, letters, even envelopes—is rich with insight into the aesthetic underpinnings of Gorey, an artist notoriously close-lipped as to his creative ideology. Indeed, the “aesthetic maunderings” of Floating Worlds not only render the most complete portrait of Gorey available but also give readers something very much like an algebraic formula of his sensibility. We are presented with a Gorey who is compelled to justify, however indirectly, his creative rationale.

Neumeyer and Gorey met in 1968, when the editor and vice president of the textbook publisher Addison-Wesley arranged for an outing on his sailboat, hoping that Gorey would find an affinity with Neumeyer’s concept for a children’s book about a boy and his fly. Instead, Gorey fell off the dock and dislocated his shoulder. The calamity was auspicious in a Goreyesque way; at the hospital, Neumeyer and Gorey set to work, embarking on the first illustrations for what would become Donald and the… and initiating the dialogue that would spill into a two-year correspondence.

In that correspondence, which spans curt missives and lofty discourses, the two men swap insights on ballet, the Beatles, Lillian Gish, kite-flying, and pancakes; they cite contemporary authors, from Eldridge Cleaver to Flann O’Brien, and ponder the lives of their cats. For an age without the internet, the ranging discussion is immaculately simpatico. The landscape that emerges is akin to that of Gorey’s works: a frisky sea without much in the way of waves. Gorey views the narrative of his life much as he views that of his stories—as secondary to the welcome distraction of life’s disturbances. Individuality is subordinate to the bumps on the journey. “There is a strong streak in me,” he...