The West Wing (1963)

If Gorey’s literary model for The Black Doll script (1973) is the silent movie,  then The West Wing is its pictorial counterpart, because in all of its sixty-four pages, there’s nary a word of written text. The book’s dedication hints at the reason behind this silent treatment: it simply states, “For Edmund Wilson.”

Edmund Wilson 1895-1972) was an American critic and essayist recognized as one of the leading literary journalists of his time. He wrote for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.                         

Among Wilson’s notable were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Nabokov. Some of Wilson’s criticism fell on Gorey’s early works, about which he relates: “(Wilson) was always castigating me for my prose. That’s why when I finally dedicated a book to him, it had no text. I thought, ‘That will fix you, Edmund. Now what will you be able to say?” ¹ Besides that, the two authors were really friends. In 1961 Gorey illustrated Wilson’s tale “Rats of Rutland Range” published in Esquire magazine, 1961, re- published as a book in 1974.

Like a tour through a surreal haunted house, The West Wing has no context. With each turn of the page an odd, unrelated vision confronts the reader: a doorway opens to a bare room with another doorway open to an equally desolate passage; two twisted pieces of paper float Dali-like in a vacant corner; and a mummy roams a silent hallway, trailing its wrappings.

Gorey is at his detailed-penwork best in these illustrations. Two examples: on page 15, a prone (dead?) man lies on an excessively patterned carpet in the corner of a lushly floral Victorian chamber, and on page 22, an Andy Goldsworthy-like chasm slashes through the floor covering’s textured design to disappear under the paneled wainscoting and elaborately-papered wall.

Gorey’s complex drawings are often compared to the etchings by Master Printers Durer and Rembrandt: they are made the exact same size as they will be printed. During the European Renaissance the price of copper for engraving was so expensive that the artists used the smallest amount of metal needed embrace the image and leaving just the slimmest room for a margin. Today’s illustrators may make their original art one-and-one-half to two times larger than it would be reproduced so the image will sharpen up when reduced for printing                

Gorey’s art strongly exhibits the same drawing techniques as the Masters through skillful hatching, cross-hatching, stippling, and areas of solid black. His levitating, lighted candle on the last page in The West Wing, is strikingly reminiscent of Rembrandt’s etching “Student at Table With Candle.” Both artists deploy a learned use of chiaroscuro (bold contrast of light and dark), moving the eye from the brightest flame of the candle into the surrounding room through increasingly darker shades until the light fades completely away. The result lends a heightened sense of dimension and drama to the art.

On this last page Gorey indulges in a little Zen exercise. All the illustrated pages are numbered serially, 1-29, in The West Wing — except for this one. Rather being numbered “30,” it is incomprehensively lettered “U.” Why? Is it to give his crony, Edmund Wilson, something more to gripe about? Or is it Gorey’s way of giving the reader a jolt to linear thinking? Why does everything have to “follow”? Why not consider an alternative path? The change-up is more baffling because the letter “U” is number twenty-one in the English alphabet, not number thirty which we’d expect to follow after the previous page numbering. Cunning Gorey left no answer.

Unearthing Gorey’s inspiration for any one of the thirty bizarre illustrations would be miraculous. It’s better to just let one’s own imagination rev up as the images roll by and enjoy the wonder of them. Meanwhile, there is one figure that Gorey devotees readily recognize. On page 23 of The West Wing, we discover the Black Doll hanging dolefully from a twisted wire in a ceiling corner of an otherwise desolate chamber.

It is sad to see this benign character trussed up like a sacrificial victim. Why is it treated so cruelly? Is this a voodoo-like omen— a black magic warning to the book’s reader: “Linger too long in the West Wing and suffer dire consequences.”

Like with almost every illustration in his remarkable book, Gorey keeps us fascinated.

He does it so well.

by Malcolm Whyte

¹ Dahlin, Robert. “Conversations with Writers: Edward Gorey. “Conversations with Writers, Vol.1, 1977. [Ascending Peculiarity. Harcourt, Inc, 2001]