The Willowdale Handcar / The Return of The Black Doll (1962)
The Black Doll makes a return engagement eight years after The Listing Attic. Repeating its role as observer rather than active participant, it is nevertheless prominently placed lounging in the vehicle on The Willowdale Handcar’s front cover and wedged into the railroad trestle on the back.
Like he did with many of his books, Gorey modelled this slim, sixty-four-page paperback on the silent film. As he told Andreas Brown, friend and publisher at New York’s Gotham Book Mart:
You know, I lay out my books, Andreas—I don’t tell very many people this—because I’m influenced by silent films. An image comes up on the screen, the people are all battling in silence: doors are opening and closing, and people are pushing each other. And then at the bottom is a two- or three-line text that tells you what they’re saying to each other. Which certainly, with twelve different people talking and coming and going, they’re saying a lot more. But, I’m creating the material to influence the reader to imagine what’s going on..1
Set in the mid-1920s, The Willowdale Handcar unreels a railroad handcar adventure with all the verve of a two-reeler. Throughout, two major stars of the silent screen, Lillian Gish (1893-1993) and Joseph Frank “Buster“ Keaton (1895-1966), impart their influence on Gorey.
In fact, The Willowdale Handcart is dedicated to Lillian Gish whose prodigious acting career began with pioneering director D.W. Griffith’s silent shorts (An Unseen Enemy, 1912, her first) and epics (Birth of a Nation, 1915) and ended with The Whales of August, her final film in 1987. A hard-working professional, she was often cast as a sweet innocent femme. Gish played in more than 100 film, stage, radio, and television dramas that embraced romance, foreign intrigue, cliff-hanging thrillers, and historic recreations. Like Gorey’s meticulous story-telling, “(Lillian) Gish delivered finely etched, nuanced turns [that carried a] stunning impact.”2 Her unflagging energy and adventurous spirit ride along to the handcar’s intrepid trio right to The Willowdale Handcar’s startling end.
Action
The story begins with Edna, Harry and Sam, dressed in striped blazer, straw boater, dashing moustaches or sailor-style pleated midi dress, looking for a way to ease their summer afternoon boredom. At the deserted Willowdale train station Harry suddenly points to a handcar on the siding. “Look! ... Let’s take it and go for a ride,” he says, and off they go.
After quick stop for soda pop and gingersnaps in Mr. Queevil’s store at Bogus Corners, they roll on past a burning house in a field, write postcards while the Turnip Valley Express rushes by with what Edna believes is Nellie Flim’s frantic face at the train’s window. During a brief rest at Chutney Falls cemetery they run into Nellie’s beau, Dick Hammerclaw, who seemed upset. Back on the handcar they spotted O. Altitudo, a palatial mansion belonging to Titus Blotter, the financier, then on to Dogear Junction and a visit to Edna’s cousin collection of 7,000 glass telephone insulators (items that Gorey also kept among his eclectic collections).
Now dressed in long, full fur coats and warm tweed outfits, the trio visit more singular sites as only Gorey could name: Penetralia, West Elbow, and Wunksieville, where they rescue an infant hanging by its nightshirt from a railroad mailbag hook. “How much she resembles Nellie” said Edna when they turned the baby over to the orphanage in Stovepipe City.
Breath came short as the tiny handcar clattered across the soaring latticework trestle spanning Peevish Gorge. Grim wreckage of an old touring car lay far below.
At a delayed stop in Violet Springs, the threesome missed a visit to Mrs. Regera Dowdy, Spying through her window they admired the desk on which she wrote her poems, but over-looked the Black Doll hidden behind a curtain in the corner.
Back along the track, Harry, Sam, and Edna found Nellie tied to it. She rode with them to where she insisted on leaving, then peddled away on a bicycle. That evening they attended a baked-bean supper at the Halfbath Methodist Church that Sam judged the meal “all right… but not a patch on Mrs. Umlaut’s back home.” A week later they noticed someone who might be Nellie walking the grounds of the Weedhaven Laughing Academy.
Still in furs, and tweeds, the travelers inconclusively end their journey at sunset as they entered the dark mouth of the Iron Hills tunnel and did not come out the other end. Meanwhile the reader has savored a series of dramatic episodes much as offered on the silent movie screen: a road trip of many parts including saving a damsel in distress— like roles played by Lillian Gish.
Camera
Influence of vintage film is evident in the way Gorey varies his art’s points of view, much as a movie director does. And no one was a better director of silent movies than Buster Keaton. In presenting the picture, both employ close-ups, worm’s-eye views, medium shots, dizzying bird’s-eye perspectives, and spectacular panoramas. Note, for example, the marked similarity between Gorey’s Peevish Gorge and Keaton’s scene from The General.
Both compositions emphasize their trestle’s hair-raising height and rickety-looking open structure. While it appears that a stiff wind could rattle the track and send the tiny handcar sailing to the bottom, the wooden cross-bracing of Keaton’s structure could safely support the ponderous iron locomotive, but it didn’t.
The movie showed Keaton, as Johnny Gray, lighting a fire on the track to stall his villainous pursuers, followed by the massive engine toppling through the flame-weakened track and crashing heavily on the rocky riverbed below. It is considered “the most expensive single take in silent-film history.
Another parallel between Gorey’s book and Keaton’s movie occurs where the protagonists of both are viewed entering a tunnel. At the start of The General, the War Between the States had begun.
Johnny Gray is jilted by his girlfriend, Annabelle Lee who won’t see him anymore until he is in military uniform. Johnny did not tell her that the recruiter wouldn’t take him because his job as a train engineer was too important to leave now.
Stunned, Johnny sinks back onto the coupling rod of the General, as Annabelle huffs off. Lost in a fog of hurt and unaware of the now moving train, he rides slowly up and down on the steel bar as it eases the engine out of the yard and into a tunnel. Stone-face Keaton’s rousing comedy, however, continues high-balling through seventy-eight minutes of multiple train chases including a brief scene of Johnny going after his stolen locomotive in a handcar, the kidnapping of Annabelle Lee, a rescue due to Johnny’s facile footwork, a surrender, a battlefield commission, and a lovers’ reconciliation.
Conversely, The Willowdale Handcar ends with the impassive disappearance of its drivers entering the Iron Hills tunnel.
Like stirring melodramas of the silent movie era, The Willowdale Handcar is a satisfying enough yarn, but being an Edward St. John Gorey Production, it delivers more. His exquisite drawings, alone, are worthy of considerable study.
His writing, too! One could also go through an extra bowl of popcorn just trying to deduce what actually happens to the handcar and crew in the Iron Hill tunnel, or why was financier Titus W. Blotter diving through the Great Trackless Swamp in his shirtsleeves, or how and where in the world did peripatetic Nellie Flim finally end up? And what of the random sightings of the Black Doll? — all questions that invite the reader to look back for clues and connect with Gorey’s inspired imagination in one of his most intriguing mystery stories,
by Malcolm Whyte
1. Brown, Andreas. Oral History, San Diego State University, May 2017
2. Ankeny, Jason, All Movie Guide.com, ca.2000.
