Devers attended an auction of the artist’s fur coats and won a Lorraine mink stroller, an unexpected turn of events she wrote about for The Paris Review. I just knew that he was getting at something ludicrous about life,” Ms.
“I don’t think I quite understood him then. Gorey’s books, which she discovered through a cool high school friend, pointed the way out of her conformist suburban Virginia town. Devers, a writer and rare-books dealer, Mr. Gorey’s work, in turn, has imprinted itself on the consciousness of generations of oddballs and bookworms, who have found in his offbeat world a measure of existential solace.
Balanchine: “an act of aestheticism worthy of Oscar Wilde,” as Stephen Schiff wrote in a 1992 New Yorker profile.)Īnd Mr. Gorey’s permanent move from New York to Cape Cod, in the mid-1980s, coincided with the death of Mr. Gorey wasn’t in the cinema or reading, he was watching George Balanchine’s ballets, around which he based his entire schedule for nearly three decades, rarely missing a single performance. An obsessive cinephile, one year he claimed to have seen 1,000 movies. Gorey appears to have spent much of his life with his nose between the covers of a book. He took the self-administered Proust Questionnaire for Vanity Fair and wrote that the greatest love of his life was “cats” and his favorite journey was “looking out the window.” By all accounts, he had no real love affairs as an adult and his sex life was almost nonexistent.ĭespite being a lifelong Anglophile, he made just one brief visit to Scotland and England, his only trip abroad.
Gorey, by his own admission, was a man to whom nothing happened. Perhaps the biggest challenge of writing a Gorey biography is that Mr.