Looking on the Dark Side

One morning, many years ago, I was lying in bed in my grand-parents’ house when something big and black fell down the chimney, landed in the empty fireplace and scattered the ashes. Instantly, I pulled the duvet over my head and breathed as quietly as I could.

And then I felt something – small sharp feet tiptoeing over my head. I screamed and threw back the duvet. Something flapped its terrible wings in my face. My grandfather entered the room, grabbed a jumper, caught the jackdaw and took it downstairs to the scullery, where he held it over the sink and wrung its neck. It was in the same bedroom that as a child I first found Edward Gorey’s The Dwindling Party (1982), a story about the MacFizzets, two parents and five children who put on their finery and set out for stately Hiyacket Hall on a family outing. I suppose a modern MacFizzet family might visit Castle Howard or Polesden Lacey and take in a cream tea while they’re about it. But this family trip has a twist. One by one, the family evaporates. Augustus is swallowed by a sea monster, Emily is captured by something ghostly in the tomb, Amanda disappears in the grotto, while Lambert lags behind and is devoured by something that looks like a hippo with sharp teeth. Mother is plucked from the air by a dragon and Father is ‘silently, slily abstracted’ while small Neville is staring out into the trees.

And so the MacFizzets, they vanished forever, At least each and every last one of the rest Except for Small Neville – who said: ‘Well, I never! But then I expect it was all for the best.’

Each character is picked off by a creature that swoops, emerges or springs, all drawn in Gorey’s distinctive, spidery hand. Perhaps it was Gorey’s lack of an education in art that enabled him to develop such a distinctive and unusual style; linear, scratchy and cross-hatched with elongated figures that intrigue and draw you in. As well as illus­trating books, he designed costumes and stage sets, and his scenes are all wonderfully theatrical, structured and dynamic. I loved this strange-looking family in their finery: Father’s mustard suit and bowler hat, Mother’s lilac hat and bustle, Augustus with his trilby pulled over his eyes like a cheap detective, and Small Neville in his plus fours, his hair swept to one side, as he contemplates existence. Of course, our shared name helped me to empathize with Small Neville, but I was also drawn to him on a deeper level. Neville is a person who always feels he is on the out­side, even among his own clan, someone who treads the line between satisfaction with the simplest things and a longing for something greater. Though he never speaks, and hardly reacts to the ghoulish events around him, we have a strong sense of a boy who is entirely lost in his thoughts in a world he cannot work out. Edward Gorey was born in 1925, a so-called prodigy who allegedly started drawing pictures when he was 18 months old. In his lifetime, he wrote and illustrated 116 books, beginning with The Unstrung Harp in 1953. It’s an autobiographical book about a writer’s lot, with its ‘attendant woes’ which include ‘plain boredom’. Graham Greene called it ‘the best novel ever written about a novelist’. With such an output, Gorey fans are spoilt for choice and rewarded when a favourite character returns in another book. Small Neville pops up again (and for a final time) in Gorey’s alphabet book The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963). ‘N is for Neville, who died of ennui’, writes Gorey – an appro­priate fate for Neville, and preferable to that of Susan who perished of fits, or Titus who flew into bits. Ennui is the perfect death for Neville. He’s not exactly bored, though boredom is part of it, but he feels something more profound. Perhaps the best summary of his condition is contained in Gorey’s dedication to the Surrealists: ‘What appeals to me most is an idea expressed by [Paul] Éluard. He has a line about there being another world, but it’s in this one. And Raymond Queneau said the world is not what it seems – but it isn’t anything else, either.’ Neville knows this feeling, as many children do. It’s the realization, even in the midst of a glorious day on the beach, that the holiday will end. Or the moment when, while opening a long-awaited present on your tenth birthday, you realize that your age will never be a single figure again. The grandparent you loved with an other­worldly affection dies, the parent you trusted breaks a promise, is late again, or leaves. A child is well able to sense that this world is not as it should be, and yet it feels so real. And this sense of melancholy, a close cousin of ennui and fear, drives the imagination. It was fear that turned the jackdaw in that bedroom into something so monstrous that I thought it had appeared directly from hell. It was ennui during those long summer days that drove my siblings and me to invent stories and plays and games. It was melancholy that left me wondering if not this world, then what? The Dwindling Party is a sparse book, as Gorey intended. Along with the Surrealists, he was inspired by the minimalism of Japanese and Chinese art. ‘The way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I am doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a read­er’s mind,’ he wrote. He is a generous writer, allowing the reader to take his books and turn them into their own. The Dwindling Party became part of our family lexicon; we understood one another when we spoke of ‘doubtful guests’ and ‘a dwindling party’. Gorey is certainly an acquired taste, and many parents might judge his stories too gothic – a child being felled with an axe, for example. But adults tend to underestimate children, especially when it comes to books. Maurice Sendak, a contemporary and friend of Gorey’s, had an enlightened editor in Ursula Nordstrom who wrote:

Most children under the age of ten will react creatively to the best work of a truly creative person. But too often adults sift their reactions to creative picture books through their own adult experiences. And, as an editor who stands between the creative artist and the creative child, I am constantly terrified that I will react as a dull adult.

I recently read The Gashlycrumb Tinies with my 3-year-old niece, who chuckled her way through twenty-six grisly ends and was partic­ularly intrigued by Neville for the same reasons, I imagine, that I was over twenty years ago. There are children’s books, old and new, that seek to deliver a moral message that earnest adults believe their Small Nevilles will take and keep in their hearts. The Dwindling Party offers something completely different: chaos, creativity, a dose of fear and melancholy alongside the humour. It speaks to children as they are, not as we might wish them to be.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Flore Neville 2024