It’s easy to love the splendors of early fall in New England, when the leaves turn Jezebel bright. But, after years in the Valley, I’ve become equally intrigued by what follows: fall in the truest sense of the word, when the leaves take on a darker palette before letting go to drift to the ground.
When that de-leaving begins, it reveals things. Suddenly the outlines of buildings once hidden in the trees take form in the gray distance of hillsides, and new vistas open up, lending the familiar a pleasant novelty. Maybe it’s supposed to be the season of battening down the winter hatches, but it feels more like a time of rediscovery.
In September, even before the leaves turned, I encountered one of those moments of discovering anew. This time, I only found something new because I was expressly looking for it. I’d travelled Route 6A out on the Cape a dozen or more times, and gotten to the point of enjoying those turns in the road where I found myself anticipating a view I’d enjoyed before. It all unspooled with that half-familiar sense, the clam shacks, the white post office, the old-fashioned wooden sign on a book shop near Barnstable. But this time, when I passed through Yarmouth Port, I kept my eyes peeled. At an unassuming intersection, I looked right, and there, though I’d passed it those dozen times and never noticed it before, was the house of one of my heroes: Edward Gorey.
I love Gorey’s weird antiquarian visual sense, his passion for a comical Edwardian floridity of language. A lot of folks know Gorey best for the animated sequence opening PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery or for his Gashlycrumb Tinies, an abecedary of children meeting horrible fates (“J is for James who took lye by mistake”). It’s easy to mistake his black-and-white drawings, stuffed full of gentlemen in enormous coats, worried children and prim ladies, for the work of a British artist circa 1920.
But Gorey was in fact American, and died in 2000. His tremendous output is a unique body of work in which the surreal and the old-fashioned mingle to create something at once poignant and funny. Though he’s often spoken of as an illustrator, he was a wicked wordsmith, a careful crafter of phrases that quietly engage the weirdness of language: “Yesterday it did not seem as if today it would be raining.”
Gorey dubbed his house, at 8 Strawberry Lane, Elephant House. It doesn’t appear particularly elephantine, and is a large-ish house of a sort often spotted on the Cape. It’s now the Edward Gorey Museum. I don’t know precisely what I expected—an Edwardian mansion? A collection of oversized urns? But inside I found a small space stuffed to the gills with ephemera and the aesthetically pleasing objects that, the guide explained, Gorey collected with something near obsession, visiting tag sales and antique shops with an eye for colored bottles, books, dolls, gewgaws and gimcracks of all sorts. Gorey’s favored outfit—including long fur coat and tennis shoes—resides behind glass. It’s a strange shrine, and one that belies the fact that central to the mission of the Gorey Museum is animal welfare.
The whole place has that undersized charm that affects most everything on the Cape. It seems a fitting hideaway for a man of unusual pastimes; surreal literary bent or no, Gorey apparently had a passion for soap operas and even TV advertisements, which he consumed while sewing together stuffed creations of his own design, including a particularly fetching batlike creature which shows up in his work.
Somehow, visiting Elephant House made Gorey the man seem prosaic, but in a good way. It seemed right that the creator of a distinctive universe overflowing with dark humor and collisions of charm and morbidity should reside in a comfortable nook, looking out on a little green at the meeting of two roads.
Living in New England, I find, is like that, if you keep an eye out—it’s a slow unveiling of things and places grown over with time. Around a corner you’ve seen a hundred times might lie an eccentric micro-universe, unremarked but ripe for exploring.
