The Black Doll, a little-known and never-produced screenplay by the celebrated artist and writer Edward Gorey (1925-2000), dishes up a rambunctious romp of a plot, featuring vile villains, wicked women, sinister socialites, and a horrified heroine. It's the stuff of many a silent melodrama but imbued with classic Gorey convolutions. Written in 1973 and originally published in Scenario magazine in 1998, The Black Doll has been missing from Gorey libraries until now. A huge film buff all his life, Gorey claimed to have watched as many as one thousand movies a year when he lived in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. He was a devoted student of silent films, citing Louis Feuillade (French, 1873-1925) and D. W. Griffith (American, 1875-1948), pioneers of the genre, as major inspirations. His informed insights on silent films were revealed in an interview with Annie Nocenti, published in the same issue of Scenario; it, too, is republished in these pages. Gorey filled The Black Doll with about twenty costumed characters, who seem to hop on and off camera haphazardly. (Don't worry: they all fall into place at the end of the story.) If the enigmatic script seems a mystery without a solution, keep in mind these words from Mr. Gorey: "I always feel, 'what you see is what you get,' but if you want to read something into it, then you can." Including several relevant illustrations from his other books and an illuminating foreword by Andreas L. Brown (owner of the Gotham Book Mart and Trustee of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust), The Black Doll is truly a Gorey gem.
Author
Born in Chicago, Gorey came from a colourful family; his parents, Helen Dunham Garvey and Edward Lee Gorey, divorced in 1936 when he was 11, then remarried in 1952 when he was 27. One of his step-mothers was Corinna Mura, a cabaret singer who had a brief role in the classic film Casablanca. His father was briefly a journalist. Gorey's maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey, was a popular 19th century greeting card writer/artist, from whom he claimed to have inherited his talents. He attended a variety of local grade schools and then the Francis W. Parker School. He spent 1944–1946 in the Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and then attended Harvard University from 1946 to 1950, where he studied French and roomed with future poet Frank O'Hara. Although he would frequently state that his formal art training was "negligible", Gorey studied art for one semester at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1943, eventually becoming a professional illustrator. From 1953 to 1960, he lived in New York City and worked for the Art Department of Doubleday Anchor, illustrating book covers and in some cases adding illustrations to the text. He has illustrated works as diverse as Dracula by Bram Stoker, The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. In later years he illustrated many children's books by John Bellairs, as well as books in several series begun by Bellairs and continued by other authors after his death.
