A Preview of
Peter F. Neumeyer's
Floating
Worlds:
The Letters of
Edward
Gorey &
Peter F.
Neumeyer
Peter F. Neumeyer's
Floating
Worlds:
The Letters of
Edward
Gorey &
Peter F.
Neumeyer
Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer
is available directly from
Pomegranate
and
Amazon.com
Previewed
Aug 2011
by Glen Emil
The Other Statue, from Simon & Schuster, was just hitting store shelves. The Blue Aspic was also fresh on the market, from Meredith Press, popular for their Better Homes & Garden series. The Epiplectic Bicycle was due to be released in a year. Frances Steloff had just sold Gotham Book Mart to Andreas Brown a year earlier. The Vietnam War began losing its' battle in the public eye thanks in large part to a widely publicized photograph of a Viet Cong officer being executed at gunpoint, was taken that year. Martin Luther King, Jr. is gunned down. 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Planet of the Apes are released a day apart, while Mister Roger’s Neighborhood and Laugh-In premiere their first episodes. Airport by Arthur Hailey is in its 12th week on the NY Times bestseller list. The Gashlycrumb Tinies is already five years old. Peter F. Neumeyer has just published Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Castle, a wide-angle lens collection of critical essays on Franz Kafka’s last major novel, and was working on his first children’s book. The first part of 1968 was a very busy time.
Gorey and Neumeyer, c. 1969, from Floating Worlds (Pomegranate, 2011)
Peter Neumeyer recalls his introduction to Edward ‘Ted’ Gorey, late in the summer of 1968:
“Harry (Stanton, Neumeyer’s editor at Addison-Wesley), Ted (to his friends), and I went sailing off Barnstable, Mass., in Harry’s boat. Ted and I sat stone silent, bow and stern, stumped for easy banter.”
“Blessedly, time passed. Ted and I rowed the dinghy to the dock. As Ted held the rope and stepped up on the dock, the dinghy scooted out from under, leaving Ted a-straddle, one foot on shore, one on the dinghy, which skittered away, until Ted himself fell down between. I grabbed for his arm, hooked him somehow to the dock, and took off after the dinghy that was floating out on the tide.”
“When I came ashore again, there was Ted, his left shoulder protruding out from his back like a bird’s broken wing. Minutes later, in the waiting room of the Hyannis hospital, we sat to wait. And we sat. And sat, until finally Ted, looking startled, turned to me and whispered, 'I think it’s popped back into place.' As, indeed, it had.”
In the ensuing hours waiting in the hospital, for Gorey had to be officially examined and released, the trio pored over the sketches for the first “Donald” book. By the end of the visit, the rowdy duo, by now drunk with a solidarity borne of the hospital’s bureaucracies, embarked on an exploration and enchantment of each other’s livelihoods, passions and dislikes. In simple terms, a friendship was born. Phone calls and letters between the two followed - lots of them.
“Although I stayed with Ted on the Cape, and he stayed with us in Medford (Mass.), we did a great deal of planning by way of long phone calls and the postal service, and there remain with me literally hundreds of pages of Ted’s letters. I would always wait expectantly for these letters because most were enclosed in beautiful, Goreyesquely painted envelopes . . . Occassionally there would be a postcards - merely a piece of dental floss scotch-taped to the card, or an anchovy label or theatre stub. Heaven only knows what the mailman thought.”
Selection of hand decorated envelopes from Floating Worlds (Pomegranate, 2011)
Floating Worlds : The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer (Pomegranate, 2011), coming this September, are those highly anticipated letters, in all their Goreyesquely painted, enveloped glory. Stitching together 256 pages of wit, critical commentary, and of mutual admiration, Floating Worlds ultimately provides a moving memoir of an extraordinary friendship. Gorey wrote that he felt that they were “part of the same family, and I don’t mean just metaphorically. I guess that even more than I think of you as a friend, I think of you as my brother.” Neumeyer stated “Your letters...your existence has made something of this world that [it] hadn’t the possibility of before.”
Neumeyer wrote in his introduction to Interpretations of The Castle, that Kafka “somehow touched a nerve. What nerve, and how he touched it…” is what he sought to discover. Neumeyer’s Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer embarks on a similar journey, an exploration of influences behind Gorey’s imagination and his talents - the art of the illustrated story.
About the Author: Peter F. Neumeyer (b. 1929), Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (1963), is Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University, and has taught at Harvard, SUNY (Stony Brook), West Virginia University (Dept. Chairman), and briefly at University of Wales and University of Rhode Island. His early writings were on comparative subjects: Kafka, Thomas Mann, Swift, Shakespeare, John Clare, Thomas Hardy, and contemporary English literature, of Language and Composition, then onto Children's Literature. Neumeyer taught some of the first classes on children's literature in the country at SDSU, enabling the university to become one of the first to offer studies in Children’s Literature as part of their English Department in the 1970s. The program is now The National Center for the Study of Children's Literature. Neumeyer's collaborations with Edward Gorey include Donald and the... (1969), Donald Has a Difficulty (1970), and Why We Have Day and Night (1970). Excerpts by Neumeyer are from his afterwards published in the 2004 editions of Donald and the… and Donald Has a Difficulty from Abrams. Neumeyer resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
-- Glen Emil, Goreyography
Images from Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer, Peter F. Neumeyer, ed., Pomegranate, 2011. Images © 2011 The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust. Courtesy of Pomegranate Communications, Inc. Excerpts from the Afterwards from "Donald and the..." and "Donald Has a Difficulty" are copyright ©2004 Harry N. Abrams
Many thanks to Stephanie King of Pomegranate Communicatons, Harry N. Abrams, and to Andreas Brown of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust for their generous assistance.