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Collected Articles on Mervyn Peake

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Collected Articles on Mervyn Peake Collected Articles on Mervyn Peake G. Peter Winnington Introduction This collEcTion reprints some of my articles on Peake spanning the last 40 years; they are available as pdf files, with appropriate illustrations. Total length 200 pages. not all were published in the Mervyn Peake Review or Peake Studies. some have appeared before only in books or other periodicals. i have grouped them more or less thematically, rather than chronologically. i © G. Peter Winnington 2016 consider the first two as introductory: they were written for people with The words and art work by Mervyn Peake little or no knowledge of Peake and his work. The first, ‘inside the Mind are copyright the Mervyn Peake Estate. of Mervyn Peake’, examines how Peake spatializes the contents of the mind; the second, ‘The critical Reception of the Titus Books,’shows how Peake’s novels were first received. The second group is largely biographical in orientation, covering • ‘Peake’s Parents’ Years in china’; • my discovery of ‘A letter From china’ by Peake; • a piece describing ‘Kuling, Peake’s Birthplace’ and a more recent one, • ‘Peake and Kuling’, written as a review of the British library’s publica- tion of ‘Memoirs of a Doctor in china’, misleadingly titled Peake in China with an ill-informed introduction by hilary spurling; • ‘Burning the Globe: another attempt to situate Gormenghast’, on the geography and mentality of Gormenghast; and • ‘The Writing of Titus Groan.’ The third group comprises articles identifying some of Peake’s sources and possible influences on his work: • ‘Tracking Down the Umzimvubu Kaffirs’; • ‘Peake, Knole and Orlando’; • ‘Mervyn Peake and the cinema’ (updated with a note on recent find- ings); • ‘Parodies and Poetical Allusions’; • ‘Peake and Alice (and Arrietty)’. (This is the opening speech delivered at the 2011 centenary conference.) in fourth place comes a short ‘volume’ relating to Peake’s art, with my assessment of Peake’s production as a war artist, and a piece that few peo- ple will have read before: ‘The Draw of the line’. it was written to accom- pany an exhibition of Peake’s work in Yverdon, switzerland, in 2009. it complements what i wrote in Mervyn Peake: the Man and his Art. The fih group comprises thematic articles: ii • ‘Fuchsia and steerpike: Mood and Form’; • ‘Peake’s Thing and hawthorne’s Pearl’; Inside the Mind of Mervyn Peake • ‘Mervyn Peake’s lonely World’; • ‘Peake’s Ballads: ‘The Touch o’ the Ash’ and The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb.’ What is as rare as to be quite alone, lastly, we have articles on the editing and resulting (un)reliability of To wander through my labyrinthine skull Peake’s texts: And hear no sound but what my brain is making? • ‘The Misfortunes of captain slaughterboard’; The Wit to Woo, Act ii1 • ‘Editing Peake’; • ‘on the Editing of Titus Alone’; When Mervyn Peake died ten years ago, he le an oeuvre of four novels, • ‘A note on the Folio Texts’; six books of poetry, four volumes of drawings and three books for chil- • ‘Peake de luxe: the Collected Works from Queen Anne Press. dren in addition to several short stories. he had illustrated more than twenty works, including Treasure Island, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.2 Beside References this considerable achievement in prose, poetry and picture, there remained countless unpublished drawings and writings which have been i have abbreviated references to the books most often quoted from: appearing in various publications ever since. Batchelor Mervyn Peake: a biographical and critical exploration. Duckworth, 1974. This ‘genius of the pen and pencil’ was born in china, in 1911, where his BiD ‘Boy in Darkness’ in Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination by father was a missionary doctor. Although his paternal grandmother came William Golding, John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake. Eyre & from Donatyre in French-speaking switzerland, the family was thorough- spottiswoode, 1956, pp.155–224. ly British in education and outlook. Aer beginning his schooling in CP Collected Poems. Edited by R W Maslen. carcanet, 2008. Tientsin, Mervyn Peake completed his secondary education at Eltham G Gormenghast (1950). Paperback editions from the King Penguin of college (a boarding school just south of london for the sons of mission- 1982 to Vintage, 1998. ary families) and then studied art at the croydon school of Art and the Gb The Glassblowers. Eyre and spottiswoode, 1950. Royal Academy schools. AWA A World Away, by Maeve Gilmore. Victor Gollancz, 1970. in 1933, he went to the channel island of sark where he spent two years MP Mr Pye. heinemann, 1953. (subsequent editions contain misprints.) in an artists’ colony founded by his ex-English teacher from Eltham. PP Peake’s Progress. Penguin, 1981, and the British library, 2011. (The Returning to England, he started to teach life drawing at the Westminster defective Allen lane hardback edition of 1978 was unfortunately school of Art in london; there he met a young artist, Maeve Gilmore, reprinted by Penguin in 2000.) whom he married in 1937. in later years, when his novels and poems PS The periodical, Peake Studies (www.peakestudies.com) 1988–2015. brought in less than enough to live on, teaching was a welcome source of smith Mervyn Peake: a Personal Memoir, by Gordon smith. Victor Gollancz, regular income. 1984. Peake spent most of his life in the london area; he returned to sark TA Titus Alone (1959). Paperback editions from the King Penguin of 1981 with his family aer the war, only to find that the economics of an artist to Vintage, 1998. and writer’s existence required closer contact with publishers, so they TG Titus Groan (1946). Paperback editions from the King Penguin of 1981 moved back to london. During the war, the armed forces had little idea to Vintage, 1998. First published in Etudes de Lettres (published by the University of Lausanne, Watney Mervyn Peake, by John Watney. Michael Joseph, 1976. Switzerland), Series vi, volume 2, No 1 (January–March 1979), pp.99–106. Reprinted (in WD Mervyn Peake: Writings and Drawings. Academy Editions, 1974) part) in The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism: Twentieth-Century British Literature, edited by Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 1987, vol.4, pp.2220–21). � Collected Articles inside the Mind of Mervyn Peake of what to do with sapper Peake; aer a nervous breakdown, he was resque adventures. something of the richness returns, nevertheless, when invalided out of the army and then received a two commissions as a war Peake indulges in tableaux – for he inclines to the painterly, and uses his artist. For a newly founded political journal, he visited Germany soon words impasto. The language, then, and in particular his imagery, is one of aer the cessation of hostilities and was profoundly shocked by the suffer- the fascinations of his work; it is also one of the obstacles to understand- ing he witnessed at Belsen concentration camp. Yet the forties were ing it. The proliferation of images is such that the difficulty lies not so Peake’s best years; he wrote much of his poetry at this time, and did most much in interpreting them, as in choosing among the plethora of possible of the illustrations on which his reputation as a draughtsman is based. meanings. During the 1950s, his health declined and commissions dwindled; he Yet there are constants in Peake’s work that serve as guides and touch- made a short-lived debut as a playwright before being overcome by stones to investigation: one of the dominant metaphors of Titus Groan and Parkinson’s disease. The sixties found him fatally ill and badly lacking in Gormenghast is that of the castle as a human body – it has a spine (TG 129 funds; his novels seemed to have been forgotten by the public. Yet in the & 202), a head with hair, eyes, jaws and even teeth (G 101). it holds its year of his death, they were republished in paperback on both sides of the breath (G 277), sweats (TG 413), and has a heart and pulse (G 17). The Tower Atlantic, and since then they have sold in their hundreds of thousands. of Flints that dominates the castle ‘arose like a mutilated finger from his first novel, Titus Groan,3 was written during the war and published among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heav- in 1946; it covers the first year in the life of the eponymous hero – but far en. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voice- more space is devoted to setting the scene, the vast and sprawling castle of less and cast its long shadow’ (TG 15). Gormenghast, than to Titus himself, who perforce has little more than a not only is the castle described in terms of the human body, it also crawl-on role to play. The main action concerns the rise to power within enjoys more abstract attributes of a living human being: it has a mind, the castle of a scheming kitchen hand, steerpike, who by guts and guile moods and thoughts – even a soul (G 14). not surprisingly, more than one exchanges his menial tasks in the scullery for those of amanuensis of the critic has called it the principal character of the novels.6 all-powerful Master of Ritual. A second plot concerns the rivalry between This assimilation of a concrete structure with a human mind and body Flay, lord Groan’s spidery personal servant, and the loathsome chef, can be found throughout Peake’s poetry. in ‘london 1941’ (one of his bet- swelter, which leads to a magnificent set scene in which they duel in the ter-known poems), the city is described in terms of a woman: cobwebbed attics of Gormenghast.
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