BiographyMervyn Peake (1911-1968) was an artist and writer of extraordinary originality and prolificity whose Gormenghast trilogy, 60 years after publication of the first volume, remains in print and continues to grow in fame and influence.
The story of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, an ancient, isolated hierarchy of Gothic grotesquerie and modern relevance, fills almost 1,000 pages of prose so dense and rich in details of oppressive architecture, bad weather, arson, murder, suicide, intrigue, caricature and satire that some readers find Gormenghast impenetrable. Countless others, however, adjusting to its leisurely pace and realising there is no need for written fiction to move as fast as film, luxuriate in Peake's idiosyncratic, visually poetic use of language, and wish the saga would never end.
Loyal readers' minds are inhabited for ever by Peake's bizarre characters, notably Lord Sepulchrave of Groan and his twin sisters, "so limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage"; Dr Prunesquallor , the effeminate court physician with a "hyena laugh", whose spinster sister "misses her footing on the social ladder at least three times a week, only to start climbing again"; Rottcodd, curator of the "Bright Carvings" by the "Mud Dwellers," who live in hovels surrounding the castle walls; Nannie Slagg, the frightened, querulous, old nurse; Opus Fluke, Perch-Prism and Deadyawn, the schoolmasters; Sourdust , Master of Ritual, and Steerpike, the ambitious, cunning, young villain (Peake relished Dickensian nomenclature).
Now welcome a marvellous new book, lavishly illustrated in colour and black-and-white, an eloquent encomium to Peake and all his works, with tributes from his son Sebastian, G Peter Winnington , author of the definitive Peake biography (Peter Owen, 2000), and some writers who have acknowledged that Peake inspired them, including adaptors of the novels for stage and television. Anthony Burgess, himself one of the most profusely logorrhoeic of 20th-century novelists, pointed out that "It is difficult in post-war English fiction to get away with big rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions". In Burgess's opinion, Peake was "uniquely brilliant". His wife, the painter Maeve Gilmore, after a courtship tea in a café and a ride in a tram, called Mervyn "unique, dark and majestic", and loved his sense of humour.
Mervyn Laurence Peake was born in China, and spent the first 11 years of his life there. His father was an English medical missionary and his mother was Welsh. The Celtic genes evidently were predominant. His education began at Tietsin Grammar School. Dr Peake had access to the secluded Forbidden City in Peking. Sebastian believes "The ritual-bound life of the Emperors in a citadel cut off from the world may well have been a source of inspiration for Gormenghast".
In Gormenghast, too, according to Peake's friend Michael Moorcock, there is "all the dusty glory of a decadent court, ancient mysteries, bizarre secrets, peculiar dependencies and relationships, old rivalries, a history already so encrusted with legend and myth that it is no longer a record of events but a litany of blind faith. This could be the China of Mervyn's boyhood translated to England" - the House of Windsor as Gothic comedy.
After years at Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, Peake was technically proficient and his imagination untrammelled. The book comprehensively exhibits his versatility in oils, water colours, pen and ink, and pencil. He was a successful portraitist, an especially honest self-portraitist, an illustrator and teacher. He wrote a guide for art students, The Craft of the Lead Pencil, an implement he described as "Hell and Heaven in a cedar tunnel". His temperament attracted him to beauty and the distortions of the macabre. Some of his line drawings are of pure lucidity, and he could make intricate cross-hatching as tenebrous as a nightmare.
The book reproduces illustrations for such disparate works as Alice in Wonderland, The Hunting of the Snark, Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Peake was able to depict insanity in the bright, desperate glare of the mariner's eyes, and the contemplative calm of Peake's own pretty young niece with Coleridge's poem and a kitten on her lap.
A genius by any reasonable definition, Peake seems to have been a connoisseur of madness in others, which apparently horrified and amused him. After Lord Sepulchrave's great library is destroyed by fire, he squats owlishly on a mantelpiece and orders his chef to bring him a plump mouse, then allows real owls to devour him.
During wartime service as an incompetent soldier and a competent, non- conformist, official war artist, Peake produced fine paintings of glass-blowers (war work) as well as a portfolio of atrocities entitled An Exhibition by the Artist, Adolf Hitler - 'The New Order'.
Peake's life ended tragically. An incurable, progressive disease, diagnosed as Parkinson's Dementia with Lewy Bodies, was exacerbated by electroconvulsive therapy and brain surgery, so he was no longer able to work. At the age of 57, he died and was buried in Sussex. His gravestone is inscribed: "To live at all is miracle enough."
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art Compiled by Sebastian Peake and Alison Eldred, edited by G Peter Winnington Peter Owen, 216pp. £35