Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968), 1930s. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Mervyn Peake
Born	9 July 1911 Kuling, Jiangxi, Great Qing Empire (modern-day Lushan District, Jiangxi, China)
Died	17 November 1968 Burcot, Oxfordshire, England
Occupation	Writer, artist, poet, illustrator
Spouse	Maeve Gilmore
Children	3
Relatives	Jack Peñate (grandson)

Mervyn Laurence Peake (9 July 1911 - 17 November 1968) was an English poet, prose writer, artist, and illustrator.

Life

Overview

Peake made a reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. For a short time at the end of World War II he was commissioned by various newspapers to depict war scenes. A collection of his drawings is still in the possession of his family. Although he gained little popular success in his lifetime, his work was highly respected by his peers, and his friends included Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. His works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives.

Youth and education

Mervyn Peake was born of British parents in Kuling (Lushan) in Jiangxi Province of central China in 1911, only 3 months before the revolution and the founding of the Republic of China. His father Ernest Cromwell Peake was a medical missionary doctor with the London Missionary Society of the Congregationalist tradition and his mother, Amanda Elizabeth Powell, had come to China as a missionary assistant.

The Peakes were given leave to visit England just before World War I in 1914, and returned to China in 1916. Mervyn Peake attended Tientsin Grammar School until the family left for England in December 1922 via the Trans-Siberian Railway. About this time he wrote a novella, The White Chief of the Umzimbooboo Kaffirs. Peake never returned to China but it has been noted that Chinese influences can be detected in his works, not least in the castle of Gormenghast itself, which in some respects echoes the ancient walled city of Beijing, as well as the enclosed compound where he grew up in Tianjin. It is also likely that his early exposure to the contrasts between the lives of the Europeans and of the Chinese, and between the poor and the wealthy in China, also exerted an influence on the Gormenghast books.

His education continued at Eltham College, Mottingham (1923–29), where his talents were encouraged by his English teacher, Eric Drake. Peake completed his formal education at Croydon School of Art in the autumn of 1929 and then from December 1929 to 1933 at the Royal Academy Schools, where he 1st painted in oils. By this time he had written his earliest long poem, A Touch o' the Ash. In 1931 he had a painting accepted for display by the Royal Academy and exhibited his work with the so-called "Soho Group".

Early career

His early career in the 1930s was as a painter in London, although he lived on the Channel Island of Sark for a time. He first moved to Sark in 1932 where his former teacher Eric Drake was setting up an artists' colony. In 1934 he exhibited with the Sark artists both in the Sark Gallery built by Drake and at the Cooling Galleries in London. In 1935 he exhibited at the Royal Academy and at the Leger Galleries in London.

In 1936 he returned to London and was commissioned to design the sets and costumes for Insect Play and his work was acclaimed in The Sunday Times. He also began teaching life drawing at Westminster School of Art where he met painter Maeve Gilmore, whom he married in 1937. They had 3 children, Sebastian (1940–2012), Fabian (b. 1942), and Clare (b. 1949).

He had a very successful exhibition of paintings at the Calmann Gallery in London in 1938. His earliest book, a self-illustrated children's pirate romance called Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (based on a story he had written around 1936) was published in 1939 by Country Life. In December 1939 he was commissioned by Chatto & Windus to illustrate a children's book, Ride a Cock Horse, and other nursery rhymes, published for the Christmas market in 1940.

Enlistment

File:Glass-blowers 'Gathering' from the Furnace. (1943) (Art.IWM ART LD 2851).jpg

Glass-blowers 'Gathering' from the Furnace. (1943) (Art.IWM ART LD 2851)

At the outbreak of World War II he applied to become a war artist for he was keen to put his skills at the service of his country. He imagined An Exhibition by the Artist, Adolf Hitler, in which horrific images of war with ironic titles were offered as 'artworks' by the Nazi leader. Although the drawings were bought by the British Ministry of Information, his application was turned down and he was conscripted into the Army, where he served initially with the Royal Artillery, then with the Royal Engineers. He began writing Titus Groan at this time.

In April 1942, after his requests for commissions as a war artist – or even leave to depict war damage in London – had been consistently refused, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent to Southport Hospital. That autumn he was taken on as a graphic artist by the Ministry of Information for a period of six months to work on propaganda illustrations. The next spring he was invalided out of the Army. In 1943 he was commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC, to paint glassblowers at the Chance Brothers factory in Birmingham where cathode ray tubes for early radar sets were being produced. Peake was next given a full-time, 3-month WAAC contract to depict various factory subjects and was also asked to submit a large painting showing RAF pilots being debriefed. Some of these paintings are on permanent display in Manchester Art Gallery whilst other examples are in the Imperial War Museum collection.

Illustration and writing

The 5 years between 1943 and 1948 were some of the most productive of his career. He finished Titus Groan and Gormenghast and completed some of his most acclaimed illustrations for books by other authors, including Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark (for which he was reportedly paid only £5) and Alice in Wonderland, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Brothers Grimm's Household Tales, All This and Bevin Too by Quentin Crisp and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as producing many original poems, drawings, and paintings.

Peake designed the logo for Pan Books. The publishers offered him either a flat fee of £10 or a royalty of a farthing (half a cent) per book. On the advice of Graham Greene, who told him that paperback books were a passing fad that wouldn't last, Peake opted for the £10.

A book of nonsense poems, Rhymes Without Reason, was published in 1944 and was described by John Betjeman as "outstanding".

Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Edgar Ainsworth, the art editor of Picture Post commissioned Peake to visit France and Germany for the magazine. With writer Tom Pocock he was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen, where the remaining prisoners, too sick to be moved, were dying before his very eyes. He made several drawings, but not surprisingly he found the experience profoundly harrowing, and expressed in deeply felt poems the ambiguity of turning their suffering into art.

In 1946 the family moved to Sark, where Peake continued to write and illustrate, and Maeve painted. Gormenghast was published in 1950, and the family moved back to England, settling in Smarden, Kent. Peake taught part-time at the Central School of Art, began his comic novel Mr Pye, and renewed his interest in theatre. His father died that year and left his house in Hillside Gardens in Wallington, Surrey to Mervyn.(Citation needed) Mr Pye was published in 1953, and he later adapted it as a radio play. The BBC broadcast other plays of his in 1954 and 1956.

Later life

In 1956 Mervyn and Maeve visited Spain, financed by a friend who hoped that Peake's health, which was already declining, would be improved by the holiday. That year his novella Boy in Darkness was published beside stories by William Golding and John Wyndham in a volume called Sometime, Never. On 18 December the BBC broadcast his radio play The Eye of the Beholder (later revised as The Voice of One) in which an avant-garde artist is commissioned to paint a church mural.

Peake placed much hope in his play The Wit To Woo which was finally staged in London's West End in 1957, but it was a critical and commercial failure. This affected him greatly – his health degenerated rapidly and he was again admitted to hospital with a nervous breakdown.

He was showing unmistakable early symptoms of dementia, for which he was given electroconvulsive therapy, to little avail. Over the next few years he gradually lost the ability to draw steadily and quickly, although he still managed to produce some drawings with the help of his wife. Among his last completed works were the illustrations for Balzac's Droll Stories (1961) and for his own poem The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962), which he had written some 15 years earlier.

Death

Throughout the 1960s, Peake's health declined into physical and mental incapacitation, and he died on 17 November 1968 at a care home run by his brother-in-law, at Burcot, near Oxford. He was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's in the village of Burpham, Sussex.

A 2003 study published in JAMA Neurology assessed that Peake's death was the result of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).

Writing

Gormenghast

Peake is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast novels. The 3 works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.

The Gormenghast series, along with Peake's other work, became much better known and more widely appreciated after his death. They have since been translated into more than 2 dozen languages.

The 3rd novel, Titus Alone, was published in 1959 and was revised in 1970 by Langdon Jones, editor of New Worlds, to remove apparent inconsistencies introduced by the publisher's careless editing. A 1995 edition of all 3 completed Gormenghast novels includes a very short fragment of the beginning of what would have been the 4th, Titus Awakes, as well as a listing of events and themes he wanted to address in that and later Gormenghast novels.

Other

Peake also wrote poetry and nonsense verse, short stories for adults and children (Letters from a Lost Uncle), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye, a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.

6 volumes of Peake's verse were published during his lifetime; Shapes & Sounds (1941), Rhymes without Reason 1944, The Glassblowers (1950), The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962), Poems & Drawings (1965), and A Reverie of Bone (1967). After his death came Selected Poems (1972), followed by Peake's Progress in (1979 – though the Penguin edition of 1982, with many corrections, including a whole stanza inadvertently omitted from the hardback edition, is to be preferred). The Collected Poems of Mervyn Peake was published by Carcanet Press in June 2008.

Other collections include The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1974), Writings and Drawings (1974), and Mervyn Peake: the man and his art (2006). An extremely expensive limited edition of the collected works, issued to celebrate Peake's centenary year, was published by Queen Anne Press, but the editing and reproduction of drawings did not match the price asked.

Critical reputation

• "Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. [The Gormenghast trilogy] is a very, very great work … a classic of our age." — Robertson Davies
• "[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience." — C.S. Lewis
• "Fuchsia was my dream. This idea of the infinite, of the unreal, of the innocence dying..." — Robert Smith 2003 (about the Peake character that inspired the early Cure song The Drowning Man in 1980)

Recognition

In 2008, The Times named Peake among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

In 2010 an archive consisting of 28 containers of material, which included correspondence between Peake and Laurie Lee, Walter de la Mare and C.S. Lewis, plus 39 Gormenghast notebooks and original drawings for both Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was acquired by the British Library.

Peake's 3 children presented on BBC Radio Four in 2018 a half-hour memoir of their father's life, emphasizing the importance of the island of Sark.

Peake in film and television

In 1986, Mr Pye was adapted as a 4-part Channel 4 miniseries starring Derek Jacobi.

In 2000, the BBC and WGBH Boston co-produced a lavish miniseries, titled Gormenghast, based on the first 2 books of the series. It starred Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Steerpike, Neve McIntosh as Fuchsia, June Brown as Nannie Slagg, Ian Richardson as Lord Groan, Christopher Lee as Flay, Richard Griffiths as Swelter, Warren Mitchell as Barquentine, Celia Imrie as Countess Gertrude, Lynsey Baxter and Zoë Wanamaker as the twins, Cora and Clarice, and John Sessions as Dr Prunesquallor. The supporting cast included Olga Sosnovska, Stephen Fry, and Eric Sykes. and the series is also notable as the last screen performance by comedy legend Spike Milligan (as the Headmaster).

A 30-minute TV short film A Boy in Darkness (also made in 2000 and adapted from Peake's novella) was the earliest production from the BBC Drama Lab. It was set in a 'virtual' computer-generated world created by young computer game designers, and starred Jack Ryder (from EastEnders) as Titus, with Terry Jones (Monty Python's Flying Circus) narrating.

In 1986, Mr Pye was adapted as a 4-part Channel 4 miniseries starring Derek Jacobi.

In 2000, the BBC and WGBH Boston co-produced a lavish miniseries, titled Gormenghast, based on the first 2 books of the series. It starred Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Steerpike, Neve McIntosh as Fuchsia, June Brown as Nannie Slagg, Ian Richardson as Lord Groan, Christopher Lee as Flay, Richard Griffiths as Swelter, Warren Mitchell as Barquentine, Celia Imrie as Countess Gertrude, Lynsey Baxter and Zoë Wanamaker as the twins, Cora and Clarice, and John Sessions as Dr Prunesquallor. The supporting cast included Olga Sosnovska, Stephen Fry, and Eric Sykes. and the series is also notable as the last screen performance by comedy legend Spike Milligan (as the Headmaster).

A 30-minute TV short film A Boy in Darkness (also made in 2000 and adapted from Peake's novella) was the earliest production from the BBC Drama Lab. It was set in a 'virtual' computer-generated world created by young computer game designers, and starred Jack Ryder (from EastEnders) as Titus, with Terry Jones (Monty Python's Flying Circus) narrating.

Peake in and radio, theater, and music

In 1983, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast 8 hour-long episodes for radio dramatising the complete Gormenghast Trilogy. This was the first to include the third book Titus Alone.

In 1984, BBC Radio 4 broadcast 2 90-minute plays based on Titus Groan and Gormenghast, adapted by Brian Sibley and starring Sting as Steerpike and Freddie Jones as the Artist (narrator). A slightly abridged compilation of the 2, running to 160 minutes, and entitled Titus Groan of Gormenghast, was broadcast on Christmas Day, 1992. BBC 7 repeated the original versions on 21 and 28 September 2003.

In 2011 Brian Sibley adapted the story again, this time as six one-hour episodes broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as the Classic Serial starting on 10 July 2011. The serial was titled "The History of Titus Groan" and adapted all 3 novels written by Mervyn Peake and the recently discovered concluding volume, Titus Awakes completed by his widow, Maeve Gilmore. It starred Luke Treadaway as Titus, David Warner as the Artist and Carl Prekopp as Steerpike. It also starred Paul Rhys, Miranda Richardson, James Fleet, Tamsin Greig, Fenella Woolgar, Adrian Scarborough and Mark Benton among others.

Irmin Schmidt, founder of seminal German 'Krautrock' group Can wrote an opera called Gormenghast, based on the novels; it was debuted in Wuppertal, Germany, in November 1998.

Peake's play The Cave, which dates from the mid-1950s, was given a 1st public reading at the Blue Elephant Theatre in Camberwell (London) in 2009, and had its world premiere in the same theatre, directed by Aaron Paterson, on 19 October 2010.

A number of early songs by New Zealand rock group Split Enz were inspired by Peake's work.

The song "The Drowning Man", by British band The Cure, is inspired by events in Gormenghast, and the song "Lady Fuchsia" by another British band, Strawbs, is also based on events in the novels.

Sting owned the film rights to the Gormenghast novels for a brief period in the 1980s, during which he discussed the possibility of adapting the novels into a series of concept albums, but he abandoned the idea after declaring the Radio 4 audio drama as ideal. As of 2015, author Neil Gaiman was in talks to adapt the novels for the big screen.

Publications

Poetry

• Shapes & Sounds. London: Chatto & Windus, 1941.
• Rhymes without Reason. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1944; Methuen, 1974.
• The Glassblowers. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950.
• The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (illustrated by Peake). London: J.M. Dent, 1962.
• Poems & Drawings. London: Keepsake Press, 1965.
• A Reverie of Bone. London: Bertram Rota, 1967.
• Selected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1972.
• Peake's Progress in 1979 Penguin edition of 1982
• A Book of Nonsense. London: Peter Owen, 1972
  • Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983.
• Twelve Poems. Hayes, Middlesex, UK: Bran's Head Books, 1975.
• Ten Poems. London: Mervyn Peake Society, 1993.
• Eleven Poems. London: Mervyn Peake Society, 1995.
• Collected Poems (edited by R.W. Maslen). Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2008.

Play

• The Cave. London: Mervyn Peake Society, 1996.

Novels

• Mr. Pye. London: Heinemann, 1953.

Gormenghast/Titus Groan

• Titus Groan. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1946.
• Gormenghast. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950.
• Titus Alone. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959
  • (text reconstructed from original manuscript by Langdon Jones). London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970.
• Boy in Darkness (story). Exeter, Devon: Wheaton, 1976.
• The Titus Books. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1983.
• The Gormenghast Trilogy. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1988.
• The Gormenghast Novels. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press / Tusk, 1995 (contains fragment, "Titus Awakes")
• The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy. London: Vintage Books, 2011.
• Titus Awakes. London: Vintage, 2011 (completed by Maeve Gilmore, based on a fragment by Peake)

Short fiction

• Boy in Darkness, and other stories. London: Peter Owen, 2008.

Art

• The Craft of the Lead Pencil. London: Wingate, 1946.
• Drawings. London: Gray Walls Press, 1949.
• Figures of Speech. London: Gollancz, 1954.
• Drawings. London: Davis-Poynter, 1974.

Juvenile

• The White Chief of the Unzimbooboo Kaffirs (1921)
• Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (illustrated by Peake). London: Country Life, 1939.
• Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions). London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948.
• Boy in Darkness (illustrated by P.J. Lynch). London: Hodder, 1996.

Collected editions

• Writings and Drawings. London: Academy Editions / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974.
• Peake's Progress: Selected writings and drawings (edited by Maeve Gilmore). London: Allen Lane, 1978.
• Mervyn Peake: the man and his art (2006).
• Works, Queen Anne Press, 2011.

Illustrated books

• Ride a Cock Horse and Other Nursery Rhymes (Chatto & Windus, 1940)
• The Book of Lyonne (by Burgess Drake) (The Falcon Press, 1952)
• Hunting of the Snark (by Lewis Carroll)
• Alice in Wonderland (by Lewis Carroll)
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
• Household Tales (by the Brothers Grimm)
• All This and Bevin Too (by Quentin Crisp)
• Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (by Robert Louis Stevenson)
• Treasure Island (by Robert Louis Stevenson)
• Droll Stories (by Balzac) (Folio Society, 1961)
• Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone (by himself; several editions include an abundance of illustrations, on plates in the center and/or distributed through the text)
• The Swiss Family Robinson (by Johann R.Wyss)

Mervyn Peake Poem I Cannot Give The Reasons from A Book of Nonsense

See also

The Glassblowers by Mervyn Peake

• List of British poets

References

• Winnington, G. Peter (ed.) (2006) Mervyn Peake: the man and his art. (London: Peter Owen)
• Winnington, G. Peter (2000) Vast Alchemies: the life and work of Mervyn Peake. Revised and enlarged in 2009 as Mervyn Peake's Vast Alchemies. (London: Peter Owen)
• Winnington, G. Peter (2006) The Voice of the Heart: the working of Mervyn Peake's imagination. (Liverpool U P / Chicago U P)
• Winnington, G. Peter. "Mervyn Peake's Lonely World". Wormwood No 3 (Autumn 2004), 1–21.
• Peake, Mervyn (ca.1950) 'Notes towards a Projected Autobiography', printed in Maeve Gilmore (ed.), Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings of Mervyn Peake (London: Allen Lane, 1978)

External links

Poems

• Mervyn Peake at PoemHunter (3 poems)
• Nonsense poetry (6 poems)

Books

• Mervyn Peake at Amazon.com
• Mervyn Peake at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Peake in Print is a full primary and secondary bibliography

About

• Mervyn Peake in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• Mervyn Peake Official website
• Gormenghast official Gormenghast site
• Riggenbach, Jeff (22 July 2010). "Mervyn Peake and the Great Individualist Novel". Mises Daily (Ludwig von Mises Institute). http://mises.org/daily/4577/Mervyn-Peake-and-the-Great-Individualist-Novel. 
• Gormenghast Castle
• Peake Studies – the periodical dedicated to Peake's life and work, with a complete Peake bibliography