Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Laurence Peake was a British writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The four 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 Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children, 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.
Peake first made his 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 C. S. Lewis, 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.
In 2008, The Times named Peake among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Early life
Mervyn Peake was born of British parents in Kuling located on top of Mount Lu in Jiujiang in 1911, only three 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. Ernest and Amanda met in July 1903 at Kuling, a summer European missionary resort in Mount Lu about the Yangtze River in Jiujiang. They got married in Hong Kong in December of that same year.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. He would later write a novella about this time, titled 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 his birthplace Kuling, as well as the ancient walled city of Beijing and 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, 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 first painted in oils. By this time he had written his first 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".
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, Peake exhibited with the Sark artists both in the Sark Gallery built by Drake and at the Cooling Galleries in London, and 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 The 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 the painter Maeve Gilmore, whom he married in 1937. They had three children: Sebastian, Fabian, and Clare.
Peake had a very successful exhibition of paintings at the Calmann Gallery in London in 1938 and his first book, the self-illustrated children's pirate romance Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, was first 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
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, Peake's application was turned down and he was conscripted into the Army, where he served first 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 Smethwick where cathode ray tubes for early radar sets were being produced. Peake was next given a full-time, three-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 five 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 The Hunting of the Snark 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 one farthing per book. On the advice of Graham Greene, who told him that paperback books were a passing fad that would not 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, Peake 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 Peake. 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, 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.During this period he was published primarily in New Worlds by Michael Moorcock, a consistent supporter since the mid-1950s.
Declining health
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 and for his own poem The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, which he had written some 15 years earlier.Titus Alone was published in 1959 and was revised in 1970 by Langdon Jones, an editor of New Worlds, to remove apparent inconsistencies introduced by the publisher's careless editing. Jones, also a composer, set The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb to music. A 1995 edition of all three completed Gormenghast novels includes a very short fragment of the beginning of what would have been the fourth Gormenghast novel, Titus Awakes, as well as a listing of events and themes he wanted to address in that and later Gormenghast novels.