An Excellence of Peake
People who didn’t know him very well often said Mervyn Peake’s books were so darkly complex that writing them had sent him mad. Others, who perhaps knew him a little better, understood how cleverly Peake was formalising his own experience and observations. He was one of the most deeply sane individuals you could hope to meet. He was a conscious artist, with a wicked wit and a tremendous love of life. “He has magic in his pen,” said Charles Morgan. “He can annihilate the dimensions.”
Although he wrote his trilogy at more or less the same time as Tolkien, with whom he was then marginalised as another ‘unclassifiable’ fantast, Peake had no great interest in The Lord of the Rings and as far as I know never read it or The Hobbit. It wasn’t his kind of thing. ‘Children are anarchists,’ he told me, ‘not policemen.’ C. S. Lewis was an enthusiast, and warned Peake against others who insisted the Gormenghast books were religious allegory. Peake, whose parents had been missionaries, cheerfully and firmly rejected this interpretation as he rejected most ‘pompous profundities’ applied to his own work. Peake’s own suspicion of academics and clerics, evident from his books, made him a little wary of Lewis’s friendly overtures and he was rather more pleased by the attention he received from Elizabeth Bowen, Angus Wilson and others, whom he did read. Wilson thought he was ahead of his time. Peake certainly never had a cult develop around him the way it did with poor Tolkien, whose last years were often made miserable by his fans.
Anthony Burgess thought the English mistrusted Peake for being too talented. Peake was a first class illustrator (at one time, ‘the most fashionable in England’, according to Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant), a fine poet and an outstanding painter. His novels, said Burgess are ‘aggressively three-dimensional… showing the poet as well as the draughtsman… 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. He is always exact… (Gormenghast) remains essentially a work of the closed imagination, in which a world parallel to our own is presented in almost paranoic denseness of detail. But the madness is illusory, and control never falters. It is, if you like, a rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect to just the right temperature. There is no really close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant.’
His wife Maeve’s memoir, A World Away, which Vintage recently reprinted, is full of stories of scratching the backs of elephants through floorboards to try to keep them quiet while he was sleeping above them, his spontaneous acts of romantic generosity, his dashing gestures and glorious sense of fun, his willingness to give drawings or poems away to anyone who said they liked them, his London expeditions, drawing faces from Soho, Limehouse, Wapping—what he called ‘head-hunting’. He courted her elegantly and with humour. He was, she said, ‘unique, dark and majestic’. Tea at Lyons, a trip on a tram, and she was his forever. He was conscripted in the Second World War, was in London a great deal during the Blitz and was the first War Artist into Belsen, producing studies that are remarkable for their humanity and sympathy, experience he used in his last book. He, like most of us, somehow stayed roughly sane, if a little overwrought, throughout the war. His practical jokes, often concocted with Graham Greene, were elaborate and subtle.
