An Excellence of Peake
Mervyn Peake was inspiring, joyful company whose tragedy was not in his life or work but in whatever ill-luck cursed him with Parkinson’s Disease. ‘If we went out,’ said Maeve, ‘it often seemed that he was drunk or drugged and offence would be taken. I longed to shelter him and resented the intelligent ones who turned their backs on him. It’s very painful to see such a gentle man cold-shouldered.’ Increasingly unable to draw, or work on the fourth Titus book, he was by the mid-1960s institutionalised and in the last stages of his illness. His public reputation had vanished. Neither Greene, Bowen nor Burgess, all of them admirers, had enough influence to convince his publishers to return his books to print.
If there’s an unsung hero of Mervyn Peake’s life and career it has to be Oliver Caldecott, painter and publisher, who became head of the Penguin fiction list, founded Wildwood House and died prematurely. Ollie and Moira Caldecott, South African exiles, had been friends of mine for several years and we shared a mutual enthusiasm for the Gormenghast sequence. We’d made earlier efforts to persuade someone to reprint it, but as usual were told there was no readership for the books. Caldecott wouldn’t give up hope.
I’d been instrumental in getting a couple of Mervyn’s short stories published and ran some fragments of fiction, poetry and drawings in my magazine New Worlds, some of his poetry was still in print, together with one or two illustrated books, but he was thoroughly out of fashion, his reputation not helped by Kingsley Amis describing him ‘as a bad fantasy writer of maverick status’, revealing a tendency for those who trawled the margins to link him with the authors of horror stories and talking animal books.
He was always badly served by comparisons with Tolkien because he was Tolkien’s antithesis. Peake spoke of his artistic experiments as ‘the smashing of another window pane’. He wasn’t looking for reassurance. He was looking for truth. “I rather thought I was writing for grown-ups,” he said mildly. “I can’t see that I have anything in common with Tolkien.” Nothing is cute or furry in Gormenghast. Peake was a fascinated explorer of human personality, a confronter of realities, beaming his brilliance here and there into our common darkness, a narrative genius able to control a vast range of characters (no more grotesque than life and many of them wonderfully comic) in the telling of a complex, narrative, much of which is based upon the ambitions of a single, determined individual, Steerpike, whose rise from the depths of society (or ‘Gormenghast’ as it is called) and extraordinary climb and fall has a monumental, Dickensian quality which keeps you reading at fever pitch. The stuff of solid, grown-up full-strength fiction. Real experience, freshly described. “It’s not so much their blindness,’ he said of his more conventional contemporaries, ‘as their love of blinkers that spells stagnation.” Gormenghast was written by a real poet, with a real relish for words and a real feel for the alienated, a painter who could see the extraordinary beneath the apparently nondescript. Closer to the best Zola than any Tolkien or the generic tosh which followed him.
