An Excellence of Peake
In his introduction to an early collection of his drawings, Peake wrote—‘After all, there are no rules. With the wealth, skill, daring, vision of many centuries at one’s back, yet one is ultimately quite alone. For it is one’s ambition to create one’s own world in a style germane to its substance, and to people it with its native forms and denizens that never were before, yet have their roots in one’s experience. As the earth was thrown from the sun, so from the earth the artist must fling out into space, complete from pole to pole, his own world which, whatsoever form it takes, is the colour of the globe it flew from, as the world itself is coloured by the sun.’
Born in China, still carrying a feel of the exotic about him, a fine painter, illustrator, poet and novelist, Peake had been a sunny, bouyant source of life for so many who knew him. His optimism could be unrealistic, but he was never short of it. He was charming and attractive, generous and expansive by nature, combining his dark Celtic good looks with a fine sense of style. Though he’d always supported his family, he’d never had much of a knack for making money—he received five pounds for the entire set of illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark. He wasn’t much good at anticipating bills but only as his illness worsened did his anxieties begin to get a grip on him and he had exaggerated hopes for his surreal play The Wit To Woo, which failed badly.
Knowing little of the brain in those days—this was before Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s were identified—we watched helplessly as Mervyn declined into some mysterious form of dementia, while the surgeons hacked at his frontal lobes and further destroyed his ability to work and reason. The frustration was terrible. His instinctive intelligence, his kindness, even his wit flickered in his eyes, but were all trapped, inexpressible. “It feels like everything’s being stolen,” he said once to me. Here was an extraordinary man, his head a treasure-house of invention, poetry, characters, ideas, being destroyed from within while his genius was rejected by the literary and art world of the day.
When art critics of reputation like Edwin Mullins tried to write about Peake, editors would turn the idea down. I had only a modest success, mostly in low-circulation literary magazines, fanzines. The story, even then, was that Peake had lost his mind. The strain of writing such dark books. All the fictional madness he had created had caught up with him. Unwholesome stuff, darkness. Sniff at it too hard and it gets inside you. That story was a damaging sensational nonsense recklessly perpetuated by Quentin Crisp (‘all that darkness, dear, gets to you in the end’), for whom Peake had once illustrated a small book and to whom the Peakes had been consistently kind in the years before his notoriety.
