Fantastic Metropolis

The rest is more or less history. A history spotted with bad media features about Mervyn which insist on perpetuating his story as a doomed loony. Bill Brandt showed him as a glowering Celt, a sort of unsodden Dylan Thomas, and his romantic good looks help project this image. Women certainly fell in love with his sheer beauty. And then with his charm. And then with his wit. And then they were lost. After he married Maeve, Peake’s home life was about as ordinary and chaotic as the usual bohemian family’s. Their mutual love was remarkable, as was the passion and enthusiasm of the whole wonderful tribe. As he faded into the final stages of his disease, we were all overwhelmed by an ongoing sense of loss, of disbelief, as if the sun itself were going out.

Peake was neither a saint nor a satanic presence and what was so marvellous for me, when I first went to see him as a boy, was realising that so much rich talent could come from such a graceful, pleasant, rather modest man who lived in a suburban house much like mine. He was amused by my enthusiasm. I was in no doubt, though, that I’d met my first authentic genius.

In time, of course, many others shared that view, until eventually all Peake’s work came back into print, new editions of his stories and poems were produced, public shows presented of his drawings and paintings and various dramatic versions done of his novels not least the extraordinary minimalist version of Gormenghast by David Glass and the Derek Jacobi TV version of his charming short novel Mr Pye.

Peake had a huge, romantic imagination, a Welsh eloquence, a wry, affectionate wit and his technical mastery, both of narrative and line, remains unmatched. “To be a good classicist,” he said, “you must cultivate romance. To be a good romantic, you must steep yourself in classicism.” He was both an heir to the great Victorians and a precursor to the post-modernists, the magic realists. His statements frequently anticipated the likes of Salman Rushdie. He influenced a generation of authors, amongst them Angela Carter, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, who found that it was possible to write imaginatively and inventively about character and real experience while setting their stories in subtly unfamiliar worlds.

And Peake’s own attitude is best summed up by a poem which achieved popularity some forty years after he wrote it. “To live at all,” he said, “is miracle enough.” Of course he did much more than live. “Art,” he used to say, “is really sorcery.” He infused life and art into everything he touched. And his sorceries continue to entrance us.

This essay was done for the Folio Society edition of the Gormenghast trilogy (1995) but published for the first time on The Sunday Telegraph (February 2000).