Mervyn Peake
&MT'S a\IUSEhlaifl
ART
By HENRY TUBE
MERVYN PEAKE is perhaps chiefly known as the author of three extraordinary 'Gothic' novels, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, pub- lished in the 'forties, and Titus Alone, pub- fished in 1959. It is at first surprising to dis- cover that he has illustrated some forty books, ranging from The Hunting of the Snark and The Ancient Mariner in the 'thirties, through Treasure Island and Alice to Dickens and Balzac in tir 'fifties. Surprising, until one begins to re- assess his two arts in the light of each other. For his peculiar vision is:entirely consistent: the novels could not have been written by anyone but an artist, while the drawings are those of-a man soaked in the text he is illustrating. This cross-fertilisation' accounts at least partly for the unique quality of his best work in both fields.
'The label 'grotesque' applied to an artist's work is apt to arouseS suspicion: if his imagination will only function under the stimulus of exaggeration, it is perhaps too artificial or too confined to the fringe ofexperience to make a fully satisfying effect. But the line between the 'real' and the 'grotesque' is not, after all, so easy to draw, and the more one examines Peake's work, the more one becomes convinced that the distinction, and therefore the label, is irrelevant. If he were to illustrate Shakespeare, Milton, even Jane Austen, his powerfully imagiria- five treatment would surely extend our response to the, texts, just as it does with Stevenson or Carroll: is Richard III less deeply disturbing than Long John Silver, or Mrs Norris than the Queen of Hearts? It is only that as children we expected to be frightened, daily and nightly, while as adults we believe with all our might in banks, insurance policies and smooth roads. So Richard III and Mrs Norris exist for us only in theatres and the pages of books, and they must not be seen to stalk the streets or sit at our family dinner-tables. But for Mervyn Peake they do stalk, they do sit, and he is there to proye
• it to us with both the talents at his command. It was not for nothing he was sent as a war-artist in 1945 to Belsen.
The corollary to Mervyn Peake's special ability to make us uneasy is that he is also a master of exhilaration. He has learnt it in part from Stevenson; he knew Treasure Island by heart long before he came to illustrate it, and the brook is a major influenee on his own novels. The salty character of Stevenson's descriptions, the way the narrative does not just create ex- citement, but is itself a kind of embodiment of excitement, this is re-interpreted, actually re- created, in the new medium of Peake's illustra- tions. Jim Hawkins clings to a diagonal mast, his feet floating over the rising shadows of the clouds; a sailor falls head-first, his lumpish hands and clumsy boots in thrilling contrast to the sway- ing currents of empty air that make up the rest of the picture; pirates are rushing the palisade, recalling a sentence in Titus Alone: 'Great blond men were draped over the banisters, two flocirs below.'
That 'two floors below' is a key to much of Peake's writing, the way that his characters
move in space, are constantly seen. For Peake has the rare and fascinating ability to make his reader at the same time observe the whole scene in front of him and take part in it; he can do it also with a picture, like the one from The Ancient Mariner where huge ragged sails dominate the foreground. the background is an expanse of sea, and at the very bottom of the composition, under the sails, stands a single black figure 'alone on a wide, wide sea.' The source, surely, is Chinese painting, as it for this passage from Titus Groan: The scorched leaves pattered one against the next, and the tares screaked thinly together. the tufted heads nodding, and upon the lake was the stippled commotion of a million pin- pricks and the sliding of gooseflesh shadows that released or shrouded momently the dancing of diamonds. ... A bird swept down across the water, brushing it with her breast- feathers and leaving a trail as of glow-worms across the still lake. A spilth of water fell from the bird as it climbed through the hot air to clear the lakeside trees, and a drop of lake-water clung for a moment to the leaf of an ilex.
And this, from Titus Alone: `. . . took their seats on one of the cedar benches. These benches . . . were placed within a few feet of the edge of the precipice.' What are they doing on the benches? Watching the sunset, of course, like civilised Chinese gentlemen, though by a charac- teristic Peake twist these watchers are peasants and have paid for their seats.
Mervyn Peake was born in China in 1911. He has noted the squalor as much as the delicacy and he has a sharp eye for the heightened effect: 'He picked up a stick and began to draw in the dust with the point of it, and the moonlight was so fierce that every line he drew was like a narrow trench filled up with ink.' But the purely Chinese word-pictures are few. We move into a different world altogether with the tortured trees burning and dripping by the dark lake of Gorrnenghast; and here there is another source to be reckoned with.
In 1950 Peake did a set of illustrations, still unpublished, for Bleak House, and Dickens accounts not only for many of the names in the novels—Steerpike, Swelter, Flay, Sepulchrave —but, more important, for the solidity, the force of gravity, the heavy shadows and sudden shafts of light which pervade both novels and draw- ings. The relationship with Carroll is more com- plex. In his illustrations to Alice, Peake has made explicit much that is glossed in the text—Alice herself, in Peake's drawing, is an infant Bardot peering through the grasses like a sultry puma— and so in the novels, though it scarcely ever breaks the surface, sex is as palpable as the limbs under Michelangelo's draperies.
Most of the books Peake illustrated are now unobtainable, and even the novels are out of print (though Penguin and others plan to re- publish them), so it is not easy to attempt the full-scale reassessment which he deserves. But, fortunately, the Upper Grosvenor Gallery has ai last set the tide moving by mounting a small exhibition of the paintings and drawings. moo of them unconnected with literature. In one sense,. this exhibition is disappointing, since it dwells. on a part of his work which is apt to be an, Achilles heel; like many artists and writers, he, is at his weakest when he approves too corn- plettly of his subject. when he ceases to allow the dark side of his imagination full scope. Nevertheless, there are a few works in the ex- hibition which no one should miss seeing — Olivier as Richard Ill, a portrait-drawing of Graham Greene who helped to get the novels published); a drawing of a frozen rat which recalls a passage in Titus Groan: 'A rat floun-i- dered across [the moat], part swimming, part walk-1 ing: Thick sepia patches of water were left in the unhealthy scum where its legs had broken through the green surface.' What we need, what' we must have, is a full-scale exhibition of Peakes, work, and if the Upper Grosvenor's preliminary.; showing leads to that, it will have been fully,,, worth while.
There is a final comparison to make which s throws a curious light on both parties. I called. the- novels 'Gothic' and the illustrations 'gro- tesque,' and perhaps my enthusiasm for his work'r has only succeeded in putting him forward as a late heir to the nineteenth century. Very well.- But what of this passage? 'He was able . . . to observe, within three inches of his keyholed an eye which was not his, being not only of a, different colour to his OLN n iron marble but being, which is more convincing, on the other side, of the door.' Or this? 'He was eminently a man of small compassion, a hurtful man, brazen and'. loveless, who would have no one beside him' in the front of the car, save occasionally an old" mandrill.' Surely we are only a step away from' the world of Samuel Beckett? There would be a set of illustrations to make us shiver in our shoes.
Previous page
