The lower depths

William Trevor

Mervyn Peake John Watney (Michael Joseph 6.90)

Little is known about creative talent, and since it cannot be classified as a disease this status quo is likely to remain. Yet the possession of such a gift, even in a modest way, can be a personal complication of vast dimensicins. It is, for a start, far easier than is generally believed for the creative imagination to go bounding off in directions that are shown with hindsight to have been Wildly inappropriate. Technical ability with a Pencil may suggest that the urge to.cornmunicate should take a visual form, when .in fact a much stronger line of communication is lyit4g latent elsewhere. With luck it may surface, but often it doesn't which may well account for that feeling of genius Just missed that dogs the work of many writers, artists and composers. A perfect example of the complicated man was the late • Mervyn Peake, even though he attempted to simplify the situation by advancing his talent along a number of fronts at the same time, in search of the avenue most suited to it. He wrote novels, 1),.,octry and drama, he planned an opera; he urew, painted, illustrated books, and di.esigned theatre sets. His book illustrations have the edge on the best of the rest. His Poetry. although a good deal better than a 1°t of current pretentiousness, is far from good. His novels are to some extent a matter of taste: 1 personally don't like them because I happen not to enjoy their particular genre, just as I happen not to enjoy reading science fiction, with which the Gothic fancifulness of Peake's novels has sMbe distant affinity. But his illustrationsfor The Ileintink of the Snarh, The Ancient "7,..ariner, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Alice in vonderlund and many other works --are It was here, in a slighter realm than Perhaps he had bargained for, that his flitts came alive. His art was interpretative: like a good actor, he had the instinctive ZiiitY to understand and reflect another mi..nd. But he needed that other mind.

eryYn Peake was born in C'hina in 1911. 'he child child of a CongregOonal missionary doctor. Twenty years later he was a member of the Soho Group, which met regularly in the n Regal Restaurant in Greek Street. He f_ars as thin as a Giacometti sculpture, and tuh a time affected a crimson-lined cloak in e manner of Augustus John. He had his ear-lobe Pierced in order to sport a Pirate ear-ring. But he Was as much an ete as an aesthete, w ith a passion for both cricket and rugby, and his sartorial extrava en,„ Sance didn't last. He becameand Js'yed being a family man, pipe-smoking

and untidy in tweeds or baggy flannels. I met him once, in the Victor Waddington Galleries in Dublin. He was shy and a little self-effacing, a man you couldn't help liking.

It is this figure that emerges quietly from Mr Watney's biography. There are many photographs of Peake in domestic situations, with his wife Maeve, with his children or with friends. The writing is simple, the story at first the familiar one of an artist's disappointments, lack of funds, and persistence. It is the story of a happy marriage, in London, in Sark, in the suburbs of the Home Counties. The war intervenes, there are the Peake family jokes, children grow up. There is no sign anywhere of the man you might possibly expect to meet, a brooding, quirky individual, the author of Titus Groan and Gortnenghast. But life, of course never reflects art in so precise a way. Mervyn Peake did not walk out of his Gormenghast fastness; it walked out of him, leaving a void behind.

So the Peake story, as told by Mr Watney, seems pedestrian enough. It paddles its way along, the agreeable man at its centre certainly becoming no less agreeable as the years pile up. And then, all of a sudden, it leaps at you like a sledge-hammer. Mervyn Peake begins to die and the story of his life comes shatteringly alive. The privacy he sought, and was accorded by his biographer, is no longer relevant. When he first began to tremble with his awful affliction, he even found it funny. He ended up a vegetable.

Mr Watney's simple approach—the casual snapshots, the small touches of mundane comedy, the low-key ordinariness -now make sense. Mervyn Peake must have worked a great deal harder than most men; he was fascinated by his own gifts and by the human condition; he was curious about everything. Yet slowly and insidiously, as if by some diabolical design, everything that had made him what he was as a man, an artist and a writer was taken away from him, jot by jot. Parkinson's Disease was diagnosed after a period of medical bewilderment.

He tried to go on working. He was to illustrate Bat/lies Coizies Drolatiques for the Folio Society: 'As Mervyn could not read the text, Maeve sat with him in the room on the ground floor which was his work-room, and went through each of the stories slowly so that he could get the idea and produce a drawing. But his memory was so defective that after a few moments he would forget what he had heard. Maeve would then re-read the passage to him. From time to time the grasp of his brush would weaken and it would fall to the ground. She would pick it up for him and they would start again, laboriously, side by side at the big table in the room, trying to complete the drawings in time'.

Also, he had been more or less forgotten. His books were out of print, the galleries weren't interested in his drawings. He had never been popular, but now his early succes (resume had all but evaporated. For anyone, Parkinson's Disease is a scourge, but for a man with the talents of Mervyn Peake it was a double affliction. A writer's hell assailed him: he could not remember words and constantly mixed them up. Instead of a pirate's ear-ring he w ore a bracelet with his name and address on it.

Like an old man, he shuffled in the Fulham Road, with the urgent falter that typifies the disease. He didn't understand money, not that there was much left to understand. He spent some years in the Priory in Roeharnpton; he died in another home. near Abingdon.

This end, for a man who takes his place with Rowlandson, Cruikshank. Hogarth.

Dore and Diirer, makes harrowing reading.

And the irony is completed by the fact that he became, after his death, a cult figure. For the first time---even if for all the wrong

reasons---he was fashionable. He was part of the fantasy boom; his long, short story

'Boy in Darkness' was published in com pany with a couple of science-fiction pieces; he was given a place on the Tolkien band wagon; a Titus Groan pop group was formed. 'Young men and women on the road to Katmandu', Mr Watney writes, 'would have a Peake in their knapsacks.

Others attempted to make the pilgrimage to South Kensington and were surprised to find that Mervyn Peake had not been an English Che Guevara, hut came from a conventional and middle-class family with such characteristics as a taste for cricket and an inclination towards patriotism'.

This book, seeming at first too easy-going for its subject, is in fact skilful and subtle.

'To live at all,' Mervyn Peake wrote in his heyday, 'is miracle enough'. In spite of his agony and the almost total emptiness at the end of his life, he was a man who might well have said it again with his final breath, had he been able to. It was this quality in him, this rare gratitude. that John Watney gently celebrates.