BOOKS
The price of Gormenghast
ANTHONY BURGESS
It is impossible not to be moved by Maeve Gilmore's memoir of her husband, Mervyn Peake: A World Away (Gollancz 40s). I feel an emotion additional to that which any lover of Peake's work must feel, or anybody who is touched by the theme of the strug- gling artist, or of married love, or of the pain of loss. For I wrote the introduction to the reissue of Titus Groan in 1968, a reissue which confirmed the classic status of the book. I wanted Peake, whom I had never met, to know how much one fellow-writer appreciated his books, as well as his draw- ings, and my admiration is in my in- troduction. But it was too late for him to know that his last disappointments — the failure of his play and the cool reception given to Titus Alone (to be published by Penguin, at 6s, on 25 June) — were mere transitory setbacks in the slow process of his establishment as a major artist. He was (which I did not know) suffering from Par- kinson's disease, already cut off from the world of cognition, and he died before the year was over. I had a bereavement of my own to deal with at that time, and it was long before I discovered that he was in fact dead and that the great epic Gormenghast project would never be completed. '
A World Away must, to any reader, be moving in another manner: it is highly articulate, but it does not essay artifice, the literary effects which render Caitlin Thomas's memoir of Dylan—Leftover Life to Kill—interesting as an essentially autobiographical experiment but totally unsatisfying as a portrait of the dead poet. Literary pretensions are always out of place in personal reminiscences of literary men, especially if produced in the phase that precedes the tranquillity which mercifully supervenes—sooner or later—on all grief. Thus, there is a sense in which Evelyn Waugh's biography of Ronald Knox fails totally, though it is in many ways a great book. Waugh himself intrudes too much—not as a man but as a craftsman. The more admirable the craft, the more it tends to diminish its subject. When biography is art it trembles on the borders of fiction.
Maeve Gilmore's own art is pictorial. She first met Peake in 1936, when he was a teacher of life drawing and she a student. He invited her to tea on her first day at the art school, and their love story begins there. 'He looked like a young handsome gipsy, or a Young tramp, slim and dark, with the deepset eyes, and heavy eyelids that were so very striking, and the deep furrows down his cheekstoo deep for so young a man.' In those days an artist could be spotted from his appearance—long hair, odd socks, orange velvet tie, black coat -with red lining. Nowadays the flamboyance stands for youth, which is supposed fo be a kind of talent. The courtship of Peake and Maeve Gilmore belongs to the end of an era—when Jacob Epstein and Augustus John were alive and Important, and 'artists went to the Café Royal. It was John who, when war started, recommended Peake as a war artist. Typically, none of Peake's talents were found useful for the war machine; he was enlisted as a sapper, sent on a course to learn about theodolites, turned into a vehicle in- structor. But the war was not altogether a period of waste for him. Many of us, like him fretting in camps on tasks deliberately imposed for their uncongeniality, got to know him then—first as a book illustrator, second as a poet.
Some of the books he embellished are, I fear, no longer to be found. I remember the drawings in Cyril load's Adventures of the Young Soldier, but I have totally forgotten the text. There was a book called All This and Bevin Too, whose ephemerality is pro- claimed in its title. But there were the fine illustrations to The Ancient Mariner (better than Dord's) in the same year as those two, and there were the Lewis Carroll volumes. Peake dared to oust Tenniel, and he got away with it. He was usually chosen when something fantastic was needed—drawings for a witchcraft book or Grimm's Household Tales or Balzac's.Droll Stories ...
He was wise not to illustrate his own Titus Groan, which he wrote during the war when not drawing or soldiering (highly nervous, he was invalided out of the army and even used as a propagandist pencil). This strange book, like Wyndham Lewis's novels, has the kind of three-dimensional solidity which we often find in pictorial artists who take to words: it is so intensely massive, even ponderous, that- illustrations would have been supererogat- ory. It is, I think, one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It depicts an enclosed world of the imagination that, though it feeds on the real world, is animated by its own laws and is realised in astonishing detail, as a separate universe, one parallel to our own. It had some enthusiastic reviews but never reached the audience that Orwell and Waugh, with their apparently greater `relevance', commanded. Now, twenty-four years after first publication, Titus Groan—and, to a lesser extent, its successors Mervyn Peake 1935 Gormenghast and Titus Alone—is recognised as a remarkable survival of the
epic tradition, something closer to ancient pagan romance than to British library fiction.
The personal story underlying the creation of Peake's works in prose, verse and pictorial line is both heartbreaking and idyllic. Maeve Gilmore is right when she says that art is not made primarily for money but that, from the age of forty, an original artist who has worked unremittingly and even collapsed from overwork ought to be earning enough to afford occasional leisure. The Peakes managed—just about. But it was a manage- ment that had to be satisfied with a derelict car and reach-me-down accommodation. They bought a house on mortgage but were unable to pay off the instalments. Saving meant throwing odd coins on to a high shelf and then occasionally climbing up to see what small pocket-wealth had accumulated with the dust. There are artists about who collect sizeable subventions from the Arts Council and other bodies, but their qualifica- tion for such help lies mostly in a professed inability to work without support. Work hard, and it will always be assumed that help is not needed. All that Peake ever received in subsidies was the small Heinemann award, with the bonus of an FRS[.. He paid his own way, but with a great effort.
The Peakes, like the Thomases, were not skilled in the sordid craft of living in a society full of bureaucrats and paperwork. Their innocence was that of people who had never owned much. They did not even realise that the possession of a worn-out car en- tailed things like road fund licences and insurance. Their ignorance about house- buying was abysmal. But this kind of blindness, which often goes with great creative ability, especially when it is not well rewarded, ought not to be scoffed at or de- nounced by citizens who are fully licensed and keep files. The artist is not wanted by the state, and he can be forgiven for a kind of vague reciprocation. The Peakes were hap- piest on the island of Sark, with the great communal machine kept well at a distance, a donkey strolling into the living-room, the sea, the barter of a brood of ducks for a batch of drawings. When Peake's illness began and he had to make use of the Na- tional Health Service, the state was eager to strike with typical brutality. On a crowded hospital corridor, a doctor casually an- nounced to Mrs Peake (who had been waiting for him to appear with the diffidence of an autograph-seeker) that her husband was suffering from premature senility.
The artist's psychosomatic structure is so delicately balanced that the depression in- cident to his art will always add fuel to a physical ailment. Byron's jibe about Keats's soul being snuffed out by an article is unworthy: he should have known better. Peake went into his ultimate decline when his play The Wit to Woo received indifferent notices--lethal to the hopes of a good run. In a sense he courted the disaster. His wife was aware that the endless vicissitudes of theatre business — alternations of large hope and despair, but little in the middle way could do him no good. Books and drawings are made and sold, even though they sell badly; a play looks for back- ing, a theatre, a director, actors, ukimately an audience: it depends on too many extra- creative factors. The Wit to Woo 'ran for two or three weeks at the Arts Theatre, and came off with no further offers. In all, Mervyn received fl 7 for it'. He was not, with the disorientations of Parkinson's disease already beginning, fit to cope with that kind of disappointment.
In 1959 I was in the National Hospital for Neurological Diseases with a suspected cerebral tumour, and I saw a good deal of Parkinson's disease in action. It is lacking in the romantic dignity of Keatsian tuberculosis or Wagnerian syphilis. The body shakes, the tongue will not function, memory goes. Peake tried to work at his trade of drawing while the disease pro- gressed. Eventually he withdrew into the world away. His widow's final words are unbearably moving: 'And now you sit amongst others, who sit because they are old. With their pasts known to themselves alone. Is it patience or tiredness which makes them so still? Are they empty of everything? . . . You look almost like them, and I want to say that you are not. But in the presence of such silent silence, I cannot think of you as any different from the other tired people. You have gone. I long to see you again.'
The sixteen pages of hitherto unpublished drawings which illustrate this book are a reminder of the variety of Peake's talent. There are no Gothic shapes here, only the clear eye and the astonishing economy of a fine draughtsman. Perhaps Peake had too many talents to please the fates or the British public. Blake died in neglect, though clear- visioned and happy; Wyndham Lewis died poor and blind; Peake died before his death of one of the most humiliating diseases an artist can know. Meanwhile the minimal talents go on being disproportionately rewarded. What can we do about it? Not very much, so long as our pragmatic civilisa- tion remains scared of genius and the in- dividual vision. Those of us who are critics can perhaps learn to temper our jealousy of the creative artist. For the rest, the moral of Maeve Gilmore's exquisite and poignant book is what we already know—that life is hell, but we had better be grateful for the consolations of love and art, human crea- tions that owe nothing either to the State or the Destroyer. There is probably nothing else in the world worth bothering about.
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