“But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man’s-land.” – Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
What better way is there than this to describe the mind of a writer engaged with pushing the boundaries of fiction forwards?
Mervyn Peake was just such a writer and artist. Even if you don’t know or haven’t read Peake’s famous fantasy masterpiece, the Gormenghast Trilogy, you will recognise his illustrations from many childhood classics, including ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’. However, there is a strange tang to the above quote, like there is to all Peake’s work, for it balances on the knife edge between reason and (for want of a better word) madness.
(An illustration of the strange world of Peake’s first book, ‘Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor’. This book is from the rare 1945 print run. It is a second edition, however, the first edition, published in 1939, is incredibly hard to find as the majority of copies were burnt during the Blitz. This copy is available in the shop, shelved with the other collectable children’s books.)
Born in China to missionary parents, Peake lived abroad until he was 12, whereupon he returned to school in England, eventually becoming a practising artist. He subsequently moved, as a young man, to the small channel island of Sark, where he lived and worked for some years. Upon returning from Sark, he met his wife Maeve Gilmore. Their happiness was marred by a series of tragic events. As a war artist, Mervyn Peake was sent to draw at Belsen concentration camp following its liberation. His children have subsequently described his inability to psychologically recover from this experience. Harrowed by the failure of his writing, in particular his play ‘The Wit to Woo’, during his lifetime, Peake suffered from the onset of a (then) unknown psychological illness.
(Another illustration from ‘Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor’, this one shows the ‘yellow creature’ who Peake based on his wife, Maeve Gilmore. She apparently was not flattered by this likeness!)
He developed severe depression. He also began to experience uncontrollable shaking down one side of his body. Electric shock therapy and a lobotomy failed to help him and further aggravated his condition. He would spend the rest of his life moving between institutions in a state that his children have subsequently described as ‘akin to incarceration’. Over time, his ability to communicate completely left him. It was during this period he wrote the final ‘Gormenghast’ novel, ‘Titus Alone’.
(This illustration from ‘Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor’ shows the island which the Captain and the yellow creature make their home. Peake often wrote, drew and was a champion of island communities, following his time on Sark.)
To hear his children speak about their father’s life, I would highly recommend the BBC 1998 documentary about his life, which is available on YouTube, and an interview given by his son Sebastian Peake which is available on BBC Sounds.
It is now believed that Peake’s illness was a rare condition that he caught as a child in China, which was triggered by the extreme shock of ‘The Wit to Woo’s’ commercial flop.
(Much of Peake’s work, like the illustration from ‘Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor’, also considers working and overworking. Peake’s own extreme work ethic, combined with lack of recognition during his life, is considered to have contributed to his nervous breakdown.)
As a result, Peake’s oeuvre as a whole is unsurprisingly concerned with the idea of ‘madness’ and what it means for someone to be ‘mad’. His characters in the Gormenghast trilogy repeatedly engage with this concept. Titus’s father, Lord Sepulchrave, descends into insanity and begins to think he is an owl. In the novel, he sits on the edge of the mantlepiece waiting for his family members and servants to bring him voles and twigs. However, in spite of this behaviour, Lord Sepulchrave is completely convinced of his own sanity. In contrast there is Titus himself, who, despite his continued reasonableness of character, believes he is insane.
For Peake, logic is a kind of madness, and madness is a kind of logic. Peake’s work continually makes us take this journey with him, and together we frequently end up in a world that is insane, ridiculous and flawed. At the time, this was highly experimental. However, as history has moved on since the 1940’s and 1950’s (when Peake’s work first appeared), this idea has become less radical and more familiar. Indeed, perhaps its similarity to our current environment is what has given Peake his enduring success.
(This is the final image from ‘Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor’, showing the Captain and the yellow creature happily settled on their island. For Peake, his happiest memories were those from his time on Sark as a young man and the time he spent with his family. He and his family moved back to Sark following the war.)