Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Peake | |
---|---|
Royal Academy Schools | |
Occupation(s) | Writer, artist, poet, illustrator |
Notable work | Gormenghast series |
Spouse | Maeve Gilmore |
Children | 3 |
Relatives | Jack Peñate (grandson)[1] |
Signature | |
Mervyn Laurence Peake (9 July 1911 – 17 November 1968) was an English writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the
Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children (Letters from a Lost Uncle, 1948), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye (1953), a relatively tightly structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.
Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. For a short time at the end of World War II he was commissioned by various newspapers to depict war scenes. A collection of his drawings is still in the possession of his family. Although he gained little popular success in his lifetime, his work was highly respected by his peers, and his friends included Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. His works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives.
In 2008, The Times named Peake among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[2]
Early life
Mervyn Peake was born of British parents in
The Peakes were given leave to visit England just before
His education continued at
Career
His early career in the 1930s was as a painter in London, although he lived on the Channel Island of Sark for a time. He first moved to Sark in 1932 where his former teacher Eric Drake was setting up an artists' colony. [4] In 1934, Peake exhibited with the Sark artists both in the Sark Gallery built by Drake and at the Cooling Galleries in London, and in 1935 he exhibited at the Royal Academy and at the Leger Galleries in London.
In 1936, he returned to London and was commissioned to design the sets and costumes for
Peake had a very successful exhibition of paintings at the Calmann Gallery in London in 1938 and his first book, the self-illustrated children's pirate romance Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (based on a story he had written around 1936), was first published in 1939 by Country Life. In December 1939, he was commissioned by Chatto & Windus to illustrate a children's book, Ride a Cock Horse and Other Nursery Rhymes, published for the Christmas market in 1940.
Enlistment
At the outbreak of World War II, he applied to become a war artist, for he was keen to put his skills at the service of his country. He imagined An Exhibition by the Artist, Adolf Hitler, in which horrific images of war with ironic titles were offered as "artworks" by the Nazi leader.[5] Although the drawings were bought by the British Ministry of Information, Peake's application was turned down and he was conscripted into the Army, where he served first with the Royal Artillery, then with the Royal Engineers. He began writing Titus Groan at this time.
In April 1942, after his requests for commissions as a war artist – or even leave to depict war damage in London – had been consistently refused, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent to Southport Hospital. That autumn he was taken on as a graphic artist by the Ministry of Information for a period of six months to work on propaganda illustrations. The next spring he was invalided out of the Army. In 1943 he was commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC, to paint glassblowers at the Chance Brothers factory in Smethwick where cathode ray tubes for early radar sets were being produced.[6] Peake was next given a full-time, three-month WAAC contract to depict various factory subjects and was also asked to submit a large painting showing RAF pilots being debriefed.[7][8] Some of these paintings are on permanent display in Manchester Art Gallery whilst other examples are in the Imperial War Museum collection.[9]
Illustration and writing
The five years between 1943 and 1948 were some of the most productive of his career. He finished Titus Groan and Gormenghast and completed some of his most acclaimed illustrations for books by other authors, including
Peake designed the logo for Pan Books. The publishers offered him either a flat fee of £10 or a royalty of one farthing per book. On the advice of Graham Greene, who told him that paperback books were a passing fad that would not last, Peake opted for the £10.[10]
A book of nonsense poems, Rhymes Without Reason, was published in 1944 and was described by
In 1946, the family moved to
Later life
In 1956, Mervyn and Maeve visited Spain, financed by a friend who hoped that Peake's health, which was already declining, would be improved by the holiday. That year his novella
Declining health
He was showing unmistakable early symptoms of dementia, for which he was given electroconvulsive therapy, to little avail. Over the next few years he gradually lost the ability to draw steadily and quickly, although he still managed to produce some drawings with the help of his wife. Among his last completed works were the illustrations for Balzac's Droll Stories (1961) and for his own poem The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962), which he had written some 15 years earlier.
Titus Alone was published in 1959 and was revised in 1970 by Langdon Jones, an editor of New Worlds, to remove apparent inconsistencies introduced by the publisher's careless editing. Jones, also a composer, set The Rhyme of the Fying Bomb to music. A 1995 edition of all three completed Gormenghast novels includes a very short fragment of the beginning of what would have been the fourth Gormenghast novel, Titus Awakes, as well as a listing of events and themes he wanted to address in that and later Gormenghast novels.
Death
Throughout the 1960s, Peake's health declined into physical and mental incapacitation, and he died on 17 November 1968 at a care home run by his brother-in-law, at Burcot, near Oxford. He was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's in the village of Burpham, West Sussex.
A 2003 study published in JAMA Neurology assessed that Peake's death was the result of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).[17]
His work, especially the Gormenghast series, became much better known and more widely appreciated after his death. They have since been translated into more than two dozen languages.
Publications
Six volumes of Peake's verse were published during his lifetime; Shapes & Sounds (1941), Rhymes without Reason (1944), The Glassblowers (1950), The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962), Poems & Drawings (1965), and A Reverie of Bone (1967). After his death came Selected Poems (1972), followed by Peake's Progress in 1979 – though the Penguin edition of 1982, with many corrections, including a whole stanza inadvertently omitted from the hardback edition. The Collected Poems of Mervyn Peake was published by Carcanet Press in June 2008. Other collections include The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1974), Writings and Drawings (1974), and Mervyn Peake: the man and his art (2006). A limited edition of the collected works, issued to celebrate Peake's centenary year, was published by Queen Anne Press.
Archive
In 2010 an archive consisting of 28 containers of material, which included correspondence between Peake and Laurie Lee, Walter de la Mare and C. S. Lewis, plus 39 Gormenghast notebooks and original drawings for both Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was acquired by the British Library.[18] Access to the Archive is available through the British Library website.[19] In July 2020, the British Library acquired from the Peake Estate a visual archive consisting of 300 of Peake's original illustrations for children's stories, Gormenghast, and other works including Treasure Island.[20]
Commemoration
Peake's three children presented on
The first blue plaque on Sark was unveiled in Peake's honour at the Gallery Stores in the Avenue on 30 August 2019.[22]
Dramatic adaptations of Peake's work
In 1983, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast eight hour-long episodes for radio dramatising the complete Gormenghast Trilogy. This was the first to include the third book Titus Alone.
In 1984,
In 1986, Mr Pye was adapted as a four-part Channel 4 miniseries starring Derek Jacobi.
In 2000, the
A 30-minute TV short film entitled A Boy in Darkness (also made in 2000 and adapted from Peake's novella) was the first production from the BBC Drama Lab. It was set in a "virtual" computer-generated world created by young computer game designers, and starred Jack Ryder (from EastEnders) as Titus, with Terry Jones (Monty Python's Flying Circus) narrating.
Peake's play The Cave, which dates from the mid-1950s, was given a first public reading at the Blue Elephant Theatre in Camberwell (London) in 2009, and had its world premiere in the same theatre, directed by Aaron Paterson, on 19 October 2010.
In 2011 Brian Sibley adapted the story again, this time as six one-hour episodes broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as the Classic Serial starting on 10 July 2011. The serial was titled The History of Titus Groan and adapted all three novels written by Mervyn Peake and the recently discovered concluding volume, Titus Awakes, completed by his widow, Maeve Gilmore.[23] It starred Luke Treadaway as Titus, David Warner as the Artist and Carl Prekopp as Steerpike. It also starred Paul Rhys, Miranda Richardson, James Fleet, Tamsin Greig, Fenella Woolgar, Adrian Scarborough and Mark Benton among others.[24]
Sting owned the film rights to the Gormenghast novels for a brief period in the 1980s, during which he discussed the possibility of adapting the novels into a series of concept albums, but he abandoned the idea after declaring the Radio 4 audio drama as ideal. As of 2015, author Neil Gaiman was in talks to adapt the novels for the big screen.[25]
Bibliography
- Titus Groan (1946)[26]
- Gormenghast (1950)[27]
- Boy in Darkness (corrupt text 1956, corrected text 2007)
- Titus Alone (1959)[28]
- Titus Awakes (2011, completed by Maeve Gilmore)[29]
Boy in Darkness and other stories (2007, the correct text and five other pieces)
Other works
- The White Chief of the Unzimbooboo Kaffirs (1921)
- Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939)
- Shapes and Sounds (1941)
- Rhymes without Reason (1944)
- The Craft of the Lead Pencil (1946)
- Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions) (1948)
- Drawings by Mervyn Peake (1949)
- The Glassblowers (1950)
- Mr Pye (1953)
- Figures of Speech (1954)
- The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962)
- Poems and Drawings (1965)
- A Reverie of Bone and other Poems (1967)
- Selected Poems (1972)
- A Book of Nonsense (1972)
- The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1974)
- Mervyn Peake: Writings and Drawings (1974)
- Twelve Poems (1975)
- Peake's Progress (1978)
- Ten Poems (1993)
- Eleven Poems (1995)
- The Cave (1996)
- Collected Poems (2008)
Illustrated books
- Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (by himself) (Country Life, 1939)
- Ride a Cock Horse and Other Nursery Rhymes (Chatto & Windus, 1940)
- The Adventures of The Young Soldier in Search of The Better World (by C. E. M. Joad) (Faber and Faber Ltd, 1943)
- The Book of Lyonne (by Burgess Drake) (The Falcon Press, 1952)
- Hunting of the Snark (by Lewis Carroll)
- Alice in Wonderland(by Lewis Carroll)
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
- Household Tales (by the Brothers Grimm)
- All This and Bevin Too (by Quentin Crisp)
- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (by Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Treasure Island (by Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Droll Stories (by Balzac) (Folio Society, 1961)
- The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (by himself) (1962)
- Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone (by himself; several editions include an abundance of illustrations, on plates in the center and/or distributed through the text)
- The Swiss Family Robinson (by Johann David Wyss)
- The Sunday Books (with Michael Moorcock) (Duckworth, 2008, from the French)
References
- ^ "Mervyn Peake biography – 1911–1968". mervynpeake.org. 2013. Retrieved 29 August 2015.
- ^ The 50 greatest British writers since 1945. 5 January 2008. The Times. Retrieved on 2022-08-02.
- ISBN 0720613418.
- ISBN 9781999891381.
- ^ Eleanor Johnson Ward (8 September 2017). "Art in the Archives / The horrors of war". The National Archives. Retrieved 15 September 2017.
- ISBN 978-0-9930884-2-1.
- ISBN 978-0-300-10890-3.
- ^ Imperial War Museum. "War artists archive Mervyn Peake". Imperial War Museum. Retrieved 11 August 2014.
- ISBN 978-1-904897-66-8.
- ^ As recounted by Clare Peake on the BBC Radio 4 programme Midweek, 22 June 2011.
- ^ Sarah Colegrave Fine Art. "Edgar Ainsworth (1905–1975)". Sarah Colegrave Fine Art. Archived from the original on 1 December 2017. Retrieved 2 July 2016.
- ^ "Gormenghast's Mervyn Peake 'influenced by death camp'". BBC News. 5 July 2011. Retrieved 13 August 2014.
- ISBN 1-55862-205-5, pp. 469–70.
- ISBN 0-89356-450-8.
- ^ "Mervyn Peake – Drayton Gardens, London, UK – Blue Plaques on Waymarking.com". waymarking.com. Retrieved 4 August 2019.
- ISBN 978-1-84854-195-5.
- PMID 12810496.
- ^ Vanessa Thorpe (4 April 2010). "How the devastation caused by war came to inspire an artist's dark images of Alice". The Observer. Retrieved 12 August 2014.
- ^ Mervyn Peake Archive, archives and manuscripts catalogue, the British Library. Retrieved 13 May 2020
- ^ "Visual Archive of Mervyn Peake acquired for the nation, including original illustrations, preliminary drawings and unpublished early works".
- ^ "A Hundred Years of Mervyn Peake", Sounds, BBC, 7 July 2011.
- ^ "Channel Islands Live: Breaking news and local stories". BBC News. 8 August 2019. Retrieved 8 August 2019.
- ^ "Classic Serial: The History of Titus Groan". BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "Radio 4 Programmes – Classic Serial, The History of Titus Groan, Titus Arrives". BBC. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ Flood, Allison (14 December 2015). "Neil Gaiman in talks to adapt Gormenghast for cinema". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 December 2016.
- ^ Peake, Mervyn Laurence (1968). Titus Groan. Eyre & Spottiswoode. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
- ISBN 978-0-7493-9482-0.)
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- ISBN 978-0-09-955276-5.)
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Further reading
- Clements, Warren (ed.), Peake Performance: The Magnificent Drawings of Mervyne Peake. Toronto: Nestlings Press, 2020. ISBN 9781775343691
- Elber-Aviram, Hadas (2021). "Chapter 3: The bells of lost London: Orwell's and Peake's anti-fantasies". Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 95–130. ISBN 9781350110694.
- Elber-Aviram, Hadas (2015). "Dark and Deathless Rabble of Long Shadows: Peake, Dickens, Tolkien, and "this dark hive called London". Peake Studies. 14 (2): 7–32. S2CID 199487750.
- Gardiner-Scott, Tanya (1989). Mervyn Peake: The Evolution of a Dark Romantic. Peter Lang. ISBN 9780820409436.
- Gifford, James (2018). "Peake's Romantic Gormenghast". A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, & the Radical Fantastic. ELS. pp. 122–144. ISBN 9781550583939.
- Gilbert, Charles (1998). "Mervyn Peake and Memory". Peake Studies. 5 (4): 5–20.
- Le Cam, Pierre-Yves (1994). "Peake's Fantastic Realism in the Titus Books". Peake Studies. 3 (4): 5–15.
- Manlove, Colin (1975). "Mervyn Peake (1911-1968-The 'Titus' Trilogy". Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge University Press. pp. 207–257. ISBN 9780521293860.
- Smith, Gordon (1984). Mervyn Peake: A Personal Memoir. Gollancz. ISBN 9780575034310.
- Watney, John (1976). Mervyn Peake. Joseph. ISBN 9780312530259.
- Winnington, G. Peter (ed.) (2006), Mervyn Peake: the man and his art (London: Peter Owen)
- Winnington, G. Peter (2000), Vast Alchemies: the life and work of Mervyn Peake. Revised and enlarged in 2009 as Mervyn Peake's Vast Alchemies (London: Peter Owen)
- Winnington, G. Peter (2006), The Voice of the Heart: the working of Mervyn Peake's imagination (Liverpool University Press / Chicago University Press)
- Winnington, G. Peter. "Mervyn Peake's Lonely World". Wormwood No 3 (Autumn 2004), 1–21.
- Yorke, Malcolm (2000). Mervyn Peake: My Eyes Mint Gold, a Life. Murray. ISBN 9781585672110.
- Peake, Mervyn (ca.1950), "Notes towards a Projected Autobiography", printed in Maeve Gilmore (ed.), Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings of Mervyn Peake (London: Allen Lane, 1978)
- "Peake in Print" is a full primary and secondary bibliography.
External links
- Mervyn Peake Archived 21 October 2021 at the Wayback Machine – the official site
- Works by Mervyn Peake at Faded Page (Canada)
- 13 artworks by or after Mervyn Peake at the Art UK site
- Gormenghast – the official Gormenghast site
- Mervyn Peake at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Mervyn Peake at the Internet Book List
- the Peake entry in the Literary Encyclopedia
- Riggenbach, Jeff (22 July 2010). "Mervyn Peake and the Great Individualist Novel". Mises Daily. Ludwig von Mises Institute.
- Gormenghast Castle
- Self-portrait from the National Portrait Gallery collection
- Peake Studies – the periodical dedicated to Peake's life and work, with a complete Peake bibliography