click to view the back cover as a pdf image
Published on 3rd October 2006 by Liverpool University Press in both hard-
and paperback
(and available in the United States through Chicago
University Press), The Voice of the Heart reveals the working of Mervyn
Peake’s imagination through the main themes and motifs of his fiction (Boy
in Darkness, Mr Pye and the short stories in addition to the Titus books),
his poetry, and his paintings, drawings, and illustrations. The final chapter
shows how Peake’s play The Wit to Woo shares and develops these same
themes and motifs, applying them to art and the life of the artist. Fifty illustrations
link his visual to his verbal art.
The book’s table
of contents and index are
available for your convenience, and there is a page for corrections
(only one so far).
The Voice of the Heart was accepted for publication on the basis of a reader’s report which began:
This is the most important book on the greatest English writer-illustrator of the twentieth century, written by the world’s foremost expert on Peake. Winnington has spent a lifetime acquiring insights about Peake that have an accuracy and sympathy that nobody else’s work has so far matched. The many often startling perceptions he offers us about Peake’s creative process are gleaned from careful consideration of the texture of his prose; and he has ordered these perceptions into well-conceived themes or topics, each topic forming the subject of a chapter that deals with one of Peake’s recurring obsessions: solitude, animals, islands, symbols, perspective, and so forth.…
As I read, I was delighted afresh by things I had noticed before about Peake, and astonished by observations I had never made but which seemed perfectly obvious once they’d been stated. I was also increasingly convinced of the man’s artistry....
These are grand statements, but The Voice of the Heart elicits this kind of fulsome praise. It is a book by an enthusiast for enthusiasts, as well as for the general reader, and will kindle or rekindle anyone’s delight and admiration in an artist whose stature is growing by the decade.
Reviewing the book in the TLS on 9th March 2007 (p.27), David Malcolm (a professor of English literature at the University of Gdansk in Poland) found it a “thorough study” of Peake’s work.
Winnington’s argument is generally clear and persuasive, and his discussions of Peake’s interest in eyes, voices and quasi-animals (slippery in terms of species and gender) are suggestive. In addition, there are useful passages here on Peake’s narrational technique (multiple, shifting points of view, extensive free direct and indirect speech), connected intelligently with the overall topic of solitude.
However
Professor Malcolm’s closing sentence called Peake’s drawings “a
little winsome for some tastes” and his novels “a shade adolescent”,
leaving the reader with a somewhat negative impression.
In Books in Canada (September 2007) Jeff Bursey contended that the illustrations “add a necessary dimension” to VoH. They confirm the “themes that wind their way through all of Peake’s works” and demonstrate that Peake’s pre-occupations were “far removed from being adolescent”. Qualifying David Malcolm’s judgment as “a kind of snootiness”, he continued:
Winnington plumbs the depths in Peake’s writing, and it would be fair to say that some of these depths once looked like fairly shallow pools. They can’t be regarded as such any more. Those who read or write on Peake or his works – or, more generally, on voice, evil, technology, or art versus religion in 20th century literature – must take into account what has finally been exposed. By cross-stitching commentary, weaving drawings and writing together, Winnington, using plain, unencumbered prose, shows how Peake explored certain themes with the hunger and ache of an obsessive.
He
called VoH “a bravura critical performance” and concluded: “A
critical book that is both respectful of its subject and audience, as well as
enthusiastic about the author under discussion, is a rare thing.”
Rob Maslen (senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Glasgow), who has prepared Peake’s Collected Poems for publication by Carcanet in 2008, reviewed VoH at length in Peake Studies (10:iii for October 2007). For him, the book
demonstrate[s] beyond all doubt … that Peake was a deeply committed artist, a serious thinker and a meticulous craftsman whose texts and pictures richly reward close scrutiny. [It] also shows that Peake’s work is best understood as a whole, since his visual art and his writing spring from the same imaginative processes. These processes Winnington investigates with the kind of inspiring thoroughness lavished on Coleridge by Jonathan Livingston Lowes in The Road to Xanadu.…
And he has found an original and highly successful way of drawing together the multiple strands of Peake’s creativity in each successive chapter.…
The chapter headings are skilfully chosen, and their subjects so thoroughly yet lucidly explored that one ends by imagining one has thought them through for oneself. And they accumulate into a remarkable portrayal of a creative mind at work, which should be recognized as making a significant contribution to our understanding of the creative process itself and of the relationship between one art form and another.…
Towards the beginning of The Voice of the Heart, Winnington writes, ‘There is a sense in which the first two books about Titus Groan recapitulate at great length the development of a work of art (whether visual or verbal) and the third dramatizes its existence in the outer world’. It is a measure of Winnington’s achievement that he ends by convincing us not just of the truth of this statement, but of the fact that this process of developing a work of art is effectively Peake’s topic in everything he writes; that he is in fact one of the great writers about the responsibilities of the artist. Everyone who admires Peake’s work will be delighted by this book; and from now on, nobody who writes about Peake will be able to do so without paying it homage.
This page last updated October 2007.
On to the table of contents; the index, and the page for corrections.
Back to the Peake Studies home page.