requently
sked uestions
answered by G Peter Winnington
This page is presented with
the compliments of Peake STUDIES
the journal dedicated to the life and
work of Mervyn Peake.
On its web site, you will
find information about the periodical,
as well as a bibliography
of Peake’s work:
books by him, illustrated by him, and his contributions to
books and periodicals in prose, verse, and in the form of dustwrappers,
etc.
and also news of recent and
forthcoming books by and about Peake.
ON PEAKE’S LIFE
Is
there a biography of Peake currently in print?
Yes. See the Peake STUDIES
page about Vast Alchemies.
Malcolm Yorke’s biography, although published a few months
later, rapidly went out of print, and many readers dislike its tone (see an example). Yorke manages to
give the impression that Peake and his wife would have had much better
lives if only Yorke had been there to advise them. John
Watney’s 1976 book contains a great many mistakes, large and
small.
For other books on Peake, see Part F
of Peake in Print.
Is
it true that Peake was born in China?
Yes, in a small European settlement called Kuling, on 9 July 1911.
In 1899 Peake’s father, a doctor with the London Missionary
Society, was posted to Hunan province to set up a medical centre. Each
summer, the European missionaries in that area would escape the
oppressive heat and humidity of the plains by climbing into the Lushan
mountains above Kiukiang (“Jiujiang” today), on the
Yantze river, where they established something like an Alpine village
that they punning named Kuling. (There is an article on Kuling, and its
extraordinary place in modern Chinese history, in Peake
Studies 9:4 (April 2006), with
photographs from the early 20th century beside recent ones.) Up there
Dr Peake met a nurse, Amanda Elizabeth Ann Powell, also with the LMS,
in July 1903. They married in December that year and worked in Hengchow
(“Hengyang” in Pinyin), Hunan province, until 1912,
when they were moved to the MacKenzie hospital in Tientsin. In December
1922 they returned to England (arriving January 1923) owing to Mrs
Peake’s ill health.
Their first son, Leslie, was born 23 March 1905. (John
Watney gets this date wrong in his biography of Peake, a
strange mistake when Peake’s brother was a major source of
information for Watney.)
This period of their lives is covered in some detail in the first
chapter of Vast Alchemies;
a map and contemporary photographs can be found in
“Peake’s Parents’ Years in
China” by GPW in The Mervyn Peake Review,
18 (Spring 1984), pp.21–30.
Is
it true that Peake was sent to the Continent as an official war artist?
No. Peake was given two commissions by the War Artists Advisory
Committee: the first was to paint glassblowers (in a Birmingham
factory) making cathode ray tubes for radar sets; the second was to
draw bomber crews before and after their missions. Pictures from both
series can be seen at the Imperial
War Museum.
When he went to France and Germany with Tom Pocock in the spring of
1945, it was for a magazine called the New Leader.
The idea was that Pocock would write articles which Peake would
illustrate. It didn’t work out quite like that.
“Peake in Print” Part D (drawings in periodicals)
for June, July and August 1945 lists what was published. Pocock wrote
an account of their trip, which included a visit to the newly liberated
concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, in 1945:
The Dawn Came up like Thunder (Collins, 1983).
How
did Peake die?
Mervyn Peake’s health declined steadily from the mid-1950s
onwards. At first an arm or a leg would shake and he thought he should
rest. But the tremors increased. Holidays brought only a brief respite.
Soon his writing became unsteady and irregular. He started to find it
hard to sleep at night and felt strangely restless. After the
disappointment of his play, The Wit to Woo, which
was taken off the stage in London’s West End after a run of
barely three weeks in March 1957, he had something of a breakdown and
was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease – of which
little was known at the time. It was just one of the many illnesses
that people got in old age – only Peake was still in his late
40s. There was no treatment for it.
He managed to finish Titus Alone early in 1959 but
when the publisher wanted him to make alterations to the text he could
not concentrate enough to do so. His wife Maeve followed the
publisher’s requests as best she could, but the result was
not very satisfactory. Langdon Jones has described in Mervyn
Peake: the Man and His Art how he revised the text for the
second edition ten years later.
Peake continued to draw, however. His wife read him Balzac’s Droll
Stories for the edition that he illustrated for the Folio
Society (published in 1961) and – miraculously – he
managed to illustrate his own Rhyme of the Flying Bomb
which was published by Dent in April 1962. Gone of course was the
flowing line with which he could draw a whole human body without
lifting his pencil from the paper. Now all he could do was build up
pictures with short straight strokes. After this, even when he was
hospitalized, he continued to have brief moments of peace when the
shaking would stop and he could fill sheet after sheet with drawings.
But these moments became rarer and he died peacefully, in his sleep, in
a private home for the terminally ill.
There is an excellent article on Peake’s illness by a
Canadian specialist, Demetrios J. Sahlas (see Part H) in versions for both
the medical profession and the general reader.
What
is the correct date of Peake’s death?
Several reference books get it wrong. The correct date is 17 November
1968.
ON THE TITUS BOOKS
Why
does Peake sometimes call Dr Prunesquallor “Alfred”
and sometimes “Bernard”?
By mistake. He obviously thought of both names for him, and slipped
unawares from one to the other. Peake’s friend Goatie Smith,
who read through the manuscript of Titus Groan
before it went to the publisher, failed to notice the error (although
he did correct the spelling of Fuchsia’s name, which Peake
had written as “Fuschia” throughout). The copy
editor at Eyre & Spottiswoode also missed it, so it remained
uncorrected.
When I made revisions to the three Titus books for the King Penguin
edition early in the 1980s, I asked Maeve Gilmore if I might use just
one first name for Dr Prunesquallor. She did not agree to this, on the
grounds that Peake had been aware of the mistake and was not bothered
by it.
See “Editing Peake” by GPW in The Mervyn
Peake Review 13 (Autumn 1981), pp.2–7, and also
Dainis Bisenieks, “How Not to Edit Mervyn Peake,” Peake Studies, vol 4 no 4 (Spring 1996),
pp.31–38.
A misprinted passage in Gormenghast
has caused some problems. In the last chapter of the novel, the Penguin
Modern Classics edition followed the first edition and printed this
paragraph on page 502:
Steerpike was dead. The
fear of his whistling pebbles was no
more. The multitudes moved without fear across the flat roofs.
The kitchen boys and the urchins of the castle dived from the
windows and sported across the water, climbing the outcrops as
they appeared above the surface, a hundred battling at a time
to gain some island tower, new-risen from the blue.
But for some strange reason, the simultaneous
second edition hardback of 1968 managed to mix up the order of lines 3,
4 and 5:
Steerpike was dead. The
fear of his whistling pebbles was no
more. The multitudes moved without fear across the flat roofs.
they appeared above the surface, a hundred battling at a time
The kitchen boys and the urchins of the castle dived from the
windows and sported across the water, climbing the outcrops as
to gain some island tower, new-risen from the blue.
Ever since, editors have struggled to make sense of
it, sometimes with ingenuity, so that practically every modern edition
of Gormenghast prints a different variation. I
won’t list them here. The main thing is: the first edition
was perfectly clear and unequivocal and it should always be followed.
ON OTHER WORKS
Is
Boy in Darkness
about Titus Groan?
Yes. In the first edition – the only one prepared and approved by Peake
– he is named more than once. Unfortunately Peake’s widow sent an
uncorrected copy of the typescript, which did not mention Titus,
to a publisher in 1968 and this was used for several editions. Worse,
when she was asked to introduce the 1976 Wheaton edition (A21 in Peake in print),
she read the corrupt edition and consequently stated that Peake never
called the Boy Titus. Worse still, when Peter Owen brought out Boy in Darkness and other stories
in 2007, they got the text right but did not correct Maeve Gilmore’s
introduction. They also invited Joanne Harris to write a foreword and,
under the influence of Maeve, she repeated the mistake. When will it
end? (More about this in Peake Studies, Volume 10, No 4, for April 2008.)
Did
Peake write a book called Uriel for President
(Boston: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1938)?
No, the entry in E.F. Bleiler’s “Checklist of
Fantastic Literature” (1948) is a mistake. The text of Uriel
for President is by an American, another (pseudonymous?) M.
Peake, about whom I know nothing. The illustrations are by the
Austrian-born artist Franz Bergmann who made a career in the US.
If
you have other FAQs
that you would like to see included here, please contact me and
I’ll be happy to address them.