Mervyn [Laurence] Peake 1911–1968

Frequently Asked Questions
answered by G Peter Winnington

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.