Mervyn Peake

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 '' Gormenghast'' books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.

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".

Early life

Mervyn Peake was born of British parents in Kuling located on top of Mountain Lu in Jiujiang in 1911, only three months before the revolution and the founding of the Republic of China. His father, Ernest Cromwell Peake, was a medical missionary doctor with the London Missionary Society of the Congregationalist tradition, and his mother, Amanda Elizabeth Powell, had come to China as a missionary assistant. In July 1903 at Kuling (from the English word "cooling"), a summer European missionary resort in Mountain Lu about the Yangtze River in Jiujiang, Peake met his soon to be wife Amanda Elizabeth Powell who had been in China since 1901. They got married in Hong Kong in December of that same year.

The Peakes were given leave to visit England just before World War I in 1914 and returned to China in 1916. Mervyn Peake attended Tientsin Grammar School until the family left for England in December 1922 via the Trans-Siberian Railway. He would later write a novella about this time, titled ''The White Chief of the Umzimbooboo Kaffirs''. Peake never returned to China but it has been noted that Chinese influences can be detected in his works, not least in the castle of Gormenghast itself, which in some respects echoes his birthplace Kuling, the ancient walled city of Beijing, as well as the enclosed compound where he grew up in Tianjin. It is also likely that his early exposure to the contrasts between the lives of the Europeans and of the Chinese, and between the poor and the wealthy in China, also exerted an influence on the Gormenghast books.

His education continued at Eltham College, Mottingham (1923–29), where his talents were encouraged by his English teacher, Eric Drake. Peake completed his formal education at Croydon School of Art in the autumn of 1929 and then from December 1929 to 1933 at the Royal Academy Schools, where he first painted in oils. By this time he had written his first long poem, ''A Touch o' the Ash''. In 1931 he had a painting accepted for display by the Royal Academy and exhibited his work with the so-called "Soho Group".

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. 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 '' The Insect Play'' and his work was acclaimed in ''The Sunday Times''. He also began teaching life drawing at Westminster School of Art where he met the painter Maeve Gilmore, whom he married in 1937. They had three children, Sebastian (1940–2012), Fabian (b. 1942), and Clare (b. 1949).

He 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. 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. 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. Some of these paintings are on permanent display in Manchester Art Gallery whilst other examples are in the Imperial War Museum collection.

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 Lewis Carroll's ''The Hunting of the Snark'' (for which he was reportedly paid only £5) and '' Alice in Wonderland'', Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'', the Brothers Grimm's ''Household Tales'', ''All This and Bevin Too'' by Quentin Crisp and Robert Louis Stevenson's ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'', as well as producing many original poems, drawings, and paintings.

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.

A book of nonsense poems, ''Rhymes Without Reason'', was published in 1944 and was described by John Betjeman as "outstanding". Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Edgar Ainsworth, the art editor of ''Picture Post'', commissioned Peake to visit France and Germany for the magazine. With writer Tom Pocock he was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen, where the remaining prisoners, too sick to be moved, were dying before his very eyes. He made several drawings, but not surprisingly he found the experience profoundly harrowing, and expressed in deeply felt poems the ambiguity of turning their suffering into art.

In 1946 the family moved to Sark, where Peake continued to write and illustrate, and Maeve painted. '' Gormenghast'' was published in 1950, and the family moved back to England, settling in Smarden, Kent. Peake taught part-time at the Central School of Art, began his comic novel ''Mr Pye'', and renewed his interest in theatre. His father died that year and left his house in Hillside Gardens in Wallington, Surrey to Peake. ''Mr Pye'' was published in 1953, and he later adapted it as a radio play. The BBC
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