How Mervyn Peake reinvented modern Gothic
Today the British Library has acquired the visual archive of Mervyn Peake, the writer and artist who became one of Britain’s leading illustrators in the Forties.
Nowadays, Peake is best remembered as a writer, notably for his minutely detailed Gormenghast trilogy, which centres on a ritual-bound Gothic castle peopled by grotesques that out-Dickens Dickens. But his deliciously disturbing imagination first manifested itself in his work as an artist.
Purchased from the Peake family for ￡500,000, with assistance from Art Fund and other bodies, the archive comprises more than 300 artworks; there are more than 200 finished illustrations, as well as rough drafts and sketches.
The collection includes Peake’s mesmerising, terrifying illustrations for Treasure Island and, in gentler mode, Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. There is also a draft manuscript of his wonderful pirate picture book Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939), and drawings of well-known theatrical and literary figures Peake knew, such as Laurence Olivier, W H Auden and Peggy Ashcroft. These acquisitions complement the literary archive – including the notebooks in which Peake wrote the Gormenghast books, plus poems and correspondence – that the Library purchased in 2010.
Peake’s career as an illustrator first took off during the Second World War. In 1941, Walter de la Mare, one of the grand old men of children’s literature, sent a fan letter to the 30-year-old Peake, praising the “genuinely sinister” illustrations he had recently produced for a volume of nursery rhymes.
“How many scandalised parents may have written to you, possibly enclosing doctors’ and neurologists’ bills, you will probably not disclose,” de la Mare wrote. “Anyhow, most other illustrated books for children look silly by comparison.”
Certainly, Peake’s illustrations – Dr Foster looking like he’s undergoing an existential crisis as he plunges into the puddle, or the butcher, baker and candlestick-maker rammed into a tub – are nothing like the twee pictures you find in most nursery rhyme books.
What Peake’s pictures do is remind you of the surreal, haunting quality of these rhymes, dulled by familiarity.
He was the first choice to work on any book with a touch of the surreal. Quentin Crisp recalled that, when he published an anti-military verse satire about a kangaroo in 1943, he was determined “to ensnare Mr Peake into illustrating it. He was at that time the most fashionable illustrator in England.”
Zo? Wilcox, curator of contemporary performance and creative archives at the British Library, points out that one of the joys of the archive is that it spans Peake’s whole life, so you can see, for example, the watercolour illustrations depicting scenes from Treasure Island which he painted when he was 15, and how they fed into the illustrations he produced professionally for the same book nearly a quarter of a century later.
“He’s wonderful at these slightly abstracted scenes of one individual figure, without a lot of background,” she notes. “I think that’s very clever because it leaves a lot to the reader’s imagination, which is the most exciting thing about reading.
“There’s a picture of Israel Hands falling from the mast in Treasure Island with a wonderful cross-hatched background of the sea behind him, and if you stare long enough at it you almost start to see colour and movement and all kinds of things. He’s very gifted in that respect.”
Even his portrait sketches of celebrities are distinctively Peakean, she notes. “In his Laurence Olivier, for example, he’s imbued him with something piratical, something of his own spirit.”
There’s a particular pleasure in being able to compare Peake’s preliminary drafts with the finished product – to be able to see, for example, how hard he worked on honing Captain Slaughterhouse. This tale of a fearsome pirate who decides to retire from buccaneering after falling in love with a strange yellow creature baffled Peake’s contemporaries, but perhaps its time has now come.
The pirates featured in the book – including Charlie Choke, who sports a tattoo of Peake’s beloved wife Maeve on his arm – are instantly recognisable as monstrous Peakean caricatures. And yet perhaps it is unfair to describe them as caricatures.
Peake used to go on what he called “headhunting” expeditions, wandering the streets to find striking-looking people to sketch, whose faces might make their way – sometimes years later – into his illustrations. Perhaps it was simply the case that he took more notice of what people really looked like than most of us do. This started early: the oldest piece in the archive shows him “headhunting” when he was seven, sketching people he passed on an afternoon walk in China. (Peake was born in China in 1911 and lived there until 1922, when his missionary parents returned to England.)
“I think he felt a disconnect between his life in China and his very ordinary English existence after the age of 11,” says Wilcox. “He had the observer’s eye of someone who always felt like a slight outsider.”
Perhaps the great glory of the archive are the drawings of the characters Peake created for his own Gormenghast novels. We Gormenghastians can have the thrill of seeing how the striking characters in the books – the Countess of Groan with her thick coils of hair “like burning snakes” or the gargantuan cook Swelter – are envisioned by their creator.
Peake drew his characters in his manuscript notebooks as he wrote, even though he knew the publishers did not want any illustrations. The same was true of Tolkien, and it seems that these two very different masters of fantasy writing both needed to produce and examine visual representations of the worlds they created before they could bring them to life.
“He would draw whenever he got stuck with his writing,” says Wilcox. “He’s trying to imagine what a character might say and how they might sound and that prompts him to break off from writing and pick up his pen and draw to find out where the story goes next. We think he was synaesthetic and he had this brain where one sense would stimulate another.”
Peake suffered a number of nervous breakdowns in his life and by the time he was 50 he was severely debilitated by what was probably Parkinson’s disease (he died in 1968). There was a widely held view that his dark imagination had driven him into insanity; “all that darkness, dear, gets to you in the end,” was Quentin Crisp’s summary. But Wilcox insists that “reading madness into his work misunderstands and misrepresents him”. Peake was a dedicated artist and observer, whose haunting images were the product of discipline and painstaking application.
In this, as in the combination of the disturbing and the slyly funny in his art, Peake has been hugely influential. He has clearly been an inspiration for Quentin Blake, who once observed: “Not least among Mervyn Peake’s virtues was his ability to be serious while involved in grotesque humour, and to be idiosyncratic while being completely professional.”
Another disciple is the political cartoonist and former Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell, who has cited the effect on his own work of Peake’s liberating dictum: “Do not be afraid to exaggerate in order to convey the real intention of your drawing.”
As Wilcox points out, Peake’s influence has reached further than we can calculate.
“Neil Gaiman put it well when he said that you can always see how Tolkien fans have been influenced by Tolkien, but Peake’s influence is in being so idiosyncratic that he inspires other writers to be unique. What he does best is to be totally himself and give other creative people the confidence to go out and do the same in their own way.”
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