Deeper into Mervyn Peake

The first two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy were published in 1946 and 1950, but by 1954, when I was first alerted to them by a school-friend, Peake had entered what his first biographer John Watney called ‘a doldrum period’. Overtaken by a wave of younger writers — Kingsley Amis, John Osborne et al — with more obvious contemporary relevance, Peake was beginning to suffer the first symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease that killed him in 1968 at the age of 47. Titus Alone, the third volume of the trilogy, appeared in 1959, but its comparative brevity, the scrappiness of its construction and the unsteadiness of Peake’s grasp of the new world beyond Gormenghast he was trying to depict made it a disappointing sequel even for his admirers. By the mid-Sixties this once debonair, romantically handsome artist, the brilliantly original illustrator of some 40 books, notably Treasure Island, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Alice in Wonderland, and author of one of the most extraordinary sagas in the English language, looked like a tired old man and was a full-time resident of the Priory, Roehampton. His work was almost forgotten — the Gormenghast trilogy went out of print in 1964 — and perhaps would have been altogether but for his wife Maeve’s efforts to keep his reputation alive and earn money for the hospital fees and her own and their three children’s upkeep by selling some of his paintings, drawings and illustrated books.

One of these selling shows was at the Upper Grosvenor Gallery in July 1966 and I persuaded The Spectator — I was its radio critic under the name Henry Tube — to let me review the show and make it the excuse to puff the novels. Two years later, whether because of The Spectator’s clout or because I had happened to ride an advancing wave, the first two books, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, were republished in a new edition, illustrated with some of Peake’s own drawings of his characters.