Biography
Mervyn Peake
was born of British parents in Kuling (Lushan) in Jiangxi Province of central China 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 nurse.
The Peakes returned to
England just before World War I in 1914 but returned again in 1916 to China. Mervyn Peake attended Tientsin
Grammar School until the family returned to England in 1923 via the
Trans-Siberian Railway. Mervyn Peake
never returned to China but it has been noted that Chinese influences can be
detected in Peake's works, not least in the castle of
Gormenghast itself, which in some respects echoes the
ancient walled city of Peking (Beijing) as well as the enclosed compound where
he grew up in Tientsin (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 (1923-1929), where his talents
were encouraged by his English teacher, Eric Drake. He completed his formal
education at Croydon School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools from 1929
to 1933, where he first painted in oils and wrote his first long poems. He
first exhibited at the Royal Academy and with the so-called "Soho Group" in 1931.
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 he
exhibited with the Sark artists both in the Sark Gallery built by Drake and at the Cooling Galleries in
London. 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 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 painter Maeve Gilmore, whom he married in 1937. They had three
children, Sebastian (b. 1940), 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.
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 his application
was turned down and he was conscripted in the Army, where he served first with
the Royal Artillery, then with the Royal Engineers. The Army didn't know what to
do with him. 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. The next spring he was invalided out of
the Army. In 1943 he was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to
paint glassblowers at a Birmingham factory making cathode ray tubes for the
early radar sets.
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 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.
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 he was
commissioned by a magazine to visit France and Germany. 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 Mervyn.
Mr Pye was published in
1953, and he later adapted it as a radio play. The BBC broadcast other plays of
his in 1954 and 1956.
In 1956 Mervyn and Maeve
visited Spain, financed by a friend who hoped that Peake's
health, which was already declining, would be improved by the holiday.
That year his novella Boy in Darkness was published beside stories by William
Golding and John Wyndham in a volume called Sometime, Never. On 18 December the
BBC broadcast his radio play The Eye of the Beholder (later revised as The
Voice of One) in which an avante-garde artist is
commissioned to paint a church mural. Peake placed
much hope in his play The Wit To Woo which was finally
staged in London's West End in 1957, but it was a critical and commercial
failure. This affected him greatly -- his health degenerated rapidly and he was
again admitted to hospital with a nervous breakdown.
He was showing unmistakable early symptoms of
Parkinson's Disease, for which he was given
electroconvulsive therapy, to little avail. Over the next few years he
gradually lost the ability to draw steadily and quickly, although he still
managed to produce some drawings with the help of his wife. Among his last
completed works were the illustrations for Balzac's Droll Stories (1961) and
for his own poem The Rhyme Of The Flying Bomb (1962),
which he had written some fifteen years earlier.
Titus Alone was published in 1959 and was revised by
Langdon Jones in 1970 to remove apparent inconsistencies introduced by the
publisher's careless editing. A 1995 edition of all three completed Gormenghast novels includes a very short fragment of the
beginning of what would have been the fourth Gormenghast
novel, "Titus Awakes", as well as a listing of events and themes he
wanted to address in that and later Gormenghast
novels.
Peake died in November 1968. His
work, and the Gormenghast books in particular, became
much better known and more widely appreciated after his death, and they have
since been translated into more than two dozen languages.
Peake's grandson
is rising UK chart star Jack Peñate