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A Child Of Bliss: Growing Up With Mervyn Peake
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 28, 2012
Memoirs of Mervyn Peake's son, and it really is all about Sebastian. The trouble is, he doesn't portray himself as a particularly interesting chap. There's not much detail or insight about Mervyn (or any of the rest of his family), and it's poorly written/edited. A hardcore fan of Peake would be unable to resist it for completeness, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.
Happy
The title is wonderfully happy and positive, and at the start, Sebastian states that "the all-pervading atmosphere of their [his parents] influence still envelops me, like a wonderful but harmless leprosy". Unfortunately he fails to convey that with any passion (unlike his sister in her memoirs, "Under a Canvas Sky", which I reviewed HERE) and in contrast, there is plenty of detail about "the uprootings that punctuated my childhood", particularly how unhappy he was at school. The trouble is, I'm not that interested in his schoolboy boxing matches or even how unpleasant the Christian Brothers could be to their charges.
Burden
That said, it must be hard to be the child of famous and talented parents, especially if you don't seem to share those talents, but I really think he would have been well advised to have a a co-writer, or even a decent editor. This rambles on in a very disjointed way, changing subject abruptly so that it would be confusing if I hadn't already read a fair bit about the Peakes. There are even quite a few sentences that are so badly mangled that I had to reread them to figure out what was meant! Various famous names are dropped, but I would like to know more about the encounters.
Weaknesses
Sebastian repeats some anecdotes for no good reason (other than sloppy editing?), and where he retells an anecdote that is also in his mother's memoirs, "A World Away", which I reviewed HERE), his version is flat in comparison.
Even more irritatingly, the book contradicts itself: in the space of two pages, he claims to have started boarding school at two different ages, and although he says "my father was not a great reader" he mentions the enormous number of books he had and the fact "he could quote from books verbatim, could recite complete poems if given only the first line". It's hard to know what's true.
Strengths
Nevertheless, there are some delightful impressions of his father. For instance, Mervyn returned from a few days away and built a surprise igloo for his sons to see when they woke, complete with a picture of an Eskimo looking out. He also had a bit of a thing about bones and skeletons, collecting some, starting with those of a whale! There is some feeling of his father as a storyteller: "I grew up knowing traditional bedtime stories very well, but interwoven with unique, strange and sometimes mad episodes."
Tragedy
His father's prolonged illness is barely even hinted at, which is bizarre, even if he understandably didn't want to go into painful details. He does fleetingly suggest the visit to Belsen at the end of the war was the cause of his death (his sister lays more of the blame on the failure of his first play, and their mother is less specific).
Other Sources
To be fair, I read this in a double volume, paired with his mother's memoirs, under the shared title "Mervyn Peake: Two Lives"; had it been more obviously an autobiography of Sebastian I might have been slightly less critical of the content and emphasis (though not the writing and editing). Also, Sebastian is very aware of his need, throughout his life, to be noticed and to feel important, and I suppose this entire book is a manifestation of that.
Here is a one-hour video of a talk Sebastian gave about his father at Gresham College:
https://vimeo.com/30842053
All My Peake Reviews
All my Peake/Gormenghast reviews (including biographies/memoirs and books about his art) are on a shelf,
HERE.
Happy
The title is wonderfully happy and positive, and at the start, Sebastian states that "the all-pervading atmosphere of their [his parents] influence still envelops me, like a wonderful but harmless leprosy". Unfortunately he fails to convey that with any passion (unlike his sister in her memoirs, "Under a Canvas Sky", which I reviewed HERE) and in contrast, there is plenty of detail about "the uprootings that punctuated my childhood", particularly how unhappy he was at school. The trouble is, I'm not that interested in his schoolboy boxing matches or even how unpleasant the Christian Brothers could be to their charges.
Burden
That said, it must be hard to be the child of famous and talented parents, especially if you don't seem to share those talents, but I really think he would have been well advised to have a a co-writer, or even a decent editor. This rambles on in a very disjointed way, changing subject abruptly so that it would be confusing if I hadn't already read a fair bit about the Peakes. There are even quite a few sentences that are so badly mangled that I had to reread them to figure out what was meant! Various famous names are dropped, but I would like to know more about the encounters.
Weaknesses
Sebastian repeats some anecdotes for no good reason (other than sloppy editing?), and where he retells an anecdote that is also in his mother's memoirs, "A World Away", which I reviewed HERE), his version is flat in comparison.
Even more irritatingly, the book contradicts itself: in the space of two pages, he claims to have started boarding school at two different ages, and although he says "my father was not a great reader" he mentions the enormous number of books he had and the fact "he could quote from books verbatim, could recite complete poems if given only the first line". It's hard to know what's true.
Strengths
Nevertheless, there are some delightful impressions of his father. For instance, Mervyn returned from a few days away and built a surprise igloo for his sons to see when they woke, complete with a picture of an Eskimo looking out. He also had a bit of a thing about bones and skeletons, collecting some, starting with those of a whale! There is some feeling of his father as a storyteller: "I grew up knowing traditional bedtime stories very well, but interwoven with unique, strange and sometimes mad episodes."
Tragedy
His father's prolonged illness is barely even hinted at, which is bizarre, even if he understandably didn't want to go into painful details. He does fleetingly suggest the visit to Belsen at the end of the war was the cause of his death (his sister lays more of the blame on the failure of his first play, and their mother is less specific).
Other Sources
To be fair, I read this in a double volume, paired with his mother's memoirs, under the shared title "Mervyn Peake: Two Lives"; had it been more obviously an autobiography of Sebastian I might have been slightly less critical of the content and emphasis (though not the writing and editing). Also, Sebastian is very aware of his need, throughout his life, to be noticed and to feel important, and I suppose this entire book is a manifestation of that.
Here is a one-hour video of a talk Sebastian gave about his father at Gresham College:
https://vimeo.com/30842053
All My Peake Reviews
All my Peake/Gormenghast reviews (including biographies/memoirs and books about his art) are on a shelf,
HERE.
July 20, 2019
This is mildly interesting, but it suffers by comparison. Having just read Maeve Gilmore's memoir of life with her husband Mervyn Peake, which was just stunningly written, this appears a bit simplistic by comparison, both in subject and presentation. Sebastian Peake tries, but he doesn't have the literary skill of his parents, and I think the book, small as it is, is perhaps not as focused as it might be. It's supposed to be a memoir of life with his father - it's right in the title, after all, Growing Up With Mervyn Peake - but it felt as if the author spent more time complaining about his various schools (and justifiably so, it has to be said) than talking about his dad. And given that it's his dad that I'm interested in reading about...
February 8, 2014
Not a great memoir, but an interesting one. Not a biography of Mervyn Peake--author, artist--but rather a memoir of what it was like being his son. As another reviewer has noted, the book could have used more careful editing--names are occasionally misspelled, for example--but overall the account is fairly straightforward. Especially nice is the inclusion of a number of Peake's drawings, some of which are of Sebastian or one of his siblings--and a set of photographs of the family.
May 22, 2016
I enjoyed the first half and then it unravelled.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews