Mervyn Peake Quotes

“[Maeve's] refined sensibilities could lead to misunderstanding, as I discovered when I worked on Titus Alone. 'Words can be a series of facts,' said Muzzlehatch in the first draft. Maeve had typed out the draft from handwritten sheets, and 'facts' was her interpretation of what she saw. This word had been crossed through by Peake and corrected. In the next version Muzzlehatch spoke more enigmatically, saying that 'Words can be a series of forts' *. From the original draft it was clear that he had been talking of something far more vaporous than stone.


* emphasis mine”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“[Maeve's] refined sensibilities could lead to misunderstanding, as I discovered when I worked on Titus Alone. 'Words can be a series of facts,' said Muzzlehatch in the first draft. Maeve had typed out the draft from handwritten sheets, and 'facts' was her interpretation of what she saw. This word had been crossed through by Peake and corrected. In the next version Muzzlehatch spoke more enigmatically, saying that 'Words can be a series of forts'*. From the original draft it was clear that he had been talking of something far more vaporous than stone.


* emphasis mine”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“[Maeve's] refined sensibilities could lead to misunderstanding, as I discovered when I worked on Titus Alone. 'Words can be a series of facts,' said Muzzlehatch in the first draft. Maeve had typed out the draft from handwritten sheets, and 'facts' was her interpretation of what she saw. This word had been crossed through by Peake and corrected. In the next version Muzzlehatch spoke more enigmatically, saying that 'Words can be a series of forts *. From the original draft it was clear that he had been talking of something far more vaporous than stone.


* emphasis mine”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“[Maeve's] refined sensibilities could lead to misunderstanding, as I discovered when I worked on Titus Alone. 'Words can be a series of facts,' said Muzzlehatch in the first draft. Maeve had typed out the draft from handwritten sheets, and 'facts' was her interpretation of what she saw. This word had been crossed through by Peake and corrected. In the next version Muzzlehatch spoke more enigmatically, saying that 'Words can be a series of forts*. From the original draft it was clear that he had been talking of something far more vaporous than stone.

* emphasis mine”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“She put me at ease from the start, and the more I got to know Maeve the more I liked her. I loved the way she assumed her own perceptions were general. I seem to remember her saying that sometimes, or course, we were inhibited from eating some fruit, like peaches, because of its resemblance to parts of the human anatomy. She looked at things from this slightly unusual angle, but it was a view that could be enlightening. I remember her saying that that a writer I greatly admired at the time had been to visit. I eagerly asked what he was like. The puzzled expression appeared in her eyes, momentarily. 'He's a very emotional man,' she said. She told me, and to this day I don't know whether she was serious, that Mervyn had mentioned that one of the formative influences on the Titus books was the rules of cricket.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“[In] the moving drawings of Peake's children one can see his passionate, unsentimentalised belief in children and their resilience, brilliance and passion for living.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“...Peake manages to walk a tightrope, to maintain a subtle balance between beauty and ugliness. What really interested him was that invisible dividing line, that border between the two. In fact, we might even say that all Peake's work is about thresholds...

[...]

His stories are all about people who, in one way or another, cross a frontier of some kind. Captain Slaughterboard, who never goes on land, discovers love by leaving his ship and exploring the Yellow Creature's pink island. Titus Groan defiantly rides out of Gormenghast to go and discover the wide world beyond the confines of the castle. Peake's last (unfinished) work is about Footfruit's journey accompanied by a dog that laughs like a drain, over the Border to the Great City and back again.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“Less immediately, [Mr Pye] is also about the relationships between art and religion and art and the world of commerce. Mr Pye would have the island's resident artist, Thorpe, who is for ever in search of the ultimate painting, believe that all inspiration is spiritual and divine. Thorpe finds it in the material world, for he is infatuated by the beauty of the island's whore, Tintagieu. That each exploits beauty in their respective trades is underlined when he tells her that she ought to be a film actress. 'They'd shoot you from below. Streamers of cloud behind your head and all that racket.' 'Shoot me from below? I'd like to see them,' retorts Tintagieu. 'Sounds bloody painful to me.' This exchange leads naturally into a splendid tirade, which Peake placed in Thorpe's mouth, linking all the themes of art and inspiration, artists and their physical suffering, the art trade and belief in spiritual values.

'Oh, these theories,' Thorpe added in a voice of scorn and with a flourish of his free arm (for Mr Pye still held the elbow of the other) - 'these theories about Art, they are all absolute n-nonsense.' (He was winding himself up, for Tintagieu was listening - he hoped.) 'Can't you see the whole thing is an organised racket? The p-painter digs his heart up and tries to sell it. The heart specialists become interested, for the thing is still b-beating. The hangers-on begin to suck the blood. They lick each other like c-cats. They bare their fangs like d-dogs. The whole thing is pitiful. Art is in the hands of amateurs, the Philistines, the racketeers, the Jews, the snarling women and the raging queers to whom Soutine is "ever so pretty" and Rembrandt "ever s-so sweet".

'What do the galleries know? They are merely m-merchants. They sell pictures instead of lampshades and that's the only difference. And the critics - Lord, what clever b-boys they are! They know about everything except painting. That's why I came out here to get away from it all. The jungle of London with its millions of apes. I came out here to find myself, but have I done so? No, Mr Pye. Of c-course I haven't. For artists need competition and the stimulus of other b-brains whether they like it or not. They must talk painting, b-breathe painting, and be c-covered with paint. That is the kind of man I would talk to. A man c-covered with paint. And with paint in his hair and paint in the brain and on the b-brain - but where are they, these men? - they're in the great cities, among the m-monkeys where they can see each other work and fight it out, while as f-far as the public is concerned they might as well be knitting, or blowing b-bubbles, for even you, Mr Pye, if you don't mind my saying so, haven't got a c-clue what it's all about, as your ridiculous "slap it on", "whisk it off" and "hey presto" attitude shows all t-too clearly. Your idea about colours is "the m-more the b-better", and "bright as p-possible", like a herbaceous b-border. Colour, Mr Pye, is a process of elimination. It is the d-distillation of an attitude. It is a credo.'

Mr Pye's face was pink with admiration. he ran his eyes over the painter as though he had never seem him before. He turned his head quickly to Tintagieu as though for corroboration and then he ran his eyes again all over Thorpe. 'That was superb,' he whispered, as though to himself.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“...Peake's writing is as mercurial as the man himself. For sixty years it has defied classification - and has therefore been sneeringly dismissed by some as 'fantasy writing' (as if real issues and real emotions could not possibly exist within such a context as an imaginary world).

[...]

And yet the Titus books are imbued with a profound sense of realism. Some of this comes from the hallucinatory attention that Peake gives to the smallest of details - shapes and textures; colours and scents; the jut of a collar-bone; the fuggy stench of subterranean kitchens; the cracking sound of man's knee-joints as he strides stiffly along a stone corridor.

Interestingly, for a writer frequently described in terms of 'Gothic' and 'fantasy', there is no trace of the supernatural in the Titus books. There are no witches, no ghosts, no magic, no religion - but for the wholly secular ritual of Gormenghast. Nor is there any sign of the usual non-human suspects that tend to permeate fantasy fiction. To Peake, humanity itself already contains so much potential for grotesquerie that there is no need for orcs or dwarves. Instead we are shown a vision of humanity at its most diverse and perplexing. Physical and mental deformity abounds; and yet beneath Peake's obvious delight in portraying the human being in all its astonishing variety he retains a quality of insight and sympathy for his creations that raises his work beyond technical brilliance into something warmer and more universal.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“Steerpike is Peake's greatest creation and, ultimately, in Gormenghast he confronts that fresh embodiment of the Groan tradition, the new Lord Titus, who has come into the title prematurely as a result of Steerpike's own machinations. Steerpike has something of the knowing, reckless villainy of Richard III, something of the cold, envying evil of Pinkie in Brighton Rock, and yet we frequently find ourselves feeling sympathy with his ambitions and his conflicts. We share his frustrations, his anger, his schemes, his secrets, his knowledge of all the illusions, hypocrisies and deceits required to maintain Groan power in that seemingly limitless castle, that model of the mind, whose Gothic outlines bear only superficial resemblance to Walpole's or Radcliffe's.

[...]

We follow Steerpike, who uses all the quick cunning and subtle understanding, all the knowing play-acting of a Lovelace, in his rise from kitchen boy to secret power of Gormenghast. His motives are credible. Again, from the first pages, Peake has led us to understand how an intelligent youth, destined for a life of humiliation and grinding servitude, is consumed with anger at the monumental injustices upon which his misfortune and the continuing fortunes of the Groans is based.

If Tolkien's hobbits display a middle-class fear of the Mob, Steerpike might be said to represent the vengeful Mob itself, all hope of justice lost, turning its ruthless fury upon those who, in their unearned, unadmitted power - no matter how innocent they seem to themselves - enjoy careless privilege. And, like the Mob, Steerpike is by no means fussy about his methods - and by no means invulnerable. Eventually common sentiment becomes both his doom and and his redemption.

At the close of Gormenghast Titus begins to come into his own. Like Steerpike, he struggles against the weight of ritual and convention which imprisons him, but he struggles only to be free, not to control. He understands the price of such power and wants none of it.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“...his conscience remained essentially that of a radical Christian. He admired Bunyan as well Blake. He was attracted to the imagery of pomp and ritual, but he was also deeply suspicious of it, always searching for what it hid. In those early pages of Titus Groan we find blind injustice, decadent ritual and haughty cruelty, folly, moral corruption, atrophied emotions and sensibilities, wretched hypocrisy and dumb despair; turbulence and terror are masked by pretence of activity, a reliance on a ritual which in the end has no function save to maintain the status quo - the power of the Groans. Yet here, too, is all the dusty glory of a decadent court, ancient mysteries, bizarre secrets, peculiar dependencies and relationships, old rivalries, a history already so encrusted with legend and myth that is no longer a record of events but a litany of blind faith.

This could be the China of Mervyn's boyhood translated to England. In that China the poor committed suicide on the surgery steps of doctors unable to cure them, and ancient wealth was displayed against a background of dreadful social suffering. It was an hallucinatory imperial twilight, common to all declining empires, which obscured that hardships of the many from the undemanding eyes of the privileged few - a light Mervyn detected in England, too. He was in many ways a conventional patriot, but he was also amused, frustrated and infuriated by the follies of the English ruling class. His own wartime experience of bureaucratic folly and the ignorant arrogance of leaders, the casual decisions which affected the lives and deaths of thousands, informed the pages of Titus Groan as he wrote it in various barracks, railway stations and transit camps while the army tried to make a gunner of him. Yet the novel never becomes a diatribe, never becomes a vehicle in which to express his own suffering.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“Peake was drafted into the Royal Artillery at the end of July 1940, just as he was starting on a story that was to grow under his pen into the three novels about Titus Groan. Given the circumstances, he wrote in notebooks that he could carry with him, rather than on loose sheets of paper that would easily go astray. Right from the start he made sketches as he went along, sometimes in the margins, sometimes on whole pages. Occasionally the text continues over a drawing. Some of these sketches depict the characters of the book; seeing them helped Peake to imagine what sort of things they would say. He rather hoped that Titus Groan might be illustrated with finished versions of these sketches, but the publisher turned down the idea... Other pictures in the manuscripts range from finished pen drawings to abstract doodles. Some are quick portraits and sketches of scenes around him as he wrote, but most of them are from his imagination.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“Fundamentally Peake's imagination was, without question, a romantic one, but, perhaps paradoxically, it is his humanity, his less idiosyncratic gifts (including the gift of farce), that distinguish him from other great visionary novelists such as Wyndham Lewis, Yevgeny Zamyatin or John Cooper Powys.

In the Titus Groan books especially, with their ornate language, long soliloquies, bursts of nonsense verse, vivid descriptions, weird anecdotes, comic extravagances, we continue to interested in the characters and their stories. Peake's control of his subject matter, his skill at handling such a large cast, is demonstrated on every page of Titus Groan and Gormenghast , which are essentially a unity. The plot marches, with all the remorseless inevitability of a novel by Victor Hugo or Joseph Conrad, towards an unpredictable resolution.

These abilities and his genuine love of people, his concern for others, his relish for life, make Peake, in my opinion, the greatest imaginative writer of his age. Neither J.R.R. Tolkien nor T.H. White, for instance, has Peake's monumental complexity or originality, his moral and formal integrity. Perhaps this is why Peake was so often praised by writers most identified with naturalistic novels of character, such as Elizabeth Bowen or Angus Wilson, who also appreciated the moral qualities of Peake's novels.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“Peake spoke of his artistic experiments as 'the smashing of another window pane'. He wasn't looking for reassurance. He was looking for truth. A fascinated explorer of human personality, a confronter of realities, beaming his brilliance here and there into our common darkness, a narrative genius able to control a vast range of characters (no more grotesque than life and many of them wonderfully comic), Peake told a complex narrative, much of which is based upon the ambitions of a single, determined individual, Steerpike, whose rise from the depths of society (or 'Gormenghast' as it is called) and extraordinary climb and fall has a monumental, Dickensian quality which keeps you reading at fever pitch; the stuff of solid, grown-up full-strength fiction. Real experience, freshly described.

'It's not so much their blindness', he said of his more conventional contemporaries, 'as their love of blinkers that spells stagnation.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“In his introduction to the first collection of his drawings Peake wrote, 'After all, there are no rules. With the wealth, skill, daring, vision of many centuries at one's back, yet one is ultimately quite alone. For it is one's ambition to create one's own world in a style germane to its substance, and to people it with its native forms and denizens that never were before, yet have their roots in one's experience. As the earth was thrown from the sun, so from the earth the artist must fling out into space, complete from pole to pole, his own world which, whatsoever form it takes, is the colour of the globe it flew from, as the world itself is coloured by the sun.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“Peake was neither a saint nor a satanic presence, and what was so marvellous for me, when I first went to see him as a boy, was realizing that so much rich talent could come from such a graceful, pleasant, rather modest man who lived in a suburban house much like mine. He was amused by my enthusiasm. I was in no doubt, though, that I had met my first authentic genius.

[...]

Peake had a huge, romantic imagination, a Welsh eloquence, a wry, affectionate wit and his technical mastery, both of narrative and line, remains unmatched. “To be a good classicist,” he said, “you must cultivate romance. To be a good romantic, you must steep yourself in classicism.” He was both an heir to the great Victorians and a precursor to the post-modernists, the magic realists.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“One is clumsy at first. So is the apprentice of any skilled craft... The secret is to draw with intelligence - to be sure of what you want; for if you are undecided, so will your drawing be.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“I can recall him saying to me once, 'It is not only how you draw but what you draw, what you choose to put in the picture and what you decide to leave out.' Although I had very little contact with him, he was the first teacher to emphasise the power of content and atmosphere in pictures and how we should aim to create a mood in our illustrations that made the content live.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art