For me, Mervyn Peake’s works have always seemed to be the equivalent of a marriage between Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe (with assorted uncles, such as H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien). His major opus, the Gormenghast trilogy exhibits such broad originality, over so many different levels and means, that you are often left breathless.

I’ve always wondered why this work has languished when compared to so many other works which are (upon finishing the Gormenghast trilogy) so obviously inferior… Of course, with this in mind, I have always found that the effort to find a gem like this worth the time…therefore, the amount of time you might take to go to Amazon.com and search for Mervyn Peake is the least you should do.

Mervyn Peake Centennial
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Daybook/Mervyn-Peake-Centennial/ba-p/5157

July 9, 2011

Mervyn Peake Centennial

Mervyn Peake was born on this day in 1911. Starting with the acclaimed BBC television miniseries based on the Gormenghast books, Peake’s work has received new attention over the last decade. The revival got further momentum with the recent publication of Titus Awakes, a final Gormenghast novel written by Peake’s widow from notes and drafts he left behind. The handful of centenary editions coming out this summer will enlarge Peake’s reputation from novelist–the London Times placed him on their recent list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945"–to poet, children’s writer, painter, and illustrator. 

Peake died of Parkinson’s disease at the age of fifty-seven. Memoirs by his wife and son recall a remarkable man, as eccentric as his work and an embodiment of the line of his poetry inscribed on his gravestone: "To live at all is marvel enough." Sebastian Peake recalls many moments in the spirit of the following, describing family summers on Sark, one of the Channel Islands:

I remember a marvelous game once, where he and I skipped and danced through the Sark house, him with a large wooden frame, and me with a smaller one resting on our right shoulder, being held in place by our right hand, and hopping from one side of the lower part of the frame to the other, with our feet sometimes on the inside and then on the outer sides of the frame. Making wild Red Indian whoops, we went upstairs and down, out into the garden, round the duck pond and in and out…until we had had enough.

Other memories recall long coastal walks on which his parents would invent "Flay, Swelter, Prunesquallor, and other exotic, idiosyncratic onomatopoeic names" for Gormenghast or Peake’s other books. Life in London was charmed in other ways:

Peter Ustinov lived almost next door, Carol Reed next to him, and in a building across the road, Augustus John had a studio. I used to go to visit the painter sometimes with both my parents, sometimes just my father…. Dylan Thomas, a friend of the family, would sometimes hold my hand and take me to kindergarten at the end of the road…. Dylan Thomas was not a very important part of my father’s life, but one day in 1946, when asked to give a lecture at a fairly august institute in the West End, he asked my father if he could borrow one of his suits. My father obligingly lent him two to see which one fitted, but he never saw either again….

The Gormenghast Trilogy plus FREE Fine Art Print
http://www.foliosociety.com/bookcat/9078/GPR/gormenghast-trilogy-plus-print

Mervyn Peake combined a true artist’s eye with a magnificent ear for language. The result was the creation of a unique modern classic: the strange and fabulous world of Gormenghast.

Gormenghast is a world into which you will find yourself irresistibly drawn; a feast of the imagination where you may gorge yourself to the full. Every inhabitant knows his place, from the Grey Scrubbers who fulfill their hereditary calling in cleaning the Great Kitchen, to melancholy Sepulchrave himself, Earl of Groan. It is a world governed by ceremony, where nonagenarian Sourdust, lord of the library and student of Groan lore, must instruct the Earl in the strange and symbolic activities to be undertaken each day, as detailed in the great tomes of ritual.

Here Gertrude, Countess of Groan, lies in bed, her red hair ‘clustered upon the pillows like burning snakes’, surrounded by hundreds of white cats. Her passionate daughter Fuchsia, ‘intemperate, suspicious and credulous all in a day’, lurks alone in her attic, while Sepulchrave’s sisters Clarice and Cora, half-witted twins, brood darkly in the Room of Roots. Next in social order come Doctor Prunesquallor – intelligent, kindly, insufferably verbose – and his bony sister Irma, who lays siege to the assembled Professors in a ‘gown of a thousand frills, with its corsage of hand-painted parrots’. Around the Family, a host of faithful retainers go about their business: Fuchsia’s devoted nurse, Nanny Slagg, self-important and resplendent in her best hat with the glass grapes; Rottcodd the curator, fast asleep in the Hall of the Bright Carvings, created by the denizens of the Outer Dwellings. In the Great Kitchen Abiatha Swelter, head chef – ‘a cataleptic mass of wine-drenched blubber’ – nurses his hatred for Mr. Flay, first servant of the Earl, above whose cracking knee-joints can be found a heart fiercely loyal to Gormenghast.

Into this stagnant world is born Titus, seventy-seventh earl. Violet-eyed and full of life, from his earliest babyhood he shows a tendency to blaspheme against the fundamental tenets of Gormenghast, as when he violates the Book of Baptism at his christening. Yet on the very day of his birth, another act of revolution is perpetrated – an act which will have consequences far more dangerous to Gormenghast than Titus’s childish misdemeanors. As Swelter celebrates the birth of the new heir, the kitchen boy Steerpike, eyes ‘dark and hot with a mature hatred’, escapes from his predestined position, and begins a vertiginous climb across the roofs of the Castle. It is to become a social climb of devilish manipulation which will lead Steerpike to a position of immense power within Gormenghast – and woe betides anyone who attempts to get in his way.

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