     I remember how impressed I was when, as a boy, I first
visited Mervyn and Maeve Peake and discovered, contrary to
my rational expectations, that they actually did live in a
great, grey Gothic house surrounded by mysterious foliage!
True, this Peake mansion was just a large Victorian family
house in an otherwise ordinary suburban street on the
southern edge of London, within walking distance of my own
home, but I hesitated on the path to the recessed front
door, conscious of the sharp rattle of rain on the
rhododendrons, beginning to wonder if, after all, the author
of *Titus Groan* affected as bizarre a life as his
creations.  I thought twice before pressing the bell.
     The door was opened by a beautiful woman with startling
hazel eyes and honey-coloured hair who introduced herself as
Maeve Peake but who might, save for her warmth, have been
the Countess of Groan.  She had invited me to tea in
response to my note about an article I was writing on
Mervyn.  As she led me through the shadowy hall I glimpsed
at least one white cat, and felt watched by the gallery of
stuffed birds, perching everywhere there was not a painting.
When we entered a comfortable living room Mervyn rose, with
some difficulty, from his armchair to shake hands.  He was
already suffering from the early stages of the illness which
would kill him, but we did not know that then, and I found
him pleasant, humorous, courteous, perhaps a little vague
and inclined to tire easily.  I also felt that for the first
time I had met an authentic genius.  In my enthusiasm I
stayed too long, but in spite of that was invited again,
coming to enjoy a valuable friendship with the Peakes and
their children, Sebastian, Fabian and Clare, who were of my
own generation.
     Mervyn Peake was born in China in 1911, the son of a
Congregational missionary doctor, and his first eleven years
were spent surrounded by the exotic and often wretched
sights of China in her imperial decline.  He had already
shown considerable skill as a writer and artist, and when
with his parents he returned to England, to 'Woodcroft', the
same Wallington house where I met him, he was sent to a
school in Surrey where his talents were recognised and
encouraged.  At Croydon College of Art and, ultimately, the
Royal Academy Schools he did well and began to mature as a
draughtsman and a poet.
     Flamboyant, enthusiastic, handsome, he was thoroughly
dedicated to his art.  For two years he lived on Sark where
he helped found the Sark school of painters.  By 1935 he had
an established reputation as a painter, some recognition as
a poet, and was back in London, venturing out almost every
day on what he called his 'head-hunting expeditions', to
sketch the people of the city.  He became a part-time
teacher at the Westminster School of Art, continued to
publish his poetry, designed stage sets (notably for Capek's
*The Insect Play*), planned novels, children's books and
elaborate drawing projects.  Mervyn received a number of
commissions for portraits (Walter de la Mare, Ralph
Richardson, Graham Greene and others) which were published
in the *London Mercury*.  In 1939 his first book, for
children, appeared, written and illustrated by him (most
copies were subsequently destroyed in an incendiary raid).
*Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor* shows all the relish
for human eccentricity, all the sense of fun, all the
generous gusto Peake brought to his life.  As well as his
talent for comic drawing, it revealed a surprising talent
for comic writing.
     In 1936 Mervyn had met Maeve Gilmore, a shy student at
the Westminster School of Art, and within a year they were
married.  As always, Mervyn discussed his ideas - his work
in progress - with Maeve and she became actively involved in
the conception of all his projects.  Sometimes, on their
frequent visits to Mervyn's parents near Arundel Castle,
they would discuss what eventually became the first Titus
Groan book.  When war was declared in September 1939, Maeve
was several months pregnant with Sebastian.  As the air
raids grew intense, Mervyn moved his wife and baby to
Warningcamp, near his parents' home, and while awaiting
call-up began offering his services to the War Artists
Commission.
     In spite of all his efforts, Mervyn was, perhaps
inevitably, sent into the infantry where life became
increasingly anxious and terrifying.  His army career was a
disaster: inadvertently, he burned down his barracks, and
then had a serious nervous breakdown.  At this time he had
been working on *Titus Groan*, writing it wherever and
whenever he got the chance.  Mervyn provides some insight as
to his methods of working and the ways in which he absorbed
and used experience in his description an early commission,
which was to record the daily work of a glass-blowing
factory near Birmingham.

     I found on entering the huge, ruinous, grimy
     wharf-walled buildings a world upon its own, a place of
     roaring fires and monstrous shadows.  It appealed
     immediately to my imagination.  Not only did I start to
     draw at once, for the glassblowers, weaving to and fro
     through searing lights, were strangely rhythmic, as
     though in the spell of their craft, as they 'gathered'
     from the furnace-mouths or juggled with the molten
     sand - but I found at the same time that phrases were
     forming in my mind, and verbal images, tangential or
     even remote from what was actually taking place before
     my eyes, began to follow one another.  And so what I
     actually wrote was an attempt to give substance to the
     firelit flutter of words and images - a substance very
     different from the drawings that I made, though
     dependent in the first place upon the visual impression
     of jugglers in a world of grime and firelight.

     During this time Mervyn produced a fine series of
pictures, a book of poems and many images which went into
his later novels.  'His head and hands are built for sin'
begins the first poem of *The Glassblowers* - which could be
a description of Steerpike, the protagonist, in spite of the
title, of *Titus Groan*.
     Even before *The Glassblowers* was commissioned, Mervyn
had continued working.  In spite of all set-backs, by 1944
he had published his first volume of poems, *Shapes and
Sounds*, two more children's books, *Ride a Cock Horse* and
*Rhymes Without Reason* (in which he revealed his talent for
nonsense verse), and had illustrated, among others, *The
Hunting of the Snark*, *The Rime of the Ancient Mariner* and
Quentin Crisp's *All This And Bevin Too*.  As his technical
skills improved, his ambitions grew and gradually *Titus
Groan* began to take on its author's own increased assurance
and authority.  Mervyn was one of the first civilians into
Belsen, working with Tom Pocock for *The Leader*:  Pocock
wrote the text and Mervyn provided the drawings.  Pocock,
quoted in John Batchelor's study *Mervyn Peake*, gives us a
description which any of Mervyn's friends would recognise:

     His dark, sombre good looks and the deep-set, troubled
     eyes might have belonged to a most forceful person.
     But he was intensely gentle ... a delightful and
     generous companion.

     Mervyn left a record, in poetry and drawings, of what
he had seen in Belsen.  Every inmate's face is the face of
an individual, drawn with profound respect.  The scenes,
translated into his fiction, occur again and again, most
fully in *Titus Alone*.  Mervyn never exaggerated.  He
described what he saw.  By the end of the war he had
completed the manuscript of *Titus Groan*.  This was
published in 1946 to considerable critical praise from the
likes of Graham Greene, Henry Reed and Elizabeth Bowen - but
it sold poorly.
     Eventually, partly for financial reasons, partly for
much-needed tranquility (with Fabian a further addition to
the family) Mervyn and Maeve went to live on Sark, enjoying
something of an idyll with their two sons, while Mervyn
worked on commissions and wrote *Gormenghast*.  He had been
witness to some of the most appalling manifestations of
human brutality, but the war had also given him a wealth of
imagery and ideas which became drawings, paintings, poems,
prose and, increasingly, plays.  Always a prolific worker,
Mervyn enjoyed a growing reputation.  At length Sark life
proved impractical and with his daughter, Clare, on the way
he and the family returned to London in 1949.
     In 1950 *Gormenghast* was published.  It received some
excellent notices but, although Mervyn was awarded the
Royal Society of Literature prize for both *Gormenghast* and
*The Glassblowers*, contemporary taste was against him.  We
had entered the grey flannel decade.  He was considered
altogether too romantic - 'Peake's ok if you like your
blackness utter', said one editor to me, dismissing him as
little more than a bad horror writer.  Mervyn's great comic
and narrative gifts were never acknowledged, his eloquent
and original use of language was ignored.
     Those years, when the first signs of his illness began
to appear, became increasingly difficult for the Peakes.
Money was scarce and the books had small sales (both were
eventually remaindered).  His other novel, *Mr Pye*, also
received praise and a prestigious prize, but it did not sell
well, even after Mervyn had adapted it as a radio play.  He
tried his hand at more plays, but they, too, were
unsuccessful.  In 1957, when his play starring Kenneth
Williams, *The Wit To Woo*, failed (the fashion was for
*Look Back In Anger*), it became increasingly clear that
Mervyn's symptoms were not merely those of nervous
exhaustion.  It was thought that he had contracted a virus
in Belsen.
     We believed at the time that he might recover and that
the great flood of drawings, paintings, poems, short
stories, novels and plays had merely slowed down for a
while.  But then, after joyously completing the last words
of *Titus Alone*, sitting under the kitchen table at
Woodcroft, Mervyn experienced a dramatic deterioration in
his energies, and thereafter he declined rapidly.
Astonishingly, he was still able to produce, for instance,
his masterly drawings for Balzac's *Droll Stories* (The
Folio Society 1961) and attempt a few other commissions, but
soon, after a move to a more convenient house, it became
impossible for Maeve to care for him at home and his last
years were spent in institutions, most of which were
depressing at best.
     Now, with bitter irony, Mervyn's star began to rise
again.  A chance discussion with my friend Oliver Caldecott,
then fiction editor at Penguin, resulted in Oliver's
enthusiastic decision to republish all three books as
Penguin Modern Classics and to have them illustrated with
Mervyn's own drawings.  This was to be a crucial turning
point in Mervyn's career for, as soon as the public found
him in easily available editions, his audience was assured.
Almost everything he had written or drawn began to be
reprinted.
     My last vivid memory of Mervyn is in the garden of a
mental hospital where Maeve and I were visiting him.  Maeve
was distressed because it seemed Mervyn was being bullied,
perhaps tortured, and was certainly being stolen from.
Mervyn had no understanding of why she was troubled but
lifted his hand, by then very palsied, in a gesture of
comfort.  When this didn't seem to work he rose with our
help and, in his dressing gown and pyjamas, began to shuffle
by himself across the grass, trying to hop on one leg and
perform a little comic dance meant to cheer up Maeve.
Eventually Maeve's brother, running a small private home for
people with Alzheimer's, was able to look after him.
Thanks to James Gilmore, Mervyn's last days were happy.  In
November 1968 he died, in the arms (Maeve told me) of a
nurse called Rosie, to whom he had become attached.
     Unfortunately, Mervyn's increased popularity made him
something of a cult figure.  When alive he had been too
unwell to counter the image of him as a doomed romantic,
tortured by visions of cosmic horror, obsessed with
presentiments of his own tragedy, and now that he was dead
the media continued to picture him in this way.  They
presented an image far removed from the typical reality of
Mervyn with a cat on one arm of his chair, a child on the
other, a cigarette dangling from his lip, listening to the
radio, making jokes and doing, for instance, the drawings
commissioned for The Folio Society's wonderful *Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde* (1948).
     This playful, sardonic man had more of the cheery,
tolerant personality of a Leigh Hunt than the profound
self-involvement of a Byron.  His enjoyment of and respect
for children made him arguably the best child portraitist of
his day.  He sympathised with the injustices children
suffered.  He had a natural, unsentimental sympathy for the
underdog.  He had a strong, essentially Christian sense of
egalitarianism which refused the narrow confines and
necessary evasions of political cant.  Like most
thorough-going romantics, he saw himself as a thorough-going
rationalist.  He had, moreover, a deep respect for the
classical method, which is clear in all his work.  He worked
regularly as a teacher at the Central School of Art and his
classes, specifically those on technique, were stimulating.
The vulgar representation of him as a wild *naif* was in no
way discouraged by Mervyn's refusal to take himself
seriously and pretend, when bored by questions, to have no
truck with analysis of any sort.
     By the mid-1980s, however, with all his work in print,
the range of Mervyn's achievement was generally
acknowledged.  A major exhibition, displaying the whole
spectrum of his talents, was staged at the South Bank and
finally gave the lie to the myth of Mervyn as some kind of
Gothic eccentric.  One of the impressions taken away from
the exhibition was of Peake's enormous sense of comedy.  It
is in the end, I believe, that comedy which most
distinguishes Peake's greatest prose work, just as his
sympathetic but ironic eye distinguishes his best portraits.
     Although inclined to reject any explanations of his
work which smacked of academic abstraction, Mervyn was
nonetheless a thoroughly conscious artist, constantly
refining and increasing his techniques.  That he knew
exactly what he was doing is demonstrated by one of the most
illuminating essays on the art of drawing, *The Craft of the
Lead Pencil* (1946).  In so many ways the quintessential
bohemian - handsome, alert, witty, eloquent, talented,
dandified - he hated airy talk of art or politics and the
elevated status many artists claimed for themselves.  His
talents were so plentiful, his spirit so generous, that he
could write in one of his poems, 'I am too rich already, for
my eyes mint gold'.  He identified himself thoroughly with
'the common man' - his heroes, like Mr Pye, were often very
ordinary indeed.  Fundamentally his imagination was, without
question, a romantic one, but perhaps paradoxically, it is
his humanity, his less idiosyncratic gifts (including the
gift of farce), which distinguished him from other great
visionary novelists like Wyndham Lewis, Zamyatin or Cowper
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 be 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 Hugo or 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 Tolkien nor T.H. White, for instance, has Peake's
monumental complexity or originality, his moral and formal
integrity.  Perhaps that is why Peake was so often praised
by writers most identified with naturalistic novels of
character, like Elizabeth Bowen or Angus Wilson, who also
appreciated the moral qualities of Peake's novels.  He
offers a solid clue to his sentiments (and his method) in
the opening sentence of *Titus Groan*:

     Gormenghast ... would have displayed a certain
     ponderous architectural quality were it possible to
     have ignored ... those mean dwellings that swarmed like
     an epidemic around its outer walls.

     By the first few paragraphs of the first Titus novel
our sympathies are already alerted.  Peake is not merely
writing Romance - he is *examining* Romance.  He is,
perhaps, even finding fault with it, or at least is looking
for flaws in its arguments.  He was of a generation which
had seen the corrupt romanticism of Nazi Germany infect most
of Europe, and his conscience remained essentially that of a
radical Christian.  He admired Bunyan as well as 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 a pretence of activity, a reliance on 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 and a
history already so encrusted with legend and myth that it 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 the
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.
     By the time we finish *Titus Groan*, with all its
wonders, its invention, its vastness, its confident
eloquence, we have become engrossed in the fate of the boy,
Titus, his relatives and retainers.  By now we are
intimately involved with Fuchsia Groan, Lord and Lady Groan,
Nannie Slagg, Cora and Clarice, Rottcodd, Swelter, Flay, the
Prunesquallors and all the others - but chiefly we want to
know what has become of Steerpike.
     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 to the
title indirectly 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.
     Yet poor silly Cora and Clarice, dreamy Irma
Prunesquallor and her ebullient, yet oddly pathetic brother
also receive our concern, because, even though they might
seem grotesque or larger than life, their dreams, if not the
details of their lives, are common to most of us.  Their
passions and desires, sadness and despair, are easily
understood.  There are no airy metaphysics in the Titus
Groan books (unless for farcical effect), no comfy
reassurances (unless from a hypocrite), no universal
railing (unless from a fool).  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 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.
     In the final volume, *Titus Alone*, which was to be the
first of a new set of adventures, Titus at last assumes
centre stage.  In the first two volumes he figures rather
less than Tristram Shandy in the work named after him, but
now he is a kind of wandering innocent, consciously based on
Candide, adrift from his roots in Gormenghast, determined
not to be crushed by the stifling decadence of his
ancestors, yet knowing little of the world beyond the walls.
With the help of the half-mad Muzzlehatch and Juno, who
becomes Titus's lover, he makes a transition from the
hermetic surreality of Gormenghast Castle to the bizarre
realities of a world far more familiar to us.
     *Titus Alone* is packed with images of
authoritarianism, of the Blitz, of Belsen and all the other
horrors which the Allies had witnessed as they moved through
the nightmare the Nazis had made of Europe.  Those who
demanded from Peake a more specific moral examination than
they found in the first two books, found it here.  For me,
in many ways, *Titus Alone* is the best of the three novels,
the most ambitious of them.  It seemed to me that Mervyn was
confronting and trying to reconcile his faith in human
goodness with his personal experience of grotesque and
brutal human evil.
     Sadly, *Titus Alone*'s first edition did not help find
Peake the recognition he deserved.  Langdon Jones, the
writer and composer, discovered while looking through the
original manuscripts that whole segments had been summarily
excised by Mervyn's first editor.  Characters were missing,
important narrative links had gone, and so on.  Jones set to
work restoring the book and, after a year's labour of love,
had managed to bring it as close to Mervyn's intended text
as possible.  This was published, thanks to the good offices
of Penguin Books, as the second edition.
     In spite of its minor flaws, *Titus Alone* reflects
Mervyn's growing confidence with his own distinctive forms
and subject matter, his deeper engagement with the
contemporary world - a world still largely familiar to us
since the social outrages he describes have not disappeared
in past decades.  Indeed, the picture of 'Cardboard City' on
the South Bank could have come straight from a Peake story.
     The fourth Titus book, as one sees from Mervyn's few
notes, would have ranged even further and extended his
powers.  His work was taking on a new, equally creative
vitality, far more informed by anger and a growing belief in
positive resistance to active evil, when the disease began
to overwhelm him.  He made various attempts to continue
Titus's story but his narrative skills were the first to
leave him.  He was fifty-seven when he died, after a
twelve-year illness.  Sadly, he was never to realise that
his work had at last found a wide audience.
     When Maeve died, as courageously as she had lived, in
1983, she had seen her husband's name firmly established as
one of Britain's leading artists.  A fine painter in her own
right, she had devoted herself to Mervyn and her children
with a dedication which had frequently meant giving up her
own ambitions as a painter.  Her last work, however, in the
years following Mervyn's death, has an almost frightening
intensity, as she tried, somehow, to come to terms with
their tragedy.  She, more than any of us, felt the loss of a
man of unique vitality and humanity, as generous in his
personal life as he was with his talent.  She had shared in
his delight at his extraordinary gifts, about which he
always seemed faintly astonished.  She had admired his habit
of self-deprecation, of minimising his gifts in
conversation, and sometimes felt frustration when he offered
them to anyone who liked them, in an act of sharing that
rarely contained any thought of money.  His talents were
used to describe and inform the world in all its variety; to
celebrate the human spirit - and that, I believe, is why
these books are assured of immortality.
     Above all, the Titus stories remain a joyous
celebration, the achievement of a man who delighted in the
world and its works, who believed profoundly in the value of
human individuality and who dedicated himself to recording
it in all its strange and beautiful manifestations.  In
1949, in his introduction to a collection of his drawings he
wrote:

     If I am asked whether all this is not just a little
     'intense' - in other words, if it is suggested that it
     doesn't really *matter*, I say that it matters
     fundamentally.  For one may as well be asked, 'Does
     *life* matter?'  If a man matters, then the highest
     flights of his mind and his imagination matter.  His
     vision matters, his sense of wonder, his vitality
     matters.  It gives lie to the nihilists and those who
     cry 'Woe!' in the streets.  For art is the voice of
     man, naked, militant, and unashamed ...
     ... 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.

     And finally, for all its shadows and dark mysteries,
the world of Titus Groan is indeed richly coloured by the
sun.

(C) Michael Moorcock, 1997

    For an account of life with Mervyn Peake I would
recommend Maeve Peake's own *A World Away* (1970), which is
one of the most moving memoirs of its kind.  Sebastian
Peake, too, has written an interesting account of his father
and family, *A Child of Bliss* (1989), and John Watney has
written a good general biography, *Mervyn Peake* (1976).
John Batchelor's book of the same title (1974) contains more
specific criticism.  *Peake's Progress* (1978), a
chronological compendium of Peake's shorter work, various
drawings and plays, contains biographical and
bibliographical notes by Maeve Peake and is highly
recommended.


