![]() His mental health, never resilient, had begun to break down completely in 1957, following the failure of his play, The Wit to Woo. He was never to write more than a couple of pages of Titus Awakes, the novel that was to have followed it. Titus Groan was published in 1946, Gormenghast in 1950, the Titus Groan short story “Boy in Darkness” in 1956, and Titus Alone, the last of the Titus Groan books, in 1959. He drew Nuremberg, and the prisoners there waiting to be tried. After the war, he was one of the first civilians to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where thousands remained unburied, and most of the living were too weak and hungry to take care of themselves or others, and was deeply affected by this. His talents recognised, Peake worked briefly as a war artist for the Ministry of Information, before being invalided out of the army in 1943. He had a breakdown, was hospitalised and continued writing Titus Groan from his sick bed. He applied to become a war artist and was initially rejected. His talents as a painter were initially used in painting Private, Officers Only on the doors of latrines. He joined the Royal Artillery in 1940, and began to write Titus Groan as a soldier, given a special dispensation to work on it by his officers. It mocks, and grins, and does not take its subjects seriously even when it takes itself seriously. Perhaps it was because he was distracted, but also perhaps because there is, at its heart, something gloriously disrespectful and out of step with the world in Peake’s art. He fell in love with Sark, failed his end-of-year exams at the RA, and his scholarship ended there. In his fourth year there, Peake went to Sark, the strangest of the Channel Islands and one he was to write about in his 1953 novel of demon and angel, Mr Pye. Peake trained as an artist, first at Croydon School of Art, and then he was awarded a scholarship to study for five years at the Royal Academy. He moved to Surrey, with encephalitis lethargica, the sleepy sickness, incubating in his body. He returned to England from China when he was 12. Peake was born in 1911 in China, the son of Christian missionaries, although he said of the house he grew up in that it might as well have been in Croydon (then a small town, south of London) – a place of utter British normality in Imperial China, where its existence was an abnormality. There are no other characters in literature who live so visually in my mind as the inhabitants of Gormenghast. His creations live and breathe in our heads because we can see them. Only Mervyn Peake paints in my head, using words as his medium. There are authors who have made perfect, plangent sentences, some of which, I suspect, I will be able to recite long after I have forgotten everything else. There are authors out there who have created moving, brilliant books, filled with characters who breathe and feel and love, true. ![]() ![]() The hugeness of Gormenghast, the castle that is a city, the habitation that is the only place there is, is uniquely an artist’s creation. ![]() He drew his characters as he wrote them, sometimes onto the very paper on which he was writing his novel. To begin with and always, the most important thing is that Mervyn Peake was an artist.
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