A profusion of Peake

Bellgrove, young Titus and Barquentine by Mervyn Peake. Case designed by Robert Hollingsworth.

I’d thought about posting the covers of my boxed set of Gormenghast paperbacks a couple of years back when there was a flurry of blogospheric attention being given to Penguin cover designs…thought about it then never got round to it. The reason for doing so now is twofold: firstly I’ve been re-reading the books, and secondly some Gormenghast-related news emerged this week which gives this post an additional relevance.

Fuchsia by Mervyn Peake.

The set of Peake paperbacks which Penguin published in 1968 (and their subsequent reprints) were the first editions of Peake’s trilogy which I encountered so I can’t help but regard them as the ones, the only copies I could countenance reading. That may change, however (see below). I’ve no idea how scarce the boxed edition is but the books are reprintings from 1970 so I presume Penguin put out a boxed gift set to make the most of Peake’s posthumous success. I always liked the presentation which is the standard Penguin Modern Classics format of the period, it leaves to you how much you want to regard the books as works of fantasy or simply novels of a rather grotesque and highly imaginative reality. Titus Groan‘s sketch of a glowering and thoroughly unglamorous Fuchsia was a daring choice for a cover intended to lure a newer, younger audience to Peake’s work. The drawing says a great deal about the author’s unsentimental attitude towards his creations; compared to the florid and often delicate covers of the fantasy books being published by Ballantine in the late Sixties (a series which included the Gormenghast trilogy), it seems shockingly unpleasant.

Steerpike and Barquentine by Mervyn Peake.

These covers and Peake’s other sketches of his characters fascinated me for years, they’re almost unique in the way they allow us to peer directly into the writer’s imagination. My only quibble is that they didn’t use one of the other Steerpike drawings for the second book, although another glowering face might have been too much. It’s this latter work I always think of when reading a description of Steerpike, and it’s undoubtedly the one Jon Savage had in mind when he very smartly compared Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols to Peake’s villain in a newspaper article, probably the only time Peake and the punk movement have been connected in any context.

Irma Prunesquallor by Mervyn Peake.

Other writers—Lewis Carroll and Tolkien, for example—have provided sketches of scenes or characters from their fiction but their draughtsmanship is never accomplished enough to do full justice to their literary imagination. With Peake you know that you’re seeing the characters exactly as he imagined them and it’s for that reason that I’m excited by news of a new edition of Gormenghast which will feature more of his drawings. In the same announcement there’s news of a 2011 publication of Titus Awakes, an unpublished sequel to Peake’s trilogy by his wife, Maeve Gilmore, who was an artist when the pair first met, and later the writer of a memoir of her husband, and a book for children, Captain Eustace and the Magic Room.

And while we’re on the subject, when I was in Manchester’s City Art Gallery recently, I noticed that Peake’s large painting The Glassblower (1944), which is part of the gallery’s permanent collection, can now be purchased on a range of cards and prints.

Update: Titus Groan rises again! Sebastian Peake on Titus Awakes.

• Mervynpeake.org
• Peake Studies
• An excellence of Peake | An essay by Michael Moorcock

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Joseph Cavalieri’s stained glass
• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs
• Peake’s Pan
• Buccaneers #1
• Pauline Baynes, 1922–2008
• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput
• The Illustrators of Alice