Mervyn Peake and the Art of Strange Beauty

Updates, illustrations, and the joy of discovering a visionary

Greetings - happy Friday! The sun is shining here in South London, albeit intermittently. Hope it is where you are, too.

This issue has:

1. Writer’s updates ✍️

2. A selective overview of the work of Mervyn Peake

3. Details of a chance to see me speak in London later this month ✨

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Writer’s Updates ✍️

A simple update:

1. I am rolling my new Substack titled Brain Stoker, back into this one.

2. Go Prefigure and Brain Stoker will sit side-by-side as a sub-sections

This is because I learned that it’s too cognitively demanding to author two blogs. (Some argue that “I am multitudes” became a cry for help for the perennially online - am sure there’s something in that.)

A reminder about what these sub-sections are about:

• Brain Stoker is focused on ideas, theory and “big picture thinking”

• Go Prefigure is focused on everyday activism and “being the change”

Importantly, you are in complete control over what content you receive, and have the opportunity to sign up to one, or both.

Experiments are how we learn. Glad I tried it out!

Onwards.

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Today’s Brain Stoker is about - gasp - not a theorist, but an illustrator, author and poet. I love art history, and poetry, as much as theory, and long-term readers will remember we looked at the French surrealist poet Paul Eluard (over two editions - here’s part two). I am a firm believer in interdisciplinarity as a value. No silos here.

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The drawings and poetry of Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake and his wife, Maeve Gilmore, drawing one another

Last month I had the pleasure of attending a paid lecture at the British Library on The drawings of Mervyn Peake. The BL has an exhibition on at the moment on the theme of Fantasy, and Peake fits within that. The talk was by Rob Maslen, co-founder and formerly co-director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow.

Firstly, I cannot recommend enough the lectures there. Whilst I hesitated to pay for a lecture, I quickly concluded they are worth it. British Library lectures are like the best Radio 4 discussions, only improved about three times by the energy of the speaker in the room, and their accompanying slides. Unlike literature festivals where the authors may be famous but they also have a book to plug, these lectures attract speakers with a real depth of knowledge. They are doing it for pure intellectual love.

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How I discovered Peake

My discovery of Peake was not, like almost everyone else, from the Gormenghast 🏰series. When I mentioned in the Q&A that I was new to his work, a white-haired lady sitting near me said afterwards that I was “lucky” and in for a treat. No, I had simply seen a copy of his drawings collection (pictured above) at Bloomsbury Book Fair some months ago and snapped it up: this had ticked some book-buying boxes, that

1. I could enjoy it quickly, thus avoiding the guilt (books-not-read) pile, and

2. I was instantly drawn to Peake’s playfulness and variety. There was caricature, fable, fantasy. The cover had a somewhat alien and feline head, atop a bare bust, somewhat Sphynx-like, outsider-art, symbolic yet unserious.

While I cannot do justice to his work, maybe I will introduce a few of you to him who, like me, were unfamiliar.

Preamble over, let’s dive in.