Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211

by TTA Press Authors

  Moorcock—a writer seemingly captivated by the energies and myths of London, the city in which he was born 67 years ago—has lived in a small town in Texas for more than a decade. I asked to what extent life in the Lone Star State has influenced his outlook and his work.

  "It's been a profound education and I have good friends in Texas, but I'm a cosmopolitan by disposition and this is, it has to be said, a provincial place to be. And from a simple, literary point of view, there are more stories—a great variety of stories—where there is a greater concentration of people. If I sat on a bench in small-town Texas I'd be lucky if I saw two people go by, and I'd know pretty much their whole history. If I sit on a bench in Paris, a hundred or more people will go by, I'd know none of them and I could imagine what their stories might be. What's more I'd be somewhere where the unexpected was more likely to occur, so my own story would also change.

  "I don't like being too safe, too comfortable, too predictable or to have too much of a routine. Still, I'm doing my best with what I have. And I still think of good stories in response to contemporary events and I still keep my optimism, which has always been rooted in the pleasure I take in the kindness of strangers.

  "Being wheelchair bound in Paris as I was a couple of years ago certainly supported that faith in human nature—there's nothing like being in a weak position or needing the help of others in order to discover how decent most people are. Especially when someone hasn't frightened them. That's what I despise most about the likes of Bush and Blair, who use the fear of fear itself to manipulate us. I think Franklin D. Roosevelt's slogan remains the best political phrase I know, and it has inspired me pretty much since I started writing. One of my earliest books, my second SF novel, The Winds of Limbo (aka The Fireclown) quotes FDR's phrase about ‘fear itself’ at the beginning. But the answer to fear, of course, is not avoidance of what might threaten you but confrontation. As a kid I had terrible nightmares. I found that by staring down the witches I could banish them a lot faster than if I put my head under the pillow."

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  Copyright © 2007 Andrew Hedgecock

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  LOVERS—A Memoir of Mervyn & Maeve Peake by Michael Moorcock

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  "The fantastic has become respectable again. All those old hippies who liked art nouveau, surrealism and symbolism, for instance, are frequently in positions where they can pass their enthusiasms on. It's all fashion and snobbery and that's got a lot to do with economics, of course. Since Lord of the Rings became identified with big bucks, fantasy has become even more respectable. Even allegory is back in fashion. There is no book, however, which resembles Gormenghast, while there are many books which resemble Lord of the Rings.

  "Peake, however, remains a confrontational artist and will never have the success that writers like Tolkien have. Peake is very much an English one-off—sui generic and thus able and likely to have influence over a very wide field. Writers and artists can be influenced by him but never really imitate him successfully."

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  INTRODUCTION

  Time Travelling: Mr and Mrs Peake Hold a Party, Autumn 1965

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  IT'S ONE OF MANY similar parties held at Drayton Gardens, South Kensington during the 1960s and 1970s. The large family house is fantastic. Almost a scene from Performance, only more exotic. Everything in it seems animated. There are murals, painted screens, stuffed birds. Even the artist's dummies are dressed for the occasion. Candles and soft lamps illuminate the house from basement to top floors. They cast lively shadows. There are bursts of laughter. Music everywhere. Light classical here, modern jazz there, a bit of Beatles, some R&B. On the stairs sits a melancholy John Braine, author of Room at the Top, squirming with distaste when advanced upon by a riotous Quentin Crisp in all his flouncing glory. Colin Spencer, cook and novelist, sits quietly weeping to himself in a bedroom. Intense art critics in Carnaby Street suits exchange enthusiasms over firmly gripped wine glasses. Pretty young actresses talk about lost, found or potential jobs while long-haired young writers pass a joint and marvel at the painted walls.

  Over all this presides a bewildered king, his huge, handsome head lifted in frowning attention, a man whose massive black eyebrows have patches of grey, whose hair has become a helmet of white. It's a Celtic head. It could belong to Robert Graves's brother. Possibly a Roman emperor. Heavy lids. Sardonic, sensuous mouth. There's a half-understanding smile on his face which changes back to bewilderment as he stretches a powerful, palsied hand towards someone he thinks he recognises. He's dressed in velvet and there are heavy rings on his fingers. A blast of music drowns the remark someone has just made. He leans to listen, trying to phrase a reply. Monosyllables form with difficulty on his lips. His eyes brighten as young women try to make conversation with him. He could be a fallen angel. His accent is cultured, belonging to another age, almost Edwardian. From time to time his shaking arm lifts a cigar to his lips. “Oh, really?” he says, clearly not understanding what's said to him. His expression turning to one of mild panic, his eyes search for someone in the crowd, fixing at last upon a handsome woman with honey-coloured hair and hazel eyes who tilts a man's top hat over her face and sings along with the record. “No, no regrets...” She also holds a cigar in one hand, a wine glass in the other. She has a feather boa over her shoulders. Some of the young men surround her, laughing and congratulating her on her costume. Their colourful clothes give them the appearance of Shakespearian courtiers. She makes a joke or two. Then in turn her eyes look to find the white-haired man standing by the stairs. Her expression softens. She moves towards him.

  "Feeling all right, darling?"

  "Oh, yes, yes, yes,” he murmurs. “Perfectly. Never felt better.” He's relieved however when she links her arm through his and like a stately Guinevere leads him into one of the busy rooms. But he's no King Arthur. In appearance he's a magnificent, bewildered Lear. He's Mervyn Peake a few years before his final removal from this world of chaotic beauty into a world of clinical ugliness and perpetual pain.

  This scene, for all its apparent melodrama, is the truth of it. Anyone who was there would tell you the same. The Peake parties were lush and rich but never self-conscious. The PreRaphaelite enthusiasms of the ‘60s, which brought Melvyn Bragg into a room dressed as if for the set of Isodora, which he was then writing, in black velvet, with silver rings, married well with the dark Fitrovian colours of Mervyn's canvasses, though Peake had no particular enthusiasm for the previous century. His preference was for the present, for Soho and the post-war world of eccentric Londoners whose portraits he collected in what he called his head-hunting sessions. At this stage of his life, however, because it reflected the concerns of his generation, his painting was somewhat out of fashion. England had entered one of her uncertain, self-examining periods of nostalgia, looking back to the fin-de-siecle and Edwardian social certainties.

  Mervyn was dramatically handsome and his wife Maeve was dramatically beautiful. They had been a remarkable couple for years, famous for their good looks, though they had not mixed a great deal with the fashionable bohemians of their day. They had spent quite a lot of time away from London, in Sark in particular. They had come to prefer each other's company. Although an accomplished painter, she had put aside her own work for the most part, concentrating on her children. He drew her and painted her a lot. She is there in everything he did. He wrote her poems when he was taken into the army during the Second World War, he produced fictional versions of her in his Titus Groan, which he wrote when he was in the army. On leave, he would draw her and the children. He was an inexpert soldier. He had a mild breakdown, which kept him away from overseas conflict. Eventually, he was commissioned as a war artist. His pictures of Maeve are not exaggerated any more than the poems for and about her, of which he wrote so many.

  We know what she looked like from his work. He was an accurate portraitist. While certainly posed to bring out the subject's mos
t dramatic features Bill Brandt's photographs of Mervyn did not lie either. Mervyn was as romantically handsome as any film star of the day.

  Otherwise Mervyn and Maeve Peake were conventionally English in their formality while being unselfconscious romantics to the core. They did not posture. They did not cultivate the grotesque or the bizarre, though Mervyn might be attracted to eccentric-looking subjects. They were not burdened by publicity and addictions, as some of their contemporaries like Dylan Thomas were. They got on better with the self-effacing Graham Greene than the flamboyant Quentin Crisp.

  Contrary to Crisp's melodramatic pronouncements towards the end of his life, Mervyn was not mad, nor Maeve neurotic. They were conscientious artists who put in a full day's work, pretty much with no time off, except for the usual holidays with the children. While erroneously assuming all their offspring would be artists of some kind too, they nonetheless cared for their children and did their best for them according to the conventions of their day, sending them to schools they thought would help them adapt better to the real world than they had themselves. They were often unable to contain their sense of life in conventional ways, but simple romantics was all they were, in an un-English world of reticence and rain.

  I think it's fair to say, however, that they were somewhat unworldly. Certainly I thought they were and in my own awkward way I did my best to help them negotiate the harsh world I believed I understood better. I began my teenage career as a practical working journalist. I admired those who practiced art for art's sake, but I was used to working strictly to earn a living, getting commissions and being paid a decent fee for a decent piece. It took me a while to come to understand their mind-set, though I always respected it because I was already convinced that Mervyn, who had been my hero for some time, was the first authentic genius I had ever met.

  Their boys were almost exactly my age, with a year or so between them. Sebastian and I were about 16 when we first met. Fabian was a little younger. Clare was away at school most of the time. I would meet her occasionally on holidays, a leggy coltish pretty girl who had much of her mother's directness, engaging wholly with whatever she was doing. As she grew up I developed a strong brotherly affection for her while my early relationship with the boys was perhaps a little distant. I think they were all a bit bemused by my enthusiasm for their father's work, my sometimes inappropriate efforts to find him jobs when it seemed most of the people who had employed him had deserted him. When I offered him a commission doing thumbnail chapter headings for the Sexton Blake Library, of which I was a sub-editor, it was only because I knew I could get him some decent money and he had done similar sketches for Radio Times, which did not, to me, seem very different. He and Maeve had been very polite to me and I was never once embarrassed by them. When I looked back later, I could see that the idea of working for a commercial detective story magazine, even then well-known as ‘the office boys’ Sherlock Holmes’ would have seemed a bit of a come down for a man who was still managing to illustrate the occasional book for the Folio Society.

  They saw their children as independent creatures and admired them as much for their beauty as their brains. Mervyn loved to draw them, but they became reluctant to sit as they grew older. Their animals, too, were embraced, involved intimately with them, enjoyed with almost greedy relish for what they were. To me, the Peakes didn't seem to distinguish much between humans and the higher mammals. They had no habits of repression, just old-fashioned good manners. Generally they thought it proper to live and let live. As artists they sought to record the world and record their own passionate responses to it. The idea of controlling anyone or anything other than their work was alien to them. And as reason fell away from him with successive operations on Mervyn's poor, but deeply sane, brain, so did their means of shaping and understanding their world.

  Little was known of Parkinson's Disease in those days. Alzheimer's had not been identified. Everything was seen as a sort of aberration, what they would usually call ‘premature senility'. The only treatment was surgery. They wondered if he had picked up a virus during the ‘flu epidemic which followed the First World War, if he had contracted something while in Belsen. Their method of coping with it was through operations to cut away the frontal lobes in the hope this would somehow help. Mervyn was a victim of the desperate medical ignorance of his day. Today, neither he nor any of us would have suffered as much. Maeve, though always her own woman, had come to take strength from Mervyn, whose reason was never diseased and who could be an inspiring teacher, as his Craft of the Lead Pencil testifies. Bit by bit the surgeon's scalpel sliced away his capacity to order his world, finishing any hope of helping him recover to shape again his great, natural genius into words and pictures.

  I knew them both pretty well, I think. I was very young when we first met. I liked their children and shared their pain and confusion from Mervyn's first exhausted, bewildered intimations of his illness to the last years of institutions and terrible surgery. As an only child brought up by a divorced mother, I was doubtless attracted to them as the family I'd always desired and Maeve was in some ways the mother I would have created for myself if I'd had the chance. Mervyn was never a father figure, though he was an inspiration. Both of them were kind to me, even though I must have seemed very strange and amusing. They made me welcome. I saw a great deal of them. I got on well with Sebastian and Fabian and Clare with whom I shared many enthusiasms, since we were contemporaries. I think it is fair to say that I came to love them, perhaps because I was impressed by their own love for each other, a love which became unbalanced at the end but which never faltered, even when Mervyn pursued affairs or when Maeve wept with despair at his gradual withdrawal into his own besieged mind. I think I was a witness to a great love. I think I was privileged. I think I was marked by their relationship forever, by its intensity, its tragedy and the terrible injustice of it. Like them I had developed few guards against the world. I was direct and I was passionate. Because of my early successes I had never had to develop much in the way of self-protection. Like Maeve I was blunt in my judgements, fiery in my dislikes and direct in my habits. By the time I came to know Mervyn he was already in the early stages of his illness and I did not associate myself very closely with him, save that I shared the same kind of mind, the same way of looking at the world in symbolic, visionary terms, even if I lacked his power to create such splendidly, credible, Dickensian grotesques. For years I saw myself as a sort of craftsman and a middle-man whose job was to keep his work (and that of others) before the world, and I did this in a variety of ways, getting what was unpublished published or republished and regularly writing articles about him to remind the public who he was. Hilary Bailey, my ex-wife, helped Maeve produce her own touching memoir, A World Away. Our friend Oliver Caldecott, who was determined to bring Peake back into print in the best and most effective way, became his publisher. Maeve became a fairly regular illustrator for New Worlds. My friend Giles Gordon published A World Away and my acquaintance Anthony Burgess continued to be an enthusiastic publicist for Peake. Eventually, by the late ‘60s, I was instrumental, with Oliver Caldecott, in getting his great trilogy published in Penguin Modern Classics (introduced by Burgess) and was the catalyst who brought Langdon Jones and Maeve Peake together so that Jones, a close friend of mine who was primarily a composer and musician, could restore the final volume, Titus Alone, to something very close to what Peake had intended.

  I am proud of what I helped to do and have always wanted to give credit to those who also helped and have, for one reason or another, not received the credit that was their due. We reprinted a number of Peake fragments in New Worlds which had not appeared anywhere else and through that magazine were able to introduce a great number of readers to his work. Another person who did the same, some years later, was the brilliant David Glass, whose theatre company produced an outstandingly good version of the first two Titus books and also introduced them to a new generation, a new kind of audience. I have been asked several times to write
a biography of Peake, but had no desire to do so. Biographies and autobiographies never really manage to give the whole story and I had no desire to tell a partial story which might contradict someone else's memories, but probably do have something new to say. To make sure that not only my impressions are offered here I have asked Sebastian, Fabian and Clare Peake to give their opinions and reminiscences of the times I remember. I visited Mervyn at most of the institutions where he was sent during the periods when Maeve was no longer able to look after him and, with my wife Linda, I saw a fair amount of Maeve in her own final years. Linda remembers Maeve with particular affection for she was one of the few Englishwomen to welcome her and put her at her ease when she first arrived from America. While Maeve rarely disguised her dislike or suspicion of the wives and girlfriends I brought to see her, behaving in some ways like an aristocratic mother or aunt, equally she could be wonderfully gracious and generous if she liked them.

  The idea of this memoir was first put to me by Sebastian Peake and it seemed that I might be able to do it, on the understanding that it would be subjective; a labour, in fact, of love. When Max Eilenberg of Methuen showed enthusiasm I decided it was time to do something. If readers find it sentimental, then it probably is. It is, as I've said, subjective. It is a book about the love of two people who could sometimes be ‘difficult', though I never really saw that side of them. I can only describe the side I knew of my relationship with the Peakes and their love for each other.

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  The memoir was commissioned by Denoel, France and will appear next year.

  Copyright © 2007 Michael Moorcock

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  LONDON, MY LIFE! or THE SEDENTARY JEW—Michael Moorcock