by Mervyn Peake
Unlike the serious poems, Peake’s nonsense verse makes no reference to contemporary historical events – with the notable exception of the fragment ‘Thank God for a Tadpole’ (p. 42), which is carefully dated 28 August 1939 (and is not exactly nonsense). It could be said, though, that this very rejection of its times by the nonsense verse is a kind of engagement with them. Many of the poems here concern themselves with resistance to entrapment: whether successful, as when the protagonist of ‘Tintinnabulum’ casts aside his soul-destroying bowler, or when Sweet Pighead decides to defy popular prejudice against her appearance with ‘unflinching courage’; or unsuccessful, as when the ‘healthy, happy man’ Footfruit is converted to dismal conformity with the ‘civilization’ of capitalism, and reduced to wretched ill-health in the process. Peake’s nonsense, like the other products of his imagination, is an act of defiance against the violence of war, the market forces that made his existence as an artist so tenuous, and the affectations and double standards of middle-class life, with which he seems to have had a love–hate relationship not unlike the feeling Titus has for the stifling ritual of Gormenghast castle in Peake’s most celebrated works, the Titus novels.
This brings us to what is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the nonsense verse: its affinity with the adventures of Titus Groan. Nonsense verse is the poetry of Gormenghast – the massive, self-sufficient fortress which stands at the heart of the Titus novels, and which casts its shadow over the hero of the sequence long after he has shaken its dust from his feet and set out for the wilderness of factories, parties, zoos and homeless shelters that lies beyond. It’s nonsense verse that Titus’s sister Fuchsia reads in her secret attic hideaway, taking refuge in its triumphant non-compliance with the unbending ritual that governs her life as a daughter of the House of Groan. It’s nonsense verse that Titus’s father, Lord Sepulchrave, spouts when his library is burned to the ground by the upstart Steerpike, an atrocity that drives the book-loving Earl to madness and death. It’s nonsense verse that the Castle Poet intones when he pokes his head out unexpectedly from one of the windows of the ancient fastness, like an animated fragment of its architecture. Later, in the third of the Titus books, in which the young protagonist escapes from the castle and finds himself wandering a landscape full of capitalists, self-servers, vagrants and rebels, every part of his new environment seems to possess its own peculiar brand of nonsense poetry. The Titus books could in fact be described as an extended meditation on nonsense and the unique perspective on the world it lends us – the many uses to which it may be put, as various as the uses to which surrealism and other avant-garde forms were being co-opted in the artistic milieu of the 1940s and 1950s.
Just how central nonsense verse is to the castle is made clear at the end of Gormenghast when the Castle Poet takes on the role of Master of Ritual: custodian, that is, of the giant books that contain the only authoritative record of the complex and crazy rituals by which the castle community is regulated. The poem this Poet recites on his first appearance in Titus Groan, ‘Linger Now with Me, Thou Beauty’ (pp. 48–9 in this book), marks him out as an indolent ‘wastrel’ who takes no account of time or the castle’s economy, rapt in perpetual contemplation of his own aimless verses (‘the splendour / Of [his] vision’) and of his desire for an unidentified ‘Love’ to share them with. By taking on the mantle of Master of Ritual, the Poet ensures that other wastrels will be able to go on leading an equally aimless existence. This is because despite the byzantine, pointless rituals that control it – or perhaps because of them – Gormenghast constitutes a haven for those who seek shelter from the remorseless logic of the world outside: a logic that led to war, genocide, book-burning, and the brutal monotony of army life during the years when Peake was writing the first of the Titus novels, Titus Groan, between 1941 and 1946. The castle’s attics, staircases and crumbling archways offer abundant secret spaces where the likes of Fuchsia, Titus and the Poet may construct their imaginative worlds: little self-contained visual or verbal bubbles, which resolutely refuse all connection with the environment in which they are fashioned, whether Gormenghast itself or the war-torn Britain that gave it birth. Poetry is as much a part of Gormenghast’s ritual as it is of the individual lives of its inhabitants. The masque figure of a Horse reads from a book of poems during the public celebration of Titus’s tenth birthday. Dr Prunesquallor reads in his study from a book of poems written by Fuchsia in an exercise book that closely resembles the nonsense notebooks we described at the beginning of this Introduction. Sometimes the poems are inscribed in a ‘heavy, ponderous and childish hand – sometimes in a quick, excited calligraphy, full of crossings-out and misspellings’, just like Peake’s own manuscripts. It’s as if Gormen ghast were the one space in which Peake’s works could be wholly at home, a safe house from the various conflicts beyond its boundaries, and from the marketplace where his poetic and artistic visions were all too often seen as self-indulgent irrelevances.
Among Fuchsia’s verses, one in particular catches Prune-squallor’s eye, ‘How White and Scarlet Is that Face’ (p. 157), in which she confesses her fascination with the deadly Steerpike. The fact that the poem refers to something outside itself – like Peake’s poem ‘Thank God for a Tadpole’ – signals the threat that Steerpike poses to the castle, whose identity, like that of the nonsense verse it nurtures, depends on its self-sufficiency, its resistance to the forces of the marketplace or the dictator’s podium. Steerpike first enters Fuchsia’s life in Titus Groan when he climbs into her attic refuge and reads a nonsense poem there – ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’ – while munching on a half-eaten pear he finds beside it. The poem gives him an insight into Fuchsia’s psychology, and he uses this insight to begin the long process of seducing her; a process that ends in Gormenghast with Fuchsia’s suicide, when she realizes that the man she had thought of as a poet – who wooed her with poems, perhaps plagiaristic of the nonsense verses he read in her attic – is in fact a sadistic murderer and would-be totalitarian despot, an infiltrator from the nightmarish ‘real’ world of the 1940s.
We are not permitted to read all the nonsense poetry we hear about in the Titus books. The verses spouted by the Horse at Titus’s birthday party remain inaudible to the reader; of Fuchsia’s poems we read only the one about Steerpike; and when Fuchsia refuses to hear Steerpike’s last poem to her we lose the chance to judge his skill as a ventriloquist, aping the kinds of rhymes that are closest to her heart. In this edition, however, you will find several poems that never found their way into the published pages of Peake’s great sequence. The song promised by the chef Swelter to his apprentices, which he never sings, is here in its entirety (‘Swelter’s Song’, pp. 53–6). So is the lullaby sung to the keeper of the Hall of the Bright Carvings, Rottcodd, by his mother (‘White Mules at Prayer’, pp. 124–6); and a lascivious lyric declaimed by the Castle Poet to the Countess of Groan (‘Song of the Castle Poet’, p. 156). The ballad ‘It Worries Me to Know’ recalls the relationship between the schoolmaster Bellgrove and Irma Prunesquallor in the second Titus novel and ends with a seeming allusion to the flood that closes it (‘All these and many more float past / Across the roofs of Gormenghast’, p. 165). There are three songs sung by Nannie Slagg to the infant Titus in a radio adaptation of Titus Groan, as well as a lyric for Fuchsia from the same source (pp. 183–4). Nonsense verse is the poetry of Gormenghast; but lovers of the Titus books will find here a great deal more than those novels, fine as they are, will have prepared them for. We hope you enjoy the adventure of reading them as much as we enjoyed the adventure of seeking them out.
R.W. Maslen
2011
A Note on the Text
This edition was compiled under rather unusual circumstances. In February 2010, after months of negotiation, Sebastian Peake succeeded in acquiring the rights to the material contained in Mervyn Peake’s Book of Nonsense, which he planned to include in an edition of his father’s collected nonsense. (It is a testament to the enduring popularity o
f these poems that A Book of Nonsense has remained in print for nearly forty years.) Sebastian naturally hoped to see the new edition prepared in time for the centenary of Peake’s birth in 2011. The problem was that the entire Peake archive – all the documents preserved by the Peake family relating to Mervyn Peake’s career as novelist, playwright and poet – was at that point being held by Sotheby’s in Bond Street, awaiting collection by the British Library, which had just bought it for the nation. Once at the Library, the papers would not be accessible until cataloguing and preservation were complete, sometime in mid-2011. From the moment when Sebastian obtained the rights to A Book of Nonsense there was about a fortnight before the Library took possession of the papers; not much time for exhaustive quarrying of the archive. After discussing the situation with Peter Selley of Sotheby’s, Sebastian arranged for Rob Maslen to travel to London and consult the Peake papers in Sotheby’s Bond Street office, where in the end he spent only two full days checking the accuracy of the published nonsense verse against the original manuscripts and discovering new, unpublished verses for inclusion in the edition. Since that time, both editors have scrupulously checked the texts of all the poems of which they have copies or for which there exist authoritative printed versions proof-read by Peake himself, but we have been unable to re-check the material unique to the Peake archive while it was being catalogued and conserved by the British Library. Any inaccuracies or omissions in our transcriptions will be corrected, we trust, in future editions of this volume. In the meantime we can only assure readers that we have done our very best to provide the most accurate texts we could in the time available.
Original punctuation and spelling have been preserved throughout, except where this was thought to make Peake’s sense (or nonsense) difficult to follow. Punctuation has occasionally been added and some obvious errors corrected, for the same reason. All editorial amendments have been recorded in the Notes.
References and Further Reading
Listed below are all the editions, criticism and biographies cited in the notes, along with other texts we have found helpful in writing the Introduction and thinking about Peake’s nonsense. For a full list consult the Peake bibliography on the website of Peake Studies (http://peakestudies.com/contents.htm). This includes an authoritative ‘Title and First-Line Index to Peake’s Poems’.
Editions are listed in chronological order. Unless otherwise indicated, the place of publication is London.
Editions of Peake’s Work
Ride a Cock-horse (Chatto and Windus, 1940)
Shapes and Sounds (Chatto and Windus, 1941)
Rhymes Without Reason (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1944)
Titus Groan (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1946)
Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions) (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948)
The Glassblowers (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1950)
Gormenghast (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1950)
Mr Pye (Heinemann, 1953)
‘Alice and Tenniel and Me’, radio talk, The Listener, 23 December 1953 (incomplete); the full text was printed in The Mervyn Peake Review, no. 6 (Spring 1978), pp. 20–24
Figures of Speech (Gollancz, 1954)
Titus Alone (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959; second English edition (revised), 1970)
The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (Dent, 1960)
A Book of Nonsense (Peter Owen, 1972)
The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (Davis Poynter, 1974)
Writings and Drawings, ed. Maeve Gilmore and Shelagh Johnson (London and New York: Academy Editions/St Martin’s Press, 1974)
Peake’s Progess, ed. Maeve Gilmore (Allen Lane, 1978; first paper-back edition with corrections by G. Peter Winnington, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). Contains Peake’s plays The Wit to Woo (performed 1957) and Noah’s Ark (not yet performed)
Collected Poems, ed. R.W. Maslen, Fyfield Books (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008)
Manifold Basket (unfinished play), ed. G. Peter Winnington, Peake Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (April 2009), pp. 3–32
Biographies and Memoirs
Batchelor, John, Mervyn Peake: A Biographical and Critical Exploration (Duckworth, 1974)
Gilmore, Maeve, A World Away: A Memoir of Mervyn Peake (Gollancz, 1970)
Peake, Sebastian, A Child of Bliss: Growing Up with Mervyn Peake (Oxford: Lennard, 1989)
Smith, Gordon, Mervyn Peake: A Personal Memoir (Gollancz, 1984)
Winnington, G. Peter, Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake (London and Chester Springs: Peter Owen, 2000); second edition (revised), retitled Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies: The Illustrated Biography (2009)
— (ed.), Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (London and Chester Springs, PA: Peter Owen, 2006)
Yorke, Malcolm, Mervyn Peake: My Eyes Mint Gold. A Life (John Murray, 2000)
Criticism
Barford, Duncan, ‘“Madness Can Be Lovely”: The Range and Meaning of Mervyn Peake’s Nonsense Verse’, Peake Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1994), pp. 29–52. The most thorough critical and theoretical appreciation of Peake’s nonsense to date.
Batchelor, John, Mervyn Peake: A Biographical and Critical Exploration (Duckworth, 1974). Chapter 6, on Titus Groan, has a brief mention of Peake’s nonsense verse (pp. 78–9), but it is not analysed in the excellent chapter on his poetry (Chapter 10).
Betjeman, John, review of Rhymes Without Reason, Daily Herald, 13 December 1944, p. 2. Betjeman describes it as ‘Quite the outstanding book I have for review… I have bought more than one copy, particularly for the last poem’ (i.e. ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’).
Le Guin, Ursula, ‘Peake’s Progress, by Mervyn Peake’, Dancing at the Edge of the World: thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York etc.: Harper and Row, 1989), pp. 273–5. This short but astute review recognizes the nonsense verse as being central to Peake’s achievement: ‘He was a master of nonsense to equal Edward Lear.’
Mills, Alice, Stuckness in the Fiction of Mervyn Peake (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York, 2006). Chapter 4, ‘Nonsense, Stuckness and the Abject in Titus Groan’, pays attention to the nonsense verse.
Winnington, G. Peter, The Voice of the Heart: The Working of Mervyn Peake’s Imagination (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006). Discusses Peake’s poetry in every chapter.
Complete Nonsense
From Figures of Speech. The Key to the drawing is on p. 234.
I Saw a Puffin
I saw a Puffin
In the Bay of Baffin
Sittin on Nuffin
And it was Laffin.
(c. 1918)
The Song of Lien Tsung
Although you may not understand it
I’ve always yearned to be a bandit;
It may seem vaguely funny and it
May of course seem more so
But now that from my love I’m taken
I’m like an egg without its bacon –
And so strange conflicts grip my shaken
Yellow torso.
(January 1930)
Railway Ditties
Waddon
Whad’n earth would I do if I lived in Waddon?
Whad’n Earth would I do?
(c. 1930)
Thornton Heath
I always cast a Mental Wreath
Upon the Lines at Thornton Heath
In Pity for the Dead who climb
The train each morning in which I’m.
(c. 1930)
Norbury
Snobbery S’Norbury
Suffers from fobbery
Each little strawberry
Costs you a bobbery
(c. 1930)
Streatham and Balham
Oh why is Streatham Common
And Balham so élite?
Because on mats in Balham
You always wipe your feet –
While through the Halls of Streatham
One carries half the street.
(c. 1930)
Green Park
What could be greener
Than Green Park?<
br />
I’ve never seen-a
Park that’s greener
Than Green Park!
(August 1930)
You Can Never Be Sure of Your Birron
You can never be sure of your Birron,
But of this be you blooming well sure,
A Birron is always a Birron
Enceforward, evermore.
(early 1930s)
From Figures of Speech. The Key to the drawing is on p. 234.
Beard of My Chin
Beard of my chin, white product of my jaw,
Pour through the dizzy height, white offshoot, pour!
Down the abyss, most fertile growth, cascade –