Mervyn Peake, like David Jones, worked across literature and visual art, with the two kinds of work complementing each other. Born in 1911 in Jiangxi province, just as the Qing dynasty was falling as a result of the Xinhai, his father and mother were congregationalist missionaries. Briefly based in Britain from 1914 to 1916, the family returned to Tianjin, a port city less than an hour by high speed train today from Beijing, where Peake attended the local grammar school. In 1922 they returned to the UK, where he was to be mainly based for the rest of his life. Training as an artist, partly at the Royal Academy Schools, Peake was to serve in the Second World War as a war artist, before a nervous breakdown incapacitated him. From the early 1960s he suffered from dementia. He died in 1968.
Peake is remembered today as author of one of the key works of the imagination from the 20th century, and for the elaborate world he constructed in particular in the Gormenghast series. This relates the story of Titus Groan, 77th Earl of Groan, and Lord of the eponymous castle. In Peake’s life time he issued three novels – `Titus Groan’ (1946), `Gormengast’ (1950) and `Titus Alone’ (1959). Other associated works have since been published, made from material unpublished in his life. The elaborate plot and setting of these works have been compared, often favourably, with the other important contemporaneous trilogy of fantasy, Tolkien’s `Lord of the Rings’ – though critics as formidable as Harold Bloom have ranked Peake’s work far higher in terms of purely literary merit.
The gothic castle of Titus has been compared to memories Peake must have had from his childhood of the city of Beijing and its labyrinthine imperial buildings and great ancient walls – walls which were to be mostly demolished (apart from a few gates which still survive) in the Maoist reconstruction of the city during the 1950s. Parts of them however (at least the third volume) were physically written in the village of Smarden, near Ashford in Kent – a place of almost impossible placidity and ancient quaintness with its famously vast church (compared to a barnyard because of the size of its Medieval roof) and the sharp bend in the road that disrupts traffic passing through. In 1950 Peake purchased `The Grange’. Over this period he and his family lived a restless life, moving from Sussex to Chelsea, from Chelsea to the island of Sark (from 1946 to 1949, where he seems to have been happiest) and then back to London before the move to Kent. In 1952, the moved again back to London.
Whatever else Smarden meant to Peake, the purchase of the large Georgian house along Smarden Bell Road for £6,000 (approximately £220,000 in 2020 values) proved ruinous for his finances, with them having to sell the place for a loss. As one study put it, `Most things in life the Peakes appear to have done from impulse, which often involved disastrous lack of forethought – as for instance the purchase of the hose at Smarden, which ruined their finances for years until Peake’s brother agreed to help pay off their overdraft.’ As wife subsequently commented, `I think Mervyn had no idea, and never would have, what interest meant. It was just to be interested. ‘ (Colin Manlove, `Modern Fantasies: Five Studies’, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1978, reprinted 2020 edition, 209).
The time in Smarden was brief for Peake, but coincided with what was probably his most productive decade. It was during this time that he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and won the Heineman Prize. The remainder of his life, with breakdowns later in the decade, the onset of Parkinson’s disease, and long separations from his wife Maeve Gilmore, was not so happy. His final years were spent in a care home.