Complete Nonsense

by Mervyn Peake, Robert W. Maslen (Editor), G. Peter Winnington (Editor)

I cannot give the Reasons,
I only sing the Tunes:
The sadness of the Seasons,
The madness of the Moons.

I cannot be didactic
Or lucid but I can
Be quite obscure and practic-
Ally marzipan
from I Cannot Give the Reasons

"Nonsense," wrote Mervyn Peake, "can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. It's magic." Peake (1911-68) is one of the great English nonsense poets, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. His verses "glitter with divine lunacy", propelling the reader to places where malicious bowler hats threaten their owners, a cake is chased across the sea by a rakish knife, aunts become flatfish or live exclusively on sphagnum moss.

Fully annotated with a detailed introduction, Complete Nonsense contains all the poems and illustrations from Peake's Book of Nonsense (1972), with forty unpublished poems discovered poems discovered in manuscripts and thirty from uncollected sources, including all the nonsense verses from his novels. It reprints complete - for the first time and in colour - the words and images from Rhymes Without Reason (1944), and Peake's comic masterpiece Figures of Speech (1954). All the poems have been newly edited by Robert Maslen, editor of Peake's Collected Poems (Carcanet), and Peter Winnington, the leading Peake scholar and biographer.

Cover Painting: Mervyn Peake, Sensitive, Seldom and Sad (1944)

Genres: Poetry

242 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, though the Titus books would be more accurate: the three works that exist were the beginning of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, following his protagonist Titus Groan from cradle to grave, but Peake's untimely death prevented completion of the cycle, which is now commonly but erroneously referred to as a trilogy. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.

Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children ("Letters from a Lost Uncle"), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye, a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.

Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. A collection of these drawings is still in the possession of his family. Although he gained little popular success in his lifetime, his work was highly respected by his peers, and his friends included Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. His works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Imperial War Museum.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give the poems on their own a four-star rating, but Peake's magnificent illustrations elevate the book to a five-star status.

That's not to denigrate the poems, many of which are favourites and, in isolation, would be five-stars, but some are more curiosities, included because this is complete nonsense.

There are some beautifully coloured illustrations included and these, for me, were alone worth the price of the book. I've also wanted to see Peake's Figures of Speech for a long time, but haven't found a copy I could afford, so it was a bonus to have these humorous visual conundrums included here.

My favourite poems, in no particular order, are Linger With Me Now, Thou Beauty; It Makes a Change; Uncles and Aunts; Squat Ursula; O Here It Is and There It Is... and Little Spider.

Definitely a book I'll be re-reading over and over. What a joy!

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I serendipitously came across Complete Nonsense in the library, not realising that Mervyn Peake had written so much nonsense verse. This volume collects as much of it as possible (albeit probably not all), together with his comical art mostly in sketch form. A few poems were familiar to me from The Gormenghast Trilogy trilogy, as Prunesquallor, Fuchsia, or Steerpike recited at least part of them. Also included is the cook Swelter's song, which he threatens but doesn't perform in Titus Groan. I found Peake's nonsense verse a little darker than that of Edward Lear or Ogden Nash and often more complex in structure. He wrote this in 1940:

I cannot simply stand and watch
A man of fourteen stone
Skinning his wife upon the sly
And thinking he's alone.
I always go straight up to him
And take away his knife,
Then looking in his eyes I say,
"Why must you skin your wife?"

On nine times out of every ten
Two tears start from his eyes,
And if he's really genuine
He follows them with sighs
And then a kind of plaintive groan
Wracks his whole body through
Which makes me give him back his knife
And say "Go friend, and skin your wife
I see your point of view."

Much of the verse is lighter in tone than that, but still has more of an adult sensibility than Lear's ageless nonsense. I enjoyed the inclusion of two variations upon the same punchline, titled The Sunlight Falls Upon the Grass and The Sunlight Falls Upon the Fields. The artworks are delightful, as Peake excelled at caricatures. Another poem I particularly liked is titled The Trouble with Geraniums:

The trouble with geraniums
Is that they're much too red!
The trouble with my toast is that
It's much too full of bread.

The trouble with a diamond
Is that it's much too bright:
The same applies to fish and stars,
And the electric light.

The trouble with the crows I see
Lies in the way they fly;
The trouble with myself is all
Self-centred in the eye.

The trouble with my looking-glass
Is that it shows me, me:
There's trouble in all sorts of things
Where it should never be.

If you enjoy Peake's novels and/or art, his nonsense verse is well worth reading too.

[Rabishu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the occasional gem, Peake's nonsense-as-nonsense never rises to the level of Lear or Carroll. However there's a lot of oddly moving material in this collection which threatens to cross over at times into "serious" poetry, and Peake is at his best, I think, when he works in this genre.

I'm not sure, however, about the inclusion of his first draft and incomplete work in this volume. I doubt he'd have wanted it to be seen, and (as one would expect) it is of noticeably lower quality than his finished pieces.

[Jan Kjellin · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Complete Nonsense" might not be complete nonsense, but nonetheless it's nonsensical enough for me.

I have come to understand that, with the exception of the Gormenghast writings, Mervyn Peake was not the author I expected him to be. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing or so... It's just that it sort of baffles me that soemone who could envison such a gothic and fantastical world as the castleworld of Gormenghast didn't really have more to offer.

Ah, well.

[Marshall A. Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of it is indeed utter nonsense. I found the pairing of poetry and illustrations to work well, and particularly enjoyed the relationship between them when Peake actually made them to work together. I wasn’t a fan of the poetry style overall (not quite Dr. Seuss, but in a similar vein), and was a bigger fan of his illustrations.

The poem I enjoyed the most was

Song of the Castle Poet
(to be declaimed with one foot in the air!)

[Mladen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful!