Status Updates From Mervyn Peake: My Eyes Mint ...

The book is stunning visually but I cannot understand how the author seemingly forcefully removed the queer subtext from several Peake’s characters AND went so far as to say (completely unsupported by documentary proof) that Peake would have voted for the Tories had he been interested in politics where we have evidence of close collaborations with artists affiliated with the British Left

Side note in case this book ever gets reprinted (I bought a copy secondhand): I think it being the biography of an author/painter/poet it could (read: should) very well do without the picture his father (an English missionary in China during the first half of the xx century) took of a severed head of a completely unrelated Chinese man🫶.

Reading this, I once again feel the heavy gravimetry of the stones. Gormenghast calls to me once more.

For fans - of his art as much as his writing. There was little that was new to me, but it was well-written, beautifully and generously illustrated, and will be used to update many of my other Peake reviews.

The paper is breathless
Under the hand
And the pencil is poised
Like a warlock's wand.
.
But the white page darkens
And is blown on the wind
And the voice of a pencil
Who can find?

'Art is really sex in another guise.' Mervyn Peake.
'Art is more than history - it is a living, breathing, self-contained and permanent state of beauty.' MP
'Beauty plus pity - that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.' Nabakov
(It's more about art and illustration than writing, so far, as expected for this stage of his life.)

Thanking his mother-in-law for 'the wondrous socks... they make me feel very sprightly and spring-like, and I am leaping about most frolicsome-like and giving little whimsical crys [sic] of delight which do not suit my inner aspect, but which satisfy my feeling.'
Mrs Gilmore kept him in socks for the rest of her life. p84

The paper and binding are unexceptional, but in every other respect, this book is a thing of profound beauty: the words, the many illustrations, and excerpts of poetry.

Mervyn is dead. Maeve carries on. Googled her to see if I could find any of her art.

Mervyn's scattered decline in late 50s. The discontinuity between first two volumes of Titus and the third.