Complete Nonsense E-Book

Mervyn Peake

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

'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 lead the reader into places where cause is cut free of effect and language takes on a giddy life of its own. Malicious bowler hats threaten their owners, a cake is chased across an ocean by a rakish knife, aunts become flatfish or live 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Complete Nonsense contains all the poems and illustrations from Peake's Book of Nonsense (1972), with forty unpublished poems discovered in manuscripts and thirty from uncollected sources, including all the nonsense verses from his novels.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, often from Peake's manuscripts, by Robert Maslen, editor of Peake's Collected Poems (Carcanet), and Peter Winnington, the leading Peake scholar and biographer. Peake wrote of the rare art that glitters with the divine lunacy we call nonsense': Complete Nonsense glitters with Peake's benign and wayward imagination.

Leseprobe

MERVYN PEAKE

Complete Nonsense

Edited with an introduction by R.W. MASLEN and G. PETER WINNINGTON

Contents

Title Page

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction by R.W. Maslen

A Note on the Text

References and Further Reading

COMPLETE NONSENSE

I Saw a Puffin

The Song of Lien Tsung

Railway Ditties

Waddon

Thornton Heath

Norbury

Streatham and Balham

Green Park

You Can Never Be Sure of Your Birron

Beard of My Chin

You Before Me

Although I Love Him

Practically Poetry

Ode to a Bowler

Raft Song of the Conger Eel

The Dwarf of Battersea

Thank God for a Tadpole

About My Ebb and Flow-ziness

A Fair Amount of Doziness

Ancient Root O Ancient Root

The Frivolous Cake

Simple, Seldom and Sad

Linger Now with Me, Thou Beauty

I Married Her in Green

Swelter’s Song

I Cannot Simply Stand and Watch

Upon the Summit of a Hill

Come, Sit Beside Me Dear, He Said

Deliria

The Sunlight Lies Upon the Fields

Mine Was the One

The Threads of Thought Are Not for Me

Come Husband! Come, and Ply the Trade

How Good It Is to Be Alone (1)

How Good It Is to Be Alone (2)

Upon My Golden Backbone

All Over the Lilac Brine!

The Sunlight Falls Upon the Grass

The Crocodile

The Giraffe

My Uncle Paul of Pimlico

It Makes a Change

What a Day It’s Been!

How Mournful to Imagine

The Jailor and the Jaguar

The Camel

I Wish I Could Remember

I Waxes and I Wanes, Sir

The Hippopotamus

A Languorous Life

Sensitive, Seldom and Sad

Roll Them Down

One Day When They Had Settled Down

Again! Again! and Yet Again

Uncle George

The King of Ranga-Tanga-Roon

I Cannot Give You Reasons

The Ballad of Sweet Pighead

Hold Fast

I Must Begin to Comprehend

The Threads Remain

White Mules at Prayer

O Love, O Death, O Ecstasy

Tintinnabulum

Squat Ursula

The Hideous Root

The Men in Bowler Hats Are Sweet

Aunts and Uncles

The Osseous ’Orse

Song of the Castle Poet

How White and Scarlet Is that Face

O Here It Is and There It Is…

Little Spider

‘It Worries Me to Know’

A-Lolling on the Shores of Old Hawaii

O’er Seas that Have No Beaches

The Bullfrog and the Flies

The Rhino and the Lark

Richly in the Unctuous Dell

Manifold Basket’s Song

With a One, Two, Up!

In Ancient Days

O Keep Away

O Darling When a Story’s Done

Undertaker’s Song (1)

Undertaker’s Song (2)

Nannie Slagg’s Song

Fuchsia’s Song

Nannie Slagg’s Lullaby

Where the Little Dunderhead

Lean Sideways on the Wind

Of Pygmies, Palms and Pirates

An Angry Cactus Does No Good

I Cannot Give the Reasons

O Little Fly

How Fly the Birds of Heaven

Leave the Stronger

Fish or Fowl

‘Shrink! Shrink!’

An Old and Crumbling Parapet

It Is Most Best

The Hours of Night Are Drawing On

Over the Pig-Shaped Clouds They Flew

Come, Break the News to Me, Sweet Horse!

What Though My Jaw

The Trouble with Geraniums

Crocodiles

Along the Cold, Regurgitating Shore

I Have My Price

Jehovah, Jehovah

Synopsis: Over the Border or The Adventures of Footfruit

The Adventures of Footfruit or The Enthusiast

Another Draft of Footfruit: Chapter 1

Crown Me with Hairpins

Notes

Key to the Figures of Speech

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

About the Author

Copyright

Illustrations

The Figures of Speech were published as a guessing game in a book with this title in 1954. So that the game can still be played, the titles are not given here but on p. 234.

Uncle Jake as a Snake, from Writings and Drawings (1974), p. 3619

Figure of Speech20

Bird with big bill in boots (not previously published)21

Chinaman with fish, from Mervyn Peake Review, no. 11 (Autumn 1980), p. 222

Figure of Speech25

‘I saw a peacock’, from Ride a Cock-horse (1940)27

Figure of Speech28

‘He must be an artist’, from Satire (December 1934), p. 17*29

‘Ode to a bowler hat’, from Satire (December 1934), p. 17*30

Figure of Speech32

Figure of Speech33

Rumpelstiltskin, from Radio Times, vol. 101, no. 1314 (17 December 1948), p. 2034

Manuscript page of the first five stanzas of ‘The Dwarf of Battersea’, from A Book of Nonsense (1972), p. 1636

Old man resting, from A Book of Nonsense (1972), p. 8841

The daily help, from Facet, vol. 1, no. 1 (1946), p. 943

Figure of Speech46

Figure of Speech51

Figure of Speech52

Flay and Steerpike watch Swelter, from Peake Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (April 2001), p. 756

Swelter with kitchen urchin from Titus Groan (1968), facing p. 36855

Figure of Speech57

Yak on a hilltop, from A Book of Nonsense (1972), p. 3859

Figure of Speech62

Figure of Speech66

Figure of Speech67

Clown on a smoking horse, from Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (2006), p. 568

Figure of Speech70

Flat face, from A Book of Nonsense (1972), p. 7272

Figure of Speech74

Rhymes without Reason (1944), dust wrapper75

Upon My Golden Backbone77

All Over the Lilac Brine!79

The Sunlight Falls upon the Grass81

The Crocodile83

The Giraffe85

My Uncle Paul of Pimlico87

It Makes a Change89

What a Day It’s Been!91

How Mournful to Imagine93

The Jailor and the Jaguar95

The Camel97

I Wish I Could Remember99

I Waxes and I Wanes, Sir101

The Hippopotamus103

A Languorous Life105

Sensitive, Seldom and Sad107

Stylized horse (not previously published)109

One Day When They Had Settled Down, from Peake Studies, vol. 5, no. 4 (April 1998), back cover*111

Again! Again! and Yet Again, from Peake Studies, vol. 5, no. 4 (April 1998), p. 22*112

Uncle George, from Peake Studies, vol. 5, no. 4 (April 1998), p. 23*113

The King of Ranga-Tanga-Roon, from Peake Studies, vol. 5, no. 4 (April 1998), p. 25*114

I Cannot Give You Reasons, from Peake Studies, vol. 5, no. 4 (April 1998), p. 26*115

Figure of Speech118

A Gormenghast professor, from Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (2006), p. 84121

Rottcodd in his hammock, from Peake Studies, vol. 7, no. 1 (November 2000), pp. 18–19124

Royal couple, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 44127

Figure of Speech129

Horned figure with familiar, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 50137

Squat Ursula, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 75*139

Men in conical hats, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 64145

Figure of Speech149

Aunty Vi, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 68*150

Aunty Flo, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 67*151

Aunty Mig, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 69*152

Uncle Jake, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 71*152

Aunty Jill, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 70*153

Figure of Speech155

A professor from the MS of Gormenghast, from Mervyn Peake Review, no. 2 (Spring 1976), p. 19157

O Here It Is and There It Is…, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 46*159

Have a pear, from Peake Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1994), p. 5160

Figure of Speech163

Thorpe and Tintagieu, from Mr Pye (1953), p. 68166

King and dog on beach, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 32167

Figure of Speech168

Figure of Speech171

Rhinoceros, London Zoo, from The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1974), p. 41172

Manifold Basket, B.F., from Peake Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (Winter 1991), p. 47175

Doctor Willy, from Peake’s Progress (1978), p. 292177

Sally Devius, from Peake’s Progress (1978), p. 290178

Four Undertakers, from Peake’s Progress (1978), p. 271180

Two Undertakers, from Peake’s Progress (1978), p. 305182

Figure of Speech185

Girls, dog and galleon, from Peake Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (Winter 1994), back cover187

Big nose, big feet, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 36188

Figure of Speech190

Figure of Speech192

Man and snake, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 28193

Bird on bird (not previously published)194

Figure of Speech197

Figure of Speech199

Sweet horse, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 34*201

Stout figure with stick, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 40202

Crocodiles, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 42*203

Manimal, from Peake Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (April 2011), p. 4205

Figure of Speech206

Figure of Speech206

Dog-man (1), from Mervyn Peake: A Personal Memoir (1984), p. 120208

Footfruit and dog under the sun, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 82*211

Manuscript page from New Worlds, no. 187 (February 1969), p. 43212

Watching Footfruit, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 83*213

Footfruit climbing hill, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 83*213

Footfruit’s boots spout water, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 84*214

Footfruit with his ears like wormcasts, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 85*215

Jackpot laughs like a drain, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 85*215

Dog-Man (2) (not previously published)217

Jackpot laughs at Footfruit, from New Worlds, no. 187 (February 1969), p. 42*217

Jackpot, from New Worlds, no. 187 (February 1969), p. 43*218

Figure of Speech219

Noah and cock (not previously published) from the MS of Peake’s play Noah’s Ark220

* Apart from the Rhymes without Reason series (pp. 76–106), only the asterisked drawings were specifically made to accompany nonsense poems. All the others have been chosen by various editors over the years.

Acknowledgements

For help in preparing this book, the editors would like to thank the following: Sebastian Peake, for making the project possible, for giving encouragement at each stage of its development, and for paying Rob Maslen’s travel costs for his first trip to Sotheby’s; Clare and Fabian Peake for answering queries; Alison Eldred, for finding and scanning dozens of images – so many, indeed, that we haven’t been able to use them all; Professor Michael Schmidt, OBE, whose enthusiasm has meant that all Peake’s poems will be in print by the end of his centenary year; Judith Willson of Carcanet, the friendliest and most efficient editor imaginable; Peter Selley, Senior Director at Sotheby’s, for allowing us to consult the Peake archive at Sotheby’s office in Bond Street, and Philip Errington, the Masefield expert and Deputy Director at Sotheby’s, for his interest and advice; Rachel Foss and Zoë Wilcox, respectively Curator and Cataloguer of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, for providing information on the new Peake archive; Pete Bellotte, for sending us transcriptions of interviews he recorded in the 1980s; Jim Boyd, for giving us access to the ‘Railway Ditties’ inscribed by Peake in his copy of Titus Groan, and Madeleine Boyd for scanning them for us; the University of Glasgow, for granting Rob Maslen the research leave during part of which he worked on his share of this edition; Kirsty, Bethany and Grace Maslen, for putting up with all his nonsense as he did so.

R.W. Maslen G. Peter Winnington 2011

Introduction

Mervyn Peake is one of the great nonsense poets of the twentieth century. His ‘rhymes without reason’, as he called them, draw inspiration from the great Victorian nonsense poets Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, but are distinguished by the unique imagination of the man who invented Gormenghast castle, and whose illustrations of Carroll’s Alice books transformed the inhabitants of Wonderland into honorary subjects of the ancient House of Groan. This volume collects all Peake’s nonsense verse for the very first time, and so makes it possible to measure his contribution to the field against the achievements of his two most celebrated predecessors. A rapid glance through its pages will show that he stands up to this daunting comparison remarkably well. And it will show, too, that there is much more of his nonsense verse than anyone could have anticipated.

As well as gathering all Peake’s published writings in this mode or genre, we found a great deal of material in the newly assembled Peake archive acquired by the British Library in the spring of 2010. Besides the two notebooks of ‘serious’ poetry mentioned in the introduction to Peake’s Collected Poems, dating from c. 1939 and c. 1946 respectively, we found two more exercise books with the titles ‘Nonsence Verse’ and ‘Nonsence / Songs of Nonsense’ inscribed on their covers. Both were formerly held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, under the shelf marks Bod. Dep. Peake 5 and Bod. Dep. Peake 4, and both are stuffed with a treasure trove of bizarre ballads, lunatic lyrics and ridiculous rhymes. The first of these books – identified as ‘Nonsence 1’ in the notes to this edition – contains drafts of Peake’s celebrated ballad The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, which according to Maeve Gilmore he completed ‘almost in one burst of writing, day and night’ on the island of Sark in about 1947 (A World Away, p. 141). This sanctions our tentatively dating Nonsence 1 to that year. The second book (Nonsence 2 in our notes) was evidently being used by Peake towards the end of his working life. The shaky hand in which it is written betrays the onset of the progressive disease that finally killed him, and some drawings and illegible scraps of verse in the later pages bear the subscription ‘The Priory 1965 and 1966’, dating them to the years when Peake was accommodated in a psychiatric hospital at Roehampton in south London. But the poems in the earlier pages of the book are beautifully transcribed, despite the shakiness of the writer’s fingers, and the title ‘Songs of Nonsense’ suggests that he intended them to form a collection. We have dated this notebook to 1957 and after, 1957 being the year when Peake’s physical and psychological condition began to deteriorate rapidly following the failure of his play The Wit to Woo on the London stage. Besides these, there are the remains of a third, undatable, exercise book inscribed ‘Nonsence Poems’, which we refer to by its Bodleian shelf mark (Bod. Dep. Peake 16), and dozens of other verses, both handwritten and typed. Further investigation of the archive may well reveal additional nonsense among the jumbled heaps of paper of which it was partly composed when we consulted it – to say nothing of the material that might emerge from Peake’s correspondence in private hands.

The title, then, of this book – Complete Nonsense – is not quite accurate. The claim that we are presenting our readers with all Peake’s nonsense does not stand up to scrutiny, not just because there may be more that we’ve missed, but also because (as his admirers often point out) everything he wrote was coloured by nonsense: novels, plays, short stories, ‘serious’ poems, etc. We might more accurately have called our edition Collected Nonsense Verse, had it not contained ‘The Adventures of Footfruit’, which is written in musical prose. The title, then, is complete nonsense, as was the title of another recent edition of Peake’s verse, Collected Poems. That phrase implied that the collection contained all his poetry between its handsome covers – yet here is a second volume, three years later, with over a hundred poems in it, some of them substantial, about thirty of which have never been published before (though some of these are drafts of poems that have been published, so that claim too is a little shaky). The primary reason for leaving out the nonsense from the Collected Poems was lack of space; but a secondary reason was that Peake seems to have thought of his nonsense verse as of a wholly different species from his serious poetry – though the categories overlapped, as is evident from the presence of drafts of The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb in a notebook devoted to nonsense. In the 1940s he published his book of nonsense rhymes and images, Rhymes Without Reason(1944), separately from his book of poetry, Shapes and Sounds (1941), and it looks as though he was planning a second volume of nonsense songs to complement his second poetry collection, The Glassblowers (1950), at the point when illness claimed him. We feel, then, that he would have been pleased to see his life’s work in these two distinct poetic modes represented in separate volumes, published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of his death (2008) and the centenary of his birth (2011) respectively.

The present book spans even more of Peake’s writing career than the Collected Poems does, tracing a golden thread of inspired irrationality that runs through all the literary and artistic metamorphoses of this most protean of creators. Like the Collected Poems, it is arranged in chronological order, and we have found it possible to date nearly all the verse with some precision; only one poem remains wholly undated. The first entry in the book was written when he was seven, and it is followed by a cluster of poems from his days as an art student – notably the group we have called the ‘Railway Ditties’ (pp. 23–4), which were inspired by the names of the stations on the railway line between his home at Wallington, Surrey and the Royal Academy Schools in central London. The last substantial piece – ‘The Adventures of Footfruit’ (pp. 208-18) – shows him planning an ambitious new departure, a kind of epic prose poem, even as terminal illness was taking hold. In between, as with the serious poems, one gets the sense that there were periods of his life when he composed nonsense with greater or lesser intensity: the years following his release from the army, for instance, culminating in the publication of Rhymes Without Reason (1944); or 1947, when he wrote The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb on Sark, and produced (as this edition makes clear) a host of other long poems in ballad form to keep it company; the early stages of his final illness, when some of his finest nonsense saw the light of day. As with his serious poetry, his output of nonsense verse slowed down in the early to mid 1950s, when he concentrated on writing plays for stage and radio, but his plays are always breaking into song. Indeed, one of them (Noah’s Ark) is effectively a musical, while he had plans to turn The Wit to Woo into a musical and Gormenghast into an opera, and the songs he wrote for them are invariably nonsense, so we have included them in this book. Absurdity was bred into Peake’s bones, rooted in his flesh, locked in the fibres of his brain, and he raised it at times to a pitch of seriousness that only Lear and Carroll could match, so that (as he puts it in ‘I Cannot Give the Reasons’, p. 189) ‘it has a beauty / Most proud and terrible / Denied to those whose duty / Is to be cerebral’.

What then is this nonsense, to which Peake devoted so much time and effort in his short but prolific career? Peake himself refused to define it when in 1954 he gave a talk on the BBC about his illustrations for Carroll’s Alice books. ‘In Alice,’ he explains – despite all the potential terrors the books contain, from the monster Jabberwocky to the bloody-minded Queen of Hearts –

there is no horror. There is only a certain kind of madness, or nonsense – a very different thing. Madness can be lovely when it’s the madness of the imagination and not the madness of pathology. Nonsense can be gentle or riotous. It can clank like a stone in the empty bucket of fatuity. It can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. It’s magic – for to explain it, were that possible, would be to kill it. It swims, plunges, cavorts, and rises in its own element. It’s a fabulous fowl. For non-sense is not the opposite of good sense. That would be ‘Bad Sense’. It’s something quite apart – and isn’t the opposite of anything. It’s something far more rare. Hundreds of books are published year after year. Good sense in many of them: bad sense in many more – but non-sense, oh no, that’s rarity, a revelation and an art worth all the rest. Perhaps one book in every fifty years glitters with the divine lunacy we call nonsense. (‘Alice and Tenniel and Me’, p. 22)

Despite Peake’s reluctance to ‘explain’ Carroll’s ‘certain kind of madness’, he says a number of important things about it in this passage. It possesses its own nature, like a newly discovered species, and inhabits its own element – a country of its own, perhaps, with its own rules, or (from the verbs he chooses to describe it: ‘swims’, ‘plunges’, ‘rises’) a medium like water in which there is no bar to movement in any direction. It’s not the opposite of ‘good sense’ because there is often sense or reason in it which, when applied in the context of the element that nonsense inhabits, produces wholly unexpected results. Can we describe nonsense, then, as an arrangement of words on the page without regard to meaning but with careful regard to grammar, form, sound and rhythm? That’s more or less right, except that in this mode of writing form gives rise to meaning. Words chosen for their sound and rhythm (or for the startling images or actions they conjure up) acquire a vigorous life of their own, determining the direction of a narrative in verse or prose – leading writer and reader by the hand, to adopt Peake’s metaphor – and thereby making a statement which is a peculiar combination of tight control and wild randomness, the promptings of the unconscious given shape and logic by the craftsman’s close attention. Of course, these observations are true of other forms of imaginative writing, but nonsense foregrounds the conjunction of tight control and lack of control more effectively than any other literary mode or genre. It’s akin to the sketchpad doodle, where a random line is shaped by the artist’s skill into the grotesque or elegant human or animal form which it inadvertently evokes, or where a carefully sketched conventional figure is transformed into a chimera, perhaps as a result of an initial slip of the artist’s hand. In both the doodle and the nonsense poem or story, meaning arises from meaninglessness in unexpected but delightful configurations, surprising the artist as much as the reader. In the process, a kind of philosophy emerges, a way of seeing the world which is tangential to (and sometimes the reverse of) the social and moral conventions that are supposed to shape our lives.

Each accomplished writer’s form of nonsense is unique. Faced with a random scribble on the page, every artist will see something different in it, just as different people see different pictures in a Rorschach blot. In response, each artist will develop a different aspect of the doodle in ways that express his or her own impulses and obsessions. As we have seen, Peake nearly always wrote the word ‘nonsense’ with a c in it – nonsence – which implies that he was well aware of its difference from the kinds perpetrated by Carroll or Lear. We have also seen that he considered it a distinct species of writing from his serious poetry: his ‘divine lunacy’ occupies clearly labelled notebooks of its own, and one should add that it has what one might call a dominant metre. As the Introduction to the Collected Poems points out, the default metre for Peake’s serious poems was the iambic pentameter, the ten-syllable line deployed by Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson. For the nonsense verse, by contrast – despite its immense metrical variety – the default metre is the iambic tetrameter, a line with four stresses, usually made up of seven or eight syllables. Often this alternates with the iambic trimeter, a three-stressed, usually six-syllable line, as in the poem ‘I Must Begin to Comprehend’ (p. 122):

I must begin to comprehend

My loves, because of my

Disorganised desire to live

Before it’s time to die.

This is the so-called ‘common metre’ widely deployed in hymns and ballads, the forms that bring together two of Peake’s strongest influences: his childhood among missionaries in China and his fascination with the sea. (Given their origin in song, it is not surprising that his nonsense verse should have been set to music by several composers.) Peake knew dozens of hymns and was always singing them, a habit he shares with the protagonist of his novel Mr Pye (1953). This tells the story of a self-appointed missionary who brings the good news of his own peculiar deity, the ‘Great Pal’, to the tiny island of Sark in the English Channel. Mr Pye has a special fondness for three hymns written partly in the ‘common metre’: ‘Dare to Be a Daniel’, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘Who Would True Valour See’, and he eventually recites a nonsense poem of his own in the same metre, one of several he once wrote, he tells us, during dull board meetings ‘while others doodled’. For Mr Pye, such compositions are ideally suited to times when one feels powerless and tongue-tied. He recites his verses to a small group of friends at a point when he is locked in a solitary struggle between the saintly and diabolic aspects of his personality – when wings and horns keep sprouting from his body, betokening an inward combat whose outcome neither he nor anyone else seems able to influence. ‘Words at such times,’ he says, ‘make little sense and what sense they do make is nonsense.’ The poem he declaims, ‘O’er Seas that Have No Beaches’ (p. 167 in this edition) is, despite its absurdity, an astonishingly eloquent evocation of loneliness, a lament for a naturally buoyant soul adrift on a shoreless ocean without hope of rescue.

It is also a song about the sea, and its subject, as well as its form, connects it with the ballad tradition, which is rich in maritime narratives, from ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ to ‘The House Carpenter’ – to say nothing of The Ancient Mariner, which Peake illustrated in 1943. The logic of ballads is akin to that of nonsense, with its perpetual shying away from explanations based on conventional notions of cause and effect, and its sudden unheralded obtrusions of the fantastic into the everyday. Peake’s fascination with the sea was evident in his lifelong devotion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which he also illustrated in the 1940s and could recite by heart as a boy. The sea keeps breaking into his nonsense verse, from the waters that implicitly fill the poet’s brain in ‘About My Ebb- and Flow-ziness’ (p. 42), and the hake-filled ocean where ‘The Frivolous Cake’ flees the unwanted attentions of a lustful knife (pp. 44–5), to the breakers that crash on the rhubarb-covered shoreline of ‘White Mules at Prayer’ (pp. 124–6), or the ‘sneezing sea’ to which the melancholy wanderers stray in ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’ (p. 106). As Lear and Carroll knew – think of ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ or the Mock Turtle – the vast pathlessness of the ocean is the perfect medium for nonsense, permitting the imagination to unmoor itself and drift at the behest of the little verbal breezes that fill its sails. But Peake’s oceans are always invading the space of the domestic, carrying off random items of furniture or offering a welcome escape-route from household crises and abortive romances. Just as the sea-adventure Treasure Island can be found on the shelves of the most landlocked family household, so a whale finds its way onto a mantelpiece in ‘It Makes a Change’ (p. 88). A table of ‘rare design’ transports a husband and wife round an unknown archipelago in ‘All Over the Lilac Brine!’ (p. 78), a sofa finds itself afloat in ‘O’er Seas that Have No Beaches’, and a disappointed lover swims to the Arctic in ‘Mine Was the One’ (p. 65), where he is joined by one of the outraged brothers of ‘The Ballad of Sweet Pighead’, who flees to the Arctic floes to escape the disgrace of a literally pigheaded sister (p. 116). In Peake’s nonsense, the cross-fertilization of the domestic setting where hymns are sung and the unstable decks to which salt-water ballads pay tribute testifies to the ineffable strangeness of families, whether these consist of childless couples or extended circles thronged with more or less distant relatives, flung into the same boat, so to speak, by the haphazard circumstances of kinship by blood or marriage.

You can choose your friends, the saying goes, but not your relatives – or even your lovers – and Peake’s characters are constantly being surprised by their bizarre connections, whether with uncles, sisters, children, aunts or spouses. Uncles and aunts are especially wayward family members in Peake’s universe. From the irrepressible Uncle Paul who plays the piano to his cats in ‘My Uncle Paul of Pimlico’ (p. 86) to the ancient aunts ‘who live on sphagnum moss’ in ‘Crown Me with Hairpins’ (p. 220), the siblings of one’s parents in the nonsense verse seem helplessly in thrall to their strange addictions. The most famous of Peake’s verses that take families as their subject – ‘Aunts and Uncles’ (pp. 150–3) – sees a succession of the titular relatives transformed into what they are obsessed by or compared with, finding the range of available options for action severely curtailed by their transformations. Aunty Grace, turned into a flatfish, ‘all but vanished’ when seen from the side; Uncle Wog, trapped in canine form, hides himself for shame – and starts hiding bones, too, compulsively; Aunty Vi, changed to an insect, is mercilessly battered by (of all people) her favourite nephew. (One wonders if he had always taken advantage of her favouritism to metaphorically batter her.) These presumably unmarried and childless family members (at least, one seldom hears of spouses or offspring in connection with these aunts and uncles) have become defined by the things their nephews and nieces say about them, locked into the limited frame of reference provided by teasing, rumour and gossip; and most of them seem either indifferent to or positively delighted by the fantastic metamorphoses to which they have been subjected.

‘Aunts and Uncles’ illustrates one of the ways in which Peake’s nonsense steers its wayward course. A string of similes or metaphors, some familiar, some unexpected, is given corporeal form in the aunts and uncles of the title, and clichés are thereby brought alive, made endlessly fruitful, so that one can imagine the series of relatives and of stanzas extending indefinitely, so jaunty is the rhythm of the poem, so amusing the antics of its cast. Some of the questions to which the series seems to respond are these: when you call your aunt a pig, snake, cold fish, or insect, what are you doing to her, and how might she react to being so labelled? If she took the comparison to heart, or became what you called her, how might she adapt her domestic arrangements to the needs of her new identity? There’s an impeccable logic to each relative’s response to his or her transformation, as there is to the reactions of Gregor Samsa’s family to his transformation into a beetle in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Unlike Gregor, these eccentrics and their families take each outlandish situation in their stride, though, recognizing perhaps that the quirks of language ensure we all inhabit a universe full of incongruities and inexplicable changes, to which we adapt ourselves every second of our lives without noticing our own versatility.

Conversations offer constant examples of this versatility, as we respond from moment to moment to the misunderstandings that bedevil our efforts at communication. Many of Peake’s most elaborate nonsense verses take the form of dialogues at cross purposes, from the fatal exchange between the tigerish ‘confidential stranger’ and his victim in ‘Come, Sit Beside Me Dear, He Said’ (pp. 60–1) to the inconclusive chat between a singing giraffe and a woman in ‘Deliria’ (pp. 63–4), or the squabble between husband and wife in ‘Come Husband! Come, and Ply the Trade’ (pp. 69–71). The wandering paths taken by these dialogues are lent their mazy complexity by the failure of either party to fathom the desires or intentions of his or her interlocutor; a failure that finds its most vivid expression in the heroine’s terror of Figures of Speech in ‘It Worries Me to Know’ (pp. 161–5). Locutions such as ‘You have blood on your hands’ haunt this heroine like vengeful ghosts, recalling for her some unspecified ‘crime / I did when I was three’ and hampering her efforts to articulate her fears to the ‘wise and cloudy man’ who seeks to advise her. For her, Figures of Speech are malignant things, prone to ambushing their users – as happens when the old man leaves her to ‘hold the floor’ at the end of the poem, which gives her blisters on both hands from gripping the parquet. In the end the heroine retreats to pastoral seclusion, although even here the mooing of cows leads her to speculate about their inward life. The Figures of Speech have been too vigorously suggestive for her, driving her to take flight from conversation altogether, like many of the protagonists of Peake’s narratives in prose and verse. Their dangerous vitality is gloriously captured in the series of drawings Peake produced for a book, Figures of Speech, in 1954, which we have used as illustrations in this edition, because of their obvious affinity with ‘It Worries Me to Know’, and because they are the visual counterpart to Peake’s habit of literalizing metaphor in his poetry and prose.

In Peake’s nonsense, similes and Figures of Speech unspool threads of ideas or images that develop into elaborate stories or quasi-dramatic exchanges; and threads themselves are one of the many repeated themes that run through his nonsense verse. ‘The Threads of Thought Are Not for Me’ (p. 68) contains no thread of thought linking its stanzas except the thought of thread itself – the cotton twine of the first stanza, the needlework of the saddle in the third, the trailing clew in the last – as if to demonstrate the capacity of the human mind to stitch things together quite independently of the causes and effects privileged in formal discourse. Threads also put in an appearance in ‘The Threads Remain’ (p. 123) and ‘Squat Ursula’ (pp. 138–9). Other obsessions are malicious bowler hats that threaten to enslave their owners (‘Ode to a Bowler’ (p. 30), ‘Tintinnabulum’ (pp. 128–37), ‘The Men in Bowler Hats Are Sweet’ (p. 148)); roots (‘Ancient Root O Ancient Root’ (p. 44), ‘The Hideous Root’ (pp. 140–4), ‘Undertakers’ Song 1’ (p. 181)); horses (‘I Married Her in Green’ (p. 50), ‘The Threads of Thought’ (p. 68), ‘The Osseous ’Orse’ (p. 154), ‘Come, Break the News to Me, Sweet Horse!’ (pp. 200–1)), and a menagerie of other animals. These thematic threads bind the nonsense verse together much as references to Jubjub birds and the Chankly Bore bind together the nonsense verse of Carroll and Lear. What makes Peake’s verse distinctive, however, is his tendency to return to the same nonsense poem or sequence of lines over many years, pursuing the imaginative possibilities it throws out in different directions each time he revisits it. For this reason we found ourselves, in this edition, printing rival versions of a number of poems because there seemed no reason to give one version precedence over another. ‘Simple, Seldom and Sad’ (p. 47) and ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’ (p. 106) were clearly regarded by Peake as different poems, since he printed the latter in Rhymes Without Reason (1944) and the former two years later in Titus Groan (1946), despite having (apparently) written it first. ‘Deliria’ (pp. 63–4) is a different poem from ‘The Camel’ (p. 96); both versions of ‘How Good It Is to Be Alone’ (pp. 71–3) and of ‘The Sunlight Lies upon the Fields’ / ‘The Sunlight Falls Upon the Grass’ (pp. 64 and 80) have something distinctive to recommend them; and ‘I Must Begin to Comprehend’ (p. 122) and ‘The Threads Remain’ (p. 123) has each its own atmosphere, despite the number of lines they have in common. The lines ‘Half tragical, half magical, / And half an hour, or two’ occur in both of the latter poems as well as in ‘What a Day It’s Been!’ (p. 90), which Peake published in Rhymes without Reason three years or so before inscribing ‘The Threads Remain’ in his 1947 notebook. Each pair of poems or duplicated lines, whether placed side by side in this edition or separated by several pages, gives us the pleasure of noting the different sorts of ‘nowhere’ to which nonsense can lead us from the same starting point – or how it can lead us to the same ‘nowhere’ from different points of origin. The journeys of nonsense extend over time as well as space, and are thus interwoven with the personal history of writers and readers as inseparably as the poems in this book are interwoven with the calamitous events of the Second World War and its aftermath.

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 of 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)