Complete Nonsense Read online

  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. 36

  Figure of Speech

  Bird with big bill in boots (not previously published)

  Chinaman with fish, from Mervyn Peake Review, no. 11 (Autumn 1980), p. 2

  Figure of Speech

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

  Figure of Speech

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

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

  Figure of Speech

  Figure of Speech

  Rumpelstiltskin, from Radio Times, vol. 101, no. 1314 (17 December 1948), p. 20

  Manuscript page of the first five stanzas of ‘The Dwarf of Battersea’, from A Book of Nonsense (1972), p. 16

  Old man resting, from A Book of Nonsense (1972), p. 88

  The daily help, from Facet, vol. 1, no. 1 (1946), p. 9

  Figure of Speech

  Figure of Speech

  Figure of Speech

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

  Swelter with kitchen urchin from Titus Groan (1968), facing p. 368

  Figure of Speech

  Yak on a hilltop, from A Book of Nonsense (1972), p. 38

  Figure of Speech

  Figure of Speech

  Figure of Speech

  Clown on a smoking horse, from Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (2006), p. 5

  Figure of Speech

  Flat face, from A Book of Nonsense (1972), p. 72

  Figure of Speech

  Rhymes without Reason (1944), dust wrapper

  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

  Stylized horse (not previously published)

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

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

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


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

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

  Figure of Speech

  A Gormenghast professor, from Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (2006), p. 84

  Rottcodd in his hammock, from Peake Studies, vol. 7, no. 1 (November 2000), pp. 18–19

  Royal couple, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 44

  Figure of Speech

  Horned figure with familiar, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 50

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

  Men in conical hats, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 64

  Figure of Speech

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

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

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

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

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

  Figure of Speech

  A professor from the MS of Gormenghast, from Mervyn Peake Review, no. 2 (Spring 1976), p. 19

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

  Have a pear, from Peake Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1994), p. 5

  Figure of Speech

  Thorpe and Tintagieu, from Mr Pye (1953), p. 68

  King and dog on beach, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 32

  Figure of Speech

  Figure of Speech

  Rhinoceros, London Zoo, from The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1974), p. 41

  Manifold Basket, B.F., from Peake Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (Winter 1991), p. 47

  Doctor Willy, from Peake’s Progress (1978), p. 292

  Sally Devius, from Peake’s Progress (1978), p. 290

  Four Undertakers, from Peake’s Progress (1978), p. 271

  Two Undertakers, from Peake’s Progress (1978), p. 305

  Figure of Speech

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

  Big nose, big feet, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 36

  Figure of Speech

  Figure of Speech

  Man and snake, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 28

  Bird on bird (not previously published)

  Figure of Speech

  Figure of Speech

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

  Stout figure with stick, from A Book of Nonsense (1974), p. 40

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

  Manimal, from Peake Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (April 2011), p. 4

  Figure of Speech

  Figure of Speech

  Dog-man (1), from Mervyn Peake: A Personal Memoir (1984), p. 120

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

  Manuscript page from New Worlds, no. 187 (February 1969), p. 43

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

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

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

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

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

  Dog-Man (2) (not previously published)

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

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

  Figure of Speech

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

  * 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, th
ere 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’.