by Mervyn Peake
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 archip
elago 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 befo
re 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.
