Back at the end of February, I wrote briefly about the influential Mervyn Peake and his novels, poetry and art.
Enter the Octopus recently posted a wonderful excerpt of a new book by the perhaps equally influential Michael Moorcock entitled LOVERS: Mervyn and Maeve Peake. A personal memoir.
I love the unabashedly hero-worshipful tone of Moorcock’s work here: “Mervyn was dramatically handsome and his wife Maeve was dramatically beautiful.” And here: “…Mervyn and Maeve Peake were conventionally English in their formality while being unselfconscious romantics to the core. They did not posture. They did not cultivate the grotesque or the bizarre, though Mervyn might be attracted to eccentric-looking subjects. They were not burdened, as some of their contemporaries like Dylan Thomas were. They got on better with the self-effacing Graham Greene than the flamboyant Quentin Crisp.”
Moorcock paints a vivid picture of the bohemian gatherings of the Peake’s, while setting them above the fray. They are obviously the only people at the party you’d really want to know. I’m hooked on this memoir in one page.
Also interesting, at the bottom of this post I found an automatically generated link to a separate piece on Crowley contemporary and automatic art proponent Austin Osman Spare, who, like Peake, was a War Artist. I’m fascinated by war artists and think Spare’s “Dressing the Wounded during a Gas Attack” is one of the most harrowing examples of the art. There is something incredibly surreal in having a bunch of artists running around during the thick of battle capturing sketches of the mayhem for later paintings—particularly in eras when the camera existed. But there is an undeniable power to some of the work of the war artists. The best of them, like Peake and Spare, captured some essential human horror that escapes the camera’s ability.
And, of course, their war-time experiences permeated their later art.
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