The art of Maeve Gilmore and Mervyn Peake, married writer-artists who moved from house to house many times in the course of their lives together, had a tendency to burst out of formal spaces (studio, gallery, the narrow confines of the sketchbook or the written page) and swarm over the domestic spaces they shared. Both revelled in painting the walls of their homes, Mervyn transforming damp patches in his warehouse apartment in Battersea into ‘faces and landscapes […] so that what should have been detrimental [became] a world of angels and monsters’,[1] then decorating the doors of their flat in Maida Vale with ‘vines, flowers and birds’,[2] while Maeve painted dynamic murals all over their Chelsea house from attic to basement. Real-life spaces, too, invaded their art. The island where they lived for four happy years – Sark in the Channel Islands – peeps out through the prose in Mervyn’s second novel Gormenghast (1950), whose titular castle shares with it the names of certain topographical features. Maeve’s novel Titus Awakes (2011) ends with the fictional protagonist making a home on Sark with the real-life Peakes. Maeve’s murals come to life in her illustrated children’s book, Captain Eustace and the Magic Room (1981), which combines knitted dolls, rhymes, and photographs of her wall paintings to create a narrative that bridges the gap between an ordinary house and the wilderness of dreams. Maeve herself became the subject of Mervyn’s poems, drawings and paintings, while Mervyn became the subject of Maeve’s celebrated memoir, A World Away (1970), as well as of her novel and many of her pictures. Their imaginative world could not be segregated from the material world through which they moved, whose details they took in with all their senses, transmuted in their minds, and revitalised in strange new colours, shapes and sounds.
Nowhere in Mervyn’s work is the intimate link between his imaginative world and the material realities mediated by his senses more vividly realised than in his picture book Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions) (1948). The book tells the story of a robust old man who wanders the wild regions of the world, far from human habitation, in quest of a mysterious White Lion known only as the ‘Emperor of the Snows’.[3] He carries with him a typewriter (which he uses to type his letters), a ‘good fat book’ full of blank paper for typing, pencils (with which he draws the creatures and adventures he encounters) and a camera (with which he hopes to photograph the Lion when he finds it). He is accompanied only by his ‘retainer’ (p. [8]), a ‘turtle dog’ called Jackson, who often annoys him. It’s a simple premise, and some have found it over-simple. The Peake scholar Peter Winnington, for instance, suggests that ‘the storyline is weak and fizzles out when the uncle encounters the White Lion, although the final picture, with its mandala in the sky, suggests a sense of wholeness that the text belies’.[4] But for me, the book represents the ultimate fusion of word and image in Mervyn’s oeuvre, whose power is largely derived from its unusual form. The crudely typed pages peppered with mistakes; the energetic and prolific pencil sketches; the smudges and smears on the surface of the paper where Jackson has trodden on it, or spilled gravy on it, or the Uncle has bled on it after cutting his finger; all these details generate the sense of ghostly presences at the edges of the reader’s perception, beings alive and commanding our attention despite the distances of space and time that separate us. The effect is, I imagine, a little like spending time in one of Maeve and Mervyn’s flats or houses, where the murals on the walls invoked a wild world beyond their confines whose shapes were always intruding on the house’s occupants at the edge of vision, ghostly manifestations of an imaginative life as vivid as the papers, pencils, tables, brushes, found objects and books that littered their rooms.
The most striking aspect of the book’s form is its physical presentation as a collection of letters. Each letter is inexpertly typed with occasional corrections or interjections by hand, illustrated with pencil sketches, and slightly damaged in various ways by the two central characters – the Uncle and Jackson – who share their cramped quarters together, with all the potential for accidents this entails. The dustcover of the first edition takes the form of a hefty envelope with a red wax seal sticking down the flap at the back and a stamp showing the Lion affixed to the front; the stamp itself has been stamped with two postmarks shaped like snowshoes. The letters inside amount to a single continuous letter, with each new section labelled ‘2nd Letter’, ‘THIRD LETTER’, ‘4TH LETTER’ and so on, and distinguished from one another, often in parentheses, by allusions to the passage of time: ‘(Continued next day)’, ‘(weeks later’), ‘six days later’ etc. The effect of this form is to encourage the reader to relive the Uncle’s adventures as they are supposed to have happened, and to reinforce the sense of unplanned or semi-planned spontaneity which is implicit in the terms ‘adventure’, ‘discover’ and ‘explore’. The form is further rendered integral to the narrative by the fact that the stamp on the dustcover represents the object of the Uncle’s travels, the great White Lion; in the first edition the reader was thereby encouraged to turn back to the dustcover for reference whenever the stamp was mentioned in the text. Holding the first edition, then, must have felt like holding the Uncle’s collection of letters itself, as against a printed version of them. The book would have had an aura to it, as if you could detect the fingers of the Uncle laboriously marking the very same pages you were turning over as you read. The book is a missive from outside the familiar universe, but it is also a piece of documentary evidence, like the travelworn diary of Captain Scott recovered from his tent. Polar winds seem to blow from its pages, which serve as an opening onto the beyond. You might be reminded of Mervyn’s preface to the book of his drawings published by Grey Walls Press the following year, which describes the drawing process as a daring expedition into uncharted territory:
The voice of a pencil. […] The voice of ink, of chalk, of pigment or stone. What are they, these varying voices that, soundless, can be like tumult or as faint as a whisper in the next room?
From the brain in the eye and the eye in the brain they make their way, these accents, through the arm and fingers to a canvas like a field of untrodden snow, to a cold chaos of stone, to the square yawn of a paper page as empty of life as the manless moon. These, the imponderable platforms: the breathless theatres.[5]
The form of Letters from a Lost Uncle makes of it a breathless theatre, a ‘paper stage’ as he calls it a few lines later in the same preface. It performs its narrative on the manless moon of the empty page, which is invoked by the vast fields of untrodden snow through which the Uncle tramps. From it, the voice of the pencil – and of the typewriter, the ‘tap-tap-tapping [of] a little black machine’ which generates the Uncle’s words as the pencil generates his pictures (p. [3]) – issues like a call to action or a summons to the strange denizens of your seeing brain.
Uncharted territory is where Maeve and Mervyn lived and worked. They inhabited a world that was self-evidently falling apart like a melting ice field, opening up a new range of uncertainties and possibilities unsuspected by previous generations. The British Empire into which they were born – Mervyn in China, Maeve in London – had begun to dissolve, with Ireland the first of its colonies to shake off the cold colonial bonds (Maeve’s father was Irish), closely followed by a succession of independence movements (Burma, Egypt, India) which sometimes took the Irish struggle for liberation as inspiration.[6] The Second World War brought bombs to the streets of London and other British cities, altering them beyond recognition, as Mervyn’s ballad The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (c. 1947) acknowledged and perversely celebrated. The waves of migration unleashed by war and new national boundaries transformed the world’s populations. Troops who served overseas returned with a new consciousness of alternative ways of living, while continued rationing and the reorganization of British society through unprecedented initiatives like the National Health Service seemed to signal a radical break with the imperial past. Between them, the Great War and World War Two bracketed a rupture from the familiar narrative of British history, a rent that almost severed it in two, before and after, ancient and modern. This giant rupture found a parallel in the many small ruptures experienced by Maeve and Mervyn as they moved from house to house, driven by economic necessity, conscription, Mervyn’s mental illness of 1942, and the endless quest for an artistic space in which to hone their craft.
This last, most quixotic of quests is what took them to Sark in 1946. It was a move that cut them off from Britain in a final, heroic gesture at self-determination, a gesture that came to an end when economic necessity took them back to London again at the end of the decade. Their period on Sark proved to be perhaps the most creative of their lives; at least, it was intensely creative for Mervyn, while Maeve completed some of her finest paintings there, and the island continued to haunt her work for the rest of her life. Marooning themselves from the crumbling world of the 1940s perfectly suited a couple who spent so much of their imaginative time practising an art focused on the domestic: from the titanic castle where Mervyn’s most famous alter ego grows up – Titus Groan, protagonist of the Gormenghast books – to the open windows and almost empty rooms that feature in Maeve’s paintings of the period, exposed to the winds of an island surrounded by dizzying cliffs. Adrift in the ocean between England and France they could concentrate on the haunted inner spaces and strange bodily and architectural surfaces that obsessed them, exploring their imaginative relationships with each other, their children, and the diverse coterie of friends and fascinating strangers – real and imagined – they had gathered outside the family circle.
The Lost Uncle is an explorer, a word that conjures up the epic travels of the adventurers who helped to forge the image of the British Empire: men like James Cook, David Livingston, Burton and Speke, Burke and Wills or Captain Scott, whose stories featured in the boy’s magazines read by Mervyn in his childhood. Many of these explorers ended their lives lost and wandering in an alien landscape, their links to the Empire severed by distance, their isolation sometimes intensified by their refusal to learn from indigenous populations. After their deaths they were hailed as heroes, their tragic ends held up as models for active young men being trained in the service of imperialism. Mervyn’s Lost Uncle shares their isolation and their sometimes gimcrack heroism – he is always improvising hairs’-breadth escapes from unforeseen dangers – but the Empire from which he has severed himself seems to have splintered into fragments, like the ice floe ‘the size of Kent’ on which he finds himself stranded at the start of the narrative [p. [7]), a symbolic representation of the slow disintegration of the island of Great Britain along with its colonial acquisitions. He hopes his account of his travels will find its way to the Natural History Museum in Kensington, but has no idea if the building still exists. The ship on which he sails at one point is called the S S Em, which he thinks may be short for Empire or maybe Emu (p. [31]), the syllable ‘Em’ invoking both a lost imperial power and a funny-looking bird from one of its colonies, as if the former may have mutated into the latter. The stamp he uses to send his letters displays not the head of the British Emperor at the time of writing, George VI, but the leonine ‘Emperor of the Snows’, the stamp itself having been manufactured by ‘Esquimaux’ rather than the Royal Mail (p. [22]).[7] The rapidly-drifting ice floe, and the general absence of placenames in the Uncle’s narrative (apart from the section set in London), suggest that the map of the world is in constant flux, no longer fixed to the walls of schoolrooms with the British territories clearly marked in red, but instead sketched hastily in erasable pencil on fragile paper as places and beasts appear and vanish before the sketcher’s eyes.
Even climatic zones have become confused in the Uncle’s world. In the Polar Regions of the title, polar vultures, polar snakes and polar beetles cohabit with polar bears, narwhals and ‘sea elephants’ (i.e. elephant seals), so that the jungles he explored in his early years somehow overlap with the icy lands to which he has dedicated himself in his maturity. The icy waste where he finally finds the great White Lion has both northern polar bears and southern penguins in it, as well as antelopes and ‘snow serpents’. If the Uncle’s pages are a mess, with their errata, smudges and spillages, the world he inhabits shares in this messiness, no longer organised around national borders, trade routes and zoological categories, but spontaneously reshaping itself from moment to moment, at the whim of the words and pencils with which it is described.
The Uncle’s adriftness extends to his home life as well as his severance from nations and empires. The ‘4th Letter’ tells his back story, describing how he found himself alienated from his relatives pretty much from birth. He ran away from home as a week-old baby (just like Peter Pan),[8] and was afterwards forcibly ‘strapped […] down in a cradle’ until ‘I was old enough to go to school’ (p. [25]); this is the closest he comes in his narrative to mentioning his parents, who feature only as an implicit part of the collective ‘they’ who seek to coerce him into compliance from an early age. The rest of his youth is spent in an equally traumatic state of forced detention. On his first day at boarding school he drinks so much ink that he is confined to bed once more until he is old enough to leave, and on returning home he runs away for a second time, comes home again because he is hungry, eats his way through the larder, and promptly falls ill ‘until I was twenty-two, when I married’ (p. [26]) (we never learn how he managed to meet his wife while bedbound). Later he runs away again, this time from his marriage, infuriating his wife and her many siblings. Even his relationship with the nephew to whom he writes his letters begins on a shaky footing: ‘I didn’t like you much at first,’ he explains in the 4th Letter (p. [38]), despite never having met him. The 4th Letter, in fact, represents the Uncle as a lifelong Robinson Crusoe, marooned in his youth among the teeming masses of London, just as he is later self-marooned among the waves of an endless ocean, or the equatorial jungles, or the featureless polar snows.
Perhaps this is because his home life and his native city share in the topographical confusion of the world beyond, so that the Uncle considers himself an explorer in the wilderness of his own back yard. He transforms his London house into an urban jungle by bringing home a range of live specimens (‘different kinds of insects, mushrooms and rats’, p. [28]) and storing them in the lounge. He carves the leg of his wife’s favourite armchair into a pipe, which he then takes with him on his travels. As his wife grows increasingly hostile to him – quite reasonably so in view of his habits – he takes to living on the streets, sleeping on a bench in Cannon Street Station and passing his days in the Natural History Museum (with its eccentric collection of stuffed creatures from all regions and all periods), or sketching the statues of lions in Trafalgar Square. In doing so, he underlines his conviction that central London is a jungle, a belief he shares with his creator Mervyn, who went ‘headhunting’ – sketching the heads of random strangers – on the London Tube and in its streets and squares throughout his life. Even when the Uncle decides to abandon the S S Em and sets out on his travels by himself, he constructs an improvised raft made of an upturned table with a wooden chair strapped to it, wrapping himself for warmth in a homely eiderdown which he later stuffs with orchid stalks to use as tobacco. By building his table raft he signals the continuity between domestic space and the nonhuman wild spaces from which it springs and on which it ultimately depends. The raft also affirms Mervyn’s instinctive belief that in the context of post-war Britain, a house where such a table, chair and eiderdown might be found could be readily thought of as unmoored, engaged in a state of constant motion through strange waters.
Despite his tendency to run away from institutions of Empire – nurseries, schools, cities, museums, houses, marriage – the Lost Uncle takes with him on his travels many elements of colonialist masculinity. His unflattering drawings and descriptions of his pointedly nameless wife (e.g. ‘the end of her nose grew as cold as ice, and her ears burned like beetroots’, p. [29]) imply a misogyny that would have been very familiar to the imperialist boy heroes of the nineteenth century. His bowler hat, which he never takes off, aligns him with the bourgeois denizens of the City of London, the bankers and brokers who are compared to ‘Vampires’ in a poem Mervyn wrote around the same time as Lost Uncle.[9] As if to underscore his continued commitment to his imperialist roots, the Uncle blithely ignores the presence of indigenous people in the lands he explores. The ‘esquimaux’ of the Arctic are only hinted at by the existence of their stamp, while he only ever encounters one inhabitant of the equatorial jungles, a ‘pigmy’ who is chased up a tree by a crocodile (p. [60]), and who is of interest to him solely because he lets fall, as he climbs, a letter with the lion stamp fixed to the envelope. Local people in other places get subsumed into the landscape, becoming a peripheral presence in what he calls the ‘coloured ports’ and ‘black harbours’ (p. [32]). At the same time, the Uncle repeatedly appropriates the tools of indigenous people, from kayaks, igloos and harpoons to birchbark canoes, dugouts, coracles and wigwams or tepees. The same colonial attitude that designed and filled the great museums of London – the Victoria and Albert, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the nearby British Museum – manifests itself both in the Uncle’s appearance and in his methods of exploration.
Chief among these methods, of course, is his exploitation of the turtle dog, Jackson. Jackson is the Jim to the Lost Uncle’s superannuated Huckleberry Finn, an embodiment of the unease experienced by many white writers in representing people of colour at a time when British and other colonialisms were being dismantled all over the world. The Uncle describes his first meeting with Jackson soon after he has written about the only Black character in the book, the ‘negro’ with whom he shares his cabin on the S S Em (p. [29]). This man never gets named, and we only ever encounter him in his sleep, when the Uncle decides not to wake him and tell him of his plan to leave the ship on a raft. The Uncle therefore sets out on his raft alone, unlike Huck Finn, and is at first supremely happy in his solitude. But as a son of Empire, however keen to disengage himself from the Empire’s conventional citizens as embodied in his wife and family, the Uncle cannot finally imagine embarking on a voyage of discovery without a convenient indigenous servant by his side. He finds one on a beach of red sand ‘littered’ with what he calls turtle dogs, a term that combines the traits of a faithful animal companion – a dog, which has so often been recruited to pull explorers’ sledges – and a water-dwelling reptile, whose shell suggests both the ability to take your home with you wherever you go and the impenetrable obduracy of its wearer. When he first sees Jackson, the Uncle at once decides he will ‘be useful […] as a beast of burden – and possibly as a friend’ (p. [36]), identifying him as both human and nonhuman in a manner that has proved convenient for enslavers and exploitative employers since the beginning of time. The enslaver analogy is reinforced by the Uncle’s claim that Jackson was lazy when he first met him (‘as you can see [from the picture] there was not much life in J’) and that he had to be coerced into servitude (he ‘didn’t want to come with me at first’). Despite this, the Uncle claims elsewhere that Jackson is happy to be exploited: ‘he has always been quite willing to help,’ he tells his nephew, ‘although I have never seen him smile’ (p. [48]). ‘Also’, he adds, ‘he does not mind me hammering nails into his back to hang things on’; the use of ‘back’ here for ‘shell’ underscores the parallel with the abusive practices of slavers. So too does this sentence from the first letter: ‘I wouldn’t swap him for six tins of condensed milk or a jug of hot rum’ (p. [8]). At this stage, the Uncle talks about Jackson as a useful object, like the ‘things’ the turtle dog carries on his nail-studded shell – though the use of the pronoun ‘him’, and the statement that the Uncle wouldn’t swap him, reassert Jackson’s incipient humanity.
The Uncle’s ‘retainer’ starts out as a figure of fun, whose function is to act as a foil to the irascible Uncle. Jackson’s head is always wrapped in a tattered kerchief, as if he suffers from a permanent cold; this makes him look like a housewife from illustrations of the 1940s, who kept her hair wrapped in a headscarf to protect it from dust. He seems unable to comprehend the simplest instructions until they have been repeated multiple times. His clumsiness leaves traces all over the Uncle’s pages in the form of spillages and footprints, and he seems to be voiceless, like a silent movie comic; as the Uncle puts it, he ‘has no conversation’ (p. [8]), which suggests he could speak if he wished but chooses not to. He can be funny because he is an imaginary creature, a hybrid being located somewhere between a sea- or land-dwelling animal and a person; his kind does not exist, which makes his exploitation by the Uncle somehow bearable. He can be funny too, perhaps, because he never complains about his treatment, though Mervyn makes it perfectly clear how unpleasant this treatment is. Even when Jackson develops a ‘beastly cough’ the Uncle has no sympathy for him at all, commenting tersely ‘Am very irritated’ (p. [57]); the word ‘beastly’ suggests that at this point the Uncle thinks of him more as a ‘beast of burden’ than a ‘friend’, while at other times the ‘friend’ aspect comes to the fore, as when the Uncle names a waterfall after him (though afterwards, the Uncle writes, ‘I wished I hadn’t’, p. [43]). Located at an uncertain point on the spectrum between humanity and animalism, beaked and shelled but possessing human-like arms and legs, Jackson avoids being wholly aligned with the enslaved people, exploited workers or abused women which his treatment conjures up, but unsettlingly invokes all three.
There is, however, something mysterious about Jackson; a quality that links him to the many strange animals he and the Uncle encounter in their wanderings. The Uncle never tells us anything about the culture Jackson came from, as embodied in the beach of red sand ‘with turtle dogs littered all over it’ where he finds him (p. [36]); the term ‘litter’ here summarises the explorer’s attitude to that culture, if he thinks of it at all. Jackson drifts into the narrative, in fact, out of the same hidden world that spawns the other beasts in Mervyn’s book. We learn nothing about the White Lion on the stamp, for instance, apart from his title, the ‘Emperor of the Snows’. We learn nothing about the ‘swarms of fishes’ that lift their ‘moonlit heads’ from the sea when the Uncle sings to express his happiness as he sails away from the S S Em on his table raft (p. [35]) (what draws them to him? We never learn). Or the swarms of little wailing creatures that suddenly appear on a particularly desolate tract of snow, ‘pouring themselves over the hills and wringing their hands as they ran’ (p. [59]); they disappear as suddenly as they came, leaving the Uncle with only the sense that ‘they were fleeing from the scene of some Arctic tragedy’. The snow-serpent that attacks the Uncle, forcing him to use his ‘swordfish’ leg to defend himself; the Polar beetle; the flock of Arctic vultures that assail the Uncle and Jackson from the air, ‘huge birds with bodies as big as dogs’’ and beaks ‘like scissors’ (p. [65]); what version of the Arctic do these creatures inhabit? The Uncle can never have seen them in the Natural History Museum; no wonder he thinks it may have vanished. Jackson shares his nature with these beings, all the more so because he is voiceless and has no back story. He cannot be categorised or fitted into any of the neat Linnaean lists beloved of imperial scientists; he is at home in some of the regions where the Uncle is only an interloper. Every now and then, too, his behaviour hints at a secret agenda inaccessible to his master/companion. When the Uncle’s life is in danger he catches Jackson apparently ‘smiling behind his hand’ (p. [106]), but concludes that this is impossible because the turtle dog has ‘never used any expressions before’ – except once, again at a time when the Uncle’s life was in danger, ‘but that was his nervousness’, the Uncle thinks, ‘or else colic’. Jackson and the other beings of the wild occupy an unseen, unspoken space to which the Uncle only has limited access.
At the same time, the Uncle himself seems to be gradually mutating into one of these beings of the wild. He has a missing leg, which has been replaced with what he insists is the spike of a swordfish but is clearly a narwhal tusk, with its distinctive corkscrew spiral. This leg makes him literally part animal, and it’s the part of his body that proves most useful in protecting him against the dangers of the wilderness. In the course of the book we see it being used to skewer a hungry wolf, to pin a snow-serpent to a tree, to fend off vultures, to stop Jackson and the Uncle from sliding off an icy cliff by being employed as an impromptu ice axe, and to anchor them both to the ice when a tornado threatens to blow them away. The Uncle’s leg-spike, in other words, helps him adapt to the environments he moves through, serving as a twisted bridge between his humanity and the wilderness he has always been drawn to. The fact that he is drawn to the wild and its animals is confirmed by the many drawings he makes of them (is there a pun intended? Mervyn loved puns), from a knotted-tail moose (another nonexistent creature) to a cheese-loving shark, from apes, crocodiles and cockatoos to penguins, gulls, polar vultures, puffins and a white crow. His intention in tracking down the great White Lion is not to shoot him, as colonial big game hunters would have done, but to take a picture of him with his box camera, paying homage to his life without depriving him of it; despite his love of museums, he will bring no body home to be stuffed and mounted in a glass case. But the loss of the camera in a snowstorm forces the Uncle instead to make yet more drawings of the Lion when he finds him, a much more bodily form of record-keeping than photography. The artist’s stare that lies behind each sketch – a total commitment to studying the distinctive shape and selfhood of the object at which the artist stares, as Mervyn explains in his little pamphlet on The Craft of the Lead Pencil (1946)[10] – involves a surrender of the self, an immersion in the other, which seems very far from an imperialist attitude. The Uncle is, like Mervyn himself, an itinerant and eccentric artist, and this sets him apart from the Empire far more effectively than his vocation as an explorer.
The Uncle’s relationship with Jackson, too, gradually grows to resemble something like companionship as the story unfolds. The Uncle’s abuse of him, after all, is part of his general irascibility, which he expresses in the language of pirates or whalers. He is constantly using piratical phrases (‘Blubber take this thumb mark’, ‘Hags blubber’, ‘O blubber it’, Oh blubberation’) which fuse his own oversized body with the many targets of his wrath, and he himself is as often the object of his disgust as Jackson is (‘Pickle my blubber!’, he remarks repeatedly, as well as ‘Oh blubber him!’). The Uncle also shares with Jackson a tendency to clumsiness: he stains his own letters with thumb prints, blood from a cut finger and washing up water, as often as Jackson spills soup or coffee over it. If Jackson is feminised by his headscarf, the Uncle feminises himself – in his own opinion – by using a typewriter (‘Pickle my blubber! But it makes me feel like a woman, writing this letter to England’, p. [4]), as well as by his housekeeping and his role as Jackson’s carer. If Jackson does not share the Uncle’s investment in the Arctic Sublime, the Uncle does not share Jackson’s fears or understand his emotions – at least at first. Both are separated from the cultures that reared them, both are isolated in the Polar wastes, both subsist on the same food and share the same rough quarters. The Uncle even has a kind of shell in the form of the eiderdown stuffed full of orchid stalks which he carries with him at all times; and at one point Jackson hides under the eiderdown without the Uncle even noticing. The pair have more in common than the Uncle cares to admit.
As the book goes on, too, the Uncle begins to refer to himself and Jackson as an inseparable unit. In the first half of the book, the Uncle speaks of himself always in the singular, as if all his travels were solitary ones (an Arctic wolf ‘sprang at me’, p. [15], ‘I came to […] a forest of trees that had been frozen into skeletons’, p. [18], ‘the beasts I met with on the way’, p. [20], ‘I’m approaching his dominion’, p. [54]). Jackson is thrust to the margins as if he were no more than a piece of the luggage he carries. Increasingly, though, the Uncle speaks of the pair as ‘us’ and ‘we’, a change that begins in the long twelfth letter which describes the first part of their final approach to the Lion’s lair. On this last stage of his quest the Uncle tends to Jackson’s wounds, shares his burdens, and saves his life on one occasion by pinning him to the ice with his leg-spike moments before the turtle dog slides into a crevasse. On another occasion Jackson must rotate the Uncle’s body, holding onto his sound leg, in order to screw him into the ice and save them both from the devastating force of the tornado; at this point it is the Uncle who serves as an object, the turtle dog who has agency. The Uncle continues to be enraged by Jackson’s obtuseness, but he also shows some sympathy for his feelings; for instance, when the turtle dog is terrified by seeing living fish under the ice beneath their feet the Uncle carries him ‘for quite a long time […] with all our belongings nailed to his back’ (p. [103]). At the climax of their journey, the Uncle and Jackson finally share the same emotions as they scale a snow-covered hill which turns out to be the Lion’s sleeping body: ‘When we reached the top we stared around us, and still could see no reason for the excitement which both of us felt more than ever’ (p. [107], my emphasis). In their isolation from the rest of humankind there’s a growing sense of mutual interdependence about them, which the Uncle can only ever express in action, saving Jackson’s life, binding his wounds, building shelters for them both and cooking their meals while continuing to shower the unfortunate turtle dog with insults.
Their severance from humankind, after all, is also a severance from its dominant narratives, including the narratives that govern hierarchy. The Uncle’s seeming commitment to science, for instance, which manifested itself in his youthful collection of live specimens and his visits to the museum, turns out to be vastly subordinate to his sense of the beautiful and the sublime; the sublime in the Burkean sense being something whose scale and causes cannot be adequately measured, understood or even communicated, the polar opposite of scientific discourse. We’ve already seen how he has become detached from the narrative of imperialism, carrying with him only broken scraps of it embedded in his body and mind. And his seeming connection to his family, through the nephew to whom he addresses his string of letters, only stresses his detachment from familial narratives. The Uncle does not seem to know or care how the nephew is related to him, or his age, or where he lives, or anything about his personality (he may be ‘very stupid’, as the Uncle points out at one point, p. [55]); so that he comes across less as a person than as a necessary manifestation of the old man’s desire to express his yearning for the Lion, a yearning which for most of his life no one else has shared. In his mind, too, the Uncle seems to model this nephew on himself, assuming or hoping that he will be more interested in strange events and wild adventures than in lounges, tables or chairs (at least, when the tables and chairs in question are firmly settled on a middle-class carpet). This invented nephew is as much a rebel against familial narratives as a product of them, and as liable to run away from their constraints as the Uncle himself.
Meanwhile, there seems to be a different narrative at work in the Uncle’s adventures, one to which the Uncle himself is forever marginal. Towards the end of his quest for the Lion one begins to sense that the real action is always happening elsewhere, out of reach of the artist’s pencil or the poet’s typewriter. This feeling starts to develop in the fifth letter, I think, as the Uncle confesses his lack of success in the quest so far. All he has found of the Lion is ‘strange rumours’, he tells us (p. [54]), but he never goes on to explain what these rumours are. He feels he is getting closer, but feelings are all he has, not evidence; he says he has discovered some ‘clues’ but never lists them (p. [63]). His travels have always been marked, in fact, by the Lion’s absence: ‘I scoured the tropics – he wasn’t there. Cancer and Capricorn had never heard of him. I scrutinized every inch of the equator and he wasn’t there, either. […] Sometimes I thought I was nearing his boundaries only to be disappointed’ (pp. [55] and [60]). He is certain, he adds, that ‘something exciting is going to happen tomorrow’ (p. [60]), but nine more days pass without incident (‘I can’t think why nothing important is happening because I am sure I am close to the White Lion’, he complains on day five, p. [63]), and when something does take place, it happens off stage. A swarm of wailing, hand-wringing creatures hurries across the snow past the Uncle and Jackson, turning the snow black with their bodies, like a sheet of paper being blackened by ink, but we never find out what is being written on the page or what ‘tragedy’ they are running from. The sea-elephants, on the other hand, seem to know all about it, since they break through the Arctic ice after the creatures’ passing and begin to ‘bellow […] as though they also knew that there was a tragedy happening somewhere which they had only just heard about’ (p. [65]). Knowledge is power, an imperialist might say, but in the latter stages of the Uncle’s narrative knowledge is always possessed by the nonhuman other.
The reference in this, the eleventh letter, to some unseen ‘tragedy’ invokes a piece of high culture, something that might have been penned by some Polar Aeschylus or Sophocles. From this point on, further works of high culture reveal themselves in the Arctic wastes, detached from the contexts that shape such artefacts in the fields we know. A sudden wind blows up, lifting the snow for miles around into a mile-high column which suddenly collapses to create a pyramid of snow, invoking some lost nonhuman civilization. Lights appear beneath an expanse of translucent ice as they are crossing it, turning the surface into a vast piece of stained glass not made by human hands (pp. [101-103]). A seeming ‘city of glass churches’ appears on the horizon (p. [100]), the biggest of which the Uncle dubs ‘the shining cathedral’ (p. [104]): monuments to an unknown religion, whose architects, priests and worshippers are not human. In this cathedral gathers a host of polar animals to witness the final act of the mysterious Emperor of the Snows; among them are representatives of all the strange species we have encountered in the book, as well as many others. These creatures know, it seems, what’s about to happen, and the Uncle and Jackson do not share this knowledge. All the same, they take their place in the congregation, finally united with the beings they have fought against and consumed throughout their journey. They are abruptly animals alongside other animals, and in this capacity the Uncle sets aside all prior narratives in favour of witnessing the Lion’s last act without speculating on its purpose, meaning, or significance to science.
The White Lion is the final work of high culture they encounter, a work that declares its independence from imperialist discourse. The Uncle’s obsession with the beast was never rooted in a colonial rationale; from the start his quest was deeply unscientific, based on the image on a stamp and his youthful delight in drawing the four lion statues in Trafalgar Square, one after the other, without noticing until the end that they were all identical. His search for the Lion has strayed with anarchic randomness from one extreme of the earth’s environment to the other, from the equator to the Pole – scarcely a Darwinian journey towards enlightenment. The beast’s whiteness may seem to make it an icon of white supremacy, but the all-encompassing whiteness of the Poles and many of their animal inhabitants ensure that whiteness in this story is not exclusive; rather it’s a sign of infinite possibility, like the whiteness of unpainted canvas or unmarked paper. The Lion’s shape recalls the various uses of the lion as an imperialist symbol, not least in the lion statues of Trafalgar Square; the Lion’s title supports this association. Lions in Mervyn’s work, however, are without exception past their prime, if they ever had one: from Headmaster Bellgrove in Gormenghast (1950), whose face resembles that of a lion with bad teeth, to the idiotic but self-satisfied lion in the play Noah’s Ark (1950s); from the enslaved lion-man in the novella Boy in Darkness (1956), who crumbles to dust as he unleashes his last roar, to the battered toy protagonist of Burgess Drake’s children’s novel The Book of Lyonne (1952), which Peake illustrated, who keeps a boy’s pyjamas in his zip-up tummy, favours ‘Demi-cratic’ principles and ‘listens to the voice of the Common People’ (p. 258) instead of imposing his will on his fellow toys.[11] The Lion in Letters from a Lost Uncle has a throne in an ice cathedral, cementing his status as King of Beasts and perhaps invoking the Lion of Judah, a figure of Christ. But he is blind (like the monstrous Lamb in Boy in Darkness) and ‘ready to die’, as the Uncle sees the moment he sets eyes on him (p. [112]). Having stalked to the ice cathedral – which is also a stage, with the animal audience arranged in tiers as if in a Greek or Roman amphitheatre – the Lion rears up, gives a final roar, and transforms itself into another work of art, a sculpture made of ice. All its cultural and religious resonances are at this stage consigned to the past, and it becomes a sublime spectacle, powerful only in its emotional and aesthetic impact on those who see it first hand after an arduous journey, such as the Uncle’s quest. Its ‘long and fabulous […] life’ (p. [117]), about which we have learned nothing, comes to an end, leaving only the fables of the Uncle’s, Jackson’s and now the reader’s imagination.
The White Lion, then, invokes a world in which old narratives have come to an end. The Uncle, too, is old, and has passed on his vision of the Lion’s death to a new generation – embodied in his nephew – to make of it what they wish. Soon afterwards the Uncle himself merges with the Arctic landscape, just as the beast did. We don’t know where he is going; we only know that he has been liberated from the quest that has driven him so far. The ‘Last Letter’ ends with him sharpening his leg-spike (now a ‘sword-spike’, like the weapon of some quixotic knight, p. [127]) and setting off into the snow to collect a wolf-skin from one of the carcasses slain in a fight between wolves and reindeer. Jackson has been ‘excited’ by the fight (p. [126]), while the Uncle regards it as nothing special after the spectacle of the Lion’s death – a direct reversal of their usual emotional reactions. But the letter’s final page shows the Uncle and Jackson side by side beneath an Arctic sky in which hangs an array of strange signs resembling waves and compass roses, a hint at further sublimity to come. The fact that we do not know what shape that sublimity will take makes of the book’s ending an opening out from the narrow bounds of Empire, and of imperial narratives of all kinds. The fact that both the Uncle and Jackson are shown on this page as tiny, insignificant figures (and the Uncle seems to be waving goodbye with his harpoon) clears a space for new protagonists – perhaps without the Uncle’s unsettling traits, though presumably with plenty of new ones of their own – to perform in the paper theatres of the future. In fact, the last few pages of Mervyn’s book repeatedly show the Uncle and Jackson side by side and dwarfed by the wonders of the North. By the end these wonders have taken centre stage, like the Lion, and their part human, part animal witnesses have dwindled to the size of the wailing and hand-wringing little creatures that swarmed over the horizon at the start of the final phase of the Uncle’s journey.
There is nothing in art or literature, I think, remotely like Letters from a Lost Uncle, but it is packed with clear allusions to other works of art and literature. Its creation through word and image of two new mythic beings, the Uncle and Jackson, invokes the work of one of Mervyn’s heroes, William Blake. There are echoes here, too, of Moby Dick (1851), whose plot is equally simple and involves a quest for a mysterious white whale: the Uncle has a missing leg, like Captain Ahab, and substitutes for it a prosthesis fashioned from a narwhal’s tusk (Ahab uses a whalebone’s jaw). William Heath Robinson’s The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902) involves an uncle’s quest to find his baby nephew, little Peter, who was stolen by a wicked bagbird – a quest that takes him through lands as many and various as the districts traversed by Mervyn’s adventurer; it seems possible that Heath Robinson’s uncle and nephew inspired Peake to place an Uncle and his absent nephew at the core of his narrative. And then there is J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911), whose protagonist is trapped like the Uncle in a perpetual cycle of irresponsible action and wild adventure. Mervyn’s Lost Uncle taps, too, into his lifelong love of pirates (his missing limb and nautical turn of phrase invoke Long John Silver or Captain Hook) and Western movies (since he is a nameless, solitary hero perpetually on the move, accompanied only by a sidekick whose principal functions are to carry his things and be rescued from danger). The high cultural aspect of the Uncle’s quest is, then, commingled with images from popular culture, so that it invokes both Don Quixote with his sidekick Sancho Panza[12] and the Lone Ranger with his sidekick Tonto,[13] both Robinson Crusoe with his indigenous companion Friday and the mendicant odd couples of cinema, such as Laurel and Hardy, or of the stage, such as Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot (1952). Several of these relationships involve the same kind of abuse as the Uncle’s with Jackson, troublingly bound together with mutual dependence and intermittent signs of real affection.
At the same time, the book is linked to the lives of the Peakes in ways that go far beyond the Uncle’s status as a migrant artist. The igloos he builds recall an igloo Mervyn built for his sons, Sebastian and Fabian, in the garden of their house on Sark, while the Uncle’s adventures recall the pictures Mervyn drew for the boys each Sunday in a series of exercise books known as ‘The Sunday Books’, full of pirates, indigenous Americans, ships and animals. The boys proposed the subjects of the pictures and Mervyn wove them into his stories; there are even some stamps among the sketches, one (perhaps) drawn for Sebastian, full of things beginning with B (a bus, a bull, a bicycle, a cricket bat, a baby), another for Fabian, as well as a lion which closely resembles the ‘lion on the stamp’ as depicted on the dustjacket of Letters from a Lost Uncle.[14] In addition, the back cover of the dustjacket bears the image of a wax seal stamped with the names ‘Sebastian, Fabian, Maeve’, as if to confirm that the contents have been sent out into the world from their island home. There’s even an in-joke in the narrative which could only have been appreciated by members of the family and some of their friends: the name of the ship on which the Uncle sails, the S. S. Em, invokes the acronym S. S. M., which stands for the School for the Sons of Missionaries – Eltham College – which Mervyn attended in his boyhood.[15] The Uncle, meanwhile, joins the parade of bizarre relatives Mervyn wrote about throughout his career, most notably the Uncles and Aunts he mentions in the poems ‘How Good It Is to Be Alone’, ‘My Uncle Paul of Pimlico’, ‘It Makes a Change’, ‘What a Day It’s Been’, ‘Uncle George’, ‘The Threads Remain’, ‘Crown Me with Hairpins’ and above all ‘Aunts and Uncles’, which contains a list of eccentric characters most of whom are transformed into animals.[16]
Letters from a Lost Uncle, then, is rooted in the moment of its creation, the immediate postwar period when the future could be said to have opened up as it opens up at the end of Mervyn’s book. It draws deeply on literary and artistic history as well as on the history of Mervyn’s family, and marks a point when post-imperial possibilities point towards a potentially vibrant future from a shabby present and a dishonourable British past. Its calculatedly chaotic and improvised nature – with its typos, blots and scribbled handwritten corrections and annotations – insist on the fact that the next moment in time or history cannot be predicted, since all familiar narratives have been disrupted. It is in a sense post-apocalyptic, like Dominic Hill’s 2026 production of Waiting for Godot at the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow. Apocalypse takes place in it, in the form of baffling signs and portents, and the Uncle and Jackson tramp their way past them into the unwritten time to come. It’s therefore also a key work of the mid-twentieth century, and one that continues to resonate in our own apparently apocalyptic moment. It deserves, and badly needs, a new edition.
Bibliographical note
My essay ends with that last sentence. What follows is a bibliographical note about an error that occurs in all known editions of Letters from a Lost Uncle, and you should only read on if you have a copy (digital or analogue) and are interested in the question of whether or not your copy is accurate. I would suggest that it is not, because as far as I can make out no copy of the book has ever been correctly printed. I shall explain this contention here.
It’s widely accepted by Mervyn’s biographers that he was unhappy with the single edition of the book that appeared in his lifetime, for reasons he gave in a letter quoted by John Watney in his early biography: first, Mervyn didn’t think much of the way the book was printed, and secondly, he was annoyed that the price on the dustjacket had been altered from seven shillings and sixpence to three shillings and sixpence, ‘thus giving the book a second-hand look from the very outset’.[17] One error he didn’t mention, however, was that some pages of the first edition had been printed in the wrong order. I first noticed this when I started puzzling over one of the Uncle’s handwritten comments, scribbled under a drawing on p. [5] of my edition (the unpaginated Picador edition of 1977, which largely reproduces the first edition of 1948). ‘I’d forgotten’, the Uncle writes, ‘that I’d already drawn a sea-elephant – not that it matters’. My edition had no drawing of a sea-elephant on any of the preceding pages; the only other such drawing in the book occurs at the top of p. [11], which shows a ‘sea-leopard’ [i.e. a leopard seal] and an elephant-seal, both carefully labelled. I then noticed that the typed prose on p. [11] begins with the word ‘and’ with a lower-case ‘a’, suggesting that the sentence has been carried over from the page before. At the same time, p. [10] ends with a full stop, which means this cannot have been the page that was meant to precede p. [11]. P. [4] of my edition, on the other hand, ends with an unfinished sentence: ‘Not only this, but what with Jackson to be unloaded before he curls up to sleep, and what with my leg-spike to polish’, followed by an ellipsis; and the sentence on p. [11] completes it perfectly: ‘and the sea-leopard stew to prepare for supper, I can’t think why I began this letter tonight of all times’. This suggests that p. [11] – along with p. [12], which follows on from it seamlessly – should actually be pp. [5]-[6].
I would also suggest that pp. [5]-[6] in my edition should in fact be pp. [11]-[12] – in other words, that both pairs of pages have been accidentally transposed. This is more difficult to justify, but the transposition makes sense for a number of reasons. First, the existing p. [5] ends with a handwritten note saying that the Uncle had forgotten he had already drawn an elephant seal (which he here calls a ‘sea-elephant’ before correcting himself to ‘elephant-seal’, presumably because his first drawing of it was labelled with the latter term). It seems unlikely the Uncle would have forgotten this between making the drawing on p. [5] and a drawing only two pages later in the same opening letter. Secondly, if the current pp. [5]-[6] were repositioned as pp. [11]-[12] the portrait of the Uncle on p. [12] (previously p. [6]) would be followed by his detailed discussion of it on p. [13]: ‘Even if the drawing of me isnt a speaking likeness, I do know that I have only one eye’ etc. The lead-up to the portrait on p. [6] makes better sense, too, if we move pp. [5]-[6] to pp. [11]-[12]. On p. [10] the Uncle writes ‘Perhaps you have never heard of me before?’, and the swap would mean he follows this comment with the detailed verbal description that’s currently on p. [5], and with the drawing of himself on the current p. [6]. The description would then be completed by his further discussion of the drawing on p. [13].
It’s worth mentioning one more thing that would need correcting in any new edition of Letters, and this is the fact that no edition after the first has reprinted pp. [24]-[25] as they appeared in the first edition (drawings from these missing pages were added to the endpapers of the book’s second edition of 1976, but are not present in any later ones). These pages were originally removed, G. Peter Winnington suggests, to reduce the length of the book to the standard 132-page format.[18]
I can imagine a new and perfect edition of Letters from a Lost Uncle, but only time will tell if it can ever come into existence. The problem is made worse by the alterations in pen which Mervyn made to some of his pencil drawings in his last illness; these have changed the look of the drawings radically, and a reprint would need to consider whether to keep these alterations, in recognition of his changing abilities as he succumbed to Parkinson’s Disease, or whether to return instead to the first edition as the most finished edition we possess, making only one change, which is to swap the two transposed sets of pages. Of course if you have a first edition you could simply read it in the new order I’ve suggested. But do read it, in whatever version you can get hold of.
NOTES
[1] Maeve Gilmore, A World Away (1970), in Mervyn Peake: Two Lives (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 4.
[2] Clare Peake, Under a Canvas Sky: Living Outside Gormenghast (London: Constable, 2011), p. 23, quoting Patricia Herington, who was the Peakes’ neighbour as a child. Also quoted in Lucy Scholes, Maeve Gilmore, Modern Women Artists (n.p.: Eiderdown Books, 2026), p. 36. Scholes gives a detailed account of Maeve’s murals in the Peakes’ Chelsea home on pp. 36-39.
[3] Mervyn Peake, Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions), Picador (London: Pan Books, 1977), p. [12]. All references are to this edition, which is unpaginated; I’ve therefore supplied page numbers in square brackets throughout.
[4] G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies: The Illustrated Biography (London: Peter Owen, 2009), p. 228.
[5] From The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949), cited in Mervyn Peake: Writings and Drawings, ed. Maeve Gilmore and Shelagh Johnson (London: Academy Editions and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1974), p. 80.
[6] See M. C. Rast, ‘Ireland’s sister nations’: internationalism and sectarianism in the Irish struggle for independence, 1916–22’, Journal of Global History, 2015, Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 479-501.
[7] In fact, George VI lost his title ‘Emperor of India’ when India won independence in 1947, the year before the book was published.
[8] Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens tells us that Peter ran away (by flying out of the nursery window) ‘when he was seven days old’, and that as a result his age is always one week. J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 12.
[9] ‘The Men in Bowler Hats are Sweet’, in Mervyn Peake, Complete Nonsense, ed. R. W. Maslen and G. Peter Winnington, Fyfield Books (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), p. 148. Cf the final stanza:
The Men in Bowler Hats are sweet
Beneath their bowler hats.
It’s not their fault if, in the heat
Of their Transactions; I repeat,
It’s not their fault if Vampires meet
And gurgle in their spats.
[10] ‘HOW TO STARE […] Scrutinize the object for a long while. Try to understand its shape, its solidity, or outline, or texture, or whatever it is that interests you about it – and then after the long stare – when you know what you want to record, begin.’ Mervyn Peake, The Craft of the Lead Pencil (London: Allan Wingate, 1946), pp. 2-3.
[11] The Book of Lyonne features a tortoise who looks exactly like Jackson in Mervyn’s illustration, down to the kerchief he wears around his head. See Burgess Drake, The Book of Lyonne (London: The Falcon Press, 1952), p. 21.
[12] The Peakes owned a copy of Don Quixote illustrated by Gustave Doré. See Sebastian Peake, Child of Bliss, in Mervyn Peake: Two Lives […] pp. 203-5.
[13] The two Lone Ranger movie serials of 1938 and 1939 were shown in UK cinemas at the time. The original Lone Ranger radio show was never broadcast in the UK.
[14] While the B picture seems to have been drawn as part of an alphabet – there is also a stamp showing objects beginning with A – I think it was drawn for Sebastian, because the capital B in it has been modified to become an anagram of SP, i.e. S[ebastian] P[eake]. The stamp I’m identifying as Fabian’s shows a boy in the cabin of a locomotive alongside the driver; the boy has blond hair, like Fabian, whereas Sebastian’s was brown. See Mervyn Peake and Michael Moorcock, The Sunday Books (London and New York: Duckworth Overlook, 2011), pp. 36-7 and p. 38. A stamp showing objects beginning with A appears on p. 130. For the lion that resembles the lion on the stamp see p. 93.
[15] See Winnington, Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies, p. 228.
[16] See Mervyn Peake, Complete Nonsense, ed. R. W. Maslen and G. Peter Winnington, Fyfield Books (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), pp. 71-3, 86, 88, 90, 113, 123, 220 and 150-3.
[17] John Watney, Mervyn Peake (London: Abacus, 1977) p. 103.
[18] See G. Peter Winnington’s bibliographical account of Letters from a Lost Uncle in his essential list of Peake’s work in print, available on the Peake Studies website here [https://peakestudies.com/parta.htm].
