Well, having started I might just as well continue. I’ve written about Edgar Thurstan and I’ve written about John Tenniel. So I might just as well go on and write about some of my other favourite Alice illustrators. So let’s discuss Mervyn Peake.
I was going to start off by saying that Mervyn Peake, like
John Tenniel, was one of the illustrators of the book who really showed at
least a touch of genius. But then on reflection I don’t really like the word
genius. Genius has the connotations of an effortless, God-given gift, almost as
if it somehow exists outside of the individual who is merely a vessel through
which it works its wonders. And that’s not what I mean at all. So please, if I
should happen to use the word genius, please accept that I mean rare,
outstanding brilliance.
One of the remarkable things about Mervyn Peake is that he
is at least as well known as a writer as he is as an artist. He was that rarest
or rara aves, a master at both. His lasting fame is assured by his Gormenghast
series of stories – a trilogy of novels and a novella. These are works of
fantasy and the darkest of black humour. To some extent his writing makes me
think of him as a dark and twisted Dickens. The first two Gormenghast novels –
“Titus Groan” and “Gormenghast” were written in the forties, an exceptionally
productive period for Mervyn Peake. During this same period he illustrated both
Alice books and also Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”. It’s well
worth taking a look at Peake’s illustrations of Treasure Island. For me they
are the definitive illustrations of the story, and they are dark, disturbingly
so.
Not so very long ago I watched a BBC documentary about some
of the illustrators of Alice. Mervyn Peake’s son was interviewed and he made
the interesting point that Peake made his Alice illustrations not long after he
was assigned as an artist to the Nazi War Crimes trials in Nuremburg after the Second
World War, and he sees the influence that this had on his father in Peake’s
illustrations of the malevolent figure of the Queen of Hearts. That’s a fair
point. Yet for me, a remarkable thing about Peake’s Alice illustrations is that
they are largely so bereft of darkness, especially compared with what he
produced for Treasure Island. I say largely. Peake’s Cheshire Cat looks almost
demonic. For the most part though his Alice illustrations are lighter than
Tenniel’s, far more dynamic than Tenniel’s and, to be honest, more fun than
Tenniel’s. In the Gormenghast books Peake uses the grotesque, both through
words and his own illustrations. He also uses the grotesque in his
illustrations of Treasure Island. Yet he doesn’t seem to hardly use the
grotesque in Alice. I might have nightmares about his Cheshire Cat but I
certainly wouldn’t have nightmares about his Jabberwock, for example.
What he does do, though, is give us a world full of
interesting and engaging characters. And it’s in this, the depictions of the
personalities – and I use that word deliberately – of Wonderland and
Looking-Glass world that Peake excels. He rarely gives us detailed backgrounds,
sometimes they are little more than a few lines. If anything, it is almost as
if he’s saying that the landscape of Wonderland (and Looking-Glass World) is made
of the characters that populate it, and everything else within it is
insubstantial and dreamlike. And this is a valid vision to put forward.
You should take a look at Peake’s illustration of the
Hatter’s Tea Party. Many illustrators borrow from Tenniel, some of them quite
heavily. Others of them seem to be primarily motivated by trying to be as
different from Tenniel as possible and are therefore defined more by what they
are not than what they are. Not so Peake’s hatter. At first sight he seems very
different from the archetype. However, Peake is confident enough to give him a
nose that, while nothing like Tenniel’s hawk beak, is just as prominent in its
own way. There’s no sign of a Tenniel-esque top hat. Instead he wears a stack
of hats of different styles that all seem to merge with each other. His body and
limbs are in proportion to his head, and he seems younger than Tenniel’s. In the
same scene Tenniel’s Hare is, well, he’s just a hare, with a bandage and a few
straws sticking out of the top of it. Peake’s hare has a personality. He has a
hare’s head, but his has a recognisable personality.
Likewise in “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, Tenniel’s Walrus
wears clothes and boots, but when you get right down to it, he’s a Walrus wearing
clothes. Peake’s Walrus also wears clothes but he has human arms and hands and
legs rather than flippers. The clothes he wears are the waistcoat, jacket and
pinstriped trousers of a successful businessman, but the shabby way he wears them
marks him out as the louche conman that he is. While the Carpenter is one of
the few characters that sees Peake veering towards grotesque, with his ridiculously
elongated slab of a chin and his wild hair.
It’s worthwhile looking closely at Peake’s Alice. In no way
can Peake’s Alice be described as a bystander like Tenniel’s Alice. She’s very
much a participant and a willing one at that. At times she seems to be
positively enjoying herself. You can’t imagine Tenniel’s Alice ever doing
something so carefree and un-self-conscious as dabbling her fingers in the
water as Peake’s Alice does in the Wool and Water illustration. She’s dark-haired
and a little older than Tenniel’s Alice. Graham Greene who was a friend of Peake
said that he thought there was a little too much of the gamine about his Alice.
I think that this is a little unfair. Tomboyish – well, perhaps just a bit, but
attractively tomboyish is maybe seeing something that isn’t necessarily meant to
be there. Peake’s Alice is an unashamed free spirit who enjoys her adventures,
and this rubs off on the viewer.
In a nutshell Peake gives us a different vision of Alice’s
worlds. His work may never be seen as archetypal images in the way that Tenniel’s
are, but for a set of illustrations to make you look again and get a fresh perspective,
they’re pretty hard to beat.
No comments:
Post a Comment