PEAKE (Mervyn, 1911-1968, Writer, Artist, Poet and Illustrator)

Exceptional Early Autograph Letter Signed "Merve" to his old friend [Helene] Lanie Bruce "Lanie dear" written in his tiny neat hand wondering where "this letter will find you. Maybe still in Ebury street. Have you seen any more of Leslie? The island is magical now. The flowers are like living cataracts of pure colour. Yesterday I spent the whole day painting in a warm valley. The sunlight was terrific making the grass, trees and flowers and especially the gorse almost dizzyingly brilliant. Oh Lord, the sunlight on the gorse is almost cruel in its unrelenting intensity. I took easel & paints, canvases, lunch and everything down in a wheelbarrow. It was wonderful. The trees, at least some of them are only just coming into leaf and make a faint pink blurr against the sky - like a cloud at sunset ... I cannot help constantly remembering about picking the flowers in the garden with you - not our garden. It was all so incredibly lovely. Oh I do want to see you again. Sark would be heaven, if we could wander about the cliff tops and among the trees and discuss things. The people I know here are all swell in their way but I always feel a trifle apart and could never get on with them as I do with you. Next Saturday the Gallery is opening for the first of the Summer shows they are holding here. It is going to be good ... better than the London one anyway for our work has changed a lot since last summer and autumn. Is there any chance of your coming over here and then returning with me for Leslie's wedding ... Is Bobbie in England still. If so give him my very, very best. A great guy. Please forgive the last disintegrated letter I sent you. God, it was lovely having you to see me off at Waterloo ... Well Lanie - au revoir pour le moment. Write soon and send good news if you can be coming over. I'd love you to see this place in the spring - besides of course the rather absurd and wholly unaccountable wish to see you myself ...", 2 sides 4to., c/o The Art Gallery, Sark, C.I., 14th Mary

His early career in the 1930s was as a painter in London, although he lived on Sark for a time. He first moved to Sark in 1932 where his former teacher Eric Drake was setting up an artists' colony. In 1934 Peake exhibited with the Sark artists both in the Sark Gallery built by Drake and at the Cooling Galleries in London, and in 1935 he exhibited at the Royal Academy and at the Leger Galleries in London.
Letters from Helene Bruce to both Mervyn and Maeve Peake can be found in the Mervyn Peake archive at the British Library
He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The three works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
Letters from Peake are uncommon as he died at the age of 67 after suffering from dementia for the last years of his life.

Item Date:  1934

Stock No:  40689