Venerable, pitiable, frightful: Mervyn Peake’s ‘Ancient Mariner’

Volume X (1944) of Tambimuttu’s Poetry London has been mentioned in an earlier post here. Besides much mediocre poetry, it contained Terence White’s remarkable “Irene”, images by Gerald White, Tambi’s perceptive review of Keith Douglas and, as a bonus, Mervyn Peake’s eight illustrations to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, published the previous year. These latter, as if they needed it, were pegged onto a forgettable essay by critic and minor poet Margaret Diggle comparing the Mariner with Eliot’s The Waste Land, her thrust seeming to be that both have something to do with redemption. (Quite so. And your point is?)

Peake’s images are sometimes tentative, under-observed, or coyly sentimental – a failure of much “fantasy” illustration. But here he is at his most resolved and most ferociously intense. This intensity derives from the obsessive and disciplined density of his pen line, which shows extraordinary virtuosity; I particularly like the looping “scribbled” hatch that forms the sky in the first image below. In the mood of their tonality these owe something to the example of Doré, but otherwise they are very much their own vision. Elsewhere they are described as ink and wash, but I can see no signs of any wash, though white ink lines are used occasionally and judiciously. C S Lewis commented on these drawings in a much later letter to Peake, praising their “disquieting blend of the venerable, the pitiable, and the frightful”, and the sheer gracefulness of their representation of horror.

In their Poetry London reprint, the images were numbered and usefully supplied by Peake with thumbnail sketches keying them to exact lines of text, which I have used as captions. The eight drawings are available here and there online, though sometimes slightly cropped or blurred, so it will do no harm to show them again. A click on the small images will throw up enough of an enlargement (click again with the magnifier cursor) for the interested viewer to lose her/himself indulgently and entirely in the jaw-dropping intricacies of Peake’s cross hatching.

The sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea.

… ‘with my cross-bow I shot the Albatross.’

Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.

I bit my arms, I sucked the blood And cried ‘A sail! a sail!’

Her lips were red, her looks were free Her locks were yellow as gold Her skin was white as leprosy, The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea!

I could not draw my eyes from theirs Nor turn them up to pray.

I pass like night, from land to land.

Nico, Beckett, Keaton and the not-self

Curious sometimes how people and things one has put in quite discrete boxes seem to slide into unexpected overlap. Or at least approach each other, moving into relation:

Nico does some mod modelling in Times Square, autumn 1964. Photo by Steve Schapiro.

“I do not read biographs. They are full of lies, in fact, because they say life has a beginning, a middle and an end. I do not believe in the middle.

You can only say one thing at the end – Nico has survived these indignities. Biographs tell you that somebody moves through life. I am saying that my life moves after me. Do you follow me?

Well, I would like a novel about me because it will come from the imagination and so it will explain my mind, not my life. My mind and my life are two different things. My mind is called Christa. My life is Nico. Christa had made Nico, and now she is bored with Nico because Nico is bored with herself. Nico has been to the top of life and to the bottom. Both places are empty; she has discovered this. But Nico does not want to be in the middle either, where people turn their back on each other. To avoid these places of unhappiness it is better to be nowhere, and drift.”

Nico, c 1981.

Buster Keaton as “O” on the set of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Film’, near Brooklyn Bridge, July 1964. Photo by Steve Schapiro.

 

“After the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again, to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another. How false all this is. No time now to explain. I began again. But little by little with a different aim, no longer in order to succeed, but in order to fail.

My concern is not with me, but with another, far beneath me and whom I try to envy, of whose crass adventures I can now tell at last, I don’t know how. Of myself I could never tell …

To show myself now, on the point of vanishing, at the same time as the stranger, and by the same grace, that would be no ordinary last straw. Then live, long enough to feel behind my closed eyes, other eyes close. What an end.”

Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, 1951.

(For previous – unrelated – posts on both Nico and Beckett, use the tabs below.)

The artist as philatelist

“Great adventures have shaken those childhood companions of ours, stamps which a thousand bonds of mystery unite with the history of the world … Here are the stamps of defeats, the stamps of revolutions. Used, mint – what do I care? I shall never begin to understand all this history and geography. Surcharges, overprints – your black enigmas terrify me: behind them are concealed an unknown ruler, a massacre, palaces in flames, and the song of a mob, waving placards and shouting slogans, that marches towards a throne …”

Aragon, Paris Peasant

Plenty of artists and artworks feature on postage stamps, but it’s hard to find a decent piece of art about philately or philatelists. (I exempt mail art and artistamps from the discussion at this point, the relation there being a conceptual game rather than an observation or reflection. Not “about”.) Such Kurt Schwitters collages as happen to contain fragments of stamps and envelopes perhaps begin to say something about the collecting process as retention, accumulation and autobiography, but only in the same way as for bus tickets or small fragments of lino – it was all one to Kurt, bless him.

Google Image suggests that paintings of philatelists (a somewhat specialised genre, admittedly) are mostly chocolate box-academic renditions of eccentric old geezers squinting through magnifying glasses. (Not that there isn’t an undeniable element of truth there, as anyone will know who has ever visited a stamp fair and studied the demography.) But here’s one that I think, for a change, makes the grade: Le Philatéliste, painted by François Barraud in 1929, just three years after the appearance of Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, whose stamp shop reverie is quoted above. (Not that Barraud was any kind of surrealist, though I notice that one of the editors of my very favouritest anthology of essays on the psychopathologies of collecting, The Cultures of Collecting, 1994, is Roger Cardinal, the Outsider Art man. To be fair, I doubt there are any other such anthologies, but I recommend the book anyway.)

Francois Barraud, ‘Le Philateliste’

François was just one of the four Swiss Barraud brothers, all painters and all employing a broadly similar style, though generally reckoned the best of the quartet. He died in 1934 at the age of 34. There is a cool neo-classicism in his style that fits the period well, with hints of Maillol or Modigliani.  But there is also a tender and modest humanism, and a hint of Vermeer too. Le Philatéliste is a self-portrait with his wife Marie. The activity of collecting is shown as male, with the wife as supporter, offering her approval. Or does she intrude? Philately has always been an overwhelmingly male form of obsession. The sideways glance with slight frown, animated by the whole diagonal of the composition, introduces a very definite anxiety. The push-and-pull tension is between the woman and the collection. This is a study of desires and sublimations, of the limits of privacy and of the nature of the self. It is a gently uncomfortable image.

(Though an accurate one. As well as the magnifier, note the round-ended tweezers, the black watermark tray, the catalogue and what may be a packet of hinges.)

Hand up. I’d better sign off here with an admission of personal involvement. Some remains of my “other” website still seem to be online here (thanks to the neglect of my previous ISP to remove them), consisting of two terrifyingly forensic studies of hopelessly recondite aspects of the philatelic history of Burma. Yes, we are talking perversion.

The practices of art and philately (considered as an exemplar of “scientific” collecting) seem to be somehow opposed – and thus connected – obsessions. But which is a perversion of which? Each of the other, perhaps. And therefore both, I guess, of some elusive ur-obsession that might even claim a higher ground in terms of authenticity or worth. Or maybe not.