a gallimaufry

Gormenghast on BBC Radio 4

It’s the centenary year of the birth of Mervyn Peake! How did I not know that? In my late teens I was obsessed with his work, starting with the Gormenghast trilogy but quickly embracing his poetry and art. I haven’t looked at any of it for ages, but particularly remember the novels and the illustrations for ‘The Ancient Mariner’ with (for me) an unusual clarity.

 
(Page of manuscript from Titus Groan showing Fuschia and Steerpike; it seems Peake sketched his characters as he wrote; taken from the Gormenghast website which is stuffed full of information about Peake)

I feel I should mark the occasion by rereading Gormenghast, but my copies are languishing in my parents’ house in England (my parents are most long-suffering and put up with boxes of books even though really I am far too old for this sort of thing and should go and sort them out) (one of these days). However, help is at hand! There is a terrific six-part serialisation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels on BBC Radio 4 at the moment: The History of Titus Groan. I think it works much better on radio than as a television series, and the cast is wonderful (it includes Paul Rhys, Miranda Richardson, James Fleet, Tamsin Greig and Mark Benton).

('Swelter with Kitchen Urchin', pen-and-ink drawing, also from the Gormenghast website; Swelter is practically engulfing the child)

There’s also a programme about Peake from his children’s perspective: 'A Hundred Years of Mervyn Peake', and an exhibition at the British Library, The Worlds of Mervyn Peake; I am most disappointed that I won't be able to see it.

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)

(And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953, oil on canvas, from here)

I must have been living under a stone for the past few months because I’ve only just discovered that Leonora Carrington died on the 25th May at the ripe old age of ninety-four. There are good obituaries of her at the Guardian and in the Independent, and a nice piece in the Telegraph by Joanna Moorhead, a relative (and author of the Guardian obituary).

 

(The Crow Catcher, 1990, oil on canvas, found here)

Carrington’s early years were eventful, to say the least: expelled from convent school and a rebel debutante, she eloped to Paris with Max Ernst where she met Picasso, Buñuel, Dalí (who praised her as ‘a most important woman artist’), Man Ray, Miró, Breton and many other artists. There are stories of her painting her feet with mustard in a restaurant and cutting guests’ hair while they slept, which she then served to them in an omelette for breakfast. They moved to Provence where Carrington started writing and was the only woman whose work was included in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour. At the outbreak of war Ernst was interned and Carrington suffered a breakdown; she was incarcerated in a Spanish asylum after she crossed the border to try and obtain a visa for him. Her father arranged for her to be sent to a sanatorium in South Africa, but she gave her minders the slip in Lisbon, while they awaited the ship, jumped into a taxi and demanded to be taken to the Mexican embassy. A friend of hers was a Mexican diplomat, and he married her to help her out and took her to New York. They soon divorced and Carrington moved to Mexico where she married Csizi Wiesz, with whom she had two sons. Her friends included Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo; Varo became a particularly good friend and they experimented with alchemy and the Kabbala together. Carrington was also fascinated by Mayan and Aztec culture and the Day of the Dead.

(Kron Flower, 1987, tempera on panel, from here)

Carrington is best known as a Surrealist artist and her paintings are wonderfully playful, dark and magical. They often depict transformations, strange creatures, gifts, nuns and food; they are ethereal, feminine and clearly influenced by Hieronymous Bosch. But Carrington also wrote a memoir of her spell of madness (Down Under) and fiction, including The Hearing Trumpet, which I read a few years ago.

(Syssigy, 1957, oil on board, from here)

The Hearing Trumpet is chattily narrated by ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby (‘Indeed I do have a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I find it rather gallant’). Her horrible son and his family fail to discern her charms (‘Grandmother,’ said Robert, ‘can hardly be classified as a human being. She’s a drooling sack of decomposing flesh’) so they pack her off to an old ladies’ home run by the Well of Light Brotherhood. The Brotherhood do not merely care for the ladies’ physical needs, they strive to Improve them, dissolve their ‘interior impurities’ such as greed and vanity and impart Inner Radiance. There are shady goings-on and an old lady is poisoned:

‘Suffering cobras!’ said Georgina who had gone pale. ‘The fudge must have been meant for me ... They must call in the police. If we were in the United States they would both go the lethal chamber and be frizzled to lard in the electric chair. I wouldn’t mind paying anything up to ten dollars to watch.’

‘There is no capital punishment here,’ I told Georgina. ‘But they might make them work on a chain gang, cracking rocks with pick axes and whipped by colossal Nubians wearing red loin cloths.’

The plot continues, increasingly wayward, with a winking Abbess, a wolf-headed woman, the Grail and a monster bursting out of a tower.  Character is less important than exuberant event; it is a Surrealist painting in prose. Odd, slyly funny and bizarre, it’s not a book for everyone, but if you like Carrington’s art and the work of Angela Carter, chances are you will enjoy this and I’d urge you to try it.

Carrington’s paintings sell for large amounts of money, but of her books, only The Hearing Trumpet remains in print in English. Second-hand copies of The Seventh Horse are expensive: come on Virago, couldn’t you republish it – and perhaps some of her other work?

(Photograph of Leonora Carrington from here; the photographer is uncredited)

The Skin Chairs, Barbara Comyns

Once a guinea-pig had died in the kitchen and one of the maids had held a small mirror to its mouth to see if its breath left a mark and ever after I seemed to see the mark of the guinea-pig’s last breath on it.

Barbara Comyns is a writer whose best work, to my mind, reveals the extreme strangeness of the world alongside the ordinary in prose which seems effortlessly innocent, and The Skin Chairs is one of my favourite novels by her. This isn’t really a book review – more of a waffle – and if you (yes you, o readers I do not have) haven’t read it I do give away a lot of the plot so be warned.

Ten-year-old Frances is enduring a stay with her horrible horsey relations, the Lawrences, when her father suddenly dies. Left in reduced circumstances, Frances’s mother is cajoled by Aunt Lawrence into taking a dreary little house nearby into which she must cram her six children. Here they muddle along as best a family can when accustomed to servants and ponies; Mother dons tea-gowns as an economy and makes the family bilious with her occasional forays into extravagant cookery, the eldest daughter Polly rules the kitchen and permits only striped bacon for breakfast and Aunt Lawrence interferes constantly and unpleasantly. Two other widows befriend Frances for their own ends: beautiful Vanda who uses Frances as a babysitter for her neglected infant Jane, and the terrifying Mrs Alexander, who keeps sad animals in her conservatory, makes her chauffeur paint her slippers gold and keeps one room of her house as a surgery and one as a shrine to her dead daughter. The novel, told from Frances’s point of view, is suffused with Comyns’s characteristic charm, humour and sense of the grotesque.

Relationships between mothers and daughters, abusers and victims, pervade the novel, but I was intrigued by the symbolism of the skin chairs of the title and have been thinking particularly about them. According to Ursula Holden, who wrote the introduction to the edition I have, Comyns declared of the novel that ‘Only the skin chairs are true. I saw them.’ In the novel, the chairs belong to the General who lives in a grand house in the village. Frances relates three significant encounters with them, the first being on a visit with her cousin Ruby:

They were dark and churchified, and the backs and seats were covered in what appeared to be vellum, blackish and cracked in places. The General’s wife looked at them ruefully and admitted that the chairs were covered in human skin. ‘He brought them back with him after the Boer War, isn’t it horrible? Five of them are black men’s skins and one white. I believe if you look carefully you can see the difference.’ [...] With a feeling of awe I gazed at the chairs thinking of the poor skinless bodies buried somewhere in Africa. Did their souls ever come to see what had happened to their skins or had they forgotten all about them?

Here the macabre is tempered by Frances’s pity and perhaps even identification with them as bereft and powerless. Later Frances sneaks back into the house to show the chairs to Esmé, her sister. They notice a biscuit barrel on the table with a ram’s head for a lid and real horns on it: ‘I knew that if there were any biscuits in the barrel they would taste disgusting.’ From behind a door they hear breathing: ‘There was something very red and white inside – most likely a hassock, I thought, or even a huge cherry pie.’ In fact it is the General suffering a fatal stroke, and the girls flee in terror leaving him to die alone. This time it is the horror and revolting physicality of death that is evoked.

At the end of the book Vanda and Mrs Alexander and their exploitative relationships with Frances have been banished from the little girl’s life and Mother has married the new occupant of the General’s house, to which the family now moves. Frances is convinced she can hear the chairs ‘rumbling and grumbling together’ in the library and they seem a threatening presence and constant reminder of horror, cruelty and guilt. Yet when Mother banishes the chairs to the attic, Frances feels sorry for them again. One night she creeps out of bed and downstairs to them, clutching her school prayer-book (‘As I did so, the rumbling-grumbling noises stopped and I seemed to hear a great sigh’) to read the Burial Service to them. First, though, she baptises them with water from a flower vase, naming them after her favourite poets (Percy Shelley, George Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Tennyson, William Yeats and Anon. Circa) in an act which renders them safer and almost friendly. The novel ends as she falls asleep on Percy Shelley while reading out the Burial Service.

To me, therefore, the chairs represent death and the grief and horror of death, while offering Frances a way of absorbing that into herself. While she never sees her father’s corpse nor is permitted to attend his funeral, and in fact hardly refers to him after the initial devastation of his death, the chairs may provide her with a physical manifestation of his dead body and her reading of the Burial Service her own private obsequy for him.

There is a great deal more to The Skin Chairs than this (for a start, it's very funny, you wouldn't guess that from this post though) and although it’s now out of print I think you can find second-hand copies quite easily. An excellent article about this and Comyns’s other novels, which has influenced what I have written here, is ‘Skin Chairs and Other Domestic Horrors: Barbara Comyns and the Gothic Female Tradition’ by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (2004; Gothic Studies 6 (1): 90–102). And there’s a really good review of it by Simon of Stuck in a Book here. The photograph opposite of Comyns in later life is taken from the Virago Press site and it is my favourite of the photographs of her which are publicly available.