TO MERVYN PEAKE

Greene met the novelist and illustrator Mervyn Peake (1911–68) in Chelsea in the spring of 1943. In June, Chatto and Windus rejected the long, unfinished manuscript of Titus Groan when Peake refused to make cuts. Greene suggested that Peake should meet with Douglas Jerrold, the managing director of Eyre & Spottiswoode, to discuss the novel and an illustration project. By the end of August he had written the last chapters and sent the whole manuscript to Greene.

Reform Club [c. October 1943]

Dear Mervyn Peake, You must forgive me for not having written before, but you know it’s a long book!

I’m going to be mercilessly frank – I was very disappointed in a lot of it & frequently wanted to wring your neck because it seemed to me you were spoiling a first-class book by laziness. The part I had seen before I, of course, still liked immensely – though I’m not sure that it’s gained by the loss of the prologue. Then it seemed to me one entered a long patch of really bad writing, redundant adjectives, a kind of facetiousness, a terrible prolixity in the dialogue of such characters as the Nurse & Prunesquallor, & sentimentality too in the case of [Keda] & to some extent in Titus’s sister. In fact – frankly again – I began to despair of the book altogether, until suddenly in the last third you pulled yourself together & ended splendidly. But even here you were so damned lazy that you called Barquentine by his predecessor’s name for whole chapters.

I’m hitting hard because I feel it’s the only way. There is obviously good stuff here but in my opinion you’ve thrown it away by not working hard enough at the book – there are trite unrealised novelettish phrases side by side with really first class writing. As it stands I consider it unpublishable – about 10,000 words of adjectives & prolix dialogue could come out without any alteration to the story at all. I want to publish it, but I shall be quite sympathetic if you say ‘To Hell with you: you are no better than Chatto’ & prefer to take it elsewhere. But at least I can claim to have read it carefully, & I do beseech you to look at the M.S. again. I began by putting in pencil which can easily be rubbed out brackets round words & phrases which seemed to me redundant, but I gave up after a time.

Write & let me know how you feel about all this. If you want to call me out, call me out – but I suggest we have our duel over whisky glasses in a bar.

Yours,
Graham Greene

Peake was shocked, but this letter marked a turning point in his career as he finally accepted the importance of ‘the blue pencil approach’. Delayed by revisions and the wartime shortage of paper, Titus Groan finally appeared on 22 March 1946.²⁰

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 728