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proud and terrible / Denied to those whose duty / Is to be cerebral’. What then is this nonsense, to which Peake devoted so much time and effort in his short but prolific career? Peake himself refused to define it when in 1954 he gave a talk on the BBC about his illustrations for Carroll’s Alice books. ‘In Alice,’ he explains – despite all the potential terrors the books contain, from the monster Jabberwocky to the bloody-minded Queen of Hearts – there is no horror. There is only a certain kind of madness, or nonsense – a very different thing. Madness can be lovely when it’s the madness of the imagination and not the madness of pathology. Nonsense can be gentle or riotous. It can clank like a stone in the empty bucket of fatuity. It can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. It’s magic – for to explain it, were that possible, would be to kill it. It swims, plunges, cavorts, and rises in its own element. It’s a fabulous fowl. For non-sense is not the opposite of good sense. That would be ‘Bad Sense’. It’s something quite apart – and isn’t the opposite of anything. It’s something far more rare. Hundreds of books are published year after year. Good sense in many of them: bad sense in many more – but non-sense, oh no, that’s rarity, a revelation and an art worth all the rest. Perhaps one book in every fifty years glitters with the divine lunacy we call nonsense. (‘Alice and Tenniel and Me’, p. 22) Despite Peake’s reluctance to ‘explain’ Carroll’s ‘certain kind of madness’, he says a number of important things about it in this passage. It possesses its own nature, like a newly discovered species, and inhabits its own element – a country of its own, perhaps, with its own rules, or (from the verbs he chooses to describe it: ‘swims’, ‘plunges’, ‘rises’) a medium like water in which there is no bar to movement in any direction. It’s not the opposite of ‘good sense’ because there is often sense or reason in it which, when applied in the context of the element that nonsense inhabits, produces wholly unexpected results. Can we describe nonsense, then, as an arrangement of words on the page without regard to meaning but with careful regard to grammar, form, sound and rhythm? That’s more or less right, except that in this mode of writing form gives rise to meaning. Words chosen for their sound and rhythm (or for the startling images or actions they conjure up) acquire a vigorous life of their own, determining the 4
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direction of a narrative in verse or prose – leading writer and reader by the hand, to adopt Peake’s metaphor – and thereby making a statement which is a peculiar combination of tight control and wild randomness, the promptings of the unconscious given shape and logic by the craftsman’s close attention. Of course, these observations are true of other forms of imaginative writing, but nonsense foregrounds the conjunction of tight control and lack of control more effectively than any other literary mode or genre. It’s akin to the sketchpad doodle, where a random line is shaped by the artist’s skill into the grotesque or elegant human or animal form which it inadvertently evokes, or where a carefully sketched conventional figure is transformed into a chimera, perhaps as a result of an initial slip of the artist’s hand. In both the doodle and the nonsense poem or story, meaning arises from meaninglessness in unexpected but delightful configurations, surprising the artist as much as the reader. In the process, a kind of philosophy emerges, a way of seeing the world which is tangential to (and sometimes the reverse of) the social and moral conventions that are supposed to shape our lives. Each accomplished writer’s form of nonsense is unique. Faced with a random scribble on the page, every artist will see something different in it, just as different people see different pictures in a Rorschach blot. In response, each artist will develop a different aspect of the doodle in ways that express his or her own impulses and obsessions. As we have seen, Peake nearly always wrote the word ‘nonsense’ with a c in it – nonsence – which implies that he was well aware of its difference from the kinds perpetrated by Carroll or Lear. We have also seen that he considered it a distinct species of writing from his serious poetry: his ‘divine lunacy’ occupies clearly labelled notebooks of its own, and one should add that it has what one might call a dominant metre. As the Introduction to the Collected Poems points out, the default metre for Peake’s serious poems was the iambic pentameter, the ten-syllable line deployed by Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson. For the nonsense verse, by contrast – despite its immense metrical variety – the default metre is the iambic tetrameter, a line with four stresses, usually made up of seven or eight syllables. Often this alternates with the iambic trimeter, a three-stressed, usually six-syllable line, as in the poem ‘I Must Begin to Comprehend’ (p. 122): I must begin to comprehend My loves, because of my 5

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proud and terrible / Denied to those whose duty / Is to be cerebral’.

What then is this nonsense, to which Peake devoted so much time and effort in his short but prolific career? Peake himself refused to define it when in 1954 he gave a talk on the BBC about his illustrations for Carroll’s Alice books. ‘In Alice,’ he explains – despite all the potential terrors the books contain, from the monster Jabberwocky to the bloody-minded Queen of Hearts –

there is no horror. There is only a certain kind of madness, or nonsense – a very different thing. Madness can be lovely when it’s the madness of the imagination and not the madness of pathology. Nonsense can be gentle or riotous. It can clank like a stone in the empty bucket of fatuity. It can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. It’s magic – for to explain it, were that possible, would be to kill it. It swims, plunges, cavorts, and rises in its own element. It’s a fabulous fowl. For non-sense is not the opposite of good sense. That would be ‘Bad Sense’. It’s something quite apart – and isn’t the opposite of anything. It’s something far more rare. Hundreds of books are published year after year. Good sense in many of them: bad sense in many more – but non-sense, oh no, that’s rarity, a revelation and an art worth all the rest. Perhaps one book in every fifty years glitters with the divine lunacy we call nonsense. (‘Alice and Tenniel and Me’, p. 22)

Despite Peake’s reluctance to ‘explain’ Carroll’s ‘certain kind of madness’, he says a number of important things about it in this passage. It possesses its own nature, like a newly discovered species, and inhabits its own element – a country of its own, perhaps, with its own rules, or (from the verbs he chooses to describe it: ‘swims’, ‘plunges’, ‘rises’) a medium like water in which there is no bar to movement in any direction. It’s not the opposite of ‘good sense’ because there is often sense or reason in it which, when applied in the context of the element that nonsense inhabits, produces wholly unexpected results. Can we describe nonsense, then, as an arrangement of words on the page without regard to meaning but with careful regard to grammar, form, sound and rhythm? That’s more or less right, except that in this mode of writing form gives rise to meaning. Words chosen for their sound and rhythm (or for the startling images or actions they conjure up) acquire a vigorous life of their own, determining the

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