Classics in Short No.104: Peacock Pie
Boys and Girls, Widows and Witches, Snails and Sparrows all baked together in a Peacock Pie
While those Royal Monkeys
who featured in our last instalment were rambling about in their snowy jungle, their creator could not escape other summonses by his Muse. From the time of his first book, Songs of Childhood, published as by ‘Walter Ramal’ in 1902, he is found mingling up verses that owe much to traditional nursery rhymes and Pre-Raphaelite balladry, his Muse laying out for him a poetic mode capable of further development.
Thus,
during the ensuing ten years, repetitions and refinements of the form are found arriving in various periodicals and, by 1912, there was a body of verse that more consciously shifted its burden to ‘poems for’ rather than ‘poems of” childhood’– Peacock Pie; a book of rhymes of 1913. During its making there had been a hope of having it illustrated by Claude Lovat Fraser, to whom De la Mare was wont to read the poems. But Messrs Constable were wary of the expense and Fraser, busy with other projects, handed the drawings over to the author as a memento. Later, in 1924, after Fraser’s death following injuries sustained in the War, Constable did publish them – in a muddled sequence – and De la Mare recalled the days when he watched the characterrs ‘leap into life’ as the artist ‘sat at his board with his brush and bright inks’.
Constable need not have worried
over Peacock Pie’s appeal. Even in its plain format it went through twenty-two reprintings down to 1935 and – never out of print in one form or another down to the present – it brought a Victorian tunefulness and an air of evanescent mystery into the annals of English children’s verse. (It was prominent as an influence on the work of Charles Causley even after Michael Rosen had invited us to his brother’s marriage in a Wimpy Bar.)
Fragmentary
though the arrival of the verses had been, the eighty-two poems that made up Peacock Pie had a homogeneity that was akin to a musical composition. Set in eight ‘movements’ ( ‘Up and Down’,’ Boys and Girls’, ‘Three QueerTales’ and so on) the divisions did not have a rigid discreteness but were more like breathing-spaces in a set of variations whose theme was a veiled regret at the mystery of things passing. This may manifest itself in the quasi nursery rhymes of ‘Up and Down’ – the undercurrent behind the comic appeal for the lost Mopser in ‘The Bandog’ or the broodings of ‘Old King Caraway’ – and it intensifies towards the mysterious power of the last ‘Songs’ which culminates in the penultimate ‘Song of the Mad Prince’ from whose first line the volume takes its name.
The instrumentation
supplied by De la Mare’s varied voicing of his lyrics is not always successful. It was a mistake to include Andy Battle’s song from Three Mulla Mulgars, a poem like ‘Many a Mickle’ sees the composer doing no more than a five-finger exercise, while ‘Peak and Puke’, with its ‘cradle in the glamourie’ annd its baby ‘chinkling up its eyne so wee’ is a terrible let-down to some of his often touching poems on changelings and people stolen into vanishment. The question may also be asked as to what readers from the Wimpy Bar will make of the rural ambience of this world of Victorian faerie.
The point would be well taken
had Peacock Pie remained in the rather dour setting of its long-lasting original form. But in 1916 the first illustrated edition was published – a small quarto in a handsome decorated binding, furnished with a line-drawing for every poem by none other than William Heath Robinson. He was a draftsman of unfailing ideas (who, a year before, had produced for Constable one of the only passable illustrated editions of The Water-Babies) but his response to what I hear as the music of Peacock Pie is erratic, striking at the book’s inner coherence. It was though the first of several further endeavours: the early Lovat Fraser colour plates, Jocelyn Crowe with pretty sketches in washed-out colours, and Roland Emmett with wild, stringy, but appropriate, introductory pages for each of the eight sections. In 1945 however, while still in Italy as an Official War Artist, Edward Ardizzone began working on a set of pen-drawings commissioned by Faber who had taken over the book’s copyright from Constable. The result, published in 1946, was not only a definitive interpretation of De la Mare’s text but (in my view) one of the most satisfying children’s books of the twentieth century. His seventy-five drawings exhibit perfection in everything that matters: choice of subject and viewpoint, response to character and setting (he even justifies ‘Peak and Puke’), and a complete consistency with the music of the book. It is a chef d’oeuvre that carries the work beyond any temporal consideration.
Brian Alderson is founder of the Children’s Books History Society and a former Children’s Books Editor for The Times.
Peackock Pie by Walter de la Mare with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone is published by Faber & Faber, 978-0571207510, £6.99 pbk.
