In the summer of 1979, when the gruelling work on the final exams of high school gave way to the sweating, aching work of the farm, I was finally able to sit down and read the Titus books by Mervyn Peake. During the last few months of school, I had tantalized myself by tasting passages here and there; now, given the chance to sink into the books without mental distraction, I took them slowly.
Peake had arrived with an echo. In the spring, while stalking through the library at Carleton University with my father's card, I had found a book by Walt Kelly, TEN EVER-LOVIN' BLUE-EYED YEARS WITH POGO. I recalled the strip from childhood; it had seemed like a shipwreck from the past on the tidy modern beach of PEANUTS: elaborate, incomprehensible, crowded with panels and words, with an ink and colour style that looked like nothing else in the newspaper. With all of this in mind, I borrowed the book, fell in love, and read it repeatedly.
The Titus books made me realize how little I knew about writing. After the duel between Flay and Swelter, which fattened page after page after page with obsessive detail yet still excited me as few action scenes had before, I put down the book, stared out the window at the Gatineau Hills, and wondered why no one had ever told me that such writing was possible.
At the same time, Walt Kelly revealed an anger at the world that somehow found ways to laugh, even if the laughter rang a bit crazed and desperate. He showed me dishonest, delusional, dysfunctional idiots, lunatics trapped in their own obsessive mazes; he made me love the mazes and the fools.
That was then. Decades later, both Peake and Kelly remain a living influence and a constant challenge. My wrestling with the candour and strangeness of Peake's verse is one of the foundations for ICE AND AUTUMN GLASS. Kelly's angry laughter suggests a more healthy response than my own seething bitterness.
Kelly and Peake were teachers in 1979, and remain teachers now. I still need to learn from their lessons.
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