Later Life
In 1956 Mervyn and Maeve visited Spain, financed by a friend who hoped that Peake's health, which was already declining, would be improved by the holiday. That year his novella Boy in Darkness was published beside stories by William Golding and John Wyndham in a volume called Sometime, Never. On 18 December the BBC broadcast his radio play The Eye of the Beholder (later revised as The Voice of One) in which an avante-garde artist is commissioned to paint a church mural. Peake placed much hope in his play The Wit To Woo which was finally staged in London's West End in 1957, but it was a critical and commercial failure. This affected him greatly – his health degenerated rapidly and he was again admitted to hospital with a nervous breakdown.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Make me thy Loome: thy Grace the warfe therein,
My duties Woofe, and let thy word winde Quills.
The shuttle shoot. Cut off the ends my sins.
Thy Ordinances make my fulling mills,
My Life thy Web: and cloath me all my dayes
With this Gold-web of Glory to thy praise.”
—Edward Taylor (1645–1729)
“The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign,—is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)