Editing Mervyn Peake (section)

==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 (writer)|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 avant-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.<ref name="Stevens">{{cite book
| last= Stevens
| first= Christopher
| title= Born Brilliant: The Life of Kenneth Williams
| publisher= John Murray
| year= 2010
| isbn = 978-1-84854-195-5
| page=367
}}</ref> This affected him greatly&nbsp;– his health degenerated rapidly and he was again admitted to hospital with a nervous breakdown.
During this period he was published primarily in [[New Worlds (magazine)|New Worlds]] by [[Michael Moorcock]], a consistent supporter since the mid-1950s.
===Declining health===
He was showing unmistakable early symptoms of dementia, for which he was given [[electroconvulsive therapy]], to little avail. Over the next few years he gradually lost the ability to draw steadily and quickly, although he still managed to produce some drawings with the help of his wife. Among his last completed works were the illustrations for [[Honoré de Balzac|Balzac]]'s ''[[Les Cent Contes drolatiques|Droll Stories]]'' (1961) and for his own poem ''The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb'' (1962), which he had written some 15 years earlier.

''[[Titus Alone]]'' was published in 1959 and was revised in 1970 by Langdon Jones, an editor of ''[[New Worlds (magazine)|New Worlds]]'', to remove apparent inconsistencies introduced by the publisher's careless editing. Jones, also a composer, set ''The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb'' to music.  A 1995 edition of all three completed Gormenghast novels includes a very short fragment of the beginning of what would have been the fourth Gormenghast novel, ''[[Titus Awakes]]'', as well as a listing of events and themes he wanted to address in that and later Gormenghast novels.