I was on the verge of sleep, but wanted to take a moment to peek into the Kindle edition of Andrew Doyle’sThe End of Woke, which I had just bought. I started from the cover (the give that option, or the beginning of the real text), and on the verso of the title page I went thru the copyright notices and credits. I was intrigued by this mention of Mervyn Peake, whom I think of as a writer and not a graphics artist.

I couldn’t find it, and blamed the way Kindle “locations” may not match published pages. But in fact my error was from not catching on to the format in that copyrights blob and seeking page 218 when it should have been 194.

But the iPad Kindle app (which I am using rather than a dedicated Kindle device) does provide search so I searched for… “Auschwitz”. Um, oops! Correcting it to “Belsen” I found not only the drawing, but Peake’s poem reprinted, and Doyle’s passage discussing them.

(This unfortunately wipes out the lineation, but you are invited to restore it mentally)

Or here it is:

It’s been a while since I read the Titus books. (And at the time, there were only four books in what was still styled “The Titus Trilogy” — there are now some five or six, don’t ask how.) And certainly Titus Alone felt like a painful shifting of gears. So it is interesting to hear about this era of the writer’s life and the experiences that may have colored the writings.