Titus Groan Read online

  By the same author

  Shapes and Sounds

  The Craft of the Lead Pencil

  Letters from a Lost Uncle

  Mr. Pye

  Peake’s Progress

  The Sunday Books (with Michael Moorcock)

  Poems

  Rhymes Without Reason

  The Glassblowers

  The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb

  For children

  Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor

  By Maeve Gilmore

  (based on a fragment by Mervyn Peake)

  Titus Awakes

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2011 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  Published in Great Britain in 2011 by Vintage, a division of The Random House Group Ltd.

  Titus Groan first published in Great Britain in 1946 by Eyre and Spottiswoode

  This edition first published in 1992 by Mandarin Paperbacks

  Copyright © The Estate of Mervyn Peake 1992

  Introduction copyright © Michael and Linda Moorcock 2011

  Note on the illustrations © Sebastian Peake 2011

  Interior illustrations by Mervyn Peake

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-102-1

  Contents

  Also by the same author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  A Note on the Illustrations

  The Hall of the Bright Carvings

  The Great Kitchen

  Swelter

  The Stone Lanes

  ‘The Spy-Hole’

  Fuchsia

  ‘Tallow and Birdseed’

  A Gold Ring for Titus

  Sepulchrave

  Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap

  The Attic

  The Frivolous Cake

  ‘Mrs Slagg By Moonlight’

  Keda

  ‘First Blood’

  ‘Assemblage’

  ‘Titus is Christened’

  Means of Escape

  ‘A Field of Flagstones’

  ‘Over the Roofscape’

  ‘Near and Far’

  ‘Dust and Ivy’

  ‘The Body by the Window’

  ‘Ullage of Sunflower’

  Soap for Greasepaint

  At the Prunesquallors

  A Gift of the Gab

  While the Old Nurse Dozes

  Flay Brings a Message

  The Library

  In a Lime-Green Light

  Reintroducing the Twins

  ‘The Fir-Cones’

  Keda and Rantel

  The Room of Roots

  ‘Inklings of Glory’

  ‘Preparations For Arson’

  The Grotto

  Knives in the Moon

  ‘The Sun Goes Down Again’

  ‘Meanwhile’

  ‘The Burning’

  And Horses took them Home

  Swelter Leaves His Card

  The Un-Earthing of Barquentine

  First Repercussions

  Sourdust is Buried

  The Twins are Restive

  ‘Half-Light’

  A Roof of Reeds

  ‘Fever’

  Farewell

  Early One Morning

  A Change of Colour

  A Bloody Cheekbone

  The Twins Again

  The Dark Breakfast

  The Reveries

  Reverie of Alfred Prunesquallor

  Reverie of Fuschia

  Reverie of Irma Prunesquallor

  The Reverie of Lady Clarice

  Reverie of Gertrude the Countess of Gormenghast

  Reverie of Nannie Slagg

  Reverie of Sepulchrave, 76th Earl of Gormenghast

  Here and There

  Presage

  In Preparation for Violence

  Blood at Midnight

  Gone

  The Roses Were Stones

  ‘Barquentine and Steerpike’

  By Gormenghast Lake

  Countess Gertrude

  The Apparition

  The Earling

  Mr Rottcodd Again

  Introduction

  Mervyn Peake came to fame first as an artist. Before the Second World War he was considered to be one of the best portraitists in England, publishing wonderful studies of writers, actors, and painters. Laurence Olivier, Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas, and others all sat for him. He was said to be the only living portraitist who could capture the individuality of a baby, and his pictures of Maeve and his children are superb. He later drew the pictures for his own nonsense books for children, including his first book, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, and began to gain a reputation as a poet. Peake proved a first-class illustrator (at one time ‘the most fashionable in England,’ according to Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant), but it was not until Titus Groan was published that his admirers also began to speak of him as a novelist.

  As his fame increased, people who didn’t know him very well often said Mervyn’s books were so darkly complex that writing them had driven him mad. Others who knew him a little better understood how cleverly he was formalizing his own experience and observations. He was one of the most deeply sane and humane individuals you could hope to meet; a conscious artist, with a wicked wit and a tremendous love of life. ‘He has magic in his pen,’ said Charles Morgan. ‘He can annihilate the dimensions.’

  Anthony Burgess thought the English mistrusted Peake for being too talented. Peake’s novels, said Burgess,

  are aggressively three-dimensional… showing the poet as well as the draughtsman… It is difficult in post-war English fiction to get away with big rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions. He is always exact… [Gormenghast] remains essentially a work of the closed imagination, in which a world parallel to our own is presented in almost paranoic denseness of detail. But the madness is illusory, and control never falters. It is, if you like, a rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect to just the right temperature. There is no really close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant.

  His wife Maeve’s memoir, A World Away, is full of stories of scratching the backs of elephants through floorboards to try to keep them quiet while he was sleeping above them, his spontaneous acts of romantic generosity, his dashing gestures and glorious sense of fun, his willingness to give drawings or poems away to anyone who said they liked them, his London expeditions, drawing faces from Soho, Limehouse, Wapping — what he called ‘head-hunting.’ He courted Maeve elegantly and with humor. He was, she said, ‘unique, dark and majestic.’ Tea at Lyons, a trip on a tram, and she was his forever. He was conscripted in the Second World War, was in London a great deal during the Blitz, and was the first War Artist in Belsen, producing studies that are remarkable for their humanity and sympathy, experiences he used in Titus Alone. He, like most of us, somehow stayed roughly sane, if a little overwrought, throughout the war. His practical jokes, often concocted with Graham Greene, were elaborate and subtle.

  I knew Mervyn as inspiring, joyful company w
hose tragedy was not in his life or work but in whatever ill-luck cursed him with Parkinson’s Disease. ‘If we went out,’ said Maeve, ‘it often seemed that he was drunk or drugged and offense would be taken. I longed to shelter him and resented the intelligent ones who turned their backs on him. It’s very painful to see such a gentle man coldshouldered.’ Increasingly unable to draw, or work on the fourth Titus book, he was by the mid-1960s institutionalized and in the last stages of his illness. His public reputation had vanished. Neither Greene, Bowen, nor Burgess, all of them admirers, had enough influence to convince his publishers to return his books to print.

  I’d been instrumental in getting a couple of Mervyn’s short stories published and ran some fragments of fiction, poetry, and drawings in my magazine New Worlds, some of his poetry was still in print, together with one or two illustrated books, but he was thoroughly out of fashion, his reputation not helped by Kingsley Amis describing him as ‘a bad fantasy writer of maverick status,’ revealing a tendency for those who trawled the margins to link him with the authors of bad horror stories and talking-animal books.

  Peake spoke of his artistic experiments as ‘the smashing of another window pane.’ He wasn’t looking for reassurance. He was looking for truth. He was a fascinated explorer of human personality, a confronter of realities, beaming his brilliance here and there into our common darkness, a narrative genius able to control a vast range of characters (no more grotesque than life and many of them wonderfully comic) in the telling of a complex narrative, much of which is based upon the ambitions of a single, determined individual, Steerpike, whose rise from the depths of society (or ‘Gormenghast’ as it is called) and extraordinary climb and fall has a monumental, Dickensian quality which keeps you reading at fever pitch. The stuff of solid, grown-up, full-strength fiction. Real experience, freshly described. In his introduction to an early collection of his drawings, Peake wrote:

  After all, there are no rules. With the wealth, skill, daring, vision of many centuries at one’s back, yet one is ultimately quite alone. For it is one’s ambition to create one’s own world in a style germane to its substance, and to people it with its native forms and denizens that never were before, yet have their roots in one’s experience. As the earth was thrown from the sun, so from the earth the artist must fling out into space, complete from pole to pole, his own world which, whatsoever form it takes, is the colour of the globe it flew from, as the world itself is coloured by the sun.

  Born in China, still carrying a feel of the exotic about him, Peake had been a buoyant source of life for so many who knew him. His optimism could be unrealistic, but he was never short of it. He was charming and attractive, generous and expansive by nature, combining his dark good looks with a fine sense of style. Though he’d always supported his family, he’d never had much of a knack for making money — he received five pounds for the entire set of illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark. He wasn’t much good at anticipating bills but only as his illness worsened did his anxieties begin to get a grip on him. He had exaggerated hopes for his surreal play The Wit To Woo, which failed badly.

  Knowing little of the brain in those days — this was before Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s were fully identified — we watched helplessly as Mervyn declined into some mysterious form of dementia, while surgeons hacked at his frontal lobe and further destroyed his ability to work and reason. The frustration was terrible. His instinctive intelligence, his kindness, even his wit flickered in his eyes, but were all trapped, inexpressible. ‘It feels like everything’s being stolen,’ he said once to me. Here was an extraordinary man, his head a treasure-house of invention, poetry, characters, and ideas, being destroyed from within while his genius was rejected by the literary and art world of the day.

  When art critics of reputation tried to write about Peake, editors would turn the idea down. I had only a modest success, mostly in low-circulation literary magazines. The story, even then, was that Peake had lost his mind. The strain of writing such dark books. All the fictional madness he had created had caught up with him. Unwholesome stuff, darkness. Sniff at it too hard and it gets inside you. That story was a damaging sensational nonsense recklessly perpetuated by Quentin Crisp (‘all that darkness, dear, gets to you in the end’), for whom Peake had once illustrated a small book and to whom the Peakes had been consistently kind in the years before Crisp’s notoriety.

  The last novel of the sequence, Titus Alone, had indeed contained structural weaknesses which we had all assumed were Mervyn’s as his control of his work became shaky. Then, one afternoon, Langdon Jones, composer of a superb musical setting for Peake’s narrative poem of the Blitz, The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, was leafing through the manuscript books of the novel admiring the huge number of drawings Peake had created spontaneously as he wrote, when he realized that much of what was missing from the published book was actually in the manuscript. The book had been very badly edited by a third party, and whole characters and scenes cut.

  Jones began to check Mervyn’s handwritten manuscript (mostly done in huge ledgers and randomly dotted with drawings) against typed pages and the final typed manuscript, slowly restoring the book to its present much improved state. It took him over a year. Meanwhile another friend and fellow Peake fan, Oliver Caldecott, shared my frustration with the situation and we talked about how to correct it. And then one morning he phoned me to tell me, with considerable glee, that he was now ‘the guy who picks the Penguins.’ And, of course, our first action must be to sort out the Gormenghast books and decide how to get them back into print!

  Eventually the whole production was taken over by Oliver, whom I had told about the illustrations. He proposed illustrating the novels from Mervyn’s own notebook drawings of his characters. A painter himself, he had the authority and experience to get what he wanted. The text was restored. Illustrations were included. Anthony Burgess gladly contributed an introduction to Titus Groan, which he believed to be a masterpiece, and Caldecott brought the three volumes out as Penguin Modern Classics. It was the perfect way to publish them, boldly, enthusiastically, and unapologetically, in the best possible editions Mervyn could have. For the first time the public could see the range of his astonishing talent as Steerpike, Barquentine, Swelter, Prunesquallor, and the rest were brought to life. But then, once again, the illustrations disappeared and readers had to hunt for copies still containing them — until now, when an even greater range of drawings shows what an extraordinary talent Peake possessed.

  The rest is more or less history. A history spotted with bad media features about Mervyn which insist on perpetuating his story as a doomed loony. Bill Brandt showed him as a glowering Celt, a sort of unsodden Dylan Thomas, and his romantic good looks help project this image. Women certainly fell in love with his sheer beauty. And then with his charm. And then with his wit. And then they were lost. But after he married Maeve, Peake’s home life was about as ordinary and chaotic as the usual bohemian family’s. Their mutual love was remarkable, as was the passion and enthusiasm of their children. As he faded into the final stages of his disease, we were all overwhelmed by an ongoing sense of loss, of disbelief, as if the sun itself were going out.

  Peake had a huge, romantic imagination, an extraordinary eloquence, a wry, affectionate wit, and his technical mastery, both of narrative and line, remains unmatched. ‘To be a good classicist,’ he said, ‘you must cultivate romance. To be a good romantic, you must steep yourself in classicism.’ He was both an heir to the great Victorians and a precursor to the post-modernists, the magic realists. His statements frequently anticipated the likes of Salman Rushdie. He influenced a generation of authors, amongst them Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair, and China Miéville, who found that it was possible to write imaginatively and inventively about character and real experience while setting their stories in subtly unfamiliar worlds.

  Peake’s own attitude is best summed up by a poem which achieved popularity some forty years after he wrote it. ‘To live at all,’ he said, ‘is
miracle enough.’ Of course he did much more than live. ‘Art,’ he used to say, ‘is really sorcery.’ As can be seen in this magnificent new edition, coinciding with the centenary of his birth in 1911, he infused vitality and art into everything he touched. And his sorceries continue to entrance us.

  Michael Moorcock, 2011

  A Note on the Illustrations

  This exciting edition brings together over one hundred drawings by Mervyn Peake; from visual aide memoires which were sketched in the margins of the original manuscripts, to stage designs for an opera based on Gormenghast. While some drawings were produced in ink and others in pencil, the medium chosen for the full page portraits was highly resolved water colour. During his time at the Central School of Art, my father would produce the occasional lithograph and monoprint of the characters. Even after the books were published he felt drawn to his castle and its denizens. He seemed particularly fond of Muzzlehatch who appears more regularly in his notebooks than any other character and he continued to depict Gormenghast’s inhabitants until illness blunted the sharpness of his vision.

  As can be seen from the eclectic range within this edition, fine detail predominates in several of the illustrations, while in others a more perfunctory view of the figure is observed. Humorous, evocative, poignant, even cartoon-like in style, quite a few also display that special skill my father possessed, one in which a character is brought to life in a single line. Whether it be the obsequious, scheming duplicity of Steerpike or the frail confused nature of Fuchsia, my father’s protagonists emerge from the page exhibiting all their strengths and weaknesses. Quentin Blake said of my father’s work, ‘Not least among Mervyn Peake’s virtues was his ability to be serious while involved in grotesque humour, and to be idiosyncratic while being completely professional. And that drawing was the essential of all he did.’

  Ronald Searle recalls reading Titus Groan for the first time and how the strikingly visual nature of the writing affected him, ‘I started reading it and did not stop. The images conjured up the most weird visions. Images that I had not encountered since absorbing my first introduction to the world of William Blake. It is a fantastic, almost surrealistic flow of vision.’