Gaum, Ghastly

I am now older than Mervyn Peake was when he died, something which brings home to me just how truncated his life was. He was in his 20s when World War 2 began. He applied to be an official war artist but was rejected, and instead was enlisted into the Royal Artillery, and then the Royal Engineers. He re-applied to be a war artist repeatedly and was repeatedly turned down. In 1942, he had a nervous breakdown and was invalided out of the army. He recuperated from his breakdown and in 1943 was finally commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. His first work was painting factory workers, and then RAF pilots being debriefed. He began writing Titus Groan at this time, and worked on it, and on its sequel Gormenghast, intermittently through the 1940s. Late in the war he was present at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. He sketched prisoners, some of whom were too sick to be moved and who died before his eyes. His sketches are heart-breaking. He also wrote poetry about what he saw, and his mental health suffered from the shock of it. It also worked its way into his other writing. The immediate postwar period was when he was most productive: Titus Groan was completed and published in 1946. He produced a series of brilliant illustrations for various books, including Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Lewis Carroll. His own collection of nonsense poetry, Rhymes Without Reason had come out in 1944, to some acclaim. After the war Peake and his family lived (from 1946) on Sark, in the Channel Islands. They moved back to the British mainland in 1950, the year Gormenghast was published.

Peake intended Titus Groan and Gormenghast as the first instalments in a long series. He wrote a third volume Titus Alone (1959) and made an abortive start on a fourth — this was eventually completed by his wife Maeve Gilmore, and published as Titus Awakes in 2011. But his health was declining fast, and doctors were unable to help him. Demetrios J. Sahlas thinks he was suffering from Dementia with Lewy Bodies, a particularly horrible form of Parkinson’s disease. This began manifesting in the mid 1950s and got progressively worse, collapsing his writing (‘the disintegration of Peake’s writing style has frequently been regarded as reflective of his encroaching dementia’ says Sahlas) and soon enough leaving him unable to care for himself: ‘Peake spent the last years of his life in various institutions, treated with neuroleptics and electroconvulsive therapy, until his death in 1968 at the age of 57 years.’ It’s a sad story, and especially tantalising where the Gormenghast books — his greatest achievement — are concerned. He managed only a few, rather scattered paragraphs and scrappy notes for vol 4, Titus Awakes, and we have only the title, Gormenghast Revisited, for the fifth volume. Thereafter, who knows.

The Gormenghast trilogy and Tolkien’s Rings trilogy (1952–53) are, despite their two rather different modes, arguably the most important Fantasy works published in the twentieth century, endlessly influential. Both are in some sense ‘about’ England, and more specifically are accounts of the catastrophe in traditional Englishness occasioned by the war. That fantasy narrative is the best way of apprehending this vast national and cultural sea change seems to me both hard to deny and endlessly surprising. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the change in question concerned not only material realities, such as the dismantling of the empire, but also the decay of an idea of England: the collapse of a particular fantasy of the realm. Both authors served in the military, although Tolkien, a generation older, had fought in the First rather than the Second World War: there is, as many critics have noted, a good deal of the Somme in Mordor and the Dead Marches. The great strengths of Lord of the Rings are in worldbuilding and narrative. Gormenghast is another matter. Not that the trilogy’s worldbuilding is deficient, exactly, but it is of a different kind to Tolkien’s: a matter of mood — of atmosphere — rather than particulars (consistency, history, variety, and so on). Peake’s characterization is of a different order too: heavily Dickensian, and deliberately grotesque, whereas Tolkien arranges various types as old as romance in interlocking narrative lines. Peake, in his poetry as in his novels, is a writer for whom narrative, character, and metaphysics tend to be subordinated to atmosphere, mood, and image. Where contemporary writers of fantasy in the Tolkienian tradition still practise detailed and consistent worldbuilding, Peakean fantasy is much more about creating a certain tone, about generating a kind of dark imagistic excession. Another way of putting this would be to say that he is a Late Romantic, and committed to the Romantic project of self-fashioning.

In terms of plot the three books are simple enough, although the narrative becomes friable and fragmentary in the third. In Titus Groan the title character is only just born, and he has little to do with the story. Instead we get various other bizarre and grotesque inhabitants of Gormenghast Castle, and the rise in prominence of scheming kitchen boy Steerpike. Titus’s father, Sepulchrave, the 76th Earl Groan, lives for his library; when it is destroyed (his two sisters, Cora and Clarice, are induced to burn it down by the scheming Steerpike) he goes mad, coming to believe he is an owl — there are a lot of owls in the book — and dying. Everything in Gormenghast happens according to elaborate and arcane ritual practice, but there is no precedence and therefore no ritual for handling such a demise. Sepulchrave’s corpse lies in his room until it is devoured by his owls.

The first book also gives us Fuschia, Titus’s older sister (‘a girl of about fifteen with long, rather wild black hair; she was gauche in movement and in a sense ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich — her eyes smoldered’) whom Steerpike seduces.

She ends up falling to her death, but Steerpike continues his ascent. He is no revolutionary, wanting not to dismantle the ancient, hierarchical society of Gormenghast but to rise within its ranks to a position of wealth and power. ‘Steerpike is climbing the spiral staircase of the soul of Gormenghast,’ Peake tells us, ‘bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy — some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself; where he can watch the world spread out below him, and shake exultantly his clotted wings’. [Gormenghast, 8]. He plots, manipulates and murders to make himself master of the castle, ‘a social climber,’ in Michael Wood’s words, ‘who also climbs all over the material castle, bringing a figure of speech to literal life in a way that marks Peake’s art.’

In vol 2, Gormenghast, Titus grows up. Steerpike continues his ruthless social ascent until he is unmasked, hunted down and slain by Titus himself, in a vividly written vertical chase-and-pursuit through the castles superstructure of ivy. Having a melodramatically exaggerated villain against which the hero is tested gives these two novels excellent clarity and narrative focus. With Steerpike dead, Titus Alone disintegrates into a peripatetic string of incident, crumbs of plot scattered across the chapters. The book also enacts a shift of mode: from the Gothic-medieval revenancy of Gormenghast Titus now moves amongst motor cars, high-tech factories and clones — as John Holbo says, the book is remarkable for its ‘sheer, genre-bending weirdness; like if spaceships had shown up in The Return of the King.’ But it makes for a pretty unsatisfying continuation for all that. In Titus Awakes, Maeve Gilmore continues Titus’s peregrinations through modernity: villages, police cells and drunkards’ dens. At one point Titus works as an orderly in an insane asylum and looks after Mervyn Peake himself, styled ‘the Artist’, who has been admitted because his mind is collapsing, and to whom Titus feels a strange connection. This epigone novel ends with Titus taking a train to the coast, then a boat to an island, then a smaller boat to a smaller island — Sark — where he encounters the Artist again, now happily with his family. Very meta. Not very satisfying as writing.

Peake as artist and Peake as writer cannot be separated out from one another, and not just because he illustrated his own writing with such panache. He is always an intensely visual writer, and also a self-reflexive one. His prose descriptions read like accounts of illustrations of things rather than direct depictions of things. And there are a great many moments of specific ekphrasis in the novels. Here’s one: Steerpike is struck by an illustration in a book. As he looks down upon it, it seems to Steerpike that ‘he was the ghost’, the image on the page ‘truth and actual fact’.

Below him stood three men. They were dressed in grey, and purple flowers were in their dark confused locks. The landscape beyond them was desolate and was filled with old metal bridges, and they stood before it together upon the melancholy brow of a small hill. Their hands were exquisitely shaped and their bare feet also, and it seemed that they were listening to a strange music, for their eyes gazed out beyond the page and beyond the reach of Steerpike, and on and on beyond the hill of Gormenghast and the Twisted Woods. [Titus Groan, 149]

Fuschia’s bedroom is an art gallery:

She looked around at the walls of her room. They were hung with pictures once chosen as her favourites from among the scores that she had unearthed in the lumber room. One wall was filled with a great mountain scene where a road like a snake winding around and around the most impressive of crags was filled with two armies, one in yellow and the other, the invading force battling up from below, in purple. Lit as it were by torch-light the whole scene was a constant source of wonder to Fuchsia. The other walls were less imposingly arranged, fifteen pictures being distributed among the three. The head of a jaguar; a portrait of the twenty-second Earl of Groan with pure white hair and a face the colour of smoke as a result of immoderate tattooing, and a group of children in pink and white muslin dresses playing with a viper were among the works which pleased her most. Hundreds of very dull heads and full-length portraits of her ancestors had been left in the lumber room. What Fuchsia wanted from a picture was something unexpected. It was as though she enjoyed the artist telling her something quite fresh and new. Something she had never thought of before. [Titus Groan, 83]

A manifesto for Fantasy itself, there. The word ‘purple’ occurs 33 times in Titus Groan (not counting the name Fuschia, which is itself a kind of purple); ‘grey’ occurs 111 times and ‘black’ 133 times, which gives us some sense of Peake’s colour-palette.

Over and again the writing generates a distinctive effect via an unusual colour-term: ‘Flay began to untie his boots. Behind him his swept cave yawned, a million prawn-coloured motes swaying against the darkness at the entrance’ [Titus Groan, 445]. Sunlight is ‘wasp-gold’; bannisters are ‘alternately apple-green and azure’; Steerpike’s eyes ‘the colour of dried blood’. The novels are a cram of vivid, grotesque, visualised specificities: ‘Barquentine put out a tongue like the tongue of a boot and ran it along the wreckage of his dry and wrinkled lips.’

Whether his face was made of age, as though age were a stuff, or whether age was the abstract of that face of his, that bearded fossil of a thing that smouldered and decayed upon his shoulders — there was no doubt that archaism was there, as though something had shifted from the past into the current moment where it burned darkly as though through blackened glass in defiance of its own anachronism and the callow present. [Gormenghast, 159–60]

Through this glass, darkly, is time itself: the dead non-releasing hand of the past. Everything is visualised and as everything non-visual resolves itself into visuality. Take the schoolroom in which Titus must take lessons:

The air was fuscous with a mixture of smells, including stale tobacco, dry chalk, rotten wood, ink, alcohol and, above all, imperfectly cured leather, but the general colour of the room was a transcription of the smells, for the walls were of horsehide, the dreariest of browns, relieved only by the scattered and dully twinkling heads of drawing-pins. [Gormenghast, 49]

Colour and line ‘transcribe’ the non-visual into the terms of the visual. These are novels about seeing, intensely: about seeing every detail. The northern dialect English word gorm means ‘heed, pay attention’ — it is more recognisable today in its negative form, ‘gormless’, but it comes from the venerable Old Norse word gaum, ‘to pay attention, to heed, to notice’. Gormenghast means, as it might be, how close attentiveness, how vision, leaves us aghast. ‘Ghast’ is terror, is that which is terrifying: it is the idiom of Gothic to pay close heed to the terrifying. It’s there in the rambling, Dickensian opening sentences of the first novel:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

Those owls, who eventually devour the Lord of Gormenghast, are there at the beginning with their giant eyes, their seeing in the dark. Were it possible to ignore indeed.

+++

Rereading the Gormenghast books, after many years, I was struck by something I hadn’t thought of before. We might call it a contradiction. Gormenghast is an edifice of stasis: ultra-conservatism and unchangingness is in a sense the whole point of the castle, and its society. Yet it is a place where there is the most amazing grotesque diversity and variety. When Titus leaves it and enters modernity he encounters many things, but a kind of flatness, a sameiness enters the telling. Both Titus Alone and Titus Awake are attenuated productions, compared with the hefty, rich massiveness of Titus Groan and Gormenghast. This seems to me an intriguing contradiction. Darwin teaches us that the tremendous variety and diversity of life is a function of change, evolution across time. Is Gormenghast a kind of anti-Darwin novel?

Steerpike is brilliant, talented (and ruthless) but he is also strangely disengaged. As Michael Wood notes:

Steerpike — the name glances at Dickens’s Steerforth — is a model of the unfeeling, intelligent person. He has, among many other qualities, ‘an unusual gift. It was to understand a subject without appreciating it.’ Similarly, he plays music brilliantly but without emotion. He doesn’t grasp, but seeks to undo ‘the ancientry of the tenets that bound the anatomy of the place together’. The most eloquent tribute to him is that Fuchsia, the wild child, almost falls in love with him and when she discovers the extent of his criminal career, considers suicide out of despair at her folly.

Ritual — the idiom of Gormenghast Castle— is the substitute for original thought and, more to the point, of original feeling. We could go further: ritual and the reification of the past are more than a restraint upon feeling, they are a substitute for it. This relates then to ‘history’ as such, and therefore to Fantasy as a mode. Whole sight, I suppose, or all the rest is desolation.