The first two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy were published in 1946 and 1950, but by 1954, when I was first alerted to them by a school-friend, Peake had entered what his first biographer John Watney called ‘a doldrum period’. Overtaken by a wave of younger writers — Kingsley Amis, John Osborne et al — with more obvious contemporary relevance, Peake was beginning to suffer the first symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease that killed him in 1968 at the age of 47. Titus Alone, the third volume of the trilogy, appeared in 1959, but its comparative brevity, the scrappiness of its construction and the unsteadiness of Peake’s grasp of the new world beyond Gormenghast he was trying to depict made it a disappointing sequel even for his admirers. By the mid-Sixties this once debonair, romantically handsome artist, the brilliantly original illustrator of some 40 books, notably Treasure Island, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Alice in Wonderland, and author of one of the most extraordinary sagas in the English language, looked like a tired old man and was a full-time resident of the Priory, Roehampton. His work was almost forgotten — the Gormenghast trilogy went out of print in 1964 — and perhaps would have been altogether but for his wife Maeve’s efforts to keep his reputation alive and earn money for the hospital fees and her own and their three children’s upkeep by selling some of his paintings, drawings and illustrated books.
One of these selling shows was at the Upper Grosvenor Gallery in July 1966 and I persuaded The Spectator — I was its radio critic under the name Henry Tube — to let me review the show and make it the excuse to puff the novels. Two years later, whether because of The Spectator’s clout or because I had happened to ride an advancing wave, the first two books, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, were republished in a new edition, illustrated with some of Peake’s own drawings of his characters. The third volume followed in 1970. After that Peake became a cult figure and by the year 2000, when Malcolm Yorke’s excellent biography was published and the first two novels were made into a BBC TV serial, Yorke reckoned that there had been more than 20 publications of the trilogy in three volumes and six in one volume.
Here now, celebrating the centenary of Peake’s birth, is a fresh publication of all three books in one hardback volume, with still more of Peake’s own illustrations, some from the margins of his manuscripts, some from the stage designs for a Gormenghast opera, some from watercolours or the occasional lithographs and monoprints Peake made at the Central School of Art in London, where he was a part-time teacher. ‘Even after the books were published,’ writes his son Sebastian, ‘he felt drawn to his castle and its denizens.’
The illustrations, mostly of the denizens, are an embellishment, but hardly necessary. One might even say that they diminish the characters by portraying them from a single viewpoint, whereas the text itself presents them in many aspects, active, vocal, moody, elongated by their shadows, carved out in three dimensions by their awkward bone structures or dramatic gestures, coloured occasionally by their clothes or their complexions or their eyes — violet (Titus), red (Steerpike), cat’s green (the Countess). There is surely no other novel in the English language so rich in the sheer visibility of its characters and their movements, as well as of its landscape: endless towers, roofscapes and courtyards, labyrinthine corridors, decaying rooms and furniture, its surrounding environment of mountain, marsh, forest and lake, its weather and seasons, its very atmosphere. Nor is it just visibility. From the very beginning, as we leave the remote, silent loft where Rottcodd, the curator of the Bright Carvings, flicks a feather-duster over the carvings but paces a floor deep in white dust, and descend to the steaming, noisy and noisome kitchen where the gross chef Swelter bullies and cuddles his team of kitchen boys, we are being led by the nose and ears as much as the eyes.
There are many faults to find in all three volumes of the trilogy: more in Titus Alone than the other two, more in Titus Groan than Gormenghast, where Peake seems at last to be fully at home in his vast construction. The dialogue is often lifeless, the descriptions are sometimes so thick with adjectives that they become a kind of empty hammering for effect, and the behaviour of the minor characters tends to be disappointingly repetitious and mechanical. Gormen- ghast is a territory in itself, seemingly isolated from any other territory and, to judge from the fact that Titus is its 77th Earl, it must have existed for roughly 2,500 years. No foreigners enter it, nor does anyone except Titus ever leave it. It has a boys’ school, artists, a poet, libraries, medicine (but only one doctor), gardeners, no shortage of food or labour, but although it must once have had builders, it seems to have none now, since the whole place is gradually falling to pieces and no one ever repairs it. There is no electricity but inexhaustible candles, no hand-guns but plenty of knives and a room full of rusting medieval armour and weapons. It grew, of course, as many have pointed out, from Peake’s childhood memories of China, where his father was a missionary doctor in the years after the fall of the last imperial dynasty.
But Gormenghast’s unreality in terms of an outside world is beside the point. For the reader, as for Peake himself, its reality is in the imagination and as the story gathers speed and force, as the author grows more confident in his audacious set-piece inventions — Sourdust treading down the crockery on the table at the Birthday Breakfast (the correct ritual for the occasion), Steerpike climbing the walls of the castle, the burning of the Earl’s library, thin Flay and fat Swelter fighting it out with knife and cleaver in a room filled with cobwebs, the flood that reaches the ninth floor — the reader too becomes an entranced inhabitant of Gormenghast. It is a grim place, where every person, except for the increasingly sympathetic Dr Prunesquallor, is a solipsist, as imprisoned in him- or herself as all are by the territory. Yet the odd thing is that, unlike the hero Titus, one has no desire to escape. The energy and relish of the telling, the excitement of the passages of action, the developing imagination and expressive power of the storyteller make it, like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a spellbinder. At its simplest level it is the story of a child growing up, but the reader cares far less for the child than for the decrepit adult-world he grows up in, and this is partly why the third book, Titus Alone, is a failure. It mistakes the reader’s and probably even the author’s own interest in Titus as a part of Gormenghast for Titus per se. Titus coming out into a crudely distorted version of our world is just another adolescent misfit.
Peake always intended to add at least one more volume to the Gormenghast saga and before his illness claimed him entirely he managed to write two short chapters. After his death, his widow decided to complete it herself on the basis of the few desultory notes he had left behind, but after her death the manuscript disappeared into an attic. It has now been rediscovered and is published as a paperback, under the title Titus Awakes, to accompany the republication of the trilogy. It takes Titus through various further adventures and relationships to a final mystical reunion with his own severely disabled author.
Maeve Gilmore does not attempt to write like her husband. Her style is simpler and more straightforward and her characters have ordinary names instead of the Jacobean/Dickensian names he favoured. Her dialogue is mostly better than his, but the whole attempt, as she surely realised while she struggled to subject Titus to the experiences vaguely suggested by Peake’s notes, must have been like trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Gormenghast, however, still stands in all its crumbling pride and absurd ritual, and for those who care to re-enter it or those who have never done so, its black humour, lavish spectacle, painterly prose and imaginative sweep are as captivating in the 21st century as they were halfway through the 20th, when I first entered this then almost secret domain.
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