Edward O’Hare
What was I after anyway? I suppose, to create a world of my own in which those who belong to it and move in it come to life and never step outside into either this world of bus queues, ration-books, or even the Upper Ganges — or into another imaginative world.
In the autumn of 1943 Mervyn Peake sent a manuscript to Graham Greene for his appraisal. When Greene, by then not only a famous novelist but also an influential figure in British publishing, wrote back, his “mercilessly frank”2 comments must have been the very opposite of what Peake had hoped to hear. Even though he had been intrigued by the opening sections of the work, which the young author had entitled Titus Groan, Greene found it marred by extreme laziness and awash with “really bad writing, redundant adjectives, [and] a kind of facetiousness, a terrible prolixity in the dialogue”.3 For everything that he considered to be “immensely good”4 about the book, Greene complained that there was an equal amount that was “trite, unrealized [and] novelettish”.5 Weighed down by “about 10,000 words of adjectives”6 which he felt were entirely superfluous, he regarded Titus Groan’s prospect of publication as doubtful, to say the very least.
Having labored enthusiastically on the novel for almost four years, Peake must have been particularly stung by the initially well-disposed Greene’s devastating verdict and by the series of rejections the book subsequently received from leading publishing houses. For Peake, the novel was not merely another of the many projects that became the focus of his multifaceted creative talent; it was his first sustained attempt to represent the world of his richly strange and gloriously macabre imagination in words. Thankfully for modern literature Peake persevered, and Titus Groan was published three years later in March 1946 and was later followed by two sequels. Although the book received some glowing accolades, Peake must have been dismayed that even after his substantial revisions many reviewers voiced opinions strongly reminiscent of Greene’s, often in similarly trenchant terms. The Irish writer Kate O’Brien called it “a large, haphazard, Gothic mess”,7 while the British playwright Charles Morgan argued that although Peake’s novel was undoubtedly an astonishing display of the “forces of dream, vision and language”8 its overall effect was weakened by his indulgence in “shocking affectations and sudden pedestrian vulgarisms”.9
Of all the critics who reviewed Titus Groan upon its original publication, the renowned novelist Elizabeth Bowen came closest to identifying the true nature of Peake’s accomplishment. Bowen observed that Titus Groan was “one of those works of pure, self-sufficient imagination that are from time to time thrown out”,10 and she correctly predicted that in the decades to come this highly unusual new author would enjoy “a smallish but fervent public, composed of those whose imaginations are complementary to Mr Peake’s”.11 Over the years the ranks of this deeply devoted and continually expanding group has included an eclectic assortment of cultural luminaries such as C. S. Lewis, Orson Welles, John Betjeman, Peter Sellers, Anthony Burgess, Michael Moorcock, Sting, Terry Pratchett, Joanne Harris, and Neil Gaiman,12 all of whom have praised the marvelous idiosyncrasy and deliciously dark wit of Peake’s creation.
Following Bowen’s example, many of Peake’s admirers have tried to define exactly what kind of text Titus Groan and the other novels which form the Gormenghast sequence are. To do this, they have consistently tried to bundle them into the genres of Gothic fiction and Fantasy literature, often implicitly assuming that there exists some critical consensus as to what those terms signify. This has proven especially misleading in the case of Peake, since his books contain none of the uncanny or preternatural elements traditionally thought of as intrinsic to the Gothic genre, nor do they feature any of the wizards, dragons, or invented languages which readers commonly associate with Fantasy novels. Another frequent approach to the Gormenghast sequence has seen critics interpret it simply as Peake’s nightmarish depiction of the events of his own age, a period of history characterized by unparalleled destruction, violence, and social upheaval. An otherworldly creative figure who discovered the extent of mankind’s barbarity while traveling through Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II, there has been a tendency to conclude that the Gormenghast sequence is really Peake’s cathartic bid to transmute the incomprehensible monstrousness of this conflict into a work of art.
If neither of these conventional forms of analysis has succeeded in capturing the artistry of these most wildly overdetermined and uproariously eccentric of texts, an alternative critical strategy is needed for examining the Gormenghast books. The objective of this essay is to formulate such a strategy in order to explore the many sides of Peake’s imaginative vision. It aims to trace the origins of the Groan family saga in Peake’s varied artistic and literary influences, as well as in the details of his extraordinary upbringing; to examine the grotesque style and ornate sensibility which are unique to his fiction; to assess Peake’s ability to defy the constraints of genre and create characters who are both utterly alien and yet curiously familiar; ultimately, I intend to demonstrate how the land of Gormenghast occupies a singular place in 20th-century fiction.
The Gormenghast sequence comprises the three original novels published in Peake’s lifetime, Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), Titus Alone (1959), the short narrative Boy in Darkness (1956),13 and (in the view of a select group of critics and aficionados) Titus Awakes (2011), a novel written in the years after Peake’s untimely death by his widow Maeve Gilmore and based upon his notes. The first two novels are set in an imaginary realm dominated by Gormenghast Castle, an impossibly vast edifice which has been in a state of decay as far back as anyone can remember. The castle is home to Sepulchrave, the morose 76th Earl of Gormenghast, his formidable wife Lady Gertrude, their petulant daughter Fuschia, the Earl’s cretinous, doll-like twin sisters Clarice and Cora, and a rigidly stratified society made up of different classes of servant. Daily existence for the Groans and their legion of loyal retainers consists of an endless series of interminable and esoteric ceremonies, since tradition must be fastidiously adhered to at all costs. Everything that happens in this dreary, cloistered place, from hour to hour, month to month, and year to year, is completely dictated by these stultifying rituals, the meanings of which (presuming that they ever actually had any) have long since been lost to time.
For an age nothing new at all has occurred within the walls of Gormenghast, but in the opening pages of Titus Groan the castle is shaken by not one but two dramatic developments. The Earl and Lady Gertrude have at last produced a son, Titus, who is destined to one day assume his hereditary title and rule over this gloomy land. With the birth of an heir it seems that the crucial stability and continuity of life in this stagnant domain is ensured, but something else now transpires which throws this into terrible jeopardy. This is the appearance of Steerpike, a supremely devious young man consumed by a vengeful desire to overthrow the Groan household once and forever. No sooner has Steerpike emerged from the lowest depths of the castle than he uses his abundant charm and ruthless intelligence to set in motion his scheme to secretly usurp control of Gormenghast. A brief summary cannot convey the intricacy of Peake’s plotting, but in the first two books of the sequence he chronicles the deceptions, manipulations, and murders which Steerpike commits in order to advance his position within the castle’s hierarchy and the brutal struggle to prevent him from fulfilling his plan.
Perhaps the best way to commence this examination of the Gormenghast sequence is to return to the accusation still occasionally made against Peake’s books, specifically that they are spectacular examples of overwriting. Graham Greene has certainly not been alone in condemning Peake as a writer too much in love with the magic of words and lacking the skill and restraint to use them effectively.14 Indeed, readers new to the author are likely to find themselves daunted by his sometimes page-long passages of description and his tendency to fixate lavishly on what might seem to be minor aspects of his secondary world. However, all of this Baroque extravagance is not so much a part of Peake’s world-building technique as the very key to it. To depict an alternate reality buckling under the weight of centuries of ruination and clogged to capacity with obscure rites and obsolete customs, Peake deliberately utilizes this vast accumulation of detail. What this intentionally stifling excess of adjectives generates in the reader is the sense that they too, like the inhabitants of the castle, are powerless prisoners in this strange world whose Byzantine workings are now largely unfathomable.
Verisimilitude, or imbuing the unreal with the appearance of authenticity through the inclusion of plausible detail, is of course an intrinsic aspect of all fiction, and one arguably even more vital to works of the fantastic. In the Gormenghast sequence, Peake pushes this literary technique to its absolute extreme. As Peake’s biographer G. Peter Winnington has written, these books contain such an extraordinary “proliferation of images”15 that the difficulty “lies not so much in interpreting them, as in choosing among the plethora of possible meanings”.16 By cramming his narrative with a quantity of detail far greater than their mind is accustomed to processing, Peake leaves the reader so overwhelmed that they have little choice but to accept the reality of his imaginary world and all that it contains.
Farah Mendlesohn has rightfully cited the Gormenghast sequence as a prime instance of what she terms an “immersive” work of fantasy, one which is “set in a world built so that it functions on all levels as a complete world”.17 She writes that an immersive fantasy solicits belief by acting as if we “must share the assumptions of the world”18: in this kind of work the reader “must sit in the heads of the protagonists, accepting what they know as the world, interpreting it through what they notice, and through what they do not”.19 Surrounded by a multitude of details whose significance we don’t even half understand, we nonetheless gradually find ourselves regarding this constructed place as normal just like the denizens of the castle do.
As Mendlesohn points out, in the Gormenghast sequence “the fantastic is embedded in the linguistic excesses of the text”20 and this is how it compels the reader to believe in it. One of the most impressive examples of Peake’s use of this technique occurs early on in Titus Groan when Steerpike escapes confinement and inches his way agonizingly across a rooftop before he finally beholds Gormenghast in all its vast, ruinous glory. Piece by piece, the enormous cityscape unfolds, and Steerpike’s awestruck reaction to this panorama is much the same as that of the reader. Peake’s feat of description is one of his finest:
Steerpike, when he had reached the spine of the roof, sat astride it and regained his breath for the second time. He was surrounded by lakes of fading daylight.
He could see how the ridge on which he sat led in a wide curve to where in the west it was broken by the first of four towers. Beyond them the swoop of a roof continued to complete a half circle far to his right. This was ended by a high lateral wall. Stone steps led from the ridge to the top of the wall, from which might be approached, along a cat-walk, an area the size of a field, surrounding which, though at a lower level, were the heavy, rotting structures of adjacent roofs and towers, and between these could be seen other roofs far away, and other towers.
Steerpike’s eyes, following the rooftops, came at last to the parapet surrounding this area. He could not, of course, from where he was guess at the stone sky-field itself, lying as it did a league away and well above his eye level, but as the main massing of Gormenghast arose to the west, he began to crawl in that direction along the sweep of the ridge.
It was over an hour before Steerpike came to where only the surrounding parapet obstructed his view of the stone sky-field. As he climbed this parapet with tired, tenacious limbs he was unaware that only a few seconds of time and a few blocks of vertical stone divided him from seeing what had not been seen for over four hundred years. Scrabbling one knee over the topmost stones he heaved himself over the rough wall. When he lifted his head wearily to see what his next obstacle might be, he saw before him, spreading over an area of four square acres, a desert of grey stone slabs. The parapet on which he was now sitting bolt upright surrounded the whole area, and swinging his legs over he dropped the four odd feet to the ground. As he dropped and then leaned back to support himself against the wall, a crane arose at a far corner of the stone field and, with a slow beating of its wings, drifted over the distant battlements and dropped out of sight. The sun was beginning to set in a violet haze and the stone field, save for the tiny figure of Steerpike, spread out emptily, the cold slabs catching the prevailing tint of the sky. Between the slabs there was dark moss and the long, coarse necks of seedling grasses. Steerpike’s greedy eyes devoured the arena. What use could it be put to?21
This dizzying, dazzling image of a patchwork of glittering rooftops stretching to the very limits of perception perfectly demonstrates Peake’s astonishing ability to depict something utterly wondrous and yet entirely credible. So meticulous and dynamic are his descriptions that it never even occurs to the reader to consider whether these things could actually exist. Once again, the source of their power lies in the denseness of their detail. As China Miéville has observed, “Asserting the specificity of a part, [Peake] better takes as given the whole — of which, of course, we are in awe”.22 Although what he describes may be fantastic and outrageously exaggerated, the absolute precision he applies to its representation makes its reality seem incontestable. In the words of Miéville, “Peake acts as if the totality of his invented place could not be in dispute. The dislocation and fascination we feel, the intoxication, is testimony to the success of his simple certainty”.23
The stunning visuality of Peake’s prose is certainly one of its most remarkable qualities. John Clute and John Grant overstate nothing when they make the claim that the Gormenghast sequence is “perhaps the most intensely visual fantasy ever written”24 and that its author stands as “the most potent visionary the field has yet witnessed”.25 The vivid people and vistas which emerge from the pages of these books inhabit the imagination with a force which makes them unforgettable. It is therefore easy to believe that the man who created them was also the most acclaimed and sought-after British illustrator of his generation. Peake was already producing superb drawings by the age of ten, and he later became equally adept as an oil painter. His accomplishment as a draughtsman brought him work as a teacher at the Westminster School of Art, but Peake also turned his versatile hand to theater costume designs, commercial graphics (his famous logo for Pan Books was used for decades), and even cartoons for magazines. As a book illustrator he scored major triumphs with his exquisite pen and ink drawings for editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) (widely considered as even more exuberant and true to the manic spirit of Lewis Carroll than Tenniel’s) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), which surpass those of Doré in their ghastly, numinous beauty.
As much as he excelled at it, Peake was never content with simply providing visual interpretations of other author’s worlds. From his earliest years he produced skillful combinations of drawings and narrative, in which the pictures and text complimented one another and formed a unified whole. As an adult, Peake’s literary experiments were often accompanied by sketches of their various characters, scenes and settings, and these helped him to form a better understanding of what he was creating. The Gormenghast sequence was conceived in this fashion. While the original editions of these novels regrettably featured only a handful of his drawings, Peake was constantly fleshing out his secondary world and its denizens in sketch pads, on canvas, and even in the margins of his manuscripts. In 2011, to mark the centenary of his birth, a lavish new edition of the Gormenghast sequence containing all of the artwork relating to the story was published, allowing readers to finally experience these texts in the way that Peake himself had probably always envisaged.
In his own modest way, Peake saw himself as following in the tradition of unclassifiable figures like William Blake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, whose drawings and oils are inseparable from their writings. Just as Peake considered his visual art and fiction as two aspects of a single creative endeavor, the Gormenghast books are informed as much by his artistic influences as his literary ones. What Winnington describes as his “richly figurative language [. . .] his wide range of vocabulary, including unusual and obsolete words, and his use of self-consciously ‘poetic’ terms”26 must be perceived as his attempt to devise a prose style as opulent and vibrant as the imagery of El Greco, Velasquez, Goya and Van Gogh, the painters whom Peake cited as his most enduring inspirations. The collection of writers he credited as contributing to Gormenghast’s heady brew was no less diverse and illustrious: Christopher Marlowe, John Bunyan, the Brothers Grimm, Robert Louis Stevenson and above all Charles Dickens remained favorites from his childhood until the very end of his life.
What primarily distinguishes Peake’s art, both visual and literary, is what Winnington terms his “eye for the grotesque”.27 Whether it was the unusual profile of a stranger who passed him on the street or some strikingly incongruous tableaux he stumbled upon, his memory recorded these things exactly and they became the raw material for his art. He possessed an innate appreciation of the bizarre and the outré, as well as an extraordinary gift for exaggerating and distorting natural phenomena. As with Coleridge, Poe, and Wilde (other authors who brought out the best in him as an artist), Peake’s extravagant and decadent aesthetic seems not to have been the result of conscious choice. Instead, it derived purely from his way of seeing things.
Peake’s use of the grotesque is particularly noteworthy for its tendency to deconstruct the subject into a set of components which share an uneasy co-existence but also seem to have independent lives of their own. Rather than providing general images of his characters, he fragments them to the point where a definite overall impression is difficult to obtain. In this regard, none of his descriptions are more memorable than those devoted to Mr. Swelter, the enormously gross and bloodthirsty head chef of Gormenghast’s Great Kitchen and the arch-nemesis of Lord Sepulchrave’s spindly and cadaverous manservant Mr. Flay. When we are introduced to the loquacious Swelter in his hellish lair, Peake describes him thus:
The long beams of sunlight, which were reflected from the moist walls in a shimmering haze, had pranked the chef’s body with patches of ghost-light. The effect from below was that of a dappled volume of warm vague whiteness and of a grey that dissolved into swamps of midnight — of a volume that towered and dissolved among the rafters. As occasion merited he supported himself against the stone pillar at his side and as he did so patches of light shifted across the degraded whiteness of the stretched uniform he wore. When Mr Flay had first eyed him, the cook’s head had been entirely in shadow. Upon it the tall cap of office rose coldly, a vague topsail half lost in a fitful sky. In the total effect there was indeed something of the galleon.28
At the ceremonial breakfast to celebrate the birth of Titus, Swelter peers through a door to inspect his gastronomic handiwork, and Peake reemphasizes this suggestion of a corporeal bulk so obscenely massive it cannot be considered by itself, only as a mass of individually animated constituent parts;
Doubling his body he opens the door the merest fraction of an inch and applies his eye to the fissure. As he bends, the shimmering folds of the silk about his belly hiss and whisper like the voice of far and sinister waters or like some vast, earthless ghost-cat sucking its own breath. His eye, moving around the panel of the door, is like something detached, self-sufficient, and having no need of the voluminous head that follows it nor for that matter of the mountainous masses undulating to the crutch, and the soft, trunk-like legs. So alive is it, this eye, quick as an adder, veined like a blood-alley. What need is there for all the cumulus of dull, surrounding clay — the slow white hinterland that weighs behind it as it swivels among the doughy, circumscribing wodges like a marble of raddled ice?29
What is immediately noticeable from these passages is the gorgeously elegant manner in which Peake portrays this intensely loathsome figure. He sees fit to imbue the repellent Swelter with a curious variety of majesty and splendor, and this same ambiguity is evident in his descriptions of all of the inhabitants of Gormenghast. Even the more outwardly attractive of them are marked by some kind of oddness or peculiarity, while those who are monstrously ugly are so to such a complete and total degree that this quality in itself becomes something strangely exquisite. In other words, the real brilliance of Peake’s grotesquerie lies in the way he constantly traverses the line which traditionally divides the beautiful from the hideous, blurring it to the extent that we are no longer certain that anything truly separates them at all. In his fantastically ornate vision of things, these aesthetic categories are inverted to the point where they have no actual value: there is only what exists and how it appears to us at any one moment.
As a writer and an artist, Peake’s sensibility veered instinctively toward the weird and disturbing, which could make publishers wary of employing him. His first set of illustrations for a treasury of nursery rhymes entitled Ride-a-Cock-Horse (1940), produced at the age of 29, were criticized for being “nightmarish”,30 with one reviewer insisting that even though they possessed “a certain sort of horrible beauty”31 they were definitely not for children. The poet Walter de la Mare more astutely characterized Peake’s work as exhibiting “a rare layer of imagination, and a touch now and then, and more than a touch, of the genuinely sinister”,32 and he half-jokingly warned his friend that the parents of traumatized children would start sending him their psychiatrist’s bills. However, this darkness is the very essence of Peake’s creative talent and the quality which elevates the Gormenghast sequence to the status of a true work of art.
In setting out to write what he called the “Titus” books, Peake explained that it was his ambition “to create between two covers a world, the movements of which — in action, atmosphere and speech — enthral and excite the imagination”.33 However, one of the great ironies of these novels is that Peake invests such energy and visionary intensity in depicting a fictional world which has succumbed to paralysis and ossification long ago. Within Gormenghast’s labyrinth of dank and shadowy passageways, winding staircases, and candlelit corridors, time, insofar as we understand it, does not exist. There is only the ceaseless repetition of set patterns of behavior, which recur over and over again, differing only in what would seem to be the most inconsequential of their details. Peake’s imaginary world is an ageless mixture of ancient and modern. At various points in the sequence, it seems to be home to a medieval society, a late 18th-century one, a mid-19th-century one, and is even enlarged to incorporate elements of the 20th century. Nevertheless, it is a place without any concept of development or growth, only mindless and remorseless continuation.
At the heart of the Gormenghast sequence is a paradox which also constitutes an intriguing artistic challenge: how is it possible to represent life in a realm caught in stasis, a land where change of any kind is not just feared with a kind of paranoid mania but where the inhabitants struggle to even imagine the intrusion of anything unexpected? One of the reasons Peake’s imaginary world seems so strange lies in the reader’s difficulty in finding significance in the behavior of his characters. This is because Gormenghast is not merely the setting of his story; it is the very foundation of their identities.34 They have no notion of belonging to this place because they cannot conceive the idea of ever belonging anywhere else. The very concept of existence outside of its environs is simply devoid of all meaning.35 Even when the superannuated Mr. Flay is banished from court and Titus boldly ventures into the unknown places beyond his home, Gormenghast is still the vital center of their beings and continues to define their every thought and action. In this way, it makes perfect sense that Peake’s central characters are known as “Castles” since each of them is a living component of this place, as integral a part of its fabric as its bricks, beams, and flagstones, and their fates are inextricably bound up with the endurance of its routines and rituals.
If the “Castles’” unthinking obedience to the inviolable traditions of Gormenghast has any real literary antecedent, it can be found in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). In this work (which Peake knew well and for which he once produced an unpublished series of illustrations), all of Dickens’s extensive cast of characters are enmired to varying degrees in the crushingly tedious and seemingly unending court case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Their free will is subservient to the maddening convolutions of this fantastically complex legal dispute, and like Peake’s characters many of them are now demented or even insane. The ghoulish, twilight world Dickens conjures up in this great work is one which has become hopelessly moribund as a result of mankind’s twisted machinations, its vitality and creativity wasted away to nothing long ago. The exhausted, crumbling world of the Gormenghast sequence is fundamentally the same. The “Castles” are so preoccupied with maintaining the Earldom’s ludicrous laws and customs they are unaware that everything that surrounds them has grown rotten and verges upon collapse. This is what the calculating Steerpike is quick to recognize, and turn to his advantage.
Most critical and biographical studies of Peake and his work have assumed that the sprawling, dreamlike landscape of the Gormenghast sequence was heavily inspired by his childhood experiences of life in China. There is much truth in this: the son of an intrepid missionary doctor, Peake was born among the hills of Kuling, Kiang-Hsi Province, in Central Southern China in 1911, but his home for a large portion of his first 12 years was Tientsin, a Treaty Port in Northern China to the south-east of Peking. Better known today as Tianjin, the city of Tientsin was occupied by a shifting conglomeration of British, Japanese, Russian, French, German, and Austro-Hungarian forces. An unruly architectural mishmash marked by a myriad cultural influences, in this respect Tientsin closely reflected the bewildering heterogeneous quality Peake would later bring to his descriptions of the citadel of Gormenghast. Encircling Tientsin was, to quote Clute and Grant, “a territory as alien to [Peake’s] world as the land surrounding Gormenghast seems alien”36 to the Groan family and their courtiers. During his formative years Peake made occasional journeys into these regions, and his imagination was set alight by such magnificent sights as the Old Chinese Road and its royal guard of giant sculpted warriors, a colossal stone path named “The Thousand Steps”, the massive expanse of the Yangtze River, and the sublime palaces of Kublai Khan’s Forbidden City.
None of these left an impression quite as indelible as the country’s elaborate traditions, which formed an inescapable part of everyday life. Discussing his father’s memories of China, Peake’s son Sebastian observed how he was captivated by the role these complicated rituals played. What particularly fascinated him was the fact that in all of them “[t]here was a historical numerical order, [and] that for example things had to be performed in the tenth month after the previous emperor had died, for the sustaining of the momentum of the historical progress of China”.37 Strictly observed by everyone from the aristocratic elite to the most lowly peasant menial workers, Peake came to realize that these rituals “were very much part of the upper-class Chinese imperative, to seek discipline and order within historical facts”.38 As he would later recreate in his own fictional land, in Tientsin the meaning of each thing was entirely contingent on the meaning of everything else, forming one huge semantic mosaic. The great tomes of Gormenghast’s rituals include a “list of the activities to be performed hour by hour during the day by his Lordship”39 as well as the archaic regulations stipulating the “exact times; the garments to be worn for each occasion and the symbolic gestures to be used”,40 and together these amount to a “complex system”41 which cannot be deviated from.
At the same time, tradition might never have acquired the specific role it plays in the Gormenghast sequence had it not been for Peake’s return to Britain in 1923. Winnington has argued that the writer’s sudden uprooting from China and its ancient culture gave rise to “a sense of dissociation”42 which lasted for the rest of his life. As an adult, Peake was conscious that he had occupied these two distant worlds, but found he could establish “no thread, no link between them”,43 and as a result “[h]is memories seemed not to be part of him”.44 China’s mysterious, age-old way of life appeared even more fabulous compared to the grimness and mundanity of Interwar Britain. Nevertheless, in the Gormenghast sequence the exotic codes of conduct he encountered in China are reconfigured to reflect the very British preoccupations with preserving the heredity caste system and maintaining self-control. Transplanted into Peake’s imaginary realm, these rituals no longer constitute a precious, orderly link to a glorious past but a pointless and irrational system which no-one can break free from. Just like the corrupt Court of Chancery in the London of Bleak House, this is an insane world where madness has become so all-pervasive it has assumed the form of law.
In his introduction to Titus Groan, which remains one of the most illuminating pieces of criticism ever written on Peake’s fiction and was instrumental in reviving his reputation, Anthony Burgess identifies the distinctive qualities of Peake’s approach to world-building. He argues that the secondary reality Peake created differs from that of other authors insofar as it was never his intention to construct a utopia or dystopia. Instead, the world we enter “is neither better nor worse than this one: it is merely different”.45 Rather than offering the reader “a central sermon or warning”46 which will drastically transform their view of the reality they inhabit, Burgess contends that the Gormenghast sequence is “essentially a work of the closed imagination”.47 By this he means that Peake presents us with “a world parallel to ours”48 which shares many similarities with our own, but it is one which “has absorbed our history, culture, rituals and then stopped dead, refusing to move, self-feeding, self-motivating, [and] self-enclosed”.49 Gormenghast is a myopic realm which has lost sight of all the meaningful things that history and tradition are supposed to preserve and yet cannot envisage any form of future without ritual. Like a once-magnificent machine which keeps operating long after it has outlived its purpose, this is a world perpetually doomed to continue going absolutely nowhere.
Burgess observes that for all its exuberant strangeness Peake’s secondary reality is a place in which “[n]obody flies from a centre of normality”50 and “everybody belongs to a system built on very rigid rules”.51 At the heart of this system is the foreboding structure of Gormenghast Castle itself. Several critics52 have made the argument that Peake gives the castle such a distinct presence and personality that it can be considered the central character of the narrative. He certainly describes the rhythms of its sterile activity as one would the shifting moods of a deeply complex individual. It also requires little imagination to go about mapping a psycho-physiological structure onto the castle: the library housing Lord Groan’s collection of precious tomes forms its brain, while the Hall of Bright Carvings (the attic in which the most magnificent pieces created over the centuries by the foremost craftsmen of Gormenghast lie all but forgotten) can be read as its unconscious; the infernal Great Kitchen, perpetually in a state of feverish and needless overproduction, forms Gormenghast’s stomach and genitals, while the countless narrow stone lanes which riddle the entire edifice are akin to veins and arteries. Peake himself deliberately represents the castle in terms of some collapsed or even decomposing corporeal form many times throughout the books, most directly in the first paragraph of Titus Groan, where its topmost pinnacle the Tower of Flints (home to a parliament of vicious, flesh-eating owls) is described as rising upward “like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry”.53
If Gormenghast’s inhabitants are akin to tiny insects crawling around the innards of a gigantic festering cadaver, the need to escape from the horror of their predicament is the reason why they must create realms of their own: Sepulchrave lives more in the world of his beloved books than in waking reality, and the Master of Ritual Sourdust and his almost equally ancient and wizened son Barquentine are similarly obsessed with the minutia of the traditions they enforce; the Countess spends most of her time in a room full of cats and birds with whom she shares a more intimate bond than she does with her own children, while her sisters-in-law Clarice and Cora lie motionless dreaming of a great power they wouldn’t know what to do with even if they possessed it. As we have seen, Flay and Swelter are consumed by their pathological hatred for one another, which culminates in a duel that is both gruesome and ludicrous; the marvelously jovial and valiant court physician Dr. Prunesquallor delights in linguistic absurdities, conundrums, and verbal play, while his nearly blind and chronically neurotic sister Irma is besotted with romantic fantasies about men she scarcely knows. As much as they are necessary, Peake portrays these fragile imaginary worlds as points of vulnerability each of which Steerpike exploits, in turn.
It is this rich interior life and desire for a private domain to avoid the harshness and frustrations of reality, which makes Peake’s creations so compelling. Since the Gormenghast books are very often magnificently funny,54 critics have tended to reinforce the impression that their characters are the sort of over-the-top and cartoonish eccentrics found in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse or even in Monty Python sketches. However, it is a complete misconception to think of them as mere comic figures. For all of their exaggerated qualities and beguiling oddnesses, they remain real people with natural reactions, thoughts, and feelings and Peake successfully encourages us to share his interest in their fates. We feel for them far more often than we laugh at them. Compared to the grandiose mythic archetypes of Tolkien or the broadly Judeo-Christian analogs of C. S. Lewis, Peake can be credited with inventing characters who are much more fully realized and whose often tragic plights are genuinely affecting. Among its many interpretations, the Gormenghast sequence can be read as a brilliant study of how people try, and fail, to maintain their identities in an unbearably overfamiliar environment which is progressively destroying their sanity.
Anyone who doubts Peake’s ability to create enigmatic characters need only consider his depiction of his most disturbing creation, Steerpike. Like so many of Peake’s characters Steerpike seems to owe a debt to earlier figures from literature, and yet on reflection the reader discovers that they have never encountered anyone quite like him elsewhere in the history of fiction. Embodying the text’s perpetual openness, Steerpike can be read as any one of a range of vastly different figures, from an aspiring totalitarian dictator, a radical political ideologue bent on bringing down the old order they hate so that they can take control, a conniving Machiavellian who plots to seize power from within using any and all means to achieve this end, and an Iago-like malefactor who does terrible things simply because they can. Indeed, for much of the first novel he is more like an actor adopting a series of guises (an image Peake reinforces by describing him as having a face that is “pale like clay and, save for his eyes, masklike”55) than an actual person,56 and it is only as the second volume unfolds that we are made aware of the true extent of his malignancy. What makes Steerpike so dangerous and yet so alluring is the ease with which Peake could have turned him into the hero of his narrative rather than its villain. After all, he is proud, charismatic, resourceful, and relentless in his pursuit of his goal and has many other traits we would consider admirable if only they were used to further good and not evil ends.
Like many of the finest villains in literature, Steerpike is all the more fascinating because he has no clearly stated origins. When we originally encounter him he is merely the wretched kitchen scullion Swelter singles out for special cruelty and abuse because he refuses to flatter the bloated chef’s vanity, but we never learn anything of his past prior to this. He simply seems to have come into being, almost as though self-created. Peake deliberately portrays Steerpike as sympathetic in the early pages of the sequence, a victim of its draconian organizational structure, and this makes it all the more unsettling when his diabolical true nature is gradually revealed to us. One of the major strengths of the first two books is the consummate skill with which Peake juxtaposes the dual narratives of Steerpike and Titus. The kitchen urchin escapes his servitude to Swelter the same day that Titus is born and uses the gatherings which mark his transition from infancy to maturity to stage his grabs for greater and greater glory. Steerpike is at his most self-assured and unstoppable while Titus remains vague and unformed as a person, but his dreams of total mastery begin to fall apart as Titus develops an identity of his own and becomes conscious of his duty to protect his homeland. It is no coincidence that, in the end, it is Titus who dispatches Steerpike, finally ridding Gormenghast of the influence of his malevolent shadow-self.
So much about Peake’s text cries out for interpretation that it is easy to overlook a pivotal question: what is Steerpike’s ultimate goal? Although he makes a show of expressing his outrage on behalf of the castle’s lowly and downtrodden, Steerpike’s concerns about inequality are mostly superficial. He is a fiendish trickster who eliminates those who stand in his way by means of lethal practical jokes, but he seems to derive no great personal pleasure from what he does. Instead, he sees himself as an arch-rationalist and supreme pragmatist, the only one capable of re-organizing Gormenghast along what he sees as sane and efficient lines. Asked what he aspires to be by Dr. Prunesquallor, he responds that “In my less ambitious moments it is as a research scientist that I see myself”.57 This is precisely what he becomes, with all of Gormenghast for his experimental subject. He is animated not by any genuine desire to improve things but by a fanatical mania to reshape the world around him into the grim, mechanized system he believes it should be. In this respect, the most profound statement which arises from the Gormenghast sequence is that we must be very wary of our longing for change since the new age we create may prove to be far worse than the ones which went before it. After all, as Steerpike conjectures, “haven’t all ambitious people something of the monstrous about them?”58
Steerpike despises the antiquated farce of tradition, but in another of Peake’s brilliant ironies he has enough cunning to know that the most effective way of making Gormenghast bend to his will is to assume the role of Master of Ritual himself. Rather than a liberating force to sweep away the injustices and oppressions of the past, the regime Steerpike introduces is even more repressive and tyrannical. In an episode which evokes the Nazi book burnings of the early 1930s, he uses fire to decimate Lord Groan’s magnificent library and purge the castle of any ideas which do not fit with his worldview. Steerpike’s obsession with order and perfection is so all-consuming that he becomes deluded into believing that emotions are unnecessary and people must be made to act like automata. He is too much the unfeeling intellectual to understand that human behavior is fundamentally messy and chaotic and can never be otherwise. In this way, in spite of his fixation with logic and reason in actuality Steerpike is the most completely deranged of all of Peake’s characters.
Steerpike is defeated at the climax of Gormenghast, but it transpires that the modern world he was determined to bring about already exists outside of the castle. Having forsaken his ancestral home, in the third volume of the sequence, Titus Alone (1959), the young Earl enters into wild, unmapped regions which could not be further removed from the ones he has known all his life. This book, published after a hiatus of almost ten years, has generated some remarkably ambivalent attitudes, ranging from enchanted bemusement to outright dismissal. Many critics favorably inclined toward Titus Groan and Gormenghast regard it as a muddled failure and a steep decline from the majestic heights of those works.59 Even some of the most ardent enthusiasts of Peake’s fiction admit to its inferiority, and have attempted to excuse its perceived weaknesses on the grounds that the author was already being overtaken by symptoms of the neurodegenerative disease60 that would eventually rob him of his talent and his mind, and end his life several decades prematurely in 1968. As ever with Peake’s work, the reality is an altogether different story.
There is no denying that Titus Alone is a very strange beast, a great deal stranger in many respects than the books which preceded it. Other than its impetuous protagonist, it seems to share no fundamental connection with the earlier novels in the sequence. Whereas their action was confined to a single, horribly suffocating space, Titus Alone has a picaresque narrative which rambles with what appears to be erratic abandon through a variety of surreal and hallucinatory landscapes. Gone is Peake’s grand, stately orchestration of plot and incident. So is his phenomenal attention to detail. In their place we have situations and characters sketched out only in their essential outlines, and a storyline which follows no single trajectory but undergoes constant metamorphosis. The entire work is less than half the length of its predecessors, with chapters running to an average of two pages. It is therefore understandable why many critics have concluded that, either due to illness or not, in the intervening years Peake had grown unsure of his abilities and possibly lacked any clear design for the book he was writing.
On the basis of its stylistic and structural differences, Titus Alone would obviously seem to support these assumptions. A more careful assessment of the text suggests that Peake knew exactly what he was doing, and that he made these artistic choices for specific reasons. For a start, the novel is set not in Gormenghast but in remote realms Titus has never seen before. They appear so alien to him that Peake quite rightly cannot find words for them, and the brief descriptions he does provide can be interpreted as representing the young traveler’s total uncertainty about where he is and where he may be headed. Second, Titus is now cut off from the controlling influence of ritual and free to experience life at its most random and unpredictable. We receive only the most fleeting glimpses of the people and places he encounters, and it can be argued that it was Peake’s deliberate intention to present the reader with a much more impressionistic view of reality than the one we had become accustomed to from his earlier books. It is as if we too are on this disorientating, kaleidoscopic journey with Titus, and no more able to make sense of it all than he is.
Peake’s minimalist, episodic approach does not make Titus Alone any less of an achievement than his previous books. Although smaller, the novel’s cast of characters is equally as bizarre and colorful. During the course of his wanderings Titus becomes entangled with such richly imaginative figures as the mercurial zookeeper Muzzlehatch, his beautiful former lover Juno, and the seductive but deadly Cheeta. In terms of theme, it can be argued that Titus Alone deals with even weightier subjects than its predecessors and confronts the reader with a much darker vision of things. Its core images were undoubtedly formed during one of the most significant episodes of Peake’s life. Shortly after the end of World War II61 he accepted an assignment to travel to the devastated ruins of Germany and record what he found there. After visiting a succession of bombed-out cities, Peake entered the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. There he sketched the former prisoners as they lay dying as well as some of their captors who were awaiting execution, and the harrowing drawings he produced are easily his most important artworks. What Peake witnessed in Bergen-Belsen never left him, and those who knew him felt that the trauma of it robbed him of his simple joy in being alive.62
The specter of the Holocaust hangs over Titus Alone, and the book is pervaded by the sense that terrible violence is happening everywhere only just out of sight. Titus’s journey from innocence to experience is a transmogrified version of Peake’s own pilgrimage through a world in ruins, but it is also a more universal exploration of how the very worst aspects of human nature have followed mankind into modernity. Titus discovers an unnamed city whose impossibly vast glass and steel towers are the antithesis of Gormenghast’s degraded masonry, and its architecture summons to mind the futuristic metropolises which the Third Reich had vowed to build. Then there are the haunting chapters where Cheeta tries to impress Titus by bringing him to see a huge modern factory. Like the death-camp Peake visited, this sinister structure has slender chimneys continually belching foul smoke and the surrounding area reeks of a vile sickly smell. As he approaches the building Titus hears a dreadful, inhuman sound emanating from within, and in each of its windows he sees identical human faces which stare back at him helplessly before disappearing at the blast of a whistle. Earlier on Titus meets the inhabitants of the Under-River, a subterranean space where the city’s vagabonds, nonconformists and refugees have been banished, and these figures closely resemble the social outcasts the Nazis had rounded up for extermination.
As well as trying to find meaning in the horrors of the Holocaust, in Titus Alone Peake once again plays upon the fear of the future and speculates whether there will be any room for human freedom in it. The great city is a frighteningly credible dystopia: it has no government or individual rights, and there is also no art, music, entertainment, or any other kind of self-expression. A cabal of scientists has established an all-powerful technocracy, and those who interfere with their plans are hunted down and disposed of by faceless secret police. So far, the scientist’s most prized inventions are a death ray (which they callously test on Muzzlehatch’s beloved zoo animals) and a floating surveillance device (Peake had clearly envisaged the drone half a century before its invention) which can think for itself, but the heartless Cheeta (who is the chief scientist’s daughter) suggests that the outcome of whatever unthinkable experiments are being conducted in the factory will be their greatest achievement. It is exactly the sort of world Steerpike would have marveled at and felt at home in.
The conclusion of Titus Alone, a work which reads like the offspring of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine (1968), is certainly proof that even at this late stage Peake’s imagination was anything but exhausted and that he had further adventures in mind for his young exile. Realizing that he has accidentally arrived home in the novel’s final pages, Titus boldly decides not to return to the safety of Gormenghast but to set off in another direction and discover what lies in wait for him there. Tragically Peake’s health had soon deteriorated beyond the point where he could continue to tell his story, but his legacy is a sequence of books which demonstrate in every possible way the boundless potential of fiction. His everlasting gift to readers is a world of dreams and nightmares that is entirely and magnificently his own.
The essay’s title, “Suckled on Shadows” comes from Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast in The Gormenghast Trilogy, London, England: Vintage, 1999, p. 373.
1 Quoted in Estelle Daniel, The Art of Gormenghast: The Making of a Television Fantasy, London, England: HarperCollins, 2000, page 41.
2 Quoted in G. Peter Winnington, Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake, London, England: Peter Owen Publishers, 2000, page 168.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid, page 185.
8 Ibid, page 186.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 In August 2019 it was announced that Neil Gaiman would be one of the executive producers of a major new adaptation of all five Gormenghast texts to be made by the American television network Showtime.
13 Originally published alongside novellas by William Golding and John Wyndham in the anthology Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination, London, England: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956.
14 Kingsley Amis was most disparaging about Peake’s work. In his critical monograph New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, London, England: Penguin, 2012, page 153, he dismisses him in his typically pugnacious and unsupported fashion as “a bad fantasy writer of maverick status”.
15 G. Peter Winnington, “Inside the Mind of Mervyn Peake” in Etudes de Lettres, Lausanne, Switzerland: University of Lausanne Press, Series VI, Vol. 2, No. 1, January–March, 1979, page 3.
16 Ibid.
17 Mendlesohn, Farah, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008, page 59.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid, page xxi.
21 Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan in The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 91.
22 Miéville, China, Introduction to The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy, London, England: Vintage, 2011, page ix.
23 Ibid.
24 John Clute and John Grant, editors, The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, available at http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=peake_mervyn.
25 Ibid.
26 Vast Alchemies, page 98.
27 Ibid, page 59.
28 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 20.
29 Ibid, page 262.
30 Quoted in John Watney, Mervyn Peake, London, England: Michael Joseph, 1976, page 106.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Quoted in The Art of Gormenghast, page 42.
34 Peake also observed how human identity could be interconnected with a sense of place when he lived as part of an artists’ colony on the Channel Island of Sark for three years. The island’s tiny population, which had almost no interaction with the outside world, resembles the isolated existence of the inhabitants of Gormenghast. Peake’s years on the island, spent amidst the rugged, windswept majesty of its landscape, were some of the happiest of his life.
35 Peake provides a terrific metaphor for the Groan’s peculiar form of attachment to Gormenghast in Titus Groan, when the Earl ponders the question “How could he love this place? He was part of it. He could not imagine a world outside it; and the idea of loving Gormenghast would have shocked him. To have asked him of his feelings for his hereditary home would be like asking a man what his feelings were towards his own hand or his own throat”, The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 42.
36 The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy.
37 Quoted in The Art of Gormenghast, page 29.
38 Ibid.
39 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 44.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid, page 45.
42 Vast Alchemies, page 43.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Anthony Burgess, Introduction to Titus Groan, London, England: Penguin, 1968, page 9. Burgess’s reverence for Peake’s novel remained undiminished since he included it in his personal selection of the most important works of fiction in English of the past half century almost 20 years later in his book 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, London, England: Summit Books, 1985.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid, page 13.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid, page 9.
50 Ibid, page 11.
51 Ibid.
52 Among them Miéville, Mendlesohn, and Winnington, who all propose that Gormenghast Castle has so many distinctive qualities that it rightfully constitutes the main character of the sequence.
53 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 7.
54 Peake’s novels abound with wicked black humor. Especially hilarious are the chapters of Gormenghast set in the academy run by the benevolent but ineffectual Professor Bellgrove and his cadre of freakish oddballs. In this school, Titus meets such characters as the ancient Headmaster Deadyawn, who is catapulted to his demise from his own mobile high chair, and the venerable Idealist philosopher “The Leader”, whose Berkeleyan theory that material reality and physical sensations are illusory is disproven when his beard goes up in flames and he perishes. The comedic highlight of the sequence, however, is Bellgrove’s courtship of Irma Prunesquallor at her disastrous garden party.
55 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 89.
56 This chameleonic aspect of the character was captured tremendously in actor Jonathan Rhys Meyer’s performance in the BBC miniseries based on Peake’s novels broadcast in 2000. His startling physical resemblance to Peake’s drawings of Steerpike was also uncanny.
57 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 127.
58 Ibid.
59 Fortunately, if belatedly, this view has begun to alter in recent years. Roger Luckhurst in Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), David Louis Edelman in his Introduction to Titus Alone (New York: The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, 2011) and Michael Moorcock in “Breaking Free: An Introduction to Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone” in Michael Moorcock and Allan Kausch, editors, London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (London: PM Press, 2012) offer much more perceptive and sympathetic readings of this text.
60 The exact nature of the medical condition which killed Peake over ten years and left the Gormenghast sequence incomplete remains the subject of speculation. It has variously been diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and different forms of encephalitis, but contemporary research has postulated that Peake may have suffered from dementia with Lewy bodies, an extreme form of premature aging. His mental and physical deterioration was only accelerated by the medications, electroconvulsive therapy, and brain surgery he was prescribed. Peake was 57 when he died, but the last photographs of him show a man who looks thirty years older. Maeve Gilmore wrote a poignant account of her last years with her husband’s entitled A World Away (London: Gollancz, 1970).
61 At the outbreak of the conflict Peake volunteered his services as a war artist. Despite being refused, he developed a project of his own, The Works of Adolf Hitler, a series of intensely horrific paintings supposedly by the Nazi leader showing scenes of carnage, misery, and anguish. These were purchased by the Ministry of Information for propaganda purposes but, no doubt due to their macabre content, were never used.
62 Winnington states that although there were 30,000 living prisoners of various nationalities in Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945, approximately one hundred survivors were still dying each day from typhus and the effects of starvation when Peake reached the camp a month later; see Vast Alchemies, page 179. Peake’s son Sebastian movingly summed up the effect of this experience on his father when he eloquently wrote that he “suffered and later died as a result of seeing manifest the antithesis of joy, love, and beauty. How can his experience of the camp not have created an eternal helplessness of the soul?” Quoted in The Art of Gormenghast, page 28.