Scratch Pad 78 October 2011
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Scratch Pad 78 October 2011 Based on the non-mailing comments section of *brg* 72, a fanzine forANZAPA (Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association) written and published by Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard St, Greensborough VIC 3088. Phone: (03) 9435 7786. Email: [email protected]. Member fwa. Contents 2 Mervyn Peake: Mind out of time — by Bruce Gillespie The covers of the first two volumes in the Penguin Modern Classics edition: (This page:) Gormenghast, first published 1950; Penguin edition 1969 cover: Mervyn Peake’s sketches of Steerpike (above) and Barquentine (below). (Next page:) Titus Groan, first published 1946; Penguin edition 1968 cover: Mervyn Peake’s sketch of Fuchsia. 1 Bruce Gillespie Mervyn Peake: Mind out of time [*brg* First presented as a talk to the Nova Mob, Melbourne’s SF discussion group, Wednesday, 5 October 2011.*] I For the last few weeks I have been living inside a dream. The dream springs from the mind of Mervyn Peake, as found in the vast territory described in the books called the ‘Gormenghast trilogy’ or the ‘Titus books’. They are Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. After rereading the first two of these books in recent weeks, I have found myself waking in the early hours almost unable to remember where I am: the world of Gormenghast castle and that of my own. Why have I become mildly obsessed with the Gormenghast books, even to the extent of also reading two biographies of Mervyn Peake? First, the long answer. The long answer is that the three novels always seems to have been a part of my consciousness, although I hadn’t read them. I bought the Penguin edition when it appeared in 1968, found the first pages of the first book difficult reading, and did not continue. However, I knew that the three books formed a classic that one day I would read. Why did I know that? Because I had seen them praised in a science fiction magazine, and not just any old SF 2 Titus Alone: first edition 1959; Penguin Modern Classics edition 1970. Cover: Mervyn Peake’s The Gormenghast Novels, the Overlook Press/Tusk edition, 1995. Cover: photo collage by J. sketch of Irma Prunesquallor, who does not appear in this novel. K. Potter. 3 magazine. Michael Moorcock, editor of New Worlds from 1965 onwards, is credited by Peter Winnington, in his biography of Peake, as being the person most responsible for bringing Titus Groan back into public view although it had been out of print since 1948. It was the young Michael Moorcock who met Peake in 1960, then championed Peake’s work in the pages of New Worlds throughout the 1960s, and who persuaded Penguin to reissue the three novels in a Modern Classics edition in 1968. Langdon Jones, who was then assistant editor of New Worlds, put a huge amount of unpaid work into assembling a definitive edition of Titus Alone, the last novel, for the 1970 edition. Second, the short answer. A few years ago Dick Jenssen gave me a copy of the most recent complete edition, the Overlook Press edition from New York. It contains not only the definitive versions of the three novels, Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone, but also introductions by Anthony Burgess and Quentin Crisp, plus 100 pages of essays about the life and work of Mervyn Peake, taken from the journals The Mervyn Peake Review and Peake Studies. We already owned a copy of the three-volume edition that most Australian readers know, the Penguin Modern Classics edition, but I had never read them. In 2008 I read the new edition, plus the two biographies, one by Malcolm Yorke, My Eyes Mint Gold, and one by G. Peter Winnington, Vast Alchemies. Dick Jenssen’s present of the new edition prompted me to start reading the ‘Gormenghast trilogy’, 40 years after I should have done so. However, I nearly put it back on the shelf. Although I was entranced by the early description of the castle itself, I found the sentences long, the characters overblown, and the narrative just a little vague. At the beginning of the first novel, called Titus Groan, Titus Groan has just been born, and he is still only two years old at the end of it. The main character is Steerpike, the boy from the kitchen who decides he is going to take power in Gormenghast. At the end of the first volume, he has already carried out some of his dirty deeds, but by no means succeeded in his aim of achieving total power. Only in the middle of the second volume, Gormenghast, do Maeve Gilmore and Mervyn Peake (1938) 4 we discover the full extent of his dastardly plans, and how various the ruler of the castle. The Earl, also called Lord Sepulchrave, and people eventually defeat him. Titus Groan himself is only 18 by the his wife, Gertrude, Countess of Groan, choose the finest object of end of that volume. the year, which is then stored in the Hall of Bright Carvings within the castle. After the ceremony, we explore the hall itself. The only Should I recommend that you read these books? Not on the basis of illumination is from ‘seven great candelabra’, all of which are kept what I have just told you. The fact that I have read two of the books burning by Mr Rottcodd, the Guardian of the Bright Carvings. Here twice shows that whatever is going on in these novels has little to he lives alone, never seeing anybody from one end of the year to do with the pleasures that one finds in conventional novels. A tale the other. of breathtaking action this is not, although some scenes are highly dramatic. It is not a ‘fantasy trilogy’, although it is often called such. Who are the Bright Carvers? Who is Rottcodd? Is he a major It contains almost no supernatural elements, such as magic, wizards, character? If not, why is he introduced before we meet anybody else? fairies, and elves. It does not fit the conventional pattern of fantasy What are we to make of Mr Flay, the Earl’s personal servant, who is trilogies that are modelled on The Lord of the Rings. It aims to be a the first person to visit Rottcodd in a year? realistic tale about a territory set on an alternative earth. Its tone is close to that of horror or dark fantasy. So how realistic is this world Mr Flay appeared to clutter up the doorway as he stood revealed, that has been built? If it is not realistic, is the trilogy really a horror his arms folded ... It did not look as though such a bony face as fantasy? his could give normal utterance, but rather that instead of sounds, something more brittle, more ancient, something dryer would II emerge, something perhaps more in the nature of a splinter or a fragment of stone. Nevertheless, the harsh lips parted. ‘It’s me,’ The main character of the first two books is Gormenghast the castle, he said, and took a step forward into the room, his knee joints rather than any of the humans who live there. The first paragraph cracking as he did so. His passage across a room — in fact his deals with the castle itself. Peake describes: passage through life — was accompanied by these cracking sounds, one per step, which might be likened to the breaking of the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, dry twigs. and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. The tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated Mr Flay tells Rottcodd that the Earl and the Countess of Groan have finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed a new child and heir, Titus. After he has delivered his news, Flay blasphemously at heaven. ... At one point within the Outer Wall, descends to the Great Kitchen of the castle, presided over by the a few feet from the earth, the great stones of which the wall itself monstrous Abiatha Swelter, the chef of Gormenghast, and his was constructed, jutted forward in the form of a massive shelf drunken apprentices, the boys who form his kitchen staff. For stretching from east to west for about two hundred to three reasons never explained, Swelter and Flay hate each other, and both hundred feet. are in turn hated by a member of the kitchen staff, a ‘high-shouldered boy’ who ‘pulled out a small pipe of knotted wormwood and filled it The first day of the book takes place on the Day of Bright Carvings, deliberately. His mouth was quite expressionless, curving neither up when the tribe who live outside the castle present their year’s nor down, but his eyes were dark and hot with a mature hatred’. carvings to be part of a ceremony presided over by the Earl of Groan, This is our first introduction to Steerpike, the character who domi- 5 nates the first two volumes of the trilogy. sixth Earl of Groan and ‘the owner of, as Steerpike put it to himself, the whole caboodle, bricks, guns and glory’. Seen through this What kind of place are we in? We are in a vast building of endless spyhole we also meet for the first time Doctor Prunesquallor, the corridors and empty rooms. We are in an edifice, above all, of rich earl’s physician. Since Prunesquallor, after another 800 pages or so, language, the kind of prose that had probably not featured in English eventually becomes one of the heroes of the drama, it is worth fiction since the heyday of Charles Dickens.