9780099288893

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NEIL GAIMAN

‘A gorgeous volcanic eruption...

A work of extraordinary imagination’ New Yorker Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh earl, Titus Groan, is lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons (and his eccentric and wayward subjects) according to strict age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle.

Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls.

‘A perfect creation’ Neil Gaiman ‘Peake’s books are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before’ C. S. Lewis

MERVYN PEAKE THE GORMENGHAST TRILOGY

VINTAGE CLASSICS

See also: Mr Pye

£9.99 VINTAGE

ISBN 978-0-09-928889-3

Penguin Random House penguin.co.uk/vintage

9 780099 288893

UK £25 CAN $53.95

65395

Cover illustration © Yiran Jia

RAN5_NP_01TheGormenghastTrilogyTPB_OUT_87522.pgs 04.10.2023 14:47

RAN5

EX LIBRIS

VINTAGE CLASSICS

MERVYN PEAKE Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in Guling, Central Southern China, where his father was a medical missionary. Within a year, the family moved to the northern city of Tianjin. Peake was educated at Tianjin Grammar School then at Eltham College in South East London. During the Second World War, while serving with the army, he established a reputation as a gifted book illustrator with his pictures for Ride a Cock Horse (1940), The Hunting of the Snark (1941) and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1943). Titus Groan was published in 1946 and was followed, in 1950, by Gormenghast. The third volume of the Gormenghast saga, Titus Alone, was published in 1959. His other works include Shapes and Sounds (1941), Rhymes Without Reason (1944), Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948) and Mr Pye (1953), and a play, The Wit to Woo (1957). He died in 1968.

ALSO BY MERVYN PEAKE

Shapes and Sounds The Craft of the Lead Pencil Letters from a Lost Uncle Mr Pye Peake’s Progress poems Rhymes Without Reason The Glassblowers The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb for children Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor

MERVYN PEAKE

The Gormenghast Trilogy Titus Groan Gormenghast Titus Alone WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Neil Gaiman

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

This edition published in Vintage Classics in 2023 First published in Great Britain by Mandarin Paperbacks in 1992 Titus Groan first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1946 Gormenghast first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1950 Titus Alone first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1959 Copyright © The Estate of Mervyn Peake 1992 Introduction copyright © Neil Gaiman 2022 Interior illustrations by Mervyn Peake penguin.co.uk/vintage-classics Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. The authorised representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9780099288893 Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

Introduction

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Titus Groan

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Gormenghast

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Titus Alone

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INTRODUCTION To begin with and always, the most important thing is that Mervyn Peake was an artist. The hugeness of Gormenghast, the castle that is a city, the habitation that is the only place there is, is uniquely an artist’s creation.

Peake was born in 1911 in China, the son of Christian missionaries, although he said of the house he grew up in that it might as well have been in Croydon (then a small city south of London) – ​a place of utter British normality in Imperial China, where its existence was an abnormality.

He returned to England from China when he was twelve. He moved to Surrey, with Encephalitis lethargica, the sleepy sickness, incubating in his body.

Peake trained as an artist first at Croydon Art College, and then he was awarded a scholarship to study for five years at the Royal Academy. In his fourth year at the Royal Academy Peake went to Sark, the strangest of the Channel Islands and one he was to write about in his novel of demon and angel, Mr Pye. He fell in love with Sark, failed his end of year exams at the RA, and his scholarship ended there. Perhaps it was because he was distracted, but also perhaps because there is, at its heart, something gloriously disrespectful and out of step with the world in Peake’s art. It mocks, and grins, and does not take its subjects seriously even when it takes itself seriously.

He taught art at Westminster School of Art. He joined the Royal Artillery in 1940, and began to write Titus Groan as a soldier, given a special dispensation to write it by his officers. His talents as a painter were used in painting ‘Private, Officers Only’ on the doors of latrines. He applied to become a War Artist and was initially rejected. He had a breakdown, was hospitalised and continued writing Titus Groan while in hospital. His talents recognised, Peake worked briefly as a War Artist for the Ministry of Information, before being invalided out of the army in 1943. After the war, as a War Artist, he was one of the first civilians to enter the ​­Bergen-​­Belsen Concentration Camp, where thousands remained unburied, and most of the living were too weak and hungry to take care of themselves or others, and was deeply affected by this. Also as a War Artist he drew Nuremberg, and the prisoners there waiting to be tried.

Titus Groan was published in 1946. Peake moved his family to Sark.

He continued to write and to draw. Gormenghast was published in 1950, the Titus Groan short story ‘Boy in Darkness’ in 1956. Titus Alone, the last of the Titus Groan books, was published in 1959, and he was never to write more than a couple of pages of Titus Awakes, the novel that was to have followed it. His mental health, never resilient, had begun to break down completely in 1957,

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f­ollowing the failure of his play, The Wit to Woo. Parkinson’s disease and Encephalitis lethargica, along with treatments that only made things worse, took their toll on him, and he died in 1968 after spending the majority of the previous decade in hospitals and mental asylums.

The world of Gormenghast, the world in which Titus Groan is born, is a fantasy world without magic or anything overtly fantastic in its ​­make-​­up, a science fiction world without the science, a surrealist world in which a scrupulous attention to reality builds a place so very grounded in reality that those of us who have read it would know precisely where we were upon opening our eyes there. The first two books of Titus Groan’s life are two of the finest, strangest and most unique novels of the twentieth century: it is unfortunate that we never got to read the author’s completed version of the third book, and a tragedy that the third novel was not the beginning of an entire sequence of novels that would have given us the life story of Titus Groan, who was born to be the 77th Earl of Gormenghast.

Gormenghast is, to my mind and to my taste, a perfect creation. A post-​ ​­ ­medieval castle, a place the size of a city, in which we find an English middle-​­ ​­ class household of the first half of the twentieth century, an English village complete with a school, and an upstairs-downstairs manor house, filled with servants and family and the equivalent of the occasional awkward weekend guest who will, of course, be staying forever.

There is an urge to view fiction of this kind as a simple allegory, for Britishness perhaps, or for the class system, but that, it seems to me, is entirely the wrong way to read it. Instead, like a surrealist poem, it becomes its best and most powerful self when taken utterly literally. We can seek layers of meaning in the castle and environs of Gormenghast, but they are powerful as layers, never as explanation. The strata of Gormenghast society, the rituals the Earl and the inhabitants are bound by, the stifling nature of the place, may have been influenced by the ​­pre-​­revolutionary China in which Peake was born, the stuffy Britain in which he grew up, but they are not either of these things: they are the rituals and the people of Gormenghast. Allegory serves only to lessen them.

There are no other characters in literature who live so visually in my mind as the inhabitants of Gormenghast. There are authors out there who have created moving, brilliant books, filled with characters who breathe and feel and love, true. There are authors who have made perfect, plangent sentences, some of which, I suspect, I will be able to recite long after I have forgotten everything else. Only Mervyn Peake paints in my head, using words as his medium. His creations live and breathe in our heads because we can see them.

I want to quote him, and I am not going to, for once I begin to quote Peake there is no stopping: and you have all three of the books here. Every glorious sentence, every obscure word pulled from obscurity and out into the light, every fragment of poem is waiting here for you. Revel in it.

Introduction

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Images splash and tumble from Peake’s pen: the horse on the roof of the Gormenghast tower; Gertrude’s tumbling red hair and white cats; the hunch of Steerpike’s shoulders; the pout of Fuchsia’s lips; Swelter’s monstrous bloat as he dips hard-​­ ​­ boiled eggs into the ​­salt-​­cellar of his navel; the Hall of the Bright Carvings; the webs in the Hall of Spiders . . . and I could continue, and continue, listing the things I love in Gormenghast (the Twins’ tree, the way Barquentine moves) but again, not attempting to describe them, because they are waiting here for you, vivid and baroque and better described than I could ever hope to emulate.

Peake can see them. All the people, all the places. He writes as if he has wandered the halls where they walked. And he makes us see them too.

Steerpike, wonderful, awful, damaged Steerpike, whom we wish to save from his doom in Swelter’s kitchens, and who instinctively plays the Gormenghast hierarchy like a musical instrument, inching himself towards what he sees as safety and dreams of as power. Steerpike is himself: he seeks out and draws to him everything Titus will want to escape from, embodies Gormenghast the​ ­place – ​while being not of Gormenghast, as Gertrude perceives and as Doctor Prunesquallor discovers: Steerpike is a virus in Gormenghast’s bloodstream, and a monster, but he’s not a simple allegory for Nazism, or for the rise of the proletariat. He is Steerpike, and that should be enough.

There is an accuracy to Peake’s observations. Gormenghast is well seen, and gloriously and even elaborately described, but it is also heard. I feel that I know Cora and Clarice, the Twins, because I have heard them talking to each other, as I have heard Doctor Prunesquallor talk to his sister, Irma. Peake’s descriptions allow us to look into Gormenghast, like Steerpike peeking through eyeholes and secret ways, to spy on the world he has built for us.

In Titus Groan, we learn about Gormenghast, we meet Titus’s wet-​­ ​­ nurse, Keda, and his family. In Gormenghast, we watch Titus grow up and make his decisions, learn what happened to Keda and to the nameless girl known as the Thing, Titus’s nursing sister. In Titus Alone, we see Titus leave Gormenghast for new places, enter a world of technology that feels contemporary and strange.

And, like Titus, whether he admits it to himself or not, we miss Gormenghast, need to understand the nature of its existence. For me, the most powerful sequence in Titus Alone is the hallucinatory conjuring of Gormenghast and its inhabitants, living and dead. It is parody and caricature, and a teasing akin to torture in which Titus finds himself, but it is still Gormenghast, as seen in a fever dream, and we wish we could return there. Titus Alone is not a bad book ​­ – ​it suffers from being seen as the final book in the trilogy, rather than, as planned, the first book in Titus’s travels.

Peake was going to build more adventures for Titus, more places for him to visit. He never did; he never could. We talk about the Gormenghast trilogy, but it is a trilogy in effect, not in intention. For Peake these were meant to have

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been merely the first three books of a life we were going to ​­follow – ​in his notes for the next book or books Peake stated that Titus would be among: ‘Snows, Mountains, Islands, Rivers, Archipelagoes, Forests, Lagoons, Fires, Floods, Typhoons, Doldrums, Famines, Pestilences, Poverty, Affluence, Debt, Society, Soldiers, Thieves, Actors, Painters, Psychiatrists, Labourers, Eccentrics, Lepers, Lotus Eaters, Monsters, Hypocrites, Madmen, Bankers, Angels, Devils, Mendicants, Vagrants, Pirates, Mermaids, Dreamers, Decadence, Athletes, Invalids,​ ­Blood-​­sportsmen, Shapes, Echoes, Textures, Sounds, Tones, Colours, Scents.’

Peake was an artist, and he drew his characters as he wrote them, sometimes drew them onto the paper on which he was writing his novel. But his vision has never precluded other artists from inhabiting Gormenghast ​­ – ​most notably Charles W. Stewart, whose Titus Groan and Gormenghast colour illustrations were never, that I know of, printed in any edition, but are up on the website of the Royal Academy (the same one from which young Mervyn Peake was long ago dismissed), and the Gormenghast illustrations by Brighton artist Ian Miller (he described Gormenghast as ‘a draughtsman’s dream and a painter’s obsession’ as he drew hundreds of roofs or the knotted roots and branches of the Twins’ tree pushing out from a distorted wall).

I read these books first as a boy of thirteen. I found them in the library of my school, in South Croydon, read them with joy and never suspected how close I was to one of the lands of Peake’s imaginings. They are always a joy to return to, unique in literature, paintings in words of a place that thrills me to imagine . . . neil gaiman March 2022

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