Titus Awakes

Introduction

Mervyn, Maeve and the Search without End

This introduction includes elements of the plot

I WAS HANDED, simultaneously, a generously measured gin and tonic and a typescript in a blue-grey folder, on the cover of which was written Search Without End, words that would eventually become the title of the final chapter to the book you are about to read.

This was over thirty years ago and Maeve Gilmore and I were sitting in what she called the ‘Petit Salon’, an intimate room overlooking the backgarden of No. 1 Drayton Gardens in Kensington, London – the last home she had shared with her late husband, Mervyn Peake.

Both were artists of considerable talent and Mervyn was a remarkable polymath: in addition to being a painter and an illustrator (reinterpreting classics such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the twentieth century) he was also a novelist, playwright and poet. As a writer, he used the rich language of the artist’s palette; repeatedly describing characters and scenes in the Titus novels in terms of composition, colour, texture, light and shade.

The walls of the ‘Petit Salon’ were hung with paintings and drawings and, along the back of the sofa, was a troupe of knitted dolls made by Maeve that were vaguely reminiscent of Pierrot and Columbine figures, but also kindred spirits of the tall, spindle-limbed acrobatic dancers that frequented many of Mervyn’s sketch-books. Here it was that, once a month, our conversation would range across a broad spectrum of subjects from books and paintings to theatre and religion, inevitably returning again and again to Mervyn’s work and Maeve’s devoted endeavours to secure the memory of his reputation as an artist and writer of genius.

The typescript I had just been handed was rather more personal: Maeve’s Search Without End was to be a continuation of the epic saga recorded in Mervyn’s trilogy of novels, Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. In fact, the trilogy was never conceived as such, for the author’s ambitious intention had always been to compose a cycle of novels chronicling Titus’ life and travels, written in a style that is frequently categorised as a hybrid of fantasy and gothic fiction, but which is unique to its author.

The first two volumes, crowded with characters of Dickensian stature, tell of the birth, childhood and adolescence of Titus Groan and his inheritance of the title of seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, a vast decaying realm in the thrall of arcane, centuries-old ceremonies. The third book follows Titus as he deserts his ancestral kingdom and finds himself an alien in a strangely futuristic world governed by the clinical, dehumanising rituals of science and technology.

By the time Titus Alone was finally published in 1959, Mervyn’s health was rapidly disintegrating due to the onslaught of the neurodegenerative illness that would eventually claim his life in 1968 at the age of fifty-seven. Although Peake had intended to write more volumes, the first of which was to be called Titus Awakes, it became clear that there was no hope of his ever being able to carry his vision through to completion. All that exists of Titus Awakes is the fragment dated July 1960, which is clearly marked at the beginning of this book. In addition, Mervyn had drawn up a list of possible subjects for chapters. Running to four-dozen, one-word categories of places and peoples, this tantalizingly enigmatic inventory included prospective episodes in which Titus would be found, for example, among the ‘snows’, ‘mountains’, ‘forests’, ‘archipelagos’ and ‘soldiers’.

Maeve would later describe these jottings as ‘tragic notes . . . the gropings of a man wishing to write something surpassing anything he had already done’. Nevertheless, these seemingly random themes provided her with the initial inspiration. Perhaps the daunting challenge of piecing together Mervyn’s notes into a story was, for Maeve, a vain attempt to deny the fact that the man, like the story he had been formulating, was now forever lost.

Begun in 1970, two years after Mervyn’s death, Maeve’s continuation and eventual completion of Search Without End was neatly written in sepia-ink and filled four black exercise books. Although, initially, Maeve was not writing with a view to publication, the handwritten manuscript was transcribed into an ongoing series of typescripts, such as the one I read in the late seventies, each with its own amendments, deletions and additions. With Maeve’s death in 1983, Search Without End was ‘lost’, eventually coming to light, more than two-and-a-half decades later, when her granddaughter, Christian, discovered it in an unprepossessing cardboard box in the family attic.

Today, when sequels to classic books written by other hands are two-a-penny, it might be thought that Maeve had approached the task of continuing Titus’ story with confidence. In truth, the writing began as an intensely cathartic experiment; a humble gesture of unconditional love and – rather in the way that Mervyn had once described the craft of drawing – as a hoped-for means of holding back astonishing and fantastical ideas ‘from the brink of oblivion’.

The story that unfolds in the following pages is picaresque: a series of episodic vignettes featuring a motley collection of characters. Some are broadly caricatured, such as the pretentious poet, ‘I am’, and his vacuous audience of aspiring literati. Others are obviously drawn, in some measure, from life – especially, one feels, Maeve’s portrait of the painter, Ruth Saxon, and her struggles with life as an impecunious artist.

References to characters in the earlier books also litter the pages. There are references to Titus’ family – particular his sister, Fuchsia – and to the women who previously awaked his emotions: the ill-starred foster-sister, known only as ‘The Thing’, and, from Titus Alone, the loving Juno, the icy Cheeta and the tragic girl called the Black Rose.

Titus’s new encounters are almost all threatening: either to his very existence or to his passion for freedom. His refusal to commit to those who show him affection – the mountain girl who bears his child, the dog who slavishly follows him and his short-term lover, Ruth – is, however, eventually, and unexpectedly, challenged and overturned in a development that, one suspects, must have surprised the author as much as it does the reader.

As the writing slowly progressed it evolved. What had begun as an act of homage – attempting to emulate Mervyn’s narrative style – was now being expressed in Maeve’s own distinctive voice which had already found eloquent expression in her emotionally charged memoir, A World Away ( 1970). The final result is a highly personal quest to understand her husband’s tragic descent into illness in terms of his artistic and literary brilliance.

This quest finds fulfilment in the meetings between Titus Groan and an ‘artist’ who unmistakably represents Mervyn. So, unexpectedly, the creator of Titus becomes a character within Titus’s universe and, at the end of the novel, is the person who, in a mysteriously spiritual sense, gives purpose and meaning to Titus’s existence.

These biographical episodes contain distressingly authentic details such as the description of the austere institution where Titus works as an orderly. This was inspired by the Friern Hospital (formerly known as Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum) where Mervyn was, for a time, confined. Less painfully, the depiction of the abbey is based on Aylesford Priory, where he had earlier spent time working on Titus Alone before his illness claimed most of his senses. In the book, these locations appear in a reversal of the order in which they featured in Mervyn’s life, almost as if Maeve were trying to turn back the clock so that, instead of relentless decline, the artist appears to be recovering, becoming a vibrant, life-embracing person once more, represented, in the novel, by the man waiting with his three children on the island jetty for Titus’s arrival.

Islands are a recurring motif throughout the Titus novels, with Gormenghast castle being frequently compared to one. It is, perhaps, the sense of isolation – even captivity – that an island can engender that contributes to Titus’ desire to escape. In Maeve’s perspective, however, the island increasingly comes to represent for Titus the opposite of imprisonment: a refuge, a sanctuary, a safe haven from the vacant wanderings depicted in Titus Alone, a place where experiences and encounters can be safely circumscribed.

Although unnamed, the island described at the end of Titus Awakes is very specifically Sark, the smallest of the Channel Islands, where Mervyn Peake first went to live in 1933 and where he spent two formative years of his career working with the Sark Group of artists. A decade later, in 1946, following the publication of the much-acclaimed Titus Groan, Mervyn returned to Sark with Maeve and their two sons Sebastian and Fabian. During their time there, a daughter, Clare, was born and Mervyn wrote Gormenghast. Sark would also later provide the setting for his novel of magical realism, Mr Pye.

For Maeve, therefore, Sark – the island that becomes Titus’s final destination – represented happier times, a place of healing and wholeness, a place where creator and creation could effortlessly become one. ‘Life, and the love of it was paramount,’ she writes of Titus’s newfound understanding. ‘There was no longer any tragic groping. What he understood was a lust for life.’

As a final gesture to her husband’s vision, Maeve eventually relinquished her title, Search Without End, in favour of the one that Mervyn had planned to use, Titus Awakes.

The book opens with words written by Mervyn Peake as he attempted to set out with his hero on another foray into the world that lay beyond Gormenghast. Maeve Gilmore chose to end the book by quoting Titus’s mother telling her departing son: ‘There’s not a road, not a track, but it will lead you home.’

What makes this coda so poignant is the realisation that home is not the crumbling, time-eaten towers and turrets of Gormenghast castle, but the mind and heart of the man who built it in his imagination.

Brian Sibley, 2011