A Little Place Called Gormenghast

Have you read the Titus books by Mervyn Peake? Overlook Press has gone to the trouble of republishing them. You ought to be able to find the individual volumes or all three bundled together along with an introduction and critical essays. I keep seeing copies in all kinds of bookstores. You might have to look in the science fiction section, which is odd considering that is not where you go to find something much more fantastic, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, usually.

Not everybody will appreciate Peake, of course. The reviewers had a difficult time with him back in his day, and it is very doubtful that things have improved since then. But a large part of his lack of appeal is that his writing lies outside of the range of sympathies of most people. His prose is lavishly poetic, his books are long and not at all fast paced, and he was fascinated with the grotesque.

For this reason I hesitate to say that if you are the kind of person who has to keep returning to Beethoven the you are the kind of person who is likely to appreciate Mervyn Peake. But I think it is true because of Peake’s boldness. Peake strikes me as a romantic born late. His life seems to me to be the story we would tell if we were to bring Byron or Shelley into the 20th century. He is all impulse and quality, atmosphere and description, and also inimitable characters.

Peake wanted to be a painter but he was not so good a painter as he was an illustrator, especially with pen and ink. He was able to change the style and mood of his illustrations to suit the many books he illustrated. He was so good that for some books he provided superior illustrations to inferior material, outdoing the text itself.

But besides drawing in pen and ink he also wrote in pen and ink and his prose is remarkably vivid in description and striking in image. And his fame will probably be carried more by his poetic and exotic literature than by his talent for drawing. His literature opens up an undiscovered country, which is why I say it is like Beethoven.

Here is a long quotation from a letter C.S. Lewis sent to Peake. It is found in Malcolm Yorke’s biography of Mervyn Peake, My Eyes Mint Gold. Notice how much Lewis wants fantastic literature (of course, he is a romantic, but still notice it).

Thank you for adding to a class of literature in which the attempts are few and the successes very few indeed. . . . to me those who merely comment on experience seem far less valuable than those who add to it, who make me experience what I never experienced before. I would not for anything have missed Gormenghast. It has the hallmark of a true myth: i.e. you have seen nothing like it before you read the book, but after that you see things like it everywhere. What one may call ‘the gormenghastly’ has given me a new Universal; particulars to put under it are never in short supply. That is why fools have (I bet) tried to ‘interpret’ it as allegory. They see one of the innumerable ‘meanings’ which are always coming out of it (because it is alive and fertile) and conclude that you began—and ended—by putting in that and no more. If they tell you it’s deuced leisurely and the story takes a long time to develop don’t listen to them. It ought to be, and must be, slow. That endless, tragic, farcical, unnecessary, ineluctable sorrow can’t be abridged. I love the length. I like things long—drinks, love passages, walks, conversations, silences, and above all, books. Give me a good square meal like The Faery Queen or The Lord of the Rings. The Odyssey is a mere lunch after all.