Titus Awakes

by Maeve Gilmore

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Also by Maeve Gilmore

  Title Page

  Introduction by Brian Sibley

  Foreword by Maeve Gilmore

  1. Titus Awakes from the Snows

  2. Titus Among the Snows

  3. Sacrifice. Behold

  4. Titus’s Awakening

  5. As the Spring Awakes, So Do the Two Strangers

  6. Awakening Is Sweet Sorrow

  7. Living Refound

  8. Life Can Be a Miracle

  9. Autumn and Winter, the Pain of Both

  10. Away from the Mountains

  11. Titus Learns of Other Loves

  12. Among the Rivers

  13. They Reach the Archipelagos and Forests

  14. Lagoons – Fires

  15. Among the Soldiers

  16. Still Among the Soldiers

  17. Back at Camp

  18. Plans of Escape

  19. Escape

  20. An Unexpected Meeting

  21. An Affectionate Welcome

  22. Titus as Model

  23. Titus Thinks of the Past

  24. Moments of Serenity

  25. At Mrs Sempleton-Grove’s

  26. From Riches to Rags

  27. Other Places, Other Work

  28. Among the Dead Men

  29. Intimations of Other Days

  30. Happening in a Side Street

  31. Under the Masks

  32. A Sanctuary

  33. An Unwelcome Interlude

  34. The End of an Unwelcome Interlude

  35. Search Without End

  Copyright

  About the Book

  With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home . . .

  In Titus Awakes the 77th Earl of Groan, leaves the crumbling castle of Gormenghast and finds the larger world even stranger than his birthplace. Confronted by elemental and human threats – snowstorms, shipwrecks and attempts on his life – Titus’ bravery is tested and he must fight to free himself from the claims of his past.

  Peake began this fourth and final volume of the Gormenghast stories but died having only written a few pages. Using notes and the fragments he left behind, his wife, the writer and painter Maeve Gilmore, has created a richly imagined sequel that fans of Gormenghast will delight in.

  About the Authors

  Born in 1918, Maeve Gilmore was a painter, sculptor and writer. She married Mervyn Peake, author of the Gormenghast novels, in 1937 and they had three children. She is the author of A World Away, an account of her life with Peake. Anthony Burgess wrote of that book, ‘it is impossible not to be moved by Maeve Gilmore’s memoir . . . The moral of Gilmore’s exquisite and poignant book is that life is hell, but we had better be grateful for the consolations of love and art.’ Gilmore died in 1983.

  Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) was a playwright, painter, poet, illustrator, short story writer, and designer of theatrical costumes, as well as a novelist. Among his many books are Gormenghast, Titus Groan and Titus Alone.

  ALSO BY MAEVE GILMORE

  Non-fiction

  A World Away

  Editor

  Peake’s Progress

  Titus Awakes

  The Lost Book of Gormenghast

  Maeve Gilmore

  BASED ON A FRAGMENT BY

  Mervyn Peake

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  Brian Sibley

  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

  Foreword

  THE GORMENGHAST TRILOGY was not envisaged as a trilogy. There was to have been a fourth book in which Titus Groan, having left his own domain of his own volition for the first time, knowing that he could not return, entered a world where he was unknown, young and alone. The life he found outside the castle was indifferent to him; there were echoes from his childhood, and the flint he carried with him gave verisimilitude, if to no one else, at least to himself.

  Gormenghast was not a dream. The world he encountered outside was not a dream, and the world that had been engendered by the first three books was to encompass the vastness of life. A picaresque tale that was so bloody, and so enormous in its vision, that only a man who had that boldness and that vision within his grasp could manipulate it.

  I am about to try to take Titus Alone into that world. The first pages will be those that were tortured into life by the man who struggled with his failing brain, and his failing hand to conjure up so enormous a task.

  Maeve Gilmore, 1970

  1

  Titus Awakes from the Snows

  MEANWHILE THE CASTLE rolled. Great walls collapsed, one into another.

  The colours of the tracts were horrible. The vilest green. The most hideous purple. Here the foul shimmering of rotting fungi – there a tract of books alive with mice.

  In every direction great vistas opened, so that Gertrude, standing at the little window of a high room, would seem to command a world before her eyes, though her eyes were out of focus.

  It had become a habit of hers to stand at this particular window, from which a world lay bare, a clowder of cats at her feet and her dark red hair full of nests.

  Who else is there alive in this echoing world? And yet, for all the collapse and the decay, the castle seemed to have no ending. There were still the endless shapes and shadows, echoing the rides of stone.

  While the Countess Gertrude moved about her home, it might be thought that she was in some kind of trance, so silent she was. The only sound coming from her coiled hair was the twitter of small birds.

  As for the cats, they swarmed about her like froth.

  One day the massive Countess standing before the little window of her bedroom lifted her matriarchal head and brought her eyes into focus. The birds fell silent and the cats froze into an arabesque.

  As she approached from the west, so Prunesquallor, his head in the air, approached from the east, and as he minced he sang in a falsetto, unutterably bizarre.

  ‘Is that you, Prunesquallor?’ said the Cou
ntess, her voice travelling gruffly over the flagstones.

  ‘Why, yes,’ trilled the Doctor, breaking off in his own peculiar improvisation. ‘It most assuredly is.’

  ‘Is that you, Prunesquallor,’ said the Countess.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Who else,’ said her voice, travelling over the flagstones.

  ‘Who else,’ cried the Doctor. ‘It assuredly is! At least I hope so,’ and Prunesquallor patted himself here and there, and pinched himself to make sure of his own existence.

  The Descent from Gormenghast Mountain

  With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast Mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home.

  That night, while Titus lay asleep in the tall barn, a nightmare held him. Sometimes as he turned in his sleep he muttered, sometimes he spoke out loud and with extraordinary strange emphasis. His dreams thronged him. They would not let him go.

  It was early. The sun had not yet risen. Outside the barn the hills and the forests were hoary with cold dew, and blotched with pools of ice.

  What is he doing here, the young man, 77th Earl and Lord of Gormenghast? This surely is a far cry from his home and his friends. Friends? What was left of them. As for his home, that world of fractured towers, what truth is there in its existence? What proof had he of its reality?

  Sleep brought it forth in all its guises and, as he turned again, he hoisted himself on his elbow and whispered, ‘Muzzlehatch, my friend, are you gone then for ever?’

  The owl made no movement at the sound of his voice. Its yellow eyes stared unblinking at the sleeping intruder.

  Titus fell back against the straw and immediately three creatures sidled into his brain.

  The first, so nimble on his feet, was Swelter, that mountain of flesh, his belly trembling at every movement with an exquisite vibration. Sweat poured down his face and bulbous neck in runnels. Drowned in his moisture, his eyes swam no larger than pips.