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 personaclass="underline" 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.