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.