Backlisted - Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Novelist Joanne Harris (Chocolat, A Narrow Door) is our guest for a celebration of Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959) by Mervyn Peake, three novels which are often referred to, erroneously, as the Gormenghast Trilogy. With Joanne's expert guidance, John and Andy revisit Peake's visionary work for the first time in decades and are surprised and delighted by what they discover. Also in this episode, Andy marks the belated UK publication of Maud Martha, the sole novel by poet Gwendolyn Brooks (Faber); while John enjoys Geoff Dyer's new book about tennis and much more, The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (Canongate). Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 07:52 - Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks. 13:51 - The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings by Geoff Dyer. 18:03 - Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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which was on a book festival on the Isle of Man, I can remember the book that you chose as well. Do you remember what it is? I don't think it was Gorman Gast, but was it...? It wasn't. It was by Shirley Jackson. Oh, yes. Well, OK. It will have been We've Always Lived in the Castle. We've Always Lived in the Castle.

Which we made an episode of Batlisted about, didn't we, several years ago? We did, yeah. We love that book. Joanne said a brilliant thing on that panel, which Joanne and I have ripped off repeatedly ever since, so I apologise in advance. You said a really great thing on that panel, which is you said classics need to be popular or unpopular at the point of publication.

popular or unpopular at the point of publication. It's quite unusual that you have a classic that comes out very quietly. It's much more likely that, as in the case of the book we're going to talk about today, it has to have an impact, even if it's a negative impact, on a rival. A negative impact is sometimes just as good. Think of the Wasp Factory. Yeah, that's a great example. Think of the terrible reviews the Wasp Factory got, and the publisher rather audaciously just printed them all on the cover, and it sold like gangsters. Same with American Psycho. I mean, we could still debate the merits of American Psycho,

but if we were thinking about a novel that sums up a particular 80s, 90s sensibility, But if we were thinking about a novel that sums up a particular 80s, 90s sensibility, there it is from the late 20th century. Yes, absolutely. And the troubled publication history of Ulysses going back to, I mean, you know, nobody could doubt that Ulysses was going to make some kind of historical statement, even though it took a long time for it to be, as it were, properly published in the UK and even longer in the US. How fortunate then that we're discussing another 20th century classic today. Indeed. So tightly bound up already, Nick. This is going so well. John, should we do the... Let's do it. Hello and welcome to Backlistedlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books today you find us lurking in a long gloomy library in the eastern wing of an even gloomier time-eaten ivy-choked castle the walls are covered floor to ceiling in shelves each packed tight with

rows of musty leather-bound volumes the only source of illumination is a huge chandelier which casts a circle of light on a table made from a single slab of polished black marble. In front of the table there are five chairs filled with a strange collection of people, there for some kind of ceremony. A tiny, ancient man, his face a mass of wrinkles, stands and intones in a dry voice, but his words are soon drowned out by coughs as the air slowly fills with smoke.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and joining us today is the author, Joanne Harris, OBE. Hello, Joanne. Hello, it's lovely to be back. Hi, Joanne. Joanne is the author of 19 novels. I believe that's right. I think so. I think I stopped counting. Who's counting?

It's just scary if you count too far. Most famously, Chocolat, of course, but most recently, A Narrow Door, which was published last year and is out now in paperback. Is that right? That's right, yes. Good, OK. And your work covers a full suite of genres, literary, gothic, romance, psychological, fantasy, folklore, plus novellas, short stories, game scripts,

the libretti for two short operas, several screenplays, a stage musical, you'll always be welcome here Joanne on that basis, and three cookbooks. Her books are now published in over 50 countries and have won a number of British and international awards. A passionate advocate for authors' rights, Joanne is currently the chair of the Society of Authors, a member of the board of the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, ALCS. And we're just going to thank Joanne for all the work that she does on behalf of any of us who write books, ensuring that we get paid for what we do. So thank you very much. Well, it's always good, isn't it?

Indeed. Thank you, Joanne. Thank you. So thank you very much. Well, it's always good, isn't it? Indeed. Thank you, Joanna. Thank you. According to her own website, she enjoys the following. Obfuscation, sleaze, rebellion, witchcraft, armed robbery, tea and biscuits, and is not above bribery and would not necessarily refuse an offer involving perfume, diamonds or pink champagne.

You haven't changed. Not really, no. She works from her shed in her Yorkshire garden and she still plays in the band she first joined when she was 16. Now, Joanne, what is your band called? Well, we are called, currently, we're called Joanne Harrison, the Storytime Band, because that's the show we do. We do live music, original music, songs and stories.

Which is excellent. But please let me ask, what were you called when your band formed, though? That's what really matters. Well, we were originally called for a very short time, Childhood's End. Childhood's End. I think it's very good, Childhood's End. Very good. Is it after the Arthur C. Clarke novel?

Of course. Or the Pink Floyd song? No, it's about the novel, obviously. Amazing. Okay. Amazing. Very good. Is there any name you feel embarrassed about? Many other names.

Well, we went through a phase of wanting to play live, but we didn't play live for about 20 years. And so we didn't have a name for a while. So we were the band with no name. But we were also called, you were called the Garden Wall for a while. And we were also called Happenstance for a time. Nice.

But, you know, there were a lot of very silly suggestions. Getting some prog folk kind of feels from it. It was definitely a bit of a prog folk outfit and it still is. There's a kind of stackridge feel to Happenstance. There's an extremely obscure, there's a thing. But that's oh well i love that okay very good well i think i like childhood end i like it too the book or books we're here to discuss today uh is the gormenghast trilogy by mervyn peak let me interrupt you john

immediately is it a trilogy that is one of the things we will be discussing today yes indeed it's a trilogy in more than three books. The three books that are often regarded as the Gormenghast trilogy. By Mervyn Peake, the first volume, Titus Grown, was published in 1946. Gormenghast and Titus Alone followed in 1950 and 1959. All were originally published in the UK by Eyre and Spottiswood. Widely acknowledged as one of the key series of post-war fantasy novels,

the Gormenghast trilogy are thought by many to transcend the genre. We'll discuss that too. Harold Bloom, literary critic, American literary critic, thought the three books formed one of the greatest sequences in modern world literature. Did he? I didn't know that. And Anthony Burgess concluded his introduction

to Titus Grone with this endorsement. There is no really close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant and we are right to call it a modern classic. One thing is certain, once you enter the castle of Gormenghast, you never forget it. All the remarkable cast of characters that Peake created to populate it. But before we brave the mud and nettles and begin the long climb up to the Hall of Spiders,

Andy, what have you been reading this week? Well, I've been reading a novel by Gwendolyn Brooks, far better known as a poet. Born in 1917 and died in 2000, she was the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize with her collection Annie Allen which was in 1949 and she was the first black woman

inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters she had a long and glorious career she wrote one novel and it's called Maud Martha. And it's just been published in the UK for the first time, which tells something of a story. It's been available in America for the last 50 years. But we in the UK have just got the opportunity to read it and it's terrific. It's been brought back or brought to bookshops by Ella Griffiths who's an editor at Faber and Faber who's running a list called Faber Editions which is devoted to bringing back older books,

some of which will be familiar to backlisted listeners. They by Kay Dick, which is also available from McNally Editions in the States. Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris, and a brilliant novel called The Glass Pearls by Emmerich Pressburger, which we talked about on this podcast back in 2016 on episode number 16. Anyway Maud Martha is a short novel it's about 100 pages

it's the story of one little girl growing up to a woman into a woman on the south side of 1940s Chicago. It's effectively a series of prose poems, 30, 32, 33 prose poems. And you dip in and out of Maude Martha's life. It deals with all the things that the black community had to deal with in day to day American life over a span of about 40 to 50 years. And it's done with a lightness of touch, which is, I found completely transporting. I found this book deeply involving, while also having a gloss on its surface which creates a really interesting tension with this isn't a page turner but but i mean that because you want to spend time in each chapter

so i'm just going to read chapter five which is called you're Being So Good So Kind. It's very very short and this will give you a flavour of what the novel is like. I don't think a more orthodox fiction writer would be capable of this. I think you can tell this is a poet's novel. Anyway here goes. Maud Martha looked the living room over, nicked old upright piano, sag-seat leather armchair, three or four straight chairs that had long ago given up the ghost of whatever shallow dignity they may have had in the beginning and looked completely disgusted with themselves

and with the Brown family. Mantle with scroll decorations that usually seemed rather elegant but which, since morning, have become unspeakably vulgar. Impossible. There was a small hole in the sad coloured rug near the sofa. Not an outrageous hole, but she shuddered. She dashed to the sofa and manoeuvred it till the hole could not be seen. She sniffed a couple of times. Often it was said that coloured people's houses necessarily had a certain heavy unpleasant smell. Nonsense, that was. Vicious. A nonsense.

But she raised every window. Here was the theory of racial equality about to be put into practice, and she only hoped she would be equal to being equal. No matter how taut the terror, the fall proceeds to its dregs. At seven o'clock, her heart was starting to make itself heard, and with great energy, she was assuring herself that though she liked Charles, though she admired Charles, it was only at the high school that she wanted to see Charles.

This was no Willie or Richard or Sylvester coming to call on her, neither was she Charles's Sally or Joan, she was the whole quote-unquote coloured race, and Charles was the personalisation of the entire Caucasian plan. At three minutes to eight the bell rang hesitantly. Charles, no doubt regretting his impulse already. No doubt regarding with a rueful contempt the outside of the house so badly in need of paint. Those rickety steps. She retired into the bathroom. Presently she heard her father go to the door. Her father, walking slowly, walking patiently, walking unafraid,

as if about to let in a paperboy who wanted his 20 cents, or an insurance man, or Aunt Vivian, or no more than Woodette Williams, her own silly friend. What was this she was feeling now? Not gave her a gift, recipient and benefactor. It's so good of you. You're being so good. It's great. It's beautiful. So there you go. That's Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks, and that's available from Faber Editions now. Yeah. John, what have you been reading this week? I've been indulging myself, I have to say. I got the great pleasure of interviewing Jeff Dyer at the Hay Festival, and I'm reading his latest book.

Is it his tennis book? Is it his legendary tennis book? It is called The Last Days of Roger Feather and Other Endings. It is not really much to do with tennis. It is to do with ending things. It's to do with the ending of novels, the ending of life. It's

how great artists and philosophers like Turner, Nietzsche, Beethoven, tackled the end of things. Nietzsche is a constant throughout the book. But so is Bob Dylan. So is John Coltrane. I mean, he writes with such great joy and humour and insight about all kinds of things.

But it's a Jeff Dye book, so you can go from Nietzsche to Jean Rees to Andy Murray's decision to stop playing tennis in the space of a few paragraphs. If this makes it sound random, I should say that he's constructed the book very carefully into 360, you know, he's constructed the book very carefully into 360 you know he's obviously recently turned 60 there are three sections each of 60 chapters so there are 120 chapters i suppose

all together and he was very carefully tried to impose an 86 400 page limit on it. Words, not page. Sorry, words. So the idea is that there is a kind of, there is an order in there, as he might say, very faint, very human. But I could talk to you about Nietzsche's theory of eternal return if you like, but actually what I prefer to do is to read Jeff at his best a

short paragraph this is this is from the from the second section paragraph nine it gives you perfect flavor of the book this is Jeff Dyer it is at his absolute best I think it's funny and clever and and very moving in places but this you I think I think everybody who listens to this, who knows Backlisted, will enjoy this. At any poetry reading, however enjoyable, the words we most look forward to are hearing are always the same. What are you laughing?

I'll read two more poems. The words we truly long for are, I'll read one more poem, but two seems to be the conventionally agreed minimum. It's lovely hearing this. You can feel a sigh of relief passing through the audience, especially if the previous couple of poems have been precedent-setting sonnets, clocking in at under a minute each. After long months in the sea of poetry, the shout has gone up from the crow's nest. Land! We're almost there. We've made it. We can practically taste the scurvy

hailing lager being poured in a bar afterwards. But then these last two poems turn out to be the opposite of the sonnets that had served as a double false dawn before the concluding multi-part epics. The felt duration of each is twice as long as the ring in the book. Which

raises a question. Why did we come if, while being here here we would end up being so preoccupied by no longer being here could it be that our deepest desire is for everything to be over with we want encores value for money bang for our buck but however vigorously we've been clapping and clamoring for more there is invariably a sense of relief when it becomes clear that the band, despite our collective imploring, are not coming back, that the house lights have flicked on, bringing the last residue of applause to an immediate,

slightly impolite halt, and that we can apply ourselves single-mindedly to getting a good place in the stampede for the exits. Beneath it all, writes the minor poet, desire of oblivion runs. Oh, it's very good. So it's called, unbelievably, The Last Days of Roger Federer. Just lovely. Jeff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer,

published by Canongate, on top form. We'll be back in just a sec. Ah, it's another barbecue summer at Gormenghast. Joanne, before I ask you, when you first read Gormenghast, I'm actually going to jump the queue and say, this has been one of the greatest pleasures I've ever had for an episode of Backlisted. But that's not what I thought it was going to be when you nominated it.

I agree. Because I tried reading this when I was a teenager and couldn't get on with it at all. And clearly something has happened to the book in the subsequent 35 years. Not to me, but I found this totally. Yeah, mind blowing is the right word. Mind blowing. It blew my mind. I could not believe how different it was to what I thought it was going to be and how it isn't like anything else. So thank you so much, John. I don't know, did you read this when you were a kid? Yeah, I think I had, I think I,

had a i think i similar to you andy i my my dad was a huge fan um and he'd introduced me to um to tolkien and i just i was just remember being intrigued by the books because i couldn't work out what they were the penguin classics that he had by his bedside and i i started to read titus grown and i like you i didn't i didn't finish it i you know and those were the days when it was quite okay not to finish anything and i it sort of haunted me it sort of haunted me ever since because i hear people talking about i've heard people for the last 30 years talk about it with such passion and um so like you um the opportunity to tackle the thousand pages of the three canonical uh um gorman gas books well said more later carefully i'm still i have to say i'm i'm still i'm kind of still reeling i i don't i i don't think i've read anything quite like it

ever yeah and i think maybe that's what we're going to say a lot during the course of this discussion. They are as original and striking and troubling and brilliant and odd as anything I've ever read. And I particularly was astonished by the last book, which came as a bit of a shock. We'll talk about that too, I'm sure. But yeah, I mean, so yeah, similar to you.

Amazing. And thank you, Joanne, for the opportunity to do it. Yeah, thank you, Joanne. Well, we must talk about Titus alone. I'm absolutely fascinated by Titus alone, but we need to do the groundwork first. So, Joanne, what does Gormenghast mean to you as a writer? Well, it's one of those books that I read young and I probably didn't understand it in the same way at the age at which I discovered

it than I do now. And I keep revisiting it. I keep coming back to it because it's so rich and there's so much in there. And every time I look at it, it has changed. I mean, really classic books Mae'n fawr iawn ac mae llawer o beth yn yno. A phob tro rwyf yn edrych arno, mae wedi newid. Mae llyfrau clasig yn rhaid gwneud hynny. Mae'n rhaid i'w fyw gyda chi. Nid yw'r un hon yn fwy, mae'n newid yn gyffredinol. Ac mae'n gweld ardalau cyffredinol o plot a ton a poedigaeth nad oeddech chi'n ei weld yn ôl. Ac rwy'n credu ei fod yn cael ei ddiddordeb hwyl ysgolol. tone and poetry that you didn't see before and I think that it just has this fascinating kaleidoscopic quality that every time you visit it depending on what sort of mood you're in

you will see something different so um so I just love it in that it's it's a kind of bible for what words can do in all kinds of different circumstances it's got it's got pathos it's got bathos it's got poetry it's got weird verse it's it's got sort of beautiful limpid sections of of nature writing and it's got these strange squiggly cramped characters and it it has these larger-than-life characters and these puppet characters and these weird subplots that seem to go nowhere, but that actually underpin the whole thing. It has no connection with any kind of novel structure

that I've ever come across, really, except perhaps for Ulysses. And people like Thomas Love Peacock might come somewhere there. But it's just it's a kind of amazing miracle grab bag of of words. I think when I first discovered it, that's what it was to me, because half the vocabulary I didn't know. And I had to keep looking it up. And that had never happened to me before. And so it was, oh, so this is the English language. Wow. Let's get in there and get some more of those words.

And how did childhood and front woman Joanne Harris discover these books? Can you remember? Did you were you given the Penguin classics or? My my flute teacher told me that I should read them. And so I got... I was 15 and I was just about to take my mock O-levels and I borrowed Gormenghast from the school library because it was the one that was there. I hadn't any idea that there was a sequence in which to read them

and it didn't seem to matter. So I plunged into the story halfway through and I just fell in there and I stopped revising. I basically read all of the books during the whole of my revision period and between exams I read the books. I just couldn't stop and I was fixated by them and I stayed that way for a really long time. And do you feel they were your...

You know, there's a famous phrase about teenagers when they encounter a book or a piece of music or a film at a certain age, they're wet cement, you know, and that's the thing that leaves the handprints in them. Is this your equivalent, Goulman Garth? Do you think this is your founding myth? It might have been. It was part of it, certainly. I think possibly I started earlier than that,

and some of my wet cement moments were with Ray Bradbury. But this was a step along the way because actually some of the things I like about Mervyn Peake I also like about Ray Bradbury. There is this intense passion and this desire to express emotions and this exclamatory, poetic kind of grand gesture of a thing that they've both got going.

But Peake does it in this much denser way, much more. It was much more of an adult thing. And I hadn't read anything in English like that before. I mean, I was reading quite a lot of French books. I mean, the closest that it seemed to me was to Victor Hugo. I mean, the closest that it seemed to me was to Victor Hugo and books like Les Misérables and Notre Dame de Paris that I was used to. Could we just unpack that a bit? Do you mean in terms of scale or in was also something to do with the concentration of language. When you had these long sentences that had to be unpacked with not just one image running through the sentence,

but a kind of multiplicity of images so that you had a layering. This ability to tell a story, but extremely slowly. I found it a page-turner, but it takes a very long time for things to happen in Victor Hugo, and Mervyn Peake is the same. You know, you will have him spending three or four pages describing a doorknob turning, and by the end of it, you're going,

dude, please open the damn door. But you actually, by that time, you've reached a moment of of exquisite anticipation and he's he's done that to you he's made you really care about the door and the knob and what's behind there john do you remember when we were on on guernsey together a few years ago we went to victor hugo's house in guernsey. And it struck me that that was quite a Gorman-Gast-like building. Constructed room by room

sort of fantasy. Also, in the language as well, definitely strong whiffs of Huismans. That strange sense of sickly, almost kind of things going to rot. And he's so good at summoning mood

out of inanimate objects or semi-animate objects or rooms or corners. Well, you can smell the petrichor. Yeah, yeah. Everywhere. But also the idea of the Gormenghast almost as a metaphor for itself, if you know what I mean. The idea that the books resemble the...

We should say, what is Gormenghast? Gormenghast is this vast, sprawling, unrealistic, maximalist... What is it? City? Castle? Well, it's supposed to be a castle, but it's a castle of many pieces because it has been built over centuries and so all the pieces were basically added by different members of the family of grown and so we have many earls of grown and they've they've they've they've all had various hobbies and so one of them may have built a library and somebody else may have built this.

And so you have this, I mean, I think, I kind of imagine Gorman Gast has been a bit like the Duomo in Milan, built over centuries in various different styles of Gothic until what you have eventually is just this sprawl of flying buttresses and weird little pinnacles. But not only that, you've got the but not only that you've got the main castle and then you've got the outside of the castle and then you've got the outer dwellings

which which is sort of the the buildings kind of hanging onto the edge of the castle and so all of this is huge obviously but you you don't really get a good sense of either the scale or the geography of it because peak isn't really interested in telling you he's not tolkien i used to have tremendous arguments with my best friend at school who was an enormous tolkien fan about whether tolkien or peak was was best and she always said tolkien and i said peak um tolkien would have given you maps he would have given you drawings you would have known exactly where the room of Roots was and how far it was from the Hall of Spiders. But you don't get this with Gorman Gas

because it exists beyond geography. It's a little bit... It's Kafkaesque in that respect. Yes, it's metaphysical rather than physical, isn't it? That's the idea. It's somewhere that is a state of mind as much as a physical presence. It's a shadow land, isn't it? It's like the... Yes. to borrow from Stranger Things, it's like the upside-down version of a British stately estate.

Well, yes, exactly. I like that. Exactly, and so there is no geography because, like in all myths and legends, people just go where they want to go. They don't go on a journey to get there. They just decide to be there and there they are. And crucially, no magic. None.

It's not a magical realm. None at all. No magic. No spirituality at all. No religion. No. Nothing but tradition. I said to a friend of mine that we were going to be doing

Gormenghast on the podcast. And they said, I said, have you ever read it and they went no i'm not really into fantasy now putting aside my friends prejudices or lack of them about fantasy one of the things i found so interesting when i read it was i thought well this isn't fantasy in the sense that we might call it it doesn't have some of the genre tropes you would expect. In fact, it doesn't have any of them. So the comparison with Lord of the Rings, which is so crucial to the way the books are marketed in the 1960s, is actually tremendously unhelpful in understanding their literary qualities. Very, because they are completely different.

They are, in a sense, the one is the antithesis of the other. The one is structured, formal, based on a tradition of folklore and legend which is already known. The infrastructure is known and anticipated. There are formalised introductions of races. In Lord of the Rings, you know exactly where you are at any time. Although, admittedly, in Lord of the Rings, magic doesn't quite work the way it does in a lot of other fantasy.

You still have this strong underpinning of magic and the logic of magic. Now, there is no logic in Gormenghast at all. There's no magic because it's not needed. Because everything in Gormenghast at all. There's no magic because it's not needed. Because everything in Gormenghast is surreal. To introduce magic into that would be, it would just be too much because you don't need it. Everything in Gormenghast is kind of suspended and moving around in this kind of fluid way. So it doesn't behave like narrative because it's not formalised, structured narrative. It doesn't have a formal sense of geography. We don't even know very much about the history of Gormenghast. And it's so important because obviously, you know, everything is built

on this age old tradition. But actually, the inhabitants of Gormenghast have pretty much forgotten the history because it's just been there for so long and they just go through the motions of these Kafkaesque rituals over and over again without really quite understanding their meaning. And so it's left to us, the reader, to give it meaning if we can. There's also a sense, isn't there, of the uncanny. We've said there isn't magic and it's not fantasy but there is a sense of the uncanny and there is a sense of the you know

the role played by animals in gormenghast be they mass familiars of cats or transformation into an owl i don't want to give any spoilers which is horror in its most um unmitigated form incredible incredible it is absolutely um i mean it's dark so we're going to hear something from the text in a minute and i'm also going to as is traditional on the podcast i'm going to read you the blurb from the first edition dust jacket of Titus Groan to see how on earth they managed it but um Joanne one of the things that occurred to me when I started reading is how outside of any literary tradition although there is one trend I think that does plug into post-war, but how outside of any trend Peake's style is, let alone the notion of an epic of this kind. And the things that matter to him as a writer are visual, as you would expect from a

visual artist, aren't they? They're not narrative, as you said, it's a page turner, but narrative isn't the thing pushing it onwards. i think that's right i think the thing that pushes onwards is the desire to be more fully immersed in what's going on and the desire to to find your way through what it is because you're right he doesn't follow any any real traditions of writing i think this is much more an exploration of visual phonetics somehow yes this is this is this is a continuation of Peake's work as an artist and when you look at the variation of of Peake's work I mean he's got some stuff that looks like Arthur Rackham he's got some other things that are completely different that are kind of rough and almost brutalist.

And in the middle, he's got all these other styles that he's tried. And he's doing this with the writing too, which is why you can have these thoroughly surreal, frivolous pieces of verse and then these dark, gothic scenarios and this bleakness and then this richness again and this passion and he's doing this all over the place and so it's it's like this tremendous tapestry of textures and colors and and thoughts and it's it's almost too much for a book to contain which is why it's so fascinating because and this i'm assuming is why people see so many different and sometimes opposing things in there.

Because actually, it's much more. I mean, I think this this is much more a descendant of psychoanalytical texts than it is of novels. like a cast left by a compulsively creative imagination, bursting out however it can in the expression of prose or drama or poetry or illustration or, you know, oil painting or sketching. He's almost, he's not a savant. That's not what I mean. But there is a sense in which it's an explosion of energy

out into the world and C.S. Lewis said something great about it, he said that the books had the hallmark of a true myth, i.e. you've never seen anything like it before you read the book but after that you see things like it everywhere he called it book. But after that, you see things like it everywhere.

He called it what one may call the Gorman ghastly has given me a new universal. And I do think that that sense that I love that idea of a cast. It's just once you've entered the virus of of of kind of Peake's imagination has entered your own, you do begin to see echoes of it everywhere. Well, I'm going to give you the blurb that they tried to run on the original dust jacket of Titus Grown, the first volume, and then I will ask Joanne to read us a section, one of her favourite parts of the book.

But this is how, you know, in the marketing department of Ayr and Spottiswood, this is how they attempted to sell. And we should say when this was published in 46, is that right? Yeah. Mervyn Peake was quite well known. I mean, he was, Ayr & Spottiswood were his publisher as an illustrator and he had illustrated certain classic texts. Alice.

So he had a reputation. Anyway, here we go. Titus grown by Mervyn Peake, inside front flap, first edition. Candles gutter, towers of black ivy drip, festooned in old ritual,

figures move by, loom and impend along the half-lit corridors of Gormenghast. Swelter, the vast, intolerable cook. Thin Flay, his knee-joints detonating. Sepulcrave, the earl, a figment of melancholy. Prune-squaller, the bizarre physician.

The red-haired countess. Steerpike, the Plotting Youth, and the rest of a weird yet very real gathering of the imagination. The dust is deep on the floor of the Hall of the Bright Carvings. The white cats glide along the battlements. All this is like a dream, lush, fantastic, vivid, a symbol of some dark struggle of the heart. Yet this is a serious novel and an exciting one, the imagination at full tide.

Whether it succeeds or fails, the quality and intention are frankly epical. The huge, strange world of Gormenghast, to which the young Titus is born heir contains tracts whose exploration must delight the poet, the child and the plotter in our minds. It compels suspension of our disbelief. Mervyn Peake, already well known as a poet, painter and illustrator, creates in this novel a consistent and portentous world of his own, macabre yet sane, amusing, exciting, lovely in their turn, or to another reader, perhaps unbearable. It is not a book for moderate judgments either way. And I'm saying to you, listeners, in in 160 plus episodes of Backlisted,

that is the greatest blurb we have ever read out. That is absolutely brilliant. Come on, Mervyn Peake wrote that. He must have done. Mervyn Peake must have had a hand in that. I guess he must have done. And I love the fact that they're saying, basically, you might not like this book, sorry.

What can we call this which will really sell it? I know, unbearable. Unbearable. That's right. No book today would have unbearable in its blurb. I love that. That is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Joanne, what section have you got for us? Well, I'm going to read something from Titus Grone um I mean because I read this at 15 I immediately assumed that I was Fuchsia because I looked like Fuchsia I looked like the picture of her on the front cover and I felt like her and and I wanted to have her attic and and in fact I did in my mind I had uh I had various roeddwn i eisiau cael ei ddoddau ac mewn gwirionedd roeddwn i wedi'i wneud yn fy marn. Roedd gen i amrywiaethau ddylunio sy'n cael eu creu ac mae'r peth honno lle mae Pete yn mynd i lawr ar y taneg fel mae'n aml yn gwneud ac mae'n siarad am y cysylltiad o berson gyda'i gilydd ac oherwydd bod y byd yn rhan mor bwysig o Gormengast yma mae'n siarad am Gormengast hefyd. of Gorman Gast here. He's talking about Gorman Gast as well. This is a love that equals in its power the love of a man for woman

and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world, for the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame. The love of the diver for his world of wavering light, his world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps, he is at one with every swarm of lime green fish, with every coloured sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's fairy

floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love. The love of the painter, standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room, the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette, the dust beneath the easel, the paint has edged along the brushes' handles, the white light in a northern sky is silent, the window gapes as he inhales his world, his world a rented room and turpentine, he moves towards his half-born, he is in love, the rich soil crumbles through the yeoman's fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, I am home, as he moves dimly in strange waterlights, and as the painter mutters, I am me, on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acred marl says with dark fuchsia on her twisting staircase, I am home.

yn dweud, gyda ffusia gwydr yn ei stair cwrdd, Rwy'n ffoc. Roedd y teimlad hwn o ddilyn y stair cwrdd a'r atoch a phobl yn ei brofi, wrth i mi ddod â'i ddechrau ar y ddechrau gwydr wrth i mi fynd i fyny, ac i gyflawni, ar ôl rhyw bryd, y bwrdd lliw, a fyddai hi'n ei golygu. Roedd hi'n gwybod bod dim ond 18 o ffyrdd wedi'i gael,

ac ar ôl dau cwrdd mwy yn y stair cwrdd, byddai'r llyfrau ffiltrwyd o'r atoch steps remained and that after two more turns in the staircase the indescribable grey gold filtering glow of the attic would greet her i mean that is an awesome awesome section amazing and he goes completely off piste here because we never hear about this pearl diver again or the yoga or anybody like that it's just it's one of those little you read it so beautifully joanne the the the sense that we're so often with these books that the reader is expected to and this is i say this is not a backhanded comment it's wholly positive

compliment the reader is expected to intuit a meaning not not understand it entirely. And that's a very difficult game to play with a reader because the extent to which the reader may go, I just don't understand this. But for me, when you were reading there, I was thinking, I feel this more than I comprehend it. I think that's right. Do you feel the same with Pete? I think so. Yeah. Definitely. I think it's a little bit like listening to poetry in another language.

When I was a teacher and I used to teach French literature, I would sometimes read poetry to the boys aloud. And it would be the kind of poetry that they couldn't really understand the French of unless we really unpicked it. And I said, don't worry about the language anymore. Just listen to the sounds because you will get what it's about. And with some poets, this was true. With people like Baudelaire,

who do these kind of pyrotechnics of language where you're not really supposed to understand the meaning of the words, just the phonetics of the music, of the sound, is enough. And I think Peake does this quite a lot. I've got a section here from Titus Alone, which is the third book. We'll come on in a minute to the circumstances in which this one was written, because that's something to ask you about as well in relation to that.

But I just want to for me this one paragraph stood out as an example of uh i i feel peak as a writer his sense of exhilaration he he's he's he's hit a seam of something and he he's he's mining it until it's empty for as long as it excites him. He's talking about Titus being in an arena. This is from chapter 58 of Titus alone. failures of the earth. The beggars, the harlots, the cheats, the refugees, the scattlings, the wasters, the loafers, the bohemians, the black sheep, the chaff, the poets, the riffraff, the small fry, the misfits, the conversationalists, the human oysters, the vermin, the innocent, the human oysters, the vermin, the innocent, the snobs and the men of straw, the pariahs, the outcasts,

ragpickers, the rascals, the rake hells, the fallen angels, the sad dogs, the castaways, the prodigals, the defaulters, the dreamers and the scum of the earth. I mean, you want to stand up and cheer at the end of that, don't you? I mean, and Joanne, it works rhythmically. I tried to put into the, it doesn't work literally, it works impressionistically. Absolutely, yes.

There's another thing, though, isn't there, that we could make it just sound like it's the most incredible gorgeous thousand page prose poem but there is a there is a movement there is a development the first book titus is only a baby the second book he he kind of he he grows up and and and leaves gormenghast and then the third book third book, he's out in the world, in Titus alone, which is in some regards recognisably a world that is 20th century, with the factory and the scientist. So it's not that there isn't a kind of, it's not that there's no plot. Oh, no.

He's too good a writer to make it an obvious allegory. But right at the beginning, the character of Steerpike, the rebel plotter who's referred to throughout as being kind of brilliant and clever, it's just a little bit where he is with Fuchsia. And there's obviously a tension between them and given that there's the book is about certainly the first two books are hugely about tradition and the upkeeping of tradition and the sort of the emptiness but importance of ritual he comes on as a sort of as a rebel and he's talking to fuchsia by the time they'd come to the edge of the wood steer pike was talking airily of any subject that came into his head mainly for the purpose of building

up in her mind a picture of himself as someone profoundly brilliant but also for the enjoyment of talking for its own sake for he was in a sprightly mood. She limped beside him as they passed through the outermost trees and into the light of the sinking sun. Steerpike paused to remove a stag beetle from where it clung to the soft bark of a pine. Fuchsia went on slowly, wishing she were alone. There should be no rich, no poor, no strong, no weak, said Steerpike, methodically pulling the legs off the stag beetle one by one as he spoke. Equality is the great thing. Equality is everything. He flung the mutilated insect away. Do you agree, Lady Fuchsia, he said.

I don't know anything about it and I don't care much, said Fuchsia. But don't you think it's wrong if some people have nothing to eat and others have so much they throw most of it away? Don't you think it's wrong if some people have to work all their lives for a little money to exist on, while others never do any work and live in luxury? Don't you think brave men should be recognised and rewarded and not just treated the same as cowards? The men who climb mountains or dive under the sea or explore jungles full of fever or save people from fires? I don't know, Fuchsia said again.

Things ought to be fair, I suppose, but I don't know anything about it. I mean, it's kind of hard not to hear 1946, you know, first Labour government, end of the Second World War, but how extraordinary. I'll add to that, John. I think the end of the second world war um but i'll add to that john i think this is a i think the success of these novels after the second world war is totally fascinating firstly because how many of the characters are have disabilities physical have sustained physical damage that's no coincidence that's a big part the body the the betrayal of the body is a big thing for peak

indeed before in a self-fulfilling prophecy before his own body betrayed him and but also you mentioned steer pike joanne i mean for me steer pike seems like the precursor of that post-war uh figure represented by joe lampton in room at the Top or The Outsider in Camus' The Outsider or Mr Sloane in Entertaining Mr Sloane. He prefigures that, to quote Morrissey, jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place. That's what Steerpike is. And indeed, he's seen as the hero-antihero of those novels at first.

Yes. Until Titus takes over, over yeah he should be much more appealing than he is but he's actually loathsome yeah i'm going to lower the tone now by quoting 1066 and all that but he is right but repulsive isn't he yeah rather than wrong but romantic and and the rest of the rest of the castle is basically wrong but romantic. And he, Steer Pike of the fierce intelligence, and you can see that Fuchsia can't hold a candle to him intellectually, but she feels with sincerity and she understands in her rather slow way

that he isn't sincere and that all this surface brilliance actually hides a void of no passion at all except this, what Pete keeps calling this overweening ambition. But to do what? Where is he going? Even that is almost existentialist because he's got nowhere to go. There's no place for him in the same way there's no place for Titus. So let's say we don't want to give any we won't give anything away but we said at the top joanne that the books aren't a trilogy though that it's habitual to refer to them as such i felt that uh it was legitimate to

see the first two books titus grown and gormengormenghast, as a pair, and then Titus alone as something completely different. And I wondered whether Titus alone is not treated as kindly as it should be, because people read it wrong. They think, well, this isn't what I signed up for in this trilogy. But the answer is, but it's not a trilogy. When you first read them, is that how you felt or did it all feel like it cohered? Oh, well, when I first read them,

I didn't know anything about the background. For a start, I read them out of order. I read Gorman-Gast first and then I read Titus Grone and then I read Gorman Gast again because I realised that that would be the best thing to do and then I read Titus alone and I realised that there was something very different about Titus alone actually I was very fond of Titus alone but for all sorts of different reasons it seemed as if it had been taken from a completely different sequence of books even Titus isn't the same and none of the other characters turn up except as effigies of themselves and then I read into it and I went

into his background and read about his history and realized why it was like that but obviously it was it was never intended to be a trilogy anyway even if Peake had been fully healthy when he'd written Titus alone it wouldn't have been the conclusion. And so there's nothing concluding about it. It's almost an opening to a series of, I think, Peake intended there to be 10 books and it would follow Titus until he was old. I think Sebastian told me this once.

So, of course, we've seen very little of that. There's just this idea that Titus is going to move away from Gormenghast, this place that has given him an identity, and losing Gormenghast, he loses his identity. And so it seems as if it's going to be a kind of progression into a search for the self, but it doesn't really happen he loses his identity and so it seems as if it's going to be a kind of progression into a search for the self but it doesn't really happen because it's it's it's it's been written in haste um at a time when the writer was not fully in control of what he was doing and so it

feels some of it feels abbreviated some of it feels unfinished actually, I quite like that unfinished feel. There's something that to me echoes Titus's untethered state, if you like, because he's a very strange character in Titus alone. He's not even particularly likeable. No. He's almost colourless. I have to say, i absolutely loved titus alone i thought it was a great a great book it made me think of what of like a a band's third album

what they record after the drummer's gone or something where they're forced to go in a different direction yes and you could compare it to their earlier things but actually it's its own universe and its own style stylistically it's very different to yes the first two books it's much less dense stylistically there's still this this dramatic theatrical sense because all of it has that but a lot of it is abbreviated a lot of it you're expecting I think with Titus Alone you're expected to bring more of yourself into the interpretation honestly

That's interesting There's more space isn't there? I just feel that it's a much airier book than the other two which are really really kind of the brooding kind of you know sort of heavy, moisture-laden air of the first two books.

In Titus alone, it feels much more like a kind of philosophical fiction. Titus alone is like Colin Wilson's The Outsider in both theme and late 50s sense of, we're not in the Second World War anymore. We're not post-war. We're looking to see what the future is going to be. It's funny you said the outsider because I thought of Camus the outsider.

Because actually, if you look at the way Titus speaks, he does speak quite a lot like Meursault. He says the truth in a sort of unvarnished, bold way. He doesn't care who it upsets because he just says things as he sees them. This doesn't make him likeable or liked, but it definitely makes him an outsider. He's an unlikable Camus. And I do think, I mean, I've often had this theory that Camus' outsider was autistic because he has a certain kind of delivery and a certain way of seeing the world. And I've often thought the same of Titus, that he has a very particular picture of the world and other people and his connection with them. And I just, you know, this is how I read him.

you know this this is how i read him joanne i i read um an interview with you where you were saying i found this totally you were saying mervyn peak is a great example of a writer where you know we all grew up in the academic environment of death of the author theory mervyn peak on the other hand is you do need to know the circumstances in which these books were written to fill in things that otherwise won't perhaps make sense. And that's a big part of it, isn't it? This sense of Peake as first this massive creative force and second of someone struggling against a long illness. You can't ignore that that's absolutely the books no i think context matters very much with peak and not just his background his visits to belson um you know the china part of his his upbringing but also his illness his long

illness because i think if we if we think of this as I do as a sort of Jungian allegory then he himself is in there I mean if we get on to talk about Titus Awakes he's definitely in there yeah um and it's a question of of finding him and in a way I think he's he's trying to find himself in these books and trying to find the wholeness of himself. And as the narrative becomes more scattered in Titus alone and the characters become more theatrical and more caricatural, you can see his connection with the passion of people and their emotions disappearing. And you can see his dismay over that and his not knowing what to do. And some of it, I'm sure, is an exploration of his own

degenerating physical condition and his mental condition. Whether he intended it to come across that way or not, everybody knows that fiction is life filtered through a series of lenses and one of those has to be his illness. This is a clip of his son Sebastian and his daughter Claire talking about the later years of Mervyn Peake's life and that feeds exactly into what Joanne was just talking about here. My father had written a play, you know,

that we all thought would do rather well. The night before, we'd all watched him and my mother go off to the first night of the play. Then the reviews came out the following day after the first night, and they were very dismissive, and we saw him crumble, and he, you know, never got well again after that. I remember coming downstairs, and a doctor had been called and he was sitting outside his study, shaking sort of violently, and he was taken off to hospital that day with a major, major breakdown. We just don't know whether they say that his illness

could have been precipitated by that, but could have been something that he'd picked up in China as a child and lain dormant and then come out with a shock. So nobody knew what it was, whether it was a breakdown, and eventually, whether that became Parkinson's or whether he'd have had it anyway, we just don't know. So I was seven then, and you were, Sebastian, what, 17? And Fabian was 15.

Then, of course, the terrible decision was made to have that dreadful operation of course, the lobotomy which didn't do what they thought it was going to do. It just transferred the shaking from one side of his body to the other. He never got well again after that. If you can bear it everybody

if you go to the National Portrait Gallery's website you can find a picture that peak's wife mave gilmore painted in 1967 the year before peak died which is one of the most haunting and distressing pieces of work utterly truthful because mave gmore was, of course, an artist and a writer in her own right. The extent to which Peake is disappearing from his own body because of his illness. For anyone to write or create under those circumstances is sort of extraordinary.

The family also said, didn't they, that Sebastian, his son says it would have been much better for my father had he never he acts he spends the whole war trying to become a war artist and he's accepted and pretty much the first assignment that he's given is to is he sent off to the liberation of the concentration camps and the children say it's the worst thing that could have happened to him because he with no one knew what they were going to go to encounter and it affected him for the rest of his life john you you found something relating to that didn't you we've talked about his descriptive powers but there's a little poem

that he wrote about a consumptive belson 1945 which i think has elements of the darkness i mean you feel that there's a there's there are elements of the darkness of this in the book as well if seeing her an hour before her last, weak cough into all blackness, I could yet be held by chalk-white walls and by the great ash-coloured bed and the pillows hardly creased by the tapping of her little cough-jerked head. If such can be a painter's ecstasy, her limbs like pipes, her head a china skull, then where is mercy? You do get the feeling in the poems that he writes at that period,

and some of them, you know, he wrote funny verses as well, but the poems that he wrote as a war artist, trying to paint and almost making sort of verbal sketches, that it was pretty unbearable. And some part of that unbearableness, I'm always struck by Sepulchre, Titus's father, the deep kind of depression and melancholy. It seems to me one of the great portraits of a dep melancholy. It's one of the great, seems to me,

one of the great portraits of a depressive in literature. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And the way he deals with the end of Seppelkrev's life, which we won't go into, but... It's a wonderful depiction. I mean, haunting. And there's a wonderful scene where Seppelkrev is trying to connect with the young Titus

by offering him pine cones. Yes. And he's gathered these pine cones for Titus to play with and they mean something to him, but Titus isn't really that interested and he feels so depressed that he hasn't managed to make even this basic connection with his son. I mean, just looking at Sepulkruve and looking at his environment,

you could almost say that the whole of Gormenghast is a sort of representation of what depression looks like as a piece of architecture. Yeah. He says it may be that not the cones themselves that angered him, Seppelkruve, but that they acted in some way as a reminder of his failures it's beautiful i think that's so true joanne i think the i think that is one of the reasons why i was polaxed by it because i didn't it i like it when i don't understand stuff i like it when you know no creative writing programme is going to produce these books.

That's not, that sounds mean. I don't mean it to be, but the rules don't apply. No, they don't. Because the rules don't apply, they give you an experience you're not going to get from a more formal piece of work. formal piece of work. Yes and a lot of it is very raw and very experimental and not based on the rules of narrative at all, based more on the rules of art and what's there on the canvas rather than the narrative from page to page and so there's that aspect of it too which is fascinating because it seems to me that he doesn't he moves from one medium to another without even realizing that he's doing it so he has these illustrations and then he has poems that just fluidly appear into the narrative and and then he has passages of prose that sound

like poetry anyway yeah yeah um and it all serves the whole Well regular listeners might like to know that Mervyn Peake was a graduate of the Croydon School of Arts I'm afraid now it's time for us to say farewell to Gormungast and its denizens. A huge thank you to Joanne for guiding us through its dark corridors and to Nicky Birch for making our individual voices sound out in the gloom and to Unbound for helping us herd our white cats and feed our stone chats.

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And for less than the price of a pagoda of toast from Swelter's Great Kitchen, lock listeners get two extra lock listeds a month. Our very own Gothic Castle, where we three perform intricate rituals of appreciation connected to the books films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight want to stamp up for that absolutely i would lot listeners also get to have their names carved in stone on the battlements of uh of the closing credits of this show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. So John who are you chiselling into the rock this week?

Huge thanks this week to Susie Robertson, to Patrick Barrett, to SB, to Anne Smith to Lee Razor and Holly Gage. They sound like characters in Norman Cates. They really do. Thank you for all your generosity and to all our patrons, huge thanks

for enabling us to continue to do what we love and enjoy joanne before we go is there anything you would like to say about mervyn peak or the gorman ghast sequence we didn't have time to talk about titus awakes which is mave gilmore's book and that's brilliant as well that is brilliant in its own right it really is definitely worth reading even though it doesn't quite read as part of the the sequence because she has her own story to tell and absolutely she has her own personal journey of grief which she's using this book to negotiate but uh no that they are wonderful books but they need to be taken with no expectation of them being like anything else at all and they are deeply felt and passionate and poetic and also if you can

possibly read them aloud because they are made to be read aloud these are soundscapes as well as as visual expressions of feelings. So, yeah, just if you haven't read them yet, I kind of envy you for not yet having discovered them. Well, thank you, Joanne. I don't know that in my advanced years I would have found my way back without your help. And it's been a major, major reading experience for me this year so thank you so much

I couldn't agree more it's like a complete other possibility of 20th century literature that I didn't know existed so thank you and that's just one episode thanks very much for listening everybody we'll see you in a

fortnight thank you bye for listening everybody. We'll see you in a fortnight. Thank you. Bye. Bye. You know that bit you were reading, Andy? Mm. It had exactly the same rhythms as Baudelaire's poem Au lecteur. That's fascinating. Which is interesting. I mean, I was going to say this at one point, and I thought, well, no,

because if I just start reading stuff in French, people are going to say I'm crazy. But you just listen to this for a minute and you will see what I mean. Hang on, let me see if I can find it. It's got to be here. alimentons nos aimables remords comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine. Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches, nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux et nous rentrons gaiement dans le chemin bourbeux, croyant par de vils pleurs laver toutes nos tâches. Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie n'ont pas encore brodé de leur plaisant dessein le canevas banal de nos piteux destins, c'est que notre âme, hélas, n'est pas assez harddé de leur plaisant dessin le canevas banal de nos pites destins, c'est que notre âme, hélas, n'est pas assez hardie. Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lisses, les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents, les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants, dans la mélangerie infâme de nos vices,

il en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde, quoiqu'il ne pousse ni grand geste ni grand cri, il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris et dans un baillement avalerait le monde. C'est l'ennui. L'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire, il rêve d'échafaud en fumant son hookah. Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat.

Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère. Isn't this great? Isn't it fabulous? And doesn't it just sound like it? If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com

forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.