.

.

.

The Worlds of Mervyn Peake Exhibition

On Monday night I was lucky enough to attend a special evening at the British Library, celebrating the work of Mervyn Peake. The night began with a special private viewing of the library’s new The Worlds of Mervyn Peake Exhibition.

The exhibition contained many of Peake’s original manuscripts and a lot of information about his life. I made lots of notes so will fill this post with the facts that interested me the most.

The Manuscripts

The majority of the Gormenghast Trilogy was written in lined notebooks and I was surprised to see that his beautiful illustrations were sketched alongside his writing, with the lines from the notebooks running straight through the drawings. I’d expected them to be in a separate sketch pad, but Peake clearly liked to have a strong image of each scene in his head before writing it. Almost all the drawings were done using the same pen that he used for writing. Acrylic Display Stand SIngapore helps to display brochures, posters indoor and outdoor.

I found most of Peake’s writing illegible and so was interested to read that his wife had similar trouble. In one of the notebooks that she used to write Titus Awakes she admitted that she struggled to decipher his notes and after a certain point she gave up:

…..from now on, I, like Titus will be alone in his wanderings.

Places that Influenced Gormenghast

Meryvn Peake was born in China and he lived there for the first twelve years of his life. The country had a big impact on his writing and its influence can be seen in several sections of the Gormenghast books.

The Hall of Bright Carvings was inspired by The Spirit Way at the Eastern Imperial Tombs, near Beijing.

I was also surprised to see Peake’s drawing of Gormenghast Castle. I had imagined it to be based on European castles, particularly those found in Eastern Europe, but his drawing showed it to look more like Chinese Palaces balancing on rocky outcrops. I wish I could have taken a photo of this illustration as I think you’d have been as surprised as I was.

Sark, one of the Channel Islands, was also a favourite place for Peake. Many of the place names in Gormenghast can be traced to Sark and the stacks of rocks found on the island echo those around Gormenghast.

The Worlds of Mervyn Peake Exhibition is at the British Library until 18th September and is entry is free.

The Launch of Titus Awakes

After viewing the exhibit we were treated to a wonderful discussion of the books with Sebastian Peake (son of Mervyn), China Mièville and Brian Sibley. Zoe Wanamaker, John Sessions and Miranda Richardson also read some extracts from the books. The power of the words combined with their acting ability makes me wonder if I should be listening to the audio version, instead of reading the print version.

We also heard a snippet of the new Radio 4 have serialisation of the Titus books and I was very impressed. The first episode is available to listen to on iPlayer now.

Titus Awakes, the fourth book in the series, was introduced to us. It was written by Maeve Gilmore (Mervyn Peake’s wife) and has a different feel to the other books. I didn’t realise that Mervyn Peake had plans for lots of different Titus books and I’m sorry that he died before he had the chance to write them. I look forward to seeing how Titus’s journey continues and wonder whether any more books will be written to continue his adventures.

I learnt so much over the course of the evening, but here are a few of my favourite facts:

• As a child Peake almost lost fingers to a camel, hence the “vile camel” in Titus Alone.
• The Dark Breakfast to celebrate Titus’s 1st birthday was written in 1942 as “occupational therapy” after Peake’s mental breakdown.
• Peake held his pen vertically as he wrote and illustrated as this is the way he was shown to do it by a calligrapher in China.
• Peake loved people spotting – sketching anyone who had interesting features.
• Graham Greene was the literary talent scout who spotted Gormenghast, but he was also the person who recommended removing all Peake’s illustrations from the original publication.

It was a wonderful evening and I’d like to thank Vintage for inviting me along and making me even more excited about reading The Gormenghast Trilogy.

For this week’s read-along discussion please see posts by other read-along participants:

(Links added as posts are published)

Gormenghast

One – Eighteen (p373 – p467)

.

.

This week’s Gormenghast discussion is written by Birdie, a blogger who reviews literary fiction with emphasis on British writers.

The beginning of Gormenghast, while retaining the absurdity of Titus Groan, has a slightly different feel to it.  I ascribe this difference to the fact that we get to see inside the characters’ heads a bit more often and in more detail.  In Titus Groan, we never really got the opportunity to understand Lord Sepulchrave’s motives, or the Countess’s, or even Prunesquallor’s, and it was the very last section of the book before we got to see into Flay’s personality (with the consequence that I sorely miss him in this text).  We did see into Steerpike and Fuchsia a bit more, but in this second book of the series we are meant to move into the world a little more.

 

Titus Groan was largely about viewing the world of Gormenghast from the outside: the first viewpoint we could really be said to follow was Steerpike’s and he was still an outsider to the culture of Gormenghast at the time. We are presented with the characters almost as Steerpike sees them. In other words, we see them from a more distant and sociological perspective. This perspective accounts for the difficulty many of us had in forming sympathetic relationships to the characters. In this second novel, Steerpike has established himself as an inevitability, training under Barquentine, spying on many of the castle inmates, engineering the disappearance of the twins and controlling them through terror. While he becomes a constant force in the castle, we as readers need his viewpoint less, and we gravitate toward the interiority of other characters just when Steerpike’s shallowness and sadism toward the aunts is demonstrated.

I find the sections of Gertrude’s thoughts particularly interesting, since she seems to have been cast as singularly thought-less in the first novel.  But in Gormenghast, we see her struggling to turn on her brain after years of neglect and we get an idea of what her internal character is like.  I have several questions that revolve around the Countess:  What is it that has awoken the mistrust in her mind/heart?  Does she sense Steerpike’s perfidy or is she simply reacting to the change necessitated by the loss of Lord Sepulchrave, Sourdust, Flay, Swelter, and the Twins?  We know that her animal/base instincts are incredibly strong since she has a greater affinity for animals and nature than for humans. What instinct, then, leads her to trust Prunesquallor?

Gertrude does not like change, which is unsurprising since the entire absurdist edifice of Gormenghast is built on the unchanging nature of out-dated ritual.  What is interesting is the way that other characters who might not have such a strong personal interest in this ritual are blindly loyal and extremely dedicated to the status quo.  In particular I’m thinking of the Professors of Gormenghast here, whose days are dictated as much by ritual as those of the seventy-sixth Earl had been, and who are also every bit as averse to change:

There had once been talk of progress by a young member of a bygone staff, but he had been instantly banished. (page 490)

What do you think Peake is doing with these characters? Is this simply more demonstration of the dangers of inertia or is Peake making a larger point about the educational system, not only of Gormenghast, but of the public schools that breed a sort of traditional mentality? Also, the narrator mentions several times that Titus is to be treated the same as the other castle whelps , presumably in order for him to understand multiple types of relationships and to humble him a bit.  But we have not seen Titus interact with any of his school fellows.  And though he is supposed to be treated the same, would there have been a school-wide search for any boy other than the young Earl?

Finally, we get to see inside Titus’s mind quite explicitly.  The boy seems to think primarily in colours and images rather than in logical thoughts.  His reflections on the marble on his desk seem related in this way to his discovery of the brightly coloured room in the castle and to his view of the separate copses as distinct from his vantage point on Gormenghast mountain.  What does this visual sense of apprehending the world tell us about Titus?

Other opinions on this section:

2606 Books and Counting