INTRODUCTION:

THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF

MERVYN PEAKE'S TITUS BOOKS *

G. Peter Winnington

When Titus Groan was published in book-hungry Britain at the end of March 1946, it was generally well received —with reservations. Mervyn Peake was already known as a poet and illustrator; many reviewers compared his novel with his previous work, and found it less successful. For the novelist Howard Spring, Titus Groan was 'full of the macabre power that makes Mr. Peake's drawings notable. But [he] has not yet learned how to apply this power effectively to the writing of fiction (Country Life, December 6, 1946, p. 1108). The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement expressed similar reservations: 'Mr. Peake's distinctive talent, as in his poetry, painting, and book illustration, should not go unrecognized. Yet the impression he leaves is not quite that of a novelist (March 23, 1946, p. 137). Several reviewers regretted the absence of illustrations; Peake had wanted to illustrate his book, but his publisher turned down the idea on the grounds that this would have placed the novel in a different category. (The drawings in the present edition were added in the late 1960s.) 

Placing Titus Groan in a category remains a problem, which explains the ambivalence of many of the reviews. Much depended on the reviewers' attitudes towards the 'grotesque', the 'fantastic', and the 'Gothic'. A few like Kate O'Brien, were openly dismissive: bad, tautological prose ... a large, haphazard, Gothic mess (Spectator, no. 176, March 29, 1946, pp. 332 & 334); others, like the celebrated novelist and short-story writer, Elizabeth Bowers (already quoted above), were more enthusiastic: Titus Groan defies classification: it certainly is not a novel; it would be found strong meat as a fairy-tale.  Let us call it a sport of literature (for literature I, for one, do find it to be) — one of those works of pure, violent, self-sufficient imagination that are from time to time thrown out.'

On balance, the reviewers were largely positive, with some lengthy eulogies in major periodicals. Herbert Reed said, I do not think I have ever so much enjoyed a novel sent to me for review' (New Statesman and Nation, May 4, 1946, p. 323). Peake's friend Maurice Collis devoted a page of Time and Tide (April 13, 1946, p. 354) to a serious assessment of the book; and R.G.G. Price (in the New English Review, vol. 12, no. 6, June 1946 pp. 592-93) concluded rhetorically: 'Grandiloquent? Thank Heavens. Verbose? Why not, if the words are good ones? Interesting and effective? Certainly.'

By this time, a few articles had appeared on Peake, but they were mostly profiles of him as an illustrator. The exception was a perceptive little article by Quentin Crisp, which is reprinted as a preface to the Overlook paperback edition of Gormenghast. Then known only for his eccentric appearance and profession as an artists' model, Crisp had made Peake's acquaintance several years before; in particular he had persuaded him to illustrate Crisp's literary oddity, a limerick sequence called All This and Bevin Too, which was published as a stapled brochure in 1943 and remains a delightful period piece.

When it came to the publication of Titus Groan in America, Peake was dismayed to find that the publisher had added the subtitle, 'A Gothic novel' to the cover and title-page of the book; this inevitably colored the reviews. Titus Groan came out late in 1946 after a flourish of advance publicity, as in the New York Herald Tribune: 'Just as we were struggling with William Blake by Mark Schorer, Will Cuppy came in and asked out of a clear sky: "What is that new novel about a character named Ug or Awk, but not by Vardis Fisher?" We knew right away he meant Titus Groane [sic] by Mervyn Peake' (September 1, 1946).

It left many reviewers puzzled, and they sought in vain for a meaning in the work: 'He would be a brave man indeed who offhand would attempt to determine the meaning of the story,' commented John Cournos, beating a retreat in the New York Sun (November 5, 1946). 'An allegory it may well be. But of what?' wondered Orville Prescott in the New York Times (November 8, 1946); he felt that the 'dark jewels of Titus Groan are buried deep and must be dug for through masses of slag and dirt: Thomas Sugrue was equally perturbed by it: 'Perhaps Titus Groan is meant to represent a dream. Perhaps it is surrealistic. Perhaps it is just a dull book, without humor, without vitality, yet tumbling on for a dreadfully long time' (New York Herald Tribune, November 24, 1946). The New Yorker concluded that 'readers who look for hidden meanings may find themselves wondering whether Mr. Peake has done anything more solemn than produce a work of extraordinary imagination while having himself a very fine time' (November 16, 1946).

Difficulties of classification again proved a handicap to success, and praise was often overshadowed by such comments as 'it is almost impossible to classify' (Call Bulletin, San Francisco, December 7, 1946), and 'a flight of allegorical fantasy that defies classification' (Beloit News, Wisconsin, December 5, 1946, repeated in the Burbank, California, Review, January 8, 1947).

Overall, however, American reviewers were quite as favorable as the British. 'With all its defects,' concluded Hermes Nye in the Dallas, Texas, Times Herald, 'this remains a book for the man who relishes the fantastic, the puckish and the beautiful' (December 8, 1946). Writers again proved to be Peake's most sympathetic readers. August Derleth informed subscribers to the Milwaukee Journal that 'this novel offers rich reward to anyone who exercises the patience and imagination to stay with it' (November 17, 1946), and the celebrated novelist Robertson Davies, writing in the Peterborough (Canada) Examiner as Samuel Marchbanks, concluded: 'it is an astonishing work of art — It has been condemned as unhealthy and absurd, but in my opinion it is neither, but a very fine book, well removed from the beaten path of contemporary fiction. I recommend it highly' (December 10, 1947).

During the three following years, Peake lived on the Channel Island of Sark; there he completed Gormenghast which was published in September 1950 to critical acclaim. 'No novel involving any comparable effort of imagination and fancy, of will-power and word-power, has appeared in English since the war,' wrote Emyr Humphreys in Time &? Tide (October 21, 1950, pp. 1065-66), and R.G.G. Price, who had already been captivated by Titus Groan, called Gormenghast 'the finest imaginative feat in the English novel since Ulysses,' although he then spoiled the compliment by adding, 'even though Ulysses is of course still much the greater book' (Punch, November 22, 1950, p. 507). By this time, readers had begun to appreciate that in Peake's work the story is less important than the telling. Several reviewers emphasized the escapist nature of his fiction: 'a holiday in the land of a dream (Lionel Hale in The Observer, September 17,  1950) and 'as a complete holiday from reality, it is a country that will bear a third visit' (Liverpool Daily Post, October 3, 1950), which boded well for Titus Alone. The following year, Peake received the Heinemann Prize from the Royal Society for Gormenghast and his collection of poems, The Glassblowers (also 1950). But there was no American edition of Gormenghast until 1967.

During the 1950s, Peake found it increasingly difficult to maintain his position as an author and illustrator. On the one hand, his style and sense of humor were increasingly at variance with the spirit of the age, which led to the relative failure of his light-hearted novel, Mr. Pye, in 1953, and the complete flop of his verse play, The Wit to Woo, staged briefly at the Arts Theatre Club in 1957. On the other hand, his health was declining to the point where he could no longer hold his pen or enunciate his words clearly; whether it was Parkinson's disease or (as a contemporary doctor put it with brutal brevity to Peake's wife, Maeve) 'premature senility', it was to render him unable to work by the early 60s and kill him before the end of the decade.

His publisher encouraged him by commissioning his novella about Titus, "Boy in Darkness", for a volume called Sometime, Never, which contained stories by William Golding and John Wyndham. Published in 1956, it later became a successful paperback, winning a Nebula Award, and drawing welcome attention to Peake's work. But that was in the 1960s.

In 1958, Maeve assembled a version of Titus Alone from Peake's various manuscript drafts and submitted it for publication. In response to her request for suggestions, the publisher proposed a number of cuts to avoid, in particular, 'the direct allegory of the scientist and his death ray' (letter from Maurice Temple-Smith to Peake, July 29, 1958, printed in 'Editing Titus Alone', Peake Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4, Summer 1990, p. 20). But Peake was beyond making revisions himself; with a heavy heart, Maeve blindly followed the suggestions. 'I can clearly recall the script coming back to me with what I had intended simply as pointers to the author accepted as if they were the final version of the book, ready for publication' (letter from Maurice Temple-Smith to GPW, printed in Peake Studies, 1:4, pp. 26-27).

When the book was published at the end of October 1959, the reviewers' praise was qualified with terms that damned it at the same time, and sales were poor indeed- 'The remarkable thing is that so intensely subjective an experience can be communicated at all. Even when one is confused by the private symbols, one accepts their reality for the author, and re-reading may give one deeper understanding' (John  Davenport in The Observer, November 1, 1959). 'Mr. Peake must be allowed a monstrous fertility of invention, a genuine feeling for the magnificence of the macabre, but the air of Gormenghast and the surrounding country is difficult to breathe' (The Times Weekly Review, November 5, 1959, p. 10). 'Nonetheless, this book is a fine a piece of fine writing — if you can take it — as we are likely to see for a long time' (Times Literary Supplement, November 13, 1959).  However, a phrase in R.G.G. Price's review in Punch (November 18, 1959) pointed the way things were to move: 'Mr. Peake has created a new genre:' he wrote, 'gothic fairy tales without fairies.'

During the last decade of his life, Peake continued to write, but his texts were disconnected and his handwriting almost illegible. From these years two fragments have been salvaged: his attempts at a fourth Titus book, reproduced here (pages 347-352) under Maeve's title, 'Titus Awakes', and the story of Foot-Fruit and his dog, of which three manuscript pages were reproduced in New World (No. 187, February 1969), alongside fiction by J.G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, John T. Sladek, Norman Spinrad, and D.M. Thomas.

Nineteen sixty can now be seen to be the turning point in the history of Peake's reputation, for that summer appeared the first of Michael Moorcock's articles on Peake, and the first scholarly assessment of his work. Having read the Titus books, and gone to visit their author, Michael Moorcock (then only 21) became Peake's champion, and promoted his work whenever he could in the science fiction magazines that he edited. On the academic front, there was an article in the Chicago Review (vol. 14, summer 1960, pp. 74-81): 'The Walls of Gormenghast: an introduction to the novels of Mervyn Peake' by the Scottish poet, translator and university lecturer (later professor) Edwin Morgan. Starting from the position that 'Poetry has to be periodically brought down to earth; the novel has to be periodically lifted off,' he claimed that Peake's work possesses 'a narrative energy and descriptive brilliance not commonly found among more conventional novelists today.' This was followed up, in 1964, by an article in the Cambridge Review by Michael Wood, who was the first to compare Peake's work with Kafka's as 'a world which can really be discussed only in its own terms — the reverse of an allegory' (May 23, 1964, pp. 440 & 443).

Then in the mid-60s came the meteoric rise to popularity of Tolkien's three-volume Lord of the Rings, and suddenly fantasy literature was back in favor. In 1967, a new American publisher, Weybright & Talley, hoping they had found another instant cult classic, brought out a fine uniform edition of Peake's Titus books, enriched with sketches from the manuscripts, and called it 'the Gormenghast trilogy'. The reception was decidedly mixed, largely because of the explicit comparisons the publishers made with Tolkien — and admirers of the one are not necessarily admirers of the other; in fact, 'they are night and day' (H.A.K. in the Boston Globe, November 19, 1967). Stephen J. Laut, S.J., set the tone in Best Sellers (November 1,  1967, p. 305) by calling the books 'a quasi-chivalric adventure' in a 'pseudo-medieval setting.' 'Could the whole thing simply be a gigantic put-on?' he wondered, and unearthed all the negative phrases from the American reviews of Titus Groan, including his favorite, 'baroque nonsense.' All because 'Peake is no Tolkien, nor a T.H. White, nor even a Malory.' He was echoed by 'a long and very sad groan' from Dick Adler in Book World, January 7, 1968 (p. 4), and by: 'maybe it just wasn't our hogshead of tea' from Aurora Gardner Simms (in the Library Journal, December 1, 1967, pp. 4434-5), for she found it 'dreadfully long and slow.'

There were, however, more appreciative readers; in a widely syndicated piece, Beverly Friend, a teacher in English at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, claimed that 'although [Peake's work] is not completely without flaws — needless scenes and characters — it can stand with the best that has been done in the English language: in theme, in method, and in scope' (Chicago Daily News, January 6, 1968). Writing in the National Observer (Washington D.C.), Robert Ostermann concluded that the books 'are, in short, a triumph... . The trilogy will be read and reread as a treasure by those who so regard Don Quixote or The Divine Comedy. Reckless comparisons? Not for this eccentric, poetic masterpiece' (December 11, 1967).

A three-volume paperback edition came out from Ballantine on October 28, 1968, less than a month before Peake's death. Compared with the reactions to the hardback edition, the reviews were harsh: Publishers' Weekly was 'too overcome by ennui to discover just what this trilogy was to be all about' (September 16, 1968, p. 72), and Robert Armstrong decided that 'anyone who is left on the edge of his chair after finishing a chapter or book has a posture problem' (Minneapolis Tribune, October 27, 1968). Yet this edition remained in print throughout the 1970s.

In Britain, the publication of new, illustrated, hardback editions of the Titus books was spaced over several years: while Titus Groan (with the introduction by Anthony Burgess printed in this Overlook edition) and Gormenghast came out in January and December 1968, Titus Alone did not appear until June 1970. They were welcomed with diminishing praise, starting with Paul Green's review in the New Statesman: "Titus Groan... is a magnificent exception to any literary pigeon-holing... Underneath the superficially farcical and grotesque aspects of the novel there is a pagan grandeur and sense of desolation which is as meaningful as any allegorical or sociological interpretation' (January 26, 1968, pp. 114-15). And on the same day, Henry Tube ended his long review in the Spectator with the conclusion that we must see Peake, the writer and illustrator, 'not as a man with two talents, but as a genius with two nibs' (pp. 105-6). On February 15, Hilary Spurling devoted much of her 850-word review in the Financial Times to an extended comparison with Kafka: 'what is interesting is that Peake and Kafka use such similar, often identical, means for exactly opposite ends.'

Without the help of an Introduction by Burgess, Gormenghast met with more tepid  praise, along with some frankly hostile comments, like Oswald Blakeston's outburst in Books & Bookmen: 'I can't see any real reason for critics to inflate this whole castle which is already too big for its boots' (February 1969, p. 14). Even R.G.G. Price found himself tempering his previous judgments: 'The trilogy is a freak, though a brilliant one, not a great novel.... On the other hand, it is more than a somber jeu d'esprit' (Punch, January 1, 1969).

The second British edition of Titus Alone introduced a new version of the text put together by Langdon Jones. He reinstated passages from the manuscripts that had been dropped from the first edition; they 'principally affect Chapters 24 (an entirely new episode), 77, 89, and from Chapters 99 to the end where the original published text has been considerably built up' (from the 'Publisher's Note' at the beginning of the edition). Some scholars are critical of Langdon Jones's work — see, in particular, Tanya Gardiner-Scott's book, Mervyn Peake: the evolution of a dark romantic (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), chapter III — but 'any attempt to reconstruct Mervyn Peake's original text of Titus Alone must fail because there never was such a thing' (Maurice Temple-Smith in Peake Studies, 1:4, p. 27).

Simultaneous with the hardback editions, paperback editions were brought out in Britain by Penguin in their series of Modern Classics and, despite the absence of really favorable reviews, they have fulfilled Elizabeth Bowen's hopes by remaining available in Britain in paperback ever since. The only change came with the King Penguin (U.K) editions of 1980-81, for which I provided limited corrections (see 'Editing Peake' in The Mervyn Peake Review, No. 13, Autumn 1981, pp. 2-7) all subsequent editions, including this one from Overlook, follow these amended texts. And I should point out that this edition of Titus Alone is the first independent appearance in the United States of the text revised by Langdon Jones. It also appeared in Overlooks omnibus edition of the Titus books in July 1988.

Within two years of Peake's death his Titus books were all in print in Britain and America, in both hardback and paperback, and his widow Maeve Gilmore, had published her moving memoir, A World Away. Then there was a major exhibition of his work at the National Book League, London, in January 1972. The world began to take notice; more thoughtful articles started to appear, ranging from an appreciation of the man and his work by Marcus Crouch in The Junior Bookshelf (December 1968, pp. 346-49) to scholarly studies like 'Gids voor Gormenghast' by Professor Herman Servotte of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium (in Dietsche Warand en Belfort, no. 116, 1971, English as 'Guide for Gormenghast' in The Mervyn Peake Review, No. 3, Autumn 1976, pp. 5-9). This was followed by Hugh Brogan's sensitive assessment of his work, 'The Gutters of Gormenghast', in the Cambridge Review in 1973, by John Batchelor's 'biographical and critical exploration' in   1974 and,  in  1976, by John Watney's official biography. Thus Peake's reputation became more firmly established and, by the end of the decade, reference works were at last including Peake among the significant writers and illustrators of the post-war period.

In 1975 an international Mervyn Peake Society was founded, based in England and issuing The Mervyn Peake Review. For ten years, the MPR provided a forum for discussion and critical debate of Peake's work, and several of the articles reprinted here first appeared in its pages. Since 1988, this need has been answered by an independent periodical, Peake Studies, which appears twice a year.

The essays reprinted on the following pages approach the Titus books from several angles. First I have chosen a personal glimpse of Mervyn Peake by Louise Collis, daughter of Maurice Collis. Then come three general articles on Peake and his work, beginning with the piece by Hugh Brogan already mentioned above, which places Peake among the neo-Romantics of the 1940s and suggests that his 'word-pictures' enabled him to write what he could not paint. Both Hugh Brogan and Ronald Binns (whose essay comes next) point to Peake's affinity with Treasure Island, an adventure story that he knew almost by heart and that he illustrated at the height of his career. Binns goes further than Brogan in situating Peake as a poet in relation to his time and, as a novelist, to romance. The most notable essay to date is by Joseph Sanders, whose elevated debate of Peake's work argues that Titus Groan and Gormenghast 'contain a richness of detail, a grasp of psychology, and a depth of human concern that mark a great work,' while Titus Alone remains flawed because uncompleted. Yet the overall opus constitutes a 'successfully humanistic conception of contemporary man.'

The next group of articles (also printed in chronological order) analyses themes and aspects of Titus Groan and Gormenghast. We begin with Cristiano Rafanelli on Titus and the Thing; Bruce Hunt on Titus Groan and Gormenghast as Bildungsroman, and Margaret Ochocki on them as fairytale. My own essay makes use of the manuscripts to discuss how Peake handles the relationship between Fuchsia and Steerpike, and in a previously unpublished article Ann Yeoman approaches Steerpike from a Jungian standpoint.

Finally I have chosen three articles devoted to Titus Alone, as the most problematic of Peake's novels. Colin Greenland's and Laurence Bristow-Smith's articles, written and published simultaneously, neatly counterpoint each other. Tanya Gardiner-Scott's essay is a first attempt to approach Peake from the point of view of gender studies.

In the articles, page references to the present Overlook edition have been added in italics; the editions for reference and their abbreviated titles are:

Works by Peake

G         Gormenghast, second English edition, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968, and Penguin, 1969. Articles subsequent to 1982 refer to the corrected King Penguin edition (1982), the Overlook hardback edition (1982), the Methuen (1985) and Mandarin (1989) paperback editions, which all have the the same pagination.

PP       Peake's Progress, edited by Maeve Gilmore. London: Allen Lane, 1978; New York: Overlook Press, 1981. There is a corrected edition of this volume (Penguin U.K., 1981).

TA        Titus Alone, second, revised, English edition, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970, and Penguin 1970. Articles subsequent to 1981 refer to the corrected King Penguin edition (1981), the Overlook hardback edition (1982), the Methuen (1985) and Mandarin (1989) paperback editions, which all have the the same pagination.

TG       Titus Groan, second English edition, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968, and Penguin, 1968. Articles subsequent to 1981 refer to the corrected King Penguin edition (1981), the Overlook hardback edition (1982), the Methuen (1985) and Mandarin (1989) paperback editions, which all have the the same pagination.

Other Works

Batchelor       Mervyn Peake: a biographical and critical exploration by John Batchelor. London: Duckworth, 1974 (paperback 1977).

Gilmore          A World Away: a memoir of Mervyn Peake by Maeve Gilmore. London: Gollancz, 1970.

Manlove         Modern Fantasy: five studies by C. N. Manlove. Cam>bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975 (paperback 1978).

Watney          Mervyn Peake by John Watney. London: Michael Joseph, 1976.

_____________________________

G. Peter Winnington is the editor of Peake Studies; he lectures in modern English literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

* I insist on calling them "the Titus books" because Peake did not conceive of them as a trilogy, but as an open-ended series, with Gormenghast providing the setting for only the first two volumes.

G. Peter Winnington

© "Overlook press", 1995 

© OCR Ksew.

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