"The passions in their clay": Mervyn Peake's Titus stories

Joseph L. Sanders

During Mervyn Peake's life, his writing received just enough critical  and financial encouragement to keep him trying, never enough to give him any assurance that a substantial number of people cared about what he wrote. That has changed. Today Peake's fiction, especially the works concerned with Titus Groan, have been republished, widely distributed in paperback, and, most importantly, admired by an increasing number of serious readers. We do care, and we are now trying sympathetically to understand what it is about Peake that impresses us.

One problem Peake faced is the still-persistent prejudice against fantasy as mere escapism.This is the attitude that Emyr Humphrys expresses in an early review dismissing Peake's novel Gormenghast as "an over-grown fairy tale, without any discernible moral, having no more connection with the reality of living than the Hunting of the Snark." ¹  Actually, the reverse is true in the Titus stories. Through his depiction of fantastic forces that emerge out of the stories' settings - and the characters' development as they react to that setting - Peake present a realistic picture of human life. The best way to appreciate this is through a detailed survey of setting and character development in the three novels and one novella Peake wrote about Titus Groan. Seeing Peake's intent and accomplishment more clearly should help us make a fairer evacuation of the Titus stories. ²

First, however, we should get clear what manner of fantasy Peake's stories are. At first glance the Titus stories appear to have little kinship with a fantasy novel like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, filled with monsters, wizards and magic rings. Yet the real purpose of fantastic elements in Tolkien's story is to extend human desires and fear far beyond their normal range. Magic and monsters objectify human passions that disrupt the natural order. In Tolkien's fantasy, fears take physical shape and desires become supernaturally achievable. In The Lord of te Rings, the Ring represents a common wish, the craving to master all knowledge and power, while the creatures and wizards show alternative ways to achieve that goal by brute force or study. Tolkien views life as a terrible struggle between desires and moral impulses, which one cannot understand let alone direct but in the midst of which he must trust in divine benevolence and hope for final victory. By accepting healthy tradition and trying to submit to the purposes  that tradition offers, one can at least haltingly participate in satisfying action.

Peake's type of fantasy also moves outside normal setting and familiar devices to present his conception of the human condition. It works, however, from a quite different viewpoint in a quite different manner. Peake does not accept the orthodox religious tradition that undergirds Tolkien's fiction. Furthermore, he does not believe that true power can be trapped in a ring, diagrammed by a sage, or seized by violence. In fact the systematic study of supernatural power, in religion or magic, is impossible; Peake not only rejects any particular religion but denies that man can gain any benefit from using a religious / ethical tradition as an aid to understanding. Titus, though beyond human comprehension sometimes are at work in Peake's stories, they resist easy labeling. The supernatural empathy between Titus and Keda's child, in Titus Groan and Gormenghast, is one such fantastic element.  The mysterious certainty that guides Keda through the last month of her life may be another. However, clairvoyance or other violation of familiar natural order are very rare in these first two books; the major fantastic element is found not in the action's foreground but in its background. The action in these first two books takes place in or near Gormenghast - an  immense castle, self-sufficient and completely cut off from contact with any outside society. At one point, the "evening star" appears in the night sky, suggesting that Gormenghast  is located on this Earth. ³ Elsewhere, however, it is revealed that Gormenghast must have been totally isolated in its wilderness for at least 368 years. (TG, p..295,230). Gormenghast appears to have no real counterpart in past or present, and it is difficult to imagine the castle as part of a  future that would leave it so undisturbed. It exists in its own world, one similar to real world but not part of it.

Gormenghast's  unnatural existence allows Peake to examine the human condition from a fresh perspective. At the same time, lack of overly fantastic forces in Gormenghast reflects Peak's attitude toward the basis of responsible action. In Titus Groan and Gormenghast, there are no easy magical tools by which one can manipulate Gormenghast's power, but on the other hand the characters actually need not fear such a power's violent intervention in their lives In a completely different setting, 'Boy in Darkness' uses  many more elements that are overtly fantastic: Titus Alone, set in still another part of Peake's special world, uses others. However in these works, too, characters lack full control over themselves and cannot pledge allegiance to some superhuman source of control; at the same time, still, they need not be controlled by tradition or ritual. Although most characters are not aware of it, because the human passions that went into their society's creation are hidden by the aura of revered mystery, they are free. No "god" appears directly or indirectly in the Titus stories. Instead, men worship a set of physical objects and the tradition associated with them. Peake believes that man's desires and fears created the setting and the tradition that envelopes it. He pictures man as the source of all meaning and all delusion, and shows one particular young man, Titus, becoming aware of himself in those terms and rousing himself to Fight free of tradition and the settings that enforce it.

Peake's few direct comments about his practice of writing show his concern with a tradition-bound setting and the people living in it. In his description of the writing of Titus Groan, called "How a Romantic Novel Was Evolved," Peake states that his book grew randomly from some idle jottings, "a page of nonsensical conversation between two pompous half-wits." ⁴ Peake's remarks stress the importance of characters in the story's evolution, and printed with his essay are several pen and ink sketches of important
characters that Peake says he drew to help "visualize the characters and to imagine what sort of things they would say" ("Romantic Novel," p. 80). But Peake's essay is only about 300 words long; the rest of "How a Romantic Novel Was Evolved" consists of five excerpts from Titus Groan. One is the conversation between Titus' aunts, the Twins, that roughly fits Peake's description of the doodlings with which it began. Three other excerpts, however, show characters acting instead of talking— and acting, always, in close relation to Gormenghast, an indication of how the castle, not the characters, dominated the stories.

It seems appropriate though to examine some of Peake's descriptions of Gormenghast and its surroundings, to see how characters are able to react to that setting.

At first, like the characters, the reader is likely to be overwhelmed by the castle's physical presence. The castle can be seen from as many angles, in as many ways as any real place. It is a mass of stones, a heap of walls and towers above an eruption of hovels: "mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.... Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow"  (TG P-159). Again, seen from a distance in summer, Gormenghast is a sprawled bulk in the dust: "It lay inert, like a sick thing. Its limbs spread. It took the shape of what it smothered. The masonry sweated and was horribly silent. The chestnuts whitened ,vith dust and hung their myriads of great hands with every wrist broken" (TG, p. 413, 323-24).

Peake's vivid descriptions convince the reader of Gormenghast s physical existence. The stories swim in such descriptions, all useful in the story and striking in themselves. Early in Titus Groan, for example, Steerpike escapes from a locked room to the castle roof and climbs about, trying to find a way back inside to safety; the episode lets Peake show the terrific size of Gormenghast, but it also gives him a chance to present vivid, fascinating sights like the following: "He had seen a tower with a stone hollow in its summit.
This shallow basin sloped down from the copestones that surrounded the tower and was half filled with rainwater. In the circle of water whose glittering had caught his eye, for to him it appeared about the size of a coin, he could see that something white was swimming. As far as he could guess it was a horse. As he watched he noticed that there was something swimming by its side, something smaller, which must have been the foal, white like its parent" (TG, p. 138, 106-107).

These passages are not only vivid descriptions; they are integral parts of the story's argument. In its first appearance before the reader Gormenghast seems to challenge "heaven" and thus the natural order of life, making an obscene gesture of defiance. But its proud egotism is countered by details that suggest failure. In the second description, the castle is presented in terms developing the earlier description's suggestion of sickness, mutilation and defeat underlying Gormenghast's pretensions. The third quotation also shows that things are happening at Gormenghast outside the inhabitants' knowledge or control. This time the disruption actually looks healthy and vital—but Steerpike's own response shows the meagerness of his vision, and this is important to the story because the way a man uses his senses reveals his potential for development. One sign of Steerpike's failure to become more fully human is his desire to force all the marvelous things he sees from atop  Gormenghast to work towards his personal profit. Although he sees clearly, Steerpike sees everything either as a usefool tool or as worthless trash. Since the scene he views cannot benefit him, he dismisses it from his mind. On the other hand, one sign of Titus' potential for human growth is his sudden ability to see objects as themselves, as he sits in the castle schoolroom:

it had been the color of the ink, the peculiar dark and musty blue of the ink in its sunken bowl in the corner of his desk which had induced his  eyes to wander over the few objects grouped below him. The ink was blue dark, musty, dirtyish, deep as cruel water at night; what were the other colors? Titus was surprised at the richness, the variety. He had only seen his thumb-marked books as things to read or to avoid reading: as things that got lost: things full of figures or maps. Now he saw them as colored rectangles of pale, washed out blue or laurel green, with small windows cut in them where, on the naked whiteness of the first page, he had scripted his name....
     He even saw his own hand as a colored thing before he realized it was a  part of him: the ochre color of his wrist, the black of his sleeve....⁵

In still another way Peake's descriptions express his attitude toward man's predicament. Though concrete, they are extremely incomplete. Peake concentrates on rendering flashes of vision or parts of a scene thrown suddenly into dramatic highlight. Here, for example, is a panorama of Gormenghast and the surrounding country:

Three shafts of the rising sun, splintering through the murk, appeared  to set fire to the earth where they struck it. The bright impact of the nearest beam exposed a tangle of branches which clawed in a craze of radiance, microscopically perfect and adrift in darkness.

The second of these floodlit islands appeared to float immediately above the first, for the sky and earth were a single curtain of darkness. In reality it was as far away again, but hanging as it did gave no sense of distance. 

At its northern extremity there grew from the waspgold earth certain forms like eruptions of masonry rather than spires and buttresses of natural rock. The sunshaft had uncovered a mere finger of some habitation which, widening as it entered the surrounding darkness to the North, became a fist of stones, which in its turn, heaving through wrist
and forearm to an elbow like a smashed honeycomb, climbed through darkness to a gaunt, time-eaten shoulder only to expand again and again into a mountainous body of timeless  towers. 

But of all this nothing was visible but the bright and splintered tip of a stone finger.

The third "island" was the shape of a heart. A coruscating heart of tares on fire.

To the dark edge of this third light a horse was moving. It appeared no bigger than a fly. Astride its back was Titus. (G, p. 96,73-74).

This fragmentary vividness works directly to  Peake's advantage, since it permits him to suggest that the things he describes so vividly are parts of a vast and shadowy whole; the many objects left undescribed are thus attached to particular things that dazzle a reader's senses. This corresponds to the way one normally sees things. Naturally Titus cannot see every object in the schoolroom, simultaneously, with the same  rich vividness. Intense vision cannot register whole scenes; it must focus on a few objects, to explore them in detail. At its keenest, sight perceives fragments of the whole.

This recognition amplifies something we noticed earlier. Fragmentary description is appropriate because so many of the things described  are fragments. In the passages quoted above, Gormenghast is described in adjectives like "broken," "mutilated," "smashed," "time-eaten" and  "splintered."  Titus Groan  opens with a description of the Tower of Flints, "patched" only by ivy and inhabited by owls. It is a visual symbol of defiance, self-will - and defeat. Furthermore, in Titus Groan, Peake thus describes in detail one wing of the castle:

Most of these buildings had about them the rough-hewn and oppressive weights of masonry that characterized the main volume of Gormenghast, although they  varied considerably in every other way, one having at its summit an enormous stone carving of a lion's head, which held between its jaws the limp corpse of a man on whose body was chiselled the words: "He was an enemy of Groan"; alongside this structure was a rectangular area of some length entirely filled with pillars set so closely together that it was  difficult for a man to squeeze between  them. Over them, at the height of about forty feet, was a perfectly flat roof of stone slabs blanketed with ivy. This structure could never have served any  practical purpose....

There were many examples of an eccentric notion translated into architecture in the spine of buildings that spread eastwards over the undulating ground between the heavy walls of conifer, but for the most part they were built for some specific purpose, as a pavilion, for  entertainments, or as an  observatory, or a museum. Some in the form og halls with galleries round three sides had been intended for concerts or dancing. One had obviously been an aviary for though derelict, the branches that had long ago been fastened across the high central hall of the building were still hanging by rusty chains, and about the floor were strewn the broken remains of drinking cups for the birds; wire netting, red with rust, straggled across the floor among rank weeds that had taken root. (TG, pp.203-204, 156-57)

Much of Gormenghast now is deserted and falling into ruin. Even as it was built, however, the castle was designed piecemeal, conceived in fragments. Just as the eye can see only parts of any scene fully, the mind also can comprehend any project only partially, and, when it tried to grasp too much is defeated eventually by nature time, and its own vanity—the desire to believe that it has triumphed. The House of Groan proclaims its victory in the midst of confusion and decay. Most of the inhabitants of Gormenghast
register the presence of the Tower and the other structures without really perceiving their import. Though they use what they see in different ways, Steerpike and Titus are apart from this general blindness. And their clear sight permits them to shape the story's action because they can act in ways inconceivable to the other people in Gormenghast.

Clearly, the other characters are only hazily conscious of reality, and thus largely are unable to act effectively. For example, the Countess avoids the most pleasant and attractive room in the castle precisely because  "there were no shadows lurking in the corners"; she prefers "those parts of the castle where the lights and the
shadows were on the move and where there was no such clarity" (TG, p. 98, 75). This craving for indistinctness is analogous to the Countess' mental retreat from the world around her, which separates her from husband, daughter and son, and from which she rouses only when Gormenghast's gloomy tradition is threatened.

The Countess is not alone in such willful semi-blindess; most of the other characters also are grotesquely incomplete in their understanding of themselves and their world. But where Gormenghast's physical incompleteness suggests Peake's understanding of human limitations, man's inability to see objects as wholes, the onesideness of the characters shows not simply their natural limitations but also the way Gormenghast has narrowed and warped them. The pretentions associated with the place have produced an immense body of ritual whose effects almost invariably are negative. Peake believes that ethical religious tradition is based not on some supernatural manifestation but on one man's own desire to evade consciousness, of his lack of ultimate knowledge and control by claiming allegiance with supernatural intelligence and power. Responding to the tendency of thought to meander in unforeseeable ways and to collapse into chaos, the rulers of Gormenghast have accumulated a body of ritual to hold tneir own fragments of meaning together. By labeling certain actions significant, ritual occupies and secures the minds of its adherents. But the process is circular. Ritual depends upon ritual tor significance. No modifications, no freshly relevant meanings can be permitted. And the people who are most formed by ritual lack even the knowledge that there is any other way to see life; they  have no way even to become conscious that they have been distorted.

For Peake, tradition embodies the most stultifying of human impulses —the will to dominate, to see the world remade in terms of self—its failure hidden only by its own self-sanctified mysteriousness. Tradition promises a share in the delight of dominating nature. In return a man must surrender his individual self to the greater self. The worshiper feels himself a part of a power that fits his deepest urges (though he is not created in its image, as the tradition states), within which he can follow any desire as long as he consciously frames his actions in traditional images. But the worshiper is thus prevented from developing his individual self. Such tradition can show a man only a distorted, deadening image of himself. Yet, as in Gormenghast, most people accept a role determined by tradition in preference to developing themselves freely. They are willing to imagine no other existence.

Most of the people who live in Gormenghast cling firmly to the castle's tradition. Lord Sepulchrave, Titus' father, holds off his chronic melancholia by complete absorption in ritual: "The many duties, which to another might have become irksome and appeared fatuous, were to his Lordship a relief and a relative escape form himself" (TG, p. 205, 759). Even when the day's routine is over, he secludes himself in the castle library, escaping into his books. He encounters his wife only on ceremonial occasions (TG, p. 204,
159). In short, his intellect, crouched under the sheltering ritual, does him no good.

By the same token, it is because of ritual that his wife's vitality is able to express itself only with inarticulate creatures. She accepts all the physical demands of ritual by divorcing her mind from the human life of the castle. In a reverie, she plans to teach Titus the same survival technique when he is older: "I [will] tell him about the skies' birds and how he can keep his head quite clear of the duties he must perform day after day until he dies here as his others have done and be buried in the sepulchre of the Groans
and he must learn the secret of silence and go his own way among the birds and the white cats and all the animals so that he is not aware of men" (TG 399, 312-13).

Titus' older sister, Fuchsia, is less successful at finding a "safe" outlet for her energy. Early in the novel she is seen dreaming  vaguely of a friend from outside her world  and its ritual (TG, pp. 145-146,112-13). Yet Fuchsia is  part of Gormenghast, too, as she perceives when Steerpike approaches her: "behind him she saw something which by contrast with the alien, incalculable figure before her, was close and real. It was something which she understood, something which she could never do without, or be
without, for it seemed as though it were her own self, her own body, at which she gazed and which lay so intimately upon the skyline Gormenghast, the long, notched outline of her home" (TG. p. 273, 213). And after her father's disappearance, Fuchsia recognizes  "that she was no longer free, no longer just Fuchsia, but of the blood" (TG, p. 459. 359).  Her character is not transformed, her role as Lady Fuchsia only adding to the tangle of purposes and feelings that ensnares her, but she is at last firmly caught within the trap of Gormenghast. Her instincts still pull her toward freedom, but the only thing Gormenghast offers her is the cold-blooded artificer, Steerpike, who recognizes Fuchsia's imaginative nature and plays on it to gain her trust (TG, p. 274, 214).

Some other main characters' accommodations to Gormenghast reveal why Fuchsia, and Titus, in his turn, are repelled by a life guided by ritual. Flay has devoted his life to the castle's oppressive tradition, denying his emotions any spontaneous expression. After he is banished from the castle, when the Countess sees him throw one of her cats into Steerpike's face, he discovers that he can enjoy another kind of life: "his love of this woodland glade he had selected grew with the development of a woodland instinct which
must have been latent in his blood" (TG, pp. 442, 346); despite this, however, he keeps as close to Gormenghast as possible, worshiping the idea  of the ritual going on within the walls.

Dr. Prunesquallor, on the other hand, impresses the reader by his spontaneous sympathy for Fuchsia, as much as by his bizarre mannerisms. He is the only character who can be depended upon to respond generously and effectively to the needs of people around him. His sound impulses are further shown as he muses over whether or not to ask Steerpike's aid in caring for the deranged Sepulchrave: "I will bear him in mind and dispense with him if I can but a brain is a brain and he has one and it may be necessary to borrow it at short notice but no no I will not by all that's instinctive I will not and that settles it" (TG, p. 394, 309). Yet, Prunesquallor is trapped too: "although the Doctor, with a mind of his own, had positively heterodox opinion regarding certain aspects of the castle's life ... yet it was of  the place and was a freak only in that his mind worked in a wide way, relating and correlating his thoughts so that his conclusions were often clear and accurate and nothing short of heresy" (TG, p. 470, 368).

The Twins share a mindless devotion to order that is symbolized in their dearest possession—the Room of Roots. Steerpike, having flattered his way into their confidence, is astonished at the Room, which is filled with the dead, carefully handpainted roots of a tree that still  clings to the wall outside the Twins' apartment; they imagine that birds will flock to "those roots whose colors most nearly approximated to their own plumage, or if they preferred it to nest among roots whose hue was complimentary to their own" (TG, p.252, 196).  But in addition to reflecting the system's foolishness, the Twins show its viciousness as they dream of the power that tradition owes them so that they would be able to "make  people do things" (TG, p. 111, 85). Even after Steerpike has made them his dupes by promising them power, each of the Twins muses, "one day perhaps I will banish Steerpike when he's done everything for us... because he isn't really of good stock like us and ought to be a servant" (TG, p. 392, 307).

All these characters see life in terms of tradition and let their lives be ruled by ritual. Gormenghast's ritual does nothing positive for them. At best, it gives them a neutral refuge from personal difficulties, but more often it encourages weakness, by overwhelming individual needs with its oppressive, indecipherable "values." For that very reason, however, the characters find it more comfortable to cling to the dead framework of ritual than to fight free. They neglect the problems whose solution might cost them real effort, and thus real pain, in favor of playing safe, mind-numbing games. And so they see everything in terms of Gormenghast. They cannot question its importance, because to do so would be to doubt the way they have spent their lives, the way they see life. Instead they cling to their duties and the wisps of power associated with those duties.

Steerpike is the only character in Titus Groan who realizes that power might be seized despite ritualistic prohibitions. At first glance, Steerpike appears to be the most sympathetic character in the book; he seems to be simply a young man who wants to escape from the brutal life of a kitchen servant. Steerpike displays intelligence and courage,  for example, as he climbs from the room in which Flay  had locked him to the roof of Gormenghast. But, as already noted, Steerpike uses his abilities chiefly to stock his mind with  knowledge about immediately  useful information: "a passion  to accumulate knowledge of any and every kind consumed him; but only as a means to an end. He must know all things, for only so might he have, when  situations arose in the future, a full pack of cards to play from" (TG, pp. 224, 174). Significantly, what he studies while Dr. Prunesquallor's servant is the concoction of poisons.

In fact, Steerpike tries to exert too much control over the incomprehensible forces of life—as a result of which he ultimately loses all control. Steerpike is sympathetic only to a point. He sacrifices vision and understanding as he pursues his goal. When necessary Steerpike can simulate emotion, but his real passions are held in check by cunning (TG, p. 156, 121). His ruling passion is a desire for power. Like the Twins, he understands that power is the ability to compel a person to do something; unlike the Twins,
he understands how to gain power in Gormenghast. But he does not realize the personal effects of that effort. Because he keeps his true self so much enslaved, he may actually be the character most enthralled by the proud, ultimately self-destructive spirit of Gormenghast.

Above all, Steerpike realizes that the power of his personal influence is not enough. He needs to command the power of ritual. After the castle ritualist dies in the library fire set by the Twins at Steerpike's command, Steerpike attaches himself to Barquentine, the new ritualist. Again he files for his future use the knowledge he gains: "it was in his mind to find himself on Barquentine's decease the leading if not the sole authority in matters of ritual and observance. In any event, the subject fascinated him. It was potential" (TG, p. 484, 380).

For the baby boy Titus Groan, too, the future appears to be utterly determined by ritual. Lord Sepulchrave charges Titus' nurse "to instill into his veins, from the very first, a love for his birthplace and his heritage, and a respect for all the written and unwritten laws of the place of his fathers" (TG, p. 228-29, 178). As we have seen, the best life the Countess can imagine for Titus is one of mechanical obedience to ritual, with his real concern elsewhere. Later, at the Earling ceremony, Barquentine tries to seal Titus' future by intoning the formula stating that Titus "will forever hold in sacred trust the castle of his fathers and the domain adhering thereto.... That he will observe its sacred rites, honor its crest, and in due time instill into the first male of his loins, reverence for its every stone until among his fathers he has  added, in the tomb, his link to the unending chain of Groans" (TG, p. 493, 356).

Even as a baby, however, Titus does not fit the role intended for him. As he looks up at Keda, his wet nurse, Titus' face shows that he is part of an older tradition than Gormenghast's: "there was the history of man in his face. A fragment from the enormous rock of mankind. A leaf from the forest of man's passion and man's knowledge and man's pain" (TG, p. 115, 88). During the Earling, Titus instinctively rebels against ritual, refusing to hold the symbolic object (TG, p. 495, 357). At the end of the ceremony, Titus further violates Barquentine's commands: "while the concluding words were being cried in a black anger ...  Titus had sunk to his knees and had begun to crawl to the raffs edge with a stone in one hand and ivy branch in the other. And then, to the horror  of all, had dropped the sacrosanct symbols into the depths of the lake" (TG, p. 496, 388). 

It could be said that Titus simply is behaving like a normal baby. However, Peake takes the opportunity to link Titus to uncontrolled, illogical, nonverbal forces of which the other characters repress awareness. In the midst of Titus' spontaneous rebellion, he utters  a cry that is answered by Keda's baby (TG, pp. 496-97, 389).  For some  time Peake has suggested a supernatural sympathy existing between the Thing and Titus (cf. TG, p 411, 322). The link thus symbolized will be very important in Titus' development, since in Titus Groan, Keda performs the only complete act of rebellion, representing the overwhelming but unreasoning power of instinct. Wandering purposelessly, after her lovers kill each other, Keda feels a baby growing within her. But as she listens to a bird's cry, she realizes there is a way to find freedom from pain: "'It is over!' screamed the beaked voice. 'It is only for the child that you are waiting. All else fulfilled, and then there is no longer any need'" (TG, p. 356, 278). She lives only to deliver her child; then she is free to die. Keda's child, thus, represents pure, vital freedom, in conception and development. Yet it is clear that this freedom is of a particular kind—impulsive and heedless, echoing the cry of a bird rather than answering a human communication. Titus is instinctively drawn toward the Thing's freedom; later, he will have to see whether it can satisfy his whole self. We should note, however, that in Titus Groan the only other person who gives himself up to such a mood is the insane Lord Sepulchrave who, after his library is burned, seeks to submerge himself in another kind of life by imagining himself one of the owls in the Tower of Flints. They eat him alive (TG, p. 440, 345).

Titus Groan ends as Steerpike wriggles his way toward the center of power and as Titus shows signs of possessing an individual will. The story obviously is unfinished; rather a sense of  impending change disturbs the inhabitants of the castle: "through honeycombs of stone would now be wandering the passions in their clay. There would be  tears and there would be strange laughter. Fierce  births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams, and violence, and  disenchantment. And there shall be flame-green daybreak  soon. And love itself shall cry for insurrection!" (TG, p.505-506, 396).

At the beginning of Gormenghast, seven years have passed.  Relatively little has changed. The Twins have fled from their official apartment, at Steerpike's command, and are concealed in a deserted wing of the castle, still hungering for power. Outside the castle walls, Flay has adapted thoroughly to life in the woods but still identifies with the House of Groan (G, p. 287, 228). The Countess and Dr. Prunesquallor are only beginning to be troubled by still unfocused suspicions of Steerpike; she is awakening to the
hint of Gormenghast's ritual (G, p. 27, 18), and he is beginning to concentrate his considerable intellect because of a feeling that the people he loves are in danger (G, pp. 41-43, 29-31). Fuchsia is still not quite a mature woman, though no longer a child. She feels drawn to both Titus and Steerpike—to Titus because of his rebellious attitude, to Steerpike because of his "vitality and air of secrecy" (G, p. 24, 16). Titus is seven years older, still torn by conflicting demands of blood and ritual (G, p. 1,1). Steerpike is stronger.

Most of Gormenghast is taken up with the development of these two young men—and the castle's response.  

Steerpike appears quite secure at first. He has concealed his viciousness and is entrenched as Barquendne's assistant. Yet Steerpike cannot be content with the power that comes from administering ritual. He must keep the Twins to perform for him and must indulge himself in random exercise of power. As several teachers cross one of the courtyards, for example, an object hurtles downward and strikes one of them on the wrist; high above, "Steerpike ... raised his eyebrows at the sound of the cry so far below him, and piously closing his eyes he kissed his catapult" (G, p. 213, 169). Power is satisfying only when it can be used at will, and Steerpike is growing tired of waiting to display his power.

He is also tired of concealing his true self; the desire to scream his personal defiance of Gormenghast is eroding his rigid self-control. The combination of fatigue and impatience undoes him. In planning Barquendne's murder, Steerpike is so eager to show Barquendne his superiority that he underestimates the ritualist. Set afire, Barquendne still manages to seize Steerpike, and the two burn together. As they struggle, Steerpike forces himself to act purposefully despite the pain. He succeeds. Yet he is changed. Besides the burns that scar his face, Steerpike has suffered injury to his self-confidence: "His poise had been so shattered that a change had come about—a change that he knew nothing of, for his logical mind was able to reassure him" (G, p. 282, 224). He is unaware of any alteration as he continues with the same plans for his future, while entrenching himself in the job of ritualist: "His miscalculation over Barquendne's murder had been unforgivable and he did not forgive himself. It was not so much what had happened to his body that galled him, but that he should ever have blundered. His mind, always compassionless, was now an icicle—sharp, lucent and frigid. From now onward he had no other purpose than  to hold the castle even more tightly in the scalded palm of his hand" (G, p. 303-304, 241). Before murdering Barquentine, Steerpike was anxious for power; now, holding practical power over Gormenghast, he cannot understand that his hold on himself has been dangerously weakened even as he resolves to control himself even more tightly.

Steerpike soon commits more serious mistakes. As interpreter of the ritual, he plans to dispose of Titus by sending him on ceremonial missions via crumbling stairs or deliberately weakened catwalks (G, p. 349, 278). At the same time, he decides to woo Fuchsia, to seal his power by marrying the only other heir to Gormenghast. By playing on her sympathy for his injury and her admiration for his courage, Steerpike leads Fuchsia to accept him as a closer—and ever more secret—friend. Fuchsia is unable to analyze Steerpike: "unlike this new companion, this man of the dusk, whose every sentence, every thought, every action was ulterior, she lived in the moment of excitement, savoring the taste of an experience that was enough in itself. She had no instinct of self-preservation" (G, p. 344, 275). Steerpike carefully imitates love, even painstakingly decorating a room where they meet in the evenings. Yet Steerpike's role is shattered before the romance is consummated. Flay has crept back into the castle and hides in a deserted section, watching secretly over the young Groans. His warning whisper, '"Be careful, my lady'," halts Fuchsia outside the private room (G, p. 351, 286) and Steerpike, when he finds her
standing there in plain sight, pushes her inside with the exclamation "'Fool'" (G, p. 351, 280). Humiliated, Fuchsia withdraws from him: "She was shocked and resentful—but less resentful, for those first moments, than hurt. She had also become, without her knowing it, Lady Fuchsia (echoing Flay's warning). Her blood had risen in her—the blood of her Line" (G, p. 352, 281). Although she can be  fooled into missing sight of some things, she cannot doubt  what she once has seen.

Howewer,  Fuchsia does agree to one further meeting, and Steerpike makes cold-blooded plans: he will seduce or rape her, holding the threat of exposure above her from then on. He realizes that  he must act immediately. Yet he feels a terrible tension, apparently sourceless, but overwhelming.  After consciously surveying  every aspect of his plan, he still is impelled to fill what he perceives as a hole in his knowledge: "his brainwork was done.  His plans were complete. And yet there was one loose end. Not in the logic of his brain, but in spite of it—a loose end that he wished to tuck away. What his brain had proved his eyes were witless of. It was his eyes that needed confirmation" (G, p. 368. 294). The "one loose end" refers to the Twins, who have rebelled against Steerpike and whom he has left locked in their rooms to die. Actually, as the preceding quotation shows, the matter—the Twins' death—is connected with a non-rational part of Steerpike's character. The "confirmation" is important not to the mechanics of Steerpike's plans but to his sense of himself as all-knowning and all-powerful. He is not conscious of why he acts as he does, but the impulse is too powerful to resist: "Steerpike was aware ... that he was behaving strangely. He could have stopped himself at any moment. But to have stopped himself would have been to have stopped a valve—to have bottled up something which would have clamored for release.... He was watching himself, but only so that he should miss nothing. He was the vehicle through which the gods were working. The dim primordial gods of power and blood" (G, pp. 381, 303). In the Twins' apartment, unaware that Flay, Titus and Prunesquallor have followed him, he releases his confined self and begins to dance and to "strut like a cockerel about the bodies of the women he had imprisoned, humiliated, and starved to death" (G, p. 381, 304). After glorying in his defiance, Steerpike rests,
emotionally satisfied but still consciously afraid of this newly-discovered part of himself: "In looking back and seeing himself strutting like a cock about their bodies, he realized that he had been close to lunacy. This was the first time that any such thought had entered his head, and to dismiss it he crowed like a cock. He was not afraid of strutting; he had known what he was doing; to prove it he would crow and crow again. Not that he wished to do so, but to prove that he could stop whenever he wanted, and start
when he wished to, and be all the while in complete control of himself, for there was no madness in him" (G, pp. 383, 305). The natural desire to escape the brutal life of a kitchen servant has, under the rigid control Steerpike has cultivated to circumvent Gormenghast's ritual, evolved into vicious, selfish hatred of everything around him. While Steerpike consciously has tried to save himself, that self has degenerated into something murderous and uncontrollable. So Steerpike turns back to business: "He was
himself again, or perhaps he had ceased to be himself (G. 384, 306). He has chosen an attractive appearance—or appearances—to gain domination over everyone in Gormenghast. He has seen himself as an ice-cold, purely rational manipulator. But the emotions he has denied still exist, though in grotesque, distorted forms. They steadily have gathered force to escape Steerpike's conscious control.

Consequently when he realizes that he has been found out, Steerpike immediately discards his careful schemes and is half glad to be openly himself: "A red cloud filled his head. His body shuddered with a kind of lust... for an unbridled evil. It was the glory of knowing himself to be pitted, openly, against the big battalions" (G, p. 385, 307) Rushing from the room, Steerpike flees, "turning left and right like a wild creature as he made his way ever deeper into a nether empire" (G, p. 386, 308). Finally driven out of his hiding place by the flood that engulfs Gormenghast, Steerpike is trapped by a search party led by Titus. His self-control almost completely gone, Steerpike scarcely can master himself enough to devise a new hiding place in the ivy matted on the castle wall:

he began to experience again, but with even greater intensity those sensations that had affected him when, with the skeletons of the titled sisters at his feet, he had strutted about their relics as though in the grip of some primoridan [sic] power. This sensation was something so utterly alien to the frigid nature of his conscious brain that he had no means of understanding what was happening within himself at this deeper level, far less of warding off the urge to show himself....

He no longer wanted to kill his foe in darkness and in silence, his lust was to stand naked upon the moonlit stage, with his arms stretched high, and his fingers spread, and with the warm fresh blood that soaked them sliding down his wrists, spiralling his arms and steaming in the cold night air—to suddenly drop his arms like talons to his breast and tear it open to expose a heart like a black vegetable—and then, upon the crest of self-exposure, and the sweet glory of wickedness, to create some gesture of supreme defiance, lewd and rare.... 

There was nothing left, no, of the brain that would have scorned all this. The brilliant Steerpike had become a cloud of crimson (G, pp. 496-97> 397-98).

Finally, as Titus drives at him through the ivy, Steerpike delays defending himself to utter a cry of defiance, and Titus' knife rips the life out of him (G, p. 499, 399).

Steerpike uses Gormenghast's tradition for his own ends, but by conforming to that tradition he denies his individual personality a chance to grow freely. His death shows the futile, self-destructive attempt to seize control. Yet Steerpike excites grudgingly sympathy—at least—as well as horror, because he represents a submerged  side of normal character. Despite his monstrous actions and more monstrous plans, he develops consistently with his first appearance as a young man trying to escape an intolerable future
in a situation where the rules can only repress people who wish to live in their own way, to satisfy themselves. 

That description, of course, could apply to Titus as well. In fact though Steerpike and Titus become bitter enemies in the course of the story, they resemble each other very much in some ways. In the eyes of Gormenghast, heresy (echoing Satan's act of rebellion against Divine Law) is the ultimate sin. Both young men are either secretly or potentially guilty of this crime. Steerpike is specifically compared to Satan several times and Titus, too, indulges in rebellious "devilment" (G, pp. 15, 7 & 19, 11). These comparisons between Steerpike and Satan increase the reader's horror of Steerpike, but they carefully stop short of full  religious force.  Thus the reader is shocked at Steerpike's mode of rebelling: however, Peake does not label rebellion itself as evil. Steerpike's rebellion is not so much against Gormenghast as against his prescribed place in the castle. Actually, his plan to improve his position unconsciously echoes the self-delusion of the men who built Gormenghast, imagining they could see life whole and master it. Beyond this, Steerpike's and Titus' attitudes differ, and thus so do the actions of which they are capable. Titus treats servants as convenient devices (G, p. 19, 11): Steerpike, though, considers all people merely tools. Titus is not aware of his own  shortsightedness, but Steerpike sees very clearly what his actions do to people. Titus wants to have power over himself, and he pays little attention to most people; Steerpike must control others to feed his hunger for power. Thus Steerpike turns inward, taking his pleasure in exercising absolute power over the Twins in their gloomy warren: "He had led them gradually, and by easy and cunning steps, from humiliation to humiliation, until the distorted
satisfaction he experienced in this way had become little short of necessity to him" (G, p. 48, 35). Titus turns outward, exploring the castle alone for his pure delight. Titus lives for himself. Steerpike lives against others.

Titus' development presents an alternative response to the tyranny of a tradition-bound, purposeless future. Titus feels this need dimly at the beginning of Gormenghast, but he is still unable to articulate it clearly. As in Titus Groan, ritual tries to create love ot Gormenghast in Titus, but Titus is instinctively repelled by that kind of life. Even as a boy, he wants at least to "pretend... to be free" (G, p. 98, 75). 

Titus is attracted by the world outside Gormenghast, because there he can escape the restrictions of his official role. When he does find a secret way out of the castle, he experiences real solitude for the flrst time. However, unfamiliar with this freedom from restraint, Titus is uneasy: "now, what he had loved he loathed. ... For it was as though he were being drawn towards some dangerous place or person, and that he had no power to hold himself back" (G, p. 132, 103). He does not know what to do with himself. But he catches sight of another human figure, springing so freely through the forest that it seems to be flying. He cannot believe that such a creature really can exist, it is so close to his deepest longing (G, p. 133, 104). Actually, it is Keda's child, now called the Thing, who lives alone in the forest. As in Titus Groan, Titus immediately responds to the kind of freedom the Thing represents, an important part of his nature is in tune with hers.

Yet, as with Steerpike, the two show differences as well as similarities. Despite Titus' intuitive supernatural link to the Thine, Peake is careful to describe the Thing as a thing, presented through images suggesting the unthinking, nonhuman order of nature: "as the light quickened the creature moved in its sleep. The eyes opened. They were clear and green as sea stones and were set in a face that was colored and freckled like a robin's egg" (G, p. 178, 141). By contrast, Titus cannot simply reflect the world around him, he must think about it (G, p 187, 148). Titus cannot repress his instincts—and does not try very hard—but he is not overwhelmed by them. Instead, he tries to understand what he
feels and act on the basis of that understanding.

Titus' problem is that, since he is a young boy, his powerful feelings have little experience to support them. His picture of himself naturally is confused. Moreover, his feelings seem to pull in several directions. He wishes to be free of Gormenghast at the same time that he rejoices in possessing it. But he does not want Gormenghast to possess him.  He cannot accept the narrow role set up for him, either as a matter of course or as a calculated maneuver. His instinct of self-preservation is too strong to compromise. Thus he is repelled by the whole mechanical ritual of Gormenghast (G, pp. 169-70, 134-35), and when Steerpike winks at him, Titus is sickened: "beyond his knowledge, beyond his
power of reason, a revulsion took hold of him and he recoiled from that wink like flesh from the touch of a toad" (G, p. 147, 116). After accidentally insulting Steerpike, Titus refuses to apologize because he realizes that "he had cried 'shut-up' to the arch symbol of all the authority and repression which he loathed" (G, p.310, 247). He faints, but he does not submit. For Titus instinctively hates the power Steerpike serves and the devious compromise that gives him a grip on that power.

As a complement to his hatred of Steerpike, his attraction to the Thing  pushes Titus toward maturity. His growth is not simple, though. Deviance of everything around him does not in itself help  Titus find  any new way to live. Separated from the Thing, after Steerpike is outlawed, Titus drifts. His emotions seem to lack object. He feels that all things are equally vulgar. Instead, in this mood  of total rejection, he performs his ritual duties earnestly because they  give his life some value, however flimsy. The Thing shakes him out of this fearful lethargy when she interrupts a castle ceremony to steal a carving that she desires. The violation of ritual stabs at the castle's heart—and Titus, "sick with excitement" (G p. 403, 322), feels a powerful emotion he had almost forgotten! He violates the ceremony himself, running after the Thing, drawn by "something more fundamental than tradition" (G, p. 407, 325). He loves the Thing for what she represents: "it was that Gormenghast meant nothing to his [sic] elastic switch of a girl!... She was freedom" (G, pp 411, 358}.

This section of Gormenghast troubles some critics who have difficulty figuring out what to make of the Thing. ⁶ Is she a character? Is she a symbol? What is she? In fact she can be both. Fantasy does give a writer exactly this opportunity to identify a character with an abstract principle. Two things must be accomplished, however, if the writer is to avoid sterile allegory. First, the action must be physically convincing. We have seen how Peake's gift for visual detail accomplishes this. Secondly, the action must ring true psychologically. Even if we cannot always account "realistically" for all aspects of a character's personality, we must be convinced of the emotional plausibility of what we see. In this case, Titus—unwillingly shaped by Gormenghast and its values - reaches out toward the Thing—unknowingly produced by free nature. Whatever made her what she is and whatever made her represent all she does to Titus, the real question is whether Peake can sustain our sense of vivid, surprising growth or whether he will let the story lapse into a neat, orderly puppet show.

Considering Peake's earlier description of Gormenghast's folly, the latter course clearly is closed to him. Yet he also recognizes the essential human need to find some place to stand amid the rush of chaotic events. The  difficulty is that each individua1 must find his own place. 

This is what Titus begins to discover.  When he finds the Thing squatting in a cave  and eating a freshly killed magpie, Titus glories in her freedom  from any tradition, her animal originality. Yet he also discovers the limits of such total freedom when he tries to talk to her: " the first sound which Titus heard her utter bore no relation to human speech. Nor did the tone of it convey that he was being answered even in a language of her own. It was a sound, quite solitary and detached. It had no concern with   communication.... So divorced was it, this nameless utterance from the recognized sounds of the human throat, that it left Titus in no doubt that she was incapable of civilized speech and not only »his but that she had not understood a word he had said" (G, p. 421, 336-37). The Thing's death by lightning, a moment later, confirms Titus' discovery that he must live without his dream of purely non-rational, instinctive freedom. The Thing is as free as a perfect animal, but Titus recognizes that he is a human being. At the same time, however, he does not fall back into negation. Rather, at seventeen, Titus puts childhood behind him: "He was himself.... He had learned that there were other ways of life from the ways of his great home.... He had emptied the bright goblet of romance.... The glass of it lay scattered on the floor. But with the beauty and ugliness, the ice and fire of it on his tongue and in his blood he could begin again" (G, p. 424, 338-39).

The next necessary step in Titus' development is the public declaration of his independence from Gormenghast. During the flood, after he watches Steerpike steal his canoe, Titus rushes to the Countess with the news of Steerpike's new hiding place. But all the reasons Titus blurts out for hating Steerpike are personal: '"He stole my boat! He hurt Fuchsia. He killed Flay. He frightened me. I do not care if it was rebellion against the Stones—most of it was theft, cruelty and murder.... He must be caught and slain. He killed Flay. He hurt my sister. He stole my boat. Isn't that enough? To hell with Gormenghast'" (G, p. 459, 367-68).

Having begun to discover who he is and to verbalize that sense of self, Titus must test himself in action. Yet the motion still is not as clearly directed as it might appear. Leading the party that traps Steerpike, Titus tastes the sweetness of his own  power to command others, to make them do as he wishes though he recognizes that such power is dangerous, "for it grew, this bullying would taste  ever sweeter and fiercer and the naked cry of freedom would become no more than a memory" (G, pp. 469, 376}.

At this time, Titus' thoughts revert to the Thing much more than the  situation demands. He remembers her again as the trap draws tighter around Steerpike: "Two images kept floating before his eyes, one of a creature, slender and tameless; a creature who, defying him, defying  Gormenghast, defying the tempest, was yet  innocent  as air or the lightning that  killed her, and the other of a small  empty room with his sister lying alone upon a stretcher, harrowingly human, her eyes closed  [Fuchsia has drowned]. And nothing else mattered to him but that these two should be avenged - that he should strike" (G, p.476, 381). 

Titus' blaming Fuchsia's death on Steerpike is not altogether unjust. It is Fuchsias growing melancholia, following her discovery of Steerpike's evil, that leads her to stand poised at her window though she actually falls into the water by accident. But  Steerpike does not even know the Thing exists and certainly is not responsible for her death. The connection found by Titus exists at a pre-rational level, and actually is based on the similarity between the two young men. Both, on their separate levels, are trapped in an unyielding, unfeeling social order. They both are too alive to submit. Steerpike acts in a way that Titus cannot, by exploiting his feigned submission to gain power. But Titus is not immune to the temptation to possess Gormenghast. Even after the Thing's death, he is torn between accepting or rejecting his role as lord of Gormenghast. Just as Steerpike attracts as well as repels the reader, the course of action Steerpike represents must attract Titus even while it repels him. ⁷

Ritual is one possible guide for Titus's life, and the adults around him have submitted to ritual in one degree or another. Looking at the people close to his own age, Titus can observe three alternative ways of life, models of selfhood. Steerpike is adept but two-faced and vicious; the Thing is healthily unrestrained but nonhuman; Fuchsia, although she seems to possess the greatest capacity for growth because of her clear insights, is too romantic to develop her understanding of what she sees and lacks an instinct of self-preservation. No individual offers a fully developed and attractive alternative to submission to the laws of Gormenghast. Titus must grow through and past these failed
courses of action. He must learn what he can from them, then discard them. Only after they are dead to him (figuratively—or literally) can he find his own course. Thus Titus' thoughts link the Thing, Fuchsia and Steerpike—because he needs Steerpike's death m the same way he had needed the others' without admitting it to himself.

Just before he spies Steerpike in the ivy and dives at him, Titus' real desire is not simply revenge for the death of the object of his romantic imagination, or for the death of the sister who mixed romanticism and realism as a way of life. Rather Titus has built a new maturity : "a kind of power climbed through him like sap. Not the power of Gormenghast. or the pride of lineage... but vengeance and sudden death and the knowledge that he was not watching any more, but living at the  core of drama" (G, p. 493-
395). Thus the components of Titus' rage show that he has learned all he can by his fascination with the alien Thing, his sympathetic pity for Fuchsia, and his hatred for Steerpike. He no longer needs to delay in uncertainty. As he acts now against Steerpike, directing the searchers, he feels at once a focus for all of life and also "only himself."

And now, with Steerpike dead, Titus can act on his feeling that he has outgrown Gormenghast, and his hunger for a setting outside Gormenghast's categories. In so doing, he is not actually free, but is following "a law as old as the laws of his home. The law of flesh and blood. The law of longing. The law of change. The law of youth" (G, p. 508, 407). Earlier, Peake has stressed Titus' membership in the human race and thus his being subject to needs and pressures more basic than the demands of Gormenghast's
ritual. Actually, in Titus and all the other characters, passion is the root of every action. Emotion cannot be repressed indefinitely without it exploding, as in Steerpike's life, in behavior more aberrant than any open display could have been. Even directing emotion through accepted channels tends to warp the individual, making him fit only for a constricted life. Judging from the failure of the characters who deny themselves in sincere or feigned service to ritual, it appears that emotion should be allowed to develop freely, to take its rightful share of command of human actions with the intellect. Thus, as he struggles to discover himself, Titus may behave selfishly and meanly, viewed from the perspective of ritual. The reader may even find Titus as unsympathetic, at times, as he finds Steerpike. But according to Peake, Titus still is doing the only thing that can help him find meaningful freedom. He has thought and doubted long enough: now he must act according to his own feelings.

The kind of action Titus must take—and the kind of world in which he must be able to act—are sketched in the remaining two works in the series. Before turning to them, however, I should repeat that these first two novels, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, form a unit by themselves. At the end of Gormenghast  the situation set up in Titus Groan  has developed to a conclusion. It is not simply  that many of the characters are dead: Titus has broken  away from Gormenghast  to find a new life. A phase of his growth is over; a  dramatic movement is complete. These two books contain a richness of  detail, a convincing grasp of psychology, and  a depth of human concern that mark a great work. The vividness with which Gormenghast is described, the careful presentation of characters - and in particular of Titus' passionate groping toward a true sense of himself —all work with Peake's thorough presentation his thesis concerning individual freedom versus tradition. I believe Titus Groan and Gormenghast  form a unified, successful whole.

Peake's next work dealing with Titus, the novelette "Boy in Darkness " was commissioned by Peake's publishers for a collection of three' original stories, Sometime, Never. Although "Boy in Darkness" could fit chronologically somewhere in the middle of Gormenghast, it represents a major step toward the world shown in Titus Alone. Apparently Peake was preparing himself to write another major novel to carry Titus forward into another stage of development.

In "Boy in Darkness," Titus is just fourteen years old, still imprisoned within the castle's ritual. He already knows that he hates "the eternal round of deadly symbolism,"⁸ and on the night of his fourteenth birthday he instinctively seizes the chance to escape. His flight takes him into a nightmarish country outside the castle. There, captured by two grossly ugly, semi-human creatures, the Goat and the Hyena, Titus is carried toward their master, the Lamb—in the person of whom Peake simultaneously attacks religion and science.

The religious implications of the Lamb are first apparent. The Lamb lives alone, blind, in an underground apartment lit by candles and carpeted in blood-red (cf. Revelation 7:14, 12:11). His face is "angelically white" (cf. 1 Peter 1:19), and his hands move "in a strangely parsonic way" ("Boy," pp. 189-190). the Lamb is, of course, a traditional religious symbol of innocence and purity; Christ is described as "the Lamb of God" (John 1:29). In Peake's story, too, the Goat mumbles to himself that the Lamb '"is the heart of life and love, and that is true because he tells us so'" ("Boy," p. 174). So the Goat and the Hyena treat the Lamb with religious awe, as they pray to him: "O thou by whom we live and
breathe and are!" ("Boy," p. 209; cf. Revelation, 5:13). Their awe is justified; though he did not create them in the first place, the Lamb has made them what they are. Specifically, the Lamb has changed the natures of all living things, shaping them to resemble the beasts they are most like spiritually. With the change they have died except for the Goat and the Hyena who have survived because of "their coarseness of soul and fibre" ("Boy," p. 201). Most recent to die was the Lion, who "only an age ago, had collapsed in
a mockery of power.... It was a great and terrible fall: yet it was merciful, for, under the macabre aegis of the dazzling Lamb, the one time king of beasts was brought to degradation" ("Boy," PP. 201-202). Thus the Lamb has ironically fulfilled an image from popular religion, by making the lion lie down with the lamb. Now, as he surveys Titus, Lamb's hand flutter "like little white doves" ("Boy," p. 213), another symbol of spiritual virtue. While he boy sleeps, the Lamb waits, lusting to change his nature too, but with "his hands together, as though in prayer" ("Boy," p. 216).

The host of specifically religious suggestions and images, in a story that until now has been devoid of such concern, suggests very strongly that Peake is here referring to the Christian religion as a debasing  influence. ¹⁰ Peake's treatment of Gormenghast's ritual shows that he dislikes any system of values imposed on the individual from outside, offering him nothing directly relevant for himself and encouraging him in whatever weakness he possesses. So here, the Lamb can break down but not build; despite his worshipper's praise, he does not really understand how to keep his creatures alive. Still the Lamb glories in his power. True, in changing men he has destroyed them, denying them freedom to develop for themselves; to the Lamb, however, that is incidental to his own gratification.

In addition to religion, however, Peake attacks modern technology. However different faith in religion and faith in science appear, they can function in the same way for their believers. When religion is employed systematically to manipulate and nullify human beings, it functions as a science for the priests who operate it; by the same token, when science gives man the satisfaction of godlike control over human beings, it serves a religious purpose for him. The country beneath which the Lamb lives is littered with the waste and debris of science and industry. Underground, also, is a dead wilderness of metal: "there had been a time when these deserted solitudes were alive with hope, excitement and conjecture on how the world was to be changed. But that was far beyond the skyline. All that was left was a kind of shipwreck. A shipwreck of metal... vistas of forgotten metal;
moribund, stiff in a thousand attitudes of mortality; with not a rat, "ot a mouse, not a bat, not a spider. Only the Lamb" ("Boy," p. 190). The Lamb belongs in this setting. He, too, like those who worked in metal and stone, thrives on change, though like that of the others it is a sterile, ego-directed change only. He hungers excitedly for more living things to alter according to his desires. 

Like the ritualists in Gormenghast, the Lamb frees the faithful from the responsibility of being individual human beings. Many of Peake's  characters seem to desire no more. In Gormenghast, for example, Bellgrove the schoolmaster gives up the masterful  role that had so impressed Irma Prunesquallor, because "there was no joy in will-power" (G. p. 340, 271). It is easier to drift, to let decisions be made by other  people, by momentary pressures and, above  all, by ritual rules. In "Boy in Darkness," the Lamb represents the tempting and horrifying surrender of self, this time as part of a specifically religious ritual. And, of course, the Lamb hates human beings, and his purpose in changing them is to destroy them. His only real pleasure is in the destruction of another living will, as the final proof of his power.

Facing the Lamb, Titus saves himself by using his strength of personality and his intelligence. Symbolically, when he attacks the Lamb, Titus reveals religion's physical and intellectual hollowness: Titus' sword "split the [Lamb's] head into two pieces which fell down on either side. There was no blood, or anything to be seen in the nature of a brain" ("Boy," p. 224). Titus evidently loses the memory of his experience, while returning to Gormenghast. Yet that experience may become part of him subconsciously, to give him strength for his later development. ¹¹

Titus Alone was written during a very difficult period for Peake. Describing his purpose, in a letter to his wife, Peake says he wishes "to canalize my chaos. To pour it out through the gutters of Gormenghast" (quoted in Gilmore, p. 107). But chaos was gaining on him. Maeve Gilmore, Peake's widow, describes his appalling nervous deterioration and the increasing difficulty he experienced in concentrating—and even in the physical activity of writing (Gilmore, p. 115).

In addition Peake faced a major test of his creative power in this final book, since Titus now must struggle toward greater maturity. As part of the escape from Gormenghast, Peake evidently had decided to let Titus find his way in what Gilmore calls "a world which was probably closer to this one [than Gormenghast] and yet alien" (Gilmore, p. 120). With his flight from Gormenghast, Titus has ceased to be a boy; to become a man he must find his way in a setting that adult readers can at least half-recognize, confronting a tradition that stems more directly from modern life. 

The society into which Titus wanders is technologically advanced. ¹² But its proud achievements are supported by the factories "where the scientists worked, like drones, to the glory of science and in praise of death" (TA, p. 159, 126). This is both figuratively and literally true. Traditional religion does not appear in Titus Alone, for it has been replaced by faith in the development of technology, of the conscious intellect by itself. As Muzzlehatch comments on Iitus destroying a robot spy-device: '"You have broken something quiet hideously efficient. You have blasphemed against the spirit of the age'" (TA, p. 106, 82). Like all who surrender themselves to this new faith, however, Cheeta's father is a distorted grotesque. His presence was a kind of subtraction.... For he was nothing: a creature of solitary intellect, unaware of the fact that humanly speaking, he was a kind of vacuum" (TA, pp. 184-185, 148). When his factory is destroyed, he collapses with the cry, '"It is all I had; my science, all that I had'" (TA, p. 251, 203).

The idea of technological superiority is not potent enough to unify people as well as does Gormenghast's tradition. However, because faith in technology is based on the same impulse to escape from personal freedom and doubt by asserting an objective principle over the self (the assertion made over the same volatile mixture of thought and passion) the society resembles Gormenghast—a heap of fragments, thronged with grotesques. The society in Titus Alone is unlike Gormenghast, however, in several specific ways. The society contains unexplained lapses, incongruous pockets of confused, frustrated activity like the Under River, which corresponds to a contemporary ghetto. But because
the society is less cohesive, its inhabitants must enforce unity more feverishly. While the Grey Scrubbers in Titus Groan  looked alike, here not only the workers but the police, symbols of state authority, are "identical in every way" (TA, p. 29, 18). Finally, the society of Titus Alone has less ability to sustain an appearance of health. Though Gormenghast is crumbling insensibly with age, Titus' new surroundings are willfully festering; the noise made by the factory belonging to Cheeta's father is "an endless impalpable sound
that, had it been translated into a world of odors, might have been likened to the smell of death: a kind of sweet decay" (TA, p. 167, 133). This new society is more incoherent, more intolerant of deviation, and even more dangerous to Titus' spirit than Gormenghast.

He becomes aware of this danger only gradually. Primarily he is trying to cut loose from his past and become an independent person. Titus is aided toward maturity by Muzzlehatch, zoo-keeper and renegade. Muzzlehatch is like Titus in the richness of his vision and his love of the world. The way Muzzlehatch adapts things to fit his dreams, however, stems from his being so intensely alive. Even his car has acquired a personality, become almost a living thing (TA, p. 61, 45). Unlike the Lamb, Muzzlehatch makes things more, rather than less than they are, because he can love the world's  variety. Muzzlehatch helps Titus because he recognizes that the young  man is like him in  hating the regimented society - in fact, Muzzlehatch comments that Titus is "'rather like a form  of me' " (TA,  p.65, 49).

Unlike Muzzlehatch, however, Titus barely can keep his sense of identity intact. He is  unable to settle into a relationship with any of the people who help him because he is afraid they can only help him to love in their ways. He does not yet know what his way is, but until he finds out he must maintain himself independent. Juno. for example, saves Titus from imprisonment by taking him into her custody. But Titus accepts her offer only out of weakness (TA, p. 88, 68). For Juno intends, in the most generous way possible, to possess Titus and give him her sense of direction.  Subconsciously recognizing this, he resolves to seduce her and thus "to bring the total of their relationship to a burning focus. To bring it all to an end" (TA, p. 91. 70). And so he moves on, feeling a mixture of "shame and liberation" (TA, p. 102, 79), to return to the search for an independent identity.

Early in the story, despite his desire for freedom, Titus still pictures himself as a lost fragment of Gormenghast. Followed by a floating, metal spy-sphere, Titus shatters the machine with the chunk of the Tower of Flints he has carried with him (TA, p. 103, 80), but later realizes that he has lost all physical proof of his past (TA, p. 105, 82). Muzzlehatch, however, advises him: "'Get on with life. Eat it up.... What of the castle you talk about—that crepuscular myth? Would you return after so short a journey?  No,
you must go on. Juno is part of your journey. So am I. Wade on child'" (TA, p. 107. 83}.

Titus does begin to age, and to act, as he wades on into the Under River, the haven tor criminals and outcasts. There he helps the Black Rose, pathetic slave of Veil, escape from her master. But Titus still is not able to love or be loved, though even he is repelled by his desire to flee from the Black Rose's need; '"Grief can be boring.' Titus was immediately sickened by his own words. They tasted foul on the tongue" (TA, p. 139, 110). Just so, Titus is forced to run away again from his gratitude to Muzzlehatch. He
exclaims, to the man who has just saved him again, '"I am too near you. I long to be alone. What shall I do?'" (TA, p. 143. 113). Muzzlehatch replies. '"The world is wide. Follow your instinct and get rid of us'" (TA, p. 144, 114).

The next person Titus falls in with, however, is not to be cast off easily—or understanding enough to wish Titus well when he must leave her. She is Cheeta, whom Peake describes as a "modern" beauty, perfect in each detail but distorted as a whole (TA, p. 160, 127). To Gheeta, who is so much a part of the modern world and its ritual, Titus is a mystery that she can neither solve nor dismiss. On his part, besides his usual reluctance to form an interdependent relationship with anyone else, Titus feels subtly repelled by Cheeta and disgusted by the factory her father owns (TA, p. 168, 134). But Gheeta, feeling that she is being robbed of "something miraculous" when Titus decides to leave her (TA, p. 173, 138), vows revenge.

 In fact, the thing that makes Titus so mysterious to Cheeta is the very thing that makes her hate him—the independent identity that strengthened itself until Cheeta can see Titus in the same way that once he  had seen citizens of the society: "she hated him. Hated his self-sufficiency" (TA, p. 183, 146). True, Titus' extreme form of self-sufficiency is unappealing to Cheeta, to most readers, and even to Titus at least part of the time; however, it is necessary to him in this period of his growth. At this stage, his only satisfying relationship is with a village maiden, described as "a rosy, golden thing" (TA, p. 206, 166}. By keeping himself thus free of entanglements, while exploring experience, Titus gains
understanding of the possibilities of experience and thus gains strength.

But although Titus is stronger, he does not feel secure yet. He always feels "the legions of Gormenghast" pressing close behind him, and he cries to the world around him, '"Give me some proof of me!'" (TA, p. 195, 157). Cheeta attacks him on this point, by ordering built a distorted replica of Gormenghast in order to humiliate Titus, or drive him insane by destroying his belief in himself. She plans well. Tricked into this setting, Titus is struck by "terror; not of Cheeta herself or of any human being, but of doubt. The doubt of his own existence" (TA, pp. 227-228, 184). 

Muzzlehatch arrives just in time to break the mood and save Titus once more. In doing all this Muzzlehatch represents more than a handy dew ex machina; he is exhibiting a facet of maturity that Titus has not yet attained. Titus has been so busy maintaining himself that he has found no time to develop relationships with others. As he reels under Cheeta's attack, though, he asks: "Why had he been so singled out? What had he done? Was the fact that he had never loved her for herself but only out of lust, was this so
dire a thing?" (TA, p. 236, 190). However defensively, Titus' questioning of himself suggests both an awareness of responsibility and a glimpse of personal failure. In the story's context, though, the question is difficult. Cheeta's hatred of Titus is perverted and vile; Titus' aloofness is a necessary phase of his development. But beyond the stage in which Titus finds himself, of self definition  by unrestrained experience, Muzzlehatch has learned that he cannot live by himself. At the beginning of Titus Alone, he loves the animals in his zoo, but even then he finds that they are not  enough: "he wanted something else. He wanted words" (TA, p. 95,73). After his zoo is destroyed by the police because he has helped  Titus, Muzzlehatch first flees, broken in spirit, then returns because of a desire to revenge himself by destroying the factory belonging to Cheeta's father—and because of an urge to help Titus. Their relationship has become a kind of love and Muzzlehatch has come to realize that meaning comes not only from the self but from the relationship of the self to others.

Titus has not come that far yet, but he may be on the way. He is essentially like Muzzlehatch, and he has passed through this difficult period without becoming corrupt. Titus' restraint from human involvement is not viciousness, and it need not be a permanent condition. At the very end of the book, wandering again in wilderness, Titus realizes he is near Gormenghast. If he wishes, he can look at the castle again to reinforce his identity; he can even enter it and return to his inherited role. He refuses: "He had no longer any need for home, for he carried his Gormenghast within him. All that he sought was jostling within himself. He had grown up" (TA, pp. 262-263, 212). He is at the end of a period of doubt and defensiveness, ready to begin self-assured exploration. 

As it stands, Titus Alone  is as unfinished as Titus Groan would be if it were considered by itself. I have analyzed what I take to be Peake's intent to make Titus' maintenance of himself the foundation for later human connections. The change has not yet been worked out fully in Titus Alone. Instead the book's short chapters and choppy writing further emphasize Titus' confusion. By this time, however, Peake was unable to develop his thoughts fully, and only notes survive for the fourth book of the series (Gilmore, p. 106).

Because Peake's illness probably affected the writing of Titus Alone and because the series is itself a developing and in complete structure, it is difficult to evaluate Peake's books about Titus as a finished work. Perhaps a fairer question is whether or not the stories accurately represent man's sense of himself as an unfinished, growing being. I believe that they do. The Titus series is overwhelmingly concerned with Becoming, rather than with fallen man's unchangeable state of Being, and shows great faith in the
individual's ability to become a stable, free individual. Peake offers no moral judgements of a young person's actions as he matures. For  Peake, the weight of moral standards comes from their being part of a tradition, and any tradition lies outside the individual potential and needs. Thus adherence to a morality impedes development of the whole self and denies real maturity. Titus' value are based on what works or fails for him, what pleases him  or makes him feel  shame. Man lives' Peake shows us, in a fantastic world, unfathomable by any mind; therefore, one cannot rely on outside teaching, but must throw himself headlong into life, transcendenting any limiting scheme.  Titus lives through a series of vivid  experiences, developing through them in a convincing manner. Titus grows beyond the limits of his tradition to become a freeminded, sympathetic man.

As a presentation of this idea, Peake's work is very impressive. In particular, his first novels —Titus Groan and Gormenghast— form a vivid and convincing unit. Even in their unfinished state, Peake's stories of Titus Groan deserve their popularity for their successfully humanistic conception of contemporary man. It is unfortunate that physical illness kept Peake from continuing his depiction of Titus' development. But there is joy and wonder in what he completed.

Notes

1. "Gormenghast," Time and Tide 31 (Oct. 21, 1950), 1065.

2. We face two major problems in setting up an analysis of the Titus stories. One concerns the overall form of Peake's work. Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959), can be considered a trilogy, with "Boy in Darkness" (1956) an outlying fragment. Actually in commenting on the effects of the nervous disease that left Peake steadily less able to work or think connectedly, Peake's widow says that Titus Alone is only "the last book in what was called a trilogy, but which would never have ended if
I nature in her aggressive way had not taken possession of all that made him a unique person" (Gilmore, p. 105). I intend to examine Peake's work in its natural units, rather than in divisions artificially imposed by his illness. Titus Groan and Gormenghast form one such unit. Not only did the writing of another novel, Mr. Pye (1953), intervene between Gormenghast and the two later works, but Titus Groan and Gormenghast form a whole by themselves. These first two novels stick closely to the same setting and center on the
same characters and issues, Gormenghast actually beginning with a synopsis of the first novel. Years pass before Peake returns to Titus, in "Boy in Darkness" and Titus Alone, and both the setting of the story and the focus of Peake's concern have undergone striking changes.

Peake's illness is the source of the second problem. As his widow says above, illness impaired Peake's ability to develop the design of the Titus stories. In addition, Peake's handwriting deteriorated severely. Thus Titus Alone offers severe textual problems, the manuscript being extremely uncertain and semi-legible as well. Both published versions required editorial choice and guesswork (in addition to Gilmore, see Batchelor, pp. 114-123, for a description of how both published versions differ from Peakes manuscript; see also Langdon Jones' note on his labors in preparing the second edition of Titus Alone [London: Eyrie & Spott.swoode, 1970], pp.7-8).  Thereafter, this essay will use the second, fuller edition of Titus Alone as its text.

3. TG, p. 358 (280).

4. In A New Romantic Anthology, ed. Stefan Schimanski and Henry Treece (Norfolk: New Directions, 1949), p. 80. Hereafter referred to as "Romantic Novel."

5.  Gormenghast, pp. 83-84 (63).

6. In tlie study cited above, for example, John Batchelor First states that "the 'Thing'... is to be seen as the embodiment of the entire natural world. Her death creates a disharmony in the universe, which then mourns her with a flood which engulfs the castle" (p. 96), but later calls her "a false goddess who deserves death by thunderbolt, although this is also a pathetic, and therefore morally exalting death" (p. 99). The scene is especially perplexing  when one remembers that the Thing is killed by a bolt of lightning — surely another "natural" force. Batchelor attributes this discontinuity to inconsistent characterization; "why," he asks, "should the spirit of nature slaughter a missel-thrush?" (p. 98). The answer must be that "the spirit of nature" can do anything. Nature does not have to fit our sense of decorum. The desire for consistency—as is the desire for a pretty, literally denatured existence —is characteristic of Gormenghast, not of the world around it. And we have seen what hollow pretension and folly that desire leads to.

7. C. N. Manlove also observes that Titus and Steerpike are very much alike (Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, p. 246); unfortunately Manlove uses this perception to question Titus' motives in rejecting Gormenghast. Manlove looks for clearly comprehensible purpose, not appreciating how Titus is trying to work his way through a tangle of contradictory desires. (In a later essay, Manlove attacks the characterization of Steerpike also, stating that his keeping the Twins alive so long is "without explanation" ["A World in Fragments: Peake and the Titus Books," The Mervyn Peake Review, Autumn, 1980, p. 12]. Again, Manlove wants to oversimplify, missing the implication that it is the very rigidness of Steerpike's self-control in public that forces him to keep someone hidden whom he can humiliate and manipulate.)

8. (London: Eyrie & Spottiswoode, 1956), p. 159.

9. The image does not come directly from the Bible. There, in Isaiah 11:6, "The wolf... shall dwell with the lamb, and the eopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the falling together...." However, the notion of the lion and lamb, in particular, lying down together has become a part of in popular Christian imagery all the way down to Christmas cards.

10. Although Peake was the son of a Congregational medical missionary he did not participate in formal religion himself. Also Peake's widow refers to the problems they experienced in gaining her tradionally Catholic parents' permission to marry, and she quotes from a poem published in Peake's last collection of poetry: "How  foreign to the spirit's early  beauty/and to the amoral integrity of the mind /and to all those whose reserve of living is lovely? Are the tired Greeds that can be so unkind" (Gilmor, p.25).

11. Edwin Morgan suggests as much in "The Walls of Gormenghast - An Introduction to the Novels of Mervyn Peake," Chicago Review, 14 (1960), 76.

12.Some space exploration has been accomplished, a situation common to science fiction at the time Peake wrote (cf. chapter 18 and 19). 

Joseph L. Sanders  

© Overlook press", 1995 

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