FUCHSIA AND STEERPIKE: MOOD AND FORM

G. Peter Winnington

When Mervyn Peake wrote Titus Groan, he knew what mood he wanted to create and he worked to achieve it, but he let the precise form of the book come by itself; he had no preconceived idea of how the plot was to develop. Consequently, the correlates of time and space in which the action takes place are riddled with inconsistency. On the other hand, those elements which go to make up the mood of the book, in particular the choice of words and images, hang together perfectly. To demonstrate one small aspect of this, I shall examine the language Peake used to describe the meetings between Fuchsia and Steerpike in Titus Groan and Gormenghast.

First of all, let’s consider the plot and the lack of detailed advance planning. Peake's notes show that, right from the start, Fuchsia was destined to meet a tragic end that would closely involve Steerpike. But for nine years, Peake was undecided as to the manner of her death. In October 1940, when he had written about a hundred pages of Titus Groan (Steerpike was still locked up and the christening scene was still to be completed), Peake thought that Steerpike should kill Fuchsia. On December 13 the same year, he wondered, "Does she commit suicide or is she killed by Steerpike?" (From the manuscripts at University College, London, Box 1, Notebook iii, hereafter abbreviated thus: MS 1.iii. I have silently corrected Peake's spelling, but left the punctuation unchanged.) He imagines "a terrible scene" in which she strikes him for suggesting that they should marry. "Thinking she has killed him [she] goes through a mental agony, revisits her attic and burn her treasures? & is burned with them. Has taken poison from [Steerpike's] purloined bottles. ????" (MS 1.iii)

Even when Gormenghast was well advanced in July 1949, we find Peake still wondering, “?? Does Steerpike give Fuchsia a child and she kills him and finding herself pregnant — kills herself (MS 3.iv). As he developed the idea of the flood, the possibility of her drowning occurred to him: “Fuchsia climbs to her attic, either slip on stairs or leaps from her attic window having tied a great weight around her body” (MS 3.iv). And so he came to write that poignant death scene which Mr. Batchelor summarizes so heartlessly (and inaccurately): "Fuchsia drowns herself by leaping from a window" (Batchelor, p. 70). It's important to get the details right: after Steerpike has been unmasked, Fuchsia's discovery of his true nature causes her to lapse into a state of melancholy—a predisposition for which she inherited from her father. At the height of the flood, she conceives the idea of suicide and, playing a game rather than acting deliberately, she climbs onto the windowsill. Her reverie is interrupted by a knock on the door of her room. Starting at the sound and finding herself dangerously balanced upon a narrow sill above the deep water, she trembled uncontrollably, and in trying to turn without sufficient thought or care, she slipped and clutching at the face of the wall at her side found nothing to grasp, so that she fell, striking her dark head on the sill as she passed, and was already unconscious before the water received her, and drowned her at its ease” (G p.454, 363). 

Although her death is accidental, Steerpike is partially responsible for it, as the main cause of her depression. It seems so appropriate, so tragically inevitable, almost predictable. This impression derives not from the action, but from other elements which we can examine in the meetings between Fuchsia and Steerpike. (For the sake of convenience, I have listed these meetings and will refer to them by number.)

The first meeting is particularly revealing in this respect. As Fuchsia approaches her attic room, Steerpike lies on the floor, pretending to be in a faint. In the “deathly stillness”, he can hear Fuchsia's heart beating (TG, p.153, 119). The fatal nature of the encounter is underlined remorselessly in the next sentence "For the first few moments, Fuchsia had remained inert, her spirit dead to what she saw before her. As with those who on hearing of the death of their lover are numb to the agony that must later wrack them, so she for those first few moments stood incomprehensive and stared with empty eyes" (p.153, 119). Later we are told that she does not know whether he is "recovering or dying"(p.154, 119); the idea of his dying in her room is appalling to her (p.155, 120). In another writer's work, this would point to Steerpike's death. For Peake, it is rather the "aura" of death that surrounds their relationship.

This first meeting takes place in semi-darkness, lighted only by the single candle Fuchsia holds. In contrast to this darkness, there is the fire of emotion that flares up within her, prefiguring her brief love for Steerpike, and echoing "the agony that must later wrack" her: "As she stood there it was as though within her a bonfire had been lighted. It grew until it reached the zenith of its power and died away, but undestroyable among the ashes lay the ache of a wound for which there was no balm" (p.154,119). Peake also used the sunflower (pp.155-6, 120-21) to underline this image of the "burning passion" that ends in death.

 These elements of death, darkness and fire form a leitmotiv to the subsequent meetings between Fuchsia and Steerpike. Two of them (numbers 5 and 8) take place beside graves; in the eighth, "they were using for their pillow the narrow grassy grave-mound of her old nurse" (G, p.195, 154); the third is set against the “death-throes" of a sunset (TG, p.292, 228); in the seventh, evocation of their second meeting causes the atmosphere to became "deathly silent" (G, p.24, 282) and at their final meeting, Fuchsia's eyes "appeared quite dead" (G, p.353, 282).

Death and darkness are clearly connected in this context, as in the “death-throes" of the sunset. The meetings almost invariably take place in twilight, or involve a progression towards shadow. In fact, a general movement towards greater darkness may be observed, culminating in the "depression of utter blackness [that] drowned" Fuchsia (G, p.395, 315). A few instances: 

Meeting 2: hardly have they met when they find that “the autumn sunlight had given way to a fast tattered sky" (TG, p.274, 214). Soon, rain is falling "in a mass of darkness”. The recesses of the cave in which they shelter are "in deep darkness" but they remain "in the dull light near the shielded entrance"(p.277,216). Just as they refrain from going into the deeper darkness of the cave, so do their hands, which are close together, abstain from making contact (cf. meeting 9).

Meeting 3: Steerpike's disquisition on equality opens as they pass "into the light of the sinking sun" (TG, p.291, 227); when it ends, "they walked on in silence, and by the time they had reached the castle night had descended" (p.293, 229).

Meeting 5: the conversation takes place as "they were treading into the shadow of a tower" (TG, p.341, 266).

Meeting 7: although this is a daylight meeting, Fuchsia's room “darkened, for half the light from her window was suddenly obscured by the miraculous appearance of the young man with high shoulders" (G, p.23, 14). By the time he has left, a few minutes later, "the sky had darkened" (p.25, 16).

Meeting 8: in the dramatic parting that follows their fall onto Nannie Slagg's grave, Fuchsia "bounded like a wild thing into the darkness” (G, p.195, 154).

Meeting 9: here the terms are more general; Steerpike is her "man of the dusk"; "their hands met involuntarily in the darkness" (both p.344,275).

The last meeting is the darkest of all: Steerpike extinguishes Fuchsia's candle and thrusts her into his unlighted room. The darkness towards which they progress is synonymous with the fatal character of their relationship; it also reflects Fuchsia's melancholy nature, "more easily drawn to the dark than the light" (G, p. 452, 362), and helps to explain, in metaphorical terms, how she is attracted to Steerpike.

He, who so detests love, cold-bloodedly kindles her love for him, and it flares up, as in the bonfire image of the first meeting. At the height of the blaze, when Steerpike is planning to seduce her, Fuchsia comes to her midnight rendezvous, "her pupils dilated in the darkness" (p. 350, 279) and commits the error of lighting a candle at Steerpike's door. "It was but a few moments before his swift, narrow, high-shouldered form was upon her and had snatched the candle from her hand and crushed out flame. In another moment his key had teen turned in the lock and she had been hustled through the door. He locked it from the inside, in the darkness, but he had already whispered fiercely "Fool.” With that word the world turned over. Everything changed" (p.351, 280).

Out goes the fire. Her love is extinguished. "She turned on her heel, in the darkened room, and before he had lit the lamp, “Let me out of here,” she said" (G, p.353, 281). The literal and the metaphorical planes work together to emphasize the abrupt transition. “There you were, like a bonfire," says Steerpike (p.354, 283), echoing the simile used to describe their first meeting (when Fuchsia also had a candle in her hand). Now, even the gift of a monkey cannot rekindle her passion: "What would once have inflamed her with excitement, left her now, at this paralyzing moment, quite frozen” (p.353, 282). And "undestroyable among the ashes lay the ache of a wound for which there was no balm” (TG, p. 154, 119).

I have neglected the intervening references to fire in favor of the striking bonfire simile. But we cannot pass over the most memorable fire of all, when Steerpike burns down the library. The chapter ends with Fuchsia's glimpse of Steerpike through the window she is about to break: "As Fuchsia began to swing her arm at the high window she focused her eyes upon it and found herself staring at a face—a face framed with darkness within a few feet of her own. It sweated firelight, the crimson shadows shifting across it as the flames leapt in the room below. Only the eyes repelled the lurid air. Close-set as nostrils they were not so much eyes as narrow tunnels through which the Night was pouring" (TG, p.319, 249). Notice how the fire is on Fuchsia's side of course, and is "repelled" by Steerpike's eyes. The capitalized "Night" is something of a surprise, for Peake rarely uses such devices. Within the context of this relationship, however, its use at this point becomes eloquent, as though Fuchsia had glimpsed her fate. And her reaction provides corroboration: "As Fuchsia recognized the head of Steerpike, the rod fell from her outstretched arm, her weakened hand loosed its grasp upon the shelf and she fell backwards into space, the dark hair of her head reaching below her as she fell, her body curving backwards as though she had been struck" (p. 319, 249).

This fall closely resembles her final fall with which I began, except that in her fall to her death, she hits her head against the windowsill. We may be reminded here of how the birthday breakfast is punctuated by the sound of Fuchsia's head hitting the table. It is in this way that, as I said earlier, Fuchsia's death seems appropriate and tragically inevitable. Despite his lack of planning, Peake had prepared his readers for it throughout the two books: all the elements of the death scene are rehearsed in her meetings with Steerpike, so that although he is absent on that occasion, he is present in the associations we have learned to make.

At the first meeting, as Fuchsia suspiciously scrutinizes the prostrate body on her attic floor, "a blob of the hot wax [of her candle] fell across her wrist and she started as though she had been struck" (TG, p.154, 119). She needs a candlestick, but dare not take her eyes off Steerpike, so she retreats, backwards: "Before reaching the wall. however, the calf of her leg came into unexpected contact with the edge of the couch, and she sat down very suddenly upon it as though she had been tapped behind the knees"(p.154, 119).

Fuchsia is naturally a clumsy girl, and in the presence of Steerpike she seems even to lose her sense of balance. The second meeting illustrates this perfectly. "As she began the short, steep descent she turned for an instant to see whether Steerpike had kept pace with her, and as she turned, her feet slipped away from under her on the slithery surface of an oblique slab, and she came crashing to the ground, striking the side of her face, her shoulders and shin with a force that for the moment stunned her" (TG, pp.275-6, 215).

Beside Nannie Slagg's grave, Steerpike provokes Fuchsia by carelessly tossing away his carefully prepared wreath of roses, and she responds by burying her nails in his cheeks. Then "a tide of remorse filled her" and "she stumbled towards him [with] her arms outstretched. Quick as an adder he was in her arms—but even at that moment they tell, tripping each other up on the rough ground —fell, their arms about one another" (G, p. 194, 154).

Fuchsia lives intensely in her imagination, so that when she is abruptly recalled to the outer world, she jumps nervously. Steerpike's lightning visit by rope to her room (meeting 7) is prefaced by a tableau of Fuchsia at her window. "Then she moved, suddenly turning about at a sound behind her and found Mrs. Slagg looking up at her" (G, p. 21, 13). Steerpike's arrival provokes a similarly brusque reaction: "Before Fuchsia had had a moment to ponder how any human being could appear on her window-sill a hundred feet above the ground — let alone recognize the silhouette — she snatched a hairbrush from the table before her and brandished it behind her head in readiness for she knew not what" (p.23, 14-15).

 The last meeting sees her jump in a similar manner. As she stands before Steerpikes door, there comes the disembodied voice of Flay, who is concealed on a ledge above the doorway: "Fuchsia had started at the sound as at the touch of a red iron" (G, p.351, 280). And with this simile we return to fire images. Within the limited scope of this article, from which I have excluded all other references to fire, death and darkness, I hope I have shown how consistent was the working of Peake's imagination. Time and again, the compete evolution of the relationship between Fuchsia and Steerpike is mirrored in a single meeting: Fuchsia's initial suspicion and reticence are craftily transformed by Steerpike into sympathy and confidence, which are then shattered by some unforeseeable event or tactless remark, whereupon her feelings swing back towards horror and disgust.

What is particularly striking is the contrast between Peake's groping for the plot and his sureness of touch in describing this relationship. We know that Peake made many alterations to his books between first draft and published text, yet a study of the manuscripts shows that the passages I have quoted here come through from first to last, untouched. In fact, many passages show no hesitation, even in the initial writing—no recasting of sentences, no juggling with adjectives and no crossing out. Peake knew precisely what he was doing here, and in this way he works subtly on the readers expectations. Therein lies the mastery, and the mystery, of Mervyn Peake.

I should like to thank Maeve Gilmore for her kind permission to quote from Mervyn Peake's manuscripts. 

G. Peter Winnington

"Overlook press", 1995 

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