The Bottle Cracks

Static for so long, when change comes it is overwhelming; all losing control of it. The Empire falls, the National Trust invades the country estates, America conquers our shops and cinemas. How much of Britain will be left? But does this concern Mervyn Peake, his Gormenghast? We suspect more private obsessions. What is an artist? Not a mad, bad, terrible tyrant…..

________

A coming of age novel, of an especially brilliant and brutal quality. To be a man we must kill in battle. Romantic, yes, but also realistic; Titus’s war with Steerpike a piece of psychological naturalism. When authority crushes, it when maims and murders, we must fight back; for it has become a zero-sum game of win or lose; death or life the only prizes here. Liberal sentiments? The correct judicial procedure? When Doctor Prunesquallor tries to arrest the Steerpike the good Mr Flay dies. Evil cannot be tolerated.

Steerpike is not really Titus’s problem; it is Gormenghast and its rituals, a living body mummified by age and routine; a way of life too subservient to the past, itself an autocrat. Steerpike’s success due to its ossification. When under attack Gormenghast cannot protect itself, too bound to its rules. One of the ironies of Titus’s triumph - the death of his enemy, the saving of the castle - is that the rules of old battles have to be broken: Steerpike such a clever foe that the only way to kill him is to improvise. Also the lucky contingency of the flood….even bad things can be beneficient. Nothing as simple as it looks.

Gormenghast has a beauty and grandeur that overawes the family, who become its servants, hollowing out their souls, enervating their will to action. It is too monumental for its owners; there is no space for them to grow; the children stunted from birth, they are forced to fit into an historical pattern; every generation dedicated to keeping it intact, freezing this castle in olden time.1 There is no elasticity here. And such rigidity works in all kinds of ways. When an Earl is born, who has more spark than many, his lively spirit is frustrated. Tradition will not be modified! This lad must be tucked and tailored into the uniform of the past. Forced into such tight clothing he rejects all instruction and influence; Titus a mirror image of his teachers - he has no give - thus instead of submitting to custom he rebels against it. The ancient line is broken. Gormenghast has lost its heir. It’s only hope, the Countess’s last peremptory cry: you will be back!

Maybe. By then, though, things will be different. Already they are changing. Gormenghast never quite the same after these escapades. The flood has destroyed too much. The flood. It is more than water rising to the towers’ tops. It is Steerpike, and the destruction he has wrought. Where did he come from? We don’t know. He emerged like an ugly smell from the kitchen.

It happens at least once in a thousand years.

Even the flood cannot change the mentalities of these custodians of an antique lineage. The Countess, after months of vigorous activity, where she reveals a powerful mind and will, sinks back into apathy; with the flood’s retreat, and Steerpike’s demise, she falls again into passivity, leaving the Master of Ritual - cuttingly called the poet - once more in control. Everything has changed. Nothing changes.

How transform a mentality? There is education, of course. In Gormenghast this means training that untutored mind into boredom and obedience; it makes for a perfect receptacle in which to pour the past. Also to give Titus a feel for the lower orders: he boards with them as an equal (although everyone, including Titus, knows he is not). We have entered into a satire on an English public school, where a dull pedagogy produces not knowledge but ignorance; also resistance to a learning that, inculcating submission, conditions its pupils into accepting the mad routines of Gormenghast, which defy any rational or sensible plan; their original meaning long since lost in the corridors of time. These children are not being educated; they are trained to fit into the slots of life already allocated them. The result: the boys are rowdy and almost uncontrollable, the masters lacklustre and decrepit. Yet it works. Though vast swathes of Gormenghast are never visited, many walls are rotting, roofs falling apart, the castle still stands; the rituals retain their efficacy; its members accept their position, bonded physically, socially and psychologically to this place and its lords, the Groans. An atmosphere, like one’s own breath, suffuses every nook, of stone, wood and flesh. Such obsessive attention to the past produces an aura impossible to escape. It is in the lungs. Even Titus breathes it in and out.

‘I want to be myself, and become what I make myself, a person, a real live person and not a symbol any more.’

….

Without her he would have never dared to do more than dream of insurrection. She had shown him by her independence how it was only fear that held people together. The fear of being alone and the fear of being different. Her unearthly arrogance and self-sufficiency had exploded at the very centre of his conventions. From the moment when he knew for certain that she was no figment of his fancy, but a creature of Gormenghast Forest, he had been haunted. He was still haunted. Haunted by the thought of this other kind of world which was able to exist without Gormenghast.

….

He ran as though to obey an order. And this was so, though he knew nothing of it. He ran in the acknowledgement of 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. The law that separates the generations. That draws the child from his mother, the boy from his father, the youth from both.

And it was the law of quest. The law that few obey for lack of valour. The craving of the young for the unknown and all that lies beyond the tenuous skyline.

Titus is different. There is no explanation for this. Since birth he has been a rebel, and with age his rebelliousness increases. Yet he also feels the pull of the castle, which generates intense emotions of longing and power. The tension is extreme. The joy of freedom or the authority of command? The urge to be free triumphs. It is the fatal weakness of Gormenghast. Recognising the need for a future lord to mingle with the lower orders, when a child, it has - terrible oversight - no space for adolescent revolt; Gormenghast needed, but lacks, some ritual - an initiation rite with its wild anarchy - where the teenager experiences a world without order and rules.2 A liberating moment before the return to the adult fold. Order requires some chaos. All individuals want to feel their weight. There must be some change, some influence. Also a need to be scared of that dangerous disorder, that wild anarchy, which mustn't last long. Alas, the rituals have insulated the castle from all alteration; a state that cannot last forever.

So much is down to luck and timing. The character of Titus. The emergence of Steerpike. The beauty of Keda and her two rivals; that duel the cause of the ‘Thing’s’ outcast status. Then there is Mr Flay, who has made a new life in the forest. A lot has to come together at one time for an Earl to quit his inheritance. 

Steerpike is crucial. He has created an unhealthy atmosphere, that has infected the whole castle. A smell of disturbance is in the air. Once out of the bottle it is impossible to expunge.3 Later Steerpike pours out the poison…when change occurs in such a rigid institution as Gormenghast collapse is likely to follow; for it lacks the plasticity to mould that change to itself. The old Earl dies. The venerable Master of Ritual is burned up in the library fire; Barquentine, the new one, is soon to follow. These strong male presences, with their subtle use of a legitimate authority, might have restrained Titus, who’d have imbibed just enough of the past’s presence, its intoxicating perfume, to prevent a total revolt. Instead, he has Steerpike, whose manipulation of the rituals and his own evil intent are communicated to the young lad, who is intuitive and sharp: he knows a bad smell when its in the room. This attempt to impose the old rituals by this new man is the cause of Titus’s complete rejection of the castle. Gormenghast has been sullied by wickedness.

No doubt there were rebellious teenagers in the past; young earls who preferred Falstaff to their father. But why doesn't this Harry transmogrify into Henry V? An exceptionally strong will clashing against an equally stubborn reverence for the past. A less fatalistic father. A more sympathetic mother. The Master of Ritual more flexible…. The Groans have lost their authority, which has been given to the scholar, and the dry dust of old books. The original noble spirit has gone. It lives in Titus! Alas, there is no way to incorporate such a spirit into this sclerotic structure; no-one left to recognise the true nature of a noble knight, his power and spontaneity. How do you educate a warrior? With the glamour of the past, the attractions of the castle, its myriad means of adventure and command, it needed but a small space for liberty, a few years of independence, to charm Titus would back into its magic circle. Every future king needs a youth frolicking with the disreputable. If only the seventy-sixth Earl had been stronger, more imaginative.

It is not to be. The Groans are too passive. Having surrendered to the old books they are easy victims for Steerpike. Only the exiled Mr Flay to save them.

The deaths of his father, of Fuchsia, of Keda, weakens Titus’s emotional bond to Gormenghast. Meanwhile Steerpike soaks the old ways with his wicked means. The castle and its traditions no longer a model on which to base a youthful ideal. Only outside can Titus find inspiration, in Mr Flay and in the ‘Thing’. Mr Flay shows Titus that he can live outside castle. The ‘Thing’ has the grace of freedom and the spirit of independence, such intoxicating adolescent drugs. But even then…we return to Steerpike. Without him it is likely that the ‘Thing’ would not exist and Mr Flay not be exiled to the forest. Steerpike is the free spirit, with all its ambiguous characteristics; liberty is both an evil and a good; destroying as much as it creates. Steerpike. His presence has melted the Castle’s frozen state. Once in charge he turns up the temperature.

He was in the posture of some earthish dancer, but he soon tired of this strange display - this throw-back to some savage rite in the world’s infancy. He had given himself up to it for those few moments, in the way that an artist can be the ignorant agent of something far greater and deeper than his conscious mind could ever understand. But as he strutted, his knees bent, his feet turned outwards, his body and head erect, his elbow crooked, and his hands clenched, he had enjoyed the novelty of what he was doing. He was amused at this peculiar need of his body; that it wished to stamp, to strut, to rear on tiptoes, to sink upon the heels - and all because he was a murderer - all this intrigued him, titillating his brain, so that, now, as he ceased to stamp, and sank into a dusty chair, the muscles of his throat went through the contractions that form laughter - but no sound came.

….

He rose form his chair in anger. But he knew in his heart that he was not angry with them. He was enraged with himself. For what had seemed amusing a few moments ago was now a source, almost of fear to him. 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 so do, 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 madness in him.

An extraordinary scene. A marvellous portrait of a sociopath. Steerpike is a machine, thus his ability to master almost any task and role. But to succeed he has to pretend to be human. Thus those highly self-conscious roles: servant, apprentice, lover, and now Master of Ritual. All are performances, where he acts out emotions he does not feel. However, there are times, and this is one, when his humanity bursts out, and betrays him. The performance not quite under control, his acting takes on its own actuality; the role itself becomes real;  both an act and true feeling. This unsettles Steerpike, for he has to be fully conscious of what he does; an actor aware always he’s on stage. What immense power this acute awareness of his own inauthenticity gives. But to do something unconsciously, to be real? Here is weakness, it is danger; it is a loss of his own self. To lose himself in a role…. A clue. Just before this scene the Doctor, Mr Flay and Titus had come across Steerpike playing the flute - is there nothing he cannot do, muses the Doctor. Steerpike playing the flute? Is this man…an artist?

Stop there. 

Up until know we have thought of Steerpike as the epitome of the power mad tyrant or the utilitarian freak. But with a twist this anti-hero resembles his author. Like Elizabeth Taylor in Angel, Peake is questioning the nature of the artist; he exploring his own dark soul, his detachment and inhumanity. Is he a tyrant too? Able to change everything at will, the whole of Gormenghast - all these living folk - are under his control; guests in his house, friends to be fêted, victims to be tortured and killed; everyone at the mercy of his crazy mind. Yet, surely, there is something different about the artist. The artist doesn’t just perform; no mere mimic this; but someone who lives, loses himself, inside his creations. It why Taylor could create real humans on the page but Angelica Deverell could not. Here, the characterisation is deep and acute. The word-painting vivid and beautiful. Plot and suspense are handled with virtuosity. Peake vitalises these people; yet he disposes of them in seconds. Those amazing fights between Mr Flay and Swelter, Steerpike and Barquentine, later Titus and the Evil One. An author killing his humans in brilliant technical performances. Fuchsia is tipped over the window ledge with a bland insouciance.4 Surely only the Devil could treat living creatures with such distance.

Art destroys as much as it creates. Gormenghast is a museum. It is a mummification of the past, with all its treasures. The museum art’s greatest enemy. Art a spirit of revolt, a narcissistic urge; and yet that lust for expression can go too far; destroying its own sustenance. A flood always comes in handy.

This novel is a study of the artist, whose attributes are divided between the different characters. Steerpike is a technician who shares some of the artist’s characteristics. Fuchsia, with her sensibility and imagination, is an artist manqué, who, if given love and a proper education, may have become a real one; so alive to the beauty and peculiarities of an ancient place and its anachronistic tradition. There are suggestions in the early years that Titus has the artist’s touch - his first thought is of colour - but the rebel gets the upper hand. A man of action, not a reflective type; it is why the beauty of the ‘Thing’s’ flight is transmogrified into the spirit of escape and quest, not artistic creation. 

As he stared a kind of ecstasy filled him. He had no sense of losing her - but only the blind and vaulting pride that he had held her in his arms; that naked creature that was now crying again, derisively in a language of her own.

It was finality. Titus knew in his bones that he could expect no more than this. His teeth had met in the dark core of life. He watched her almost with indifference - for it was all in the past - and even the present was nothing to the pride of his memory.

But when, out of the heart of the storm that searing flash of flame broke loose, and ripping a path across the the dazzled floods, burned up the ‘Thing’ as though she had been a dry leaf in its path, and when Titus knew that the world was without her for ever, then something fled in him - something fled away - or was burned away even as she had been burned away. Something had died as though it had never been.

At seventeen he stepped into another country. It was his youth that had died away. His boyhood was something for remembrance only. He had become a man.

To touch ground zero. Lose complete control of one’s self. Only then can we grow. Become adult. Be truly free.

A coming of age novel. A disquisition about art; about the beauty of the past, also its stultification, a huge weight squashing our need for the new, its excitement and adventure. How the young like to smash things up! The past has to change. But alas it is not Fuchsia who will undertake such a delicate business. It is left to Steerpike, the technician supreme, who appears in so many guises; of popular novelist, entertainer, guru, of politician, of con-artist. He knows all the tricks, can assimilate any role, but only to pastiche them; too detached from his feelings in transform them into a living body of art. The result is desecration. If only Fuchsia…. But she is not strong enough to escape Gormenghast’s thrall; more aesthete than artist, she is too passive to create things of her own. Too attached to the past she cannot destroy any of it. At the same time she is attracted to Steerpike, his promise of a freedom that is illusory. Wracked by the tension she dies, inadvertently. Only Titus breaks free. His own life to be his creation.

Will he succeed? The third volume awaits.

Review: Gormenghast

________

1. Compare with Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.

2. Geoffrey Bateman, Naven.

3. For a political example: George Lamming, Of Age and Innocence.

4. One of the great death scenes, which surprises us in its suddenness; it is up there with Norman Mailer’s second killing in The Naked and the Dead and the sister’s accident in A.S. Byatt’s Still Life.