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Steerpike. © The Estate of Mervyn Peake

Steerpike in 'Over The Roofscape' from Titus Groan. Sketch © The Estate of Mervyn Peake

John Lydon couldn’t have become Johnny Rotten if Mervyn Peake hadn’t first created Steerpike, it doesn’t matter whether Lydon ever read Titus Groan. Peake troubled himself to describe the tics that not only make Gormenghast’s denizens come to life but also turn them into supernormal beings; his humour sparks life into them; he makes characters fascinating in the way anything that cannot be fully understood is fascinating. I can think of few other writers courageous enough to glance away from irresistible action to describe “rissoles” of fat on the kitchen floor, but it’s the complexity of Gormenghast that makes it so terrifyingly humdrum; so splendidly real.

It must have been through the music of the Strawbs that I first heard the name. The English folk-progressive-rock band’s frontman Dave Cousins wrote in his sleeve notes for A Choice Selection of Strawbs (A&M): “‘Lady Fuchsia’ was a [drummer Richard Hudson and bassist John Ford] song inspired by Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. We never played it on stage, but it sounds glorious.” (That’s the only place the band renders the name Fuchsia as Peake did in his books, at least as far as I can tell. On the label copy of Bursting At The Seams, an album I listened to thousands of times in my teens – on my pre-recorded cassette the song was perfectly bookended by Dave Lambert’s ‘The Winter and the Summer’ and the Cousins lament ‘The River’ – as well as on all the other compilations released, the song title is spelt more as the name is pronounced in English: ‘Fuschia’, rather than in honour of Fuchs, the German botanist who named the plant.)

In 1986 I watched the four-episode British Channel Four mini-series Mr Pye, starring Derek Jacobi, and then later borrowed the book from a library. It seems unlikely that neither Streatham nor Chiswick libraries had Peake’s books on their shelves in the 1970s and 1980s, but in any case it wasn’t until I stayed in Montreux in Switzerland for a short time in the early 1990s that I read the three Gormenghast books, which had been recommended to me by a friend.

We were staying at the Hotel Helvetie for the jazz festival and apparently I had a lot of time on my hands. With its mansard roofs and hints of continental decadence, there wasn’t much that was Gormenghast-like about my immediate surroundings; and yet – the lakeside location was surreal, the whole town was remote, shrouded by the Alps from the trivia of the passing moment, cut off from the world’s worries. So perhaps it was the perfect stepping stone to Gormenghast.

On my return I joined the Mervyn Peake Society. I still treasure a copy of Masks by Sebastian Peake. It’s a chapbook of drawings made by his father, subtitled Out of the overlapping leaves of my brain came tapping, and I once used that Peake quotation to personalise the title page of The Bumper Book of Lies. Gormenghast resurfaces elsewhere in my writing; Peake’s drawings and paintings continue to chill and mesmerise me; the worlds he created feel part of my dream DNA.

Self-portrait, 1932 (National Portrait Gallery). © The Estate of Mervyn Peake

I can only talk, then, in personal and not in scholarly terms about Mervyn Peake’s influence. One of the few constructs I still believe in is the collective consciousness; I have no idea how it might work if it actually exists; there are simply connections I prefer not to dismiss as coincidences. The threads draw together all kinds of memories, associations and familiarities. Here’s one I discovered before I began reading Peake. It’s from ‘Household Tales’ an essay by Russell Hoban, from The Moment Under The Moment (it was his introduction to the 1977 Picador edition of Household Tales by The Brothers Grimm and he’s describing one of Peake’s original illustrations for the first edition of that book):

“Most modern illustrators fudge a horse the best they can and hope to get by on technique. Mervyn Peake’s horses are of a piece with his people: some are knaves, some are drudges, and some of them are magical.

“The drawing of the goose-girl talking to the head of Falada is a picture that one can look at for a long time. The horse is one of Peake’s magical beasts.”

Mervyn Peake's drawing that was used as the basis of the Pan Books logo. Illustration © The Estate of Mervyn Peake

It’s worth mentioning that a Peake illustration was used by Pan Books for the basis of its original logo. This was a symbol I saw daily if ignorantly on my bookshelves in the 1970s, on the jackets and spines of my copies of The Pan Book of Horror, with stories by Basil Copper and others who’d later influence my writing.

Sketch of Steerpike. © The Estate of Mervyn Peake

I’m not sure when, where or how I first made the connection, but I’m pretty sure it was on first reading Peake’s description of Steerpike in Titus Groan so, although it’s been said before, it bears repeating: John Lydon couldn’t have become Johnny Rotten if Peake hadn’t first created Steerpike. It doesn’t even matter whether Lydon had ever read Titus Groan, which seems frankly unlikely; just as in this BBC headline Peake becomes a captive of Gormenghast, as though he couldn’t have existed if it did not.

It saddens me, then, when I read people glibly dismiss Peake’s writing, especially the Gormenghast books, as “turgid prose”. There really is no accounting for taste. Economy of prose is laudable but for me there’s a realism in Peake that’s lacking from the writing of minimalists.

Just as film directors such as Terry Gilliam and David Lynch are never afraid to have a hamster running on a wheel in the background to a key long shot, or to zoom in on dust bunnies behind a radiator, Peake is not afraid to look at what is just out of focus. I think of it as the kind of terror in detail I experience in dreams that are not quite nightmares, not benign enough to be fantasies. It’s the temporary incapacity to focus on the movement of bigger events because of the distractions of the butterfly in the periphery of vision, the crumbs littering the carpet, the mysterious scratching and whispering behind the walls.

Take this description of The Great Kitchen in an early chapter of Titus Groan:

Swelter, chef of Gormenghast. © The Estate of Mervyn Peake

“The stock-pots were perpetually simmering, having boiled over, and the floor about them was a mess of sepia fluid and egg-shells that had been floating in the pots for the purpose of clearing the soup. The sawdust that was spread neatly over the floor each morning was by now kicked into heaps and soaked in the splashings of wine. And where scattered about the floor little blobs of fat had been rolled or trodden in, the sawdust stuck to them giving them the appearance of rissoles.”

I can think of few other writers who’d be courageous enough to glance away from irresistible action to describe rissoles of rancid fat on the kitchen floor, but it’s the complexity of Gormenghast that makes it so implausibly believable; so terrifyingly humdrum; so splendidly real.

Don’t try this at home
I’m fascinated by this provocatively precise description of Mr Flay’s curious body movement as he peers through the Spy-Hole, also from an early chapter of Titus Groan:

“He placed his eye to this hole and Steerpike watched the wrinkles of his parchment-coloured skin gather below the protruding bone at the base of the skull, for Mr Flay both had to stoop and then to raise his head in order to apply his eye at the necessary angle.”

In fact, so fascinated was I by it that when I first read it more than 20 years ago, and again when I reread it recently, I had to mime Flay’s stooping to see how it might work. So not only did it hold me up, my back pain did, too (I’m recovering; prescription drugs help, thanks).

Peake troubled himself to describe his characters’ tics and traits. These not only make Gormenghast’s denizens come to life but also turn them into frightening, supernormal beings. His humour sparks a life into them that’s horrifying; he makes characters fascinating in the way anything that cannot fully be understood is fascinating:

“The laugh of doctor Prunesquallor was part of his conversation and quite alarming when heard for the first time. It appeared to be out of control as though it were part of his voice, a top-storey of his vocal range that only came into its own when the doctor laughed. There was something about it of wind whistling through high rafters and there was a good deal of the horse’s whinny, with a touch of the curlew. When giving vent to it, the doctor’s mouth would be practically immobile like the door of a cabinet left ajar. Between the laughs he would speak very rapidly, which made the sudden stillness of his beautifully shaven jaws at the time of laughter all the more extraordinary. The laugh was not necessarily connected with humour at all. It was simply a part of his conversation.”

And it isn’t only ‘human’ characters to whom Peake devotes such wide-eyed attention:

“He stood on the foot-rail, his claws curled around it, and stared at Lady Groan. After a moment or two of stillness the white rook moved his feet up and down on the rail in a treading motion and then, flopping on to the bedclothes at her ladyship’s feet, twisted his head around and pecked at his own tail, the feathers of his neck standing out as he did so, crisply like a ruff. The pecking over he made his way over the undulating terrain of the bed, until within a few inches of her ladyship’s face, when he tilted his big head in a characteristic manner and cawed.”

'The Nightmare of Death': Peake's illustration from 'Masks' by Sebastian Peake. © The Estate of Mervyn Peake

But if you’ve put off reading Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone because your preconceptions are of pages of exposition and character descriptions, Peake can also set the scene in a single, luminous sentence in which Time Gone and Time Yet-To-Be collide. From ‘A Gold Ring For Titus’ in Titus Groan:

“Nannie Slagg entered, bearing in her arms the heir to the miles of rambling stone and mortar; to the Tower of Flints and the stagnant moat; to the angular mountains and the lime-green river where twelve years later he would be angling for the hideous fishes of his inheritance.”

His fish, of course, could not only be fish, just as the fish that form part of Lord Groan’s extravagant, bizarre breakfast in Titus Groan are not allowed to be mere appetizers but must also function as ciphers. Lord Sepulchrave is sequestered from the delights before him and, by the end of the description, decline has crept almost unseen even onto his table:

“As he sat, this morning, in his high-backed chair he saw before him – through a haze of melancholia that filmed his brain and sickened his heart, robbing it of power and his limbs of health – he saw before him a snow-white tablecloth. It was set for two. The silver shone and the napkins were folded into the shapes of peacocks and were perched decoratively on the two plates. There was a delicious scent of bread, sweet and wholesome. There were eggs painted in gay colours, toast piled up pagoda-wise, tier upon tier and each as frail as a dead leaf; and fish with their tails in their mouths lay coiled in sea-blue saucers. There was coffee in an urn shaped like a lion, the spout protruding from that animal’s silver jaws. There were all varieties of coloured fruits that looked strangely tropical in that dark hall. There were honeys and jams, jellies, nuts and spices and the ancestral breakfast plate was spread out to the greatest advantage amid the golden cutlery of the Groans. In the centre of the table was a small tin bowl of dandelions and nettles.”

That his Lordship doesn’t notice the delicacies suggests his mood is worse than a black dog or hangover; that he has nothing to say about the centrepiece of weeds, let alone the coiled fish, verges on what the Germans call Galgenhumor.

There’s a lot of it in the three Gormenghast books. I’ve only just begun re-reading them. I’m on page 80 of Titus Groan, so I have 1200 pages ahead of me. I’m looking forward to every word. For now, the most concise summary of what I love about Gormenghast comes from Anthony Burgess’s introduction to the Mandarin paperback edition of Titus Groan:

“It is a complex book in that it evokes many layers of response: the sophisticated pleasure in consummate artifice, the more naïve enjoyment proper to a rather archaic romance, horror which is qualified by disbelief, a kind of ‘camp’ titillation, self-indulgence in ‘Gothic’ atmosphere, a genuine aesthetic elation induced by language finely used.”

The English Heritage blue plaque marking Peake's 1960-1968 home at 1 Drayton Gardens, Kensington and Chelsea, London SW10

• The title of this blog post comes from a line on page 68 of Titus Groan, ‘Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap’, describing Fuchsia’s attic kingdom. I urge you to visit the Official Mervyn Peak website; Sebastian Peake’s blog; and to read at least one of the many books Peake wrote and illustrated.

Quotations and illustrations © The Estate of Mervyn Peake

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