Mervyn May, Volume 1
"Student of the Groan lore" aka the first Titus Groan discussion post
Welcome1 to the first official Monday of Mervyn May2! This is an annual tradition here at Fran Magazine where we do a book club for a month, because I believe in my heart of hearts that people only like being in a book club for one month before things descend into social pettiness and shallow conversations about whether you liked or didn’t like the book based on who picked the book. Anyway, in case you’ve been ignoring all Fran Magazines for the past month, this year’s selection is Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. Mervyn May will go for the four Mondays of May, and each Monday, I’ll post a discussion post about the pages we all (more or less) read and then the comments are a free-for-all where anyone can share thoughts, passages, confusions, questions, insights, etc.
Because copies of Titus Groan are about 360-400 pages depending on which edition you have, plan to read about 90-100 pages each week. I’ll always give specific chapter titles of where to stop. This week’s discussion will go up to the chapter called “Titus is Christened.”
Mervyn moment
If you’ve read even four pages of Titus Groan, it’ll strike you, perhaps, the extent to which the name “Mervyn Peake” sounds as though it could maybe find its way into Gormenghast. I think there’s one main thing we need to get out of the way about Mervyn Peake before we delve into things…
Mervyn Peake was hot.
A few aspects of Peake’s biography are points of interest, both in terms of knowing about the people who write books and in the subject matter of the books themselves. Peake was born in 1911. His background was in painting and illustration — more on this in the discussion below — which was his primary occupation through the Second World War. His wife Maeve Gilmore was also a painter; they met at the Westminster School of Art.
Peake had a classic kind of “artist’s career” prior to his writing Titus Groan: he worked odd illustrator and painting jobs, sold a few paintings, designed costumes for a play, and taught in order to pay the bills. During the Second World War, he applied to be a war artist, but he was rejected and conscripted into the Army itself, where he eventually suffered a nervous breakdown, recovered, and then finally worked as a war artist. It was during this time that he started writing Titus Groan which was then published in 1946.
Titus Groan is set in Gormenghast, a gigantic fictional castle that basically is the whole world of these books. We don’t know of any life that exists outside of Gormenghast — just what’s on the inside of the castle and right on the outside, a divide between the haves and have nots. Peake himself was born and (mostly) raised in China, attending primary school while his parents were missionaries. He spent his later adult years — post WWII and during the writing of the Gormenghast books — living on Sark, a fiefdom (!) in the Channel Islands where you can’t drive a car. Both experiences, isolating for him whether chosen or not, really drive at the general claustrophobia of Gormenghast, a place where a person can shout in a castle and someone on the other side of it can hear.
Can’t wait until the doomsday
I am a very self-conscious person who cannot read or do anything, really, without noticing when someone is doing something well that I cannot do at all, which is to say: the first thing that’s really stood out to me in this first act (or so) of Titus Groan is Peake’s dedication to making sure, over and over, that we know exactly what everyone looks like.
About the court doctor named Prunesquallor:
His fish eyes swam all round his glasses before finishing at the top, where they gave him an expression of fantastic martyrdom. Running his long, exquisitely formed fingers through his mop of grey hair, he drained his glass of punch at a draught and start for the door, flicking small globules of the drink from his waistcoat.
I don’t have a great visual imagination. I’m good with faces in real life, but when I read, I struggle to picture characters and their settings. I’m always complaining when I write that I have no idea what a room is supposed to look like — walls? shelves? books? I don’t know. All these characters, however, feel fully formed in part because of Peake’s background in portraiture. They feel and act like caricatures, but already into this first act I know who is tall (Prunesquallor) and who is spindly (Mr. Flay — frequently described as skeletal) and who is gigantic (Swelter, the chef) and who is old (Nanny Slagg). That Peake cares so much about what these people look like suggests, you know, a visual artist’s heart at the center of things. Thematically, however, I think the focus on appearances tell us a number of things: 1) classically: not everyone is as they seem, 2) this is a shallow world governed by shallow lore, and 3) these are characters who look at each other a lot. The floating third person POV — underrated, under-utilized, if I read another 21st century novel written in first person I’m gonna lose it — allows us to drift in and out of various characters’ minds like we are God or a ghost taking long leaps into their brains and back out again. The ugliness feels directed at the characters not necessarily from Peake himself but the other characters in the book who are hyperaware of the standings of everyone around them. It all feels like those occasional annoying remarks that everyone in a certain place (or scene or city) is really ugly — like, who is looking but you?
The inciting event of the book is the birth of the titular Titus Groan, the first son of Lord Sepulchrave (the Earl of Gormenghast) and his wife, the Countess of Groan. This sends all the various helpers — Rottcodd, the curator; Flay, the servant; Prunesquallor, the doctor; Slagg, the nanny; etc — into variable states of panic and curiosity and joy. Finally! A male heir! A cause for celebration. Gormenghast, which is by all descriptions decrepit and rotting, can barrel along through time and space, same as it ever was.
We also meet two outsiders, so to speak: Steerpike and Keda. Steerpike is a kitchen boy, repulsed by the drunken, frat boy-adjacent behavior of the chef Swelter and his band of worshipping boys. In the opening chapters of the novel, Steerpike manages to escape the kitchens and embeds himself with the company of Flay, the closest servant to Sepulchrave which puts him in prime position to have more influence than he’d ever have in the kitchens. Keda, on the other hand, comes from the outer walls to be the night nurse for baby Titus, whose mother refuses to deal with him until he’s six. Keda, in the company of Nanny Slagg who is a freak and a loser, has the most normal vibe of anyone in the book so far, as evidenced by the fact that I can’t find a funny little drawing of her by Peake himself.
My personal favorite character so far is the older Groan child Fuchsia who is NOT happy to learn that there is another baby that’s come and threatened her status.
What was it that quickened her to a sense of something irreparable having been done? To an outsider there would have been nothing untoward or extraordinary in the fact that a group had gathered hundreds of feet below in the corner of a sunny stone quadrangle, but Fuchsia born and bred to the iron ritual of Gormenghast knew that something unprecedented was afoot. She shared, and as she stared the group grew. It was enough to throw Fuchsia out of her mood and to make her uneasy and angry.
Fuchsia is perhaps the most emotionally robust character we’ve met so far, which makes sense because she’s a teenager.3 Her jealousy is palpable, her quirks aplenty, and she has the most reason of anyone we’ve met so far to set forward some dramatic actions. I always root for the moody teen — how can you not!
As always, I’m eager to hear what everyone is thinking, which characters are standing out, any passages of note. I’ve underlined and asterisked a lot but try to keep things manageable here so that the magic can happen in the comments section. I won’t be an annoyance about this but I always find in discussions that it’s great to back away from “I liked this / I didn’t like this” and more into what’s working and how it’s working as a jumping off point.
Next week, please plan to read up until the chapter “The Room of Roots.”
Not doing May book club? No problem whatsoever! You will miss nothing! That said, please just ignore these issues — it’s just for the month! — and do not unsubscribe from beloved publication Fran Magazine. 🙏🏻🩵
#MervynMay
I initially thought she was maybe 8 or 9? Some research/additional reading suggests she’s 15. Maybe this was said in the book and I missed it.
Mervyn May I?
The first note I texted Fran about this book was "Goth Moomins"? Which I think needs unpacking but there's two components to that phrase, basically:
1 - Peake's characterizations are cartoon-like, relying on exaggerated physical characteristics to describe personalities (as Fran has detailed above). So I found myself thinking of Tove Jansson right away (because her Moominland was a fully realized literary creation as well as an illustrated one) but also Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams, who are closer to the "goth" half of this equation. (Although this needs further investigation, the writing style also reminded me of John Gardner, in particular The Sunlight Dialogues with its illustrations by John Napper).
2 - The big difference between Peake's writing and Jansson's, so far, is the ecological philosophy of Moominland vs Gormenghast's architectural approach. Just as the Moomins and their neighbors together make up the wildlife that maintains the natural environment around them (for more on character vs. environment, read Jansson's gorgeous novella Sommarboken), the characters in Titus Groan are written as if they are part of the architecture.
The servant class have their roles and assigned rooms, beginning with Rottcodd, the curator of the Hall of Bright Carvings who never drops his feather duster, while the royal family have also isolated themselves so much that they, too, become extensions of Gormenghast, like the Countess, adorned with birds in her enormous bed as if she herself were one of the Carvings.
(To this second point, I guess as long as we're teasing out where the plot of this novel might be going, it makes sense to keep an eye on Steerpike -- who seems to have escaped his assigned place in the castle for the time being -- and Nanny Slagg, who is so far the only character to venture outside the castle itself.)
Of course none of the writers or artists mentioned above are themselves British which seems like an essential component of Peake's worldview as well. Given his upbringing I'm not totally sure that it would be fair to say his work reflects any kind of outsider perspective on England but there is a fantasy-satirical angle here about an empire so old that its maintenance belongs entirely to caretakers who have forgotten why they are there -- the only one with real passion for the customs of Gormenghast seems to be Sourdust, the librarian.
(great to be here! if you saw me accidentally post this comment first under the wrong issue ... no you didn't.)
The sign of a book with gloriously baroque language: I've fired up a list of my favorite words used in these first chapters, including "recrudescent."
So far, I've been delighted by how funny Titus Groan is. I think I was anticipating something more dour and self-serious. And, as mentioned in Fran's post, Peake's emphasis on world-building through physical descriptions is so effective, I'm really amazed that this hasn't been made into films. Like...does Tim Burton know about this??
I am not a huge fantasy person and I was so obsessed with Middlemarch last year that I opened this book feeling slightly bummed we weren't just reading more George Eliot, but now I'm #Groanin'.
#MervynMay #WeGroanin' #KedasAngels