To Live at all Is Miracle Enough

MERVYN PEAKE IS BEST known for his novels Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. They are often called the ‘Gormenghast trilogy’ but since they are about the eponymous hero rather than his castle home it is more accurate to call them ‘the Titus books’. The appellation is, however, significant: it's the place rather than the plot that remains in the mind. Rarely has a literary castle caught the imagination of so many readers.

In the space of less than 25 years Peake also produced thousands of drawings and book illustrations, hundreds of paintings, more than two hundred poems, a dozen plays, another novel, a novella and a handful of short stories. What was the creative process that makes Gormenghast so memorable and facilitated so many works in so many media in so short a time? Although Peake was not given to theorizing, he wrote of what drawing meant for him in the Introduction to a book of his Drawings. In so doing he supplies some answers to my question. So this chapter is based on a close reading of that Introduction, illustrated with quotations from his poems and the experiences of his fictional characters.

AT THE CENTRE OF the poem printed as the epigraph to this chapter, ‘To Live at all is Miracle Enough’, Peake writes: ‘the imagination's heart / Is constellation high and can't be weighed’ (Gb3). In this I hear an echo of Shakespeare's definition of love in Sonnet 116: ‘It is the star … / Whose worth's unknown although his highth be taken’ (NAEL 1: 1038).