a doubly posthumous book
Jan. 17th, 2010 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacSometime between Mervyn Peake's death in 1968 and her own death in 1983, Mervyn's widow, Maeve Gilmore, made her own attempt at writing the fourth Titus Groan book that her husband had managed to get down only some fragmentary notes and a couple opening pages of, before debilitating illness claimed him about 1960.
So much has been known, though not much remarked upon, for some years, but what makes this news is that Maeve's manuscript has been found (I didn't know it had been lost) and is going to be published next year.
The news story is interesting, because it's slightly different from what was previously known. John Watney, the only Peake biographer to say much about the fragments for Titus 4, also introduced their one and only publication in the 1992 Overlook Press edition of Titus Alone (the third book). Maeve deciphered Mervyn's almost illegible handwriting, Watney says, and "felt moved enough to write the book that Mervyn would have written ... But although Maeve completed over 45,000 words of the book she entitled 'World Without End' she herself died before she could complete it." (p. 357)
Watney is not always a reliable source, unfortunately, but he was close to Maeve in her later years and presumably knows what she did. Watney says nothing about the manuscript being misplaced. He says that Titus Awakes, the provisional title given the manuscript according to the news story, was the title that Maeve chose for Mervyn's unfinished book, but that her own story had a different title. (But perhaps the estate and the publisher think a title with "Titus" in it would be more marketable.) Most importantly, the news story implies that Maeve's manuscript is complete, while Watney says it is not.
Well, we'll find out when it's published. The phenomenon of relatives or other heirs writing their own sequels based on fragmentary notes left behind by a deceased author does not have a very illustrious history. (Pause to insert the usual caution that this is not what Christopher Tolkien has been doing: he's been editing his father's manuscripts - sometimes extensively - not writing new stories of his own based on notes, though there are ample sources with which to do so.) There are some exceptions, but the names Brian Herbert and Mark Saxton do not loom high in the esteem of most readers. All I know of Maeve's writing is her memoir of Mervyn, A World Away, a delicate and elusive book, more a series of emotional impressions than a story.
What's important about this release is that it emphasizes that neither word of the term "Gormenghast trilogy" is accurate. It's not about Gormenghast, it's the biography of Titus, which is why the third book (and the fourth) can leave Gormenghast entirely behind, and it wasn't intended as a closed-ended trilogy, but an open-ended series of however many books it took to tell the story. Critics sometimes condescendingly excuse Titus Alone because the author was ill, but he wasn't so ill that he didn't know exactly what he was doing in shocking the reader by sending Titus out from his atavistic faux-Renaissance castle into a bizarre futuristic science-fictional world. But he also takes the castle with him: throughout Titus Alone, Titus's principal concern is to prove to the world, and indeed to himself, for he's come to doubt his own memories, that Gormenghast exists. In the tiny fragment of Titus Awakes that Mervyn wrote, Titus lies in a barn and dreams of Gormenghast, specifically of the titanic clash that ended the first book.
And what will he do then? The suggestion in Mervyn's notes is that Titus would have a series of picaresque adventures in various settings. Maeve is gone now too, but she can tell us what she thinks.
So much has been known, though not much remarked upon, for some years, but what makes this news is that Maeve's manuscript has been found (I didn't know it had been lost) and is going to be published next year.
The news story is interesting, because it's slightly different from what was previously known. John Watney, the only Peake biographer to say much about the fragments for Titus 4, also introduced their one and only publication in the 1992 Overlook Press edition of Titus Alone (the third book). Maeve deciphered Mervyn's almost illegible handwriting, Watney says, and "felt moved enough to write the book that Mervyn would have written ... But although Maeve completed over 45,000 words of the book she entitled 'World Without End' she herself died before she could complete it." (p. 357)
Watney is not always a reliable source, unfortunately, but he was close to Maeve in her later years and presumably knows what she did. Watney says nothing about the manuscript being misplaced. He says that Titus Awakes, the provisional title given the manuscript according to the news story, was the title that Maeve chose for Mervyn's unfinished book, but that her own story had a different title. (But perhaps the estate and the publisher think a title with "Titus" in it would be more marketable.) Most importantly, the news story implies that Maeve's manuscript is complete, while Watney says it is not.
Well, we'll find out when it's published. The phenomenon of relatives or other heirs writing their own sequels based on fragmentary notes left behind by a deceased author does not have a very illustrious history. (Pause to insert the usual caution that this is not what Christopher Tolkien has been doing: he's been editing his father's manuscripts - sometimes extensively - not writing new stories of his own based on notes, though there are ample sources with which to do so.) There are some exceptions, but the names Brian Herbert and Mark Saxton do not loom high in the esteem of most readers. All I know of Maeve's writing is her memoir of Mervyn, A World Away, a delicate and elusive book, more a series of emotional impressions than a story.
What's important about this release is that it emphasizes that neither word of the term "Gormenghast trilogy" is accurate. It's not about Gormenghast, it's the biography of Titus, which is why the third book (and the fourth) can leave Gormenghast entirely behind, and it wasn't intended as a closed-ended trilogy, but an open-ended series of however many books it took to tell the story. Critics sometimes condescendingly excuse Titus Alone because the author was ill, but he wasn't so ill that he didn't know exactly what he was doing in shocking the reader by sending Titus out from his atavistic faux-Renaissance castle into a bizarre futuristic science-fictional world. But he also takes the castle with him: throughout Titus Alone, Titus's principal concern is to prove to the world, and indeed to himself, for he's come to doubt his own memories, that Gormenghast exists. In the tiny fragment of Titus Awakes that Mervyn wrote, Titus lies in a barn and dreams of Gormenghast, specifically of the titanic clash that ended the first book.
And what will he do then? The suggestion in Mervyn's notes is that Titus would have a series of picaresque adventures in various settings. Maeve is gone now too, but she can tell us what she thinks.
