an attempt to please the owls

Someone last week mentioned "the abject" and I thought how well Gormenghast fitted that kind of state, with the position of disgusting subjection imposed on everyone by the castle's cultural structure -- not fleshy or fluidy or like the skin on milk, as in Kristeva, but an imposed closeness to insanity, and everyone passionately involved in coping with it. Alice Mills in Stuckness in the Fiction of Mervyn Peake, 2005, specifically names Swelter as an avatar of the abject (and no other character, I think?) because he is so bodily gross but if we're going to talk about Kristevan abjection then the whole form of the Law should be implicated. It shoves everyone up against a breakdown of sense and holds them there by forcing them to admire it as if it is its own opposite, complete meaning. This is not life but they have to live it. They are smelling this corpse of actual society. So. And you could push it a little bit; say that everyone's intense engagement with their own personalities is their state of joy or "vomit," that sort of ecstatic position of being in there with the abject thing, and gripping it. (Though isn't personality described as their way of distancing themselves from it and holding themselves constantly apart to create a tiny gap where they can live? But is it a gap?) And Titus is an escape from joy. "Madness has done little more for Sepulchrave than replace his servitude to ritual with an attempt to please the owls," says Mills seriously, which made me laugh.

the how and what, the this and that

– in order to know "whether John Clare was less influenced by Charlotte Smith as he aged" I think I would have to read everything Clare had written. Then re-read Smith's Elegiac Sonnets. Next, get myself a yardstick. Easiest would be to count the number of times they both (independently of one another) use the word 'the' and compare his number to her number and see if they grow farther apart but other writers have used 'the' as well so no go. Find some other pinpoint to free myself from the appearance of futility or farce, two characteristics that infested other writers I have been reading, Regina Ullman and Robert Walser, so that one of the questions that hangs around them both might be what is futility? "All stories bear resemblance to an elegant skirt that wants to cling tightly and becomingly to to a shape, that is, to something concrete: in other words they have to be told in such a way that the sum total of words forms a skirt that fits the body loosely but with a certain conciseness – fits, that is, the how and what, the this and that, to be reported." (Walser: All those who like to laugh while crying …, tr Susan Bernofsky) A hero named Westermann enters his Goddess of Poetry, and the composure of those sentences, the ones that describe this hero, irritates the author. "This intruder Westermann is getting on my nerves. How does he plan on reimbursing me for the attention I'm paying him, for seeing he comes out of it favourably?" God what are those characters doing? Finishing lunch and leaving. "I wish they'd stick fast to the table; then I'd be rid of them." Coleridge: "A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself—as Greece by Persia; and Rome by Etruria, the Italian states, and Carthage." (Table Talk.) Walser asks: who compresses a story into its increment? He keeps returning to the river that runs through the town even when it is far away from the action; his mind will wonder ah dear. One Ullman story becomes solemn around the presence of a cake. "But then, like a small, curled dragon, the lie came crawling out of the cake. It had been purchased at the last minute from the baker, and from the outside it looked just like every other bundt cake in the world. As for the astonishment it produced you would simply accept it in silence, just as she had done, but you could not simply accept the candid truth that was its real core." (Retold, tr Kurt Beals.) And Theo. Dreyer in Joan of Arc spends so much time looking at the contours of Joan's head next to the wet humps of her gleaming eyes, and it is one of the great films of world cinema say the critics: what do I make of that? Now springing out of context into my implied mouth come the eyes like "gaping well-heads" from Peake.

and made a gesture

I'm still surprised by the notion that so many moments in this book are either action-oriented or stasis-oriented; that some of them you can look back on and say, “That was the first step in a chain of events,” and of other ones you can say, “That could have happened in a different place, or it might not have happened at all and nothing else would have had to change.”

Also: not knowing which is which when you encounter them.

(I believe it was an education in Mervyn Peake that made me sensitive towards static moments, because he values them: recall the reflective drop near the end of Titus Groan, Peake's response to nihilism if you like, the world being so full, “mine eyes mint gold;” a book with no indifferent instants. The chapter in Gormenghast about the old man who says that death is life until a young man kills him by setting his beard on fire, is a crude version of the same idea. Gormenghast is a cruder book than Titus Groan.)

Not only moments but sometimes words, which I know you could say about any book, but that thought occurs to me especially now because Mann uses so many adjectives to describe furniture and other household objects, and he seems to feel a weight inside these adjectives when he uses them. I'm remembering the word “heavy” in the description of heavy chairs and heavy food in my last post: “There they all sat, on heavy high-backed chairs, consuming good heavy food ...” which (that repetition existing in an undifferentiated and contented utopia) was like opening a story, seeing that the first line was, “They all lived quietly in the peaceful countryside ...” and anticipating trouble.

“Heavy” is a knowing and therefore sinister word, not an innocent word; it can see the future, the characters can't, though it shares their dining room, and supports their bottoms and lies on their plates.

For an example of an adjective that seems static to me, there is the word “oval” when Tom Buddenbooks holds a doorknob (p. 328, Cardinal, 1957). “He held the oval doorknob in one hand and made a gesture of weary protest with the other.”

This “oval” not presaging future disaster or commenting on the present, Tom's weariness not having discourse with the shape of the doorknob, and a square doorknob would have seen him equally weary, or a brass doorknob, or a clean doorknob, or a blue doorknob, none of them having anything to say except that a doorknob of such and such kind existed in this fictional room off its own bat, in a lonely way, filling or defining space; and that the author might have been picturing one kind of doorknob, not another kind of doorknob, that he might have had a specific doorknob in mind (you're allowed to presume) -- maybe there are oval doorknobs in his house at the moment that he's writing this book, or, if you've heard that Buddenbrooks is supposed to be based on the history of his family, you could imagine that his childhood home, or his grandparents' home, had oval doorknobs. You could speculate for hours on the multitude of routes he might have taken before he encountered oval doorknobs.

waves broke calmly and indifferently

No more Powys, Powys ended, none after this, even though there are still books by him that I haven't brought up, no mention of Ducdame, because I can't find it, no Homer and the Aether for the same reason (the enervating knowledge that the thing would not be on the shelf if I looked there for it; the stubborn resistance to the idea of buying it on Ebay – no --), no mention of Wood and Stone, or, wait, I'm wrong, I must have mentioned that it was dedicated to Hardy, in one of the posts in which I was saying that Powys indebted himself to Hardy. “All of Powys' fiction began with the description of a hill in Wood and Stone,” is probably what I said, and everything afterwards takes place in the shadow this embarkation, hills recurring in his work, hills in Porius, hills in Owen Glendower, countryside often looming, hills and then the sea, the hint of infinity in the vertical direction and the hint of infinity in the horizontal, Adrian, about to die in Rodmoor, shouting across the sea that separates him from his son.

The long dark line of waves broke calmly and indifferently at his feet, and away — away into the eternal night — stretched the vast expanse of the sea, dim, vague, full of inexpressible, infinite reassurance.

Troubled things happening on beaches, Weymouth Sands opening with trouble on a beach; Powys himself in his Autobiography sneaking often away to a beach to visit the women's legs. I might have posted his description of the hill.

Were it not for the neighbourhood of the more massive promontory this conical protuberance would itself have stood out as an emphatic landmark; but Leo's Hill detracts from its emphasis, as it detracts from the emphasis of all other deviations from the sea-level, between Yeoborough and the foot of the Quantocks.

Probably I compared it to the opening of Titus Groan, seeing that Peake has come up several times in this long series of posts. “John Cowper Powys is difficult to categorize,” reads the blurb for a book named Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex, by Jeremy Mark Robinson. “We place him (usually) in amongst D.H. Lawrence, Mervyn Peake, Robert Graves, William Blake and Thomas Hardy.” How much do I have in common with “we”? Wessex opens with a quote from Hardy as remembered by the critic William Archer (1856 - 1924): “What are my books but one long plea against “man's inhumanity to man” – to woman – and to the lower animals?” Powys empathises even with the worms, empathising with things that can't use his empathy, like fictional characters and mythological demons, which might be the smallest and lowest kind of animal for if they wriggle away from the grasp of a human then they die, and even a worm can wriggle away from a human and live.

it was only himself

Free will (or "the ultimate illusion of free will") in Powys proves itself to itself by defying some other power "unexpectedly, capriciously and wantonly." If it is defiant then it must be self-conscious. It has its own strict standards. What if it defies that power slowly and thoughtfully? Then is its free action tainted by "any motive at all, or by any urge at all"? Can not thinking about your motive genuinely remove an action from any influential context, as the character John Hush believes? He is blurring ideas about spontaneity into ideas about freedom. One image of freeness is moving on top of another. Freedom needs to be freed from the brain itself. I think that's where this passage is trying to go. It can't get there, but it's heading in that direction. The word "free" has infested the paragraph. Everything has to be free, even freedom. Peake makes Titus capricious too, especially at the end of Gormenghast when he has decided to kill Steerpike. Steerpike is responsible for his dead sister, but Titus decides that he is going to fight him because he loves his missing canoe. As though Peake thinks that the less reasonable and expected motivation will make the action seem more lifelike, strange, respectable, and true. Earlier Modernists having already argued that people do not have direct thoughts from A to B, Peake cuts the Gordian knot of psychological representation by making his character go through C instead. I believe he is refusing to acquiesce to a demand that he can sense hanging behind him as he writes. But confused. The tempo of the book changes here.

And the people in Powys, at crucial moments, are noticing those bubbles or those piles of dung or, in that same scene from The Inmates, they are being invaded by ideas that seem to come from nowhere. "[T]wo rather unusual words came into John's head which he tried in vain to connect either with what he was watching of the person and the proceedings of Morsimmon Esty, or with himself as he peered out from under those sweet-scented spruce-branches." Rhisiart in Owen Glendower watches a man draw a sword in front of him and "the queerest side-way impression rushed through Rhisiart's consciousness."

Then there will be a massive sprouting-outwards from the irrelevant observation of dung or bubbles, or the two words will stay in the mind of Hush for more than a page, or the sword in Owen Glendower will turn into a paragraph. "Its ancient cross-handle in some fantastic way conveyed to the lad's mind the notion that it was a kind sword!" Things are no longer irrelevant if they have this weight. Powys elevates and enlarges his defiance. He is a de-irrevelantor. The defiance becomes its own excuse. Rhisiart often believes that he is being invaded or "swamped," particularly by women. "Call it his wickedness, call it what you like, he felt he must keep the central core of his identity from being drugged, swamped, dissolved, in this Tower-room piety." In another chapter, when a stronger man is crushing him unconscious, he spontaneously decides that he is not going to call for help. "You can't make me call for help!"

The crushing man doesn't care whether Rhisiart calls for help or not. He's not deliberately trying to kill him or even bully him, or extract information, he's only crushing him for fun because they've been drinking and people are getting rambunctious: "he had simply given way to a whole-hearted joy in the power of his hairy arms." (He is behaving "unexpectedly, capriciously and wantonly.") But Rhisiart reacts as if someone or something is telling him to shout for help. There is that power of expectation letting him know that it wants him to do something and he won't do it. Refusing to save himself, he is transported. "Rhisiart began to find something in the pain itself that gave him a strange exultation." He is doing it for Owen Glendower, he thinks: somehow Owen Glendower will know that he didn't cry out. "'It's for Owen,' he thought." Then he feels himself wrestling his own corpse.

And he kept crying out to it, 'I know your name!' though how it could have a name when it was only himself remained one of those problems that often confront a mind under some cracking tension.

Powys doesn't know the answer to that question any more than his character does. He cuts off the transport there and uses another man to knock Rhisiart loose. In his Autobiography he reads Proust -- Proust could have shown him how to get past the high montaintop of drama in these situations, and analyse, but the lesson didn't get passed on.

In Peake it is a plot manoeuvre. The plot excuses it.

seized with a great trembling

"[I]t is the dictum of nature, who is the mother of all wisdom." Thus the book closes (A Humble Enterprise), and maybe all the fixed finities in the world are threats of an ending; the cannibals in Fugitive Anne might decide, let me imagine, not to doubt Anne's godhood, ever, no matter what she does, and by doing that they will fasten her in that role, keeping her there, and Anne, married at the start of the book, might have been trapped with her bullocky husband forever if she hadn't escaped from her ship's cabin, and then, when she is the priestess of the Permanently Ancient Mayans (who are known as the Aca if I'm remembering that rightly), she might have been stuck with them in their caves for the rest of her life if the same bullock driver husband hadn't come along through the bush looking for her. "Then, seized with a great trembling, she swayed dizzily, and might have fallen, but for Semaara's sustaining arm." Soon they are trying to feed her to the holy tortoise or throw her into the volcano, as is the Ancient Mayan way.

She is always being shunted into these positions (wife or priestess or god) that could have immobilised her indefinitely (kept in a cave as the goddess, kept in convent or temple as the priestess) if some change and shock had not been allowed to enter the story, whereupon she is no longer a goddess, no longer a priestess, not really a wife, so forced to move on into another state of discovery, where she will be pushed, eventually, yet again, into a further cul-de-sac, until she reaches the one the author was looking for, which is the Albert Hall and the British aristocracy. There she is allowed to rest. Yes yes, says the author, I'll let you stay in this one.

Fugitive Anne is made out of periods of stasis broken by violent disturbances that Rosa Praed, through her characters, dreads, and yet nonetheless she needs them if her adventure story is going to get anywhere. She likes to write those paragraphs of frozen stage scenery (I've mentioned them before), the heroine standing in front of the rock face with her chin tilted up, her grey clothes, "delicate aquiline nose," etc, an aesthetic photograph, the details perfect, the effect perfect, then movement thwarts it, "a spear, hurled down with unerring aim, struck the ground a few paces from the outskirts of the mob."

Stiffness in her scenes, so why not the liquid tremblingness that I recall when I think of stage-scenes in Mervyn Peake -- the setting of the scene around the lake at the end of Titus Groan, with the reflective drop -- why -- as if it is all in abeyance only temporarily and ready to move again -- then why does Praed seem static and eternal, as if Anne's chin could have stayed up there forever with the same perfect tilt?

lightbulbs

Sometimes in a long book I forget who's who and then one note in the juxtaposition chorus goes dung in a baffled space, the present is supposed to echo deeply off the past but it does not; there is a deadness in some aspect of the character's behaviour when they appear after a long time away and speak again, when I can tell (by the way the author has made a phrase) that their conversation is supposed to have extra meaning due to who they are, whatever the hell that is.

And sometimes I only realise that I could tell in retrospect when the clues mount up, memory hits me, and I think, Wait, this is so and so. Then I see that there have been clues for pages and that I was disturbed by them without knowing what I was disturbed by: it was disquiet, it was a stranger coming up to you fervently and calling you by your name and Hey, yes, hi, hello! you say, while you wonder, Who are you?

That happened last year when I was reading Pynchon's V. and there was a character who was supposed to have resonance when she turned up again, but I thought she was new, and didn't realise that she had been there in the beginning, chapter one or two, then gone underground, the buzz of juxtaposition not there, the character dead, or not dead but subdued. Here was a woman who had been brought in, I thought, to fall in love with one of the male leads, a fresh existence in the book, but then I realised after she said a few words about gear sticks that she had to be the one who had appeared at the beginning, and then she was also that woman; they were not separate, and this new doubled-person had a different point of view on everything; she was more tomboyish than she had been a moment earlier (though her behaviour on the page had not changed) and in an instant this behaviour made no sense, ladies and gentlemen, or else seemed too convenient (for the plot) and too warped from what she should be (in my mind: suddenly she was out of character), and not even aging a few years and shifting to another part of the country (as she'd done) accounted for it I thought, this abrupt girlfriendishness in which she had become engaged, and which I had been following tamely and which I imagined she had been introduced to conduct (so she had, but earlier than I had imagined).

And she was left there by her creator, who had to finish the book somehow, sending off his characters or abandoning them when they were still in the middle of an action. Some books will kill their characters, some will chase them away (Christina Stead does one or both), some will summarise their fates (Dickens), some will philosophise (Middlemarch), some will present themselves with a problem, as does Yambo Ouologuem when he spends the book, Bound to Violence, describing massacres, armies, wild huge actions, then finishes the manuscript with two people sitting alone and holding an unrushed discussion; some will fade their people out gently, like John Crowley in Little, Big, when everybody is at a table among trees and the book looks over the weather that attacks their house, the lightbulbs going out (darkness setting in as the story prepares to vanish); then there is Titus Groan and everyone in a procession, going inside the castle -- the book ends -- they go in and the book ends at the same time; they have walked themselves out of the book. Inside the castle and outside the book they are still walking; they continue on, they are going past the spine, they are off the edge of the table, they are out of the room, they have found their way into the kitchen and they are heading past the cockroach traps into the area under the fridge with the crumbs and shadows and those hard objects like springs and boxes that hide under there, the workings of the machine.

the hipster whose identity is defined by the post-Modern imperative

Five hundred names, says Aelian. (Considering the end of my last post, he decides to speak up.) Well done. That's an easy solution. That's perfect. That's fast. You'll be done in minutes. Mechanical simplicity, says PJ Ray: hipsters love it because it gives them a feeling of autonomy and control, and they hope that they are released from the humiliation of dependence that is contingent upon their existence, which supplies them with iPhones, computerised cars, and other gadgets that are too difficult to fix without a technician. "In short, the fetishization of low-tech is about the illusion of agency; it provides affirmation for the hipster whose identity is defined by the post-Modern imperative to be an individual, to be unique."

George Scialabba, paraphrasing Christopher Lasch's ideas about modern industrialisation in his .pdf chapbook, Divided Mind, pictured this "imperative" as a psychological development, Freudian rather than post-Modern, and a paraphrase like to have a well-composed adult mind would take the place, in his argument of to be an individual, to be unique. He writes:

And in promising an endless supply of technological marvels, it evokes grandiose fantasies of absolute self-sufficiency and unlimited mastery of the environment, even while the quasi-magical force that conjures up those marvels – i.e., science – becomes ever more remote from the comprehension or control of ordinary citizens. This is a recipe for regression to psychic infancy: fantasies of omnipotence alternating with terrified helplessness.

An irony, says Ray, is that the companies selling gadgets will use the ideas of autonomy and psychic freedom to sell the gadgets; these ideas are a marketing tool and how do you escape from the iPhone that is like a ritual in Gormenghast, administered only by the authorities? "We are built," he writes, "to desire what society needs from us and to demand the same from others. Delueze observes with transparent contempt that “young people strangely boast of being ‘motivated;’” they require no institutional coercion," they want, and are tempted, and are not like the kings or the narrator in The Grasshopper, by Richard Lovelace (1618–1657).

Thus richer than untempted kings are we,
   That, asking nothing, nothing need:
Though lords of all what seas embrace, yet he
   That wants himself is poor indeed.

Which is desire not unfulfilled but short-circuited, or routed back to the one object, oneself, though many of the other poems of that time and place (if the anthologies I've been reading are good guides, and the collected Donne, etc) are about longing for a thing not oneself, instead another's self, the beloved, a complicated machine but one that may be modified without technicians, let me try to pry you open with this hammer darling, oh let us come together --

Love me less or love me more,
And play not with my liberty,
Either take all or restore,
Bind me at least or set me free ...

(from Song, by Sidney Godolphin (1610? – 1643) )

-- switch me on or off, he begs, but don't leave me in the middle, a poor dickering bulb, don't leave me with my friends, the other poets, whose "fantasies of omnipotence alternating with terrified helplessness" recur throughout these poems you could say, or am I stretching it? The beloved's gaze or promise will annihilate or restore, it is worth more than diamonds or more than the sky, or it is heaven and the hair is gold, or some similar thing, so let that loved one be contrasted with some object, usually a flower or a star, the paps are snow, the cheeks cherry, nature feels shy when she walks, "The sun would steal a kiss: | The wind upon her lips | Likewise most sweetly blew" (George Wither (1588 - 1667), A Love Sonnet) and she is sometimes resistant to the poet's appeals, this resistance interpreted as cruelty ("I see you wear that pitying smile | Which you have still vouchsaf'd my smart," from the Godolphin again), though in Phillis Knotting by Sir Charles Sedley she is preoccupied, or else she is wishing the speaker would go away, or feels shy for some other reason. Enclosed in her own unpenetrated quiet she is closer to the characters in Peake's book, who are "themselves" as the author often reminds us: themselves with a bottomless reserve of self. "Titus is not a symbol. Titus is himself."

You could take the whole Titus trilogy as a piece of support for the idea that being yourself does not make you happy, seeing that so few people who live in Gormenghast castle are happy, if in fact any of them are, possibly none whatsoever except the Doctor, yet all drenched in Themselves. This notion is so prominent in my mind that when I was listening the other day to an album by the Californian band Los Cenzontles and the singer sang this line, "I want to be free to be me," I thought, No you don't, look what happened to Fuchsia. And could not stop feeling that this was an extremely legitimate criticism of the entire song.

in and out of the game

I like Freya Stark's romantic singularity more than Matthiessen's primal hugging and why I prefer it is a thing I might one day sit down and think about, though it may have been Peake when I was younger, helping to teach me, yet I believe it may have been my own sense of privacy, standing foremost, fitting me to like Peake's books, and also, recently, Vilette, with its protagonist who loves her interior, her loneliness, and her thoughts. I looked at a copy of Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot and remembered one nurse in The Eye of the Storm running through a paragraph of thought while she's alone in, I think, the garden.

Walt Whitman makes me uneasy whenever he decides that he is large, he contains multitudes, he sees all of America, "The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, | I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen," this big web he says he is, this interconnection, this human being as a spy camera never letting you away, or me; all of us his grist, but then I remember that he says

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

and that the conglomerate poem is made of discrete pieces, two-line verses, aphorisms, and other independent units: it contains antisocial elements, and people will normally remember a line or two or a scrap, but rarely the whole poem at once: the isolated reserves itself, and is a mark of mortality. The isolated is the thing that stops.

And I wonder if the removal in Song of Myself is less the removal of a door between the narrator and other people ("Unscrew the locks from the doors! | Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!") than it is the imaginary removal of the door between imagination and life, for if he is "hauling my boat down the shallow river, | Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter" then he is living an imaginary life, he is his imaginary life, and he is only doing and being the things that Walt Whitman has heard about in his private brain, from books he's read or papers he's heard, or lessons he's had, these bits of news about Egyptian gods, ships, horses, and buck hunting, but anything he does not mention I assume he does not, in his role as a singular and absolutely disconnected nineteenth-century North American person, know. He has assembled a primary set of sources; he arranges them so that they radiate out from him. He is a little adventure-story writer, and all lives are adventure-story lives, all imagined, as the person takes the available information and dreams up boundarylines and relationships -- Whitman dreaming heavily of both, and having both, being the sensual unit and the universal object at the same time, an ambiguity, as Peake's characters in Gormenghast are hampered by the society of the castle and yet the author tells us that they are "themselves;" they are coherent, as no reader in their modern choice-world will ever be. The Countess Gertrude, buttocking up the ladder in the seared library, is expressed beautifully by her bottom, but my bottom has never done the same for me.

(This idea of being "yourself" is a strange one now that I come to think of it; what does it mean?

In Titus Groan and Gormenghast it seems to mean that you are consumed in yourself, your nature dictates everything you do, and even your features, your nose, your feet, your hair, will be examined by an author who wants to know whether this part of yourself suits you or not; you behave absolutely in the way that the thing that is you should behave (you're not only never out of character, you're always reinforcing that character), you do not let anything else distract you; you are solitary in the ongoing consummation of yourself, you are a vacuum into which anything of you disappears if it does not express that character.

I see commentators who say that Peake's characters have been damaged by their setting; I do not often see one who points out that they have brutally been perfected by it.)

in strength compared to the impulse

A focus is a vehicle, focus puts you in itself and steers you around. I wouldn't have read Green Mansions last Wednesday if I hadn't heard that the character called the Thing in Peake's Gormenghast was inspired by Rima, the "wild girl" who runs through Hudson's South American woodland. The Thing's parents die, and she runs away from the Bright Carvers and raises herself in Gormenghast Forest, meanwhile, in Mansions, Rima's parents die, and she grows up leaping through the trees, hated by a nearby clan of indigenous Indians ("savages" writes Hudson; the book was published in 1904), who believe that she has mysterious cursed powers, and the equivalents of the savages in Gormenghast believe that the Thing, too, has some kind of cursed power or supernatural vindictiveness, anyway, they stay away from her and abuse her from a distance, which is how the Indians treat Rima.

Rima's parents are dead, and so are the parents of the Thing, and both of these teenage women make an incomprehensible sound when they want to talk, although Rima, who has been adopted by an old man, can also carry out conversations in a form of Spanish, which, since the book is written in English, is English. The Thing hasn't been adopted by anybody and she can't speak to Titus in any language; nor does she love him, as Rima loves Hudson's hero Abel. "But the shame was as nothing in strength compared to the impulse I felt to clasp her beautiful body in my arms and cover her face with kisses," Abel tells the reader, and Titus tries to carry out the same operation with the Thing, ("he longed savagely and fearfully to clasp it") but the Thing with her egg-shaped head and habit of eating fledgelings (and Rima is compared frequently to birds) is frightened and escapes from him, fleeing out of the cave where they have been sheltering from a brutal thunderstorm; and then a bolt of lightning comes down and burns her to death, obliterating her body: "out of the heart of the storm that searing flash of flame broke loose."

The weather in Green Mansions is frequently stormy, and the storms are full of lightning. This lightning had to wait until it got to Gormenghast before it could kill anybody, it's harmless in Hudson's book, but, still, Rima dies as the Thing dies, by burning. The Indians, noticing her high in the branches of a tree, set the trunk on fire. She perishes in "the sea of flames." Her body disintegrates into ash and bone fragments. Abel locates the tree later, lone and dead in a bare area of the forest -- the Thing spends one chapter of Gormenghast up a lone dead tree herself, isolated in a bare area -- Abel scrapes up as many of these fragments as he can find and then he does something that is very strange in this pragmatic adventure book, but it's very Peakean: he becomes an artist. He makes a clay vessel for the bone fragments, he decorates it "with a pattern of thorny stems, and a trailing creeper with curving leaf and twining tendril, and pendent bud and blossom," and then he invents dyes. "I gave it colour."

Strange, strange, because Hudson is a practical author, he usually doesn't include an idea unless he can make it useful, and yet Abel's vase isn't practical, not to him nor to the story, and he has to throw it away a few pages later because it's too heavy and he wants to move freely through the jungle. That's the end of the vase. But the author spent half a page describing it. That's unprecedented in Green Mansions. It's as though W.H. Hudson in 1904 was inspired by Mervyn Peake, who would not be born until 1911. The current of a similar culture ran through both, you say, they had their culture in common, but there are other currents Hudson could have chosen to follow and why this one?

Imagine for a moment that he knew he had to plant that detail there to fix the unborn future author's mind to the book, for surely this is an idea that would attract the artist-romantic Mervyn Peake, this hero Abel who rears up into artistic productivity, kicked by emotion, so that Peake would be compelled to think over Green Mansions and accumulate the ideas he needed for aspects of Gormenghast, the wildness of the wild girl, the hostility of the savages, the storms (rain plays a huge role at the end of his book, and in Mansions Rima reveals herself to Abel when she comes out to save him from the rain), the lightning, which in Hudson's book seems to exist only so that it can magnify the fury of the South American weather, but is in reality waiting for a chance to fry a character in a story that won't be written until the 1940s, the cave where Rima shelters with Abel (and where Titus shelters with the Thing), the notion of death by burning, the disintegrated corpse, an exultation of emotion following the death, and perhaps Peake, who wrote about a landscape of stones, would even be struck by the other author's description of Abel's emotions as he makes the vase -- "dwelling alone on a vast stony plain ... all things, even trees, ferns, and grasses, were stone" -- and -- to balance out the murder of one character, Hudson gives him the tool he needs to save another, namely Steerpike, who becomes uneasy in Gormenghast when he sees the Twins in front of him, staring into his face so directly that he is reflected in all four of their eyes. You should look into my eyes, says Abel to Rima: you would see yourself reflected there. Oh I know what I should see there, she says. "There is a little black ball in the middle of your eye; I should see myself in it no bigger than that," and she marks off about an eighth of her finger nail. "There is a pool in the wood, and I look down and see myself there. That is better. Just as large as I am -- not small and black like a small, small fly." The Twins have set a trap, Steerpike realises, and he looks up in time to avoid the axe that comes down from a spiderweb of strings and wires, up in the shadows, waiting to be triggered, and the axe buries its edge in the floor at the place where he would have been standing if he hadn't seen himself reflected in their pupils like a small, small fly, drawn in fine glowing lines, as though some artist had used the proboscis of a bee for a paintbrush.

crumbling stone

I'm still turning over the potential nothingness of most of Gormenghast castle in my head, so excuse me while I part-repeat myself. I'll throw in a few new words so this won't be totally boring. The castle is huge, according to Peake, but vaguely huge, with miles of stone, hundreds of rooms, so big that it can't be detailed by the author (suggests the author indirectly), and this absurd uncontained hugeness is a part of the structure itself, and so it seemed wrong to me when I saw the building framed by the screen in the 2000 BBC television miniseries as though it were a compassable assemblage like an architectural butte; and if I ever filmed it, I think I would give you a very high high shot, with a patch of green nature in one of the lower corners -- because the reader knows there is a forest and a mountain, and paths running away into them so we need the greenery there -- and the rest of the screen would be rooftops, on and on, tiny, detailed, like grains on a beach (but then you will remember that people as large as yourself are living under those grains and your brain will pitch forward and slew around in terrifying vertigo), rooftops covering the rest of the screen, taking up one whole wall of the theatre where you're sitting, which for the effect I want should be an IMAX. And you will feel as if you are falling forward and drowning.

Then we will have Gormenghast wallpaper, which will be the same thing, with the blot of sward by your pillow, or by the sink or by the dog bowl or television or whatever you want, (depending on the room, depending on your furniture) and the rest of the four walls will be nothing but detailed tiny fields of tiny tiles, each tile absolutely delineated and in black and white to make it more unreal and disorienting.

Or else nothing except one small area of detail, measuring less than a cubit square as you will be able to see when when you put your arm against the wall, and in here the story in the books takes place, and beyond that a void with words sketched across it, "crumbling stone," "vistas" and so on, just these thin lines of sketch stretched across the whistling gap to keep it from dropping away. I thought, "If he is writing then he is compelled to name, there is no way to write and not name something, which is perhaps why it had never occurred to me before, this idea of the castle being nothing." Every word either names a thing or prepares it for placement, the ors and buts and verbs and thens being the design and scaffolding, and then the nouns bringing the thing about and submitting it to a category of existence, pin, leg, moose, or table, and even if I write, "There was no moon" (as Beckett does somewhere in Molloy, I think) I have still named a moon and created a moon, and then I tell you that my created moon is somewhere else, which is what I would expect you to understand when you read "no moon" -- not "the moon had stopped existing" but "the moon existed and it was not visible in the sky right then."

I can't deny the moon. I have named its absence, but then I haven't, because I've still named it and not the phenomenon of not-it, which needs a hyphen, "There was a not-moon," or a newly minted word, "There was an unmoon." It was an unmoonish night, I say, and not very starrish either.

"Unmoon? No such thing. Means nothing to me. Pointless," says the reader probably. Can you write about an object in a way that removes it? And then there is Romola's flashing eye, which has a strange existence. If we were somehow in the room where these two people were staring at one another we wouldn't expect to see the flashing eye (am I being presumptuous? are there readers who seriously expect flashes? I'm wary of this "we" but on I'll go) because the rest of the book around this scene has been written in a way that signals Realism. Film it, and we'd see the woman sitting, we'd see her turn her head to her husband, we'd see him put his keys in his scarsella, all of these would be real events, in the terms of the fictional-real, but the flashing eye would be symbolic everywhere, and the flash would go away instantly and live in one of the rooms that Peake never visits.

And once when I was standing on one of the upper floors of the Leid Library at UNLV and looking through a window at the horizon I saw a yellow strip at the feet of one mountain, an area of open desert between the city and the foothills, and then because I was so tall at that moment I saw the desert on the other side of the same mountain, which was the same barren tawny tiger colour, and in that moment I imagined leaving the building and travelling over the mountains, and going and going like Voss, and finding nothing there, until realising finally that the only patch of detail in the world was the city of Las Vegas, and there is nothing else out there at all, no world, no northern hemisphere, no sea, only Las Vegas, and the rest was only the rumours that had come to us through the internet and books, somehow generated by the city itself, which likes to keep us here with the desert cutting us off like an axe from something else, which is maybe Gormenghast castle.

had held at bay the illness

As I was finishing this sentence about Titus Groan in my last post, "How many rooms does the reader never see because no character visits them?" it occurred to me that the answer had to be "None" and "Innumerable." Titus, in the third book of Peake's trilogy, removes himself from the castle and runs into the wide and open outer world, but the author keeps restoring him to enclosed spaces, putting him in a prison cell, or an underground tunnel, or a car, where he usually acts against one other key person, Old Crime in the cell, or Veil in the tunnel. He enters from the wings of one of these stage-areas, exchanges dialogue, then exits to another stage. This two-way opposition works in the other books as well, where you have Flay against Swelter, or Prunesquallor exclusively talking to Gertrude, but Titus Alone is unique in that one side of the dialogue rarely changes. It is usually Titus. He is the static force now, he is Gormenghast castle, the object that carries through the story from one end to the other.

He is trapped and released and trapped and released and trapped again. (You could even argue that the endings of the last two books are being mashed together and relived, mashed together and relived. End of book one: Titus is imprisoned. End of Book Two: Titus escapes from that prison. The body of Book Three: ditto ditto ditto. So that Titus Alone is not a sequel to the other two books but a compression of them, their anthology or compilation tape.)

An alien society is surging somewhere outside the walls that the author keeps putting in place around him, or at least that's my feeling when I read the book -- this surging, this muttering -- the strange culture exists and it has its own rules and laws, it picks up the young man and puts him in a courtroom, then shuttles him into the cell, then persecutes him, but the mutter of this society is happening apart from him; it happens outside and away and it touches him only to harm him, and otherwise it's foggy.

To extend the idea of a stage: this society is the audience gathering in the theatre foyer during the interval to make a verbal judgment that can be heard perhaps dimly through the walls backstage, and the actors come out again at the start of act three to meet this judgment, not knowing what it is. Titus emerges onto the stage, he gestures dimly against judgment, he sulks, strives, panics, and runs to evade it.

Peake wrote a stage play, hoping to make money, but "The reviews were not good," states John Watney in his biography Mervyn Peake, "the work of seven years wasted; the magic wand that was to solve all their worries had broken." It had a short run and he received seventeen pounds. "He had expected too much from it, he had worked too hard on it, and had held at bay the illness that had started to take hold of him."

The next work he finished before "the illness" broke him down irrevocably was Titus Alone, and the characters keep returning to these stage-areas, they present themselves on stages again and again, and the book's writer-character, who squats behind mouldering remaindered copies of his novel in the dark Under-river, is a pessimistic object; he is set up next to his failures, they are on display; and Titus is sent to the Under-river by his author to witness this failure and misery, and to fight an evil pimp named Veil.

Titus fought a different man in the previous book, and won, but now he isn't saving his homeland, as he did in Gormenghast, he goes to commit murder because the other soul disgusts him (as Steerpike did: it is important to Peake that the fight be subrational), and he fights in order to rescue a sick woman so that she can be allowed to die as she wants, on clean linen. Veil is foul in the author's estimation, morally filthy; this is a battle over the clean and the unclean; she dies on clean linen but she is still dead, a small wish is granted but nothing is saved, unless you consider Freud, and the idea that the most independent wish of every life is to control the manner of its death, and yet she didn't control it, she didn't command it, she only wished for it, and it was only through the intervention of a stranger that the wish was fulfilled. It was a ruthless culture that damaged her, and a ruthless culture that pushed her saviour down there to put her on a flawless pillow, which kills her instantly.







I don't have the book with me, so all of this might actually be wrong.

On the subject of that flawless pillow: notice that clean things in Peake are often dangerous. Swelter's axe is clean. Steerpike is clean. The evil technology in Alone is sleek and neat. Fuchsia is messy and harmless. But the Doctor is clean too, and we even see him taking a bath, so I can't say that Gormenwashing is universally bad. Whimsical washing versus serious washing? (The Doctor plays in his bath.)

the sea is one hydra

The blind men come up to the elephant and one of them finds a tail, "The elephant is like a rope," this person says; and another finds a fat leg, "The elephant is like a tree," and a third finds the trunk, "The elephant is a hose," but if they hadn't already experienced a rope, a tree, and a hose, then what would they find? A Ponge from another planet might recognise other qualities in bread. Christina Stead starts The Man Who Loved Children on a specific street, with a specific house, "Tohoga House, their home," and everything she finds from there onwards, is the book. Perhaps each book is a long search. Mervyn Peake goes to a building of his own, larger than Stead's, almost blank at first, a wall and houses outside the wall, and he discovers everything in that one focussed area of land, not walking through it with the personal and monodirected tone of Ponge, but sensing it multipronged through characters, using them to feel the castle as if they were several tentacles. Mr Flay enters the Kitchens to watch Swelter and the author witnesses the Kitchens; one of the Twins walks through a room and he follows her and voila, the room is exposed to him, here are its details. His voice reaches around like a curious octopus, touching here and there. How many rooms does the reader never see because no character visits them?

Peake was grabbed by an octopus once off the island of Sark, or this is what he told his friend Gordon (or Goaty) Smith in a letter, and he had to beat it to death; in Hugo's Toilers of the Sea the hero in similar straits slices the animal's head off. "He had plunged the blade of his knife into the flat slimy substance, and by a rapid movement, like the flourish of a whip in the air, describing a circle round the two eyes, he wrenched the head off as a man would draw a tooth." Parts of Hugo could make prose poems if you picked them out of his novels, for instance, this description of the sea, also from Toilers:

The indivisible cannot be broken up into compartments. There is no intervening wall between one wave and another. The Channel Islands feel impulses coming from the Cape of Good Hope. Shipping throughout the world is confronting a single monster. The whole of the sea is one hydra. The waves cover the sea with a kind of fish's skin. The Ocean is Ceto. On this unity swoops down the innumerable.

This stolen poem works in strong declarations, certain things are so, and other things cannot be treated in that way, but a word like "indivisible" is precisely ineffable and "Ceto" and "hydra" are mythical -- he is declaring the unprovable, he is declaring the air. Then there is a closing mystery and a new idea. What is "the innumerable"?* Then silence after the mystery. There is a tussle between the power of the language to say and its power to mean. It says what it says very directly, but it means what it means very obliquely. And the same goes for Peake's Groan which is not in favour of the aristocracy but not against it either, which is Dickensian but not, which reflects the England of his day but doesn't, and Steerpike is Hitler but he isn't, and the Rituals are army regulations but they're not, and the author, using passionate and heightened language, posits a dry static society that damages its inhabitants, yet places the book's only egalitarian statement between the lips of a selfish arsonist. The book ends with the baby Titus "enter[ing] his stronghold" after an act of symbolic rebellion (it can't be anything other than symbolic, the baby is a baby, we recognise the rebellion, he can't) which the author regards as a kind of mystic heroism, but the stronghold, to which he comes surrounded by triumphant language, is a prison, antithetical to his humanity. It will not, like a stronghold, protect him from harm. It will do the harm. It will warp him. He comes to his triumphant mutilation.

There is another tension in the books. The readers, if they love Peake, love the castle and the society of the castle, and depend on this society to produce and to frame the characters that they also love. These characters are different expressions of isolation. Fuchsia isolates herself in her attic, Swelter isolates himself eminently above a crowd, Gertrude can remove herself from any conversation by addressing a raven, Prunesquallor separates himself from his sister by chattering, and so on, and so on, or to a cat, and so on. Each one of them is a machine that manipulates isolation (and an experiment in isolation management), and they reveal themselves to us by their methods; by their methods we know them. Castle society makes isolation essential; it also makes it possible. If we love the books then the castle is the heart of everything we love. And the hero wants to take us away from it. The hero, the person we're supposed to be supporting, if we support anybody -- he is our enemy, and we are his.







* It's not a mystery in the book. He means "the wind." James Hogarth translated. Malcolm Yorke mentions Peake's letter to Gordon Smith in his Peake biography, Mine Eyes Mint Gold.

a formless and black mass which all of a sudden passed from the depth of night into a blaze

When you left me at the end of the last post I was preparing to fall asleep, so I'll pick up there again and say that if Macbeth doth murder sleep then he's only doing what we should all want to do, because sleep murders us, it disintegrates us utterly for hours every day, and if a person came along and did the same thing then they would be our enemy, and we would do anything to stop them, and the government would wheel out its guns and the private householder would stay up all night with a pitchfork, but sleep, evil sleep!, sleep weasels its way into our lives when we're young, and so we think it's as natural as a parent, that's how early it arrives -- and we have no idea how much it hates us, and it's easy to deduce that it hates us, I mean, if I came into your house and knocked you unconscious for hours you wouldn't think I liked you.

What value do we have when we're asleep, I wonder, as I put down my Claire Tomalin; what am I about to do, going under like this in an irresistible submarine, and why not stay awake and find out more about Nellie Ternan, knowledge that might be useful one day, you never know -- a quiz -- ten million dollars -- some detail of Nell Ternan's life, and I whip it out and behold, I am rich, and then I contact Powell's and ask if they still have that copy of Holbrook Jackson's Anatomy of Bibliomania with the blue hardback cover and the margin notes. I move to Tasmania and never see a desert again. Standing on Flamingo today, where it joins the Strip, I looked away down the road to the west and saw the bare scraped mountains with their drawn combed thighs standing up in the distance with the brooding silent meaningful stare of the Victorian Houses of Parliament at the top of Bourke Street, when you're standing in the arcade, by the Myer windows, right in the path of a tram, which is when you move, before they ding at you, and then run you over, and you lose a leg; you are not that toddler who fell under a lawnmower in Maryknoll a few days ago, there are no parents to comfort you -- you are an adult -- so now you lie there in the middle of Bourke Street ruining the view for others with your screaming and your pools of blood.

Proust wrote about sleep but how rare that is; books usually inhabit the waking part of life as though it is the only life we have, the only life the author has; they are not authors but waking authors and so perhaps somewhere there are sleeping authors who write the books we will never read. Ivan Goncharov pretends that he is dedicating a chapter to "Oblomov's Dream" but this only an author's dodge, no, Oblomov does not dream, he appears to fall asleep, "Sleep had cut off the slow, leisurely flow of his thoughts and carried him off in an instant," translates Stephen Pearl, but he is really awake in the past, remembering himself in childhood, his family home, his parents, his schooling, everything factual and blissful and sane. This is not a dream, it is a time machine, it is an author's manoeuvre. We know that the description we are reading is not a description of a dream because no dream is that long and that neat. Not even life is that neat. It only becomes that neat if memory and wishful thinking collaborate to neaten it.

Doctor Prunesquallor, at one point in Gormenghast, dreams about the other characters with such mysterious insight that we can guess he has merged partly with his creator and achieved a unique and godly perspective on the book that he himself inhabits. Otherwise he has merged with us, he looks back over the book with our eyes, and understands the experience of reading in a confused dream-way, in scraps, as we do when we sleep, and any book might seem like this to one of the characters if they dreamed back on it afterwards, just gestures and scenes, compressed and vivid, not necessarily connected; and in this dream the villain running across the earth is accompanied by a shadow made of rats. The rats never appeared in real life but they are a summary.

Some authors give their characters prophetic dreams, and Iris Murdoch makes a joke out of that idea in The Italian Girl when she has one character come in near the start of one chapter and then another chapter and then another, describing almost the same dream, which stars, I think, a ringing telephone. The normal reader, who recognises a trope when they see one, will probably decide at first that the author is foreshadowing, and maybe they will even take it seriously the second time, but by the third time it's starting to feel ridiculous, and by the forth time we are in the position of readers who are being asked to decide if these dreams are foreshadows as well as running gags, or if they are only running gags. So the dreams have become mysterious to us, but not in the way that a dream in a novel is usually, predictably mysterious. The mystery is usually, What Will This Prophecy Look Like When I See It Realised Concretely In The Plot? Cassandra comes on, the other characters fleer and scorn and the audience thinks wisely, "No, you should listen to her, you should pay attention" -- then the story continues, events occur, and the audience says, "I was right, fantastic, brownie points for me."

But once the serious atmosphere of prophecy has been destabilised by humour we've been pushed closer to the role of the other characters in the play, who feel, uneasily, that this is something too crazy to believe, and then what are we?

Proust is strong on the subject of dreams because he doesn't treat them like toys, like hammers for banging in plot-nails, as Goncharov does, or like jokes, although the dreams in Temps Perdu are both useful to the book, and also funny. He respects the strangeness of a dream and he can give you an idea of it in prose. There's a good example in Cities of the Plain, when the narrator dreams about his dead grandmother, and the grandmother in the dream is dead and alive at once, as she is to his brain, to his consciousness; he is used to thinking of her as a living being because she has been alive all his life but at the same time he knows she's dead, and these two pieces of information wrestle together as he sleeps.

In the dream he has decided that he is going to visit her but but his father tells him that he shouldn't try, "she is quite lifeless now," and yet, he adds, this person with no life would somehow suffer from headaches if her grandson asked her to think too hard -- therefore he mustn't go. She exists somewhere -- his father even offers him the address -- then he says, "I don’t suppose the nurse will allow you to see her." The son pleads. "You know quite well I shall always stay beside her," he says, "dear, deer, deer, Francis Jammes, fork," as he wakes, surfacing, the cloth of the dream coming apart and snagging up things here and there.

The argument between the father and the son is bizarre, it doesn't make external waking sense, but it makes total emotional-sense and dream-sense. His grandmother, exists, in emotion and memory, she is present in every dimension of his life except one -- but he can't reach her, thanks to this thing called death, which acts like an invisible wall or a series of magical excuses keeping them apart. His father has intercepted his desires before (we learnt in Swann's Way that he prefers not to let the narrator kiss his mother goodnight) so let him represent this standing-in-the-way being called Death. It is mad and it is absolute expressive sanity. It is the epitome of poetry, it is metaphorical.

Proust follows the narrator up out of the dream and describes him going through that migration, emerging from sleep like a man stepping off a plane in a foreign country and remembering the airport where he got on.

But already I had retraced the dark meanderings of the stream, had ascended to the surface where the world of living people opens, so that if I still repeated: “Francis Jammes, deer, deer,” the sequence of these words no longer offered me the limpid meaning and logic which they had expressed to me so naturally an instant earlier and which I could not now recall. I could not even understand why the word ‘Aias’ which my father had just said to me, had immediately signified: “Take care you don’t catch cold,” without any possible doubt.

He observes, and he has the patience to describe his observations, and translate them into the language of fiction (he must have adapted the tenor of his own dreams, and re-understood them into his character) and draw conclusions and even make the sad situation droll; he brings science and philosophy into his book, and the whole work is a kind of compendium or hybrid, with its false-memoir, myth, analysis, theory, and philosophical deduction, its mixture of cartoon character-tags with deep character-depth, and also here a nod to his friend Francis Jammes, who was the poet he was visiting on that night in World War I when he came home in the dark with bomb-smashed spears of glass stuck to his hat. Céleste was frightened for him but he told her it was wonderful, his eyes were stars, and the sight of aeroplanes flying over Paris appeared later in Time Regained. "The city seemed a formless and black mass which all of a sudden passed from the depth of night into a blaze of light, and in the sky, where one after another, the aviators rose amidst the shrieking wail of the sirens while, with a slower movement, more insidious and therefore more alarming, for it made one think they were seeking an object still invisible but perhaps close to us, the searchlights swept unceasingly, scenting the enemy, encircling him with their beams until the instant when the pointed planes flashed like arrows in his wake. And in squadron after squadron the aviators darted from the city into the sky like Walkyries."







Strange thing. Hours after I'd posted this I was reading André Gide's North African Journals when one of Gide's friends appeared in Biskra, and it was Francis Jammes. "I was waiting for Jammes with delicious impatience."

Jammes gives me his cane. It is made of ironwood and comes from the "Islands." It delights the children here because the handle is a greyhound's head: it is polished like jade, and yet so crude that it seems to be whittled. I've never seen anything so odd. Down the shaft, there are verses in capital letters, including these:

A squirrel had a
rose in its teeth, a donkey
called him crazy.

And these, which he used to put at the top of all his letters:

A bee sleeps
in the thickets of my heart.

(translated by Richard Howard)

the climber scrambles and clambers ever higher

I've put this link in the sidebar but I'm going to add it here as well -- it is Brian Sibley's Radio 4 serial adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Titus books. I can't say anything about Episode Two, because I haven't listened to it yet, but Episode One is excellent, just an excellent example of books being taken apart as books and put together again as radio. The opening lines of the first book, the outer houses clinging like limpets to the castle wall, don't appear until almost twenty-five minutes in, and he inserts them as we're following a character away from Gormenghast for the first time, and seeing it from without -- which is exactly the point of view of those lines. So he's paying attention to what things mean.

He has (and he had this too, back in 1984 when he turned the trilogy into a radio two-parter) an Under Milk Woodish habit of eliding his lines, and slicing them up, so that one character might start a description and another character slip in to finish it, or the narrator will begin to explain a point, then a character in the scene will speak and the narrator will pause naturally, as if a comma has uttered, then go on. The whole play flows and flows as though we're listening to a river running on and each ripple has a new voice. This is how he gives us Nannie Slagg leaving the castle to find a wetnurse for the baby --

A Bright Carver: One from the castle comes amongst us.
Nannie [to herself]: Ooh, but I must remember the right words …
Narrator: Nannie Slagg
Nannie: The bright carvers.
Narrator: Fourteen inches taller on account of a black hat
The Bright Carvers [responding to Nannie]: The castle!
Narrator: Topped off with a bunch of glass grapes that flare in the moonlight.

-- and here are the two narrators taking part in the same sentence --

Titus: Meanwhile, Steerpike the climber scrambles and clambers ever higher
Narrator: Through the dusty matted mass of ivy
Titus: Ever nearer to my world

-- and here's the technique in Milk Wood:

First Voice: Ocky Milkman, drowned asleep in Cockle Street, is emptying his churns into the Dewi River,

Ocky Milkman: regardless of expense,

First Voice: and weeping like a funeral.

The lines slip after one another pauselessly; the pauses in this play occur within the actors' performances, their own pauses, in character, the Doctor, for example, giggling, hesitating, then laughing again. (James Fleet as Doctor Prunesquallor gives individual personalities to passages of speech that, written down, would not be anything more useful to an actor than the flat nudity of "ha ha ha.") They slide on one another's heels like those staggered splitlines of Shakespeare's, in King Lear, Scene Two, Act Two, when Kent says, "It is both he and she / your son and daughter," and Lear follows immediately with, "No." Online versions of the script don't seem to replicate this, but the Oxford Shakespeare I've got here shows the nos and yeses arranged down the page from left to right like a set of steps. Kent: "Yes." Lear: "No, I say" -- and then the next line shuttles all the way back to the left side of the page as the tempo skips a beat and then it begins to make steps again: "I say yea," "By Jupiter I swear no." Maybe Kent, feeling thwarted by "No I say," had to pause to gather himself together for another assault on the unbelieving and knuckleheaded world, who knows; the actor can interpret it as he likes. But the way the lines are placed -- the fact that the playwright means them to follow one another quickly -- "conveys an increased sense of dramatic moment," writes David Crystal in the Oxford's introduction. And it does, even on the page. "An increase in tempo is also an ideal mechanism for carrying repartee," writes Crystal, and he quotes another example of stepped lines from Taming of the Shrew. Kate and Petruccio: "You are withered. " "Tis with cares." "I care not." The Titus books are known among other things for their slowness, but Episode One moves like repartee, like a grand conversation, addition on addition like a stack of challenges pushing onwards, like a train, clack clack clack.

terrifyingly themselves, as they set out for the Cool Room

Riding carbound through western Oregon I looked through the window at the forest and thought of Gormenghast. Peake dug his way so thoroughly into me when I was younger that it seems impossible to ever reach a state where an object that suggests castles or forests will not remind me of the books, always there, they are always ready to be accidentally summoned, like the ability to ride bicycles.

All around the road were the dark trees, black trees, clawing trees in the drizzle, "the branches interlacing so thickly that even the heaviest downpour was stayed from striking through," the moss growing on the rocks and on the concrete road-dividers, and different moss (darker) on the trunks, lighter moss on the branches like buds. By the time the new leaves need to sprout the weather has become too warm for this lighter moss so it dies and drops off, allowing the leaves to take its place, which is a beautiful symbiosis. (Another symbiosis: when we stopped in Arizona later three small birds came down to stand on the front bumper of the car and eat flattened insects off the paintwork.)

Gormenghast castle is set behind deep forests, like Portland (from the south, anyway), which you approach through trees and then through fields, but with my mind I can easily compress the fields to nothing and see only the city's downtown area inside a wall of this forest, which rises thickly on all sides of the buildings, as close as the thorn barrier around Rapunzel's tower, while the inhabitants of Portland (who, when we saw them, were either homeless or else dressed in black and standing by the counters of coffee shops, as if they'd stepped out of a stereotype of Melbourne) live inside, cultivating their eccentricities. (But we can only dream of a world as sprouting and disheveled as Peake's: the employee-hiring section of the website for Powell's Books is as sober as the white forehead of "the high-shouldered boy.")

In the north the buildings run up to the river that borders Washington. We went across quickly, ate lunch and then came back, so that we'd be able to say in future, "We've been to Washington," but all we saw of the state were some one-way streets and a one-legged man in a wheelchair, a rectangular grassy park, and a sign for the Vancouver School of Beauty printed in lavender.

Coming back days later to the low desert of Arizona, I remembered Peake in Titus Groan describing the self-contained nature of his characters, "terrifyingly themselves." How did the sentence go?

Each one with his or her particular stride. His or her particular eyes, nose, mouth, hair, thoughts and feelings. Self-contained, carrying their whole selves with them as they moved, as a vessel that holds its own distinctive wine, bitter or sweet. These seven closed their doors behind them, terrifyingly themselves, as they set out for the Cool Room.

Peake, an artist who worked as an illustrator, wrote as if his mind was going through the procedure of drawing, he wrote as a person drawing sees, paying attention to the proportions and singularities of objects, measuring the negative spaces between leaves,* or noticing the distance between one person's nose and eyes and another person's nose and eyes. He magnifies differences and reiterates them. We could guess at the lack of inner sympathy between the characters even if we only saw them standing far away in silhouette -- the physical contrasts are so strong -- fat Swelter fighting with thin Flay, or tiny shivering Nannie Slagg, "like a withered doll," attending to the hair of the monumental and still Countess Gertrude, whose "effect … was one of bulk," or Fuchsia, whose stance is untidy, talking to Steerpike, who is neat and contained, "methodical and quickly moving," and who keeps his hair slicked back.

The author plays the game a little differently when it comes to the Doctor and Irma, making them look superficially similar, giving them both "the Prunesquallors' head," and then assuring the reader that their minds are absolutely antithetic in noteworthy ways. "Her own brain was sharp and quick but unlike her brother's it was superficial." The contrary features that he makes external in a couple like Flay and Swelter, he internalises for the two Prunesquallors.

Arriving at the Twins he changes the game again and creates two characters who look, think, and behave so alike that they are virtually the same person. Now the striking thing is the likeness between the two sides of the pair, not the dissimilarity. (When he brings them together with Steerpike the threesome behaves like a twosome; the Twins are so identical that conversations with outsiders arrive at the same result no matter which one of them is speaking.) At this point you realise that Peake's technique is something like Lewis Carroll's, the author acknowleging a set of rules and then tweaking them to find out what effect these changes will have. But Peake's rules are visual and physical, where Carroll's were abstract, linguistic and mathematical.

I thought, "If you're comparing landscapes then it's Arizona that has the Gormenghast spirit, not Oregon. It doesn't look like the landscape in the book, but it has that emphasis on difference." The desert is so wide, the foliage is so low, and lit with such a brilliant crushing light, that each plant stands out distinctly, and when I see a saguaro standing up in this crouching countryside, I have the impression that I'm looking at a bare stage with a single prop. Those shapes, like poles, seem too striking and isolated to be ordinarily alive. They are supernatual, "terrifyingly themselves." But in Oregon the plants have so much rain that they never have to crouch, they grow tall, lush, and crammed, in places a weaker tree will lean sideways into the others and tangle itself in their branches, the moss runs from the earth up the trunks disguising the join between the two, and nothing is allowed the total isolation of the saguaro. In Arizona the plants are singular, in Oregon they are plural. Arizona has a tree, Oregon has trees.







* In Titus Groan, the chapter called Farewell: "Her eyes seemed to be drawn along the line of the dark trees until they rested upon a minute area of sky framed by the black and distant foliage. This fragment of sky was so small that it could never have been pointed out or even located again by Keda had she taken her eyes from it for a second."

Measurements that are even more detailed are not difficult to find. In the Blood at Midnight chapter:

Swelter's shadowy moonless body at the door was intersected by the brilliant radii and jerking perimeters of a web that hung about halfway between himself and Mr Flay. The centre of the web coincided with his left nipple. The spacial depth between the glittering threads of the web and the chef seemed abysmic and prodigious.

This is more or less the way my mind talks to itself when I'm drawing objects with a pencil -- sorting out intersections and proportions, and guessing at the effects. Peake's language works by combining exact observation ("The centre of the web coincided with his left nipple") with words that suggest largeness, vagueness, grandeur, romance, and drama -- "abysmic" "dark trees" "terrifyingly" -- the precisely known meeting the ineffable -- or the mechanical meeting the spiritual -- the same tension that we see described in Anthony Burgess' assessment of the books, "A rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect."

I'm not totally sure if the moss story is true. M. says that a friend told him about it.

trudging along the road, advancing upon the estate

We're packing for the move to the US, and I've been reading some of my unread books to find out if I should keep them or get rid of them. I was going through Theodore Roszak's The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein when, near the end, I came across this sentence: "Today, reading the Countess de Genlis, I look up from the page to see a lone figure trudging along the road, advancing upon the estate."

Then (as it has before) my mind jumped to another sentence in another book, one from Titus Groan, a sentence about a man on a horse riding away from the castle in the distance. The reader never knows the name of this man and we never hear about him again. He exists for that one sentence, and then he is gone. A number of items like this are dotted throughout the book, tiny moments of acute detail that have the effect of drawing my attention aside from the plot and concentrating it briefly before letting it go. I find this calming, stilling; it throws the events of the plot into a certain perspective -- "Look," it says, "while you're paying so much attention to those people, another story, just as interesting, is happening in this other direction. You will never see it, but it is there."

"It is difficult, in post-war English writing, to get away with big rhetorical gestures," wrote Anthony Burgess about Titus Groan, "Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions." I believe these moments of drawing-aside serve a purpose there too, cooling the blood, not distancing the reader, but telling them, "The world of this book is large, and you are small in it." Not pulling you away, then, but working to embed you.

The similarity between the two sentences was this: in both instances I saw the figure clearly in my mind, then a patch of landscape around the figure, as if the figure itself had brought that landscape into existence. The area of illumination was roughly circular or oval, and around the edges it faded into a black fog that surrounded it to the edges of my vision. I could see that ink-coloured darkness as clearly as I saw the figure in the landscape. My eyes were fixed on this small space. As I saw the man in Elizabeth Frankenstein, I thought, "A point of simplicity." Why simplicity? I decided that it must be thanks to a post I read at the Wuthering Expectations blog a short while ago -- the last of a series of posts on the subject of beauty. I read this: "I now see my problem: I want “beauty” to be both simpler and more complex than it is." Simplicity, I thought, and concentrating on a small area.

Then I remembered something else. In the opening of an essay about a journey to Moscow he undertook in the mid-1920s, Walter Benjamin wrote --

But, equally, this is why the visit [to Moscow] is so exact a touchstone for foreigners. It obliges everyone to choose his standpoint. Admittedly, the only real guarantee of a correct understanding is to have chosen your position before you came. In Russia above all, you can only see if you have already decided ... the question at issue is not which reality is better or which has greater potential. It is only: Which reality is inwardly convergent with truth? ... Only he who clearly answers these questions is "objective." ... But someone who wishes to decide "on the basis of facts" will find no basis in the facts.

"I wonder if beauty is like this Moscow of his," I thought, "and you can "only see" after you've chosen your standpoint, or after you've charmed yourself (in an existentialist way) with an idea of yourself as a thing, a solid, fixed, and impossible object -- a person who is certain." Ruskin (discussed in Wuthering Expectations' posts) had his standpoint: his beauty was a theological beauty, its existence was evidence of the divine, and from there he could discuss a beautiful painting as if it were not only attractive, but also morally good. Theological critical theory led him (Wuthering shows us with a diagram) to compare natural curves: here is a leaf, here is a glacier, here are their curves, God's work! The characteristic tone of Ruskin's writing is that of certainty. One thing is noble, another is wicked, a third had a chance to be noble but it took a wrong turn. "Thus treated, drapery is indeed noble; but it is as an exponent of other and higher things. As that of gravitation, it has especial majesty, being literally the only means we have of fully representing this mysterious natural force of earth ... But drapery trusted to its own merits and given for its own sake ... is always base," he writes in The Seven Lamps of Architecture.

Losing his faith in the late 1850s he judged himself afterwards "stunned — palsied — utterly helpless —" By 1869 he was trying to find simplicity in his new state. "That I am no more immortal than a gnat, or a bell of heath, all nature, as far as I can read it, teaches me, and on that conviction I have henceforward to lead my gnat's or heath's life."

Ruskin discovered Beauty one July evening as he was lying next to a fountain. A storm struck, and from his prone position he saw a gathering of pyramids standing still.

Suddenly, there came in the direction of Dome du Goûter a crash — of prolonged thunder; and when I looked up, I saw the cloud cloven, as it were by the avalanche itself, whose white stream came bounding down the eastern slope of the mountain, like slow lightning. The vapour parted before its fall, pierced by the whirlwind of its motion; the gap widened, the dark shade melted away on either side; and, like a risen spirit casting off its garment of corruption, and flushed with eternity of life, the Aiguilles of the south broke through the black foam of the storm clouds. One by one, pyramid above pyramid, the mighty range of its companions shot off their shrouds, and took to themselves their glory — all fire — no shade — no dimness. Spire of ice — dome of snow — wedge of rock — all fire in the light of the sunset, sank into the hollows of the crags — and pierced through the prisms of the glaciers, and dwelt within them — as it does in clouds. The ponderous storm writhed and moaned beneath them, the forests wailed and waved in the evening wind, the steep river flashed and leaped along the valley; but the mighty pyramids stood calmly — in the very heart of the high heaven — a celestial city with walls of amethyst and gates of gold — filled with the light and clothed with the Peace of God. And then I learned — what till then I had not known — the real meaning of the word Beautiful.

So it goes in Titus Groan and Gormenghast too, the massive edifice of Gormenghast Castle is always there, solidly, through every kind of weather, floods and snow, "the mighty pyramids stood calmly," a static constant behind the moving figure of the enigmatic man on his horse (whatever he is doing, it must relate somehow to the castle -- thinks the reader -- for everything does), and giving ballast to the various ridiculousnesses in the books; Irma Prunesquallor, for example, object of the author's mockery, decides to give herself breasts by arranging a hot water bottle in her dress -- and my thought is -- who manufactured that bottle and where did they get the rubber? But everything is excused by the existence of the Castle.

Ruskin sometimes wrote nonsense too, not intentionally, as Peake does, but, seemingly, as a consequence of his mind flying away on the wings of theocriticism. He makes his madder announcements -- that cave fish are ugly because we cannot see them and that therefore God had no reason to make them attractive, or that iron reaches a personal apotheosis when it rusts -- with the same tone of conviction that he uses when he discusses ideas that are uncontroversial. Give yourself a solid thing to stand on and you can talk about anything you like. Imaginary conversation: "Mr Ruskin, can you tell us about the interior of Mars?" "Indeed! Sir, it is not beautiful. If God had made it beautiful, He would have put it where we could see it."







I came across those Ruskin quotes in this article at the Victorian Web. The ugly cave fish appear in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and rust is mentioned in The Two Paths.

a bustle and a little chearful song

Thinking about the Great Australian Loneliness -- and mourning a chance lost -- if only Ernestine Hill hadn't been a journalist, if only she'd, somehow, been able to merge (across the centuries) with Dorothy Wordsworth (died demented), who decided that she was not interested in publication, and therefore wrote freely, without the kind of journalistic latchhook that Hill feels obliged to insert. Then Hill could have concentrated on the appearances of things, and the contrasts that tickle her --

Under the baton of a Cingalese conductor, the strains of 'Dixie' are wafted across the Straits, none the less sweetly in that the ancestors of Solomon Salt, the big bass drummer, blew the conch and sounded the hide drums for the cannibal orgies of less than a century ago, and that the grandmothers of the smartly dressed audience were content with the green frilled skirt of a banana palm and a necklace of shark's teeth.

-- and there'd be no need for the propaganda parts, the lectures about half-castes, the exhortation urging city-women to travel to the outback and marry lonely men in the bush, an exhortation she sabotages in other parts of the book when she retails gruesome anecdotes of people out there suffering, dehydrating, dying, vanishing, going insane, and ending up in forgotten graves:

... many a lonely grave was by the track. Alas for man's mortality, the only one remembered was the post-and-horse-shoe monument of the engine-driver's dog, killed on the line.

She loves these stories. Here I realise, again, the intelligence of Christina Stead, who felt this excitement too, in the seething variety of human life, but, unsatisfied with the surface of her fictional earth, she dug for the core as well. Hill, too easily satisfied, or too happily engaged in her adventures, remains near the surface, pleased.

(It was only after I'd posted this that I re-read Randall Jarrell's foreword to The Man Who Loved Children and noticed: "Christina Stead can perfectly imitate the surface of existence -- and, what is harder, recognize and reproduce some of the structures underneath that surface.")

Wordsworth, in her journals, goes smoothly cleanly deep (not so much Stead's gung-ho delve), and touches -- just touches -- not hugging something as if to keep it, but touching and then releasing. She "was the very wildest ... person," said Thomas de Quincy, "the quickest and readiest in her sympathy," and the forces she writes about are wild, they move, they shift. She, in the cottage she shared with her brother William, is a steady lighthouse from which I see every aspect of the world stir and change. The moon waxes, wanes, falls behind clouds, the wind attacks a tree ("It bent to the breezes as if for the love of its own delightful motions"), and then there is rain, or a rainbow, or a storm. "The trees almost roared, and the ground seemed in motion with the multitudes of dancing leaves ..." She has a knack for the accurate word and the poetic shortcut: for example: noticing the similarity between the tails of swallows and those of fish.

They twitter and make a bustle and a little chearful song hanging against the panes of glass, with their white bellies close to the glass and their forked fish-like tails. They swim round and round and again they come.

In the first few pages of the Alfoxden Journal she sees sheep "glittering" in the sun. The sharpness of this word goes against the nature of literary sheep: usually fluffy, woolly, softly white, or, if lambs, playfully gambolling. But it is correctly evocative. Wordsworth is not unusual for the sake of being unusual, she is unusual for the sake of being right. She has her own kind of digging.

Romance got hold of Ernestine Hill, this bad habit of valuing things for the sake of the dramatic effect they cause, and she plants those effects solidly on the page, not moving them forward lightly as Wordsworth does. Hill likes to make declarations. "A hundred miles south-west of Darwin, the Daly River runs into the sea." "Honesty, humour, kindliness and discretion have made T.B. an outstanding character." "You will not find Jiggalong on any map." "The journey had a fatal precedent." "It is surprising what they fit in on Thursday." She talks about the "fires of romance" but underneath the hot language this style has a cold and uninflamed heart. Words are being used to manacle ideas in place and keep them still. Peake does this too, and part of Gormenghast castle's atmosphere of stillness comes naturally from this cold and fixed style, which he manipulates adroitly. It sympathises with his subject as naturally as Sterne's dashes suit the tangent-theme of Tristram Shandy. (Sterne's narrator, like the swallows, is always darting off. He swims round and round and again he comes.) Romantic style blockades Peake into a rare moment of ugliness when Titus reacts to the death of the Thing with a burst of egotistical and unempathetic joy. But Titus is less cold than his creator, who raised the Thing in order to kill her. And neither of them is as heartless as Ernestine Hill, who is willing to tell her unprepared urban reader that she should travel into the outback to marry a man who, if the rest of her stories can be trusted, is likely to be shy, reclusive, or mad. "No longer do they need the companionship of their fellows."

a strange and wonderful motion takes place: the memory arts

Titus Groan, I decided. I'll read it from start to finish. How often have I done that? I didn't know. My usual way, with a book I like as much as I loved this one when I was in my mid-teens (devoutly), is to read it in pieces, out of order, opening the volume in some region of the story (near-the-endish, in-the-middlish, at-the-startish, expecting in one instance to find myself reading Fuchsia in her attic or Steerpike on the rooftops; in another instance that Flay and Swelter would be in the middle of their battle or that his Lordship would be, slightly post-battle, coping with the owls, or Barquentine, post-owls, would be listening to the messengers in his room) and running my eyes over half a page or so of words, a soothing exercise, like moving your feet in bed and realising that the blankets are still there.

I must have read the book in the start-to-finish way at least once, because I remembered how the plot was ordered. I knew that Steerpike meets, first Fuchsia, then the Doctor, then Irma, then the Twins, and not, say, Irma, then Fuchsia, then Nannie Slagg; and I knew who would die in the fire, and why it would be lit, and how those events would lead to the closing chapter. So I had this evidence, quod erat demonstrandum, that I had read it, but no actual recollection. I must have, or else how did I know the plot so well? But I couldn't see myself, standing or sitting, for the first time, reading Titus. (Why don't we remember the moment we learnt we would die? asks Rosencrantz or Guildenstern in Stoppard's play. Why didn't it sear itself into our brains?) My absence of memory was so complete that it would have been easy to erase my own assurance, and convince myself that I had never read Titus before from start to finish, that this would be the first time, and that I had, forever, only known the book in pieces.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing about Godard's Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma --

Curiously, Godard accords the ultimate honor of achieving some sort of power through art to Alfred Hitchcock, “the greatest creator of forms of the 20th century,” who “became the only poète maudit to meet with success.” We may forget the plots and situations of his films, “but we remember a handbag . . . a bus in the desert . . . a glass of milk . . . the sails of a windmill . . . a hairbrush . . . a row of bottles, a pair of spectacles, a sheet of music, a bunch of keys” because “through them and with them Alfred Hitchcock succeeded where Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Napoleon had all failed, by taking control of the universe. Perhaps there are 10,000 people who haven’t forgotten Cézanne’s apples, but there must be a billion spectators who will remember the lighter of the stranger on the train.”

This was my Titus Groan, before I began to re-read: a bitten pear ... a thin man ... a mountain ... Fuchsia ... glass grapes ... and the dark cactus ... a series of scenes, without anything between them, disconnected from a plot, or at least, the plot never seemed important, it gave the scenes some background, therefore a purpose, but everything else stood out on front of it -- it was the wax in a lost wax casting. The map of authors inside my head is like this as well -- a fog or a cloud, with bright or dark patches here and there and each patch an author -- not a picture of an author, or the name of an author, but some sign by which I know the author -- like a memory palace, come to think of it, but a palace with planless architecture, outhouses constantly tacked on the wings, fresh random cupolas, not as orderly as the ones John Crowley gives to Giordano Bruno in his Aegypt books.

And now by degrees, more quickly for some than for others, a strange and wonderful motion takes place: the memory arts of the Brunist have begun to create within the souls of the ladies and gentlemen the image of a living world, a world of innumerable and endless processes producing an infinite number of things, inside every one of which is a divine spark that orders it without error or hesitation into its place in the ranks of creation from lowest to highest.

Ruskin inside my head is a book, a specific book, open to a specific page, and one long sentence standing out from the others, somehow, by a light of its own that I can feel but not see -- that's Ruskin -- George Eliot is a mass of books superimposed on top of one another, as if the books were spirits, all coexisting. Those books are, specifically, The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt the Radical, and Middlemarch. Christina Stead is my copy of The Man Who Loved Children, with its diagonal white crease running across the bottom right-hand corner.

All of this changes from time to time.

Strange to have Titus Groan reassemble in front of me as I read, regaining its length and distance. For the first time in how-long I was doing this journey one foot in front of the other, not darting down from the sky into the castle like a hovering god. I was wing-clipped, very slow. I had forgotten, if I had ever known (it felt like a brand new realisation), how much scenery there is in this book. How much weather. And I had forgotten entirely the bit at the end, all the cats on turrets, looking down at the procession. New! I was astonished.

A little to the left and about fifty feet beneath his window was a table-land of drab roof around the margin of which were turrets grey with moss, set about three feet apart from one another. There were many scores of them ... every turret was surmounted by a cat, and every cat had its head thrust forwards, and ... every cat, as white as a plume, was peering through slit eyes at something moving -- something moving far below on the narrow sand-coloured path which led from the castle's outhouses to the northern woods.

life would ever be made precious to me

M. said that he wondered if he was losing his old passions, and I began to talk about J.A. Baker and The Peregrine, a book that I picked up almost by chance at a library book sale where the people in charge suspected that I was buying the books to resell them. My copy is not the recent New York Review of Books reissue but a secondhand 1970 Penguin, white, black, orange, thin, and plain. The book was first published in 1967. Baker himself was born in 1926 and is assumed to have died at some point during the 1980s. He spent years exploring a piece of Essex fenland, watching for peregrines, following them, stationing himself in trees, and imagining how the world must look, to them, from the air.

I found myself crouching over the kill like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. I looked into the wood. In a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life.

The birds were Baker's passion. He opens the book with a sketch of his intentions and goes on to describe the peregrine in a methodical way, telling the reader that the female bird is "between 17 and 20 inches long: roughly the length of a man's arm from elbow to fingertip" while males "are 3 to 4 inches shorter." "Weights also vary." The rest of the book is written in the form of journal entries. In most of the entries a peregrine appears, hunts, makes a kill, or misses, and leaves. In the next entry it appears again and hunts again. But there are these variations: the bird appears in a different place, it kills a different species, the weather is rainy one day, sunny another, it is a "frosty day, fading from brightness slowly, hour by hour," or there is "hot sun and cooling breeze, the North Sea flat and shining." December 22nd is "The shortest day: dull, cold, with a sudden flare of sunlight before dusk." In winter the ground is covered with snow, and the birds are dying. I remembered the dead birds in Gormenghast: "In the wide, white fields that surrounded the castle, the birds lay dead or leaned sideways stiffening for death. Here and there was the movement of a bird limping, or the last frantic fluttering of a small ice-gummed wing." In the Peregrine, too, birds freeze: "Near the brook a heron lay in frozen stubble. Its wings were stuck to the ground by frost, and the mandibles of its bill were frozen together." So it wasn't an exaggeration of Peake's after all.

Reading through these days of routinely appearing and vanishing peregrines I thought about the kind of repetition that can make aboriginal Australian song-poetry seem aimless or enigmatic when it's translated into English. There's this Baby Cockatoos, recorded and translated by RMW Dixon, spoken by a Jirru man named Pompey Clumppoint:

Waiting hopefully in the end of a hollow log
They swallow noisily, their voices beg

Waiting hopefully in the end of a hollow log
They swallow noisily, their voices beg
For the food their mother brings

Waiting hopefully in the end of a hollow log
They swallow noisily, their voices beg
For the food their mother brings

In life, off the page, there must have been movements and inflections to go with this, an atmosphere that disappears when you remove it into a book. Baker, the Englishman, coming from a cultural background of books, a book-nation, does the song-dance in prose, and the inflections that would give me his character and his purpose are contained in his language: he is dumb for me, he is invisible (and dead now too: dead as the partridge on page 112, dead as the beak-lanced curlew on page 80), yet he speaks, he describes --

A cock blackbird, yellow-billed, stared with bulging crocus eye, like a small, mad puritan ...

What was left [of a newly dead gull] smelt fresh and sweet, like a mash of raw beef and pineapple.

Trees by the brook were grey with a lichen of woodpigeons.

There are different ways of making sense.

The crow-catchers of Königsberg kill their prey in the same way [as the peregrine]. Having decoyed the crows into their nets, they kill them by biting them in the neck, severing the spinal cord with their teeth.

Writing for readers who are invisible to him, who might be sitting distantly in a city, at home, indoors, or overseas, he can't, like Pompey Clumppoint, assume that the audience is so familiar with his birds that they can fill in the details for themselves, so Baker has to explain, and the explaining fills the book.

When a wader would not move, they [red-legged partridges] tried to walk over it. For a bird there are only two sorts of bird: their own sort, and those that are dangerous. No others exist. The rest are just harmless objects, like stones, or trees, or men when they are dead.

His language is rapt and steady, as if all this is fate, but what if he hadn't discovered this passion for peregrines, I wonder: did he think of that, and did he fear it, the thought of ending up like Dorothea in Middlemarch, or derailed like Lydgate, a fear that George Eliot expresses more than once in her journals: the fear that she will do nothing worthwhile, that her life will be gone and the vital thing will not be done or found.

This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva, in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that -- despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was the sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.