The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
It was 99 years ago this month that the author of one of the most notable individualist novels
of the 20th century, Mervyn Peake, was born, in the unlikely setting of Tencent China, where
Where his father, Dr. Ernest Cromwell Peake, a nonconformist, that is, an English Protestant
not associated with the Church of England, was working as a medical missionary.
Young Mervyn had what his widow would later call a strange childhood in China during and
just after World War I.
Such a mixture of English nonconformity and almost bourgeois convention, she wrote.
Congregational hymns, tea parties, a straight-laced upbringing, and, outside, surrounded by dragons
and carvings of ancient imagination and disastrous beauty.
When his son was 11 years old in 1922, Dr. Peek moved the family back to England.
And it was in England that Mervyn Peek acquired the bulk of his formal education and, in the
early 1930s, launched his career.
Not as a novelist, that would come later, but as a graphic artist.
He specialized in book illustration, and was, according to the British literary critic C.N.
Manlove, best known to the public during his lifetime for his drawings.
He produced new sets of illustrations for classics like Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the
Snark and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and The Household Tales of the Brothers
Grimm.
He taught drawing at an art school.
He wrote and illustrated several of his own children's books.
He wrote a book for aspiring artists called The Craft of the Lead Pencil.
He began publishing poetry in the weekly and monthly magazines.
He became moderately well-known in England, but little of his work made its way outside
England into any of the rest of the English-speaking world.
Things remained this way for the rest of his short life, which ended in 1968, when death
took him at the age of 57.
Parkinson's disease had robbed him of the ability to either write or draw for the last
ten years of his life, which he spent mostly in various institutions.
But I get ahead of my story.
It was early in 1940, in the first months of World War II, when Mervyn Peake was 28
years old, that he began working on that novel I spoke of a couple of minutes ago, a work
that turned out to be one of the most extraordinary novels of individualism written and published
in the last century.
Most people who know about this work don't think of it as a single novel.
J. R. R. Tolkien's Great Novel, The Lord of the Rings
Continuous Story. It was published in three volumes for purely economic reasons. It is
not three novels, but one novel published in three volumes.
The case of the Gorman-Gast trilogy is somewhat different. Mervyn Peak did publish its three
volumes as three separate novels, and several years went by between volumes. The first volume,
Titus Grohn appeared in 1946, the second, Gorman-Gast, appeared in 1950, the third,
Titus Alone, appeared in 1959.
By contrast, the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings were issued within a few months
of each other in late 1954 and early 1955.
On the other hand, the three Gorman-Gast novels turn out to be, on examination, one long continuous
The first two volumes of this long novel are set in and around an almost inconceivably
immense castle called Gormengast.
C. N. Manlove estimates, on the basis of descriptions of the place scattered through the first two
There are two volumes of Peake's story that it must be at least 20 miles across and 2,000 feet high at its highest point, the top of the massive tower of flints.
It has grown gradually over many, many years, each generation building and adding new wings, new extensions, new towers.
Vast expanses of the castle are abandoned as our story begins, for Gormengast is like civilization itself.
Sometimes what one generation builds is used for centuries.
Sometimes it is forgotten and left to molder and ruin while life goes on all about it.
Sometimes what one generation builds has not been very well thought out.
Sometimes what one generation adds on to the ever-expanding patchwork of civilization is quickly seen to be utterly useless,
Like the useless passage in one part of the castle, described early in the second chapter of Titus Grone, which stretches in darkness, for there were no windows or doors, until it is terminated by a wall of flints, then there's the rectangular area of some length in the castle's east wing that is entirely filled with pillars, set so closely together that it was difficult for a man to squeeze between them.
Like civilization itself, Gorman-Gast has evolved somewhat randomly, guided by no master plan, and this process has been going on for a long, long time.
How long? The castle and its immediate environs constitute a tiny principality or city-state, ruled ostensibly by the House of Grown.
The man on the throne of this principality at the time our story begins is Seppelcrave,
the 76th Earl of Gormengast.
Think about that number for a moment.
The 76th Earl of Gormengast.
The Grone dynasty has been in place then for close to 2,000 years, at the very least.
I have said that Gormengast is ruled ostensibly by the House of Grone, because in fact it
is ruled by a person known as the Master of Ritual, who meets every morning of the year,
Peek tells us, with the currently reigning Earl. The two men meet in the castle library
just after breakfast, and the Master of Ritual instructs the Earl on what will be required
of him on that day. The Master of Ritual does this with the aid of three huge books.
The left-hand pages were headed with the date, Peake writes, and in the first of the three
books this was followed by a list of activities to be performed hour by hour during the day
by his lordship, the exact times, the garments to be worn for each occasion, and the symbolic
gestures to be used.
Diagrams facing the left-hand page gave particulars of the routes by which his lordship should
approach the various scenes of operation, the diagrams were hand-tinted.
So much then for the first of the Master of Rituals volumes. The second tome, Peake continues,
was full of blank pages and was entirely symbolic, while the third was a mass of cross-references.
If, for instance, his lordship Seppelcrave, the present Earl of Grone, had been three
This complex system was understood in its entirety only by the master of ritual, the technicalities demanding the devotion of a lifetime, though the sacred spirit of tradition implied by the daily manifestations was understood by all.
Gorman-Gast is, then, a society ruled by a body of tradition so old that the symbolic acts, the rituals, that express that body of tradition and fill up every day of the Earl's life, are no longer understood by anyone but the master of ritual.
No one else knows why the Earl does what he does, what it means, what it signifies.
The Earl, and to a lesser extent all the other inhabitants of the castle, do what they do
because they are told to do so by the master of ritual.
It is then he who actually rules Gormengast.
The supposed hereditary rulers, the members of the Grone family, are more ruled by the
by tradition and by the ritual than any of their supposed subjects.
On the day our story begins, an heir to the throne is born, Titus Grone, who will become
the 77th Earl of Gormenghast.
The problem is that the heir doesn't want the throne.
In the very first public act of traditional symbolism in which he participates, while
While still a small child, he is supposed to stand on a raft floating in Gormenghast
Lake, holding a symbolic stone in one hand and a symbolic ivy branch in the other.
But when his handlers attempt to place these objects in his hands, he won't take them.
After a few minutes, he does take them, only to pitch them quite unceremoniously into the
lake.
A few years later, the Master of Ritual walking through the castle reflects for a few moments
on what he sees as the perplexing problem presented by the young Earl, who is now around
ten and enrolled in the castle's grammar school.
"'There was something about the way the boy moved,' Peek writes, a restlessness, an independence
that galled the Master of Ritual.
It had about it the taste of something acid, something rebellious.
The young Earl was too much himself. It was as though the child imagined he had a life
of his own, apart from the life of Gormengast. As Titus enters his teens, it becomes apparent
that this is precisely what he imagines. Increasingly, by word and deed, he makes it clear that he
wants to live his own life, make his own decisions for himself, do some traveling, see what else
This exists in the world besides Gormengast.
He doesn't want a life in which every minute of every day is planned in advance for him
and laid out in a bunch of books, however venerable they may be.
What do I care for the symbolism of it all?
He demands of his mother near the end of the second volume.
What do I care if the castle's heart is sound or not?
I don't want to be sound anyway.
I want to live. Can't you see? Oh, can't you see? I want to be myself and become what I make myself, a person, a real, live person, and not a symbol any more.
Titus ends the conversation with his mother decisively. He says to her, in so many words, to hell with Gorman Gast.
If he feels this way, why then doesn't Titus just leave Gorman-Gast once he has become
old enough?
In the end, he does.
But in the meantime, there is a complication, for on the day of his birth another important
event had taken place in the castle.
A seventeen-year-old scullery rat named Stearpike had escaped the great kitchen on that day
and embarked on a new and much more ominous career, a career in what one can only call
politics.
Stearpike, as Peek depicts him, is a clever young man, talented with words, a quick and
avid learner, whether from books or from experience, a young man who possesses remarkable charm,
remarkable skill at telling people what they want to hear, remarkable skill at persuading
He has also gradually attracted suspicion, particularly among those in the castle who have known him longest, but who were largely distracted by the events of their own lives, while his inexorable climb to power and influence was taking place.
Another who comes to suspect Steerpike is Titus, now about the same age Steerpike was when he escaped from the Great Kitchen nearly two decades before.
The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit
about his loyalties and duties in this regard.
He doesn't himself want to spend his life in a world, as Peek puts it, where change
is crime, a world in which most people believe that, again in Peek's words, change is the
most unforgivable of all heresies.
His thinking seems to be, if my family wants to live in a perpetually stagnant society,
In which, as Frank Vanderlip used to say, nothing is ever done for the first time.
Let them.
At least those administering the tradition are merely trying to do the right thing.
At least they are not acting out of any lust for power over others.
But one must do what one can to prevent their being enslaved by a despot, someone who would
would manipulate the pointless traditions and rituals to build and safeguard his own personal
power.
And so it is that in Gorman-Gast's heavily ironic climactic scene it is Titus who confronts
and brings down Steerpike, only to then confront his own mother and say to her, I am leaving
Gorman-Gast, I cannot explain, I do not want to talk, I came to tell you and that is all.
He turns to go, only to hear his mother's voice behind him.
"'There is nowhere else,' she says.
"'You will only tread a circle,' Titus groan.
"'There's not a road, not a track, but it will lead you home, for everything comes to
Gormengast.'
Meaning, if I have read Mervyn Peake's symbolism correctly, that human society must have some
From Structure, and there is nothing but tradition that can give it such structure.
In human society it is therefore true, figuratively speaking, that everything comes to Gormengast.
In the third and final volume of Peek's masterwork, Titus discovers a human society outside of
Gormengast, a police state not too unlike the sort of society Steerpike would probably
have created if he had ever had the opportunity, the time and the resources.
I'll say nothing more about this third volume of Mervyn Peake's so-called Gormenghast trilogy
in the hope that the chance to find out what happens in it will entice at least a few of
my listeners to read these books for themselves.
The three volumes of Peake's great novel have enjoyed the status of modern classics in England
since around the time of their original publication in the 1940s and 50s.
It is high time that American readers were brought up to speed on the importance of these
books too.
And I would think that American libertarians would be particularly interested in them,
since the perspective on the individual and society that pervades them is very libertarian
in the broadest sense of that word.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.