WEBVTT NOTE Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.200 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:13.200 --> 00:00:19.240 It was 99 years ago this month that the author of one of the most notable individualist novels 3 00:00:19.240 --> 00:00:26.560 of the 20th century, Mervyn Peake, was born, in the unlikely setting of Tencent China, where 4 00:00:26.560 --> 00:00:33.240 Where his father, Dr. Ernest Cromwell Peake, a nonconformist, that is, an English Protestant 5 00:00:33.240 --> 00:00:38.400 not associated with the Church of England, was working as a medical missionary. 6 00:00:38.400 --> 00:00:44.120 Young Mervyn had what his widow would later call a strange childhood in China during and 7 00:00:44.120 --> 00:00:46.600 just after World War I. 8 00:00:46.600 --> 00:00:52.400 Such a mixture of English nonconformity and almost bourgeois convention, she wrote. 9 00:00:52.400 --> 00:00:59.480 Congregational hymns, tea parties, a straight-laced upbringing, and, outside, surrounded by dragons 10 00:00:59.480 --> 00:01:04.420 and carvings of ancient imagination and disastrous beauty. 11 00:01:04.420 --> 00:01:10.980 When his son was 11 years old in 1922, Dr. Peek moved the family back to England. 12 00:01:10.980 --> 00:01:16.800 And it was in England that Mervyn Peek acquired the bulk of his formal education and, in the 13 00:01:16.800 --> 00:01:20.180 early 1930s, launched his career. 14 00:01:20.180 --> 00:01:24.560 Not as a novelist, that would come later, but as a graphic artist. 15 00:01:24.560 --> 00:01:30.340 He specialized in book illustration, and was, according to the British literary critic C.N. 16 00:01:30.340 --> 00:01:35.500 Manlove, best known to the public during his lifetime for his drawings. 17 00:01:35.500 --> 00:01:40.220 He produced new sets of illustrations for classics like Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the 18 00:01:40.220 --> 00:01:46.580 Snark and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient 19 00:01:46.580 --> 00:01:52.460 Mariner, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and The Household Tales of the Brothers 20 00:01:52.460 --> 00:01:53.460 Grimm. 21 00:01:53.460 --> 00:01:55.420 He taught drawing at an art school. 22 00:01:55.420 --> 00:01:59.020 He wrote and illustrated several of his own children's books. 23 00:01:59.020 --> 00:02:03.920 He wrote a book for aspiring artists called The Craft of the Lead Pencil. 24 00:02:03.920 --> 00:02:08.080 He began publishing poetry in the weekly and monthly magazines. 25 00:02:08.080 --> 00:02:13.760 He became moderately well-known in England, but little of his work made its way outside 26 00:02:13.760 --> 00:02:18.440 England into any of the rest of the English-speaking world. 27 00:02:18.440 --> 00:02:24.340 Things remained this way for the rest of his short life, which ended in 1968, when death 28 00:02:24.340 --> 00:02:27.400 took him at the age of 57. 29 00:02:27.400 --> 00:02:31.880 Parkinson's disease had robbed him of the ability to either write or draw for the last 30 00:02:31.880 --> 00:02:36.820 ten years of his life, which he spent mostly in various institutions. 31 00:02:36.820 --> 00:02:38.840 But I get ahead of my story. 32 00:02:38.840 --> 00:02:44.760 It was early in 1940, in the first months of World War II, when Mervyn Peake was 28 33 00:02:44.760 --> 00:02:50.760 years old, that he began working on that novel I spoke of a couple of minutes ago, a work 34 00:02:50.760 --> 00:02:56.360 that turned out to be one of the most extraordinary novels of individualism written and published 35 00:02:56.360 --> 00:02:58.480 in the last century. 36 00:02:58.480 --> 00:03:02.760 Most people who know about this work don't think of it as a single novel. 37 00:03:02.760 --> 00:03:09.760 J. R. R. Tolkien's Great Novel, The Lord of the Rings 38 00:03:32.760 --> 00:03:39.040 Continuous Story. It was published in three volumes for purely economic reasons. It is 39 00:03:39.040 --> 00:03:44.680 not three novels, but one novel published in three volumes. 40 00:03:44.680 --> 00:03:50.580 The case of the Gorman-Gast trilogy is somewhat different. Mervyn Peak did publish its three 41 00:03:50.580 --> 00:03:57.680 volumes as three separate novels, and several years went by between volumes. The first volume, 42 00:03:57.680 --> 00:04:05.480 Titus Grohn appeared in 1946, the second, Gorman-Gast, appeared in 1950, the third, 43 00:04:05.480 --> 00:04:09.000 Titus Alone, appeared in 1959. 44 00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:13.680 By contrast, the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings were issued within a few months 45 00:04:13.680 --> 00:04:18.960 of each other in late 1954 and early 1955. 46 00:04:18.960 --> 00:04:26.180 On the other hand, the three Gorman-Gast novels turn out to be, on examination, one long continuous 47 00:04:26.180 --> 00:04:46.060 The first two volumes of this long novel are set in and around an almost inconceivably 48 00:04:46.060 --> 00:04:49.660 immense castle called Gormengast. 49 00:04:49.660 --> 00:04:54.940 C. N. Manlove estimates, on the basis of descriptions of the place scattered through the first two 50 00:04:54.940 --> 00:05:06.940 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. 51 00:05:06.940 --> 00:05:16.940 It has grown gradually over many, many years, each generation building and adding new wings, new extensions, new towers. 52 00:05:16.940 --> 00:05:23.940 Vast expanses of the castle are abandoned as our story begins, for Gormengast is like civilization itself. 53 00:05:23.940 --> 00:05:28.940 Sometimes what one generation builds is used for centuries. 54 00:05:28.940 --> 00:05:34.940 Sometimes it is forgotten and left to molder and ruin while life goes on all about it. 55 00:05:34.940 --> 00:05:39.940 Sometimes what one generation builds has not been very well thought out. 56 00:05:39.940 --> 00:05:48.940 Sometimes what one generation adds on to the ever-expanding patchwork of civilization is quickly seen to be utterly useless, 57 00:05:48.940 --> 00:06:16.940 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. 58 00:06:16.940 --> 00:06:29.940 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. 59 00:06:29.940 --> 00:06:40.940 How long? The castle and its immediate environs constitute a tiny principality or city-state, ruled ostensibly by the House of Grown. 60 00:06:40.940 --> 00:06:47.420 The man on the throne of this principality at the time our story begins is Seppelcrave, 61 00:06:47.420 --> 00:06:50.740 the 76th Earl of Gormengast. 62 00:06:50.740 --> 00:06:53.100 Think about that number for a moment. 63 00:06:53.100 --> 00:06:56.780 The 76th Earl of Gormengast. 64 00:06:56.780 --> 00:07:04.620 The Grone dynasty has been in place then for close to 2,000 years, at the very least. 65 00:07:04.620 --> 00:07:10.740 I have said that Gormengast is ruled ostensibly by the House of Grone, because in fact it 66 00:07:10.740 --> 00:07:16.980 is ruled by a person known as the Master of Ritual, who meets every morning of the year, 67 00:07:16.980 --> 00:07:22.840 Peek tells us, with the currently reigning Earl. The two men meet in the castle library 68 00:07:22.840 --> 00:07:28.760 just after breakfast, and the Master of Ritual instructs the Earl on what will be required 69 00:07:28.760 --> 00:07:35.760 of him on that day. The Master of Ritual does this with the aid of three huge books. 70 00:07:35.760 --> 00:07:41.240 The left-hand pages were headed with the date, Peake writes, and in the first of the three 71 00:07:41.240 --> 00:07:47.600 books this was followed by a list of activities to be performed hour by hour during the day 72 00:07:47.600 --> 00:07:54.640 by his lordship, the exact times, the garments to be worn for each occasion, and the symbolic 73 00:07:54.640 --> 00:07:56.760 gestures to be used. 74 00:07:56.760 --> 00:08:03.060 Diagrams facing the left-hand page gave particulars of the routes by which his lordship should 75 00:08:03.060 --> 00:08:09.620 approach the various scenes of operation, the diagrams were hand-tinted. 76 00:08:09.620 --> 00:08:16.380 So much then for the first of the Master of Rituals volumes. The second tome, Peake continues, 77 00:08:16.380 --> 00:08:23.860 was full of blank pages and was entirely symbolic, while the third was a mass of cross-references. 78 00:08:23.860 --> 00:08:28.920 If, for instance, his lordship Seppelcrave, the present Earl of Grone, had been three 79 00:08:58.920 --> 00:09:15.920 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. 80 00:09:15.920 --> 00:09:34.920 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. 81 00:09:34.920 --> 00:09:41.920 No one else knows why the Earl does what he does, what it means, what it signifies. 82 00:09:41.920 --> 00:09:47.720 The Earl, and to a lesser extent all the other inhabitants of the castle, do what they do 83 00:09:47.720 --> 00:09:52.240 because they are told to do so by the master of ritual. 84 00:09:52.240 --> 00:09:56.840 It is then he who actually rules Gormengast. 85 00:09:56.840 --> 00:10:03.160 The supposed hereditary rulers, the members of the Grone family, are more ruled by the 86 00:10:03.160 --> 00:10:08.240 by tradition and by the ritual than any of their supposed subjects. 87 00:10:08.240 --> 00:10:14.700 On the day our story begins, an heir to the throne is born, Titus Grone, who will become 88 00:10:14.700 --> 00:10:17.820 the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. 89 00:10:17.820 --> 00:10:21.520 The problem is that the heir doesn't want the throne. 90 00:10:21.520 --> 00:10:26.720 In the very first public act of traditional symbolism in which he participates, while 91 00:10:26.720 --> 00:10:32.360 While still a small child, he is supposed to stand on a raft floating in Gormenghast 92 00:10:32.360 --> 00:10:38.920 Lake, holding a symbolic stone in one hand and a symbolic ivy branch in the other. 93 00:10:38.920 --> 00:10:44.440 But when his handlers attempt to place these objects in his hands, he won't take them. 94 00:10:44.440 --> 00:10:49.880 After a few minutes, he does take them, only to pitch them quite unceremoniously into the 95 00:10:49.880 --> 00:10:51.240 lake. 96 00:10:51.240 --> 00:10:56.840 A few years later, the Master of Ritual walking through the castle reflects for a few moments 97 00:10:56.840 --> 00:11:03.320 on what he sees as the perplexing problem presented by the young Earl, who is now around 98 00:11:03.320 --> 00:11:06.560 ten and enrolled in the castle's grammar school. 99 00:11:06.560 --> 00:11:13.200 "'There was something about the way the boy moved,' Peek writes, a restlessness, an independence 100 00:11:13.200 --> 00:11:15.540 that galled the Master of Ritual. 101 00:11:15.540 --> 00:11:20.000 It had about it the taste of something acid, something rebellious. 102 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:25.360 The young Earl was too much himself. It was as though the child imagined he had a life 103 00:11:25.360 --> 00:11:32.480 of his own, apart from the life of Gormengast. As Titus enters his teens, it becomes apparent 104 00:11:32.480 --> 00:11:39.400 that this is precisely what he imagines. Increasingly, by word and deed, he makes it clear that he 105 00:11:39.400 --> 00:11:46.400 wants to live his own life, make his own decisions for himself, do some traveling, see what else 106 00:11:46.400 --> 00:11:49.500 This exists in the world besides Gormengast. 107 00:11:49.500 --> 00:11:55.200 He doesn't want a life in which every minute of every day is planned in advance for him 108 00:11:55.200 --> 00:12:00.180 and laid out in a bunch of books, however venerable they may be. 109 00:12:00.180 --> 00:12:03.160 What do I care for the symbolism of it all? 110 00:12:03.160 --> 00:12:06.640 He demands of his mother near the end of the second volume. 111 00:12:06.640 --> 00:12:10.200 What do I care if the castle's heart is sound or not? 112 00:12:10.200 --> 00:12:12.880 I don't want to be sound anyway. 113 00:12:12.880 --> 00:12:30.880 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. 114 00:12:30.880 --> 00:12:38.880 Titus ends the conversation with his mother decisively. He says to her, in so many words, to hell with Gorman Gast. 115 00:12:38.880 --> 00:12:44.920 If he feels this way, why then doesn't Titus just leave Gorman-Gast once he has become 116 00:12:44.920 --> 00:12:46.280 old enough? 117 00:12:46.280 --> 00:12:48.480 In the end, he does. 118 00:12:48.480 --> 00:12:54.000 But in the meantime, there is a complication, for on the day of his birth another important 119 00:12:54.000 --> 00:12:56.640 event had taken place in the castle. 120 00:12:56.640 --> 00:13:02.840 A seventeen-year-old scullery rat named Stearpike had escaped the great kitchen on that day 121 00:13:02.840 --> 00:13:09.200 and embarked on a new and much more ominous career, a career in what one can only call 122 00:13:09.200 --> 00:13:11.200 politics. 123 00:13:11.200 --> 00:13:17.200 Stearpike, as Peek depicts him, is a clever young man, talented with words, a quick and 124 00:13:17.200 --> 00:13:24.840 avid learner, whether from books or from experience, a young man who possesses remarkable charm, 125 00:13:24.840 --> 00:13:30.080 remarkable skill at telling people what they want to hear, remarkable skill at persuading 126 00:14:00.080 --> 00:14:17.080 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. 127 00:14:17.080 --> 00:14:28.080 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. 128 00:14:28.080 --> 00:14:58.080 The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit 129 00:14:58.080 --> 00:15:01.440 about his loyalties and duties in this regard. 130 00:15:01.440 --> 00:15:07.240 He doesn't himself want to spend his life in a world, as Peek puts it, where change 131 00:15:07.240 --> 00:15:13.680 is crime, a world in which most people believe that, again in Peek's words, change is the 132 00:15:13.680 --> 00:15:16.640 most unforgivable of all heresies. 133 00:15:16.640 --> 00:15:23.080 His thinking seems to be, if my family wants to live in a perpetually stagnant society, 134 00:15:23.080 --> 00:15:28.840 In which, as Frank Vanderlip used to say, nothing is ever done for the first time. 135 00:15:28.840 --> 00:15:29.840 Let them. 136 00:15:29.840 --> 00:15:34.600 At least those administering the tradition are merely trying to do the right thing. 137 00:15:34.600 --> 00:15:39.040 At least they are not acting out of any lust for power over others. 138 00:15:39.040 --> 00:15:45.640 But one must do what one can to prevent their being enslaved by a despot, someone who would 139 00:15:45.640 --> 00:15:51.840 would manipulate the pointless traditions and rituals to build and safeguard his own personal 140 00:15:51.840 --> 00:15:53.340 power. 141 00:15:53.340 --> 00:16:00.480 And so it is that in Gorman-Gast's heavily ironic climactic scene it is Titus who confronts 142 00:16:00.480 --> 00:16:07.280 and brings down Steerpike, only to then confront his own mother and say to her, I am leaving 143 00:16:07.280 --> 00:16:14.360 Gorman-Gast, I cannot explain, I do not want to talk, I came to tell you and that is all. 144 00:16:14.360 --> 00:16:18.840 He turns to go, only to hear his mother's voice behind him. 145 00:16:18.840 --> 00:16:22.040 "'There is nowhere else,' she says. 146 00:16:22.040 --> 00:16:25.200 "'You will only tread a circle,' Titus groan. 147 00:16:25.200 --> 00:16:31.160 "'There's not a road, not a track, but it will lead you home, for everything comes to 148 00:16:31.160 --> 00:16:32.160 Gormengast.' 149 00:16:32.160 --> 00:16:39.320 Meaning, if I have read Mervyn Peake's symbolism correctly, that human society must have some 150 00:16:39.320 --> 00:16:44.760 From Structure, and there is nothing but tradition that can give it such structure. 151 00:16:44.760 --> 00:16:53.000 In human society it is therefore true, figuratively speaking, that everything comes to Gormengast. 152 00:16:53.000 --> 00:16:59.680 In the third and final volume of Peek's masterwork, Titus discovers a human society outside of 153 00:16:59.680 --> 00:17:05.800 Gormengast, a police state not too unlike the sort of society Steerpike would probably 154 00:17:05.800 --> 00:17:11.840 have created if he had ever had the opportunity, the time and the resources. 155 00:17:11.840 --> 00:17:18.040 I'll say nothing more about this third volume of Mervyn Peake's so-called Gormenghast trilogy 156 00:17:18.040 --> 00:17:23.080 in the hope that the chance to find out what happens in it will entice at least a few of 157 00:17:23.080 --> 00:17:26.300 my listeners to read these books for themselves. 158 00:17:26.300 --> 00:17:31.840 The three volumes of Peake's great novel have enjoyed the status of modern classics in England 159 00:17:31.840 --> 00:17:37.480 since around the time of their original publication in the 1940s and 50s. 160 00:17:37.480 --> 00:17:42.120 It is high time that American readers were brought up to speed on the importance of these 161 00:17:42.120 --> 00:17:43.600 books too. 162 00:17:43.600 --> 00:17:48.720 And I would think that American libertarians would be particularly interested in them, 163 00:17:48.720 --> 00:17:54.880 since the perspective on the individual and society that pervades them is very libertarian 164 00:17:54.880 --> 00:17:57.940 in the broadest sense of that word. 165 00:17:57.940 --> 00:18:04.940 This is Jeff Rigenbach.