September 27, 2024

Something Good #103: All I Want to Do Is Read

The love of the diver for his world of wavering light.

All I want to do right now is read. I have been voraciously consuming books lately, juggling several at a time, losing myself in bookshops, wondering why I bother doing anything else with my spare time. Put me in a nice setting with a good book and a chair with decent back support and I am set for hours.

I won’t list everything I’ve read lately (you can find me on Storygraph if you really want to know¹), but the book that occupied my imagination the most significantly this year has to be Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. I had been vaguely interested in the author’s *Gormenghast “*trilogy”² for decades, after reading about it in, I swear to god, an old edition of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, but for some reason put off actually reading the books, which seemed long and gnarly and intimidating.

That description applies equally to the sprawling, endless ruin of a castle that provides the series’ setting and name. The aristocratic family of the Groans have been ruling and decaying in Gormenghast for millennia. It is a place of intricate, barely-understood but slavishly-followed rituals, a rigid, ridiculous social hierarchy, and uncountable halls inhabited by nervous clusters of the earldom’s subjects. (The books are definitely on a continuum with one of this newsletter’s most beloved novels, Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi.)

The book nominally follows the ascent of a kitchen boy, Steerpike, as he schemes his way into the court of the depressive Lord Sepulchrave, 76th Earl of Groan, whose wife, Countess Gertrude, has a mysterious affinity with cats and birds, and whose daughter, Fuschia, has been nearly forgotten with the birth of her baby brother Titus. Steerpike is a useful outsider to bring readers into this esoteric world, but the book flits between him and a variety of other characters and it is never clear where the author’s sympathies lie, or whether he has sympathies at all, one of many things that distinguishes it from much of the fantasy literature alongside which it is usually shelved.

Peake is often compared to Tolkien; Titus Groan was published in 1946 after The Hobbit and before The Fellowship of the Ring. With its near-absurdist castle setting, I guess you can call it, broadly, fantasy literature. But besides being clearly shaped by the horrors witnessed in wartime (Tolkien in the trenches of the Somme, Peake as one of first people on the scene at the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp) and a castle or two, the comparison doesn’t do much for me. The book is something strange and very singular, as befits the author’s life.

Before he was a writer, Mervyn Peake was a celebrated (and exceedingly good-looking) artist on the London scene in the 1930s and 1940s, known for his portraits of various important people and his illustrated editions of Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson. (I particularly love his portrait of his wife, sculptor and writer, Maeve Gilmore, from 1940).

It must have been a surprise when he emerged, after the war, with the first books of his Gormenghast series in which the writing was just as, if not more, splendidly illustrative and evocative as his illustrations. Tragically, though, Peake’s health began to decline in the late 1950s, with the onset of what is now believed to be dementia, and what followed were the grim treatments of that era: a lobotomy, electro-convulsive therapy (which can be therapeutic, but not, seemingly, in this case), and a slow decline as he desperately tried to finish his books, managing to produce Gormenghast (the novel) and Titus Alone. He died in 1968, with one posthumous novel based on his notes and completed by his widow, published in 2011.

The setting of the book, its hilarious, melancholy characters and their solemn customs; these are all wonderful things, but it is Peake’s writing that turned my mind upside-down. Although I had always figured I would get around to reading Peake, it was an episode of the Backlisted podcast on Titus Groan that convinced me to move the book to the top of my reading list. In particular, one of the hosts read a passage from the book that electrified me, and still does.

It takes place as Fuschia Groan, daughter to the Earl, ascends a hidden staircase from her bedroom to her beloved attic, her retreat, where her inner self truly comes to life among centuries of dust and forgotten junk. The passage begins philosophically, performs an act of tripartite mitosis into three luminous metaphors before somehow, miraculously, coalescing back into the reality of the story.

There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their center where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.

The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every colored sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love.

The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry on his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes’ handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in Love.

The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman's fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, “I am home” as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, “I am me” on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre'd marl - says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, “I am home.”

The only way I can describe this passage’s effect on me is by invoking that particular feeling when you wake up early in the morning and fall back asleep again into a tumble of interwoven dreams, only to emerge suddenly back into consciousness. Nothing I’ve ever read has quite made me feel this way.

When I heard it first, I thought: “I am home.”

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Bonus track:

As a kid I was obsessed with Madonna's "Live to Tell" and its melodramatic accompanying video, but I never actually saw the movie it was recorded for, At Close Range.

The movie seemed terribly adult and serious and beyond my grasp. I had a vague idea it was about a military father and his tortured relationship with his son.

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to finally see the film on 35mm at the recently refurbished (courtesy, in part, Denis Villeneuve—very cool move) Cinéma du Parc, where it was presented by former programmer Mitch Davis, who lent the print from his personal collection. (As the projection booth only has one 35mm projector left, we were treated to a live feed of the reel change—which ruled.)

Except for the military bit, I was mostly right. Turns out At Close Range is a rural crime drama about a crime family tractor rustlers led by patriarch Christopher Walken, sporting a florid moustache and fluffy hairdo (my God, I’m just realizing now he looks a lot like that above portrait of Mervyn Peake). It’s a luridly beautiful ‘80s neon noir with an incredible Jan-Hammer-ish soundtrack by Patrick Leonard, who co-wrote the above song with Madonna. The pop star was dating star Sean Penn at the time, who gives a vintage tortured teen performance. There are choice turns from Crispin Glover, David Strathairn and Kiefer Sutherland too; soulful performances by Eileen Ryan, Millie Perkins and Mary Stuart Masterson in underwritten roles. (Also, young Chris Penn was quite an Adonis himself.)

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A contest: can you guess who this is? No cheating: reverse-image-searching is not permitted.

First to correctly guess gets a prize. (If you already knew, please indicate as such, and I’ll send you a different kind of prize.)

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This week’s #nojacketsrequired was discovered by me, in the secret bookstore of the Atwater Library. Come to Montreal and I’ll take you there. As always, send me your de-jacketed finds at [email protected]. Apologies to Calum Marsh, who sent in last week’s; I was mixed up and once again I am truly the “Idiot” in this situation.

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I dedicate this issue of Something Good to the memory of my friend Robyn Fadden, who passed away a few minutes after midnight on Monday. This is hard to write. Robyn had been, like me, a writer and editor in the Montreal alt-weekly scene of the 2000s, her for Hour weekly, myself for the Mirror. She was a presence at every show, every opening, a musician in her own right, and somebody who always seemed curious, fascinated, and happy to be there, for the art, for the people, for whatever weird or silly energy was in the air. She was a generous laugher. I don’t know anybody who didn’t think she was just the best. She loved our city’s cultural scene and represented so much of what drew people to it over the years. It’s so hard to imagine Montreal without her.

We had known she was really sick. Karen had brought over a cake and exchanged texts just a week before, but things had suddenly, it seemed, started to move with terrifying speed when we heard on Thursday night that she had been moved to a hospice. The shock of that settled over us all weekend.

On Sunday night I went reading through the archives of an old music message board on which Robyn and I had first met in the early 2000s, quickly identifying ourselves as fellow Montrealers. Looking back at posts from around 2007 was like opening a window into our lives back then. We laughed about shows, festivals, I asked if she was going to my party that night at the Casa del Popolo, bringing back all kinds of events that I barely remember today but back then, were the texture of all of our lives.

It made me smile in the saddest way. I went to bed thinking of Robyn and woke up to the news next morning.

For years, I thought her social media handle, @apoemabouteverything, was just a lovely turn of phrase, until I learned from a friend after her death that it derives from a joke by comedian Steven Wright: “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.” Robyn was a person who really loved the world, and who cared about it, and as far as I’m concerned, will always be part of it.

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Read more about Robyn at the Montreal Review of Books, where my friend Malcolm Fraser wrote a lovely tribute.

I was going to write about some more of the books I’ve been reading, but I ran out of space. I’ll save them for a future issue; so this would be a good time to subscribe if you don’t already. I have not forgotten about Barely a Book Club; expect the next installment, wrapping up our series on Dervla Murphy’s Full Tilt, in the very near future.

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