The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [509]
He shut the door. The moonlight flowed across the cold encampment. It shone on the roofs of the castle and lit the high claw of the Mountain.
When he came to the Tower of Flints his mare was waiting. He mounted, shook the reins, and moved away at once through the inky shadows that lay beneath the walls.
After a long while he came out into the brilliant light of the hunter’s moon and sometime later he realized that unless he turned about in his saddle there was no cause for him to see his home again. At his back the castle climbed into the night. Before him there was spread a great terrain.
He brushed a few strands of hair away from his eyes, and jogged the grey mare to a trot and then into a canter, and finally with a moonlit wilderness before him, to a gallop.
And so, exulting as the moonlit rocks fled by him, exulting as the tears streamed over his face – with his eyes fixed excitedly upon the blurred horizon and the battering of the hoof-beats loud in his ears, Titus rode out of his world.
For
MAEVE
TITUS ALONE
Publisher’s Note
Titus Alone as originally published in 1959 was printed from a typescript prepared from the notebooks in which Mervyn Peake always wrote. Recent examination of the manuscripts showed that the 1959 version was not complete and in this revised edition various omissions have been restored. These principally affect Chapters 24 (an entirely new episode), 77, 89, and from Chapters 99 to the end where the original published text has been considerably built up. In re-issuing this text the publishers are pleased to be carrying out the author’s intentions and wish to join with Mrs Maeve Peake in recording their thanks to Mr Langdon Jones for the long hours and meticulous care he has spent on comparing the various versions and discovering the author’s real intentions.
Mr Langdon Jones writes:
When I came to the reconstruction of Titus Alone I was working from three different versions. The most important was the first typescript. This was the version that had been first submitted for publication, and on which most of the alterations had been made. The first third consisted of a carbon copy with no markings at all. The second typescript was the version that had been prepared to the editor’s directions in his attempt to make the book coherent, for Mervyn Peake was already suffering from his final illness at the time of submission. The first third of this consisted of the original sheets taken from the first script, marked by Peake and the editor. The last two thirds (in which the bulk of the modifications had occurred) were re-typed according to the editor’s specifications, although there were sporadic corrections by Peake. The other script, to which recourse was made to check illegibilities and for those sections which had disappeared from the typescripts, was the first draft, which had been handwritten in a variety of notebooks.
Thus while reconstructing this book I worked primarily from the first typescript, constantly checking the second to ensure that I incorporated those alterations made by Peake, at a later date, to the section that had not been modified by the editor.
My aim has been to incorporate all Peake’s own corrections while ignoring all other alterations. It has also been to try to make the book as consistent as possible with the minimum of my own alterations.
I have been forced to exercise my own judgement only in a few places, where normally one would have been obliged to consult the author. I have changed several inconsistencies, the only important alteration being the reluctant deletion of twenty-five words of Titus’ delirium, in which he remembered characters whom only the reader, not he, had met.
Had Peake been able to continue there is no doubt that he would have polished the story still more. But I believe that in this version the factory has become a much more powerful expression of that evil which attained for Peake its supreme manifestations when, having been commissioned as a war artist, he entered Belsen at the end of the war. Peake seemed