The Drowning Man

Gormenghast, the novel

The novels in the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake are set in the mythical land of the title.

Titus Groan (1949), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959) are focused on the main character, Titus Groan, the ruler of Gormenghast. 

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His half sister, Fuschia is in love with a man called Steerpike, whom she discovers is her father's murderer. Fuschia stands at a window considering suicide. There is knock at the door which startles her and causes her to fall into the flood water below her which 'drowns her at its ease'. Later, Titus refers to himself as being left as a drowning man by her death. 

Page numbers refer to:

Gormenghast Mervyn Peake

First published 1950

Penguin Modern Classics 1974 reprint

P452–3

“...it was then that she froze within herself and locking herself away, became ill with the failure of her life, the frustration of her womanhood, and tossing and turning in her improvised bedroom twelve feet above the flood, conceived, for the first time, the idea of suicide.”

“What was the darkest of the causes for so terrible a thought it is hard to know. Her lack of love; her lack of a father or a real mother? Her loneliness?”

"She walked unsteadily on the window. Her thought had taken her into a realm of possibility so vast, awe-inspiring, final and noiseless that her knee felt weak and she glanced over her shoulder although she knew herself to be alone in her room with the door locked against the world.”

“When she reached the window she stared out across the water, but nothing that she saw affected her thought or made any kind of visual impression on her.”

“All she knew was that she felt weak, that she was not reading about all this in a tragic book but that it was true. It was true that she was standing at a window and that she had thought of killing herself. She clutched her hands together over her heart and fleeting memory of how a young man had suddenly appeared at another window many years ago and had left a rose behind him on her table, passed through her mind and was gone.”

“And as she pondered, she slid moment by moment even deeper into a world of make-believe, as though she were once more the imaginative girl of many years ago, aloft in her secret life. She had become somebody else. She was someone who was young and beautiful and brave as a lioness. What would such a person do? Why, such a person would stand upon the window sill above this water.“

“It was all true. It wasn't any story. But she could still pretend. She would pretend that she was the sort of person who would not only think of killing herself so that the pain in her heart should be gone for ever, but be the kind of person who would know how to do it, and be brave enough.”

“For how long she would have stood there had she not been jerked back into a sudden consciousness of the world - by the sound of someone knocking upon the door of her room, it is impossible to know, but starting at the sound and finding herself dangerously balanced upon a narrow sill above the deep water, she trembled uncontrollably, and in trying to turn without sufficient thought or care, she slipped and clutching at the face of the wall at her side found nothing to grasp, so that she fell, striking her dark head on the sill as she passed, and was already unconscious before the water received her, and drowned her at its ease.”

P461

Titus is bereft and becomes the metaphorical Drowning Man:

“To be brave among the living - what was that compared with the bonfire of his rage against Steerpike at whose door he laid the responsibility for Fuschia’s death? And the tides of the loneliness that had surged over him, drowned him in seas that knew no fear of the living, even if a mother such as his own.”

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