The Drowning Man and Gormenghast

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Going to end my literary inspired pop with one of the best bands to use literature in their lyrics: The Cure.  

While The Cure are well- known for quoting Camus in their “Killing an Arab”... Robert Smith's lyrics are often literarily inspired: "Adonais," "Charlotte Sometimes," "Bird Mad Girl," "Bananafishbones," "How Beautiful You Are," "Looking Glass Girl"… and so much more (I could do a blog post JUST on his literary inspirations... )

But the subject of today’s post is the haunting song, "The Drowning Man," from the 1981 LP Faith (a personal favorite) and is inspired by the death of Fuchsia of Gormenghast. 

The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake take place in the remote kingdom of Gormenghast and focus on the intrigues that unfold within the huge, isolated Castle Gormenghast and its environs.  The three novels--Titus Groan (1949), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959)--follow the main character, Titus Groan, from birth to manhood and chronicle his role as the reluctant ruler of Gormenghast.  Titus's closest relative is his half-sister, Fuchsia, who has an erratic nature and is given to melancholy since the death of their father. But she's warm and lovely character who, sadly, never realizes her full potential in life.

In Gormenghast, Fuchsia learns that the man she loves--the villainous Steerpike--is not what he claims to be, and is in fact a villainous social climber who killed her father. Contemplating the disillusionments of life, Fuchsia stands at a window casement above rising floodwaters and muses upon life and death. She thinks about suicide and what it may (and may not) solve. At that moment, a knock is heard at the door, and, startled, she loses her footing and falls. In her fall, she strikes her head and hits the waters below unconscious, thereby drowning. Titus, who loves his sister deeply and is his only remaining family, is shattered by her death.

She stands twelve feet above the flood

She stares

Alone

Across the water

The loneliness grows and slowly

Fills her frozen body

Sliding downwards

One by one her senses die

The memories fade

And leave her eyes

Still seeing worlds that never were

And one by one the bright birds leave her ...

Starting at the violent sound

She tries to turn

But final

Noiseless

Slips and strikes her soft dark head

The water bows

Receives her

And drowns her at its ease

Drowns her at its ease

I would have left the world all bleeding

Could I only help you love

The fleeting shapes

So many years ago

So young and beautiful and brave

Everything was true

It couldn't be a story

I wish it was all true

I wish it couldn't be a story

The words all left me

Lifeless

Hoping

Breathing like the drowning man

Oh Fuschia

You leave me

Breathing like the drowning man

Breathing like the drowning man

Much of the lyrics here are taken directly from the novel… as Robert Smith has a beautiful way of finding the poetry in the prose. Here is the excerpt with the corresponding lines highlighted:

"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 togheter 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.


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. 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. And…she…would…and as the child in her was playing the oldest game in the world, her body, following the course of her imagination, had climbed to the sill of the window where it stood with its back to the room.


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."

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