Sometimes I enjoy a book so much I don’t want to finish it. The tone, voice, and story cast such a spell I fear it can only end in disappointment. Should I put the book down forever, to hold onto that brief feeling before the author drives it off a cliff? Or do I press on?
The only time I actually chose Option A was while reading this. Just 12, I found myself swept away as John Steinbeck retold the legend of King Arthur in all its gnarly glory. As Arthur stood at a riverbank somewhere in England, having vanquished his enemies after a hard fight, I suspected the book would turn grey and depressing. So I put it away.
It would be decades before I returned to The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights. Dammit, I was right:
Then the king conveyed the babies to the coast, for he could not bring himself to slaughter them. He placed the month-old babies in a little ship and set the sail to an offshore wind and it moved out to sea unattended. King Arthur with shamed and evil eyes watched the little ship carry its evidence of his fate away, shrinking in the distance. And the king turned and rode heavily away.
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| King Arthur holds aloft Excalibur, the sword that defines his mighty rule. In Steinbeck's telling he is victorious in war but struggles in peace: "Then Arthur learned, as all leaders are astonished to learn, that peace,
not war, is the destroyer of men..." Image from https://youngzine.org/news/societyarts/king-arthur-and-new-manuscript |
Every generation has its own version of King Arthur, that noble king and unifier of a nation inevitably undone and betrayed by those he loved. Baby Boomers had “Camelot,” a musical which in the United States became an avatar for liberal New Frontierism. Us Generation Xers had Monty Python’s Arthur, who pummeled the source material with killer rabbits and knights who said “Ni!”
Before all this, legendary novelist John Steinbeck took his own turn at Arthur with two purposes in mind. One was to relive the marvel he felt reading Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur as a boy. The other was to recast the mythic character as a figure Americans could relate to in the 1950s, a man of psychological depth and existential crisis.
In a 1956 letter to his literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck explains his thinking:
One other thing I do not want to do. There are many places in this book which are not clear, as poetry is not clear. They are not literal. I don’t intend to make them clear or literal. I remember too well my own delight in conjecture.
Steinbeck wanted a version of King Arthur that did for 1950s audiences what Malory had done for him: create penumbras of unexplained mystery and foggy narrative ellipses designed to befuddle and imaginatively engage readers. Alas, he died with the project unfinished.
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| Arthur's home castle, Camelot, as depicted by artist Kieran Belshaw. In Steinbeck's telling this fabled fort is largely ignored in favor of the restive lands around it. Image from https://the_duellist.artstation.com/projects/42xOY |
In The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights, nobody seems to have purpose. Knights either kill one another for fun or are locked up with their friends and brothers by the score for years by giants and tyrants who set up shop in Arthur’s kingdom, somehow unmolested.
Galahad is by turns Lancelot as a youth and another knight entirely. Quests are undertaken for little purpose and with much bloodshed. The Round Table of legend seems a place for feasting and boasting and not much else. After his act of mass infanticide, Arthur becomes more of a background figure, making only brief cameos after the first 100 or so pages.
The most vivid character in the book, the one with all the best lines and too soon gone, is the wizard Merlin. He knows exactly how he will be vanquished yet does nothing to prevent it. “Somewhere in the world there is defeat for everyone,” he tells Arthur. “Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.”
Despair is thick on every page. I wonder how I missed it as a kid.
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| Tragedy is at the heart of the Arthur legend, but in Steinbeck's telling it is closer to the fore. Above, a scene not depicted in Acts Of King Arthur, the death of the king, as painted in 1823 by James Archer. Image from http://art-now-and-then.blogspot.com/2017/08/king-arthur-art.html |
Yet the book is not such a disappointment. Steinbeck’s wit, spirit of engagement, and joy of medieval customs and culture all captivate. The prose is quite lovely, meant to suggest Malory’s ornate, archaic style but leavened with a pleasingly modern sensibility:
“If he had said he alone would fight me I would be more afraid. If he needs six sons to back him up, he is not confident in himself or in them. This is a precise and a skilled profession and numbers do not make up for incompetence.”
The above passage is from “Gawain, Ewain, and Marhalt,” one of the book’s two longest sections and by far its best. It would have been better had Steinbeck pulled it aside to make it into a standalone novella. By itself, “Gawain, Ewain, and Marhalt” might have taken its place alongside other famous Steinbeck novellas like The Red Pony and The Pearl. Instead, it offers a welcome reprieve from a choppier, go-nowhere narrative.
If you are reading Acts Of King Arthur expecting the quest of the Holy Grail or the destruction of Camelot, you won’t find them or other memorable pieces of Arthurian legend. Arthur does pull a sword from a stone, and later on a Round Table is built, but these and other familiar highlights flash by in Steinbeck’s telling like a medley of greatest hits.
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| There is much battle in The Acts Of King Arthur. Steinbeck writes: "The purpose of armor is to protect only what skill and speed and
accuracy cannot. It should be as light as possible, and offer only angles to
glance a blow." Image from https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/medieval-tournament-125018 |
Steinbeck’s focus is more on the sordid side of Arthur, beginning with how he was the product of rape when his war-making father impregnated his mother in the magical guise of her newly-slain husband. Arthur’s knights live fat off the land while their people suffer. Religion exists to excuse the crasser barbarities of life, like when an abbess enthuses about the knights Lancelot will slay in an upcoming tourney.
In the appendix to this edition, Steinbeck’s letters to his literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, show his plan was to recreate Malory’s narrative in all its particulars, giving it a more modern spin and an American voice. As he began sharing excerpts of his work in progress, her enthusiasm ebbed.
No wonder. This is rather off-brand for Steinbeck’s regular audience, who would have expected present-day social realism, and not that original an idea besides. T. H. White, another acclaimed American author, was already well into retelling the same story in The Once And Future King. There was also a musical version coming from the team that had just landed the biggest hit on Broadway, “My Fair Lady.”
We don’t see much of what Otis was writing, but as the years flew by she must have been encouraging Steinbeck to move on to other projects. The man who wrote The Grapes Of Wrath and Of Mice And Men had admittedly gotten stuck, churning out hundreds of pages with no end in sight. Again and again, he just needed a little more time…
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| Author John Steinbeck. In an introductory essay to this posthumously published book, he explains: "In no sense do I wish to rewrite Malory, or reduce him, or change him, or soften or sentimentalize him. I believe the stories are great enough to survive my tampering..." Image from https://www.thoughtco.com/john-steinbeck-list-of-works-741494 |
Steinbeck felt he had an ace in the hole, something that would give his work lasting literary value: His love for Malory.
Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was not just a set of thrilling adventure stories but a literary marvel that helped to raise the English language to a level of expression that would serve Shakespeare more than a century later. Steinbeck writes about uncovering that language, and a mythical central figure in Arthur, to awaken a sense of purpose and meaning for a world going increasingly mad.
“This is no nostalgia for the finished and safe,” he wrote Otis in 1959, as his struggle with Acts Of King Arthur reached a terminal period. “My looking is not for a dead Arthur but for one sleeping. And if sleeping, he is sleeping everywhere…”
That quest for a larger connecting purpose to the Arthur story seems to have undone Steinbeck in the end. Certainly the book we have here, cobbled from Steinbeck’s many drafts, lacks a unifying vision. A knight named Sir Balin steals a damsel’s sword and later dies because of it. Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fey commits treason against him but runs away before he can catch her.
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| In the 1981 film version of the Arthur legend, Excalibur, Morgan le Fay does double-duty as Merlin's vanquisher and Arthur's arch-enemy. In Steinbeck's telling, she is just the latter. Above, Helen Mirren as Morgan squares off against Nicol Williamson's Merlin. Image from https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/the-twisted-ambition-of-excaliburs-morgana |
Lancelot gets the longest section in the book, a shambolic run of quests, killings and jousts. The objective, it seems, was to keep him from being idle. Lancelot comes back with a few freed knights to drain the king’s larder. It ends with a furtive kiss from his queen, Guinevere, that portends great turmoil to follow. There our book ends.
Just as well, too. If this is how Steinbeck depicted the rise of Camelot, I can forego his telling of its fall.
There are times I not only felt I understood what Steinbeck was going for, but appreciated its value. There is a sorceress in the book, named not Morgan but Nyneve. She is the ultimate destroyer of Merlin, Arthur’s great ally, yet then goes on to do great things on Arthur’s behalf. There is an open-endedness to her story, a suggestion of cosmic capriciousness, that stimulates a deeper interest in the material.
Otherwise, the females in Acts Of King Arthur are either stick figures or causes of ruin, a fact Steinbeck blames on Malory in his Appendix but a fact nonetheless. “Among the ornaments of ladies, pity is a rarity,” observes Sir Gawain. Morgan is the most blatant example of this, though most of the females here make for miserable company.
Steinbeck plays this up for amusing effect, and there are places where it works rather well. The core of “Gawain, Ewain, and Marhalt” involves three women of varied ages who lead the named knights off on individual quests. Their different motivations and dissimilar conclusions (though the knights all end the tale at the same place it began) lend a pleasing shape to an often-crackling narrative.
The rest of the book are narrative dead ends, either meant to flash on some major piece of the Malory original or set up something newer Steinbeck was fated to leave unresolved. Steinbeck’s enthusiasm for Arthur’s legend is palpable if not contagious, but an inability to make Malory’s story into his own seems to have been its undoing.
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