The Once and Future King by T. H. White

The best thing about reading King Arthur retellings is how all the different Arthur books are about something else. I wonder why Arthur and his knights make such a good blank slate for ideas. Possibly because from the first they were all about an ideal, which we can continually reshape and re-examine. In the first it was cold chivalry and brave war and noble death with value placed on the upper class and Christianity and violence.

White primarily tackles the issue of violence. Arthur was always trying to have the war to end all wars, a war to establish his superiority and, thus, peace. Essentially, he does. With small exceptions, he does become dominant over all the lands, and their leaders acquiesce to him.

However, White’s Arthur realizes that wars don’t only spring from pure intentions, or from necessity, but from a unslakable feeling of violence and aggression in all people. He wants to redirect these kinds of violent energies, and so he comes up with the Round Table. I love how insightful he is when he says, “We shall have to make it a great honor, you see, and make it fashionable and all that.” It’s a very modern insight – people are more likely to do what is good if it is cool to do so! Poor Arthur paints his own self always as a stupid and simple man, but he is written as quite sensitive and wise.

Arthur is something of a Christ figure. He is filled with many human strugglings, but still. He has little ego, strives for all his people to be as good as they can be and never hurt each other, and puts the needs of the greater good always before his own, and loves forever his wife and his friend despite knowing the worst of them. He forgives their betrayal, not nobly or in a big way, but from simple pure love. They don’t even know they are being forgiven and he does not care for them to know.

Is it that something about Arthur must always be likeable and good? He seems (though sometimes made simplified, as I believe Steinbeck did, and perhaps Mallory too) to be always portrayed as kindly, intelligent, and infinitely full of love for his subjects and friends. I have not yet finished with The Mists of Avalon, but there is consistency in this image through those books too, though Bradley goes much deeper with the characters than Steinbeck, Mallory, or White.

In the original stories, Arthur does some horrific things. He sleeps with his own sister, impregnates her, and then kills all the children in his kingdom of the age that it is possible they are his own incest-born bastard. White forgives Arthur both these sins, through Arthur’s ignorance of committing them or guilt later. In Bradley, the massacre never even happens. Why must Arthur be good? Why is it inherent to the success of the story that Arthur be so Christlike?

Arthur is, in a way, the moral lynchpin of the stories. Though the characters and society are very Christian, there is no Christian sentiment in White’s writing. I don’t get the impression there is much in Mallory’s either, though I have not read him yet. I am searching for a good version and reading it last. The church, in The Once and Future King, is not the moral compass. Arthur is. Because of his goals of creating a peaceful kingdom he must be truly pure at heart.

He also must be good for the other characters to be forced to explore their own morality and confront their own sins. Lancelot would never feel so bad about his relationship with Guinevere if Arthur weren’t such a good man, and if he didn’t, at heart, know that Arthur knew his sins and was forgiving him. Guinevere, though less pious of a person here, feels something of the same. She feels a fierce and guilty loyalty to Arthur. Because her morals seem less serious than Lancelot’s, I doubt a mediocre or bad man could inspire the same kind of guilt or introspection as Arthur does by treating her well.

Lancelot’s character is essential and, I think, very brilliantly written by White. In a way, he is very typical and also very ideal under Arthur. He has something dark inside him; he is not inherently good, a quality Arthur recognizes about his people.  “It is as if people were half horrible and half nice. Perhaps they are even more than half horrible, and when they are left to themselves they run wild.” My favorite quote about Lancelot I cannot find, but it says how he felt such a need to strive so hard to be perfect because inside his soul he was not good; he truly enjoyed hurting, and killing. He was inherently violent. Maybe there is something of original sin in that, as well. He is exactly as Arthur describes all people to be.

Under Arthur’s pure and Christlike influence, he channels this violence into knightly exploits, and he hides his bloodthirsty joy, and he tries to be pious. He becomes, in fact, known as the most benevolent knight and does good and inspires admiration wherever he goes. But there is always something in him which feels guilty. I think this goes beyond the affair with Guinevere. He just knows that, somehow, whatever he does, he is simply not good like Arthur. He will never be good, and it shows on his ugly face. This is the only telling of Arthur that I know of that makes Lancelot ugly; I think classically he is quite handsome.

Lancelot truly mourns his inherent sinfulness, but cannot change himself. He is devastated when he is shown by God that God recognizes him as a sinful man. Experiencing the pleasure again of being the best knight when he knows he does not deserve it and knows God knows he does not deserve it is even more tragic for him. Arthur, too, knows his sins and forgives him, and Lancelot knows this. His greatest torture is knowing that he is Arthur’s first and favored knight and best friend despite Arthur knowing the worst of him.

Arthur’s goodness, however, is the ruin of everything in the end. If Arthur were not so good, Lancelot and Guinevere would likely have run away at the start. Arthur could have married again and this time, probably, borne a son too. The many knights of the Round Table would never, inspired to enormous religious enthusiasm at Arthur’s behest and example, have scattered across the countryside in search of the holy grail, many of them dying in the effort. Were Arthur not kindly and full of love, he would never have allowed himself to be fooled by Mordred, who he would have put down immediately upon discovering him. And he would never have allowed himself to, out of a painful self-inflicted obligation to be a compass of fair and equal justice for his people, be convinced to put Guinevere to death, which resulted in the deaths of innocent Gareth and Gawaine, and started an all-out war. His goodness is, eventually, his fatal flaw as a character. It drives all the conflict in the narrative.

All this makes you wonder about Arthur’s optimism in the first place. Can extreme goodness only arouse violence around oneself, like it did for Christ as well? To his last moments he has hope that one just needs to find the right thing, the thing that causes discord, and fix it, and humanity will fall into peace. Whatever he said to Merlyn, he does not seem to believe that humanity is truly bad. He wants to give himself to save them.

But if we look at Lancelot, we have to worry that Arthur’s hopes are futile after all. Lancelot is the perfect knight, and he tries the hardest and cares the most, but he never can conquer his innate evil and he is miserable. He hates himself always for what he is incapable of fixing. If Lancelot is hopeless, how can the rest not be?

Guinevere is curiously difficult in this retelling. White never gets close enough to her to really pull her apart. She remains something of a mystery. She is by turns mature and childish, wise and petty, charming and obnoxious. Most frequently she is the latter of each of these pairs, or at least the presence of Lancelot seems to turn her so. Their relationship is also a strange beast. Though it is, as classically, described as very pure, courtly-love type sentiment, it seems to make both of them, even in old age, into children. Maybe this was the nature of so-called “courtly love;” it was inherently childish. Maybe that childishness was what was supposed to be pure about it. We are not treated to the blissful year they are supposed to have spent together early on in their youth, but we are shown many of the petty bickerings and jealousies that seem to make up the later years of their relationship. She is irrationally jealous and he is irrationally guilty. They do seem dearly invested in one another despite all.

No other women are fully realized like Lancelot and Arthur are, either. Morgause is the only other one who is interesting at all. Though approached distantly, she is quite interesting. She is so cold and loves her children so little, and it is interesting to see what men her kind of mothering raises them into. I did really enjoy the overt Oedipism  manifest in Agravaine, who barely knew how to hide his sexual jealousy of his mother, who never paid him any attention as a child except when she couldn’t get any from other men. And there was maybe something, in retrospect, that was subtly homosexual the triangle of brothers and Lancelot - how Mordred hated him to the point of obsession and Gareth idolized him to obsession. Was there something of jealousy in it? Who knows, but they were entertaining brothers. (Is it just me, though, or is poor Gaheris left out of everything? Sometimes you didn’t even think he was in a scene until all of the sudden he had a dialogue line, some weak insertion of opinion, then he vanished again, never having had an impact on anything. In Bradley, he leaves the story entirely halfway through and is never mentioned again.)

White’s retelling seems aimed at a young audience, as Steinbeck’s was, but it has more humor to it. White makes jokes. Some dull or morally questionable characters – like Pellinore particularly – are made sweet and ridiculous. Pellinore’s dragon becomes an amusing and harmless beast, and his murder of Lot a regrettable accident. Jokes are made frequently about the impracticality of giant sets of armor. However, some characters and scenes are still rendered with solemnity. I think particularly of Elaine, who is in actuality somewhat ridiculous, and also conniving and occasionally cruel. But White treats her only with dignity, never a mean-spirited jab. There is an especially quiet and poetic moment in one of the towers with Guinevere and Lancelot when they have grown older. They are singing together, and White describes the country and its people as he imagines it would have been, with some sense of nostalgia. This is late in the narrative; the book seems to mature as its characters do.

For instance, the first book of The Once and Future King – The Sword in the Stone – particularly seems written in a more lighthearted style, clearly for young adults or older children. It is quite out of step with the rest of the narrative, and is, as far as I can tell, almost wholly fabricated by White. We know what this early schooling with Merlyn does for Arthur – it teaches him about peace and gives him perspective on the human situation. But why show it? Is it meant to force the reader to re-approach war and human struggle from a point of pure ignorance, as Wart, a child with no experience in the world, must? He must counteract his experience in the everyday world where violence is glorified, just as we must.

For me, however, it was strange. It was disconcerting to move so far away from Arthur for the last three quarters of the book, after being so close to little Wart in The Sword in the Stone, and to see him forget those experiences later. Just as you are thinking, maybe, that you rather miss little Arthur and wish you could know more of him in his adult life, he says he cannot remember the experiences among the animals during his childhood, which as a reader we still have such clear memory of. It creates an uneasy boundary between the reader and Arthur. Perhaps it has to be that way as he is a king, and a king gets to be close to no one.

Ah, but at the end, something returns. You cannot but love him. There is hardly a more poignant scene than old Arthur, slumped in his chair, asking Mordred weakly if it is truly necessary to burn Guinevere, still his love, at the stake. watching him listen as Mordred narrates the scene below the window, because Arthur cannot bear to watch. He is suddenly so small and weak and sad. And we join him at the end of the novel, utterly defeated in every way, having lost everything, and we experience his small moment of clarity and triumph just before his death. His optimism is not naive but dogged and deliberate, and he persists in it to his last moments. I think this is why, despite his being unnaturally perfect and likable, we can still love him. He is a good man, but no fool.

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck

I haven’t been this excited after reading something in a long time. I spent the whole day after I finished looking up as much as I could about Arthurian legend. Here, Steinbeck has taken Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur – which itself mostly compiled, streamlined, and embellished older Arthurian tales like the French Vulgate Cycle – and translated it into modern English, while re-writing and adapting a lot of the stories to be accessible to audiences of any age today. Steinbeck worked on it for years, appears to have given up on it for the most part at some point, and never finished the project before his death.

While charming and (mostly) beautifully written, it’s a flawed work. In some cases, Steinbeck may have been too affectionate of the Malory. The first parts are insufferable at times, and unrelatable the rest. The battles were dull and confusing – I’m sure much worse in the Malory, but still hard to read in Steinbeck. Other times, the characters were so quickly encountered they felt stiff or strange. Many parts were a mere listing of deeds and events. Characters were impossible to track. These qualities – distant, matter-of-fact prose and characters whose motivations were too far removed from the modern day to be relatable – are, I think, what Steinbeck was hoping to change in his adaptation. In places, he does this wonderfully. But early on, the prose doesn’t differ enough, I think, from the original Malory.

More difficult for me to get over than the prose style were the morality and relationships. It was all so hard to truly grasp and understand while reading. These knights adhered to a very particular brand of morality, one that no one expects ordinary people ever lived by. After all, the stories don’t take place in any real time in history. But the knights typify some kind of perfect moral figure – or at least the attempt at it. These knights may not always succeed, but at their best they are portraying what people in Malory’s time must have seen as some kind of ideal. Or perhaps the ideal hails from before Malory; from the Vulgate Cycle or earlier. There is chivalry without kindness, death without purpose, this obscure concept of honor. Sometimes it is honorable to simply fight another knight, occasionally to the death, for no reason or quarrel whatever. Sometimes violent demands were made for no reason. People could be evil one minute and acquitted the next, and evil again later. Some knights could do evil things, but were still defended out of pure loyalty. And loyalty itself was considered a virtue. Illogical by nature, their loyalty simply love and respect borne out of servitude, and servitude given out of love and respect. Loyalty was not given because the service was for a pure or good or worthwhile master. Your cause or master was pure and worthwhile because it was your cause or master, and because you served it, not for any inherent traits. This is so hard for me to understand.

And of course it goes back to the King and his – as Steinbeck explains in letters – unimpeachable, unquestionable, inherent goodness. It is actually impossible to place blame upon him. The opposite of now, when our leaders must often shoulder blame for even things that are beyond their control. Everything Arthur does is either good and correct because he does it, or the blame for the consequences is put on inferiors. This was not a matter of legal truths, or truths as they were presented by authority, where people would still whisper otherwise to one another. He was considered, uniformly, to be beyond wrongdoing. I suppose this is divine right – all bad that happens in the world is the fault of man. And whatever one concedes is within God’s control is determined to have a good and right purpose, because He did it, and He is good. And Arthur was a hand of God. Perhaps this is where the concept of loyalty is. If you believe those above you to be above you because they are naturally and morally better than you, then it makes some sense, I suppose.

This is impossible to truly conceptualize now, though, and that makes it quite hard to read the story sometimes, as Arthur wages wars, killing thousands of purportedly great soldiers and knights and devastating his people and his countryside, and as other kings do the same, all over petty political quarrels (which Merlin could have prevented, I might mention). It is even difficult to watch his subjects be subjected (ha) to the whims of kinghood – condemning and acquitting, making decisions that affect his subjects based on the feeling of the moment; or paranoia; or blind, misplaced trust. I felt that the first third to half of the book was interesting as a cultural artifact, but not quite entertaining. It was too detached from the too-large cast of characters, their values and motives, as described, were not much relatable, and too many apparently unrelated events happened.

However, it was slowly picking up ever since Merlin, and The Three Quests truly hooked me. the three Quests was a story with a concrete, fable-like structure. Three different knights, three different ladies, paired off and traveling in search of adventure. It was a kind of parable, but the characters were all, finally, very tangibly written to be more than faceless symbols – even the women this time! There were relationships quite relatable to present-day, and the characters were all quite flawed and interesting.

This is all not to mention the hearty dose of misogyny, though. You could run across it in almost all the stories, but it was most pronounced in The Three Quests, as female characters featured most prominently here. It was funny to notice (or not) how the female and male characters were all equally flawed, but the males came off as still admirable heroes as long as their faults did not interfere with their knighted code. The only fatal flaws for knights seemed to be a lack of chivalry (a very narrow concept anyway), a lack of mercy, or an avoidance of conflict or fear of death. Oh – or, of course, disloyalty. Every other difficulty of personality or flaw of characters was quite forgivable and still fully compatible with great knighthood. The ladies, however, were fully demonized for every flaw – shrewishness, using sex for leverage, not loving a man who loves her, cruelty or disregard, disloyalty to husbands, pride, demanding favors (or sometimes merely asking them), being useless, being too man-like, being too interested in love and male affections, being uninterested in love and male affections, being too bold, just to name a few. There are only two women who occur to me who did not display two or more of the qualities listed. There are probably only three in the whole book who were not wholly demonized. Guinevere is one, but in later stories she is hung and burned, I believe for disloyalty to Arthur.

As I found out later, a lot of the more in-depth tales were almost totally fabricated by Steinbeck. Malory barely wrote female characters, with exception maybe for Morgan le Fay. This makes me wonder about Steinbeck’s intent in writing women this way; whether it’s critical, or simply in-keeping with the views of Malory’s time, or otherwise. I honestly have not come to any conclusion, and will have to re-read, I think, to have more fleshed-out thoughts about it.

Ah, but Lancelot’s story, at the end. This is so good. It was just beautiful. I was completely engrossed once Lancelot’s story got going. And you can tell here, near the end of the book, what a change has taken place in the prose. There is almost poetry now, and long quiet moments where you are very, very close to Lancelot. Lying in the sunny grass with him; trapped alone in the witches’ dungeon. He is such a full character, very much a hero but with such specific and sometimes unusual – but justified, and always wholly relatable – faults. It’s incredibly how close the prose is to Lancelot, and his mind. You can feel how Steinbeck truly loved Lancelot.

And the prose has simply matured. Steinbeck recognizes this; he states in the letters that follow the work that Malory’s writing grew and improved while writing The Morte, and that Steinbeck wanted to retain that progression in his version. Here, near the end of what Steinbeck translated, we have more long, close scenes, specific sensory detail, long conversations between characters. They start to feel like people, now. There’s an incredible scene between Lancelot and Kay, where Kay gives a very poetic speech about how numbers and accounting have eaten away at his soul like no one great force or event ever could. The speech moved me deeply. To contrast this passage with the matter-of-fact style of the beginning parts of Merlin is simply stunning. A bit later, there’s a passage where a young witch tries to enchant Lancelot, and he looks deep into her eyes and sees only Guinevere. The imagery in this passage is surpassingly lovely.

The way the style of the prose slows and deepens and the story progresses initially excited me greatly. However, looking up the Middle English just briefly later, it seems, to no surprise, all the beauty was Steinbeck after all. I will have to read the whole thing to try and get a glimpse of what he was talking about, of Malory’s development as a writer over the course of the stories, because on skimming I cannot detect it. As it is, it is an interesting traipse into the mind of Steinbeck as he moved through this work, leaving the early parts so close to whole, and letting the last parts blossom into his true style; straying so far from the Malory in the end as to make up, as far as I can tell, almost the entire tale of the Three Quests. The prose by the end is so gorgeous, though I do have to stress that the beginning was, consequentially, a bit of a slog.

It’s tragic this was never finished. Steinbeck’s letters that follow were, truly, at least as interesting as the tales themselves, and they may show why it never was. They were a fascinating insight into the mind, inspiration, artistic patterns, and worries of a classic and genius writer. His confidence had constant dips and peaks. He worked hard, researched thoroughly, overthought and obsessed. You could tell he worked hard, probably from years of experience, to force himself to continue through. However, every step of the way he was obsessing about each little thing. He was constantly losing confidence in the entire project, then a month later writing his editor or friend about some completely new approach he had come up with, so excited, only to repeat the pattern a month later.

The letters were beautifully written, and deeply interesting. But it’s not surprising, reading them, that Steinbeck never could complete this translation. He cared too much about it. But that is exactly what is good about it, too. The moments that are great in the stories are so suffused with love and tenderness for these strange, far-removed, clunky knights who strive so hard to be idyllic.