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.
