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.