The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976) John Steinbeck | Analysis & Commentary

Literature was not promulgated by a pale, emasculated, critical priesthood, singing their litanies in empty churches. Nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the chin-horned mendicants of low-calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it. And it has not changed, except to become more needed. Hello everybody and welcome to Ear Read This, a podcast providing critical introductions to our favourite works of literature. I'm Ash, your host, and today, lapped by outmoving rings of serene greatness, I am talking about The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck. Last time we looked at Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court, and today we have another American interpretation of the Arthurian legends, this time not a satire, or contrast as Twain called his own book, but a work of earnest translation. Steinbeck was a lifelong admirer of Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and wrote that he wished to set it down in plain present-day speech for his own young sons, and for other sons not so young. As a child, Steinbeck had struggled with reading, so much so that books became for him the tongs and thumbscrews of outrageous persecution. That's a quote from later life, I'm guessing, I don't think he was such a jumped-up little diva to come out with that at the age of nine, which was when everything changed for him, and he received a copy of Le Morte. I loved the old spellings of the words, Steinbeck recalled, and the words no longer used. I was delighted to find out paradoxes, that cleave means both to stick together and to cut apart, that host means both an enemy and a welcoming friend. When it came to writing his own book, Steinbeck originally planned to leave out nothing and add nothing, in other words, to complete a full translation of Mallory's enormous text. In November 1956, he wrote momentously to his agent, I am going to start the mort immediately. Let it be private between us until I get it done. It has all the old magic. Twenty years after that letter, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights was published posthumously to a muted and baffled response. While Steinbeck had often signalled his interest in Arthurian mythology in his novels, the translation of these ancient English legends by one of America's great social chroniclers still seemed odd. What was intended to be, as G. A. Masterton calls it, the Steinbeck version of the tales, interlarded with interpretive essays, the capstone to his career and the key to his beliefs, amounted to a strange, desultory volume of seven stories. This was bookended with a series of letters from Steinbeck to his agent Elizabeth Otis and friend Chase Horton. The failure of the project retold in these letters relegated The Acts to an interesting but minor appendix in the great author's canon. So why are we talking about it? Well, a modernised Mallory written by a legendary American author can't fail to attract Arthurians and Steinbeckians alike. But it is also a book with a fascinating composition history. This episode might have a bit more of a making-of feeling than usual episodes because today we will not only be discussing once again the tales of a fabled English king from around the 6th century, Mallory, the knight and writer from the 15th century, but also the doomed quest of a literary giant living and working in the 20th century. Joining me in King Arthur's court are two Pennsylvanian Yankees, Caleb James and Spencer Church from the Drunken Pen writing podcast, which, if you haven't listened to before, is a very funny show in which Caleb and Spencer discuss everything from questionable writing habits to the most outlandish sub-genres of erotica. They also interview authors and discuss single works in their Book of the Month episodes. There's even a recent edition featuring yours truly in which we talked about Casino Royale and all things Bond, James Bond. As usual, I'll leave a link to their podcast and website in the episode description box below. Today's episode is a bit of a first in more ways than one. We are talking, I think, for the first time about an unfinished work of literature, but also, more excitingly, this particular book has split the room as Caleb and Spencer aren't nearly as taken as I am with Steinbeck's King Arthur. So, you both loved Steinbeck's King Arthur then? Uh, love is a very strong term. I would say it was so beautiful it made me weep. What about you, Spencer? I'd go more just like indifferent. Just to give you the quick rundown, we both agreed on this. The problem with it, one, it didn't really feel like a Steinbeck novel. Again, it was, I mean, he didn't finish this, so I would imagine this was his first draft, the whole thing. And then, it was just him kind of retelling the stories. It didn't, he didn't really add much to it that I noticed. Steinbeck is one of my top favourite authors of all time. Really? I read most of his work and I didn't know he had a King Arthur collection. I never heard of it. So, just because I'd never expected him to write any kind of fantasy, which is what this was categorized as. So, I didn't really look for it, but it wasn't easy to find. Even ordering, we got a Kindle version. I couldn't find a print version that was reasonably priced. Really? I thought that was interesting too. So, it obviously wasn't very popular. And I watched a couple book bloggers on YouTube just to kind of see what their assessment of it was. And all the American book bloggers had a similar reaction that we did, where we didn't really care for it, we thought they didn't really add much to it. Caleb is not the first Steinbeck fan to be disappointed by the acts of King Arthur and his noble knights. The best one contemporary review can do is call it an erratically charming curiosity. This is not only due to the fragmentary status of the volume, but also Steinbeck's determination to get away from his customary style. "'I feel that I am reaching towards something valuable,' he writes. "'It doesn't sound like me, because I don't want it to.'" Diana Rowan suggests that what sent Steinbeck back to Mallory in 1956 was a despairing mistrust of his creative powers, and a helpless feeling that he did not understand his own age. By then, Steinbeck had written some of his most famous masterpieces, including The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. With a Pulitzer Prize under his belt and a Nobel on the horizon, he was, even in his 50s, a grand old man of letters. He watched with admiring anxiety the younger generation of writers, the beats and angry young men, trying to create a new, volatile language. Steinbeck supported them in their efforts, but he was heading in the opposite direction. Yearning for the older properties, he wrote, "'Tragedy, true tragedy, is laughable unless it happens in a flat in Brooklyn. Kings, gods and heroes, maybe their day is over, but I can't believe it.'" Steinbeck was also worried that, in comfortable later life, he lacked the pressures necessary to creative survival. He was disillusioned with the tricks of the trade, speculating gloomily that maybe the future of literature is clever little trick pieces with a semblance of originality and not any depth. He hoped that his update of Mallory could compete with the moving pictures and comic strip travesties that furnished the average child's idea of King Arthur. You really can't knock Steinbeck's ambition here. That sounds as feasible as trying to lure kids away from their phones with a new edition of The Canterbury Tales. Although he would modernise Mallory's language, he was adamant about preserving the wonder and the magic. In no sense, he declared, do I wish to rewrite Mallory, or reduce him, or change him, or soften or sentimentalise him. I believe the stories are great enough to survive my tampering. Though keen to write for children, Steinbeck also ruled out cleaning up the stories. He would leave them with their full complement of butchery, incest, and child murder. He reasoned that children not only understand these things, but accept them until they are confused by moralities which try by silence to eliminate reality. He wouldn't make the same mistake as Tennyson, who, as Steinbeck put it, rewrote Mallory for his soft Victorian audience and pulled the toughness out, thereby transforming muscular prose to watery poetry. Now, not for the first time, I want to reassure any Tennyson fans listening that he will have his day on this podcast. We've heard him take an absolute battering from T.S. Eliot, T.H. White, Mark Twain, and now Steinbeck, but I have an episode coming up that will allow him to make something of a defence. Back to Steinbeck, already we can see some divisions looming on the horizon of his project. He wanted to reach child readers, while keeping the adult material and losing none of the length of the mort. He did not want to reduce or rewrite Mallory, but he wished to change the very archaic language that had so enchanted him as a child. He was facing conundrums of his own alongside those which all Arthurian adapters face, ones that even Mallory had to deal with. As Nancy Stork has said, the story recedes from us infinitely. Arthur lived a thousand years before Mallory told his tale. There has been forever the mismatch between this tale and the words to tell it. When it comes to the Steinbeck version, what I was excited about is, I thought it would kind of Americanise, with his writing style, Arthur legends. So it would, I guess, make it more relatable to American people, because the way we view it, again, kind of an adventure thing, but the actual classic Arthur stories, I don't think most Americans are interested in. Yeah. If you read the original, or even Mallory's writings, they're just not that fun. I think the same thing would go with Shakespeare too. A lot of Americans don't care for Shakespeare that much for similar reasons. We always have to either modernise it or just, I mean, I guess just the culturally, there would be a lot of differences. I don't know. I really like quite a lot of American productions of Shakespeare because they don't have the English problem of assuming by birthright that they understand it all. There are no birthrights here. We don't care. There's no nobility. We don't have the problem of being able to reach a certain level in society because of our birthright. Like you could be a hobo and just a regular Bendlestiff and still become president or something. Whereas most older English stories, it comes, you know, oh, peasant boy, he can't rise up among the ranks. Being a fan of King Arthur can bring you into contact with some fairly crusty nationalists tied into this sort of glorious merry old England idea. And even with Shakespeare, there's a lot of people who, because he doesn't seem to have gone to university, can't really handle it. Like the fact that he might be of low birth and yet have written all of these important plays for us. Steinbeck may not have had the same native connection to Mallory as, say, Tennyson or T.H. White, but the book was his somewhat unlikely portal to reading and influenced his own fiction from the get-go. The title of his first novel, Cup of Gold, evokes the Holy Grail, and though its protagonist is a pirate, he is knighted by the King of England at the end of the book. One of my favourite Steinbeck novels also has roots in Mallory. "'Tortilla Flat' grew out of my study of the Arthurian cycle,' Steinbeck acknowledged. I wanted to take the stories of my town of Monterey and cast them into a kind of folklore." Just as in the previous century Mark Twain had transformed the ancient Britons of Arthur's day into cowboys and Indians, Steinbeck saw that the culture of his own day was suffused with Arthurian lore and imagery, saying, "'The myth of King Arthur continues even into the present day and is an inherent part of the so-called Western with which television is filled at the present time. Same characters, same methods, same stories, only slightly different weapons and certainly a different topography. But if you change Indians or outlaws for Saxons and Picts and Danes, you have exactly the same story. You have the cult of the horse, the cult of the knight.' The Victorian mania for King Arthur had long abated, but there were still major works in recent memory. T.H. White's The Once and Future King, for example, which Steinbeck granted was marvellously wrought, though lacking in the permanent magic he found in Mallory. And there had recently been a major development in Arthurian studies, one which was going to be of great significance to Steinbeck. The version of Mallory he had loved as a child was the Caxton version, named after the 15th century editor who first published the book. But in 1936 a second manuscript was discovered in Winchester College. The Winchester Manuscript, as it became known, appeared to be the text that Caxton had based his version on. In theory, this made the Winchester closer to Mallory's original. In 1947, Professor Eugene Vinever published an edition of Mallory's works following this Winchester Manuscript. John Steinbeck agreed with Vinever, finding what he called lovely nuances in the Winchester version missing from the Caxton, and concluding that it was indeed much closer to Mallory. Steinbeck travelled to England to research his book, spending months there in 1959 visiting Hadrian's Wall, Glastonbury, Tintagel and Winchester College to see this manuscript for himself. Such was Steinbeck's eagerness to sink himself into Mallory's world that he took up residence in a medieval cottage in Somerset, where he wrote with a biro inserted into a goose quill. He also struck up a friendship with Eugene Vinever, who said the drafts Steinbeck showed him were by far the best thing of its kind written in English since the 15th century. Steinbeck pays tribute to Vinever in the Acts by including him in the roll call of Arthurian writers that have gone before him, as the French books say, and Mallory also, as well as Caxton and Salvy, as Sommer and Coneybear, Tennyson, Vinever, and many others. As the letters at the end of the Acts movingly show, Steinbeck worked with wavering confidence, sometimes feeling like he had something valuable on his hands more permanent than Twain or T.H. White, and at other times losing steam. After throwing away two unsatisfactory drafts, Steinbeck hit upon a way of using a distinctly American voice that pleased him, writing, I suddenly felt as Chaucer must have felt when he found he could write the language he had all around him and nobody would put him in jail. I admit I'm getting a little beyond my peers, but a cat may surely look at Chaucer. At lower moments he seems to have felt like his powers were failing, that he no longer had control over his writing. Vinever recalled Steinbeck saying, I tell these old stories, but they are not what I want to tell. I only know what I want people to feel when I tell them. Understandably daunted by the enormity of his project, when Steinbeck's momentum vanished he described it as follows, a curious state of suspension has set in, a kind of floaty feeling, like the drifting in a canoe on a misty lake, while ghosts and winkies, figures of fog go past, half-recognised and only partly visible. I had no idea until I started reading about this how serious he was about King Arthur, like it was a bit of a lifelong obsession. It's what made him want to be a reader. Yeah. He wasn't interested in reading at all before he read Mallory's King Arthur tales. I didn't get as far, because that was in the introduction, I don't remember if it talked about that, if that influenced his writing at all, but it definitely, his reading and his love for literature came from the King Arthur stories, which is why he wanted to tackle the retellings of the stories originally. Dimebeck, he really came to prominence during the Great Depression, so he was a child during World War I, and the Spanish flu, just a very bleak upbringing, I would imagine. I mean, I think he lived in California, so he had that view on things, a little more sunny disposition, but I think just the fantasy aspect of it and being able to, like the escapism of King Arthur probably lit up something in his brain that wasn't in the fiction he was probably reading in America at the time, which is very interesting, seeing how his writing was more directed towards societal issues versus any, this was his only fantasy story or collection. That's why I was very surprised when you brought up that there was a Dimebeck King Arthur collection, because I didn't know he tackled fantasy in any kind of respect. When I was nine, writes Dimebeck in his dedication, I took siege with King Arthur's fellowship of knights most proud and worshipful. It chanced that squire-like duties fell to my sister of six years. It sometimes happens in sadness and pity that faithful service is not appreciated. Wherefore this day I make amends within my power and raise her to knighthood and give her praise. From this hour she shall be called Sir Mary Steinbeck of Salinas Valley. The dedication is written in the medieval style of the Winchester manuscript, for which, as Ellie McCausland writes, Steinbeck embarked upon a self-proclaimed quest to London where he purchased sheets of vellum. Vinever helped him to locate a scribe capable of copying the 15th century hand and replicating the embellishments of the original, incorporating phrases from Mallory's text and visually resembling the opening page of the manuscript in its elaborate flourishes and script. The importance of Steinbeck's childhood playing of King Arthur with his sister Mary is stressed by McCausland, who says his musings upon the permanent nature of the mort centre upon the dreamlike childish aspects of Mallory's work. One of the ways that Steinbeck was to part from Mallory was in his approach to the female characters. He was constantly amazed by Mallory's feeling about women. Mallory doesn't like them much unless they are sticks, he noted. Though Steinbeck's is hardly a feminist reading of Guinevere and Nineveh, they are more than slots, harpies or sticks. And Steinbeck offers us his most complex female character in Lady Lynn, an original creation. She is a woman of 60 who trains knights, taking the young Ewain under her wing for a year of tutelage. She tells him that as a girl she loathed embroidery and would instead dress as a boy. At heart, she says, she is a fighting man and teacher of fighting men. Perhaps here Steinbeck is paying a further tribute to his former squire, his sister Mary, by admitting a woman into the knightly fold. After all, women invented chivalry, as Lynn tells Ewain, something the knights don't remember, just as they won't remember the name of Ewain's tutor. But I will leave men behind me, she says. My tiltyard is the womb of knights. Steinbeck very neatly unfolds his addition to the legends while providing an explanation for her absence elsewhere. As Ewain rides back to Camelot, we leave him preparing his tale as he would have it told and repeated down the ages, thereby hinting at how the tale of a female trainer of knights might subtly disappear from the record. The baggy, porous nature of Arthurian legends invites such tampering, of course, but the creation of Lady Lynn runs counter to Steinbeck's promise to alter nothing and add nothing to Mallory, and is all the more surprising in light of his obsessive research. Steinbeck made two fact-finding tours of England and another to Italy to examine medieval archives. To keep his growing store of reading material on hand, Steinbeck acquired a 17-pound micro-reader, which, as he excitedly reported, allowed him to carry around a large library in a shoebox. Steinbeck was a university dropout, the nervously self-deprecating references to his research in his letters suggest to Ellie McCausland underlying insecurities regarding his academic legitimacy. Nothing is so dangerous as the theories of a half-assed or half-informed scholar, Steinbeck writes at one point, all of which is rather at odds with his desire to reach children and recapture the old magic he himself experienced as an untutored child reader, not only reading but enacting the tales of Arthur. While the earlier stories in the acts could have been written by an academic, by the time we reach Lady Lynn, a novelist has taken over. We'll return to this transition shortly, but for now I want to talk a little more about the book's relationship with children. "'You must learn to listen to children,' Merlin advises Arthur. Having just appeared before the king in the likeness of a child, Merlin reflects the state of his latest author. Like Merlin, Steinbeck was an old master of his art, conjuring with his childhood. Perhaps worried that nostalgia may lead to childish errors and therefore desiring academic approval, Steinbeck wrote the following request to Eugene Vinnevar. "'A long time ago I learned a trick, or perhaps it might be called a method, for writing. I stopped addressing my work to a faceless reader and addressed one person as though I had only that one to talk to. I gave him a face and a personality. Sometimes I told a book to a real person. I should like to hold you in image in this new work. You would then be the focusing point, the court, the jury. Also the discipline of your great knowledge would forbid nonsense, while the memory of excited exchanges would keep alive the joy in explanations. This would be very valuable to me, and I hope you will not forbid it.'" Coming from a seasoned novelist, this sounds strangely like asking for permission. Perhaps Steinbeck felt that if he could count on Vinnevar's guidance, he would be freer to listen to his own inner child. As Ellie McCausland says, Acts holds a complicated relationship with children and childhood, and today is not identified as a text for child readers, despite Steinbeck's intentions as expressed in his preface. It is a text about the child, rather than for the child. As Steinbeck well knew, some of the subject matter of The Mort is emphatically not child-friendly. Take, for instance, Arthur's Herod moment, when he orders the killing of children in response to the prophecy that one will grow up and defeat him. Steinbeck himself felt there was nothing in literature nastier than this. But even in the nastiness, Steinbeck found resonances of childhood, recognising the childlike self-interest of The Mort's characters. On the purer and more constructive side, Steinbeck emphasised the power of childhood imagination and fantasy. In the final story of the book, Lancelot is imprisoned by four powerful queen witches, whose magic renders the knight's physical prowess redundant. Alone and falling in and out of consciousness, Lancelot dreams and recalls the imaginative tricks he played as a child in order to cope with hardships. And so, as McCausland writes, in returning temporarily to memories of himself as a little boy and the mental spells he performed, Lancelot is able to understand and to outwit the witch queens. It was interesting reading the letters at the end because he was quite keen on the idea of doing exactly what you said he doesn't end up doing at the start, which is kind of like Americanising it a bit. He really wanted to celebrate the American language as opposed to this dusty old English language. He said something, you know, the American language is a new thing under the sun and felt it was an opportunity to use all the different kind of cultures that feed into the American language. He said something like, this is a highly complicated and hugely communicative language. It has been used in dialogues, in cuteness, and perhaps by a few sports writers. It has also been used by a first person telling a story, but I don't think it has been used as a legitimate literary language. I thought that was quite interesting because it's a bit like, I know separately, we've both talked about Raymond Chandler and that sounds pretty much word for word what he thought as well. And I think he's probably a bit more successful. Not to divert from the language aspect, but how has Steinbeck, because Steinbeck was a very regional writer. He mainly wrote about poor people in California for the most part. What is, how is he viewed in England and in Europe in general? I don't know about Europe in general, but I think if any conversation about the great American novel ever comes up, the two names are Melville and Steinbeck. He's got these great big sort of slightly romantic, but like social history books. He's got the kind of that Greek feeling, which is kind of why I thought, you know, he'd do well as a, with an Arthur book because Of Mice and Men feels like a Greek tragedy in America. And then yeah, Tortilla Flat. I don't know if you've, it is a little bit King Arthur. It is this sort of band of brothers thing. Yeah, those whole series of books were really good. Setting, what was that? Monterey, I think. But those are just great stories because you have the drunken paisanos and the winos and people who are just down on their luck, but they love life, but they really love life, even though they have nothing. Yeah, so I really enjoyed those stories as well. And obviously Of Mice and Men is one of the best works ever. I actually like your interpretation of it being kind of like a Greek tragedy. I never thought of it like that before. But another thing most Americans don't do is they don't think of things in terms of Greek tragedies. Or anything that could draw upon those influences too much. But it's so clean, Mice and Men. There's no, like, it's got no novel-y bagginess about it at all. There's no, like, it's like, bang, in and out. It feels like you've gone to the theatre. I'm trying to think if that was King Arthur where he wrote, no, that was Grapes of Wrath, was actually written to be set as kind of a play production. It was a new style of writing he was trying when he wrote the Grapes of Wrath. Was it really? Yeah, it's either Of Mice and Men or Grapes of Wrath, but I'm pretty sure it was Grapes of Wrath. Then they made the movie of it, and that'd be something to look up. Don't take my word for it, because it's been a while since I heard that. But yeah, the style of writing, it was actually supposed to reflect a play. At the same time as his Mallory project, Steinbeck was also working on a play based on Don Quixote called Don Quinan. According to Linda Wagner-Martin, with each project Steinbeck was clearly interested in all manifestations of the codes of chivalry and the characters' moral purpose, or their fabrication of what they assumed a moral purpose to be. With both, Steinbeck was struggling to reconcile the mechanics and demands of the romance genre with modern writing. As Nancy Stork writes, romance requires characters to be unaware of their own motivations and states of mind. They are characters who don't know themselves because there is no knower to know them. It is as if the matter of Britain simply told the story by itself. The novel needs an author, and Steinbeck, in his veneration of Mallory, was unable to wrest the story from Mallory's words and revivify it. Other writers, like Twain, kept the famous characters flat and exaggerated their flatness for comedy. Elsewhere, T.H. White, like Steinbeck, wanted to give Arthur and Merlin psychological depth, and managed it by knowing when to part from his source material. Steinbeck's problem was cleaving to Mallory too much, but paradoxically, this would lead to a breakthrough that allowed Steinbeck to cleave his own way instead. The breakthrough came in Italy, where Steinbeck had been spending his days rummaging through the medieval archives and reading scholarly appraisals of the mort. Waking suddenly at 5am and watching the sun coming up over Rome, something that had long been bothering Steinbeck fell into place. He wrote to his agent, Elizabeth Otis, Mallory has been studied as a translator, as a soldier, as a rebel, as a religious, as an expert in courtesy, as nearly everything you can think of, except one, and that is what he was, a novelist. As a novelist, Steinbeck reasoned, Mallory was bound to have embedded himself into the characters. A novelist not only puts down a story, but is the story, he wrote. He is each one of the characters in a greater or lesser degree. Otis responded to this saying it was one of the most impressive letters that you or anyone else has ever written. It certainly marked a turning point for Steinbeck. Instead of depending on the academic expertise of others, he could depend on his own intimate knowledge of the nature of novelists. From then on, his letters are full of fascinating and often radical readings of Sir Thomas Mallory as novelist. Diana Rowan writes, Steinbeck saw the author of The Mort caught up like him in shifting and perilous times and trying to order them through his work. In a flash of insight, he saw that Mallory's self-character, the one into which every author puts himself as he is and as he would be, is Lancelot, the man who could not win the grail because he was stained with sin and imperfection, but who nevertheless could father Galahad. Elsewhere, Steinbeck writes that a beautiful thing is how Mallory learned to write as he went along. The straggling sentences, the confused characters and events of the earlier parts smooth out as he goes along so that his sentences become more fluid and his dialogue gets a sting of truth and his characters become more human than symbolic. He became a master and you can see it happening. I'm not going to try and change that. I'll go along with his growing perfection and who knows, I may learn myself. Convinced as he was that the Winchester manuscript was closer to Mallory than the Caxton version he'd read as a child, Steinbeck now suggested how those new discovered nuances might have been lost. Caxton was a printer and editor and city man whereas Mallory was very, very much country and also in jail quite a bit. Quite a bit being an impressive piece of understatement as Peter Ackroyd writes in the introduction to his own version of Mallory, at the beginning of the 20th century, an American scholar discovered a court record, partially burned, that accused Mallory of rape, ambush, intent to kill, theft, extortion and gang violence. In our last episode, we saw how Mark Twain attacked the monarchy by introducing a rogue democratic element into King Arthur's court and according to Ellie McCausland, by probing deeper into the basic human qualities underpinning Mallory's creative vision, Steinbeck affected a further democratisation of the legend, identifying its characters, particularly Lancelot, as mystic ciphers for Mallory's own rather more prosaic consciousness. This line of thinking had a freeing effect for Steinbeck. His inherited characters now acquired new idiosyncrasies and soul. Merlin's self-prophesied doom, namely that he will fall in love with a maiden who will be his undoing, infuriates Arthur just as it infuriates the rest of us. But here it is justified with elegance and pathos. Merlin cannot avert his fate, not because he is stupid, but as he says, because I am wise. In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins. While Steinbeck frankly admitted that Arthur was a dope, other characters are full of new intrigue and richness. Gawain, the Lady Lynn says, is a temperament who feeds upon himself like those lizards who consume their tails. Gawain has up days when the moon is an easy jump and down days when an earthworm makes a high arc over his head. We hear the pain of Kay, the Seneschal, who organises the countless feasts and celebrations, and talks of being eroded by the pressures of event management. Granite so hard that it will smash a hammer can be worn away by little grains of moving sand, he says to Lancelot. To you, a feast is festive. To me, it is a book of biting ants. Even villainous non-human characters are treated with sympathy. When Sir Marholt finds the hoard of a giant, he sees gold and silver, jewels and bright cloth, alongside pieces of broken glass from church windows, and quartz, and shards of blue and yellow pottery. A mighty mixture of great wealth and great nonsense. The Knight comments, poor thing, he didn't know the difference. He couldn't learn to steal only valuable things, as civilised men and women do. John Gardner notices that as he warms to his work, Steinbeck uses Mallory more freely, cutting deeply, expanding generously. In Mallory's version, the story of Sir Ewain is only three and a half pages long. With Lady Lynn in tow, Steinbeck produces thirty. The last story of the acts concerns Lancelot, who Steinbeck had identified as the character Mallory most projected himself onto. And perhaps this is why he pays special attention to him. As Gardner writes, Steinbeck creates a lifelike Lancelot, a veteran soldier who knows his business, how to grab sleep when you can and so on, shows in quick, realistic strokes how the soldier wakes up, wrings his muscles against cold and cramp, and how magic starts to happen to this cool, middle-aged realist. Arguably the most un-Mallory-like sequence comes right at the end, as Lancelot and Guinevere give in to their suppressed passion for one another. Their bodies locked together as though a trap had sprung. Their mouths met and each devoured the other. Each frantic heartbeat at the walls of Ribs, trying to get to the other until their held breaths burst out and Lancelot, dizzied, found the door and blundered down the stairs. And he was weeping bitterly. Though he retains the Mallory habit of starting a sentence with and, there is nothing this intimate or physically passionate in Steinbeck's source. According to Laura F. Hodges, the total reality revealed through the acts is that our most cherished heroes are subject to human failings, and that we as fellow humans prefer not to acknowledge these failings as facts, but that mature men and women, such as Lynn, Marholt and Lancelot, must and do confront the flaws they discover in their unconscious reality. Conversely, those who are immature, as are Morgan, Gawain and Arthur, practice avoidance procedures. They practice deceit, excuse the inexcusable, and hide the evidence of their mistakes. Sometimes even from themselves. Because I didn't read Mallory's King Arthur tales. How different is the retelling from John Steinbeck's version compared to those? Other than maybe the stuffy language. Well, I think I read that he wrote, Steinbeck managed about a tenth. So Mallory's is huge, is the first thing. I think he writes in a letter like, this is going to take me 10 years, and that might be a conservative estimate. And then obviously he writes a good chunk and gives up. And that's still only, I think about a tenth. I think that might be a bit under, I think he might have managed a bit more than that. But yeah, it's much, much longer. And I think he got a bit carried away with Mallory as a early novelist, as opposed to a kind of collector of tales. That he started to see how Mallory's writing improved as he went along. He said he started off really scrappy and all the characters are kind of just symbols. Then by the end, Mallory's become a much better writer, which you'd hope after you've written that much, you know, picked up some good ideas. But I think Steinbeck strays from the source a bit more as he goes along. From the introduction in our collection, they said he fleshed out the characters a lot more. Whereas in Mallory's, they were just kind of, I guess, simplified, just bland, blank characters. But even with John Steinbeck's, I don't want to say dumbed down, but obviously a much smaller version of what Mallory did, I found I was getting bogged down with a lot of muddiness with way too many lords and dukes and knights and too many names. And I just couldn't keep up with some of them. That was my main problem. Whenever they got alpha characters, other than like Arthur and like Merlin, like, you know, that's when I was engaged, the stories revolved around like those guys. Or like the two brothers who had the exact same name. Yeah. Just spelled differently. Or about just like when I was most engaged in the book was like whenever the stories revolved around like Arthur or Merlin, like those kind of guys. But whenever we got into like the other knights, just openly questing and, you know, just roaming around is when it kind of bogged it down for me. I didn't think it really picked back up until maybe Lancelot's story. Maybe that's just the American in me, just the low attention span. But I just didn't enjoy the middle portion of the Arthur tales. Steinbeck worked on his project from 1957 to 1959. Its abrupt abandonment appears to have been caused by the unexpectedly negative reaction from Otis and Horton to the author's draft of The Death of Merlin. Steinbeck's letter in response to this was written on May the 13th, 1959. Let me say first that I hope I am too professional to be shocked into paralysis. The answer seems to be that you expected one kind of thing and you didn't get it. Remaining adamant that he was onto something valuable, he nevertheless acknowledged, if I'm wrong then it's a real whopping wrongness. The shock at Otis and Horton's disappointment seems to have been enough to puncture Steinbeck's self-belief. Earlier he had said he wanted to forget how to write and learn all over again with the writing growing out of the material. Evidently both author and project were at a fragile stage of development. Steinbeck was holding out hope that apparently contrary elements in his process would pay off. That scholarly research and childlike fantasy could coexist. That by focusing heavily on Mallory, Steinbeck could find his own voice. And that by turning over the lumber of the past, he might find the future. My looking is not for a dead Arthur, he wrote, but for one sleeping. And if sleeping, he is sleeping everywhere, not alone in a cave in Cornwall. Despite his initial defence, within a few months the work had petered out. It doesn't gel, he wrote to Otis, you know that and so do I. For six years the letters pertaining to King Arthur stopped. But that's not quite the end of the story. After abandoning the draft he was working on in 1959, Steinbeck began again and it is this second version that was published years after his death. As Chase Horton writes, it is unfinished and wasn't edited or corrected by the author. Elizabeth Otis received a final letter from her client on the subject of the book on July 8th, 1965. I go struggling on with the matter of Arthur. I think I have something and I'm pretty excited about it, but I am going to protect myself by not showing it to anybody so that after I get a stretch of it done, if it seems bad, I can simply destroy it. But right now, I don't think it is bad. Strange and different, but not bad. There was moments when they mentioned the round table and etc. Get pumped up, yeah I know that stuff! But then nothing happens with it. Yeah, apparently everybody was just sticking swords and stones. So it's like, what's happening here? Stupid lady from the lake, that's who I hated the most. I'm glad she got her head cut off, I enjoyed that part. There was a lot of polite brutality that I enjoyed. It's like, I'm going to kill you, but first I'll let you stand up and fight me like a man. And then I'll chop your head off. Also, sidebarks, I think we talked about this on another episode, maybe. I didn't realize that a lot of the mafia code comes from the King Arthur legends. Oh, does it really? Yeah, for instance, like the wedding. You can ask King Arthur on his daughter's wedding day for a favor and he'll grant it. That's obviously a big mafia trope. And then the whole thing with honor. And if you have a guest, you can't kill a guest in your house or things like that. A lot of that that comes from King Arthur is also adopted by mafiosos, which I did not know. And in The Untouchables, they sit around a round table in that shot when De Niro has the baseball bat. Arthur, I don't think, ever clubbed one of his knights to death at the round table. But he'd have had an helmet on. Imagine there's a lot of knights that would not enjoy that, they might be upset. So there was a lot of stories in this collection where a knight would go to one of the millions of kings apparently England had at the time, go to their kingdom, and then go to their banquet where they were a guest, and then obviously cause mayhem. I think the biggest story, I don't remember which character it was. Was it like the spear that stabbed Jesus? He finds it and the whole kingdom collapses on him. The Dolorous Stroke. Yes. Yeah. Out of the stories, which one was your favorite? Of the ones that are in Steinbeck, I think the two Merlin ones. I would say the two brothers, I forget their name, they have the same name, I think, who ended up fighting each other on the island to the death. I like that story. And I also like the Merlin stories a lot. Yeah. Other than his demise, which I thought was very stupid. Um, the lady who he taught how to trap him, and he knew it was going to happen and he still did it. And I'm going to give you the trapping me in a cave spell. Yeah. Whoops. Probably should have did that, that was a mistake. Yeah. And then obviously the King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone was a good touch. And also another thing I didn't know, that Excalibur is not that sword. Yeah. Not realized. Yeah. I always thought they were the same. Over here, they just kind of mix that around. I think there was a animated movie we watched in school. They probably show, we're like, Oh, you know, he has Excalibur. And he was a little wienery kid. And, uh, it was a lie, just a lie. I never realized how big of a thing jousting was. Yeah. That's their main form of battle. And that the whole, like the whole fighting afterwards, like I thought it was always just hitting each other with a big stick. And like, that was it. Like, you know, you fell off and you won. But no, he goes on to try to stab each other to death. There was a lot of jousting, way too much jousting. I would say. And like, you couldn't ever turn it down. No, that seems like one of those things. Cause King Arthur a couple of times was really beaten up. And he was like, Hey man, just give me like a day and a sandwich. I'll be all right. I can joust tomorrow. No, you can joust now, good sir. Or you will name shall be best marched forever. Okay. There were a couple of dishonored knights, like the Invisible Knight, I think was a jerk. And, um, there was a couple other rogue knights who, but they all still went on quest and stuff. That's another thing we both agreed, especially Spencer. The questing was too much. The work, the actual word questing in this collection. Well, just even though in two, we would always talk about like, what's the role of the knight? Like, what are the, are they supposed to be like a police force? Are they like. From what I heard of the role of the knight, before we actually get the real role of the knight that he's going to tell us. I got the feel that they're like the ancient samurai of Japan, where they just served the Lord. And, uh, pretty much just kind of like an army of, of men who have respect. But when the chips are down, then they just, they're dishonored. And they just run the countryside, people and questing and jousting with their terrible armor. Yeah, pretty much. What's weird about the knight, the whole knight system is it's, it's, it's like saying I want to have a private army, but I want every single member of that private army to feel like he could break off and form his own kingdom at any moment. Yeah, that's what I gathered. And that's all we have time for today. Thank you very much for listening. And a huge thank you to Caleb James and Spencer Church for coming on the podcast, especially as I got them to read a book they didn't end up liking too much. Do check out The Drunken Pen. They've got a great podcast. They've also got a website where they sporadically ask for writing submissions. If you're a writer, you should definitely check that out. I'll leave a link in the episode description box. If you visited our Instagram page recently, you might see that we've started doing some t-shirts featuring our artwork, all done by my sister. We'll have more designs going up there, maybe a Steinbeck one, I don't know. So check that out if you fancy some clobber. But I think that's everything for today. I'll be back soon with some Shakespeare. But until then, happy reading.