Arthur Rex
A Legendary Novel
Thomas Berger
TO MICHAEL AND ARLETTE HAYES
The Rubrics of the Content of the Books
Introduction
I. Of Uther Pendragon and the fair Ygraine; and how Arthur was born.
II. How Uther Pendragon died; and how Arthur took the sword from the stone; and of the challenge to King Arthur by the Irish Ryons.
III. How King Arthur had converse with a lady, and who she was.
IV. How King Arthur took a wife and acquired the Round Table.
V. Of Sir Gawaine and King Pellinore; and how Merlin was assotted with the Lady of the Lake.
VI. How Sir Tristram fought with the Morholt; and how he met La Belle Isold.
VII. Of Sir Launcelot and Elaine the maid of Astolat; and how the wicked Sir Meliagrant abducted the queen.
VIII. How Sir Launcelot rescued Guinevere; and of their criminal friendship.
IX. Of Sir Gawaine’s temptations at Liberty Castle; and how he kept his appointment with the Green Knight.
X. How the vile Mordred made common cause with his wicked aunt Morgan la Fey; and of his good brother Gareth.
XI. How Gareth fought four felonious knights each of another color; and how he fell in love.
XII. How Sir Accolon, who was assotted with Morgan la Fey, made an attempt on King Arthur’s life.
XIII. Of Sir Tristram and La Belle Isold; and how King Mark discovered their love.
XIV. How Sir Gawaine fought with King Pellinore; and then how he saved King Arthur’s life; and how he found a bride.
XV. How Sir Tristram was married to Isold of the White Hands; and of what happened then.
XVI. How Sir Launcelot was cured of his illness by Elaine the daughter of the maimed king Pelles; and how Galahad was conceived.
XVII. Of Percival and his sheltered upbringing; and how he became a knight.
XVIII. How Mordred came to Camelot and was knighted by his father the king.
XIX. How Sir Launcelot and the queen were discovered in their illegal love; and how Sir Gawaine’s brothers went to arrest Guinevere; and how Gawaine swore vengeance against his friend Launcelot.
XX. How Sir Percival and Galahad came to Camelot in King Arthur’s absence and met Mordred; and of the colloquy between the king and the queen; and how those two great knights Sir Launcelot and Sir Gawaine fought together until one of them fell and gave up the ghost.
XXI. How Mordred stabbed King Arthur from behind; and how the battle began.
XXII. How Sir Galahad joined the battle and whom he fought; and how Sir Percival fell; and how King Arthur fought Sir Mordred; and how the king returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake and then was borne away by three ladies in a barge.
XXIII. Of the opinion of some men as to the whereabouts of King Arthur.
XXIV. Of the ladies who carried King Arthur away, and who survived him; and of the moral of this story.
A Biography of Thomas Berger
Introduction
Of the thousands of books that have come and gone or remained during the more than eight decades I have maintained a personal library, I cherish none more dearly than King Arthur and His Knights (“Based on Morte d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory; Compiled and Arranged by Elizabeth Lodor Merchant; Illustrated by Frank Godwin”), published by the John C. Winston Company in 1927.
On the title page, Ms. Merchant is identified as the head of the Department of English at William Penn High School in Philadelphia. Most of Mr. Godwin’s enchanting illustrations (dragons, knights, the Lady of the Lake) are in black and white, though several are in sumptuous color, including at least one that represents a golden-haired Guinevere, on whom I acquired an ardent crush at age seven that has persisted into my eighty-ninth year. How Ms. Merchant’s genteel paraphrase of selected tales from Malory compares with other versions of Arthur-for-children I cannot say: My next encounter with the most majestic of literary themes came when, many years later, I read Sir Thomas’s masterpiece in his own classic language, followed by the works of his forerunners, the likes of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Layamon, and such successors as were in the public domain and could be plagiarized without penalty. These included Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Alfred Tennyson, of course, even Richard Wagner (the libretti of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal). (Though not, unfortunately, Milton’s Arthurian epic, apparently dreamed of but never written.)
But to return to my first exposure to the Round Table and its gallant personnel, on the flyleaf of Elizabeth Lodor Merchant’s book is written, in the elegant hand that alas I did not inherit, “To Tommy from Daddy, Merry Christmas, 1931.”
My novel was published during a strike at the New York Times, and it seemed to take forever for the Book Review to reappear, but when it did Arthur Rex was called “the Arthur book for our time.” Meanwhile, other favorable notices, some quite lavish, could be read in periodicals across the country. The book got sufficient attention to attract a producer from the world of mass entertainment to make an offer for the rights to do a television version as a miniseries. “Isn’t he aware,” I asked my agent, “that all of this material is in the public domain?” “I guess he likes your unique interpretation,” said the late, great Don Congdon, who always looked after my interests much better than I did. So we accepted the option. When it was inevitably dropped a year later, Congdon forwarded to me a copy of the script that had been written in the interim. “Read it,” said Don, “and make a note of everything that the scriptwriter has used from the novel. The producer has willingly offered to pay for a quitclaim.” I did as asked and could not find anything peculiar to Arthur Rex; indeed, not even much from Malory et al. The scriptwriter had been more inventive than I. But Congdon, of course, had no hesitation in asking the producer for a tidy sum, and the latter was pleased to pay it promptly. This episode is not unrepresentative of my many (usually happy) experiences with show business (like which there is no business).
I have been pleasantly surprised by the generosity of the community of legitimate Arthurian scholars to my own amateur contribution to the genre, which might well have been seen as dilettante, even impudent, but in fact Arthur Rex was treated handsomely in a series of learned essays in their journals. In at least one anthology (that edited by Professor Alan Lupack, whose erudition in the subject inspires awe), a chapter from my version is included with excerpts from Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Matthew Arnold, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to mention only a few of the masters with whom, through no fault of their own, I found myself.
Among the reviewers for periodicals were surely more dissenters than the only one I remember, but the latter distinguished himself in the most honorable way. Our exchange began when he found my use of the archaic term “mammets,” in reference to female breasts, ignorant. Its proper derivation and connotations, said he, had rather to do with Mohammed. I sent him the following response:
Dear Mr. —:
In my use of “mammets” I chose to turn my back on both the OED and Webster, who of course trace the word, in its variant spellings, to one or another version of the Prophet’s name; on Dr. Johnson, whose note to Hotspur’s speech is, simply, “Puppet”; and on Farmer & Henley, who in their celebrated Slang and Its Analogues define the term as “a puling girl” and cite passages in Romeo and Juliet and Jonson’s Alchemist.
Instead I went along with E. Partridge in his Shakespeare’s Bawdy, from which I here quote the appropriate entry in its entirety:
“mammets. Female breasts. ‘Hotspur. I care not for thee, Kate:
This is no world to play with mammets and to tilt with lips’.
1 Henry IV, II, iii 92–93.
“L. mamma, a breast (especially of a woman): an echoic word, symboli
zing the baby’s gurgle of satisfaction when given its mother’s breast. –Cf. pap.”
That the Oxonians include “pigeon” among the possible meanings of “mammet” and the Websterians not only join them but add “scarecrow” are perhaps other matters—or mammets.
Yours faithfully
On receipt of my letter, the gentleman sent me an immediate apology. As of 1978, anyway, the chivalric Arthurian values of honor and grace were still valid.
One last note: Some years ago I met a genuine Sioux warrior of the present day, a Lakota-born combat infantry officer in the US Army, and was gratified to hear his kind words about Little Big Man. We spoke about the days when the Plains Indians had what has been authoritatively called the greatest light cavalry that ever rode into battle, and he said, “You know what occurs to me when I think of those old guys? The Knights of the Round Table.”
—Thomas Berger, 2012
BOOK I
Of Uther Pendragon and the fair Ygraine; and how Arthur was born.
NOW UTHER PENDRAGON, KING of all Britain, conceived an inordinate passion for the fair Ygraine, duchess of Cornwall, and having otherwise no access to her, he proceeded to wage war upon her husband, Gorlois the duke.
Thereupon Gorlois closed his wife into the lofty castle of Tintagel, high upon an eminence of adamant, and himself took refuge in another strong fortress called Terrabil, which Uther Pendragon put under siege with a mighty host of men, but nevertheless could not penetrate.
And unable to achieve his purpose the king fell ill with rage against the duke as well as with love for the fair Ygraine, and he lay endlessly on a couch in his silken pavilion, before which was mounted a golden device fashioned in the likeness of the great dragon from which he took his surname (and which had appeared as a fire in the sky over Winchester when he assumed the crown).
To Uther now came one of his barons, the dotard Sir Ulfin of Rescraddeck, saying, “Sire, when you are ill, all Britain ails.”
“Even a dragon,” said the king, “can be felled by love.”
“But love,” said old Ulfin, “can not be taken by sword and lance.”
“Yet the favorable conditions for love can be so established,” said Uther Pendragon. “Could I take Terrabil, I should put Gorlois to death. The fair Ygraine, widowed and undefended, then must needs accept my suit.”
“Alas, Sire, while we are fruitlessly occupied here upon the plain before Terrabil,” said Ulfin, “the Angles and Saxons are regrouping their forces in the east, augmented by new hosts from barbarous Germany.”
And Uther Pendragon fell back groaning. “Ulfin,” said he, “I can not do without this woman. Unless I may have her, I can not rise from this couch. I shall sicken further and I shall die, and Britain shall die with me, and this beautiful land, which my forebear Brute, the grandson of Aeneas, conquered from the giants who then ruled it, will fall to the German toads and become a vile place named Angland.”
And Ulfin nodded his old white head. “It is apparent to me, Sire, that this love which holds you in thrall, you who might on demand have any other woman in the realm but this one, is due to a spell worked upon you by some sprite or fiend evoked by one of your enemies—perhaps by another female whom you have spurned. Now, my counsel is that you consult Merlin, than whom no one is a greater authority on the powers of the unseen.”
“A spell so powerful,” the king agreed, “that it hath closed my mind to the obvious. Merlin, of course! If he could by magic transport from Ireland and erect in a circle at Stonehenge the monoliths that an entire army could not budge, he can get for me one damned little wench.” But here he blanched and seized his beard. “I am overwrought, Ulfin. The fair Ygraine is for me the only woman in the world, and I shall die unless I can have her.” He closed his eyes and his thick black beard did fall slack upon his mighty chest.
Now having taken leave of his sovereign, old Ulfin found him two knights and charged them to discover Merlin and fetch him hither with all haste, and these knights set out for Wales. After a journey of many days they found themselves deep in an enchanted forest at a spring called Alaban, and on the branch of a tree which hung over this spring sat a large raven whose body was so glossy black as to show blue reflections in the sunlight that filtered through the foliage.
And both the knights and the horses, being sore thirsty, drank from the crystal water of the spring (into which one could see forever because there was no bottom) and by the time they had soaked their parched throats the men had been transformed into green frogs and the horses into spotted hounds.
Now in despair and confusion the knights clambered with webbed feet from the steel armor which had fallen around them as they diminished in size, and the horses howled in dismay.
“None may drink of my waters without my leave,” said a voice, and looking aloft the frogs saw it was the raven that spake.
Then the glossy black bird flapped his wings twice and before their bulging eyes he was transformed into a man with a long white beard and wearing the raiment of a wizard, which is to say a long gown and a tall hat in the shape of a cone, both dark as the sky at midnight with here and there twinkling stars and a horned moon. And the next instant Merlin (for it was he) caused both knights and horses to return to their proper forms, and only then did he laugh most merrily.
“Forgive me,” said he, “for my magician’s japery. Surely it did no harm.”
Then the knights informed him that he was required by the king, and he revealed that through his arts he had long known the summons would come and should be at Uther Pendragon’s side in an instant, and so he was. But the knights were constrained to return as they had come, and as it happened they were never seen again, and it was supposed they had been destroyed by monsters.
Now when Merlin materialized in the king’s pavilion Uther Pendragon said to him, “Merlin, I have all the grief in the world, being ruler of all the civilized portion of it. A spell or charm hath been put upon me in which I love to the point of madness the one woman I am denied. Either get for me the woman or relieve me of the spell, and thou shalt be granted any good that is within my power.”
“Sire,” said Merlin, “your distress is at an end. You shall lie with the fair Ygraine this night, and you shall have pleasure to the limits of your capacity, which a thousand women can certify is formidable as befits a mighty king.”
“Thou undercounteth me somewhat, Merlin, unless thy computation refers only to the previous twelvemonth,” said Uther Pen-dragon, rising from the couch. But then he peered suspiciously at his wizard, saying, “Methinks thou wilt ask a king’s ransom for making this arrangement. Thy sovereign is not Croesus.”
“What I shall ask, Sire,” said Merlin, “is nothing which you now possess, no gold, gems, land, castles, nor serfs. The material is of no value to me, I who traffic in the ethereal.” Saying which he moved his wand and for a moment the pavilion was thronged with airy spirits who danced on fox fire. But with another gesture Merlin caused them to vanish as quickly, and then he spake as follows.
“By your exertions this night you will beget upon the fair Ygraine a male child. This child is what I ask you to grant me.”
Now though he had heard pleasantly Merlin’s listing of the rewards which he would never ask for, the king was not quick to assent to the positive demand.
“A son? My son? Though having no interest in my gold, Merlin, surely thou art extravagant with my blood. My heir and successor? The next king of Britain? For what purpose, pray? To apprentice him in thy black art of nigromancy?” Uther did scowl. “A British king kills many, but it would be unnatural for him to speak with the dead.”
“Even so long ago as the reign of your predecessor,” said Merlin, “the unfortunate Vortigern, who introduced the treacherous Anglish and the vile Saxons into this land to help him fight the barbarous Picts and savage Scots (and soon found the Germans at his own throat), I did prophesy the coming one day of a great king, the greatest king of all that was and would ever be amongst huma
nkind.”
“Indeed thou didst do,” said Uther Pendragon, plucking from the little tree of stag horns next the couch his crown and placing it upon his head. “I have reigned now for twelve years.”
“Truly,” said Merlin, who was also a diplomatist, “only from the loins of such a mighty king could come the one who would realize my prophecy.”
“I see,” said Uther Pendragon, who could not long have ruled his realm were he a mere vassal to his own vanity. “Well, no man can escape what hath been foretold. If I am to be father to the greatest, and not the greatest in mine own self, then so be it.”
“Therefore,” said Merlin, “the time is at hand for the conception of that future king, whom you will beget on the fair Ygraine. And even as it is I who will make possible your begetting of him, so must it be I who will prepare him in the time of his nonage for the high office to come.”
“I grant that which thou wouldst have,” said Uther Pendragon. “But my pleasure in thinking on his future achievements is stained with the awareness that I must necessarily be dead before they come about—for I warn thee, Merlin, that I shall, unlike my forebear Lear, not while I live relinquish my crown to my offspring, be he another Alexander or Caesar.”
“Far greater than either,” said Merlin, and this statement caused a shadow to cross through Uther Pendragon’s eye with the swiftness of a swallow darting over a battlement. Therefore the wizard was quick to distract the king with the nearer prospect of lust satisfied. “But now, as to the business with the fair Ygraine, through my craft I shall change you into the very likeness of her husband, the duke of Cornwall, and in such guise, while Gorlois stays besieged here at Terrabil, you shall go to Tintagel, be admitted to that castle as its proper lord and into the chaste Ygraine’s bed as her rightful master.”
Now this plan did bring a glint to Uther’s eye, and he went to pick at his great nose even as it began to diminish in length and fatten at the lobes to become that, in image, of Gorlois. So did his height dwindle, the massive tun of his chest lose half its capacity, his legs bow, and his arms wither, for the duke of Cornwall was not a comely peer though married to a beautiful woman as is often the case.
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