The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

by John Steinbeck

  I feel sad today--not desperate but questioning. I know I'll have to go along with my impulse. Maybe it will get better as Malory got better--and he did. If when I've worked the summer away and the fall--if it still seems dull, then I will stop it all, but I've dreamed too many years--too many nights to change direction. I never thought this work would be intensely popular, but I did believe it would have a constant audience, not changed but made available. I changed myself because I was sick of myself, dropped my tricks because I didn't believe in them any more. A time was over, and maybe I was over. I might just possibly be wiggling like a snake cut in two which we used to believe could not die until the sun set. But if that's it, I'll have to go on wiggling until the sun sets.

  Nuts! I believe in this thing. There's an unthinkable loneliness in it. There must be.

  TO ERO--SOMERSET, MAY 1959

  I am moved by your letter with the implied trust in something you don't much like. Surely I did not intend to misinform you. It seems that we were not talking about the same things. One of the difficulties seems to lie in the great length of the work. I wish I could discuss this with Chase. I agree with him about the breaks for volumes. But I am more and more reluctant about the Roman episode. It has never seemed to belong. There isn't much of any story. The two great and continuing stories are those of Lancelot and Tristan. The Lancelot breaks in the middle, Tristan comes in and then Lancelot and the Grail sequence and the morte. I am going to think very carefully about leaving the Emperor business out. The first volume then would go to the beginning of Tristan. I think at this moment, subject to change, of course, to do the translation of all of that--leaving out the Emperor business perhaps--then going back--reworking the translations with even more freedom--then putting in my own work between the stories, which would embody a great deal of the knowledge Chase and I have accumulated. Now that would make a very deep and hefty first volume. Also we would then know what we have and whether the method stands up. It should also be complete enough to go toward publication as it stood. If it did not stand up, and I must believe that it might--then to continue with Tristan and finally to the Grail and the morte. I think this would be the test volume. If it turned out to be no good, we could either abandon or change the whole plan. Now that means from the beginning to the end of the first part of Lancelot leaving Claudius Emperor out. What do you both think of this as a method? It is more than possible that I might finish this first volume in draft at least before I come home. If I do the whole thing and then find it no good--that's too much. Think about this please.

  I know one of the problems concerning these things I am sending to you and again it arises out of my failure to explain. Or in explaining have not gone far enough. These are translations in which I have tried to extract the meaning in Malory as closely and as completely as I can. They are not the final form. Once done, they will be the working material and I shall not go back to Malory again but shall work from my own translation which by that time will have no relation to Middle English. I know this is a long way around but it is the only way I have of avoiding the compelling and infectious Malorian prose. So bear with me a little. I think I know what I want, and I'm trying to get it.

  TO CHASE--SOMERSET, MAY 22, 1959

  Thank you for your letter of confidence. One can go on in the face of opposition, but it is much easier not to. I am learning something new every day. In a matter this large it is impossible to carve out a bunch in advance. It is like the wood carving I do--the wood has its way too--and indicates the way it wants to go, and to violate its wishes is to make a bad carving.

  Yesterday I finished the first part of Morgan--called Accolon. A fabulous character and quite a dish. I am going to have an essay about Malory's feeling about women.

  I am a bad scholar and moreover have not many references at hand and beyond that find myself skeptical of many of the references that are blandly accepted just because they have been printed. Sometimes a truth lies deeper in a name or an appellation than anywhere else. Now here is a premise, a kind of inductive speculation that should delight your heart. It came to me in the night, dwelling on the fact of Cadbury. Look at the place names--Cadbury, Caddington, Cadely, Cadeleigh, Cadishead, Cadlands, Cadmore, Cadnaur, Cadney, Cadwell. According to Oxford "Place Names" the first element refers to someone named Cada--

  Then there are the Chad places--beginning with Chadacre and lots more ending with Chadwick. These are attributed to Ceadvalla--the Celtic counterpart. There are many other variations. Now look at the cad words in the dictionary and see where so many of them point, Caddy, cadet, caduceus, Cadi is Arabic and you come back to Cadmus, a Phoenician, founder of Thebes, bringer of the alphabet to Greece. Caduceus--symbol of the herald, later of knowledge, particularly medical, and the snake staff still used on license plates. Cadmus sowed the dragon's teeth also, which may be another version of the tower of Babel, but the main thing is that the myth ascribes his origin to Phoenicia. Were the Trojans forerunners of the Phoenicians? Geographically they should have been the same group and the Brut name is strongly entrenched here as well as the tradition of Troy.

  But let's go back to the Cads. We know that in 1,500 to 2,000 years the only foreigners to come to these islands were Phoenicians, that they brought design, ideas, probably writing, and certainly ideas straight out of the Mediterranean. They also concealed these islands from the world so that their source of metals was not known--this to protect their monopoly of the tin which made all of the bronze in the then known world. And where did these Phoenicians come from? Well, their last stopping place and probably their greatest outland port was Cadiz--a Phoenician word which has never changed.

  Is it beyond reason to conjecture that the Cad names as well as the Cead words, the Cedric words, came from Cadiz, which came from Cadmus, who is the mythical bringer of culture from outside? Such things have a very long life. Kadi is a judge to this day, Caddie a gentleman, Cadet a noble. Caduau a gift or a bribe. I know nothing of the Semitic languages. But I'll bet you will look to the Hebrew and other Semitic origins of the syllable Cad--or Kad right back to the Mesopotamians--Babylons, Tyres, etc. Why would not these rich and almost mythical people who came in ships and brought curious and beautiful things have names of their origin--the people from Cadiz, the people of Cadmus, the bringer of knowledge, the messengers of the gods. They must have been godlike to the Stone Age people. They would have brought their gods, their robes of Tyrrhenian purple; their designs are still on early British metal and jewelry. Their factors would have lived with the local kids and their memory seeped into the place names. There is little doubt that they brought Christianity to these islands before it even got a start in Rome.

  In none of my reference books can I find even a hint of this thesis. It is supposed after fifteen hundred years of constant association with the West Country the one bright and civilized people disappeared, leaving no memory. I just don't believe it. I think the very earth shouts of them.

  What do you think?

  TO CHASE--SOMERSET, MAY 25, 1959

  (from Elaine S.)

  This is more or less in the nature of a P.S. to the letter I wrote to Elizabeth Saturday. Over the weekend John read the most recent ms. to me, and it is a great deal better. He also has been restudying Vinaver's notes on Malory, and points out to me, "Malory cut and re-edited the French, so I can do the same with Malory." I think the Steinbeck version is slowly coming to life, and I just am anxious for you to know. He says this first draft is just that, and he will make his version from it. I said, "Why didn't you say so?" and he was indignant! You see, it is evolving slowly. I think both of you have given great help in the evaluation.

  TO CHASE--SOMERSET, JUNE 8, 1959

  I have been thinking about E.O. You know in the many years of our association there has been hardly a moment without a personal crisis. There must be many times when she wishes to God we all were in hell with our backs broke. If we would just write our little pieces and send them in and take our money or our reject
ions as the case might be and keep our personal lives out of it. She must get very tired of us. And also this must be a weary pattern. We pile our woes on her and they must always be the same woes. If she should suddenly revolt, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Instead of gloriously clean copy she gets excuses, and mimes and distress and former and future and bills. Writers are a sorry lot. The best you can say of them is that they are better than actors and that's not much. I wonder how long it is since one of her clients asked her how she felt--if ever. It's a thankless business. How sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a writer. The smallest activity of a writer it seems is writing. If his agonies, his concupiscence, his errors in judgment were publishable the world would be navel deep in books. One of the happier aspects of television is that it draws off some of these activities. Patience on a manuscript.

  Now back to Malory or rather my interpretation of his interpretation to be followed, I hope, by my interpretation of my interpretation. As I go along, I am constantly jiggled by the arrant nonsense of a great deal of the material. A great deal of it makes no sense at all. Two thirds of it is the vain dreaming of children talking in the dark. And then when you are about to throw it out in disgust, you remember the Congressional Record or the Sacco and Vanzetti case or "preventive war" or our national political platforms, or racial problems that can't be settled reasonably or domestic relations, or beatniks, and it is borne in on you that the world operates on nonsense--that it is a large part of the pattern and that knight errantry is no more crazy than our present-day group thinking, and activity. This is the way humans are. If you inspected them and their activities in the glass of reason, you would drown the whole lot. Then when I am properly satiric about the matter I think of my own life and how I have handled it and it isn't any different. I'm caught with the silly breed. I am brother to the nonsense and there's no escaping it. But even the nonsense is like the gas and drug revelations of the Pythoness at Delphi which only make sense after the fact.

  I am working now on Gawain, Ewain, and Marhalt, having lost a little time over the issues of the boys. It's so full of loose ends, of details without purpose, of promises unkept. The white shield for instance--it is never mentioned again. I think I am breathing some life into it but maybe not enough. As I go along I do grow less afraid of it. But there must be some reverence for the material because if you reject these stories you reject humans.

  There are two kinds of humans on the creative level. The great mass of the more creative do not think. They are deeply convinced that the good world is past. Status quo people, feeling they cannot go back to the perfect time, at least fight not to go too far from it. And then there is creative man who believes in perfectibility, in progression--he is rare, he is not very effective but he surely is different from the others. Laughter and tears--both muscular convulsions not unlike each other, both make the eyes water and the nose run and both afford relief after they are over. Marijuana stimulates induced laughter, and the secondary effect of alcohol false tears, and both a hangover. And these two physical expressions are expendable, developable. When a knight is so upset by emotion that he falls to the ground in a swound, I think it is literal truth. He did, it was expected, accepted. And he did it. So many things I do and feel are reflections of what is expected and accepted. I wonder how much of it is anything else.

  Isn't it strange how parallels occur. About a month ago, while doodling in preparation for work, I wrote a short little piece and put it in my file where it still remains. I quote from it.

  When I read of an expanding universe, of novas and red dwarfs, of violent activities, explosions, disappearances of suns and the birth of others, and then realize that the news of these events, carried by light waves, are records of things that happened millions of years ago, I am inclined to wonder what is happening there now. How can we know that a process and an arrangement so long past has not changed radically or revised itself? It is conceivable that what the great telescopes record presently does not exist at all, that those monstrous issues of the stars may have ceased to be before our world was formed, that the Milky Way is a memory carried in the arms of light.

  TO ERO--SOMERSET, JUNE 1959 (THURSDAY)

  Alas! I can only agree with you--Arthur is a dope. It gets so that you want to yell--Not that again! Look out--he's got a gun! the way we used to in the old movies when our beloved hero was blundering stupidly into the villain's lair. Just the same as Arthur. But it goes further and even gets into the smart ones. Consider Morgan--without checking whether her plan to murder Arthur had succeeded, she goes blithely ahead as though it had. But this is literature. Think if you will of Jehovah in the Old Testament. There's a God who couldn't get the job as apprentice in General Motors. He makes a mistake and then gets mad and breaks his toys. Think of Job. It almost seems that dopiness is required in literature. Only the bad guys can be smart. Could it be that there is a built-in hatred and fear of intelligence in the species so that the heroes must be stupid? Cleverness equates with evil almost invariably. Is a puzzlement, but there it is.

  I have a feeling that I am really rolling now in the stories of Ewain, Gawain, and Marhalt. In the first place it is a better story and in the second I am opening it out. Where Malory plants an incident and then forgets it, I pick it up. It's a long one and my version even longer in some parts, but it is also cut in parts. I am having fun with it.

  I am constantly amazed at the feeling about women. Malory doesn't like them much unless they are sticks. And dwarfs--there is almost a virility fear here. Now in the fifteenth century people were not dopes. We know from the Paston Letters and from many other sources that they were demons and also very capable of taking care of themselves. The fifteenth-century man had no more likeness to the Arthurian man than the Old West had to the Western. But in both cases there is the yearning for the childlike simplicity of a time when the Great were not clever. Someone was clever enough to keep Malory in jail the last part of his life without ever bringing him to trial. No virtue is involved here. Some damn fine intelligence didn't want him around. The world was not young and innocent when Malory wrote. It was old and sinful and cynical. And it is not innocent now when the slick story and the Western flourish. Can it be that the true literature of the future will be Mickey Spillane? It is at least conceivable.

  Yesterday afternoon after work I went up on Cruch Hill where some schoolboys are excavating under the direction of good people from the British Museum. A neolithic fort and on top an Iron Age fort and on top of all a Roman temple. The neolithic people built a wonderful system of walls and defenses. My God! the work they did and the earth and stone they moved. A fantastic amount of work. And all of Somerset is littered with these great works. There must have been a very large and highly organized population. You don't push mountains around without machinery unless you have lots of people. And the size and consistency of the design indicates not only a tight organization but a great continuity. The work--all in one pattern--must have gone on for generations. The lines are clean and straight and the intention did not change. It is remarkable.

  TO ERO--SOMERSET, JUNE 1959 (SUNDAY)

  Elaine is at church and I am in the middle of my day's work. She said this morning--"You ask Elizabeth to take care of the damndest things. I'll bet she would like a client who just writes and sends in stories."

  And it is true, too. She is right. As a client I have always been a mess. Thank heaven there has been a little profit to justify it.

  That being so, I think it would be good to write a letter to you telling you I know how much you do and always have done and second, a letter in which there are no pains, complaints, requests, explanations, or excuses. Wouldn't that be a relief?

  I can tell you one thing I have finally faced though--the Arthurian cycle and practically all lasting and deep-seated folklore is a mixture of profundity and childish nonsense. If you keep the profundity and throw out the nonsense, some essence is lost. These are dream stories, fixed and universal dreams, and they have the inco
nsistency of dreams. Very well, says I--if they are dreams, I will put in some of my own, and I did.

  Now much later, and I have had a wonderful work day, filled with excitements probably not justified but enjoyed just the same. It's a crazy story but it means something somewhere.

  Now I've talked about myself steadily for months. How are you? Are you content? Will you take some vacation? Will you go out to Sag Harbor? More than anything I can think of I wish you could slip over here and settle into Byre, which is a very pleasant room. I wish you could feel this place, just let it seep into you. I haven't mentioned this but I have been trying to beam a thought in your direction hoping it would pick up force along the way so that one morning you would know you had to come here without even knowing why. I have sat sometimes arguing with you, even wrestling with your mind and trying to topple your arguments. "Nonsense. It's expensive. I don't like the country. I have no reason to go." "Well, it isn't nonsense and it isn't even expensive. It isn't really country. It's the most inhabited place you ever felt and there's a goodness here after travail. There's something here that clears your eyes." And you--"My eyes are as clear as I want them to be. It's not sense." Me--"Well, there's something here that I think is related to you. I just want you to see it and feel it. It has meaning--I don't know what it means but I know how it feels." And then you toss your head like a pony the way I've seen so often and you set your chin and change the subject. "Then you won't consider it?" "No." "I'll keep after you. There's a power here I'll put to work on you." "I wish you wouldn't. Let me alone." "It's more than meadows and hedges--it's much more than that. There are voices in the ground." "Go away." "Well, I won't. I'll wait until you are asleep and I'll send a squadron of Somerset fairies to zoom around you like mosquitoes--real tough fairies." "I'll bug-bomb them."