by Michael Bloor
[first published in Literally Stories, March 30th 2025]
In my generation, every child in Britain grew up knowing at least three stories – the Christ story, that of Robin Hood, and that of King Arthur and his knights. The Arthurian Legend has been told and re-told by many different tellers for around one and a half thousand years.
As for me, I was hooked early, by Tennyson’s re-telling in The Idylls of the King. And I can still chant effortlessly that chiming stanza that begins, ‘And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:’
‘I go […] to the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever the wind blows loudly: but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.’
For John Steinbeck (1902-68), it was Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, that he read and re-read as a child, enrolling his kid sister in imaginary battles against invaders and traitors. It had been Caxton’s early printing, in 1485, of Malory’s English text of Morte d’Arthur that kick-started the English-reading public’s enthusiasm for a hero-king from a glorious past. And Steinbeck believed that Malory’s telling of Arthur’s struggles against the plundering Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain had then acted as a rough template for a thousand other stories of righteous conflicts, right through to that of Gary Cooper in High Noon.
I was a big Steinbeck fan, having read and loved his Cannery Row in my mid-teens (I later discovered that Bob Dylan had been similarly smitten), so I was delighted to read, a decade after Steinbeck’s death, that there was a new Steinbeck publication – the manuscript of his incomplete reworking of Morte d’Arthur: The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (Heinemann, London, 1976). I made a rare hardback purchase.
To prepare for his Morte d’Arthur re-write, in 1956, Steinbeck and his wife came to the UK for three years, living in a country cottage in Somerset, with a view of Glastonbury Tor in the distance. For those three years, he researched and he wrote.
There’s a debate, of course, about whether or not Arthur was an historical figure or a bardic fiction. The case for a flesh-and-blood Arthur is strongest if we throw overboard a royal court, a chivalric order and all the medieval baggage. A plausible account would make Arthur a formidable warrior of the Gododdin, an independent warlike British tribe in what is now South-East Scotland, just north of the Roman garrisons on Hadrian’s Wall. The Gododdin would have been familiar with the tactics of the Roman cavalry, seeing how a mobile force of mounted men could surprise and rout a larger infantry army, such as that of the Saxons. When the last Roman legions left Britain in 407 AD and the attacks of the sea-pirates – Angles, Saxons, and Jutes – intensified, the Romano-British appealed to the Emperor Honorius for help. The appeal went unanswered. The pirates came to plunder and they stayed to settle. The last best hope of the Britons lay in a native force accustomed to Roman tactics, led by a war-duke, a commander-in-chief who could unite the various petty kings of the British tribes. Arthur is thought to have been that war-duke. It’s certainly the case that, for a while, the tide turned and, in a battle at Badon Hill in the West Country, a large Saxon force was routed and destroyed around 500 AD. Gildas, a near-contemporary Welsh monk, reported that sixty years of peace followed that victory, but he doesn’t mention Arthur. The earliest surviving mention of Arthur is a passing reference to him as a great warrior of the past, in a bardic poem composed about the heroic but catastrophic defeat of the Gododdin cavalry at the Battle of Catraeth in around 600 AD.
But it’s doubtful if Steinbeck was much interested in these matters. It’s true that he visited the hill fort of Cadbury Castle, thought by some to have been Arthur’s Camelot. But he was much more enthused by a visit to Winchester to see a manuscript version of Morte d’Arthur that had been. discovered in the library of Winchester School in the 1930s. The Winchester ms. differed in some respects from Caxton’s printed text. Believing that Caxton may have edited Malory’s tale to it’s detriment, Steinbeck decided to base his re-telling on the Winchester version. Steinbeck was concerned with the Arthurian Legends as literature, not as history.
He stayed in that Somerset cottage for three years, but he left it with his version of Malory still unfinished. And it remained unfinished when he died nine years later. Nevertheless, 294 pages of Steinbeck’s version were eventually published in 1976, edited by Chase Horton, who had served as Steinbeck’s research assistant. Steinbeck completed seven chapters – ‘Merlin,’ ‘The Knight with The Two Swords,’ ‘The Wedding of King Arthur,’ ‘The Death of Merlin,’ ‘Morgan Le Fay’, ‘Gawain Ewain and Marhalt,’ and ‘The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake.’ Chase Horton added an appendix of letters Steinbeck had written to himself (Horton) and to his long-standing literary agent, Elizabeth Otis. It seems his agent had been shocked when she received the first (‘Merlin’) chapter – she’d envisaged a free adaptation of Morte d’Arthur, something like the very popular T.H. White’s ‘The Once and Future King.’ That wasn’t Steinbeck’s intention at all. He was determined to remain faithful to Mallory’s narrative; to eliminate archaic spellings and usages, but to retain the sense of remoteness. Take, for example, the opening paragraph of his fourth chapter, ‘The Death of Merlin:’
When Merlin saw the damsel Nyneve, whom Sir Pellinore brought to court, he knew that his fate was on him, for his heart swelled like a boy’s heart in his aged breast and his desire overcame his years and his knowledge. Merlin wanted Nyneve more than his life, as he had foreseen. He pursued her with his wishes and would not let her rest. And Nyneve used her power over the besotted old Merlin and traded her company for his magic arts, for she was one of the damsels of the Lady of the Lake and schooled in wonders (Steinbeck, 1976, p.99).
Now, that is a cracking first paragraph. The reader is drawn in, right away. And the use of slightly antique phrases like ‘his desire overcame his years,’ serve to reinforce a sense of bygone days. In my humble view, this approach would be a much better re-telling than the T. H. White strategy.
However, Steinbeck seems to have strayed from his chosen path in the very last (Lancelot) chapter, where Lancelot and Guinevere (SPOIL ALERT) fall on each other like lost desert explorers with a single can of beer between them. No sense of remoteness there: just two excited, randy people. And yet that works too. The last sentence of the tale describes post-coital Lancelot as leaving the queen’s chamber ‘weeping bitterly’ (p.293).
Maybe Steinbeck abandoned the enterprise because he couldn’t decide which re-write approach to take?? The editor gives no clue. But we should be grateful that Steinbeck’s unfinished re-write saw the light of day. For myself, I find both the helplessness of irritating old Merlin (for all his wisdom and far-sightedness), and the tears of the oath-breaking perfect hero, very affecting.