The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

  Twelve was the normal number for any group of followers of a man or a principle. The symbolism was inevitable. And whether the Grail was the cup from Golgotha or the Gaelic cauldron later used by Shakespeare doesn't in the least matter since the principle of both was everlasting or rather ever-renewed life. All such things fall into place inevitably but it is the connective--the continuing line with the piece missing in the middle--that fascinates me.

  Another beautiful thing is how Malory learned to write as he went along. The straggling sentences, the confused characters and events of the early 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 even though he tries hard to keep the symbol, and this I am sure is because he was learning to write as he went along. He became a master and you can see it happening. And in any work I do on this thing I am not going to try to change that. I'll go along with his growing perfection and who knows, I may learn myself. It's a lovely job if I can only lose the sense of hurry that has been growing in me for so long. That's the real curse, and why and for whom? Maybe I've written too many books instead of one. But Malory had one great advantage over me. He was so very often in jail and there wasn't any hurry there, except now and then when he wished he could get out.

  TO CHASE--SAG HARBOR, JANUARY 9, 1957

  Reading on and on and I am so slow. I literally move my lips. Elaine can read four books while I mumble through one. But I guess this isn't going to change. Anyway I'm having fun and there is nothing to interrupt.

  Going into New York next Monday. I'm going to have lunch with Adams of the P.M. Library next week. I have suggested Thursday if he is free then or Wednesday or Friday if he is not. He is going to bring Dr. Buhler along whose name you will know from his Medieval and Renaissance work. Of Buhler, Adams says--"He has some of the lustiness of his subject." Anyway they are being very cooperative in every way. I hope you will also be free for lunch. I have suggested the Colony Bar, 12:30 next Thursday, the 17th I think. Can you come? If they are not free that day I will call you and let you know, but I would love it if you could join us.

  I'm getting many glimmerings but I'm going to leave them that way. Nothing is so dangerous as the theories of a half-assed or half-informed scholar. I'm pretty sure that a lot of it was only glimmerings to Malory also. Can't thank you enough for sending the books but it is going to take me a long time to catch up. I'll call you in town.

  TO CHASE--NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 18, 1957

  The idea of thanks from you to me is ridiculous. The enormous amount of work and thought you are putting into this would be hard to repay. And the future is loaded with more work. Thank heaven it is work we both like to do--

  In so far as I am able--which isn't far--I am trying to exclude everything right now until I have put down the base pattern to see what is there for me.

  TO CHASE--NEW YORK, MARCH 14, 1957

  Now Malory was a pretty exact man with words. He does never mention Frensshe books--but only Frensshe book. In other words, he did not need a library, and there is little evidence that he used one. He never once refers to the alliterative poem in English nor to Geoffrey of Monmouth. He was not a scholar. He was a novelist. Just as Shakespeare was a playwright. We know where Shakespeare must have got his English history, since the parallels are too close, but where did he get his Verona, his Venice, his Padua, his Rome, his Athens? For some reason it is the fashion to believe that these great men, Malory and Shakespeare, did not read and did not listen. They are supposed to have absorbed by osmosis. I read the Mabinogion thirty years ago and yet in Sweet Thursday I repeat the story of the poor knight who made a wife out of flowers. And in something else I retold the story of the man who hanged a mouse for theft. And I am not in a recall class with Malory or Shakespeare.

  And I want to elaborate a little on the egg of an hypothesis that the Morte d'Arthur might have been a political protest of sorts.

  When Shakespeare wanted to inveigh against the throne--because he was no fool--he did not attack the Tudor throne but the older lines--ones of which Elizabeth may have been a little jealous since she was descended from a Welsh upstart. A frontal attack on the crown was the surest suicide, known in both Malory's and Shakespeare's times. But let's see what you would feel if you were for Neville, duke of Warwick--and Edward IV were king. Such a king could do no right.

  Let me tell you a story. When The Grapes of Wrath got loose, a lot of people were pretty mad at me. The undersheriff of Santa Clara County was a friend of mine and he told me as follows: "Don't you go into any hotel room alone. Keep records of every minute and when you are off the ranch travel with one or two friends but particularly, don't stay in a hotel alone." "Why?" I asked. He said, "Maybe I'm sticking my neck out but the boys got a rape case set up for you. You get alone in a hotel and a dame will come in, tear off her clothes, scratch her face and scream, and you try to talk yourself out of that one. They won't touch your book but there's easier ways."

  It's a horrible feeling, Chase, particularly because it works. No one would ever have believed my book again. And until the heat was off I never went any place alone. And we didn't invent it.

  The knight prisoner was unfortunate but not guilt-ridden. And that makes one suspect all the stories of Knights taken prisoner by sorcery. Until recently we could destroy a man by simply naming him a communist and he could be charged by a known liar and still be destroyed. How easy then must it have been in the fifteenth century.

  We know why Cervantes was in jail. Do we really know why Malory was?

  You know, Chase, I never worked with anyone who was more fun to work with. You catch fire the way I do. If we do our work well, we will have built a tiny rush fire in the anteroom to the faculty club. But it's real fun, isn't it? And the parallels with our own time are crowding me.

  TO CHASE--FLORENCE, ITALY, APRIL 9, 1957

  People ask me when I will have the Morte thing ready and I choose a conservative figure and say ten years. The size of the job, however, makes me feel that this might be a conservative estimate.

  I think I wrote to Elizabeth that Dr. Vinaver has been greatly impressed with the rough translation of the early part that was sent to him and has offered any help possible. And that was a very rough translation indeed. I can do better than that.

  TO ERO--FLORENCE, ITALY, APRIL 19, 1957

  Later I am meeting and conferring with Professor Sapori, who is the great authority of Medieval economics and a fascinating man. I am also going to see Berenson at his earliest convenience. He knows where everything is and sees the sparrow fall.

  But you can see that I have not been without activities here. I am in a state of wonder at the enormous amount of effort on the part of Chase. He is doing fantastic work. Please tell him how much I appreciate it and also that I will forward to him anything I can turn up here. If he is interested in the suit for recovery, there might be some references in the Morgan Library, but I will soon have assembled all of the sources consulted here and in Rome for the bibliography which will be an astonishing structure by the time we are through. I am getting more and more a sense of the time. If he has not read The Merchant of Prato by Iris Origo, Jonathan Cape, London, 1957, tell him that he will be interested. It is the Paston letters of Tuscany gleaned from one hundred and fifty thousand letters of one business firm in Prato in fourteenth and early fifteenth century and a beautiful job. I have a copy and will send it if he has difficulty finding it. As a matter of fact I think I would do well to send the books I am accumulating home to Chase as I finish them. We are going to have a rather formidable library before we are finished and I couldn't be happier about this.

  TO ERO AND CHASE--ROME, ITALY, APRIL 26, 1957

  I had letters from the American Embassy and from Count Bernardo Rucelai of Florence, who is an old friend of the keeper. So I was very well received. The archives are the God-damndest things you ever saw, acres and acres of just pure information. I had a hard tim
e tearing myself away. I have certain things to look for and the US Information Agency is going to get me someone to see if the material I want is in existence. Incidentally, Chase, the bibliography is leaping what with Florence and now here. Maybe I can't find what I want but there is no harm in trying and apparently no one has ever looked in this direction or in Florence before.

  I have been reading all of the scholarly appraisals of the Morte and the discussions of Malory's reasons for his various attitudes, and all the time there has been a bothersome thought in my brain knocking about just out of reach, something I knew that was wrong in all of the inspection and yet I couldn't put my finger on it. Why did Lancelot fail in his quest and why did Galahad succeed? What is the feeling about sin, or the feeling about Guinevere? How about the rescue from the stake? How about the relationship between Arthur and Lancelot. It has all been turned over so often and like the Alger Hiss case there has seemed something missing. Then this morning I awakened about five o'clock fully awake but with the feeling that some tremendous task had been completed. I got up and looked out at the sun coming up over Rome and tried to reconstruct what the task had been and how if at all it had been solved, and suddenly it came back whole and in one piece. And I think it answers my nagging doubt. It can't be a theory because it won't subject itself to proof. I'm afraid it has to be completely intuitive and because of this it will never be very seriously considered by scholars.

  Malory has been studied as a translator, as a soldier, as a rebel, as a religious, as an expert in courtesy, as nearly everything you think of except one, and that is what he was--a novelist. The Morte is the first and one of the greatest of novels in the English language. I will try to put this down as purely and simply as I can. And only a novelist could think it. A novelist not only puts down a story but he is the story. He is each one of the characters in a greater or a less degree. And because he is usually a moral man in intention and honest in his approach, he sets things down as truly as he can. He is limited by his experience, his knowledge, his observation and his feelings.

  A novel may be said to be the man who writes it. Now it is nearly always true that a novelist, perhaps unconsciously, identifies himself with one chief or central character in his novel. Into this character he puts not only what he thinks he is but what he hopes to be. We can call this spokesman the self-character. You will find one in every one of my books and in the novels of everyone I can remember. It is most simple and near the surface in Hemingway's novels. The soldier, romantic, always maimed in some sense, hand--testicles. These are the symbols of his limitations. I suppose my own symbol character has my dream wish of wisdom and acceptance. Now it seems to me that Malory's self-character would be Lancelot. All of the perfections he knew went into this character, all of the things of which he thought himself capable. But, being an honest man he found faults in himself, faults of vanity, faults of violence, faults even of disloyalty, and these would naturally find their way into his dream character. Oh, don't forget that the novelist may arrange or rearrange events so that they are more nearly what he hoped they might have been.

  And now we come to the Grail, the Quest. I think it is true that any man, novelist or not, when he comes to maturity has a very deep sense that he will not win the Quest. He knows his failings, his shortcomings and particularly his memories of sins, sins of cruelty, of thoughtlessness, of disloyalty, of adultery, and these will not permit him to win the Grail. And so his self-character must suffer the same terrible sense of failure as his author. Lancelot could not see the Grail because of the faults and sins of Malory himself. He knows he has fallen short and all his excellences, his courage, his courtesy, in his own mind cannot balance his vices and errors, his stupidities.

  I think this happens to every man who has ever lived, but it is set down largely by novelists. But there is an answer ready to hand for every man and for novelists. The self-character cannot win the Quest, but his son can, his spotless son, the son of his seed and his blood who has his virtues but has not his faults. And so Galahad is able to win the Quest, the dear son, the unsoiled son, and because he is the seed of Lancelot and the seed of Malory, Malory-Lancelot has in a sense won the Quest and in his issue broken through to the glory which his own faults have forbidden him.

  Now this is so. I know it as surely as I can know anything. God knows I have done it myself often enough. And this can for me wipe out all the inconsistencies and obscurities scholars have found in the story. And if the Morte is uneven and changeable it is because the author was changeable. Sometimes there is a flash of fire, sometimes a moody dream, sometimes an anger. For a novelist is a rearranger of nature so that it makes an understandable pattern, and a novelist is also a teacher, but a novelist is primarily a man and subject to all of a man's faults and virtues, fears and braveries. And I have seen no treatise which has ever considered that the story of the Morte is the story of Sir Thomas Malory and his times and the story of his dreams of goodness and his wish that the story may come out well and only molded by the essential honesty which will not allow him to lie.

  Well, that was the problem and that was the settlement and it came sweetly out with the morning sun on the brown walls of Rome. And I should like to know whether you two find it valid at all. In my heart and in my mind I find it true and I do not know how in the world I can prove it except by saying it as clearly as I can so that a reader may say--"Of course, that's how it had to be. Whatever else could be the explanation?"

  Please let me know what you think of this dizzying inductive leap. Does it possibly seem as deeply true to you as it does to me?

  I shall dearly like to know what you think.

  FROM ERO TO J. S.--NEW YORK, MAY 3, 1957

  Your letter about Malory this week is one of the most impressive letters that you or anyone else has ever written. Now you are back home. The creative process has started. I never saw it so accurately described. Time, place, feel. Enter novelist.

  Wonderful that you are coming to consider my friend Guinevere, she has been so neglected. You may not want to do much with her, but she really must have been an important part of the picture.

  TO ERO AND CHASE--FLORENCE, ITALY, MAY 9, 1957

  I continue to write in covers like this because it is nearly impossible for me to write separately. I am going every day to the craft shops and at the same time doing my scrimy little newspaper pieces (which nevertheless take time) and also going over the material developed by my girl who is working in archives.

  I can't tell you how pleased and glad and relieved I am that you approve of my Malory approach. It has given me a whole new drive and a perceivable end, which I never had before. And your backing makes me feel that I am on some kind of firm footing. Chase, your letters are a very great help to me and are filed for much rereading. And Elizabeth, I too have felt this lack about Guinevere. She has always been the symbol when in fact she must have been a dame. I have been reading a great deal about women in the Middle Ages and I think I know now why modern scholars can't think of her as anything but a symbol. There was just a different way of looking at them. It shows up in every phase of women's life as described by contemporaries. Baldini particularly sets it down clearly. I believe that Malory also set it down. I know what you mean, Chase, about the impossibility of ever getting scholars to agree. I might put in a chapter just listing their disagreements with one another down through the centuries. Hell, I might put in a chapter about anything. I don't know where this is going now but I do have a taste for it and a tone of it and that is the only true beginning. And I don't think I am wrong in developing as much material as I can. With a little time and some instinct, something of my own will emerge. At least it always has. And all kinds of feelings are beginning to squirm up into the thinking level. But I don't want them up there for some time. I would like it to boil around for quite a while.

  TO CHASE--FLORENCE, ITALY, MAY 17, 1957

  Last evening I spent with Professor Armando Sapori. He is quite old and has been ill but he ask
ed me to come, and often during the evening when I asked to go for fear of tiring him he demanded that I stay. He speaks no English, but one of his students, Julio Fossi, translated for us in so far as we needed translation. He is a man so learned and so simple that I understood him mostly very well. As he spoke the Middle Ages came back--the Amalfi League, beginning of the Renaissance, the entrance of Greek thought and conception of the commune or city, not from Greece but from the Arabs and incised as it was in Rome by Saracen slaves after the Crusades.

  The other day I came across Strachey's volumes of Southey's translation of the Morte. It was cleaned up, so that it might safely be put in the hands of Boys. Could you get that for us? The translation is good but I'll have no part of the cleaning up for boys. Let boys beware--and boys won't thank God.

  TO CHASE AND ERO--GRAND HOTEL, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN, JULY 4, 1957

  I started a letter and now we have finally got some kind of order in our planning. In the first part of this letter I got us as far as London. If we start northward on the fifteenth of July, that will give us ten days, we would go up through Warwickshire and to the wall and then when we had made our bows to Hadrian move gradually down the western country to see some of Wales and also Glastonbury and Tintagel, etc.

  I shall take along the books you sent and besides the book of maps I have got the large-scale maps of some of the country, particularly of Warwickshire.

  TO ERO AND CHASE--LONDON, JULY 13, 1957

  Well, on Monday we're off with a driver named Jack in a Humber Hawk. We are armed with books, papers, your letters, cameras and sketching pads. The last is for show because we can't draw. We are both looking forward to this a great deal. Of course there are lots of things we won't see but there are lots of things we will. From the enclosed list you will see what we intend.