Malory’s Morte d’Arthur:  Success or Failure    — the End or a New Beginning?

First published in Steinbeck Review
vol 12, no 1, 2015,  pp 74-86, with documentation and bibliography                

Colliding Cultures like Tectonic Plates

Shortly before Steinbeck was born Henrik Ibsen was busy writing plays in Norway. Like Steinbeck (and many other writers) Ibsen too wrote himself into the story. Like Steinbeck he too had a strong concern for society and social justice. Like Steinbeck he wrote (in his case plays) to portray the ills of society, beginning with the superficial respectability and hypocrisy of people in public office (Enemy of the PeopleDoll’s House), followed by mysogynism and the hypocrisy of the married man in a world where self-serving honour outshone love () and the dead hand of convention in a society where the sins of the fathers are visited on the children (Ghosts).

Like Steinbeck he had few disciples, experienced the indifference of some and the opprobrium of others. At first nothing daunted, he discarded the brakes and stepped on the gas. Somebody of integrity had to stand his ground in a society so bare and paltry. So he created Thomas Stockman1a man of the utmost integrity who stands his ground against the ruling elite until they secured the support of the common people and virtually destroyed him and his family, leaving a defiant Stockman to affirm that, ‘the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone’ as the curtain comes down. 

So it may be, but when the opposition responded by turning up the heat Ibsen quickly learned that defiance of ‘the compact majority’2 came at a price, felt the heat and retreated to the mountains to lick his wounds. When he returned he had a different message. His next play3 (The Wild Duck) acknowledged the dangers of bringing people out of darkness into light, in which he acknowledged that possibly some people needed their illusions and some even falsehood, leaving himself with some difficult questions to answer, including the possibility that he may have been wrong.4

Ibsen and Steinbeck share a common problem in their writings, possibly a symptom of a problem in their personal lives, and as old as Christianity. What happens when two cultures collide like tectonic plates in a world where the pursuit of ideals comes up against years of crusted dogma? Are the idealists to be allowed to scatter land mines on every highway reeking destruction with one explosion after another?  Or is the ‘life lie’5 to given free rein to roll on like a juggernaut, destroying everything in its wake?

In the two plays that follow,6 (Rosmerholm and Lady from the Sea) Ibsen has lost none of his idealism but it is different. His stamping ground has moved away from society and political structures to the more personal problems of the human psyche, from the community to a loving (or pseudo-loving) relationship. Idealism may be something to search for and believe in rather than something to proclaim and achieve but all the issues are still open and uncertain.

In Rosmerholm Ibsen seems to suggest that, left to themselves, tradition, (‘the life-lie’) and change (the truth) support each other, feed on each other and influence each other as Rosmer comes to share his wife’s enthusiasms and she is softened and steered by his refining influence, but neither can really change, leaving us with two diverse life principles, each one-sided and inadequate, as husband and wife commit suicide together. 

In Lady from the Sea there is a choice. Nothing has changed but Ibsen has weathered the storm and matured to the point where he can at least glimpse the possibility of a new birth for those with the courage to take it. So Ellida is left with a choice. Is she to accept and embrace the new life she has chosen with her husband but which she finds unsatisfying, or should she seize the opportunity to escape and revert to the life she had left behind?

Interestingly, there is no indication from his output that all the agonising made any difference to Ibsen. On the contrary, like the best playwrights, his work ends with an open question, leaving his audiences to write the next act.

From this point, however, with the exception of the next paragraph, it is not our intention to pursue the similarities any further. Suffice it to serve as an introduction to Steinbeck’s interest in Morte d’Arthur against this wider backdrop of social responsibility in a changing community which has either lost its vision or never had one and the way in which the quest may have changed his life and self-understanding.

The American Dream

Like Ibsen, Steinbeck was something of a dreamer, visionary and idealist, but unlike Ibsen, who grew up in the cold and gloomy climate of a North European country, where everything seemed to be in chains to the past, Steinbeck grew up in sunnier climes under the shadow of the American Dream, the origins and definition of which are many, varied, uncertain and disputed.

Kevin Starrtraces the American Dream mentality as far back as the Indians 8,000 years earlier and sees it as deep-rooted in American history, evolving first with the arrival of the white man, continuing with the arrival of the Spanish and centring on California by the early 19th century. Much of the momentum was lost by the end of the First World War (1918) though the ideals lived on for a further fifty years,9 boosted by a group of Republican reformers led by Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)10 and the arrival of Hollywood in the 1920s.11

 According to Sarah Churchwell12 the phrase ‘American Dream’ never went back to the nation’s founding. It did not exist (as we know it) when Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and clarification has never been straightforward, the emphasis varying according to time and circumstance from those who were content to see it as meaning that every individual had the potential to live a happy, successful life. and could succeed through hard work,13 and those who saw it not merely as a dream of motor cars and high wages bu

‘a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position’.14

Though amply presented and variously defined and interpreted in film and literature over the years,15 enthusiasm for the concept has never been universal. There have always been those who have seen cracks in the structure, but the broad idea of something worth believing in and striving for blossomed and persisted throughout Steinbeck’s life as a symbol of inspiration and hope and few will want to question the notion that Steinbeck belonged to and grew up in a nation for whom the concept was deep-rooted. The extent to which it influenced him is less clear but it is not unreasonable to suggest that it was one of those things taken for granted in adolescence, rarely questioned, and hardly ever totally abandoned, and Steinbeck’s mood and (to some extent) his output mirrors these issues.16

Steinbeck’s Dream

We have already alluded to the fact that from an early age there was always something of the dreamer (in the sense of an idealist) about Steinbeck. Early evidence may be found in his enthusiasm for Malory, a copy of which his aunt gave him as a boy. They were good stories. He read them, enjoyed them, and what they embodied was so much of what he was brought up to believe as ‘gospel’. They resonated with the American Dream and the essence of Judaism and Christianity, portraying a picture of a world worth fighting for.

Further evidence appears in his early twenties with his attraction to Ricketts and teleological thinking, especially its emphasis on the interconnections of life with all things fitting together and working towards some ultimate end or purpose. Not precisely, perhaps, the American Dream, as found in popular culture and literature but not a million miles away from what was going on around him and the people he rubbed shoulders with day by day.

There is, however, the occasional hint that he had some problems with it. More than most he was always well aware of the tension between the Dream and the Reality. He was never wholly convinced by Ricketts’s Argument of Phalanx and teleological thinking,17 and East of Eden, started as his magnum opus to pass on the family story to his sons, became a theological examination of the human predicament by the time he finished it, a discourse on the origins of evil and an exploration into the way to handle it. 

So was the Dream a misguided adventure in faith or was it that the American people had lost faith in it? Either way, it wasn’t working. It was time to look somewhere else.  

East of Eden had taken him part way on the quest and timshol offered a kind of temporary comfort zone. There was something rewarding and satisfying with the notion that things did not to have to be as they were. We did have a choice, perhaps not as to which path we trod but certainly in the way we trod it. Still questions remained. The search must continue. The Holy Grail must be sought somewhere else. If not in the New World then maybe in the Old, and for a man who loved magic, dreams and fantasies and for whom (in his own words) ‘in reading Malory “the magic” happens’18, where better to recapture the spirit than at its source. Tintagel, Arthur and the Knights, here I come.

Why Malory?

Superficially Malory’s world and Steinbeck’s world were not poles apart. French19 suggests that what made Arthur and his Knights so attractive to Steinbeck was their traditional underlying values: loyalty, a shared vision and bonding (even including its destruction by an adulterous relationship), in an imaginary world where personal purity is the dream, embodied in Arthur, an idealised dreamer of an imaginary England that probably never was.

Others have drawn attention to signs of disaffection with the American Dream by the time he set out to write East of Eden and the failure to find a wholly satisfying solution in timshol by the time he finished it, possibly reflecting some confusion in his own mind as to which of the two worlds he belonged to, the one he grew up in (the Hamiltons) or the one he encountered in adulthood (the Trasks), neither of which seemed to embody the ideal or to fulfil the Dream.  

French20 identifies this ambivalence as early as 1935, describing Tortilla Flat as ‘a novel of defeat’ in which Steinbeck satirises middle class, bourgeois values, mediocrities and the organised church, while glamourising the very people who enjoy the benefits of civilisation without contributing to it, both of which may have something to teach us but neither of which is the answer to society’s problems.

Meyer21 suggests that as Malory saw himself in Lancelot so too did Steinbeck and was probably also aware that he shared Lancelot’s problem: how to go on believing he is capable of perfection when he keeps failing. Could this have been the spark that not only drew him to Malory in the first place but also which led him to refuse to drop it when ‘wiser heads’ (perhaps) were hoping he would abandon it?22 If it were, his correspondence at the time explains his refusal to follow their lead and his determination to turn the spark into a flame.

Having completed his magnum opus (East of Eden) his letters show that he ‘was seized by a powerful urge to return to his first great inspiration . . . the mammoth task of retelling Malory’s stories from a more modern point of view . . . (which) he thought might become his crowning achievement’. No longer simply the author, this was Steinbeck, the ‘questing knight endlessly pursuing the Holy Grail of his story’ to the end.23

Within three months of arriving in England, Steinbeck was clear on the human predicament and the strength and weakness of the Arthurian Legend to deal with it, having come to the conclusion that the Arthurian legends (and possibly all deep-seated folklore) were a mixture of profundity and childish nonsense — fixed and universal dreams, with the inconsistency of dreams — but that if you tried to keep the profundity and throw out the nonsense something was lost. Hence his commitment to the book. He wanted to add some dreams of his own24.

Why Not?

So, with that vision, commitment and Steinbeckian determination, how come that he got no further than drafts for seven chapters and then abandoned the project? Had his Grail finally eluded him? Was it that the dream had changed, the American people had changed, or simply Steinbeck’s perception? Or is this simply an author sorting himself out and turning to Malory and Arthur as the coping stone of a life time’s quest for meaning and purpose?  

Answers are many and various and of necessity speculative. Simmonds25 suggests that he had exhausted himself physically and mentally by research before he even he put pen to paper and frequent negative comments from his publishers (less enthusiastic than he was) must have dulled his enthusiasm. Benson26 thinks he had written himself into a corner, never wanted to admit defeat but found the whole operation an impossible one and returned from England suffering from depression from what he conceived to be a failure.  

Less speculative hints and comments in his correspondence, however, give us a better insight into the character of the man, and his thoughts and feelings, plus three writers in particular who have addressed the subject more fully, call for reflection.

Astro27 sees it as a sign of a disillusioned man, with the seeds of a failing idealism and a consequential decline in the quality of his writing as early as Cannery Row (1945), revealing a scepticism as to whether a man has the ability ‘to grow beyond his work’ and ‘emerge ahead of his accomplishments’, and therefore becoming either ‘a conventional moralist’ exhorting man to choose good over evil or ‘the wasteland prophet’ lamenting the demise of a good man in a corrupt world.28

Sundermeier29 examines different possibilities. Unconvinced that Steinbeck had run out of creativity or that the obvious conclusion confronting him was too near the bone, he thinks it more likely that Steinbeck’s was suffering from an inability to identify the problems. Was it the realisation that life was not one unified organism moving to a fixed and pre-determined end? Was it that people are motivated more by survival than the feeling of going somewhere, leading to his pessimism about heroic action and beginning to see that large-scale change is the result of thousands of incidental small changes with judgements on heroes and martyrs subjective and tenuous? Or if the value of heroism were not so much what it achieves as what it symbolises might it therefore be better to be detached rather than engaged; more important to understand the world than to change it? He was wrestling with big issues.

Meyer,30 starts from Timmerman’s remark31 that the spiritual pivots of the myth (the Grail and Guinevere) ‘contain the possibility of Arthur setting aside social responsibility to perform the dream of individuality’ and sees Arthur as the idealised concept of an idealised past, the ideal world of lost innocence, suggesting that Steinbeck used the Arthurian legends (including the myth) to examine the problems he saw in society;32 mankind constantly reaching for the unattainable, when all the time the unattainable recedes in front of their eyes. The Holy Grail may be a worthy objective while portraying a futile search to attain perfection, and when he began to see himself in Malory and Malory in Lancelot, he stalled.                                                                                          

Once again, moving from the realms of speculation to Steinbeck’s correspondence may be a better and more reliable guide as to what he was thinking and feeling at this time, beginning with Benson when he says that Steinbeck understands that any man achieving maturity knows that he will not win the quest and achieve the Grail; like Lancelot, his own personal weaknesses will prevent it.33 Steinbeck himself said as much to the creators of the musical version of Of Mice and Men two years before he left for England in 195734 and the more he went into the Malory tales on that visit the more the issues seemed to focus sharply and painfully. Writing became difficult for close on eighteen months, a worry to his wife35 and a burden to himself as he shares his loss of vision with Elia Kazan.36 He had lost what Wordsworth called ‘the visionary gleam’.37

Two years later, back in Sag Harbor, he is once more all fired up and ready to go, but still not going. ‘All my life has been aimed at one book and I haven’t started it yet’, he writes; ‘the setting down of words is only the final process’.38 But then he goes on, ‘It is possible, through accident, that the words for my book may never be set down but I have been working and studying toward it for over forty years’, and following up his earlier paragraph he adds that ’the `Grail is always one generation ahead of us’. Slowly the truth is dawning and the focus sharper.  

Steinbeck has long known that the Dream world is an unreal world but one which very clearly exists (and not only in the United States). The Dream may be something to experience and the Grail even something to pursue, essential to our very humanity, but achieving it will always elude us. People have three basic reactions to it. Underlying two of them is that real change is neither possible nor necessarily desirable; for the third group it is probably unrealisable even though it may be the fuel that drives the rest of us forward. His conclusion leaves us in no doubt as to where he sees himself.39 Whether he chooses to see it or pursue it, or both, he now not only knows the truth but is beginning to live with it and to see that he is part of it.

Far from being the comment of a deflated, demoralised man who has lost his way this sounds like a man of considerable perspicacity and judgement who has found the truth, can embrace it and respond positively to it. Was this then the moment when he came to the conclusion that ‘the Matter of Arthur is the Matter of Me’40 and (sooner or later) did he abandon the book not because it didn’t stand up nor because he lost interest in it but because he saw it for what it was and no longer needed it. He had matured, grown up and moved on.

Reflection

Looking back it is clear that this was not the first major change in Steinbeck’s philosophy, the seeds of which were there much earlier.

Step One was when he moved out of the ‘Hamilton world’ and entered the world of the Trasks, saw the world he had grown up in more objectively and  discovered that all the virtues were not to be found in one stratum of society. He saw the holes in the one (the pure selfishness and immorality and grasping of the Knights) and appreciated the quality of virtues in unexpected quarters in the other (though often dressed in unfamiliar garb), leaving him with a revised understanding of both worlds though still confused as to where he belonged to and where he wanted to place himself.  

Step Two was timshol.  Evil in one form or another was a fact of life and we had to live with it but we didn’t necessarily have to go along with it.

Step Three was his quest for the Holy Grail.

Step Four was the recognition that there is no Holy Grail. The very concept has its limitations, its value in the quest rather than the discovery, and Arthur’s contribution is to sum up and absorb the myths.

The reason he never finished it, therefore, may be not so much that it did not fit with his hopes, his quest, his search or his theories, nor that he saw the futility of the quest and could not face the reality in himself (pace Sundermeier) but rather that by the time he got to the end of chapter 7 he had in fact matured and moved beyond it, still confronting the same world, still seeing the same people but seeing everything differently.

Undoubtedly from this point Steinbeck has lost something. He may still not be clear what it is nor what, if anything, he can do about it, and was probably well aware that what had happened to him had also happened to many of those around him. Society — the Dream — was not what it was either, but perhaps the difference between Steinbeck and many of his contemporaries was that for him it was not so much ‘a loss’ as the abandonment of something which then opened a door to a new world and a different way of viewing it. Not so much the Death of a Dream as the Discovery of Reality. Not a death but the first ray of hope in the dawn of a new day.

Post Malory

Having become a different person, some critics have suggested that he had lost ‘the fire in his belly’ and that his later work is of a different quality from what went before but is that necessarily the case? One possibility is that the critics and the general public thought they knew what to expect from Steinbeck and found it difficult to live with the change. An alternative view, more positive and productive, is not that Steinbeck had failed to find the Holy Grail but that he had in fact found it, albeit not quite the Holy Grail he had been looking for, nor what his critics were hoping he might find. Whether Steinbeck himself was aware of this and prepared to recognise is still debatable but from now on it seems that, consciously or subconsciously, he was content to live in its shadow.

One reading of The Winter of our Discontent suggests that ‘the new Steinbeck’ was well aware of it, some evidence for which may be found in this, his penultimate work, and which he very much wanted to get across whilst leaving it no more than semi-transparent for the reader to discover what he was saying.41 Whether The Winter of our Discontent was the fruit of the change or the very business of writing it was the means by which the change came about (chicken or egg?) is unclear, still on the agenda and not very important. Some will still maintain that post-Malory there was a decline in the quality of his writing and it is not difficult to see why. A straight reading certainly suggests that something of ‘the old master’ is missing, but that should not blind us to the fact here too is something new, different and no less important.

Easter

Let us begin by asking why an author whose interest in the the church and the Christian faith had always been minimal, if not hostile, and who in a lifetime of writing had barely made references to either, should choose to set what might become his last work in the context of Easter, with a principle character (Ethan) reflecting Steinbeck’s own attitude to the Festival and coming from a similar background. (For Aunt Deborah read Steinbeck’s aunt who introduced him to Malory, and for Ethan read Morte d’Arthur.)

This in itself may go some way to explain how and why it is different from what had gone before and account for the charge of inferior quality, but what follows in his presentation of Ethan is a relatively ordinary and unassuming character with very clear and decided principles living in a very different world where he feels lost and isolated, the head of a family which is with him and yet at the same time not with him.

Ethan is a Hamilton — not perfect and not free from temptation but clear where he is and what he stands for — in a world of Trasks — not particularly wicked or criminal but always with an eye on the main chance — coping with the tension of living in a community where ‘All men are moral — only their neighbours are not’,42 and where even the strongest forces for truth and goodness seem indifferent to doing anything about it.43 Its basic theme, according to Gentry,44 has moved from ‘the Dream’ to immorality, defined by Steinbeck as ‘taking out more than you are willing to put in’, and seen as the death of community. Marullo, by contrast, is a representative of that community which just does not know how to live with an honest man.45

For Steinbeck Ethan is ‘the honest man‘ and the Ethan family, despite cheating in the I Love America Essay Competition (which after all comes pretty low on the scale of evil compared to the Trasks at their best and the Hamiltons at their worst), reflects in microcosm the macrocosm of American society, caught in the warp and weft of the American Dream.

Setting it in the context of Easter, however, raises the interesting (not to say theological) question as to whether Gentry’s identification of the theme as ‘immorality’ is correct. Another view is to see the theme as ‘the transformation of a character’. Easter is not about immorality or evil and the emphasis on the suffering and judgement of Good Friday is what Ethan hates most about it, but by Easter Sunday he is beginning to see it differently. Its fundamental message is hope and endurance. The light must never go out.

Saturday night was Ethan’s moment of darkness. The world he had always nurtured and treasured had ben brought to an end, shattered not by the horrors and the evil of the world at large but by a relatively minor peccadillo in his own family: a thoughtless indiscretion and a not altogether unreasonable desire for achievement and recognition. Suicide is his only escape, until as he clambers out of the waters (as from a grave) the light dawns. Something in his bones tells him that if the honest man image is not to disappear altogether from the community somebody just has to ensure that the ‘light’ never goes out.46 Ethan is not the light, but he has to be the guardian of the light if the community he treasures is to survive.

In a personal way, whether aware of it or not, Ethan embodies the message of Easter: not immorality, not suffering, but hope — and endurance — and both dependent on those who keep it alive. The resurrection is no longer something to be believed, nor Easter something to be celebrated, but something to be embodied and nurtured in our humanity. 

Having discovered that ‘the problem of Arthur is the problem of me’ is Steinbeck now telling us that ‘the glory of Easter is that Easter is Ethan’: the new man, the guardian of the light, and could this be (almost) his last word?  

Steinbeck and the Rabbi

Sceptics will inevitably want to know wherever Steinbeck might have got such an idea. The answer may not be far away. We know he had an ear fo Judaism.46 Was he therefore familiar with one rabbi’s explanation of how Elijah appears on Seder night during Passover?.

On Seder night the Jews had a tradition of opening their doors to welcome the return of Elijah. One day, it is said, a pious and wealthy Jew told his rabbi that every Seder night for forty years he had been opening the door and waiting for Elijah to come, but he never did. Why? To which the rabbi replied,

‘In your neighbourhood there lives a very poor family with many children. Call on the man and propose to him that you and your family celebrate the next Passover in his house, and for this purpose provide him and his whole family with everything necessary for the eight Passover days. Then on the Seder night Elijah will certainly come.’

The man did as was told, but returned to the rabbi after Passover to report that yet again he had waited in vain. ‘But I know very well that Elijah came on the Seder night to the house of your poor neighbour’; said the rabbi, ‘but of course you could not see him’. Then, holding a mirror before the face of the man, he said, ‘Look, this was Elijah’s face that night.’48

Elijah was there all right, but not in the way expected and in a way not even the bearer of his presence was aware.

Was that the ‘moment’ in which Ethan (and possibly Steinbeck) found themselves? Not the light, not even the guardian of the light, but the one through whom others may find the light for themselves, and (to return to Ibsen) is this what it means to be ‘the strongest man in the world’?  


Works Cited

Adams, James Truslow, The Epic of America, Little Brown & Co, 1931.
Astro, Richard, John Steinbeck and Edward F Ricketts. The Shaping of a Novelist, OUP, 1973.
Benson, Jackson, J, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Heinemann, London, 1984.
Churchwell, Sarah, ‘The Gatsby Curve’, in The Guardian, 16.11.10 and 26.05.12.
French, Warren, ‘Of Mice and Men: ‘A Knight Dismounted and a Dream Ended’, in Clarice Swisher, Readings in John Steinbeck, Library Companion Series, pp 130-137, San Diego: Greenhaven Press, reprinted from French, John Steinbeck, Twayne, 1961 (First Edition). 
Gentry, Curt, ‘John Steinbeck: America’s King Arthur is Coming’, in the San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 1960.
Gilmore, Alec, ‘A Steinbeck Midrash on Genesis 4: 7’ in Michael J Meyer & Henry Veggian (eds), East of Eden. New and Recent Essays, Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York, pp 257-88.
Harris, Paul, ‘Decadence and decline of the Great Gatsby in The Observer, 21.11.10.
Horton, Chase, (ed), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, with a Foreword by Christopher Paolini, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 1976.
Jaeger, Henrik, Henrik Ibsen. A Critical Biography, A C McClurg, Chicago, 1901. Meyer, Michael J, ‘The Search for King Arthur: John Steinbeck’s Continuing Preoccupation with the Grail Legend’ in David Bevan (ed), Modern Myth, pp 7-22, Rodopi, Amsterdam.
Simmonds, Roy S, A Biographical and Critical Introduction of John Steinbeck, Studies in American Literature Volume 36, Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY, 2000.
Starr, Kevin, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era, Oxford University Press, Oxford,1986.
Steinbeck, Elaine & Robert Wallsten (eds), John Steinbeck. A Life in Letters, Minerva ppk, London,1994.
Sundermeier, Michael W, ‘Why Steinbeck Didn't Finish His Arthur—The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights’ (1976), in Tetsumaro Hayashi and Thomas J. Moore (eds), Steinbeck's Posthumous Work: Essays in Criticism. Steinbeck Monograph Series, No. 14, 1989.
Timmerman, John,  John Steinbeck’s Fiction: the Aesthetics of the Road Taken, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Okla, 1986.
Wiener, Aharon, The Prophet Elijah in the Development of Judaism: A Depth-Psychological Study, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978.
References to Henrik Ibsen plays: Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, The Winter of our Discontent, Rosmersholm and Lady from the Sea.


© Alec Gilmore 2014