The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

I guess this is the first time I have ever written a first part first. It is also probably the only passage in the whole thing which will be written in fifteenth-century spelling. (Save possibly a footnote or caboose material.)

TO ERO—NEW YORK, MARCH 4, 1958

I think the time has come for a progress report in the matter of the Malory work. I also want to make a kind of declaration of immediate intention in regard to this work. As you know, the research and reading and accumulation of knowledge has gone on over a long, long period now, and must continue to go on at least until the autumn. You will understand that I am pumped full of information, some of it possibly ill assimilated and perhaps being slowly digested. As usual it is the texture rather than the exact information which has the most profound impact on me, but even so a remarkable amount of factual material seems to be getting through to me. I have read literally hundreds of books on the Middle Ages and have literally a few hundred more to dip into before I shall be ready to start writing. The enormous accumulation of notes which Chase and I have made are necessary, even though they may not come to the surface in the work to be done. To proceed without the information would be to proceed without foundation. Last year I spent some time in England, as you well know, going to a number of places which will be referred to in the work, to absorb the physical feeling of the places. I thought that I had covered the field fairly well. It is only with continued reading that I find that there are gaps in my information. I shall find it necessary to return to England to pick up, or rather to fill up the holes in my visual background. I think the best time to go would be the first of June. I must go to spend some time at Glastonbury, at Colchester and at parts of Cornwall in the neighborhood of Tintagel and then north again to spend a little more time at Alnwick, and at Bamborough Castle in Northumberland. These last two are very important since one may well have been the Maiden’s Castle referred to by Malory, and the other might be Joyous Garde. And I must have the feel and look of all of these places, which are not only referred to but are parts of Malory’s experience in the fifteenth century. Pictures do not do any good. There is a great charge to be gained from going there. I shall be very glad if Chase can accompany me to these places, since our research has been done in conjunction.

I plan to spend the month of June in England picking up final topographical information and also consulting with certain authorities, such as Professor Vinaver of the University of Manchester, and others who are preeminent in the field of the fifteenth century. I shall return to America about the first of July and will continue the reading in the light of what I have found in this next trip into October. And if I can judge at all by my own state of information and mind, I should be able to start writing on this book this fall. And of course, once started, I shall continue with it until a great part of it is completed.

Building a background for this book has been a long and arduous job but highly rewarding. I doubt very much whether I could have done it at all without the help of Chase Horton. Surely it might have been done but not with the exactness and the range and the universality that he has brought to the association.

I come now to something a little more exact. First, title of first proposed work, and this I shall want to discuss with you further, but I think I can put a preliminary discussion of this matter in this letter. When Caxton printed the first edition of a book by Sir Thomas Malory in the fifteenth century, he gave it a title and we do not know whether this was the title used by Malory or not. It may have been supplied by Caxton. The full title gradually was reduced to MORTE D’ARTHUR, but this was only three words in the title and did not describe the book at all. The full title in Caxton, you will remember, is: THE BIRTH, LIFE AND ACTS OF KING ARTHUR, OF HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE, THEIR MARVELOUS ENQUESTS AND ADVENTURES, THE ACHIEVING OF THE SAN GREAL, AND IN THE END LE MORTE D’ARTHUR WITH THE DOLOROUS DEATH AND DEPARTING OUT OF THIS WORLD OF THEM ALL. Now this is the title that was used by Caxton and why this whole body of work should come to be known as MORTE D’ARTHUR, which is just one little part, I will never know. I propose, therefore, to give it a title which is a little more descriptive of what the body of the work is about. A title such as THE ACTS OF KING ARTHUR, which is sufficient, or if necessary, THE ACTS OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS. Now this would describe much more completely what the body of the work is about. It also would be a kind of a new approach, a living approach rather than a deathly approach to the whole subject. We will discuss this later, but I think that I am ready to leave the word “Morte” out of this because it is such a small part of the whole body of the work. And if the followers of Caxton could abstract a few words from the whole title, I don’t know why I can’t abstract a few more, particularly if they’re more descriptive. This is not essentially the story of the death of Arthur but of the life of Arthur. I think it’s very important to put that in the title. We will never know, of course, what Malory himself called the work. It may well be that Caxton used the title that Malory himself used, which is the full title.

As to the exact method I shall use, it is beginning to take form in my head, but I don’t think that it is complete enough to discuss it now but there must be much discussion before I go to active work in the fall. It seems to me that in addition to the daydreaming and nightdreaming that I do about the book that my first job is to complete my research on the Middle Ages and to pick up the material in England, which I failed to do on my last trip.

I am going to talk to Chase about the possibility of his joining me in England because I think that two sets of eyes would be more valuable than one, and two sets of information could be compounded into one thing.

My purpose will be to put it into a language which is understandable and acceptable to a modern-day reader. I think this is not only an important thing to do, but also a highly practical thing to do, since these stories form, with the New Testament, the basis of most modern English literature. And it can be shown and will be shown that the myth of King Arthur continues even into the present day and is an inherent part of the so-called “Western” with which television is filled at the present time—same characters, same methods, same stories, only slightly different weapons and certainly a different topography. But if you change Indians or outlaws for Saxons and Picts and Danes, you have exactly the same story. You have the cult of the horse, the cult of the knight. The application with the present is very close, and also the present day with its uncertainties very closely parallels the uncertainties of the fifteenth century.

It is actually a kind of nostalgic return to the good old days. I think Malory did it, and I think our writers for television are doing it—exactly the same thing and, oddly enough, finding exactly the same symbols and methods.

Thus we find that the work I propose is not a period piece necessarily, and certainly not a specialized piece of work, but one with applications in the present day and definite roots in our living literature.

TO ERO AND CHASE—NEW YORK, MARCH 14, 1958

There seems to be something necessary about pressures. The other night I was lying awake wishing I could get to Malory with a rolling barrage of sling-stones and arrows—which isn’t likely to happen—and suddenly it came back to me that I have always worked better under pressure of one kind or another—poverty, death, emotional confusion, divorces—always something. In fact the only really unproductive times I can remember were those when there were no pressures. If my record has any meaning at all, it is that pressures are necessary to my creative survival—an inelegant, even a nauseating thought, but there it is. So maybe I had better pray not for surcease but for famine, plague, catastrophe, and bankruptcy. Then I would probably work like a son-of-a-bitch. I’m comparatively serious about this.

A curious state of suspension has set in, kind of a floaty feeling like the drifting in a canoe on a misty lake while ghosts and winkies, figures of fog, go past—half recognized, and only partly visible. It would be reasonable to resist this vagueness, but for some reasons which I will set down later, I do not.

It is all very well to look back at the Middle Ages from a position of vantage. The story, or part of it, is finished. We know—to a certain extent—what happened and why and who and what were the causes. This knowledge of course is strained through minds which have no likeness of experience with the mind of the Middle Ages. But the writer of the Morte did not know what had happened, what was happening, nor what was going to happen. He was caught as we are now. In forlorn-ness—he didn’t know finally whether York or Lancaster would win, nor did he know that this was the least important of problems. He must have felt that the economic world was out of tune since the authority of the manors was slipping away. The revolts of the subhuman serfs must have caused consternation in his mind. The whisperings of religious schism were all around him so that the unthinkable chaos of ecclesiastical uncertainty must have haunted him. Surely he could only look forward to those changes, which we find healthy, with horrified misgiving.

And out of this devilish welter of change—so like the one today—he tried to create a world of order, a world of virtue governed by forces familiar to him. And what material had he to build with? Not the shelves of well-ordered source books, not even the public records of his time, not a single chronological certainty, since such a system did not exist. He did not even have a dictionary in any language. Perhaps he had a few manuscripts, a missal, maybe the Alliterative Poems. Beyond this, he had only his memory and his hopes and his intuitions. If he could not remember a word, he had to use another or make one up.

And what were his memories like? I’ll tell you what they were like. He remembered bits and pieces of what he had read. He remembered the deep and terrible forest and the slime of the swamps. He remembered without recalling, or recalled without remembering, stories told by the fire in the manorial hall by trouvères from Brittany; but also in his mind were the tellings in the sheep byre in the night—by a shepherd whose father had been to Wales and had heard Cymric tales of wonder and mysticism. In his mind were perhaps some of the triads and also some of the lines from the poems of hidden meaning which survived in him because the words and figures were compelling and spoke to his unconscious mind, although the exact meaning was lost. The writer had also a sky full of cloud-like history, not arranged in time but with people and events all co-existing simultaneously. Among them were friends, relatives, kings, old gods and heroes, ghosts and angels, and devils of feeling and of traditions lost and rediscovered.

And finally he had himself as literary material—his vices and failures, his hopes and angers and alarms, his insecurities for the future and his puzzlement about the past. Everyone and every event he had ever known was in him. And his illnesses were there too, always the stomach-ache, since the food of his time was inadequate for health, perhaps bad teeth—a universal difficulty—maybe arrested syphilis or the grandchildren of the pox carried in distorted genes. He had the strong uninspected fabric of the church, memory of music heard, unconscious observation of nature, since designed observation is a recent faculty. He had all of the accumulated folklore of his time—magic and soothsaying, forecast and prophecy—witchcraft and its brother medicine. All these are not only in the writer of the Morte—they are the writer.

Let us now consider me—who am the writer who must write the writer as well as the Morte. Why has it been necessary to read so much—most of which will probably not be used? I think it necessary for me to know everything I can about what Malory knew and how he might have felt, but it is also necessary for me to be aware of what he did not know, could not have known, and could not feel. For example—if I did not know something about contemporary conditions and attitudes toward medieval villeins and serfs, I could not understand Malory’s complete lack of feeling for them. One of the greatest errors in the reconstruction of another era lies in our tendency to think of them as being like ourselves in feelings and attitudes. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man—if he were confronted by a fifteenth-century man—there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth-century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible.

I don’t think any of the research on this project has been wasted, because while I may not be able to understand all of Malory’s mind, at least I know what he could not have thought or felt.

With all of the preceding in mind, it must be clear that the opposite is going to be a definite difficulty. In translating, I cannot communicate all of the Morte because the modern mind, without great knowledge and intra-era empathy, is quite incapable of taking on a great part of it. Where this is so, the only recourse will lie in parallels. Perhaps I will be able to evoke a similar emotion or image although it cannot be an identical one.

The difficulties are now apparent to me in relation to this work. But the credit side must not be discounted. There is a continuing folklore which has never been lost, down from generation to generation. This body of myth has changed very little in its essence, although its clothing may vary from period to period and from place to place. And within the legend there is the safety of identification, almost a set of responses to mental stimuli.

Also the drives and desires of people have not changed. A man’s true wish is to be rich and comfortable and noticed and loved. To these ends he devotes all of his wishes and most of his energies. Only when he is frustrated in these does his direction change. Within this pattern the writer of the Morte and I and those who may read my work are able to communicate freely.

TO CHASE—LONDON, MAY 1958

Welcome to fifteenth-century London! We’ve just come in from two and a half days wandering with Vinaver. We couldn’t get reservations in Winchester for tonight because of an agricultural fair, so we are driving there early in the morning so Vinaver can show John the manuscript himself. We will have lunch there with the librarian, see the Mss. and drive back to London. We will call you the instant we get in, probably around 6:30 or so.

We have planned an All-Malory—Welcome to Chase Horton—Memorial Dinner Party for tomorrow night (Wednesday)—the Watsons, the Vinavers, us and you. Hope you aren’t too tired; the Vinavers must return to Manchester early Thursday morning and this is their only opportunity to meet you. We’ll have a drink here in our rooms, and dine downstairs in the Grill.

Can’t wait to see you!

XXX from us both,
Elaine

Wed. morning
Just received cable. Will expect you join us no matter how late.

TO ERO—NEW YORK, JULY 7, 1958

I think this is a kind of a milestone letter, more so than a progress report, although it will be that also. As nearly as I can see, the long and arduous and expensive research toward my new work on the Morte d’Arthur is just about complete. That is, it can never be complete but the time has come to go to work on the actual writing.

I know you are aware of the hundreds of books bought, rented and consulted, of the microfilms of manuscripts unavailable for study, of the endless correspondence with scholars in the field, and finally the two trips to England and one to Italy to turn up new sources of information and to become familiar with the actual scenes which must have influenced Malory. Some of the places are unchanged since he knew them in the fifteenth century and of the others it was necessary to know the soil and the atmosphere, the quality of the grass and the kind of light both day and night. A writer is deeply influenced by his surroundings and I did not feel that I could know the man Malory until and unless I knew the places he had seen and the scenes which must have influenced his life and his writing.

From scholars in the field all over the world I have received welcome and encouragement, particularly from Dr. Buhler of the Morgan Library and from Professor Vinaver of the University of Manchester. All of the people who have given me of their learning and made their books and manuscripts available to me will be thanked in a special preface, of course, but I want to make mention now of the enormous job that Chase Horton has done toward this project. He has not only found and bought and inspected hundreds of books and manuscripts but his genius for research has pointed directions and sources which I doubt very much I should have found without him. On the trip to England just concluded, his work and planning and insight have been invaluable. Let me repeat, I do not think I could have done the work or achieved the understanding of the subject which I hope I have without his help.

Now that I come to doing the actual writing I must admit to an uneasiness approaching fright. It is one thing to gather information and quite another to set it down finally. But the time has come for that. I plan to start now, and barring accidents and the normal interruptions due to health and family duties, to carry it through as rapidly as my knowledge and ability can contrive.

I have given a great deal of thought to method and have come finally to the conclusion that the following will be my best method. There is only one complete Morte d’Arthur in existence and that is the Caxton first edition which is in the Morgan Library in New York. There is of course the earlier manuscript at Winchester College in England, which differs in certain things with the Caxton, and but for the misfortune of lacking eight sheets at the end, might be the one unimpeachable source. As it is, all work on Malory must come from a combination of these two copies. I have not only seen and examined both of these originals but I have also microfilm of both, and these two sources must be my basis for translation. I have the Caxton microfilm by courtesy of the Morgan Library and the Winchester mss from the Library of Congress. This then is my basic material for translation.

I intend to translate into a modern English, keeping, or rather trying to re-create, a rhythm and tone which to the modern ear will have the same effect as the Middle English did on the fifteenth-century ear. I shall do a specified number of pages of this translation every working day, that is, five days a week, and six to eight pages of translation a day. In addition, I shall every day set down in the form of a working diary, the interpretations, observations and background material drawn from our great body of reading. By doing these two things simultaneously I hope to keep the interpretive notes an integral part of the stories being translated. When the translation is finished I should then have a great body of interpretation which is an integral part of the spirit of the stories and their meanings. The introduction, which should be a very important part of the work, I shall leave for the last since it must be an overall picture of the complete work, both translation and interpretation.

I think that is all for now. I am aching to get to work after the years of preparation. And I’m scared also, but I think that is healthy. I have spent a great deal of money and even more time on this project. It is perfectly natural that I should have a freezing humility considering the size of the job to do and the fact that I have to do it all alone. There is no one to help me from now on. This is the writing job, the loneliest work in the world. If I fail there is only one person in the world to blame, but I could do with a small prayer from you and from any others who feel that this should be the best work of my life and the most satisfying. Prayer is about the only help I can hope for now. Yours. And I am now going into the darkness of my own mind.

TO ERO—NEW YORK, JULY 9, 1958

Yesterday I started the translating, starting from scratch, and continued today. By the end of the week I may not like what I’ve done but so far I do. It is absolutely fascinating—the process I mean. And I’ve thrown out so many ideas which I found at the time.

You remember when I started talking about it, I wanted to keep the rhythms and tones of Malory. But since then I have learned a lot and thought a lot. And perhaps my thought parallels Malory’s. When he started, he tried to keep intact the Frensshe books—largely Chrétien de Troyes. But as he went along he changed. He began to write for the fifteenth-century ear and the English mind and feeling. And only then did it become great. His prose was understandable and acceptable to the people of his time. The stories and the relationships are immortal. But tone, and method, change. The twentieth-century ear cannot take in the fifteenth-century form whether in tone, sentence structure or phraseology. A shorter and more concise statement is the natural vehicle now. And oddly enough, this is just what Malory had to do to his source material. As he became confident, he shortened and tightened for his period. And he also clarified some obscure matters. Well, that is what I am trying to do—to make the material not a period-piece in form, to keep the content and the details but to cast them into a form for our time.

An amazing thing happens once you drop the restrictions of the fifteenth-century language. Immediately the stories open up and come out of their entombment. The small scholars are not going to approve of this method but I think Vinaver and Buhler will love it for it is Malory, not as he wrote, but as he would have written now. I can give you many examples in the way of word use. Let us take the word worship in the Malorian sense. It is an old English word worth-ship and it meant eminence gained by one’s personal qualities of courage or honor. You could not inherit worshipfulness. It was solely due to your own nature and actions. Beginning in the thirteenth century, the word moved into a religious connotation which it did not have originally. And now it has lost its original meaning and has become solely a religious word. Perhaps the word honor has taken its place or even better, renown. Once renown meant to be renamed because of one’s own personal qualities, and now it means to be celebrated but still for personal matters. You can’t inherit renown. I’m just trying to give you an idea of my experiment. And so far it seems good. I am so familiar with the work now that I am no longer frightened of it. The work must also be a little expounded. For example—Malory says,“—Uther sent for this duke charging him to bring his wife with him for she was called a fair lady and passing wise and her name was called Igraine.” Now your fifteenth-century listener to the story knew immediately that Uther was on the make for Igraine even before he saw her—and if the listener didn’t know it, the teller of the story could inform his audience with a raised eyebrow or a wink or a tone of voice. But our readers, having only the printed page, must be informed by the word. And I am no longer afraid to use the word. Many of the seeming gaps were doubtless filled in with pantomime by the raconteur but I must fill those gaps. And where once I would have been reluctant to add anything, I no longer am. You, Chase and Vinaver have removed that fear from me.

Anyway, I am started and I feel pretty fine and free. I am working in the garage until my new workroom is completed and it is good. Thank God for the big Oxford dictionary. A glossary is a very unsatisfactory thing but that big Oxford is the greatest book in the world. I find myself running to it constantly. And where Malory uses often two adjectives meaning the same thing I am using one. For on the one hand I must increase the writing—on the other I must draw it in for our present-day eye and ear. It may be charming to read—“to bring his wyf with him for she was called a fayre lady and passing wyse and her name was called Igraine.” But in our time it is more communicating to say—“to bring his wife, Igraine, with him for she was reputed to be not only beautiful but clever.”

I do hope this doesn’t sound like vandalism to you. I think the content is just as good and true and applicable now as it ever was but I believe now that it can only be released from the fifteenth-century tomb by this method. If it or rather they (the stories) had been invented in the fifteenth century, it would be another matter—but they weren’t. If Malory could rewrite Chrétien for his time, I can rewrite Malory for mine. Tennyson rewrote him for his soft Victorian audience and pulled the toughness out. But our readers can take the toughness. Malory removed some of the repetition from the Frensshe books. I find it necessary to remove most of the repetition from Malory.

It is my intention to write to you regularly in this vein. It is better than a day book because it is addressed to someone. Will you keep the letters? They will be the basis for my introduction.

TO ERO AND CHASE—NEW YORK, JULY 11, 1958

You know in the new little house I can have my dictionaries instead of having to run into the house to look up a word. But it’s not really bad. I just feel mean. I’ll go to work and drain some of the meanness out.

And I did pretty well considering and a most difficult part too. When Malory tries to throw everything into one basket—action and genealogy, past and future, personality and customs, I have to kind of sort it out in so far as I am able. I am going very slowly and trying not to make too many mistakes which will have to be untwisted later. This going back and forth in time may have to be worked on. It was all very well when people knew that the first Elaine, sister of Igraine, was Gawain’s mother, to put that fact in even before Gawain was born, but it might be a little confusing to a modern reader—to whom genealogy is not terribly interesting unless it is their own.

Elaine just came in with letters from both of you and I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you approve of the method. It was like holding one’s nose and jumping feet first into cold water. And it is contrary to all standard, scholarly Arthurian methods but, by golly, I’ll bet Vinaver will approve of it.

Now as to character and personality. It is my belief that they are there and were understood in their time. It is for me to understand the shorthand and bring them out. Consider this little lost bit. Igraine has been laid by someone she thought was her husband and later discovers that at the time her husband was dead. Now in the first mention of her, Malory says she was a fair lady and passing wise. When she hears that her husband is dead and in some way she cannot understand she was tricked—Malory says, “Thenne she marvelled who that knight that lay with her in the likeness of her lord. So she mourned pryvely and held her pees.”

My God! There’s all the character you need if you only point it with a repetition. I have translated as follows: “When news came to Igraine that the duke her husband was slain the night before, she was troubled and she wondered who it was that lay with her in the image of her husband. But she was a wise woman and she mourned privately and did not speak of it.”

It’s all there, you see. A whole character—a woman alone in a hostile and mysterious world. She did the only safe thing. “She held her pees.” The book is loaded with such things. They only need bringing into our focus. Malory’s listeners knew exactly the situation she was in but a modern reader has no conception of a woman’s life in the fifteenth century. She had to be very wise to survive at all.

Now the jokes are there too—sometimes they take the form of little ironies and other times of satire. Merlin loves to play jokes with a childlike joy in his magic. It only requires a word to show that Merlin loved what he was doing. It is a child’s joy in being able to astonish people. Then of course there is the end of Merlin—a cruel and horrifying situation and funny as hell. An old man enamored of a young woman who worms his magic out of him and then uses it on him. It’s the story of my life and a lot of other people’s lives—a broad and heartless joke—the powerful and learned man who gets his comeuppance from a stupid, clever little girl. Oh, there is plenty here. And I am becoming less shy with it all the time. I don’t think I dare be shy or respectful as I will lose what he has. And he has plenty. But I do want to work very slowly and carefully at first and to be very careful that I do not miss the things he is saying. It will probably go faster as I go along.

Let me now discuss for a moment Arthur as a hero. There is no doubt in my mind that Malory considered him a hero but he was also a king anointed. This second quality tended to make him remote to Malory. In the fifteenth century the principle that the king could do no wrong was in full force. His faults were the blame of his counselors. This wasn’t just an idea—it was so. If he could do no wrong the factor of pity is removed. But in spite of this Malory has him sin with his half-sister and draw his own fate down on him. I know that in some of the later stories Arthur is to us only a kind of Scheherazade, but he was also the heart of the brotherhood. I think I can work on that. Naturally, Malory would be more interested in fallible people—who could make mistakes and even commit crimes. We are still more interested in crimes than in virtues. But what is lost to the modern reader is that Malory never lost track of the importance of the king. Here, Elizabeth’s thought of the circle has particular emphasis. The circle couldn’t exist without Arthur. In fact it disappeared when he was gone. Now these are simple things—but why has nobody read this man? Increasingly I come to believe that the scholars have not read him at all—at least not with the intention of understanding what Malory meant and what he conveyed to his listeners. I could go on with this indefinitely and probably will because it clarifies things for me to try to explain them. Also, the deeper I go the more worth doing it seems to me. Far from growing less—it billows greater all of the time. It is the problem of simple things, some of them not understood in our time and perhaps some of them not understandable in our time. The preciousness of blood line—that is going to be one to do. The conception that common people were actually another species—as different from gentle people as cows were. There is no snobbishness here. This is just the way it was. I’ll put this aside now for a little.

TO CHASE—NEW YORK, JULY 14, 1958

Thanks for your good letter and also for the books that are coming along. I guess there are never enough books.

I think I’ll continue to send the work letters to you and Elizabeth. It is very good to do them as I am working, don’t you think?

TO CHASE—NEW YORK, JULY 28, 1958

I have been pretty inattentive but not unappreciative. The books you have sent are wonderful. Things have been so confusing here that I have got more and more mixed up, that’s all. They’re supposed to start on my house today. I think that will make all the difference. At least I will be able get away from the confusion. It has all been built separately so it will take only about three days to set up.

TO ERO AND CHASE—NEW YORK, AUGUST 11, 1958

Joyous Garde is now finished. At least it is finished enough so I can work in it. After work of course there are a hundred little refinements which I will make and install. I have never had a place like this.

I shall be in it every day from morning until I feel that this day’s work is done. The fact that I can see in every direction is not at all deflecting. Quite the opposite. The fact that I can see in all directions makes it unnecessary for me to look. That may seem a contradiction, but it is not. It is just the plain truth. Now the fooling around, the excuses and the complaints are finished. Now I am insisting that I go to work and I can find absolutely no excuse for not going to work . . . No one ever had a better place for it.

For myself, I now have just about everything I can think of that anyone, particularly me, could want. A boat, a house, Joyous Garde, friends and work. Also I have some time left for all of them. Recently I have brooded about the closing down of time, I think this grew out of the frustration of not being able to work because of a kind of creeping clutter. Now that is all wiped out, at least of this morning. I have been a terribly persistent complainer. This is nothing new with me. I think I have always been. But now I am going to go out of my way to stop it. At least that is my resolution this morning. And I do hope it lasts.

TO CHASE—NEW YORK, OCTOBER 21, 1958

I realize that after all of our months of work together, for me to cut myself off as I have must seem on the prima donna side. And I haven’t been able to explain it simply, not even to myself. Kind of like an engine that is missing fire in several cylinders and I don’t know quite what is causing it although, knowing something about engines, I am aware that the causes must be limited, that somewhere in a range of four or five will be the cause or perhaps several things may contribute to the difficulty. But this is my problem. The only thing that will be applicable to you is that the engine doesn’t run. The whole thing must be a little insulting to you and I don’t want it to be. It grows out of my own uncertainties.

You will remember that, being dissatisfied with my own work because it had become glib, I stopped working for over a year in an attempt to allow the glibness to die out, hoping then to start fresh with what might feel to me like a new language. Well, when I started in again it wasn’t a new language at all. It was a pale imitation of the old language only it wasn’t as good because I had grown rusty and the writing muscles were atrophied. So I picked at it and worried at it because I wanted desperately for this work to be the best I had ever done. My own ineptness and sluggishness set me back on my heels. Finally I decided to back off and to try to get the muscles strong on something else—a short thing, perhaps even a slight thing, although I know there are no slight things. And that didn’t work either. I wrote seventy-five pages on the new thing, read them and threw them away. Then I wrote fifty pages and threw them away. And then it came to me in a quick flash what that language was. It had been lying around all the time ready at hand and nobody had ever used it as literature. My “slight thing” was about present-day America. Why not write it in American. This is a highly complicated and hugely communicative language. It has been used in dialogues, in cuteness and perhaps by a few sports writers. It has also been used by a first person telling a story but I don’t think it has been used as a legitimate literary language. As I thought about it I could hear it in my ears. And then I tried it and it seemed right to me and it started to flow along. It isn’t easy but I think it is good. For me. And suddenly I felt as Chaucer must have felt when he found he could write the language he had all around him and nobody would put him in jail—or Dante when he raised to poetic dignity the Florentine that people spoke but wouldn’t dare to write. I admit I am getting a little beyond my peers in those two samples but a cat may surely look at a Chaucer.

Now I seem to be flowing and I find I can’t go to sleep at night because the myths keep flowing past my audio complex and the figures jump like chiefs over my visual complex. I am not speaking of the language of illiteracy although to classicists it will be so considered just as Chaucer was. The American language is a new thing under the sun. It can combine all the erudition of which I am capable with the communication of our own time. It is not cute nor is it regional. The frames have grown out of ourselves but have used everything that was there before. But most of all it has an ease and a flow and a tone and a rhythm which is unique in the world. There is no question where it comes from, its references, its inventions, its overtones grew out of this continent and out of our twenty generations here. It is English basically but manured and seeded with Negro, Indian, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish, German, but so mixed and fermented that something whole has emerged.

And that is what I am working with and that is why I have times of great happiness as well as times of struggle and despair. But it is a creative despair. It is a vulgar language as all living languages are. Its figures grew out of ourselves. Well, that’s about it. I don’t know that I will do it well but if I do it only 10 percent as well as I wish, it will be better than I can hope for.

We will be in next week to set up residence. And if I seem vague, you now know why. I am happy and perplexed as a cat in a clam bucket.

TO ERO—NEW YORK, JANUARY 3, 1959

Since work is going very badly, I mull over things with the kind of repetitiousness that is making the work go badly. The sense of having done all this before is pretty constant. I am depending on Somerset to give me the something new which I need.

It is my profound hope that at Avalon I can make contact with the very old, the older than knowledge, and that this may be a springboard into the newer than knowledge. It is a brazen hope I guess, but all I can come by right now. And I guess I am grabbing at hopes. I can hope, for example, that I will come by a feeling not watered down and attenuated. Perhaps what I am fighting is simple age and a low-burning fire but I don’t think that is so. I think it is confusion, or you might call it conflict of interests, each one canceling another out to a certain extent. And this would be nobody’s fault but my own. I can enforce a demand if I have one strong enough. And if anything, I have more respect for the craft than I ever had, much more because I know its hugeness and to some extent my own limitation. The angry young men and the Beats are simply trying to add velocity to the other three dimensions as they should. Because now it has finally seeped down from pure abstract mathematics that the fourth dimension is duration. But that doesn’t need to mean fast. It may as well mean slow so long as duration is the dimension. It requires a language which has not been made yet but the Beats are working on it and they may create it. The measurement of time beyond sun, moon and year is a very recent thing. When Julius Caesar claimed descent from Venus, he did not think of his ancestry as remote. Factors of light speed and concepts of the so far non-conceptual are all gumming the works, mine as well as theirs. I know that what I am going looking for in Somerset I can find right here. I am not such a fool as not to know that. What I am wishing for is a trigger rather than an explosion. The explosion is here. But in the haunted fields of Cornwall and the mines with the tin and lead pits, in the dunes and the living ghosts of things, I do wish to find a path or a symbol or an approach. An old man on St. Michael’s Mount told us he put the brackets on conys in the moonlight and zo got’s dinner. It’s somewhere there so common that those born there know it but can’t see it. Maybe that’s my trigger. I don’t know. But it might be. I do hope that if it is not so I will know it soon and not go knocking at the shapes of doors that are no entrances. And please do know that in turning over the lumber of the past I’m looking for the future. This is no nostalgia for the finished and safe. My looking is not for a dead Arthur but for one sleeping. And if sleeping, he is sleeping everywhere, not alone in a cave in Cornwall. Now there, that’s said and done and I’ve been trying to say it for a long time.

If this does seem to be taking a trip to Southernmost England very seriously it is so because it is much more than that to me. Not only is the time or continuum important, but I am taking note that there are two ends to a voyage—what you go away from as well as what you go toward.

TO CHASE—NEW YORK, JANUARY 28, 1959

The only glory that had come to England in memory was when history was accomplished with the long bow at Crecy and later at Agincourt. Laws of the Edwards made practice with the bow compulsory. When Malory attacked Monks Kirby, he did so with picks, jacks and bows and arrows. He was charged with lying in wait for Buckingham with bows and arrows.

In his raids he was accompanied by yeomen. The weapon of the yeoman was the longbow. He fancied himself somewhat of a tactician as some of the battle plans of the Morte indicate. Yet in the Morte there is no mention of the bow, no use of the yeoman as a soldier. Commoners are mentioned but not yeomen. And yet in his living history there was no English success which did not involve the bow. Isn’t it interesting that some reference to the bow did not creep in?

I am by no means content with this thing. The Winchester ms. may have been before or may not. It is on paper with a water mark like those dated 1475. A vellum patch to repair a tear is gummed down indulgence of Innocent VIII 1489 and printed by Caxton. Copying did not cease entirely with Caxton for many years afterward. The Winchester therefore may conceivably be after Caxton. It is largely in Chancery hand or script which is the model of Caxton’s early type. There may well have been diehards who just can’t believe in the printing press. Just as there are people who still don’t like paperbacks or the linotype. A great number of books are printed with handset type. Print may well have seemed cheap and worthless to book lovers. This is only a question. I mean to ask a lot of them.

Why does every commentator become convinced that a man had to have read everything he knew? In a time of recitation the memory must have been much better trained than it is now. For instance, a common man below the salt, on hearing a respected performer, must have in many cases memorized it as he went and when he met others probably repeated what he remembered of it.

In 1450 a rich man like John Fastolf had only eighteen books besides missals and a psalter. And that was a considerable library. He had incidentally Liber de Ray Aethaur. Is it possible that Malory departed from the Frensshe books not because he wanted to but because his memory failed? And his invention took over? Just a question. I have lots of them.

The memory was the only recording instrument of the great part of the population. Deeds and transfers were made permanent by beating young retainers so they would remember. The training of the Welsh poets was not practice but memorizing. On knowing 10,000 poems, one took a position. This has always been true. Written words have destroyed what must have been a remarkable instrument. The Pastons speak of having the messenger read the letter so that he could repeat it verbatim if it was stolen or lost. And some of these letters were complicated. If Malory were in prison, it is probably true that he didn’t need books. He knew them. If I had only twelve books in my library I would know them by heart. And how many men had no memory in the fifteenth century? No—the book owned must have been supplemented by the book borrowed and thus by the book heard. The tremendous history of the Persian Wars of Herodotus was known by all Athenians and it was not read by them, it was read to them.

The reason I am beating this point is that I think not enough care has been given to this memory thing. In such memories—everything heard was catalogued until the library was enormous—and all in the mind. In Shakespeare’s time a good man could memorize a whole scene from a play and write it down afterwards. That was the only way to steal it.

I don’t want you to think that I am becoming overconcerned with who Malory was. I don’t think that is very important. But I do want to know what he was and how he got there that way. If the Malory of the Morte is the Malory of the inquisitions and charges and escapes, he was no ivory tower boy lonely on a peak of nobility. His associates were husbandmen, yeomen, tailors, and how about Richard Irysheman? And the names—Smyth, Row, David, Wale, Walman, Breston, Thorpe, Hellorus, Hande, Tidman, Gibb, Sharpe? These are not noble names. They are farmers or guildmen. They were also tough men and thoroughly used to the harshness of the times.

I know it can be said that the form required certain conventions of chivalry. But particularly in the later parts, Malory slipped into things he knew, trees, plants, water, soil, habits of speech and clothing. Why then did he not slip into the weapons he knew—bows and arrows. Under Beauchamp he served with a lance and two archers. This is about the usual mixture. At Agincourt of an estimated six thousand English there were about four thousand archers. Now wouldn’t you think that a man who served in France later but with much the same tactics, when he came to write of war, would have slipped in a little of what he knew? He did in many other directions. His knowledge of men and animals pushed out the conventions of the romanceurs and put in what for the time was tremendous realism.

Now it is several days later. And I can’t stress enough the lack of consideration among scholars of the word of mouth. Being used to books as mechanisms of communications, they fail to realize that until very recently, book and writing were the rarest form. Consider the million rules for living, spinning, farming, fasting, brewing, building, hunting, together with the arts and crafts. None written down and yet all communicated. I want to make a strong point of this, particularly in my own mind.

Second point. The conception that the Cycle was the property of the few, the literate, the erudite. That was not so. Chaucer himself has given us the answer. He didn’t invent the form nor did Boccaccio. The stories were told, remembered, repeated. And only at the very last were they written. And the amazing thing is how purely they came down and with how little change. A careless scrivener could cause more havoc than a hundred tellers.

This time it’s finished—

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, MARCH 24, 1959

The countryside is turning as lush as a plum. Everything is popping. The oaks are getting that red color of swollen buds before they turn gray and then green. Apple blossoms are not out yet, but it won’t be very long. We had an east wind right out of Finland and the White Sea and it was cold. Then it switched to the West as if the Ode to a—and immediately the warmth of the Gulf Stream moved in. I’m ready to work now and naturally that frightens me. Must hold my nose with my fingers and jump in feet first. There’s a kind of point-of-no-return feeling about it. I suppose I will get over it.

The micro projector works well. It sits in the deep embrasure of my window and projects on my work table. All in all, this is an ancient place. Elaine loves it, too. There’s a quality here that I haven’t known for very long. The twentieth century seems very remote. And I would like to keep it that way for a while. Moon shots indeed! I’m wondering how long Edward IV can hold on.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, MARCH 27, 1959

It was a fortunate accident which drew me to this place. I thought, as you know, that it would be some time before I would settle in and go to work. But it is not. The work is coming as it should. I wonder why it has taken me so long to find my path. In a Somerset meadow it came to me and this I tell you truly. And you have probably known it all along. Thus went my thinking—

“Malory wrote the stories for and to his time. Any man hearing him knew every word and every reference. There was nothing obscure, he wrote the clear and common speech of his time and country. But that has changed—the words and the references are no longer common property, for a new language has come into being. Malory did not write the stories. He simply wrote them for his time and his time understood them.” And so you know, Chase, suddenly in this home ground, I was not afraid of Malory any more nor ever will be again. This does not lessen my admiration but it does not inhibit me either. Only I can write this for my time. And as for place—the place has become not a little island set in a silver sea, but the world.

And with that, almost by enchantment the words began to flow, a close-reined, taut, economical English, unaccented and unlocalized. I put down no word that has not been judged for general understanding. Where my time cannot fill in, I build up, and where my time would be impatient with repetition, I cut. So did Malory for his time. It is just as simple as that and I think it is the best prose I have ever written. I hope this is so and I believe it. Where there is obscurity or paradox I let intuition, my own judgment and the receptivity of our times govern me.

I’m trying to hold the production down. I don’t want it to race but to come sweetly out so that every word is necessary and the sentences fall musically on the ear. What Joy. I have no doubts any more. I goddam well can write it. Just wanted you to know. In fact I am writing it.

“ludly sing cucu”

TO ERO—SOMERSET, MARCH 30, 1959

I have forgotten how long it is since I have written you. Time loses all its meaning. The peace I have dreamed about is here, a real thing, thick as a stone and feelable and something for your hands. Work goes on with a slow, steady pace like that of laden camels. And I have so much joy in the work. Maybe the long day off is responsible or perhaps it is only Somerset but the tricks are gone, and the cleanness and the techniques and style that I can only think of as a kind of literary couture, changeable as the seasons. Instead, the words that gather to my pen are honest sturdy words, needing no adjectival crutches. There are many more than I will ever need. And they arrange themselves in sentences that seem to me to have a rhythm as honest and unshaken as a heart beat. The sound of them is sweet in my ears so that they seem to me to have the strength and sureness of untroubled children or fulfilled old men.

I move along with my translation of the Morte but it is no more a translation than Malory’s was. I am keeping it all but it is mine as much as his was his. I told you I think that I am not afraid of Malory any more for I know that I can write better for my time than he could have, just as he wrote better for his time than anyone else.

Meanwhile I can’t describe the joy. In the mornings I get up early to have a time to listen to the birds. It’s a busy time for them. Sometimes for over an hour I do nothing but look and listen and out of this comes a luxury of rest and peace and something I can only describe as in-ness. And then when the birds have finished and the countryside goes about its business, I come up to my little room to work. And the interval between sitting and writing grows shorter every day.

TO ERO—SOMERSET, APRIL 5, 1959

Another week gone and how did that happen? With daily work and mail and spring coming, and gardening and going to Morlands at Glastonbury to see the processing of sheepskins as they have been done since prehistory. I don’t know 1st how the week went so fast and 2nd how so much was accomplished in that week.

The work continues a joy and a trial to me. End of last week and into the next, the Battle of Bedgrayne, a terrible mess, even to Malory. I have to straighten out not only what happened but why, and cut deeply. Present-day people can read unlimited baseball scores in which the narration isn’t very great and fifteenth-century people could listen to innumerable single combats with little variation. I have to bridge that so that the battle remains important, exciting, and doesn’t get lost in a hundred running together of individual knights and still keep the sense that war was a series of man-to-man fights. Is a problem. This is the most terrible mess in the whole first part. Malory can take six pages for the fighting, but when the most important two things in the first part happen—the conception of Mordred and the meeting with Guinevere—he devotes two lines to each. I can’t spend much time on them but I have to give them dreadful importance. Never a dull moment, you see.

Now a question for Chase to mull over. When the battle is over and Merlin hotfoots it to Northumberland and reports all the details and names to hys mayster Blayse. And Blayse wrote the batayle word for word as Merlin told him—And all the battles fought in Arthur’s time and all the worthy deeds of Arthur’s court, Merlin told to Blayse and Blayse wrote them down. Now—who the hell was Blayse or who did Malory think he was? Does he occur in the Frensshe books? Did Malory make him up? I would be very glad to know what Chase has to say about this.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, APRIL 9, 1959

I must be careful to avoid repeating what I have already written to Elizabeth and what you have doubtless seen. This morning a letter from Jackson. They have the dictionaries and I have ordered them. They have no lexicon of Cornish Celtic but suggest I try hereabouts which I will. Also no Middle English and I did not bring mine. They say it has been taken over from Oxford and is now handled by Michigan University Press. I think mine is Oxford and I left it at home. And darn it, I need one. Could you please either send me mine or another. I think that is all I will need. It’s mostly words and their meanings. The rest I will find in Malory and in myself. I am getting an entirely new look at Arthur in the Merlin part and, I suppose it follows, a new look at Malory and myself. Enormous profundities here for one who wants to look. From the dream (serpents—throughout the questing beast to the recognition of the mother) is all one piece. But you will see what I have done with it when I send it. I will record it on tape in case of loss and probably will send the hand-written ms. on to you. Mary Morgan can type it, several copies on thin paper, and then maybe I can have a copy back, but I will have the tape recording just in case anything should happen. It never does happen if you are protected. I would like it if you would begin to work on a standardization of the names of people and places and also identification with names and places used today, at least where possible the places Malory was thinking of when he was writing. As for the proper names, they should be reduced to their greatest simplicity and made easy to pronounce. And all of the uncommon ones standardized. That in itself is a big job but I know you have done a lot with it already so you are well prepared. The Merlin has been a bitch with all of its confusions but I think you will be pleased with my handling of the Battle of Bedgrayne—a very difficult passage to bring out I can assure you. Also I can’t tell you often enough what a good move this was to come here. If there were nothing else, the peace and the pace make it worth doing.

Three days in London next week. A kind of clearing of the palate for the Knight with the Two Swords. This is a profound piece and entirely different. It has the Greek sense of tragedy—man against fate, beyond his control and wish, and I must get everything I can from it. The form is all here in the Morte but sometimes it is out of perspective for the modern reader. It is that bringing it into focus that is my job. And I shall be really anxious to know what you think of what I am doing. No one seems even to have attempted it. I wonder why. As Vinaver says, no one thinks to go back to Malory. Well, I am and I find it very rewarding and I hope to make it rewarding.

This is the great changeable month for showers and for times of brilliant sun in the last hours. The gas stove went out last night and I had to build it back and in the process I learned.

In the ancient back of Mr. Windmill’s ironmongery there is a forge and tools from the Middle Ages. Mr. Arthur Strand still uses them and he can make anything. He has become my pal. I may ask him to make me an axe or at least to adapt one. Maybe he will let me do it myself at his forge. I want an axe like the ones the Norse and Saxon warriors carried for war and work. All modern axes have a straight blade like this. 014

This makes the force of the blow distributed along the whole length of the blade. But the old one was like this 015

so that the impact was on a small area and gave it much better penetration. With the old axe you can practically carve wood because of the small area of impact. I must speak to Mr. Arthur about that. He can probably find me some old adzes too. In the evenings I am back to my wood carving—It lets me go on thinking and still have my hands busy. I’m making spoons for the kitchen now—out of pieces of old oak.

I think I’ll go on a little on thin paper. I’m not quite warmed up for work yet.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, APRIL 11, 1959
(continuing letter of April 9, 1959)

Now it is Saturday, I don’t know how it got to be. I shall finish the Merlin either today or tomorrow, and I really think it is good. But looking back through the pages I see many little things I want to change. Therefore I think I am wrong in the interest of hurry to send the ms. to you. I shall have it typed here, correct the typescript before I send it on. Then it will be much more nearly right. This will have had several treatments so that what you will receive will amount to a corrected third draft and when Mary Morgan types in the changes, it will be much more nearly finished. It will be longer before you receive it, but I think worth the time.

Well, the Merlin is nearly done and it is a far more profound and warming thing than I had thought. I do hope I am making the most of it. I have a wonderful sense of joy in what I have done. I don’t know whether that will be sustained in re-reading. But it is worth it to have it at all.

I have made some quite good spoons for cooking and I have done so well that I have designed some salad forks which I hope I can execute for Elaine. The bowl of one will be the Tudor Rose and the bowl of the other the Triple Cross of Rome. And when they clash in tossing lettuce there will be a little bit of history in the salad bowl. I hope I can do them nicely. It is a nice thought, it seems to me.

Time now to go back to work. I shall finish this later. But I have a curious fight and then the sword—the sword of swords.

And I did—and I like it. And now I will finish this letter and send it on. Today came books we had ordered. Two volumes 1832 a history of Somerset with all the details of Dugdale. What a joy!

I’m going down now to the joys of the Somerset books. Graham Watson found them for us and they are very rare.

TO ERO—SOMERSET, APRIL 10, 1959

Another week going fast. I shall finish the Merlin this week and I think it is the hardest of all. I also think it was the hardest for Malory because into this must be crowded all of the background and confusion of Arthur’s birth and his assumption of power, of the rebellion and mystery of his birth. It amounts to a long and dissonant chronicle. But I think it is sorting out into something that flows in modern prose, but of course it can never have the rounded or elliptical form of some of the later tales which do not require throwback and where the cast of characters is not so huge. The Battle of Bedgrayne gave me hell but I think it comes through. I had to keep it mounting and moving and I tried to communicate some of the excitement as well as the sadness that is in it. The end of the book is a kind of magic dream full of mood and foreboding, a psychiatrist’s dream of heaven if he cared to look. Between the serpent dream and the revelation to Arthur of his true right to the throne, it is all of a piece. I feel that Arthur did not want to know because he was afraid of what he might find. He even goes looking for trouble and action to avoid thinking. This is not unlike experiences in our time, even the dress symbols are still with us unchanged. I’m dealing with all of it as the fringes of a dream. Anyway it is moving along and after this terrible first story nothing else can be as hard.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, APRIL 11, 1959
(from Elaine S.)

Jackson sent the two-volume History and Antiquities of Somerset by Phelps this morning, and we had to hide them for a day in order to get any work done. They will make fine fireside reading for us.—John is working on “The Lady of the Lake” sequence today, and only comes up for air every two or three hours to get a cup of coffee. He is beginning to live and breathe the book. In the evening he carves wooden spoons for our kitchen and talks about Arthur and Merlin.

A letter from Eugène Vinaver today tells how homesick he is for France, but he adds: “It is better while I am busy with an English book to be here. English words come more naturally to one’s mind when the flowers and the trees around one have English names.” He is talking about himself, but I think it applies to John as well, don’t you? Arthur seems to be here.

Vinaver also quotes what John once wrote: “I tell these old stories, but they are not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them.” Isn’t that a wonderful thing? Eugène says it is the truest and most significant sentence he has found in all the innumerable books about books.

TO ERO—SOMERSET, APRIL 12, 1959

These long and ponderous chronicles will continue, I suppose. Another week gone or rather past and now it is one month today that we have been in this house.

One month in this house and it seems like ours. I had thought it would take at least a month and maybe more to get squirmed down in my writing chair, and today I am finishing the Merlin, the hardest and most complex tale of all. Malory wasn’t comfortable in it either. He was troubled and unsure how to start and he doubled back and raced ahead and sometimes refuted what he had said a page ago. But I think I have it straightened out now, at least to my satisfaction. Nothing else will be as hard. I can feel this man’s mind. He put things down he did not know he was writing and there is the richness, but hidden sometimes very deep. Well, we will see whether it is good or not. I have a feeling that it is.

Three days in London and then back and to the strange and fated story of the Knight with the Two Swords. I think I understand it—a kind of tragedy of designed errors, one growing out of the last and so building until there is no return. It is the only story of its kind in the whole cycle. When I have finished it, the season will be broad spring and then I shall take one or two days a week to look about me. The pattern will then be set and I will not be afraid of a break. But until then I want not to break my rhythm.

My joy in the work continues and increases. I think I have pulled an understandable character out of Arthur. And he has always been the weakest and coldest to our modern eyes. And if I can do that, the rich ones, Lancelot and Gawain, will be pure dreams to work with. And I have a curtain line for Merlin. This trick or method was not known in the fifteenth century but readers need it now. And they have it.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, APRIL 20, 1959

About the books. I’m going to ask you to try and get the lexicons you mentioned. It isn’t such a rush now that I have the Anglo-Saxon, the Middle English and the two-volume Oxford. The big Oxford I presented to Bob Bolt, who found us this house. He is going to be a very important playwright and no better present could be given a writer. He was practically in tears.

I am half through the revising of the Merlin and I have changed my mind again. The wife of one of the masters of King’s School is a good typist. I would like to see this in type before I send it on to you. I’ll ask her to make four copies. This is not final of course but it will be much better if it is typed. It will give you something tangible to play with. I have a little tape recorder for playback now. It gives me a much better sense of words to hear it back. I catch errors I didn’t know were there. Good Lord! how this thing grows in me. There is no way of making a tight short story form of the Merlin. It is, to a certain extent, episodic. But I am trying to give it continuity, believability, mood and emotional content, together with a kind of plan for its being. It is actually the formation of a kingdom. Do you remember that I always said that Malory was uneasy in this part? Well so was I. But as he learned, so am I learning. And I have a sense of freedom in this material I never had before. I do hope you will like it. I think it is good writing—as good in its way as Malory’s was in its way. I am awfully excited about it.

TO ERO AND CHASE—SOMERSET, APRIL 20, 1959

I wrote the beginning of the Merlin. The whole thing should be gone over maybe and redone. I’ve learned so much about my own method that the early parts are kind of outmoded already. I guess that always happens. Anyway, I’ll see what I want to do with it before I send it. I still like what I’m doing. In London I ordered a table-top architect’s board that tilts. My back and neck get too tired.

TO ERO AND CHASE—SOMERSET, APRIL 1959

What is in a writer’s mind—novelist or critic? Doesn’t a writer set down what has impressed him most, usually at a very early age? If heroism impressed him, that’s what he writes about, and if frustration and a sense of degradation—that is it. And if jealousy is the deepest feeling, then he must attack anything which seems to be the longed-for success.

Maybe somewhere in here is my interest and joy in what I am doing. Malory lived in as rough and ruthless and corrupt an age as the world has ever produced. In the Morte he in no way minimizes these things, the cruelty and lust, and murder and childlike self-interest. They are all here. But he does not let them put out the sun. Side by side with them are generosity and courage and greatness and the huge sadness of tragedy rather than the little meanness of frustration. And this is probably why he is a great writer and Williams is not. For no matter how brilliantly one part of life is painted, if the sun goes out, that man has not seen the whole world. Day and night both exist. To ignore the one or the other is to split time in two and to choose one like the short stick in a match game. I like Williams and admire his work but as he is half a man, so is he half a writer. Malory was whole. There is nothing in literature nastier than Arthur’s murder of children because one of them may grow up to kill him. Williams and many others of this day would stop there, saying, “That’s the way it is.” And they would never get to the heartbreaking glory when Arthur meets his fate and fights against it and accepts it all in one. How can we have forgotten so much? We produce talented pygmies like court dwarfs who are amusing because they mime greatness and they—I should say we—are still dwarfs. Something happens now to children. An artist should be open on all sides to every kind of light and darkness. But our age almost purposely closes all windows, draws all shades and then later screams to a psychiatrist for light.

Well—there were men once and there may be again. I have a friend, nameless of course, who bases his trouble on having been rejected by a woman. And he completely forgets the literally hundreds of women who accepted him. I told him that in a letter recently and I don’t know how it will go down with him.

I’m serious today, perhaps because I have had a tussle with a section of Merlin in rewriting. I knew what I wanted to say and couldn’t find the words for it. But I will, because I have time.

Jumping back a paragraph—I’ve been rejected by some, but my God some wonderful ones have accepted me. To forget that would be foolish and to brood on the others would be like brooding because everyone didn’t like my looks. I’m grateful that some people do.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, APRIL 25, 1959

The Cornish Dictionary is not necessary for this work but for future work, so by all means send it by boat. If we had known about it in time, Mary could have brought it. Any lexicons of this area will be valued by me. I hate to get into the Welsh because I can’t pronounce it.

I had an excellent day yesterday and got well into the Knight with the Two Swords—a strange and fated story. Hope I can bring something to the surface—the Invisible Knight, etc. and the utter savagery coupled with sweetness. Also I cut down a local hatchet to the shape of a Saxon axe for wood shaping and dug a garbage pit.

My table-top tilt board came. Makes a draftsman’s table of a card table. My neck and shoulders don’t get so damned tired.

TO ERO AND CHASE—SOMERSET, MAY 1, 1959

Yesterday something wonderful. It was a golden day and the apple blossoms are out and for the first time I climbed up to Cadbury—Camelot. I don’t think I remember an impact like that. Could see from the Bristol Channel to the tops of the Mendip Hills and all the little villages. Glastonbury tor and King Alfred’s towers on the other side. I shall go back over and over but what a day to see it first. I walked all around the upper wall. And I don’t know what I felt but it was a lot—like those slow hot bubbles of molten rock in a volcano, a gentle rumbling earthquake of the Spirit. I was ready for it too. I’ll go back at night and in the rain, but this was noble gold even to use Tennyson’s phrase—mystic—wonderful. Made the hairs prickle on the back of the neck. Mary is here and she went with us—and she was very moved. Tomorrow after work I’m going back to Glastonbury to the Abbey. I’m ready for that now too.

I hope to finish the Knight with the Two Swords today. I do hope I’ve done it well. Merlin is out being typed. I don’t know when it will be finished but I’ll send it as soon as I check it over. I think Balin is good but I’ll have to listen to it on tape before I’ll really know. What a magic and fatal story it is.

Now—there’s something I want to ask. We are supposed to leave the country on or before June 11 and reenter. I was going to ask the Home Office for an extension rather than waste time and money for a rubber stamp in a passport. But if there was a reason, it would be different. Lying in bed last night a very definite reason visited me. I know the lay of the land of nearly all the work now save one—Brittany. And with the war against Rome coming up, and the whole complex of the Celtic migrations back and forth, I could well use a few days looking at Brittany. That would be the best reason for leaving England for a few days.—From Calais to Mont St. Michel. What do you think, Chase? And can you get me some geographical and historical material on the area with reference both to the myth and to the Brittany of Malory’s time which will be what he himself has seen. This makes much sense to me, however, killing two birds.

Time for me to go to work. I’ll finish this letter later. I have finished Balin and I am pooped. But I do think I got something in it. I dearly hope so.

Now I must set out my lettuces in flats so that they can get bigger before I set them out in the garden. I start the seeds in my window sill.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, MAY 4, 1959

Another week starting. Elaine and Mary off to Wells which gives me a fine long day for work. Start Torre and Pellinore, marriage of Guinevere etc. Half the typed Merlin came back. The rest early this week and I will get a carbon off to you and Elizabeth with strong hope that you will like it. After you have read it I suggest that you go back to Malory and see what I have done. You will instantly know why. I put the Balin on tape yesterday and listened to it back and it sounds pretty good. There will have to be lots of refinement of course in all of it but the essence is there and I can’t find that I have missed much from the original. It is most painstaking work. You will notice that I have removed all of Merlin’s prophecies having to do with future stories. They simply blow the point. Also Malory never could lead to a climax. He gave it away three times before he came to it. The hardest work was the battle. Nothing will be that hard again—am removing the tiresome detail and at the same time keeping action and plan of battle. But there are such profundities in Malory sometimes hidden in a phrase. I have to be very careful not to miss them and sometimes to blow them up a little to make them apparent.

TO ERO—SOMERSET, MAY 5, 1959

The last part of the Merlin should be in type today and I will get a carbon off to you right away by air mail. I shall be on needles to know what you think of it. Meanwhile I am well into Torre and Pellinore, the first of the questing stories and the beginning of the Round Table. From this point on Arthur becomes a hero and almost without character. But this is the nature of all heroes and to make him human might be a revolution. God knows he is surrounded by humans and maybe that is necessary—the contrast. Actually Arthur becomes a little like the Caliph in the Arabian Nights—a kind of referee of adventures and one who devotes himself to a kind of mild commentary. I don’t know what I am going to do about that. But every day is a challenge of major proportions. Every day something.

Now it is afternoon and the Merlin typescript has come back. I think I will go to Bruton a little later and mail it to you because I fervently want you to see it. Am I off on the wrong foot? It seems right to me but I can be very wrong. There must be some reason why no one has done this properly. Maybe it is because it can’t be done—but I don’t really believe that. I think the reason is that they tried to make it costume instead of universal. Well, anyway, you will know. And good or bad, I have a feeling that the prose is good. Incidentally, I am sending no copy to anyone but you. I have an original and two carbons here. Does Chase want or need one? It needs lots of work I know but this is just a draft.

The Post Office is going to go mad when I send it air mail. They think we are terribly extravagant anyway and this is going to make them think I am nuts. We give them more business than the whole town of Bruton.

Oh well—here we go. And I am well into Torre and Pellinore today.

Love to all there. I’m sorry I’m so nervous about this but after all, I’ve been at it a long long time and this is the first and acid test—the hardest story and the first.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, MAY 7, 1959

A small warm-up before my day’s work. I finished Gawain’s quest in Torre and Pellinore yesterday and continue with the second quest today. I hope to finish the whole thing sometime during the weekend.

I now have an architect’s board that sits on a table and what a difference it makes. I don’t get so tired leaning over—I shall not finish this today, because as surely as I write to you, I get a letter by return mail. Please do let me know of your reaction to the work I have sent when you get a chance. Maybe I’d better send two copies from now on. I am having an original and three carbons made.

Now it is Sunday and I have just finished the Three Quests. Tomorrow the Death of Merlin and if I am lucky next week Morgan le Fay, which is short. But it does more and I think I discovered some gold in the Quests. Of course the real things are to come.

Now Monday again. These weeks run by and disappear like rabbits in a shooting gallery. We’ve been here two months. Can you imagine that? I can’t. It seems such a short time that I feel I haven’t got enough work done and I know that isn’t true. I have done a lot. This flimsy paper is very unsatisfactory to write on. I love the foolscap, even the white British foolscap.

I got some typescript on Wednesday and will send it along—It will be much more of Malory than the Merlin, where I have always felt that he was floundering with his material. Today I start the Death of Merlin, a ghastly job, the ridiculous defeat of a great man, adored in all ages. I’ll have to see what I can do with it. It’s the banana-peel treatment, the great leveler. And it is time I got to it because there may be some false starts.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, MAY 11, 1959

The fact of the matter is that there isn’t enough time in a day to do what I want to do. I finished the Death of Merlin and the Five Kings yesterday. And today go on with Morgan le Fay. I like my version of the end of Merlin. It’s a sad and a general story. Perhaps that is why it has lasted. It and the Marriage will go to be typed on Wednesday.

Planted three dozen lettuce plants yesterday and among the grasses in the back garden I found a number of strawberry plants all in blossom and cleared the rack away from them. I find all sorts of things back there.

My spelling—never very sure and fixed—has become completely infected by Malory. Batayle seems much more normal than battle—more warlike somehow even if it doesn’t mean the same thing as battle.

What a way to live! I worked very hard yesterday what with writing and cutting grass with a scythe. Went to bed at nine o’clock before it was dark and instantly to sleep. A mist on the meadows this morning with the sun burning through. Everyone agrees that this is the most beautiful spring in many years. And some who have been burned by the last few seasons say we will pay for it later. Well, we shall see.

I may want to get out but I hate to. Also, I resent anything that interrupts the slow, steady flow of this translation. I feel that it is getting a flow and a good tone now.

Time’s up now. A-working we must go.

I’ll get this off.

TO ERO AND CHASE—SOMERSET, MAY 13, 1959

Then your comments and Chase’s almost lack of comment on the section sent to you. I must think very carefully and not fall into obscurity in my answer. To indicate that I was not shocked would be untrue. I was. I wonder if the three thousand miles makes any difference. It is apparent that I did not communicate my intention but I wonder whether I could have if I had been there. It is natural to look for arguments in my defense or in defense of the work as I am doing it. Let me say first that I hope I am too professional to be shocked into paralysis. The answer seems to be that you expected one kind of thing and you didn’t get it. Therefore you have every right to be confused as you say and disappointed. I had never told you what my plan was, perhaps because I was feeling my way. I can say that this is uncorrected first draft, designed to establish style and method, and that the slips and errors will be removed, but that isn’t good enough. Perhaps I thought I had told you that I am presently trying—not to bring up the whole cycle with its thousand ramifications, but to stick tight to Malory, who wrote in the fifteenth century. And all the reading and research is not wasted, because I see and I think understand things in Malory I could not have seen before. Finally, I have had no intention of putting it in twentieth-century vernacular any more than T.M. put it in fifteenth-century vernacular. People didn’t talk that way then either. For that matter, people didn’t talk as Shakespeare makes them talk except in the bumpkin speeches. These are all negatives, I know.

I know you have read T. H. White’s Once and Future King. It is a marvelously wrought book. All the things you wished to find in my revision are superlatively in that. But that is not what I had wanted and I think still do not want to do.

Where does the myth—the legend—start? Back of the Celtic version it stretches back to India and probably before. It splits on the migration—part going to Greece, part to Semitic exits, part coming up through Georgia and Russia and Germany to Scandinavia and crammed with the Norse and part in Iberia and Celtic Gaul flooding up to Britain, Ireland, Scotland, where it incubates and there moves out again all over the world. Where do you stop it or limit it? I chose to start with Malory who was the best writer, better than the French, better than the parts of the Mabinogion and closer to our general understanding. White brilliantly puts the story in the dialects of present-day England. I did not want to do that. I wanted an English that was out of time and place as the legend is. The people of legend are not people as we know them. They are figures. Christ is not a person, he is a figure. Buddha is a squatting symbol. As a person Malory’s Arthur is a fool. As a legend he is timeless. You can’t explain him in human terms any more than you can explain Jesus. As a person Jesus is a fool. At any time in the story he could have stopped the process or changed the direction. He has only one human incident in the whole sequence—the lama sabach-thani on the cross when the pain was too great. It is the nature of the hero to be a fool. The Western sheriff, the present literary prototype as exemplified by Gary Cooper, is invariably a fool. He would be small and mean if he were clever. Cleverness, even wisdom, is the property of the villain in all myths. I am not writing this to titillate the ear of the twentieth century. Perhaps I am overambitious, but I am trying to make it available, not desirable. I want the remote feeling of the myth, not the intimate feeling of today’s man who in his daily thought may change tomorrow but who in his deeper perceptions, I am convinced, does not change at all. In a word I have not been trying to write a popular book but a permanent book. I should have told you all of this.

It has been my intention in all of this and still is, to follow each story with an—what can I call it?—essay, elucidation, addendum. In this I propose to put the reality, the speculative, the explanative, even perhaps the characterization, but I wanted to keep it separate. I do not know that Merlin was a Druid or the memory of a Druid and certainly Malory never suspected it. In the studies I can speculate that this may have been so, although I suspect that the Merlin conception is far older than Druidism. His counterpart is in every great cycle—in Greece, in the Bible, and in the folk myths, back to the beginning. Chase says wisely that Saxon and Saracen are probably the same thing. Foreigners from far off. They always occur. To Malory the most recent mysterious and powerful strangers were Saracens. Saxons, unless he was a Celt, were part of himself, even though he probably thought of himself as of Norman descent—for social reasons.

Very well, you will say—if that is your intention, where are those comments which intend to illuminate? Well, they aren’t written for two reasons. First, I’m learning so much from the stories, and second, I don’t want to break the rhythm. I found there was a rhythm, and I was pleased with it. Also, by their nature, these stories must be spare. In the additions I have made, I’ve tried to keep that spareness.

I know I seem to be defining my thesis and that’s exactly what I am doing. But there are some things I don’t understand. You say the killing of the babies is an unkingly retelling of the Herod story. But that is the theme of the whole legend. The Herod story is simply another version of the timeless principle that human planning cannot deflect fate. The whole legend is a retelling of human experience. It is a version of “Power corrupts.”

You will understand that what saddened me most was the tone of disappointment in your letter. If I had been skeptical of my work, I would simply have felt that you had caught me out. But I thought I was doing well, and within the limits I have set for myself, I still do.

The first story is by far the most shapeless, the most difficult and the most loaded.

The story of the Knight with the Two Swords is more direct but not less mysterious.

Finally, and I won’t labor the point after this, I feel that I am reaching toward something valuable. It doesn’t sound like me because I don’t want it to. And it occurs to me to wonder whether you would prefer that I don’t send the stories as they are done, but wait until the very end when the between chapters are in place. I had thought at the end of four or four hundred and fifty pages, to go back and complete that part, since it will be one volume, before going on. There may be two versions, one simply the translation and the other the translation plus the inner chapters. As for the translation I am sure of one thing—it is the best by far of any that has been done. But you must let me know about this. On this end—Mais, je marche!

TO ERO—SOMERSET, MAY 14, 1959

Now I have thought a day and throbbed through a night since I rewrote the letter. Also I have corrected somewhat the copy enclosed. The first was uncorrected, and I still feel about the same. Maybe I am not doing it well enough. But if this is not worth doing as I am trying to do it, then I am totally wrong, not only about this but about many other things, and that is of course quite possible. Alan Lerner is making a musical about King Arthur and it will be lovely and will make a million-billion dollars—but that isn’t what I want. There’s something else. Maybe in my rush to defend myself I’ve missed what I wanted to say. Maybe I’m trying to say something that can’t be said or do something beyond my ability. But there is something in Malory that is longer-lived than T. H. White and more permanent than Alan Lerner or Mark Twain. Maybe I don’t know what it is—but I sense it. And as I have said—if I’m wrong then it’s a real whopping wrongness.

But, can’t you see—I must gamble on this feeling about it. I know it isn’t the form the present-day ear accepts without listening but that ear is somewhat trained by Madison Avenue and radio and television and Mickey Spillane. The hero is almost bad form unless he is in a Western. Tragedy—true tragedy—is laughable unless it happens in a flat in Brooklyn. Kings, Gods and Heroes—Maybe their day is over, but I can’t believe it. Maybe because I don’t want to believe it. In this country I am surrounded by the works of heroes right back to man’s first entrance. I don’t know how the monoliths were set up in the circles without tools but there was something more involved than petty thievery and schoolboy laziness and the anguish of overfed ladies on the psycho couch. Someone moved a whole lot of earth around for something beyond “making a buck.” And if all of this is gone, I’ve missed the boat somewhere. And that could easily be.

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 rejections 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 inconsistency 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.”

TO ERO—SOMERSET, JULY 1959 ⁽SATURDAY⁾

The work comes sweetly and well. I am not going to send any until I have enough to show you the new departure, which I happen to love. Also I have a great plan for unity. But as I said—in a previous letter—I am not going to talk myself out of it. I do that too much. This much I can tell you though—if it continues this well I can go home in October with a free heart, knowing I can finish it anywhere. And it is beginning to take a whole roundness of form in my mind and millions of ideas are swarming and breeding and that’s the best life possible to me. It does take so long to get it though.

Now some words for Chase. It will be repetition for him since I am sure he has told me before. I should just like to have it all in one letter. About the first of the month I or rather we are going into Wales. I wish Chase would lay out an itinerary. I want to catalogue it in my mind so I can have access to it in memory wherever I go to finish it.

I’m glad Shirley likes the Triple Quest. That’s its name by the way. I assure you the Lancelot is much better. Finally I have unlocked the door.

Now let me tell you about a miracle, of the kind that happens here. Day before yesterday I was writing about a raven, quite a character and a friend of Morgan le Fay. Yesterday morning at eight I was at my desk and there was a great croaking outside my door. I thought it was a giant frog. It awakened Elaine sleeping upstairs. She looked out the window and there was a huge raven pecking at my door and croaking—a monster bird. The first we have seen. Now how do you account for that? I wouldn’t even tell it if Elaine the Truthful hadn’t seen it also.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, JULY 3, 1959
(from Elaine S.)

Yesterday we drove through Plush Folly, a new addition to our place-name list. It is in Dorset. We had a lovely afternoon. John is taking one of his knights questing along the country and wanted some geographical details. Now that’s the way to take advantage of being in England. We drove down to below Dorchester and climbed Maiden Castle, a vast hill-fortress which goes back to 2000 B.C. It’s a marvelous and enormous flat-topped hill with 8 ditches, deep and steep-sided. You could sure defend one hell of a lot of people up there. From the top, we could look down on Dorchester and see clearly the form of the Roman city. The four Roman entrances to the town are now lined with trees and called The Walks.

We also went to Cerne Abbas to see the Dorset Giant, the several hundred feet high man carved out in the chalk hill. He is ferocious and swings a club over his head. He also is extremely phallic. John says some ancient people put him there as a symbol of fertility. I think they put him there to scare the tar out of passing ladies, who would then go home and say to their husbands, “Don’t stand there and tell me you are going to fight them? ”

I have your letter about Bodmin Moor and Caerleon on Usk, along with the map you marked, in the car with our other maps and guide books. John says he wants to go to both places soon.

We are up to our ears in Devonshire clotted cream, as this is the height of the strawberry and raspberry season. Our berries come from Discove garden—and sometimes I make our own clotted cream. Whenever we are given cream by our friends, I stand it in a shallow pan on the warm part of the stove for six hours, then move it to the cool stone floor of the kitchen for several hours. When it becomes clotted, I skim it and chill it in the fridge and serve it with berries. Delicious!—I couldn’t do without the Constance Spry Cookery Book; use it daily. I have learned to make a proper Indian curry. The ingredients are bought at the Bombay Emporium in London. We will have a curry dinner party in the fall.

I hope to have ms. tomorrow. I went by and jogged Mrs. Webb about it Wednesday. She was typing a passage in which John has a maiden wash a knight’s undergarments and hang them on a gooseberry bush to dry, before they spent the night in the forest. She wanted to know if I knew that in England babies come from under gooseberry bushes! He didn’t and was delighted.

TO ERO AND CHASE—SOMERSET, JULY 13, 1959

Of course, I did no writing while away. Always think I will but I don’t. However, lots of thinking. I’m going to throw out my beginning of Lancelot and start again because I think I know it now. And after the Lancelot, I rather think I’ll go back to the beginning and start over. Maybe I have my boy now. It does take time.

Chase, thanks for the Maiden Castle work. I am still drawn to my own suspicion. This is mainly because I know how it worked in Mexico. Spaniards came in, heard an Aztec word, and named the place the word sound in Spanish. There are hundreds of them. For instance Cuernavaca—cow horn. Aztec name was Cuanahuatl, which sounds a little like cuernavaca only it means the Place of the Eagles. But it was the sound that mattered, not the meaning. And I suspect that Maiden in Maiden Castle is a sound in a previous language and I’ll bet it is the Indo-European root word mei meaning changed or heaped or not natural. And the great earthworks are “heaps.”

But all of this is only interesting. I am trying to work on the “people” of the stories. I’m glad the Triple Quest pleases you a little, Chase. At least it gives some reason for the three damsels. The Lancelot as I see the beginning now begins to make some sense to me and even in terms of the reason for the Grail quest, which comes later. It has always been considered that first comes the Grail and then the Quest. But suppose a quest was required and the Grail was placed as a target. But I am not going to do more trial runs. I’ll send it when it is finished as a fait accompli. Perhaps I have done too many dry runs. But I feel better about it.

TO ERO—SOMERSET, JULY 25, 1959

I sent the very first part of Lancelot to you yesterday after having received your wire. I think it is wise to send it. If it should happen to be lost in the mail I have a carbon, faint but quite readable as a safety factor. And I never had anything lost anyway. This ms. is beginning to be somewhat like what I want. You will see that little by little, while adhering to the story, I am putting my own construction on matters which are obscure and eliminating things which either were meaningless or have become so. And if this work has some quality of a dream—why all life has that. Most people live in a half-dream all their lives and call it reality. Also, whenever by suggestion I can tie the story to the present by developing a situation which was true in both, I have done so. And since this is a curious decorative story I have tried to give it some quality of medieval painting, a little formal but not always. Mostly I have had to make the people come alive. In this first part and it is far from finished, Lancelot has not yet had to face his dual self. He is morally untested. That’s why I love Lancelot I guess. He is tested, he fails the test and still remains noble.

You are worried about Vinaver’s influence on the kind of work I am doing. I am not sure, of course, but I think really he will be the first to applaud it. He isn’t the stodgy scholar you think. And he knows the changes others have made. I would almost bet he’d approve, and if he didn’t I will be so well along by then that I don’t think it would have much effect. I’m beginning really to love the work for itself and I am letting what mind I have go to its own sources. Back pathing—I think the analysis of witchcraft is rather brilliant, and so far as I know—new.

I agree with you about continuing from where I am and only at the last going back to the beginning. Also I am going to try to eliminate all of the side stories in this first draft and aim right down the main line. Tristan is another story completely. It can come later. But the story I want now is Lancelot, Arthur, Guinevere—Anyway, I am going to see what I can do with that main central and unified theme. And do you know, the title of that should not be Arthur but Lancelot. He’s my boy. I can feel him. And I’m beginning to feel Guinevere and out of that I will get to feel Arthur.

TO ERO—SOMERSET, JULY 28, 1959

Difficulty with work today—partly a mean decision about form and elimination. That damned Malory has got this quest in his teeth and is running mad with fighting. Also he gets so enthusiastic about curing crowds with a piece of bloody cloth that he gets all mixed up about who and why. Then he has Lancelot masquerading in Sir Kay’s armor and suddenly forgets all about it. And I have to excavate these things and give them some point or else cut them out. About three out of eight adventures are really good, but they aren’t the ones he likes at all. It is very difficult. I think I have maintained a fairish high level of interest so far in this story and I don’t want to let it peter out in the usual Malory manner. Is a puzzlement. But if I just keep plugging away, I’ll find a way out of it. I have to. The best way is the simplest but it takes an awful lot of thought to be simple.

I had a good letter from Shirley. I am terribly glad she likes the Triple Quest. As I know—one will choose the quest most like himself. I hope you will like the part of the Lancelot I sent. And I hope to finish this first part of the old boy’s life this week and get it off to you. After this, his life grows more complicated. This first part might be called the childhood of a knight—full of wonders. But Lancelot has some pretty damned adult problems to face later, problems by no means gone from the world.

TO ERO—SOMERSET, JULY 28, 1959

I should finish this piece today if all goes well, but it is early in the morning and I will start a note to you. You will find in this whole section a greater departure than the rest. It is above all a magical section, you might call it the innocence section of a life where dragons and giants dwell, the inside ones that come later. I have eliminated a number of the more obscure adventures in Malory, but others I have greatly expanded in a way that might deeply shock the master. I have the last scene of the section to do today and it is a hard one. Also, if it should grow as some of the others have, I might not get it finished. I hope I do, but it doesn’t matter. As an exercise in images this has been very interesting to do. Throughout I have tried to needle the imagination to go further, but I have no idea whether it is successful. In this part I have tried it out to be a living wall painting, formal, a little florid and unreal, and yet having all the qualities of reality. What I want it to be more than anything is believable. Now Lancelot, so far, is not a terribly complicated character, but I have one coming up today—Guinevere—who is a doodle. I think I have a line on her but we will see.

Later Sunday—Well there it is finished, dag nab it. Rough it is but it will have to stand on its own feet now. And tomorrow I’ll get it off to you if the post office is open.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, AUGUST 1, 1959

I’ve not written much lately because as you will see by the ms. being sent on, I’ve been mazed in work. I finished the last episode in the first book of Lancelot yesterday after a long and hard rough and tumble, very satisfying, and I am quite able to say without vanity that for the first time it makes sense, for that matter that the whole necromantic climate makes sense. I feel that I am getting somewhere at last. Today I have to tie the whole series of quests into one packet, develop two characters, give reasons for the whole thing and finally make a transition into the next Lancelot. But it feels good. The fury of writing has come into it. You will find it very rough but that won’t matter. The essence is there and the fabric. And only you will be aware of the mass of reading that went into it. It is crammed with the medieval, I hope inserted so subtly that it does not protrude as scholarship.

I keep asking you to do things for me and here’s another. I use Cross ballpoints now for writing. They are particularly good for carbons, being thin, firm, and heavy in weight. I have three of them—one pretty badly beat up. I think you know. I bought some refills and Mary Morgan sent more and still I am running out. I love to switch pencils because they seem to tire and need a rest before I do. Could you then send me by air mail two pens and the following refills—8 with the finest line they make, 3 with a medium line, and 2 with a heavy line and all with the blackest ink they make? I’m scared I will run out and I become such a creature of habit when I am writing well that a change irritates me.

Must get to work now. I would like to get the end of the first Lancelot in the mail to Elizabeth before the weekend.

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, AUGUST 9, 1959

The Trip was pretty good, I saw most of the things I wanted—largely having to do with waterways, topography colors, etc. Caerleon was fine and Usk even better.

Also there was the typed first part of Lancelot. And a remarkable good job of typing too. I haven’t checked too closely but it seems very accurate. And yes, I am going to follow the Lancelot now into the second part. I see no reason to break it with the long Tristan. So—any notes you may have will be welcome. I’ll have to read for a few days before I start because I will put Lancelot in no more long and meaningless adventures unless they contribute to the development of the fates of the three people.

TO ERO AND CHASE—SOMERSET, AUGUST 10, 1959

I have been waiting for you to catch up with the anachronisms, Chase. I knew all about them and put them in intentionally but that doesn’t mean they won’t be eliminated. I have thought so much about that. Indeed it is one of the greatest of the many problems, and perhaps this must be dealt with in an opening essay. Where do you place Arthur? Malory believed he lived in the fifth century since he had Galahad take the Siege Perilous in 454 after the birth of Christ. He then proceeded to put his knights in fifteenth-century armor and impose the twelfth-thirteenth-century code of knighthood against a curious depopulated and ruined countryside, which reminds us of England after the first plague and ruined as the Wars of the Roses made it. His cities were fairy-tale, even Walt Disney affairs. But how would you dress a fifth-century dux bellorum, if you chose that time, particularly one who was Roman by breed and background? I know what the late Roman heavy cavalry wore and it had no relation to fifteenth-century cap-a-pie plate armor. The jousting spear was unknown, chivalry had not been invented.

One thing Malory did—he placed his time as BEFORE. Now there is a curious time and one I have tried to adopt. Time interval in the past is a very recent conception. Julius Caesar found no difficulty in being descended from Venus and didn’t feel the event very remote. Herodotus makes his past a flat picture. Galahad is grandson eight times removed of Joseph of Aramathea and Lancelot 7th degree descended from Jesus Christ, although how that was accomplished I do not know. I am not being didactic here. And I may change after discussion. I have the following choices—I can choose a period and stick with it, making this whole work a period piece, which I don’t like because these stories are universal; or I can, as did all the others, make the past a large composite curtain called “before.” Now that is actually how most people see the past. In this pattern the lake village and the Tuscany merchant can both operate because both belong to the “before.” The only things that cannot enter are the things of the “present,” the “now.” But on the other hand the human problems must all be of the now. Malory put all of his fifteenth-century problems in the “before.” And I must put the problems of our time in the “before.” I want you to argue with me about this. Maybe I am wrong. I believe these stories to be moral parables. Aesop put his wisdom and his morals in the mouths of animals. I must put it or rather them in the mouths of knights but it is the present I am writing about just as it was with Malory. Oddly enough, if I make it a period piece, it becomes their problem. But by setting it against a huge, timeless, almost formal curtain of the “before,” I hope to make it doubly true of the “now.” Do you see at all what I mean? And is it valid? I do feel that my introduction should deal with this problem, though. But we will discuss all of this long before we see print.

TO ERO—SOMERSET, AUGUST 22, 1959

The work doesn’t jell. You know that and so do I. It isn’t one piece yet. There is a time when all the preparation is done when it has to take shape and no one can do that but I. It must become one thing and that it hasn’t as yet. Then I got to thinking that I am here and a room here is like a room in New York. I can bite my nails anywhere. And so I am going to spend my last time seeing rather than writing, storing things up. We hope to sail home about October 15 on the Flandre if we can get a reservation. The last two weeks or ten days we will spend in London. Lots I want to see there too. Then I will have a storehouse to draw on. And I am much better when I have seen a place. We’ll do the adjacent areas until September and when the traffic thins we’ll go farther afield. And it will be just the two of us. I can’t travel with anyone else. Then once home, I’ll be on my own. And it is properly called the lonesomest profession in the world. Maybe then it will take form. Who knows? But there is a point beyond which no one can help until it is done. Then of course it is different.

But I think I am right about the storing process. I want to know the whole coastline from the Bristol Channel to Land’s End. I learned so much from seeing the lake and noting the tides. And tides were very important.

Gerald Wellesley called to say that Sir Philip Antrobus, who owns both Stonehenge and Amesbury Abbey (where Guinevere died), is one of his oldest friends and will be delighted to give us the run of the place, which we will do as soon as I have a reply to a note. Now there’s a name, Antrobus. Oxford “Place Names” has no original but says it is hardly English. I’ll look up the family in Burke’s as soon as I can get over to Alex Barclay’s. Might it not be simply the Greek word anthropos, meaning a man? It surely isn’t like any other British name I ever heard. Anyway, we will spend time there probably next week. The whole Salisbury complex fascinates me. It is probably the oldest center of population in all England. Maybe Sir Philip can get me access to Stonehenge to see closely the raising of the fallen stones now being done by the Ministry of Works. I want to see what was underneath. Might be more crossed axes. I will surely take my magnifying glasses so I can inspect closely. Also I want to take a long and critical look at Old Sarum. Sometimes when I squint my eyes I can see things truly. I spent most of the day Elaine was in London up on Cadbury hills wandering alone in the ditches. I know now why Caerleon is where it is but I have never read it. That’s what I mean by tides. If in a boat, you catch an incoming tide at the mouth of the Usk, it will take you to Caerleon on one tide. And the same is true coming back. These things were very important. I know a lot about Camelot since wandering there by myself. It’s a matter of sensing “how it was.”

TO CHASE—SOMERSET, AUGUST 27, 1959

This morning I wrote my ninth letter to the Customs and Excise Office in London re ballpoint pens. I have had to get a license to import, 4 letters, fill in forms, 3 letters. I have now told them if they cannot deliver the damn things to confiscate them and throw them in the ocean. Once you get involved with any government bureau, you are in trouble. I could probably sell my correspondence to Punch.

Yesterday to Amesbury and spent the day with the Antrobus who owns it and until recently owned Stonehenge. He took us all over the place. Nothing left of the early church except suggestions.

Their tradition (family) is that the name Amesbury or Almsbury comes from Ambrosius Aurelius and that this was the seat of that family and hence the property of Arthur, this being the reason Guinevere was sent back to it. In the church there is a carved head they presume to be that of Aurelius Ambrosius, but on looking closely I found a crown of fleur de lys. They are charming people. He is 83 and looks 60. I asked about his odd name, Antrobus. It is a Cheshire family, quite an old baronetcy. He said they thought it might come from entre bais of French origin. He was astonished and interested when I suggested it might be the Greek word anthropos. If El Greco could live in Spain and Xeno in Greece, why not Antropos in England? The idea delighted him.

Going to Glastonbury today to watch more digging. Next week we go south to cover the whole Cornwall complex. We may be gone a week or ten days. All storing up for the future. I am dissatisfied with my whole approach, completely dissatisfied. Maybe something will emerge. I don’t know.

I’ll write later and give you future plans. We plan to leave here Oct. 1, go to London for two weeks, and sail for home on the fifteenth on Flandre if we can get space.

Isn’t it odd that Malory, who knew the route from Amesbury to Glastonbury, didn’t mention Stonehenge although he had to pass it. I think I know why. But will tell you that when I see you.

TO ERO—SOMERSET, SEPTEMBER 10, 1959

It was a very good trip. We were out eight days and I now know the coast from the Thames to the Bristol Channel in great detail. Someday I will do the Welsh coast out around St. David’s Head and on up and some further day the east coast. Coasts seem to be very important to me. I don’t quite know why.

As for my own work—I am completely dissatisfied with it. It just sounds like more of the same, a repetition of things I have written before. Maybe the flame has gone out. That has been known to happen and I don’t know why it should not happen to me. I put things down with excitement and they turn out to be the same old stuff, nothing new or fresh, nothing that hasn’t been said better. Maybe the future is clever little trick pieces with a semblance of originality and not any depth.

Anyway, we can discuss this when I get home. I have my arms full of material and I don’t know what to do with it and I am too old to kid myself about it.

Please tell Chase that I finally got the pens after I had written the final letter telling them to throw them in the sea or anything else they wanted.

TO ERO—LONDON, OCTOBER 2, 1959

Now about work. I have been thinking and thinking and thinking. It seems to me that I might have an answer but I would prefer to tell it to you if possible with some samples. Meanwhile I am inspecting the thought like a woman shopping in Klein’s basement. It would, if I could do it, take care of most of the difficulties. Anyway, I’ll keep going over it.

We are going to the river now. I’ll write again soon.

TO ERO—NEW YORK, (undated?) 1959 ⁽WEDNESDAY⁾

I hope Chase doesn’t feel that I cut him off short. I can’t think of anything until I get this done. Also I stopped in and had long coffee with Pat. He sad-jokingly urges me to get to work on the Malory so he can “live to see it.” And he isn’t really joking, you know. I don’t plan to write a single word on it until after Jan. 1. Too much yet to read and think about quietly. And Chase has such a mass of material for me.

[No correspondence on Morte d’Arthur from end of 1959 to below date.]

TO CHASE—SAG HARBOR, MAY 15, 1965

I thoroughly agree with you that the list of ms., artifacts, and illuminations you have listed in the enclosed would be very valuable and interesting in relation to our work in showing the great distribution of the Arthurian theme as well as its almost universal acceptance, and that at a very early period. You will find these and many more evidences in Italy and I hope you will keep after it.

I have some other things I think it would be valuable for you to do, if it or rather they can be done in the course of your travels in Italy.

It would be good if you could find Professor Sapori and talk with him. He is a Florentine but he has held a history chair in the University of Pisa, and I think still does. As you know, he is the recognized authority in the economics of the Middle Ages, and since Florence was the node of the economic system of all Europe, he is well placed.

One of Sapori’s fields is the relations with the Arab traders of the period of the founding of the Amalfi League and on. As far as I know, it has never been asked whether the Arthurian cycle got a foothold in Islam and/or whether there was a parallel to be discovered. Also whether the legend can be traced to an Indo-European base. We know that the Legend of St. George did come in from the East. One of the first references occurs in Egypt. It would be interesting to see whether there is any Hindi or Sanscritic name which sounds in any way like Arthur or Artu or any variations of this sound.

We know that Arthur was accepted as one of the nine worthies and sometimes of the Three Immortals, but when that came into being I for one do not know. The theme probably got into Sicily with its Norman rulers, but on the other hand it may there have run head on into the same thing coming west from the Arabs.

You should, if you possibly can, get into the Vatican Library. Permission can be got through the United States Information Service. There are very many other things to investigate and I will send them to you as they occur to me.

I hope all goes well with your plans.

TO J.S. FROM CHASE—NEW YORK, JUNE 18, 1965

When we talked in April about the great spread of Arthurian material in all of Europe we mentioned Italy as a country where general knowledge of this material was known to the man in the street as early as A.D. 1100. It was entertainment certainly, but much more.

In May I sent you a brief list of manuscripts and carvings that still survive in Italy. We both felt that if I could see and evaluate some of this material, it would prove to be helpful to you in planning your work on King Arthur. These talks resulted in a trip to Italy, just completed. The trip justifies our concept of a great interest in Arthurian material among the people of the streets as well as the people of the castles. For several centuries Arthurian stories, legends, readings were the number-one entertainment items.

In Rome the carved ivory mirror case is interesting. The best mirror case is in France at the Cluny.

At the Bargello in Florence they have a Sicilian quilt with many Arthurian scenes. This was made about 1395 A.D.

In the Biblioteca Nationale in Florence there is a Venetian manuscript dated 1446, showing many of the Arthurian characters and scenes. This excellent library has more Arthurian material.

In Modena the cathedral has an archivolt over one doorway, showing Arthur, Gawain, and several other Arthurian characters; this doorway according to some scholars is dated as early as 1106. I learned in Italy that microfilm copies of any of this material you may need can be ordered. I have supplied pictures of some of these items and I will show you some additional pictures and notes.

As you have said, “This is a never-ending search.”

TO CHASE—SAG HARBOR, JUNE 22, 1965

I have your letter of recent date together with your report of your findings of Arthurian material on your recent trip to Italy. Very interesting, and I think you are now convinced that the trip was necessary, as I suggested. It is true that most of the lists and pieces of the puzzle are known, but as I have repeatedly pointed out, it is their position, where they are placed architecturally. For example, the placing of Arthur on an arched doorway must be evaluated through the relation to other figures on the same doorway, which is important. At various times, as you know, King Arthur was accepted as one of the “Nine,” the “Seven,” and the “Three.” Relationships of these shifts in importance can only, because of the lack of literature, be understood by dating the buildings where they occur in relation to one another.

I would be glad if you would continue the study of the Sicilian bedspreads again, relating the figures one to another in importance. I have a strong feeling that, as in most symbolic folk art, these relationships hold a code or message which is only mysterious to us because we have not understood them.

All in all, Chase, I think your Italian investigation, while not complete, has opened a door on a new field of research and one which I hope you will want to pursue. As in most things, there are whole areas of interest and importance which have not been inspected with the new eye we are able to employ.

It is my hope that on your next trip you will find your way into the Vatican Library in Rome. As you know—fifteenth-century English gentry almost invariably appealed to the Pope in one controversy or another. I myself found some Malorian material in the Vatican, and I am sure there is more. See (Monks Kirby etc.). To the end that such future work on your part may be facilitated, I propose to write to the Monsignore who superintends the Vatican files to prepare for you permission for access and help in going through the records. I have always found these authorities extremely cooperative in any area except only the Holy Office, which is not in our pasture anyway.

And before I forget it, let me congratulate you on your recent findings. It was not only luck as you protest. It was also learning what to look for and how to see it once you found it.

I can now see light at the end of the passage of this long, long job. I hope we can soon get together and plan the clean-up operation.

Meanwhile get some rest and prepare yourself for future effort. There’s no rest for the curious.

TO ERO—NEW YORK, JULY 8, 1965

I go struggling along with the matter of Arthur. I think I have something and am pretty excited about it but I am going to protect myself by not showing it to anybody so that after I get a stretch of it done, if it seems bad, I can simply destroy it. But right now I don’t think it is bad. Strange and different, but not bad.