There are certain books we consider "MOTEV books" - titles she has thrust upon us as worthy for one reason or another over the years. You know, things like The Magic Mountain, The Man Without Qualities - light reading. Back in the early 1980s, she became aware of the release of John Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights - Steinbeck's incomplete attempt to render the Arthurian tales in "plain present-day speech for my own young sons" - which she brought home for us, commencing a lifelong love of both Arthur and Steinbeck.
Unlike Christopher Paolini, who found Malory first and has contributed a thoughtful introduction to Viking's brand new reissue, Steinbeck brought us to Malory, and then to everything from T.H. White to one of the earliest graphic novels (when they were still called comics), Camelot 3000. But the Steinbeck has always retained a place of affection in our library. He worked on it intermittently from 1956 to 1959 but only got as far as the Lancelot tales before abandoning the work, "just as he seemed to hit his stride," according to Paolini's introduction. (We like the opening Merlin chapter more than Paolini seems to.) As for what brought Steinbeck to halt, Paolini notes that his correspondence with his agent and editor "indicates that he had difficulty finding a unifying theme or focal point of the story."
As is the way with incomplete works, the value of this one is both literary and forensic. (Think The Last Tycoon - much speculation of what might had been.) What makes this book especially interesting is the Appendix, which contains Steinbeck's correspondence with his agent Elizabeth Otis and his editor Chase Horton. And so it was a book that simultaneously opened two magical worlds for us - the world of Arhturian romances, and the equally mysterious world of the working writer. Here is Steinbeck to Otis on November 11, 1956:
I am going to start the Morte immediately. Let it be private between us until I get it done. It has all the old magic.
Secrets, magic, the mystery of the creative act. We were hooked right away. From the outset, Steinbeck was determined not to talk down to his audience.
There are several things I will not do. I will not clean it up. Pendragon did take the wife of Cornwall, and that is the way it was. I think children not only understand these things but accept them until they are confused by moralities which try by silence to eliminate reality.
In a December 1956 letter to his agent, Steinbeck discusses the problems to tracking down arcane words in a pre-Google age:
There are, however, in the Winchester manuscript a large number of words which, while I can pick out the general meaning, may have special meanings too. It is difficult to find lexicons or dictionaries of the older languages. However, I have the library and Fannie working on this and I hope to have some material this week.
Steinbeck never had illusions about the enormity of the task he'd undertaken, telling Horton in an April 1957 letter that "People ask me when I will have the Morte thing ready and I choose a conservative figure and say ten years. The size of the job, however, makes me feel that this might be a conservative estimate." Then, in July of 1957 Steinbeck made a trip to England to visit some of the relevant Arthurian sites:
If we start northward on the fifteenth of July, that will give us ten days, we would go up through Warwickshire and to the wall and then when we had made our bows to Hadrian move gradually down the western country to see some of Wales and also Glastonbury and Tintagel, etc.
By March 1958 Steinbeck was ready to start writing and wrote to Horton:
Yesterday, I wrote the very first lines of the book, either for the first printed page or endpaper, which I here enclose.
I guess this is the first time I have ever written the first part first. It is probably the only passage in the whole thing which will be written in fifteenth-century spelling.
The section in question ended up as the dedication of the book, signed by "John Steinbeck of Monterey, Knight.
By August of 1959, he was struggling with the work, and complained in a letter to Otis that "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." Finally, at the end of 1959 correspondence on the subject of Arthur abruptly ends and is not taken up again until 1965, when the material appears to have reawoken something in Steinbeck. In the book's closing, hopeful letter dated July 1965, he writes to Otis:
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.
Other letters in the Appendix attest to Steinbeck's detailed research, his struggle to grasp the various conflicting historical and literary threads of the great legends. These alone are worth the price of this fine book, but at its heart lie the tales themselves which resonate through all ages and countries. Paolini is right to observe that "Malory's legacy surrounds us," and as Steinbeck modestly observed in his introduction, "I believe the stories are great enough to survive my tampering, which at besr will make the history available to more readers, and at worst can't hurt Malory very much."