Robert E. Howard Days and remembering my 2023 trip

Robert E. Howard Days is here again. The annual gathering to celebrate one of the twin towers of modern fantasy at his home in Cross Plains, TX. And I won't be going. I'm definitely feeling a few pangs of regret and a fair bit of FOMO.

I suppose I'll be there tangentially; David Hardy is bringing a Solomon Kane fanzine in which he asked me to contribute a short essay.

Two years ago I attended the mecca for Howard-heads, staying in a rented home with Deuce Richardson and Ken Lizzi. You can read the sordid tale of our exploits here. If you want more there's an oral history of it here on this episode of the Rogues in the House podcast, where I was joined by fellow guests Jason Waltz and Jason Ray Carney.

I came back loaded up with more loot than a Viking raid of the Irish coast circa 780 AD. 

I do absolutely plan to get back one day, and hopefully soon. One Howard Days is not enough. I'd like to see Howard's home and Higginbothom's again and take in the panels, but also the fantastic human companionship. Shake Will Oliver's hand for example for his herculean task of researching and writing Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. Have a great trip Will! And the Shiner Bock is not drinking itself.

In 2023 I was asked to present a paper at an academic panel. I thought I'd share that here, since I only recited it orally and it has never seen print elsewhere. 

Here is Far Countries of the Mind: The Frontier Fantasy of Robert E. Howard.

2023 Glenn Lord Symposium panel... left to right Dierk Gunther, me, Will Oliver, Jason Ray Carney.

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Far countries of the mind: The frontier fantasy of Robert E. Howard

When Jason asked me to present a paper at the Glenn Lord Symposium, I wanted to do something that would both be on point with the man of the hour, but also spoke to why we need to seek out new experiences and new landscapes.

This is my first trip to Cross Plains, a far country at least to this son of Massachusetts. 

Any Jack London fans here?

Howard certainly was; he referred to London as “this Texan’s favorite writer,” and boasted that London “stands head and shoulders above all other American writers.” 

London is today best known for his novels The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, and short stories like “To Build a Fire.”

London actually did write some notable fantasy, including a book which held Howard in a particular possession: The Star-Rover.

But compared to Howard, London’s literary corpus was principally set here, in a recognizable historical framework contemporary times. The Klondike, and the South China Sea.

Why?

Born in 1876, three decades before Howard, London was able to experience life in a way Howard could not.

London had a literal frontier to set his stories: The Klondike, Yukon territory up in northwest Canada. London experienced North America’s last frontier first-hand. In 1897, a 21-year-old London took part in the gold rush in search of fame and fortune. His adventures in this vast, unforgiving, awe-inspiring expanse of wilderness informed the remainder of his writing career. It was something akin to magic.

In the last chapter of The Call of the Wild, “The Sounding of the Call,” John Thornton, Buck and their companions embark on a long overland voyage in search of a lost mine, pushing the boundaries of the gold rush into uncharted lands. Here it’s as though the characters have left reality and entered the land of myth. A hunt for treasure in a dangerous, unknown, and fantastic world, not so far from the likes of Conan as you might think. 

London’s language here is heightened, rarefied, almost otherworldly. Indulge me this reading:

“When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.

But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the backbone of the continent.

… on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.”

We’re in Holy Grail territory here, or perhaps the land of the Jewels of Gwahlur. Possibly.

Born 30 years after London, Howard lived in a world in which the frontier, at least in the continental U.S., had closed. In 1906, the west was only recently settled but was settled nonetheless. After Wounded Knee the days of Indian raids were largely over. 

In Howard’s time the “gold rush” was not individuals seeking wealth, but oil companies setting up shop in Texas and pumping the land of black gold, leaving broken bodies and despoiled land in their wake. 

Faced with this unsatisfying reality Howard turned his typewriter to stories set in the world of fantasy, where a frontier of the mind could still be found.

The Hyborian Age is Howard’s impossibly ancient re-creation of the western, when the entire world was still a frontier to be explored, great plains and vistas of wild lands to be traveled and settled, forgotten cities and their riches waiting to be discovered and plundered, and decadent cities and civilizations ripe for treading under the sandaled feet of barbaric races.

It was also a place where life had meaning, because it was put to the test.

Back to London, in his story “In a Far Country” two civilized slackers serving as part of an expedition in the Klondike opt to leave their party and hole up for the worst of the winter in a cabin. They succumb to their own sloth and the dark isolation of the terrible cold north. It’s dark and terrible (and wonderful).

From "In a Far Country":

“When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit under the new restrictions which they do not understand. This chafing is bound to act and react, producing divers evils and leading to various misfortunes. It were better for the man who cannot fit himself to the new groove to return to his own country; if he delay too long, he will surely die.”

This was Howard’s model; these lands were hard, and broke many, but they were a testing ground, where life was vivid and real, and you could emerge from it transformed if it did not destroy you.

Artist credit: Alex Kerr.

Being of Texas Howard has always been a western writer, even if not always recognized as such. According to Glenn Lord (and you knew I had to reference him here), Howard wrote 41 westerns over his career, all but four prior to 1933. These include Weird Westerns like “The Hoofed Thing,” “The Black Hound of Death,” his humorous Breckenridge Elkins stories, and even pulpy historical fiction like “The Vultures of Whapeton.” His “Marchers of Valhalla” takes place in a prehistoric Texas. 

Karl Edward Wagner in Echoes of Valor described Howard’s work a “fusion of Old World Myth and Old West Legend.” Mark Finn has made mighty inroads with Blood and Thunder. 

But mostly he’s known as the Conan guy.

Another Howard scholar who sought to rectify this narrow view was the late great Steve Tompkins. In “How the West Was Wondered” in the April 2005 The Cimmerian journal, Tompkins quipped, “Robert E. Howard’s sense of humor could be plenty dark, and we can but hope that he would have been amused by his status as a perennial absentee, a Nowhere Man of Texas Literature. He has become a figure of world-historical significance in modern fantasy without ever figuring in the literary annals of his home state.”

Tompkins essay includes a William Carlos Williams citation. Williams described America as being the perhaps the only nation capable of flooding the civilized world with “rich regenerative violence” because of its frontier legacy. 

And when we see the Picts flooding over the walls of Valenso’s stockade at the end of “The Black Stranger,” we understand.

Howard had no contemporary frontier in which to tell his stories, like London had. But Howard’s violent fantasy frontiers regenerated reader’s minds that were no longer offered the possibility of somewhere else.

The Hyborian Age became Howard’s Far Country, a place where he could hurl off the shackles of modern courtesies, conformity, and expectation, through larger-than-life figures like Kull and Conan. 

We need a frontier. I sometimes wonder if our lack of unclaimed land is at the root of our current national and international unrest. At least here in the U.S. we don’t do well with restrictions and imposed scarcity. 

We feel the need for frontiers without, and we feel them within. Howard needed them, something beyond the close walls of his Cross Plains bedroom, crying out for individual liberty, the only thing worth a damn.

The Hyborian Age is Howard’s impossibly ancient re-creation of the western, when the entire world was still a frontier to be explored, great plains and vistas of wild lands to be traveled and settled, forgotten cities and their riches waiting to be discovered and plundered, and decadent cities and civilizations ripe for treading under the sandaled feet of the barbaric races.  In “Beyond the Black River” a small group of settlers struggle to make a living on the edge of a vast, dark Pictish wilderness, and is essentially a western masquerading as a weird tale. Consciously or unconsciously the west crept into his fantasy, which lent them much of their unique character.

As has been well documented, Howard began to turn away from fantasy, and toward stories of the old west, specifically the history of Texas. Howard often waxed poetically of these bygone times. In a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft he relayed a road trip he and good friend Truett Vinson took to the wild and isolated frontier village of Lincoln, home to the infamous and bloody Lincoln County War. Howard described his arrival as stepping into an elder age where old ghosts stalked its dusty, haunted streets, and of catching a glimpse of the once limitless frontier in the open desert plains west of the Pecos River.

In this old town of ghosts he saw the frontier.

Had he lived longer he would have written these stories; while this assertion involves some degree of speculation his own words layer that assertion with more than a veneer of Truth. I offer this passage from one of his letters:

Well they have gone into the night, a vast and silent caravan, with their buckskins and their boots, their spurs and their long rifles, their wagons and their mustangs, their wars and their loves, their brutalities and their chivalries, they have gone to join their old rivals, the wolf, the panther and the Indian, and only a crumbling ‘dobe wall, a fading trail, the breath of an old song, remain to mark the roads they travelled. But sometimes when the night wind whispers forgotten tales through the mesquite and the chaparral, it is easy to imagine that once again the tall grass bends to the tread of a ghostly caravan, that the breeze bears the jingle of stirrup and bridle-chain, and that spectral camp-fires are winking far out on the plains.

We would have had some amazing western literature from Howard’s typewriter, blending poetic flourishes with realism. Possibly tales about Billy the Kid or John Wesley Hardin, of whose tales he regaled Lovecraft at length. Maybe something as poignant as Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (McMurtry was a Howard fan, by the way), blending virtue and violence and an unflinching look at what a cattle drive might actually look like, when aid was far away and Indians and cattle-rustlers stood in for Picts and Zamorian thieves.

Howard’s mind was in a far country; maybe he tarried there too long. 

Sadly we don’t have his great tale of Texas. But what we do have are his stories of impossibly distant frontier life, in a far country, Beyond the Black River.

Some further thoughts on generative AI art

We’re getting increasingly embedded into machinery. The future is almost certainly cyborg, flesh and circuitry melded together. It is already happening but will occur on a rapid scale.

What about art? Why shouldn’t art be the same? 

We’ve already seen this trend. Even before generative AI, many/most artists were using advanced digital tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Writers were using grammar and spelling checker tools embedded into word processing software.

You can make the case that with gen AI nothing has really changed. Others are already making the case by just doing the thing; putting out art that is obviously AI generated.

I saw a recent post in a sword-and-sorcery Facebook group by an author promoting a new book with the most generic AI cover I’ve ever seen. I’m not going to link to it, but it’s obvious, and terrible. A search of said author’s website reveals everything about it including text is all AI.

Points for brazenness? 

What’s so wrong about generative AI, anyway?

My personal belief is that using AI in heavy quantities no longer makes the art yours, nor you an artist. At some point the credit must go to the machine. And the machines are not a neutral piece of technology. Nor are the companies programming the AIs and their leadership, who make very suspect ethical decisions.

Beyond these very real concerns is an even bigger underlying question: What is the purpose of AI generated art itself?

The question I have for heavy AI users is, do you see the same problem as I? Why do I need to bother reading (or certainly paying) for your art when I can just log into ChatGPT and have it create images and text that I prompt? 

Maybe that is the future of art—we just create our own, staring into our screens and having it create exactly what we want, when we want it. 

I don’t love the thought of this future.

When I view art, part of the experience—for me, it might differ for you—is engaging with the artist, too. What motivated them to create this piece, this way, with this mood, this viewpoint? How did Tolkien’s WWI experience influence The Lord of The Rings, how did the Texas landscape influence REH? 

I like engaging with unique visions from the minds of individuals. The Mad Max films look and feel a certain way, say certain things, because of George Miller.

It makes art unpredictable. Sometimes I don’t like the output, but that’s part of the experience. 

All of this is lost in the slop of a machine, which is a giant aggregator. We’re no longer engaging with a unique individual, or a discrete group of individuals (cast, director, and crew). We’re engaging with machine modeled output and algorithms. 

For all its limitations and mistakes generative AI is a massive leap forward from the tools described above. 

So what of its output?

I don’t like it. If it has a unique character, its soullessness. I will never, ever buy a book using obvious generative AI. If I’m being fully honest, I think less of people that publish it. It is giving me serious pause about buying anything written after 2021, which makes me sad.

It also makes me angry, because it’s an unearned and lazy shortcut.

If you can’t write well, you must learn to do so. If you can’t draw, learn the skill. Or, pay a fellow professional. If you can’t pay them, offer up some service in exchange they can’t perform. Bartering is profoundly human, accepting the output of a machine, Faustian. You’re undercutting the whole enterprise of art when you do this. Because again, art produced so cheap and easily is not worth consuming.

But being kind, and on the backend of a long career in publishing, I also say, YMMV. I might be wrong about this. Perhaps gen AI is bringing a new type of art into being, man-machine art. Perhaps it gives people without the means to publish the ability to do so. Perhaps we all might be using generative AI every day with the same ubiquity as email. 

I have used and continue to use AI for certain tasks in my own work. I know its power, I know its limitations. And I continue to wrestle with the morality of it all. To quote Danny Glover I’m perhaps too old for this shit. To understand it, to embrace it, to appreciate it.

But I don’t think I am wrong. I believe there is something deeply wrong here.

A D-Day reflection

June 6 will forever be D-Day.

I revere Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. But June 6 stands out, perhaps because it’s tied to a specific event and time. A single day. 

The longest day. 

June 6, 1944 was a long one.

Years ago I met a gentlemen on the deck of the decommissioned aircraft carrier U.S.S. Midway, a floating museum in the San Diego bay. Here’s the pic, of he and I. His name was Bob Watson, and he was in one of the first waves to hit the beach on that fateful day.

Bob had with him a photo collage that included handshakes with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, taken on the eve of the debut of Saving Private Ryan. The two legends interviewed Bob as part of their research for the film. 

Spielberg later asked Watson what he liked and disliked about Ryan. "The landing scene was accurate, though not quite as bloody as what really happened that day,” he said.

Yikes. 

In general Bob thought it was an excellent film and a compelling portrayal of the war. His sole criticism? "I told Spielberg: 'Who were these guys (actors)? They're too old. All the guys I knew were almost all 18, 19 years old.'" 

Bob was just 18 when he hit the carnage on the beach. The thought of a bunch of 18-year-olds whose first experience of combat was on Omaha is sobering and horrifying. 

The logistics of June 6, 1944 defy belief. I struggle with creating an email campaign for a webinar; can you imagine planning a seaborne invasion of Europe against an entrenched Nazi war machine? It makes my problems feel … ridiculous. 

My struggles are real but I’m glad I have this struggle, and not the one that confronted the allies that day, long ago. Your troubles are real, and worth solving. But when you look back at June 6 you also realize they’re not really that big, and some of them are not really problems at all.

Walking into withering MG-42 machine gun fire without cover, waist deep in water that is quickly turning to blood? Major problem. The best way to visualize this is to watch the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and the landings on Omaha Beach. 

I also recommend “Band of Brothers” which tells the story of Easy Company, the paratroopers who landed behind the lines shortly after midnight on June 6. Over 18,000 men of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the British 6th Airborne Division were dropped into Normandy, landing about 12:15 a.m.

That was just the beginning of a very long day.

Bob passed away in January 2024. If you know anyone left alive from that day, or WWII more broadly, give them your thanks. 

Sword-and-sorcery pinball machines are fucking cool

That’s the post.

I love the pairing of sword-and-sorcery aesthetic with machines of glass and steel. My idle daydream is to acquire a couple. Given the time and money I’d build a dedicated gaming den, dominated by … Gorgar.

I’ve never played this but chanced upon it in a happy internet search and fell in love with this and a bunch of other games that hold a dim place in my Gen-X memories.

What’s not to love about Gorgar? Hot chick in a bikini on a bloody altar? Check. Skulls. Muscular warriors. And giant snakes everywhere (a meme has been circulating that sword-and-sorcery is when the snakes are big). “Beware of the Pit.”

And of course, Gorgar himself, a red skinned demon with a menacing bass voice. The world’s first-ever talking pinball machine.

Then there’s Sorcerer. Seriously, look at this thing: https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/sorcerer/gallery It’s got that stoned 70s vibe, an image you once saw airbrushed on the side of a van. Hard to rip your eyes away.

Centaur (1981) is absolutely balls-out as well. Take a listen to the voice and sound effects, a robotic “Destroy Centaur!” Incredible.

Even cooler, the centaur isn’t half man, half horse, it’s a half man, half motorbike. Wielding an axe. This can be none more metal.

This dude has it going on with Centaur in his game room (and don’t think I don’t see that collected edition of Captain America).

Apparently player demand for Centaur led to Centaur 2. This video gives a better look at the complex clockwork mechanisms underpinning the game. Pretty freaking cool.

A few others include

Paragon.

Black Knight (1980). 

Seawitch.

Grand Lizard.

(edit) and of course Lost World, which I once highlighted here).

Absent any space restrictions I’d include Hercules, allegedly the world’s largest pinball machine. Which is reportedly lousy to play but sizewise it goes to 11. 

Today everyone is playing fully immersive MMORPGs with photorealistic graphics and novel-quality storylines. I have no problem with this, even though I gave up video games long ago. But there is something about real steel and glass, painted cabinets and game boards and lightbulbs and rubber bumpers. The tactile, analog, reality of these games, that have huge appeal.

Further there is something about the aesthetic of the late 70s/very early 80s games in particular that grip me. The colors have that Frank Frazetta/Jeff Jones muddiness/dun pallor to them, yellows and tans mixed with splashes of bright red and pale gold. As you slide into the mid-and late 80s the cabinets are brighter, a bit more comic book bright and garish. There are still amazing games here but just a little bit outside of what I’m looking for. And while I’m no pinball historian the video game boom of the early 80s dimmed this golden age of the silver ball.

By the way this theoretical S&S game room is not restricted to pinball. I’d have Heavy Metal, Fire and Ice, Conan the Barbarian 1982 and Thundarr the Barbarian playing in a continuous loop on a projection screen. Perhaps Gauntlet in the corner, or Joust. And of course, a bar with a couple kegs of beer tapped 24-7. Which is dangerous … but sword-and-sorcery is not for the faint of heart, and ale must be quaffed in quantity. 

My tastes are simple, Conan with a slight tweak:

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I play pinball, and am content.”

Three things

Walk with me...

Thing 1

I just finished re-reading The Long Walk after a long walk of my own, years and years of life since my last reading decades ago. Some thoughts.

We get no details on why the Walk came to be, just a couple scant suggestions. Like this: “In the old days, before the Change and the Squads, when there were still millionaires, they used to set up foundations and build libraries and all that good shit.” There is a reference to a war fought against a nuclear-armed Germany in 1953. So it’s not set in an apocalyptic future but some alternate history, perhaps one in which Germany develops an atomic weapon before 1945 and greatly extended the second world war. The result is a terrible totalitarian 20th century where the country is so lost and the future so bereft of hope that it turns to horrible death-fueled game shows to forget.

We don’t know, and I like it this way. Given the many chapter epigraph references to the Price is Right, prize fighting, and the Ten-Thousand Dollar Pyramid, I’m sure King was inspired by the game show craze sweeping the nation in the 1970s.

Things haven’t changed all that much. We all seem to be walking around in a fog, distracted just enough by digital spectacle to ignore the real horrors going on around us, as well as our own impending deaths. Just scroll an Instagram feed.

The Long Walk is an extended metaphor on dying. We’re all on the same Walk, two minutes from a ticket out (Walkers who slow their pace get three warnings before they are shot dead). That brief space tracks somewhat closely to what happens when you stop breathing. We’re separated from the other side by a thin margin. So we walk, and everyone around us drops off, one by one, until its our turn.

I know the literal, physical territory of this Walk, I was just on it, yesterday, when my wife and I had a nice dinner in Portsmouth, NH. The Walk starts in Maine, crosses into New Hampshire, and a skeletal handful make it all the way to my home state of Massachusetts. Weird, wild. Between King and H.P. Lovecraft New England takes a back seat to no other region of the United States when it comes to horror.

I really do enjoy King, in particular his old stuff. Say what you want about his long-windedness, his occasional closure whiffs and bad endings, and his lack of philosophical depth (King himself describes his work as the literary equivalent of a cheeseburger). I’d be hard-pressed to think of another writer who can so sweep you up into a story and hold you spellbound until the end. That’s true talent.

Thing 2

I’ve seen a few places—messageboards, articles, reddit threads—refer to the sword-and-sorcery definition I offered in Flame and Crimson as “seven points,” which makes it seem like a cumbersome checklist that must be met.

This is not correct, because it’s not what I wrote. 

What I wrote was, sword-and-sorcery often contains these handful of elements; it does not need all of them nor any precise proportion. But shorn of any it’s hard to picture anyone calling said story S&S.

I kind of like this, it seems to me flexible and elegant, forgiving but not without boundaries. A precise definition of S&S is not really possible, IMO. When you look at how the subgenre evolved it coalesced over three decades and in conversations with authors and a fan community. It has changed and will continue to evolve. So instead of a precise definition I offered up a constellation of tropes. With the caveat that I am just a guy and YMMV.

See some of my other musings here.

But for some reason this seems to be a continued source of confusion and occasionally complaint. Some feel the need to simplify the definition, boil and boil down like maple syrup in some type of purity contest, until the definition of S&S might fit on the head of a pin.

If you must insist…I can’t boil it down to one word but I’ll give you two: Pulp Fantasy.

I am this target audience.

Thing 3

I mentioned Instagram further up; yesterday that platform triangulated me with precision, locked in with unerring heat detecting radar, launched its missile, and hit me with a dead-on bullseye.

The missile: A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap. Signed by director Rob Reiner.

How did I not know this existed? The ad hit my feed. I preordered.

The takeaway: Algorithms work, and I too can be reeled in like a fish on a line. 

Gods of War, Def Leppard

Electric guitars playing in the right tone can produce in me a feeling that has no words. Its like I've entered into a new dimension adjacent to this one, transported to a better world.

Steve Clark's guitar work on "Gods of War" produces this effect in me.

You never really hear much about this track. Although its on the wildly popular Hysteria, its greatly overshadowed by the lineup of mega hits on the rest of the album. Buried in the middle, an afterthought amid the seven (!) singles that dominated the charts.

But I find the guitar tone on "Gods of War" impeccable ... nostalgic, epic, beautiful.

Here's a live performance from 1988. Give it a listen and let me know if you agree. See 1:27 mark.

Sad that Clark left us just three years later but this is a legacy piece of work.

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck, a review

John Steinbeck is rightly remembered these days as a Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Grapes of Wrath and secondarily, East of Eden; almost no one talks about his foray into Arthurian myth.

Yet his heart lay in time-shrouded tales of questing knights and the shining castle on a hill. Steinbeck was ensorcelled by the stories of King Arthur his entire life. They were his gateway to a true love of reading at age 9, and from youth all the way to his death in 1968 the stories of King Arthur were never far from his mind. 

Steinbeck embarked on his own spin on Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, writing The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights in a two-year period from 1958-59. Sadly the book was never finished … but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it.

You should. I just did, and I’m better for it.

The King Arthur stories are not (just) stories of dudes in armor riding off on great quests. They are part of our western literary canon, but even more so, part of the fabric of western myth. They instruct us how to behave, but also where we fall short.

And so we have passages like this (cue Nicol Williamson); not a celebration of our species’ predilection for violence, but certainly a good as explanation of any as to why we’re still fighting wars in the 21st century in the shadow of millions of heaped corpses still fresh from the 20th: 

“Then Arthur learned, as all leaders are astonished to learn, that peace, not war, is the destroyer of men; tranquility rather than danger the mother of cowardice, and not need but plenty brings apprehension and unease. Finally he found that the longed-for peace, so bitterly achieved, created more bitterness than ever did the anguish of achieving it.”

Here is Steinbeck’s Merlin, wise beyond comprehension to the point of being able to see the future, yet he too is subject to the lusts that rule men, falling helplessly under the binding spell of Nyneve:

“In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins. I have told you your certain future, my lord, but knowing will not change it by a hair. When the time comes, your feeling will conduct you to your fate.”

This is a tale of many characters but Launcelot is the central figure; Launcelot who is the best of all knights, but of course with a fatal flaw; who despite his love for Guinevere wins every bit of our admiration because when asked if he is content to be the world’s perfect knight the question nearly splits him in two before he regains his composure. This internal struggle is rendered beautifully by Steinbeck:

A black rage shook Sir Launcelot, drew his lips snarling from his teeth. His right hand struck like a snake at his sword hilt and half the silver blade slipped from the scabbard. Lyonel felt the wind of his death blow on his cheek. 

Then, in one man he saw a combat more savage than ever he had seen between two, saw wounds given and received and a heart riven to bursting. And he saw victory, too, the death of rage and the sick triumph of Sir Launcelot, the sweat-ringed, fevered eyes hooked like a hawk’s, the right arm leashed and muzzled while the blade crept back to its kennel.

Lancelot and Guinevere.

Launcelot is if not the “greatest” knight the most sympathetic, because he wrestles with his conscience and occasionally fails, yet never relents. Unlike the perfect Galahad who recovers the grail, for Lancelot every day is a battle that leaves him bone-weary, either with foes eager to test their mettle or against his own weaknesses—vanity, violence, disloyalty. And yet we love him for it, as does his young cousin and knight in training Sir Lyonel:

Sir Lyonel knew that this sleeping knight would charge to his known defeat with neither hesitation nor despair and finally would accept his death with courtesy and grace as though it were a prize. And suddenly Sir Lyonel knew why Lancelot would gallop down the centuries, spear in rest, gathering men’s hearts on his lance head like tilting rings. He chose his side and it was Lancelot’s.

This is a book of quests, and one of my favorites is when Lancelot confronts a broken Kay, who used to be a great champion but is now a shell of his former self. Lancelot asks him why he has fallen; Kay explains the weight of responsibility, and the mundane, soul-crushing management required of a kingdom:

“Granite so hard that it will smash a hammer can be worn away by little grains of moving sand. And a heart that will not break under the great blows of fate can be eroded by the nibbling of numbers, the creeping of days, the numbing treachery of littleness, of important littleness. I could fight men but I was defeated by marching numbers on a page.”

I suspect a modern office middle manager, or Kull at his writing desk, would be nodding his head sagely. Lancelot does as any good friend should; he dons Kay’s armor and shield and rides out to knock a hundred men off their horses and send them groveling back to Arthur’s court to submit to the queen as Kay’s prizes, unbeknownst they were fighting the greatest knight in the land.

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights is of course notably unfinished, published posthumously in 1976; leading one to speculate. Did Steinbeck finally lose interest in Arthur? Was it becoming tedium, because the story was not his and he knew how it would end? Could he not bear to engage in the full measure of tragedy in a time when he and his wife were reportedly at their happiest?

We don’t have an answer. In its early stages Steinbeck described it as the greatest work of his life. Keep in mind this was late in his career, AFTER all his major works were completed.

It is perhaps fitting the story ends with a kiss, perhaps the most passionate and illicit in western literature. From there it’s all downhill for Camelot. Perhaps Steinbeck did not wish to deal with the full measure of the tragedy. Which seems unlikely given the tragedy in his better known literary works, but Le Morte D’Arthur is the big daddy of tragedy.

We can only guess. But I’m glad we have what we have. Highly recommended.

A few notes: Because it was unfinished and Steinbeck indicated that it took him some time to get down the style, he intended to go back and do rewrites. As such it’s a uneven to start and does not truly get going until the Morgan Le Fay chapter about 100 pages in. Up until then it feels like a beat-for-beat translation of Le Morte D’Arthur with updated diction, but at that point takes on something of the pace of a modern novel.

A perilous quest...

Most critics then and now did not care for the book, mainly because they were expecting something much more Steinbeck and not a faithful adaptation/quasi translation of Malory. Steinbeck’s agent was puzzled upon seeing an early draft, leaving him stung by the reaction. Perhaps they were expecting a family of migrants on a dusty trek/quest to California, riding flatbed trucks instead of chargers? That does sound cool come to think of it but not what we get here. I suspect Steinbeck held Le Morte D’Arthur in such reverence he found no need to try to improve upon it; he set out to tell the same story in plainer English and IMO for what we have, succeeded. 

He might also have felt like the original stories were being lost. In an age of radical literary experimentation and increasing Hollywood exploitation (then and now) he was not wrong. 

My edition has a wonderful series of letters at the back, most from Steinbeck to his literary agent or his longtime friend. These offer terrific insight into his first-person research that included trips to Wales, Glastonbury, Tintagel and other places associated with Arthur. We get valuable insight into Steinbeck’s writing process, including his struggles to find the right literary voice and approach, eventually settling on “a close-reined, taut, economical English, unaccented and unlocalized … it just as simple as that and I think it is the best prose I have ever written,” Steinbeck says. And everywhere his love of Malory that shines through any faults he found in the original. Steinbeck was very well versed in the old stories and I enjoyed reading his own analyses of the myth, as here where he compares the stories to modern televised westerns:

And it can be shown and it will be shown that the myth of 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.

Steinbeck felt the profound human truths at the heart of the story, truths which transcend time and place, and sought to preserve it whenever possible. This is not George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, it is something much older and in my opinion, far deeper. It will endure the ages.  To close with Steinbeck: “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.”

***

A few other thoughts about Arthuriana.

When talking about the north stars of fantasy most seem to skip the King Arthur stories. If I had to speculate, it’s because they occupy some liminal space between mythology, history, and national epic. You can’t really compare Sir Thomas Malory with Dunsany or Tolkien, Howard or Leiber, Lewis or LeGuin, Martin or Rowling.

But of course they are largely fantasy, replete with spells and giants and magic swords. And if you choose to classify them as such, it’s hard to think of anything more fantastic.