Dem ol' debil round table blues

renounced for rational renderings of them in modern terms; we read The Grapes of Wrath instead of King Arthur because we can understand a character who blurts, "Well, me and Aggie Wainwright, we figgers to git married we are an' they ain't nobody can stop us!," better than one who exclaims "dayle I sholde have kyssed the...sispyte of Quene Gwenyver." The first is immediate, the second quaint.

Quaint and somehow childish, it sounds to the sophisticated modern ear, to say "I should have kyssed the." We read The Grapes of Wrath instead of Arthurian tales also because the 20th-century novel seems more logical, more intellectual, more "grown-up." The nakedness of Arthurian events seems too simple, the characters sound naive. But the characters and events of Arthur's court are in fact as psychologically complex and possible as those of any novel. If they are considered simplistic, bare chains of events (Lancelot loves Gwenyver but she's married to his lord, Arthur), its's because modern readers and rewriters faced with the intricacy of Middle English have simplified the idiom to an extreme, ignored the subtleties in style and reduced the work to the lowest common denominator of its plot. In this shape, King Arthur is kid stuff.

As a kid, John Steinbeck read the Arthurian legend in the Caxton edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Grappling with the language, he met the tale on its own terms, with few concessions to propriety or adult ideas of logic. His resulting love for the legend prompted him to return to it again and again, digging up the sources and scholars of Malory. Finally, in 1956, he approached Malory with greater daring.

"I wanted to bring to present-day usage the stories of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table," he says in the introduction to The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, an unfinished reworking of Malory posthumously published by his wife and his editor, Chase Horton. "My purpose will be to put it into a language which is understandable and acceptable to a modern-day reader, Steinbeck wrote to Elizabeth Otis, his literary agent. "The work applications in the present day and roots in our libing literature."

Steinbeck only partially succeeded in bringing Arthur to the audience he claims he wrote for: "those of today impatient with the difficulties of Malory's spelling and use of archaic words." Throughout The Acts Steinbeck searches for a voice in which to recount the stories; he finds several, none of which are adequate in themselves, no two of which mesh harmoniously on the page. The result is a composite and uneven piece of work, by turns news analysis, history, psychological explanation, novel, poetry and myth. Malory managed to weave these threads together, but Steinbeck hasn't.

Steinbeck has no trouble speaking in any of his voices. He can make medieval diction comprehensible yet not catchy: Arthur charges to a knight's rescue and offers: "My old friend, it seems to me that you could use a horse. Please use this one." This is characterization of great subtlety, extracting Malory's essence and couching it in terms that are not fixed by time or place. Steinbeck's descriptions can reach the same crystal perfection; a day painted as "dream-darkened" is captured in one adjective.

But too often, in trying to make Malory understandable, Steinbeck explains away all the magic, substituting psychology for enchantment, and sociology for mystery. The frequent analysis of motivation, such as "When he (Lancelot) was confronted with treachery, Lancelot grew frightened, and only then could be cruel," are glib and gratuitous.

Steinbeck's elaborations on Malory are often efforts to rationalize the characters or events. These explanations weaken the style of the book, sap its pace and deprive its people of any life undiagrammed by an omniscient author.

With few (though brilliant) exceptions, Steinbeck gets in the way of Malory. Undecided as to what Malory was writing or why (as the speculations excerpted at the end of the book reveal), Steinbeck is unsure what role he himself should play. Periodically he steps into that of a chronicler ("Now go we to the adventures of") but for most of the book he has no persona. Rather he looks at the events from a modern novelists' distance. Phrases like "The kind was chuckling" show Steinbeck watching the action take place from another plane.

More even than his uncertain conception of Malory, Steinbeck's misunderstanding of the nature of the legend itself creates problems in the work. He seems to have had little grasp of the innate flaws in the characters of Arthur, Lancelot or Gwenyver that led them inevitably to their end. He wrote to Otis, "Why this work should come to be known as the Morte d'Arthur I will never know." The comment indicates that he didn't see the story as a series of sevents leading to a climactic and all-encompassing death, a statement about human life of the utmost finality. He read Malory not as drama or myth, but as fable.

"I believe these stories to be moral parables," he wrote to Otis just before he gave up working on The Acts, in August 1959. On this assumption, he moralizes the Arthurian legends--changing them from tales to lessons, from eternal image to example. Retelling the tragedy of Arthur, or that of Lancelot, he optimistically leaves loopholes by which these characters could have altered their destiny without changing their own nature. Such rationalizing, moralizing and ordering destroys the essence of tragedy, castrating the work in much the same way that his diagramming of the characters' motives deprives them of life.

Steinbeck has tried to feel the Arthurian apestry, not just to look at it from a distance. The Acts tries to re-weave the fabric of this legend in colorfast and pre-shrunk threads of modern idiom. Casting nostalgia aside, one must admit that any tapestry furnishing the room of a modern mind must be able to go in the wash, to be treated as something useable and abusable, not as a museum piece. Steinbeck has come a long way towards making Arthur wash.

But he didn't have quite enough faith in the old pattern, so he re-ordered it to make more sense. The Acts, though a noble effort, fails because Steinbeck refuses to accept the irrationalities of questing struggle and fate in Arthur's day, and by implication in ours. But if we are to understand Arthur and the Arthurian myth, it will be not with intellect but with emotion, with that part of us which is unashamedly irrational and which, without needing to know what "sytthen" or "clypped" signify, comprehends the desperate love of the woman pouring out her desire to Lancelot.