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 i
s 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--
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights Page 35
