Arthur Rex
Authors: Thomas Berger
A Legendary Novel
Thomas Berger
TO MICHAEL AND ARLETTE HAYES
I. Of Uther Pendragon and the fair Ygraine; and how Arthur was born.
III. How King Arthur had converse with a lady, and who she was.
IV. How King Arthur took a wife and acquired the Round Table.
V. Of Sir Gawaine and King Pellinore; and how Merlin was assotted with the Lady of the Lake.
VI. How Sir Tristram fought with the Morholt; and how he met La Belle Isold.
VIII. How Sir Launcelot rescued Guinevere; and of their criminal friendship.
XI. How Gareth fought four felonious knights each of another color; and how he fell in love.
XII. How Sir Accolon, who was assotted with Morgan la Fey, made an attempt on King Arthur’s life.
XIII. Of Sir Tristram and La Belle Isold; and how King Mark discovered their love.
XV. How Sir Tristram was married to Isold of the White Hands; and of what happened then.
XVII. Of Percival and his sheltered upbringing; and how he became a knight.
XVIII. How Mordred came to Camelot and was knighted by his father the king.
XXI. How Mordred stabbed King Arthur from behind; and how the battle began.
XXIII. Of the opinion of some men as to the whereabouts of King Arthur.
Of the thousands of books that have come and gone or remained during the more than eight decades I have maintained a personal library, I cherish none more dearly than
King Arthur and His Knights
(“Based on Morte d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory; Compiled and Arranged by Elizabeth Lodor Merchant; Illustrated by Frank Godwin”), published by the John C. Winston Company in 1927.
On the title page, Ms. Merchant is identified as the head of the Department of English at William Penn High School in Philadelphia. Most of Mr. Godwin’s enchanting illustrations (dragons, knights, the Lady of the Lake) are in black and white, though several are in sumptuous color, including at least one that represents a golden-haired Guinevere, on whom I acquired an ardent crush at age seven that has persisted into my eighty-ninth year. How Ms. Merchant’s genteel paraphrase of selected tales from Malory compares with other versions of Arthur-for-children I cannot say: My next encounter with the most majestic of literary themes came when, many years later, I read Sir Thomas’s masterpiece in his own classic language, followed by the works of his forerunners, the likes of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Layamon, and such successors as were in the public domain and could be plagiarized without penalty. These included Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Alfred Tennyson, of course, even Richard Wagner (the libretti of
Tristan und Isolde
and
Parsifal
). (Though not, unfortunately, Milton’s Arthurian epic, apparently dreamed of but never written.)
But to return to my first exposure to the Round Table and its gallant personnel, on the flyleaf of Elizabeth Lodor Merchant’s book is written, in the elegant hand that alas I did not inherit, “To Tommy from Daddy, Merry Christmas, 1931.”
My novel was published during a strike at the
New York Times
, and it seemed to take forever for the
Book Review
to reappear, but when it did
Arthur Rex
was called “the Arthur book for our time.” Meanwhile, other favorable notices, some quite lavish, could be read in periodicals across the country. The book got sufficient attention to attract a producer from the world of mass entertainment to make an offer for the rights to do a television version as a miniseries. “Isn’t he aware,” I asked my agent, “that all of this material is in the public domain?” “I guess he likes your unique interpretation,” said the late, great Don Congdon, who always looked after my interests much better than I did. So we accepted the option. When it was inevitably dropped a year later, Congdon forwarded to me a copy of the script that had been written in the interim. “Read it,” said Don, “and make a note of everything that the scriptwriter has used from the novel. The producer has willingly offered to pay for a quitclaim.” I did as asked and could not find
anything
peculiar to
Arthur Rex
; indeed, not even much from Malory et al. The scriptwriter had been more inventive than I. But Congdon, of course, had no hesitation in asking the producer for a tidy sum, and the latter was pleased to pay it promptly. This episode is not unrepresentative of my many (usually happy) experiences with show business (like which there is no business).
I have been pleasantly surprised by the generosity of the community of legitimate Arthurian scholars to my own amateur contribution to the genre, which might well have been seen as dilettante, even impudent, but in fact
Arthur Rex
was treated handsomely in a series of learned essays in their journals. In at least one anthology (that edited by Professor Alan Lupack, whose erudition in the subject inspires awe), a chapter from my version is included with excerpts from Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Matthew Arnold, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to mention only a few of the masters with whom, through no fault of their own, I found myself.
Among the reviewers for periodicals were surely more dissenters than the only one I remember, but the latter distinguished himself in the most honorable way. Our exchange began when he found my use of the archaic term “mammets,” in reference to female breasts, ignorant. Its proper derivation and connotations, said he, had rather to do with Mohammed. I sent him the following response:
Dear Mr. —:
In my use of “mammets” I chose to turn my back on both the OED and Webster, who of course trace the word, in its variant spellings, to one or another version of the Prophet’s name; on Dr. Johnson, whose note to Hotspur’s speech is, simply, “Puppet”; and on Farmer & Henley, who in their celebrated
Slang and Its Analogues
define the term as “a puling girl” and cite passages in
Romeo and Juliet
and Jonson’s
Alchemist
.Instead I went along with E. Partridge in his
Shakespeare’s Bawdy
, from which I here quote the appropriate entry in its entirety:“
mammets
. Female breasts. ‘
Hotspur
. I care not for thee, Kate:This is no world to play with mammets and to tilt with lips’.
1 Henry IV,
II, iii 92–93.“L.
mamma
, a breast (especially of a woman): an echoic word, symbolizing the baby’s gurgle of satisfaction when given its mother’s breast. –Cf.
pap
.”That the Oxonians include “pigeon” among the possible meanings of “mammet” and the Websterians not only join them but add “scarecrow” are perhaps other matters—or mammets.
Yours faithfully
On receipt of my letter, the gentleman sent me an immediate apology. As of 1978, anyway, the chivalric Arthurian values of honor and grace were still valid.
One last note: Some years ago I met a genuine Sioux warrior of the present day, a Lakota-born combat infantry officer in the US Army, and was gratified to hear his kind words about
Little Big Man
. We spoke about the days when the Plains Indians had what has been authoritatively called the greatest light cavalry that ever rode into battle, and he said, “You know what occurs to me when I think of those old guys? The Knights of the Round Table.”
—Thomas Berger, 2012
Of Uther Pendragon and the fair Ygraine; and how Arthur was born.
N
OW UTHER PENDRAGON, KING
of all Britain, conceived an inordinate passion for the fair Ygraine, duchess of Cornwall, and having otherwise no access to her, he proceeded to wage war upon her husband, Gorlois the duke.
Thereupon Gorlois closed his wife into the lofty castle of Tintagel, high upon an eminence of adamant, and himself took refuge in another strong fortress called Terrabil, which Uther Pendragon put under siege with a mighty host of men, but nevertheless could not penetrate.
And unable to achieve his purpose the king fell ill with rage against the duke as well as with love for the fair Ygraine, and he lay endlessly on a couch in his silken pavilion, before which was mounted a golden device fashioned in the likeness of the great dragon from which he took his surname (and which had appeared as a fire in the sky over Winchester when he assumed the crown).
To Uther now came one of his barons, the dotard Sir Ulfin of Rescraddeck, saying, “Sire, when you are ill, all Britain ails.”
“Even a dragon,” said the king, “can be felled by love.”
“But love,” said old Ulfin, “can not be taken by sword and lance.”
“Yet the favorable conditions for love can be so established,” said Uther Pendragon. “Could I take Terrabil, I should put Gorlois to death. The fair Ygraine, widowed and undefended, then must needs accept my suit.”
“Alas, Sire, while we are fruitlessly occupied here upon the plain before Terrabil,” said Ulfin, “the Angles and Saxons are regrouping their forces in the east, augmented by new hosts from barbarous Germany.”
And Uther Pendragon fell back groaning. “Ulfin,” said he, “I can not do without this woman. Unless I may have her, I can not rise from this couch. I shall sicken further and I shall die, and Britain shall die with me, and this beautiful land, which my forebear Brute, the grandson of Aeneas, conquered from the giants who then ruled it, will fall to the German toads and become a vile place named Angland.”
And Ulfin nodded his old white head. “It is apparent to me, Sire, that this love which holds you in thrall, you who might on demand have any other woman in the realm but this one, is due to a spell worked upon you by some sprite or fiend evoked by one of your enemies—perhaps by another female whom you have spurned. Now, my counsel is that you consult Merlin, than whom no one is a greater authority on the powers of the unseen.”
“A spell so powerful,” the king agreed, “that it hath closed my mind to the obvious. Merlin, of course! If he could by magic transport from Ireland and erect in a circle at Stonehenge the monoliths that an entire army could not budge, he can get for me one damned little wench.” But here he blanched and seized his beard. “I am overwrought, Ulfin. The fair Ygraine is for me the only woman in the world, and I shall die unless I can have her.” He closed his eyes and his thick black beard did fall slack upon his mighty chest.
Now having taken leave of his sovereign, old Ulfin found him two knights and charged them to discover Merlin and fetch him hither with all haste, and these knights set out for Wales. After a journey of many days they found themselves deep in an enchanted forest at a spring called Alaban, and on the branch of a tree which hung over this spring sat a large raven whose body was so glossy black as to show blue reflections in the sunlight that filtered through the foliage.
And both the knights and the horses, being sore thirsty, drank from the crystal water of the spring (into which one could see forever because there was no bottom) and by the time they had soaked their parched throats the men had been transformed into green frogs and the horses into spotted hounds.
Now in despair and confusion the knights clambered with webbed feet from the steel armor which had fallen around them as they diminished in size, and the horses howled in dismay.
“None may drink of my waters without my leave,” said a voice, and looking aloft the frogs saw it was the raven that spake.