Arthur Rex

516 Pages·2013·2.94 MB·English

by  Berger Thomas

Arthur Rex
A Legendary Novel
Thomas Berger
TO MICHAEL AND ARLETTE HAYES
The Rubrics of the Content of the
Books
Introduction
I. Of Uther Pendragon and the fair Ygraine; and how Arthur was born.
II. How Uther Pendragon died; and how Arthur took the sword from the stone;
and of the challenge to King Arthur by the Irish Ryons.
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.
VII. Of Sir Launcelot and Elaine the maid of Astolat; and how the wicked Sir
Meliagrant abducted the queen.
VIII. How Sir Launcelot rescued Guinevere; and of their criminal friendship.
IX. Of Sir Gawaine’s temptations at Liberty Castle; and how he kept his
appointment with the Green Knight.
X. How the vile Mordred made common cause with his wicked aunt Morgan la
Fey; and of his good brother Gareth.
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.
XIV. How Sir Gawaine fought with King Pellinore; and then how he saved King
Arthur’s life; and how he found a bride.
XV. How Sir Tristram was married to Isold of the White Hands; and of what
happened then.
XVI. How Sir Launcelot was cured of his illness by Elaine the daughter of the
maimed king Pelles; and how Galahad was conceived.
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.
XIX. How Sir Launcelot and the queen were discovered in their illegal love; and
how Sir Gawaine’s brothers went to arrest Guinevere; and how Gawaine swore
vengeance against his friend Launcelot.
XX. How Sir Percival and Galahad came to Camelot in King Arthur’s absence
and met Mordred; and of the colloquy between the king and the queen; and how
those two great knights Sir Launcelot and Sir Gawaine fought together until one
of them fell and gave up the ghost.
XXI. How Mordred stabbed King Arthur from behind; and how the battle began.
XXII. How Sir Galahad joined the battle and whom he fought; and how Sir
Percival fell; and how King Arthur fought Sir Mordred; and how the king
returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake and then was borne away by three
ladies in a barge.
XXIII. Of the opinion of some men as to the whereabouts of King Arthur.
XXIV. Of the ladies who carried King Arthur away, and who survived him; and
of the moral of this story.
A Biography of Thomas Berger
Introduction
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
BOOK I
Of Uther Pendragon and the fair Ygraine; and how Arthur was
born.
NOW 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