Arthur Rex!

Our book today is Thomas Berger’s 1978 foray into Camelot fiction, Arthur Rex, and as I’ve had occasion to mention before, it represents just that same kind of oddity that seems to come from many popular authors when they’re seized – almost invariably at middle age – with an apparently irresistible urge to compose Arthurian fiction for a general audience. These authors prosecute successful careers (Berger’s own success multiplied a thousandfold, of course, with the publication of his 1964 romp Little Big Man) and then are suddenly gripped with the creative necessity of writing about destriers and pennants and varlets. These authors don’t become Arthurian experts; the mania eventually passes (except when it doesn’t get the chance – a disturbing number of these books end up being published posthumously for the simple reason that they kill their authors). But while they’re in its grip, they swerve hard right into the world of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur

The basic narrative remains the same: young Arthur pulls the magic sword Excalibur from a stone and become rightwise king of all England; with the aid and advice of the wizard Merlin, Arthur soon overcomes the rowdy independent barons inflicting factional misery on this kingdom and establishes the Round Table of Camelot, whose devoted knights channel the violence of the age into chivalrous adventures; Arthur comes to love his best friend Lancelot (Berger styles it Launcelot) and is queen Guinevere, whose love of each other eventually shatters this harmonious triangle and plunges the kingdom into turmoil; that turmoil is greatly increased by the traitor Mordred, whose machinations bring about the destruction of Camelot. Arthur dies a bitter old man, but there’s a prophecy that one day he’ll return as ‘the once and future king,’ a phrase T. H. White used as the title of his great novel, by far the best fictional adaptation of this story.

Berger doesn’t alter the basic story in Arthur Rex (most hardcovers and paperbacks of which are adorned with that great cover-painting by Jean-Leon Huens), but he does infuse it with his signature 1970s taste for ribaldry; much like Malory but more explicitly, Arthur Rex brims with sexual imagery, sexual tension, and just plain sex:

And whilst he was doing this he hears some soft gasps coming from not far away and rising with his peach he went to a near-by tree, where first he came upon a lady’s clothing strewn on the earth and then that of a knight, and under the fruit-laden branches of this tree, which were so heavy that they came down as a screen on all sides, this page saw the heaving of the beast-with-two-backs, and this being a domesticated breed and not savage except to its own constituent parts, he observed its antics for a while, for he was but fourteen years old and he was curious to learn of the animal husbandry which lay in store for him as a man. But he could not see the twin faces of the creature, for they were obscured by the hair, which was respectively gold and sable.

And always with the classic Berger funny twist at the end:

Then the varlet finished eating his peach, and thinking he might well be punished if detected at his observation, he dropped the stone and crept away. (And finding a secret place he polluted himself, the which he duly confessed on his next peccavi.)

Berger is such a fluid, confident stylist that you’re carried effortlessly along the contours of this old familiar story; there’s plenty of combat, plenty of courtly love-making, plenty of Arthur’s nobility, and plenty of the doomed attachment between Guinevere and Lancelot. Like so many writers before him, Berger turns a good deal of his plot’s heavy weight on the weird allure of Guinevere, an allure that requires none of the spell-craft of Morgan la Fey and that catches so many of the men who encounter her, even though from early on in the story, she knows where here own heart lies:

“Now,” said [Sir Meliagrant]. “when I win this fight you can no longer despise me, and there there remaineth no reason hwy we should not become lovers.”

And Guinevere wondered at this statement. “Can it be?” she asked, and then, “Was this thine intent from the outset?”

“My purpose was to humble you,” said Sir Meliagrant, “but I found I could not manage that.”

And the queen asked, “Therefore thou hast fallen in love with me?”

“I fear that I have,” said Meliagrant, “and thus far it is rather I who have been humiliated, and this love hath brought me nothing but two wounds.” And he told her of his encounters with the crippled beggar and Sir Kay.

“Of the latter I have been apprised,” said Guinevere, “and Kay would make amends and fight thee.”

“This honor,” said Meliagrant, “can be a taxing thing. Is it not remarkable enough that I fight fairly even once?”

“Then who is thine opponent?” asked Guinevere.

“A knight who is named Launcelot,” said Meliagrant.

“My poor Sir Meliagrant,” said Guinevere, “then thou shalt fight but once.”

Ultimately, it’s the contours of that old familiar story that work to limit the effectiveness of books like Arthur Rex (or Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mist of Avalon, or the “Tales of Arthur” manuscripts no doubt being endlessly tinkered with even now by John Banville, Nicholas Shakespeare, and Peter Ackroyd). The sameness of the story throws all the emphasis back on the execution side of things, and there is no living middle-aged writer in English who could possibly match the weird, sad brilliance of The Once and Future King. The most that even the best of these other variations on the theme can do – and Berger’s is one of the best – is give us little glints and refractions off that massive iceberg of melancholy and feathery hope. Readers should enjoy Arthur Rex for its bawdy vivacity specifically because there’s not a trace of bawdy vivacity in White. That’s plenty to enjoy.