Author, Arthur

Elizabeth Chadwick recently wrote a nice piece about her formative influences, which inspired her to historical fiction.  I came to actual authorship far, far later than she, but those works she wrote of I am familiar with set chords thrumming, and those which I don’t know, and which are out of print, have me most intrigued.

That and a recurring crop-uppance of Arthur recently have me thinking along similar lines:  how did I come to where I am as a writer?  Not as an author, but as a writer?  For me, the author is the business steward of the work I as a writer – that solitary thing, that creative animal not participating in the querying and all else – creates.  Why am I the writer I am?

The short answers have been written – how I came to write about Clovis, specifically.  But why do the things I gravitate to fascinate me?

I tend most often to remember the books my mom put down – Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Norah Lofts – and think that was my entre’, along with the appearance of Mary Stuart and Myrddin Emrys just at the right moment, that summer I was fourteen and staying at my Aunt Leila’s house.  I can still remember the bookstore, the sun, the very wall before which I stood, when I found The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills.  Today, though, for whatever reason … the name Malory appeared somewhere or other.  It’s been a long time since I remembered that my dad had a copy of Steinbeck’s very late Arthurian work, the 1976, modern translation of Le Morte.  And now I can think of little else - oddly, that work tied up to a reading of Connecticut Yankee when I was young as well.

I have not touched Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights in thirty years now, but suspect I still own it, and am burning to pick it up again.  My recollection of it is fairly clear as something very unlike other Arthurs (though, like most, Arthur himself is just the excuse to tell others' stories).  Steinbeck’s experience of violence, Steinbeck’s cynicism, Steinbeck’s humor and even extreme disillusion permeated that writing.  And it was writing, pure and clear – nothing worried over with an eye to any market, nothing coddled for the needs of any agent.  It was a raw thing, as I remember it, but that is not to say it was a draft piece.  I remember its view of women – both a pitying and pitiless view, a consideration of characters from the man who wrote Rosasharn, the man who had no "feminine side" as the kids call it nowadays, but who has nonetheless touched millions by now.  I remember being affected by that book.  It may be the first book that ever involved me quite as it did emotionally, it may not.  But I remember it – not as clear as Stewart’s Arthuriana, which I re-read and re-read, and which still is new to me when I leaf into it a little – but perhaps more deeply.  That it ended incomplete – the place it ended – always physically hurt me.

Given my leanings, you might think I’d have been more of an Arthurian nerd, but if the truth is told, even with friends and family thinking of me that way and even giving me Arthurian books, some of them beautiful artifacts in themselves, I rather limited myself after Steinbeck and Stewart.  Who was going to improve on my experiences of those two writers’ works?  Nobody.  It wasn’t a need for Arthur that interested me – it was Stewart’s Merlin, it was Steinbeck’s impossible talent.  It never really was Arthur himself, and the truth is, in the books I did read, he wasn’t even the main character.  Only a frame on which more interesting stories were hung.

I was in college before my Aunt Leila (she and her own bookshelves had a great deal to do with my fascinations; I wish I had ever told her that before she died …) gave me the Kristin Lavransdatter series by Sigrid Undset.  Lavransdatter intrigues me, as I grow older, as a study in the way we read things differently as we mature (or not).  The first time I tried to pick up The Bridal Wreath, I found the writing arid in the extreme.  The whole of the works is, after all, very hefty.  So things do not move at a clip, though there is no lack of action in Kristin’s story.  I recall finding the story offputting, as a girl of a certain moral conviction, and disliking the leading man very much indeed.  It was hard, therefore, to much like the girl so taken with him, and the first experience for me was clinically unappealing.  I thought I wasn’t smart enough to get the novels, and indeed I probably wasn’t – the story was geared to be archetypally feminine, and I at that age had hardly experienced my own feminine life.

I don’t know whether I read them in the interim, I think that I must have, but my next recollection of reading Kristin is when I was just past thirty.  I remember sitting in what we joked about being my De-Lux Apartment In the Sky.  I remember the 3-CD stereo my dad and I had bought, listening to only two on random rotation – Fiona Apple’s debut and David Bowie’s “Hours” – some of the best reading music ever written, and I’m not much for music when I’m reading, actually.  I remember giving my brother a copy of “Hours” and his saying to me, “I hope you bought this for me because you have it” – it is that good a piece of art.  I remember sitting in my grandmother’s chair, in the alcove beside my door, feet tucked up beside me, facing, but hardly looking up from the book to actually gaze, westward.  I remember the light in that apartment.  I remember that reading, those days, those weeks, those hours, as sacred time.  It may not have been peace in my life, but those books, that music, that light, that chair.  Peace in the sacred space we create when reading.

Older now, I look at Kristin and understand why some voices of posterity remember the story as somewhat melodramatic, a bit soap-operatic.  But I know, too, why this histfic has the staying power it has.

Likewise, Anya Seton’s Katherine, the story of Katherine Swinford, nee de Roet, who shaped English history for centuries.

My mom found this one at an antique store, and amazingly I had never heard of it.  She gave it to me around the time I had split from Beloved Ex, and that seems late to me for the discovery of this work.  For one, its place in the genre is perhaps as well known as Lavransdatter.  For two, the first time I read it, I was utterly ensconsed, and a later re-reading felt just as pleasant but very different.  It came off more as a romance novel than it had seemed to me at first, but still a high quality story I know I will read again.

It is this kaleidoscopic experience of perspective which drives me to return to works I have loved.  Some never pall for me – A Memory of Lions, I know, will never lose its place in my heart and mind.  Some simply shift a little.  A recent re-reading of the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide reaffirms its appeal, but exposes to me the extent to which I am no longer the facile kid I was when I first knew those characters.  (The blasphemy – H2G2 will never die for me, but I like the Dirk Gently novels better …)  So I am burning to pick up Steinbeck’s Arthur again, to clarify in my mind those scenes with Lancelot encountering the tragic, the ridiculously sad, the cruelly tempting.  Between picking up my own work – and picking it apart once again – there must be something else to fill, to occupy, my reading mind.  Because that’s what a writer is:  a reader.