ACTS OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS NOBLE

publishing business. The first book to

appear under the Ben Abramson, Publisher imprint was Pilgrims through Space and Time, by J. O. Bailey. But his business was unsta- ble, and his final years were bleak. In 1947, Ben collapsed from pleurisy and experi- enced a complete breakdown, which resulted in a short stay in a sanitarium. In 1953, he returned to Chicago; two years later, on July 16, depressed and desolate, he committed suicide.

Further Reading: Benson, Jackson J. The

True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New

York: Viking, 1984; Covington, Deborah B.

The Argus Book Shop: A Memoir. West

Cornwall, CT: Tarrydiddle, 1977; Fensch, Thomas. Steinbeck and Covici: The Story of a

Friendship. Middlebury, VT: Paul S. Eriksson,

1979.

Jennifer Baumgartner

ACCOLON OF GAUL, SIR. In The Acts

of King Arthur, lover of Morgan le Fay, who

gives him Excalibur, the sword she has sto- len from Arthur.

ACTS OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS NOBLE

KNIGHTS, THE(1978). Published in 1978,

this posthumous Steinbeck work, although uncompleted, was a book that he had argu- ably always been destined to write. In 1911, as a child of nine, Steinbeck was given a copy of The Boy’s King Arthur, an edited ver- sion of the Caxton Morte d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory. The legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table became a lifelong fascination and a constant meta- phor in his work. The little closed societies of Danny and his paisano friends in Tortilla

Flat and of Mack and the boys in Cannery

Row and Sweet Thursday possess certain analogies with the concept of the Round Table. The influence is established more importantly, however, in the Arthurian ethos, which, to one degree or another, underpins the whole of Steinbeck’s fictional output and has as its starting point the image of the Holy Grail: the search for the unattainable—the never-ending quest that

motivates the actions of so many Steinbeck- ian characters and is most memorably delineated in the story of the two bindles- tiffs George Milton and Lennie Small in Of

Mice and Men and in the saga of the Joad

family’s journey to the false promised land of California in The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck finally decided to write his own modern version of the Malory cycle of Arthurian romances in the mid-1950s. His original intention had been to modernize the text of the familiar Caxton Morte

d’Arthur, but by the time he began to write

he had decided to abandon the Caxton text and to base his work on the authentic Malo- rian text of the Winchester manuscript, which had been discovered in 1934, edited and interpreted by Eugene Vinaver, and published by the Oxford University Press in 1947 in a three-volume edition under the title The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. Stein- beck’s change of mind immediately posed several structural problems, for whereas Caxton had effectively edited the Malory romances into a continuing narrative, the Vinaver text reverted to Malory’s original eight separate romances, the first of which,

The Tale of King Arthur, is divided into six

sections.

The text of The Acts of King Arthur and His

Noble Knights, edited by Chase Horton, con-

tains Steinbeck’s versions of these six sec- tions of the first romance (Merlin, Balin or

The Knight with the Two Swords, Torre and Pel- linor, The War with the Five Kings, Arthur and Accolon, and Gawain, Ywain, and Marhalt)

and his version of the third of the romances (The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake), which together compose only approxi- mately two-sevenths of the total Vinaver text. He visualized that his version of the whole work would run into two volumes, the first volume ending with the first part of Malory’s fifth romance, The Book of Sir Tris-

tram de Lyones, and the second volume con-

taining the latter part of the fifth romance, together with the sixth, seventh, and eighth (The Tale of the Sankgreal Briefly Drawn Out of

French Which Is a Tale Chronicled for One of the Truest and One of the Holiest That Is in This World, The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen

Guinevere, and The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur Saunz Guerdon). Steinbeck did,

in fact, also complete a version of the fourth of Malory’s romances, The Tale of Sir Gareth

of Orkney That Was Called Bewmaynes, but

Horton has silently dropped this from the published text.

Steinbeck wrote the whole of the extant text of his Arthurian book, including the unpublished Sir Gareth, during the time he was staying in a tiny cottage on the outskirts of the Somerset town of Bruton, in England, from March through September 1959. He had gone there with his wife, Elaine, specif- ically to soak himself in the atmosphere of Avalon while writing his book. At first, the work went well, but after he had completed the first four sections, a growing disen- chantment with what he was doing began to set in. He was by then receiving unfavor- able and somewhat puzzled feedback from his New York agents, who had clearly been expecting more Steinbeck than Malory in the text. Moreover, he had from the begin- ning, particularly in the Merlin section, been plagued by a series of small but vital struc- tural problems and these problems were further aggravated in later sections by Mal- ory’s failure to tidy up loose ends in his own narrative and by the difficulties Steinbeck experienced in necessarily putting his own construction on matters that, with the pas- sage of time, have little meaning for the modern reader. Beginning with the sixth section of the book, Gawain, Ewain and Mar-

halt, he commenced to elaborate on Mal-

ory’s text, letting his own imagination and scholarship take wing. He justified the abandonment of his earlier purist stance by observing that he was simply cutting and re-editing Malory’s text in the same way that Malory himself had cut and re-edited the “Frensshe Booke” on which his romances were based. The sixth and sev- enth sections of The Acts are the most vivid and successful in the whole book and con- stitute some of the best prose Steinbeck ever wrote. This, unfortunately, was not a good enough solution, for the structural prob- lems persisted and became irresolvable. Steinbeck found himself torn between car-

rying on with his own extended versions of the somewhat disjointed scheme of Mal- ory’s romances and either disputing the order of the remaining romances or discard- ing some of them, wholly or in part, as he had earlier discarded The Tale of the Noble

King Arthur. He had still not discovered a

way out his confusion when, at the end of August 1959, he broke off work on the book, and indulged in an extended round of sight- seeing until mid-October, when he returned home to New York. He intended that the suspension of work on the book should be merely temporary, and comforted himself with the thought that a room in the Bruton cottage was no different in essence from a room in New York. But it would seem, as he put it, that “the flame had gone out,” and, although he subsequently spoke and wrote about his Arthur book, the break proved to be permanent.

Steinbeck’s text of the first and third of the Malory romances is supplemented in

Acts of King Arthur by sixty-eight pages of

letters, or extracts from letters, to his agents and to Chase Horton covering the period from November 1956, when he first determined he would begin concentrated research on the Morte, until July 1965. These letters provide a fascinating study of Steinbeck’s continuing struggle to find a rationale for and a path through the over- whelming mass of material he had at his disposal.

The book was respectfully, if somewhat cautiously, received by the critics of the day. Subsequent scholarly assessment has inevi- tably concentrated on the Arthur-Lancelot- Guinevere aspects and has been extremely well-informed. While being viewed in cer- tain quarters as something of an anachro- nism in the Steinbeck canon, the book is in fact essential reading for anyone interested in an understanding of the Steinbeckian view of life.

Further Reading: Gardner, John. “The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights,”

New York Times Book Review. October 24, 1976,

Aguirre, Fernando 5 Adaptation of Malory’s Launcelot: A Triumph

of Realism over Supernaturalism,” Quondam et

Futurus 2 (Spring 1992) 70–81; Mitchell, Robin

C. “Steinbeck and Malory: A Correspondence with Eugene Vinaver,” Steinbeck Quarterly 10 (Summer–Fall 1977) 70–79; Simmonds, Roy S. “ A N o t e o n S t e i n b e c k ’ s U n p u b l i s h e d Arthurian Stories,” in Steinbeck and the

Arthurian Theme. Ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi.

Steinbeck Monograph Series No. 5 (1975) 25–29.

Roy S. Simmonds

ADAMS, HENRY (1838–1918). American historian, philosopher of history, and cul- tural critic who wrote one of America’s outstanding autobiographies, The Educa-

tion of Henry Adams (1907). Steinbeck was

familiar with Adams’s historical theories. Adams’s most impressive achievement as a historian is his History of the United States

of America During the Administrations of Tho- mas Jefferson and James Madison (nine vol-

umes, 1889–1891), in which he contended that the decisions and policies of the period from 1801 to 1817 shaped the main course of subsequent American political development.

His Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919) includes three essays on his philoso- phy of history. In this work Adams intro- duced his dynamic theory of history. Derived from the second law of thermody- namics, the theory that maintains energy is in a constant state of dissipation, Adams believed that human history is similarly devoid of purpose and consists merely of a succession of energy phases. Steinbeck knew the dynamic theory and probably read Adams’s most widely read book, The

Education of Henry Adams (for which Adams

was awarded, posthumously, the Pulitzer

Prizein 1919). The book is an autobiogra- phy written in the third person with detached skepticism and delicate irony. Its main concern was to indict the educational system of his day for its failure to prepare an intelligent man for the chaos of modern life. Adams’s works reveal a profound concern with the destiny of the modern world.

Further Reading: DeMott, Robert. Steinbeck’s

Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed. New York: Garland, 1984.

ADAMS, WILLIAM (1922–2005). Adapted and directed a not very successful stage ver- sion of The Grapes of Wrath that played at some colleges in 1978.