Reviews and Comment 397 The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. Edited by Eugene Vinaver. Oxford, Clarendon

The discovery of a manuscript of Malory at Winchester in 1934 put scholarly work into a state of suspended animation, ended only with the publication of a full edition of the manuscript by Vinaver in 1947. Since that date the tide of interest has been strong, and the present revised edition takes due account of new interpretation while offering a fresh collation with both Winchester and Caxton. There is a good deal of new matter in the commentary, some sections of the introduction have been rewritten, and an entire new section has been devoted to the question of unity-how far Malory’s work can fairly be viewed as a single book.

That, when all is said, remains the central issue. Vinaver chose his title, The Works of Sir Thomtrs Malory, with due care: for the Winchester MS revealed that Malory had written not one continuous work but eight separate romances. (The colophons, incidentally, revealed the author as ‘a knyght presoner’, so that the prayer for ‘good delyueraunce’, which Caxton had printed in the closc of his book, takes on literal significance.) Caxton, it was clear, was to be sharply distinguished from Malory. He had created one book out of these different materials, at the cost of some ‘incongruities’ and, in one section (the Roman War) some distinct shortening, and had published these under a title taken from one of Malory’s romances, the last one, ‘The Tale of the Death of King Arthur’. Praise and blame in terms of unity were to be directed towards Caxton: what Malory had given us was not one book but ‘a series of works forming a vast and varied panorama of incident and character’.

This view, first expressed in 1947, was subsequently challenged, notably by those who wrote under R. M. Lumiansky’s editorship (Malory’s Originality, Baltimore, 1964). But Vinaver remains unrepentant: and he firmly disposes of claims which would sort everything (including the lengthy ‘Book of Sir Tristram’, obstinately standing foursquare in the middle) into a steadily-progressing story of the downfall of Arthur’s kingdom. I feel he is right. What stands out all the more clearly is Malory’s increasing control and concentration in the concluding two works-the ‘Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’ and the ‘Morte Arthur’ itself, the death of Arthur and the overthrowing of the Round Table. Malory’s interests, assuredly, were not Caxton’s. Malory was drawn to Arthur as a pattern of earthly chivalry, a victorious leader whose war-band is in the end overthrown from within-by the treachery of Mordred and by the fatal quarrel of Lancelot and Gawain. In Malory’s telling the Roman War looms large, as establishing at the outset the military glory of Arthur: correspondingly, the Tristram and the Grail stories are less important than in French handling of Arthurian matter. Provided we do not press for one arche- type, into which all must fit, we shall not go far wrong. Vinaver himself is the first to teach us this, by his own example. When he began to write on Malory (as long ago as 1929) he bewailed English muddle-headedness, prosaic and commonplace handling of French material, above all a failure of insight into the central importance of the Grail, ‘the seeking out of the high secrets and hidden things of our Lord’. But his recognition of the independent vigour of Malory’s work has steadily grown; and it was perhaps best expressed (in the Presidential address to the Modern Humanities Research Association, 1966) when he likened the difference of narrative technique to a movement away from polyphony, the interlacing unity of certain forms of Romanesque ornament, to a sequential structure, events separated in time and coming to a single and unalterable climax. Indeed, Vinaver can now declare roundly: ‘This “single book” the critics are convinced Malory wrote, how fortunate it is for us that he never wrote it!’ In this light, the final drama of Arthur, Gawain and Lancelot gains above all by being placed ‘in stark isolation’.

This is well said. All parties to the dispute can agree on the weight and con- clusiveness of the last two books; and it is reasonable to assume that Malory

Press. 2nd edn. 3 vols. E14 14s.

398 Critical Quarterly found his way forward to that conclusion, guided by his unflagging interest in ‘derring doe’, and strongly motivated by nostalgia, his sense that a glory had passed away, so that temporal successiveness (rather than any super- naturally-approved eternal present) is his natural medium. His first response towards the intertwined structure of his ‘bookes of Frensshe’ may have been one of healthy mistrust, so that his reaction was that of nature, not art-to break oppressive links and to establish lines of demarcation within which he could get to work. But if so, his final achievement is not diminished: all comes to an irreversible disaster, ‘a grete angur and unhappe that stynted nat tylle the floure of chyvalry of alle the worlde was destroyed and slayne’.

Vinaver’s title, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, is abundantly justified. But there is no question of a lower shelf for Caxton’s Morfe Darthur. He, too, had his eye on an English monarch-not the military hero whom Malory honoured, but Arthur the undoubted king, ‘reputed and taken for one of the nine worthy, and the fyrst of the thre Crysten men’. Caxton saw that the Morte, the death of Arthur, was the climax, and he says so, citing the obvious objection only to refute it-‘Nothwythstondyng it treateth of the byrth, lyf and actes of the sayd kyng Arthur’. Given the ending, all falls into place. Caxton and Malory see different things in Arthur: but both see him set unalterably in past time. If there is one lesson to be drawn from Vinaver’s lifelong interest in Arthurian story it is the freedom and potential variety which that material offers. In this sense, ancient prophecy is fulfilled. Arthur is rex quondam rexque futurus, a sleeping hero who comes to life in different guises for different men.

JOHN LAWLOR

Innovations. Edited by Bernard Bergonzi. Macniillan, 45s. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. By Gaston Bachelard, translated by Alan C. M . Ross.

Existence and Imagination: The Theatre of Henry de Montherlant. By John

From its origins the modern movement in the arts has been in a peculiar position. Instead of having to fight only the reactionary forces still clinging to the innovations of yesterday as the finally established norm, it has had to fight on two fronts: first against the reactionaries and then against the ultra-modernists, who have carried its insights much further than it is itself prepared to do-in fact, to the ultimate destruction of art. The really annoying thing about this situation is that the reactionaries have accused the modernists of all the vices of the ultra-modernists, who in their turn have accused them of all the vices of the reactionaries. This has bedevilled all discussions of modernism for close on fifty years. Bernard Bergonzi has assembled a distinguished collection of spokesmen for both the modernist and the ultra-modernist camps, but the book makes depressing reading. There is no dialogue between the two groups, and no possibility of one, for their premisses remain totally different. Yet this is not really the source of the depression. It is rather the tired way in which all the old clichb are trotted out by one eminent authority after another, in which our culture is analysed and appraised without the reader ever getting the feeling that this particularly matters. There is plenty of commitment here, but it is commitment to commitment rather than to anything in particular. How I longed for the infuriating, biassed and peremptory statements of Stravinsky in the conversations with Robert Craft or Picasso in the conversations with Brassai !

Bachelard‘s The Psychoanalysis of Fire came out in France in 1938, and was followed by the author’s studies of earth, air and water. It is high time English readers were acquainted with this historian of science who turned to the study of myth late in life and has had such a profound influence on post-war French criticism.

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 18s.

Batchelor. University of Queensland Press, $6.95.