The King of Camelot and I

Once again, I received an assignment that translated neatly into a blog post.

When I was in kindergarten, my mother ordered a box set of E. B. White’s best-known works, thinking that she would read them to me at bedtime. That plan was scrapped when she got home from work to find me full of questions about why Stuart Little was Mrs. Little’s biological son when the movie clearly presented him as adopted. This incident set the tone for my reading experiences in grade school. I wanted to read long chapter books, but there was also an element of name recognition in appealed to me. This clashed, however, with my attention-deficit, which made reading truly long works an unpleasant chore. This meant that my favorite books were either extremely episodic in nature (as Stuart Little was) or anthologies of short stories. Ultimately, I gravitated most to the oldest stories. I was fascinated by stories of Greek gods and Shakespeare’s plays, loved American Tall Tales and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Yet, somehow, none of them had quite the same impact as did the story of King Arthur.

I had a conceptual awareness of the Arthurian legends from a fairly early age, presumably from a combination of picture books and Quest for Camelot. At the very least, I knew that Arthur was an important king who had knights and a Round Table. At some point in the third grade, I checked out a book about the legends of Camelot from the school library. I must not have seen The Sword in the Stone, because I remember that the actual details of Arthur ascending the throne were new and exciting as I read. I was intrigued to learn about all of his knights and their individual adventures, and it was at once confusing and enlightening to realize which parts of my previous knowledge had been completely wrong. It was an adventure, one that I enjoyed right up until Lancelot was caught with Guinevere. From that point on, I could only watch in silent horror as the characters I had come to love turned against each other, fighting and even killing each other. No other mythological conflict had ever felt so senseless to me, not even the Trojan War. The worst part was when Arthur, betrayed and mortally wounded, boarded the barge with the hooded maidens and floated away. I think that the way it was worded implied to me that he might have survived with the help of those maidens, leading me to hope for his survival. That hope was immediately and painfully dashed as he instead, seemingly consciously, chose what to me was effectively death. I had never seen a character left so broken that they would make such a choice. I’m fairly certain that I cried over it.

Though my reading palate expanded as the years went by, I never really lost my connection to the mythologies I loved so much. I sought out and read various series which tried to modernize or reinterpret those favorite stories. Knowing the real stories made me more critical of some books for treating complex deities as flat villains, but at the same time, it made me appreciate the effort put into works such as Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which managed to make references that even I didn’t know. Once again, however, it was a story linked to King Arthur that left the most striking impression on me at that time. This took shape as a trilogy written by Kevin Crossley-Holland which, rather than modernize the story, instead presented it in parallel to the life of a boy living at the time of the Crusades. This turned what had been a familiar story back into something suspenseful and new, and I easily recalled how it had felt to read the stories a mere three years before. I distinctly remember talking incessantly about it to anyone who would listen, it was that exciting. Also, although Arthur inevitably met his sad fate, the parallel character was able to learn from his predecessor’s mistakes and ultimately made better choices. I appreciated that, perhaps more than I realized at the time.

High school corresponded with a general decrease in leisure reading. This was partly because of the increased workload, but also just due to being busy with school, social obligations, and access to the Internet. I was still interested in the various mythologies, though, which led me to take an extra semester of English in senior year with a class entitled Myths, Tales, and Legends. It was a profound disappointment. While I had enrolled with the understanding that I might not learn anything new about the Greek myths, I had not counted on having a new teacher who was as unfamiliar with the material as some of the other students. Still, I was vaguely comforted to see one book that I had never read on the course list: A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. We were told that it was based on Arthurian legend, but I was dubious, feeling that manor house rooms named after legendary characters was insufficient for such a claim. I kept reading, though, and as the parallels between Arthur Pendragon and Tony Last came into focus, I realized that I was once again reading about Arthur’s downfall. That simple fact made me care significantly more about the systematic collapse of the protagonist’s life, but at the same time, I had a sense of hope that, just as the other parallel protagonist had, Waugh’s too would find a happier ending than his legendary counterpart.

My faith in Tony’s survival was bolstered when he abandoned a rapidly deteriorating divorce talk and took a voyage to Brazil, but that was merely a matter of having forgotten the exact circumstances of King Arthur’s death. I recalled immediately what had happened as a string of terrible occurrences left Tony floating alone down a river, dying of some horrible Brazilian illness. Yet, just as I began to mourn for him, Tony was rescued by a hermit and nursed back to health, causing me to dare to hope once more. That hope was for nothing; the hermit turned out to be malevolent, and the book ended with Tony still breathing, yet dead to the rest of the world. It was an ending that brought the decade-old memories of reading the end of the Arthurian legends back to the surface, and I cried over both their deaths and my dashed hopes. Even while this happened, I also immediately fell in love with Evelyn Waugh for writing something that caused such a visceral reaction, one that I hadn’t felt in years. It was the sort of personal, profound experience that reminded me why I loved reading and literature in general.

Disappointingly, we barely discussed A Handful of Dust as a class. From what was said, I could tell that nobody else had been nearly as affected by the book as I had been. If anything, most of them found it dull. I understood why that was; I’d had context for the book since I was eight years old, whereas most of them seemed completely unfamiliar with the legends. At any rate, I once again had an appreciation for how much the stories I read as a child mean to me even now. It’s comforting to know that, even as my life continues to change, those myths and legends which stood the test of time will do the same for me.