Sit down with a cup of coffee because this one’s a long read today at 15 whole minutes. When I came across this passage from one of John Steinbeck’s letters, I felt like he was speaking to me from the grave, as he understood the process behind how I created my favorite characters better than even I did while I was doing it.
What follows is a long excerpt from John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, his effort to update Le Morte d’Arthur into modern English. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and buy, borrow, or beg it and push it to the top of your reading list. I wish I, like Steinbeck, had read Malory’s version when I was a child just so I could have the pleasure of having read it over and over again since then.
One of the things that makes the book so great is that after the text (of which Steinbeck only finished a fraction—he, like you and I probably, went for the good bits first and never got around to finishing the rest), there are dozens of pages of letters to Elizabeth Otis, his agent, and Chase Horton, who edited the book. Steinbeck kept detailed diaries while he was working (Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath, and Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters are amazing reads) that give insight into his thinking process as he wrote, and the letters that conclude the book are a masterclass into a master’s mind.
This selection, from pages 303-304 of the Kindle version, is one of those classes:
Malory has been studied as a translator, as a soldier, as a rebel, as a religious, as an expert in courtesy, as nearly everything you think of except one, and that is what he was—a novelist. The Morte is the first and one of the greatest of novels in the English language. I will try to put this down as purely and simply as I can. And only a novelist could think it. A novelist not only puts down a story but he is the story. He is each one of the characters in a greater or a less degree. And because he is usually a moral man in intention and honest in his approach, he sets things down as truly as he can. He is limited by his experience, his knowledge, his observation and his feelings.
A novel may be said to be the man who writes it. Now it is nearly always true that a novelist, perhaps unconsciously, identifies himself with one chief or central character in his novel. Into this character he puts not only what he thinks he is but what he hopes to be. We can call this spokesman the self-character. You will find one in every one of my books and in the novels of everyone I can remember. It is most simple and near the surface in Hemingway’s novels. The soldier, romantic, always maimed in some sense, hand—testicles. These are the symbols of his limitations. I suppose my own symbol character has my dream wish of wisdom and acceptance. Now it seems to me that Malory’s self-character would be Lancelot. All of the perfections he knew went into this character, all of the things of which he thought himself capable. But, being an honest man he found faults in himself, faults of vanity, faults of violence, faults even of disloyalty, and these would naturally find their way into his dream character. Oh, don’t forget that the novelist may arrange or rearrange events so that they are more nearly what he hoped they might have been.
And now we come to the Grail, the Quest. I think it is true that any man, novelist or not, when he comes to maturity has a very deep sense that he will not win the Quest. He knows his failings, his shortcomings and particularly his memories of sins, sins of cruelty, of thoughtlessness, of disloyalty, of adultery, and these will not permit him to win the Grail. And so his self-character must suffer the same terrible sense of failure as his author. Lancelot could not see the Grail because of the faults and sins of Malory himself. He knows he has fallen short and all his excellences, his courage, his courtesy, in his own mind cannot balance his vices and errors, his stupidities.
I think this happens to every man who has ever lived, but it is set down largely by novelists. But there is an answer ready to hand for every man and for novelists. The self-character cannot win the Quest, but his son can, his spotless son, the son of his seed and his blood who has his virtues but has not his faults. And so Galahad is able to win the Quest, the dear son, the unsoiled son, and because he is the seed of Lancelot and the seed of Malory, Malory-Lancelot has in a sense won the Quest and in his issue broken through to the glory which his own faults have forbidden him. Now this is so. I know it as surely as I can know anything. God knows I have done it myself often enough. And this can for me wipe out all the inconsistencies and obscurities scholars have found in the story. And if the Morte is uneven and changeable it is because the author was changeable. Sometimes there is a flash of fire, sometimes a moody dream, sometimes an anger. For a novelist is a rearranger of nature so that it makes an understandable pattern, and a novelist is also a teacher, but a novelist is primarily a man and subject to all of a man’s faults and virtues, fears and braveries. And I have seen no treatise which has ever considered that the story of the Morte is the story of Sir Thomas Malory and his times and the story of his dreams of goodness and his wish that the story may come out well and only molded by the essential honesty which will not allow him to lie.
What a passage. Everything you need to know, everything he learned in his 56 years alive until then and in the two decades since Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath is packed into this large diamond of a letter. If I can be so audacious as to condense it into one sentence, it would be this: we write for people, but we also write as people.
That almost seems trite and obvious: after all, someone has to be telling the story. That someone is the reason AI still writes stories that are cold and instantly-identifiable; since they’re trained on everyone, they sound like no one.
The image at the top of this post is so obviously generated by AI that normally I’d have tossed it in the delete bin right away, but this particular one is broken in a way that a human would have a hard time doing. It’s shattered into two vertical fragments along the left 1/3rd line, then the right part is broken again into two horizontal parts. The reflection is wrong and surreal, but that’s what gives it the dreamlike quality that made me unable to not use it here. All of its flaws lead to something beautiful. The consistency of its inconsistencies, its inability to maintain a fixed perspective… these are all human mistakes that all authors will bring to a work even when they don’t mean to, and that’s where the beauty lies. It’s an image that looks like no one because it looks like every one of us.
Steinbeck takes that further and says that it’s not just inevitable that an author will have someone they identify with in everything they write, it’s a good thing. The flaws that make us human will be in there, but so will the hopes and dreams, the aspirations, the desire to be and to make something more perfect. In effect, the author being part of the story gives the writer someone to root for as the story is written, and in the end, gives the reader something to care for, too.
Into this character he puts not only what he thinks he is but what he hopes to be. We can call this spokesman the self-character. You will find one in every one of my books and in the novels of everyone I can remember…. I suppose my own symbol character has my dream wish of wisdom and acceptance.
John Steinbeck
In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck loved Jim Casy (the wise preacher and—spoiler alert—sacrificial lamb who meets the same end as another historical figure with the initials J. C.) because he was Jim Casy. That connection is what made him such a powerful character. When I set out to write my first novel, I intended to do the same. Karl was supposed to be me and Richard was supposed to be my opposite. As I learned to write by writing, Karl moved slightly toward the middle, but Richard moved much more toward it. And then Eileen came along and she became a character that was neither of them and both of them at once.
Karl is my funny side, the absurd dreamer, the grown-up that never lost the child in him. He is the clean conduit of my wit and the street gutter of my unwise self that eats greasy food and can’t help himself from starting another crazy project before he’s done with the last shiny object. His background is shadowy because there are so many things we won’t allow ourselves to reveal to the world. But he’s also the one who never lost hope even after going through the worst tragedy anyone can ever have happen to a person. He’s the one who you want by your side because no matter how absurd the fight or how crazy the odds, he’s in.
Richard was originally only supposed to be Karl’s foil. He was supposed to be darker, deeply scarred by the same childhood abuse I suffered as a teenager. There is a chapter in the book where he describes the day his stepmother almost killed him and then has him—yes, him—arrested for it the next day. It is intentional self-insert: a pure autobiographical scene because I’d tried and discarded several other things that could have left him with wounds that still hadn’t healed decades later and each of those imaginary scenarios wasn’t as horrible as what had actually happened to me. So he got saddled with my burden, which also helped sidestep the complaints that might have happened had I given him another affliction that I never had. I don’t have to deal with accusations of appropriation by people who might say I’m trivializing child abuse because that chapter is almost a word-by-word account of what actually happened to me, and it’s an event that is still that clear in my mind decades later.
Although that trauma gave him a lingering avoidance of making deep attachments to anyone, once he met his One True Love in Eileen, he turned into my romantic side. He’s the one who makes the grand romantic gestures I’d like to make to my wife but for some reason never do. (Or ones I have, but he does it on a much larger scale.) He’s the one who shows how much he loves Eileen and he isn’t afraid to tell her, even though she never says it back. Both of them have good reasons for being afraid to say it at all, but he’s the one who overcomes that fear while she’s still working on it.
Yet my fourth book appears on the surface to be about Eileen and a horrible thing she did, but it was really my attempt to understand him and how he could look utter devastation in its dark face and stare it down. He looked into the abyss and the abyss looked into him… and it flinched. He’s led into temptation not once but twice, and almost falls into it both times, but (unlike Lancelot) delivers himself at the last moment. I wrote that book to find out how he found the strength to do that, and even though it ended up being 240,000 words, I still never got the answer. The only answer I could come up with after almost a quarter-million words is that faith doesn’t answer questions. His didn’t, and like Steinbeck observes when he says, “All of the perfections he knew went into this character, all of the things of which he thought himself capable,” he’s a version of me that’s better than I can be, mere human that I am.
All of the perfections he knew went into this character, all of the things of which he thought himself capable.
John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s letter was interesting, something to nod one’s head about, but it only put into words something I’d thought myself, even if not as elaborately and elegantly. It wasn’t until his further observation that the flawed characters that are based on us have no possibility of ever touching the Holy Grail. But it can be done by their offspring: “the son of his seed and his blood who has his virtues but has not his faults.”
This observation is what pushes this selection from mini-class to masterclass. It took me by surprise, but its undeniable truth is what took me from simply agreeing with what he’d written and moving on into “I have to write an exceedingly long post on this” territory.
I’d been unconsciously thinking this almost from the moment Eileen first appeared. I hadn’t even realized it was under that surface, even though several times throughout the series, I figuratively refer to Eileen as Karl’s daughter, and she even once calls him a “bonus dad.”
They’re not quite far apart enough in age for that to actually be the case (he’s not much older than her big sister), but Steinbeck’s idea still rings true. Since the line of descent goes me → Karl → (symbolically) Eileen, she is the spotless one.
Even her trauma comes from her a place of pureness. Just before beginning her senior year of high school, she’s rejected by the boy she’s in love with. It’s the first time she’s ever faced failure, and as she has her own Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane—although hers was in a gas station parking lot in Maryland, and it wasn’t intended to be written as one; I only noticed the parallel once Steinbeck made me think more about her path—it leads her to notice that a lot of the music they both loved was performed by people who made it big for only a short time, then faded into obscurity. She wants to be noticed, wants to be the best, wants to be loved by all, and her first experience with unrequited love has life-changing consequences. But that still isn’t a fall from grace for her, as the chain of dominoes her teenage heartbreak sets in motion leads to her demonstrating her nobility of spirit as she relinquishes her upbringing as a sheltered rich girl to serve her country.
One of the reasons Steinbeck’s observation of the spotless being the one to win the Quest when all others will fail made me feel so called out is that one of the things that bothered me when I was beginning to write Eileen was that she was too spotless. Karl had his human faults, although most of them were on the funny side, and Richard had his own darker ones rooted in his past, such as not being able to see that his incredible record as a pro cyclist and the hard work and dedication he put into it meant he deserved much more than he had always settled for.
But not Eileen. She walked onto the scene as an angel, free from sin. All sin: in my head, even though she was 29 and beautiful, she was still a virgin. A little bit of that came from her needing to be such a contrast to Richard that he’d immediately see that she was unlike anyone or anything he’d ever seen. Her lack of human stain isn’t completely implausible: after all, she was so dedicated that she prioritized dance and her studies above everything in high school, then joined the Army where she would have been too busy learning to fly and then fighting, and then at 22 had the helicopter crash that would leave her too physically devastated to want to let anyone touch her.
If that’s all there was to it, Steinbeck’s observation wouldn’t be such a big deal. But even at the time, I had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that that part of her backstory was more of a justification/explanation than the real reason. Steinbeck pulled the deeper reason out of my subconscious: she has to be without sin because she’s the one who will win the Quest because that’s what lets her and keeps the others from it.
In each of the books, she wins her Quest, but always at a cost. In the first book, she wins a new life and her first true love, but at the cost of her old life and the comfort of the routines she’d built for herself throughout the years. In the second, she wins, but teeters back and forth across the line of insanity to do it. In the third, she wins, but at the cost of reopening old psychological war wounds as she’s forced to revisit a life she thought she’d long left behind.
In the fourth, she wins a tarnished victory: she helps her friend heal, but gives up her spotlessness to do it. And in this case, Richard is the one who is indispensable because he’s spent the three books up until then cleansing himself from the sins of his own past as he becomes the Lancelot he was always destined to be but had never had the Guinevere to let him become.
Steinbeck wins again.
Oh, don’t forget that the novelist may arrange or rearrange events so that they are more nearly what he hoped they might have been.
John Steinbeck
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