One of this year’s best-selling poetry books is a little unexpected -- it’s an Arthurian epic about the Holy Grail written in ballad form by an Anglican priest. Malcolm Guite is an ambassador for the imagination -- currently traveling the United States on a visit from the UK. WSHU’s Davis Dunavin caught up with him in New Haven just before a talk at Yale.
Galahad and the Grail is part one of a four-part series of Arthuriana. Malcolm Guite opens the book by reminding readers he’s stepping into a long tradition of stories about the knights of King Arthur and the quest for the Grail. Like the rest of the story, it’s written in rhyme.
Guite: “First of all, I think I love rhyme itself, and I think the English language is my muse. I think it gives her pleasure to be rhymed. You know, not many poets have been doing that for her lately. You know, so I'm kind of saying to her, ‘Honey, honey, I know how to make you feel good. You know, this is the way you want to sound.’ But if there's a single figure who kind of, I think, really recovers it and gets it going, it's actually Bob Dylan … One of the most sort of beautiful things he does is in Mr. Tambourine Man, where he says, ‘If you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme to your tambourine in time, I wouldn't pay it any mind. It's just a ragged cloud behind. It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing.’ … That is so gorgeous, and that sense of the minstrel, with these literally skipping reels of rhyme. … There's something of that spirit I want to channel.”
WSHU: “What do you mean to say, ‘Take up the tale?”
Guite: “I'm stepping with some temerity into a long tradition, and I have to be deeply immersed in that long tradition. I have to have heard all the other people who've taken up the tale. I have to have seen how they've handed on to one another before, as it were. I have the temerity to take it up myself, and I do so in humility, knowing that I'm just one of the bearers of this tale, and that somebody will eventually take up the tale from me. … Fortunately, there is no authorized version of the stories of King Arthur. … I can't emphasize too strongly these stories are working at a profound level, what Lewis and Tolkien called mythopaeia. You know, it's story which is so deep and so close to the condition of myth or legend itself that you have to … come to it with humility, you come to it knowing. Basically, I come to it knowing that the story is older and wiser than I am, that knows things that I don't know but need to know, and it knows things specifically that this generation needs to know, which is why I must take up the tale.”
WSHU: “What I find incredibly wonderful is how your mother introduced you to Arthur.”
Guite: "I was very fortunate to grow up amid story and song, and my Scottish mother was a great storyteller and a great reciter of poetry, and an immense bank of poetry in her in her mind. … So my mother began to tell me the stories of the Knights of the Round Table when I was quite young, so I first heard them from her lips, rather than with a book at all. So it was almost going not only pre-modern but pre-printing, pre-literate. You know, I was hearing them as they would once have been told. … Now, very quickly, I realized just just in terms of who you identify with in the great realm of Arthurian. I realized very rapidly that I was not Lancelot … I was never going to be captain of the school football team or you know prowess on the playing field, but I realized I might well be like Galahad … with this sort of uncanny sense of the otherness of things, his yearning to to lift the veil on something on the Grail. You know, very early on I recognized that, and yet he was a knight at arms, and he had a horse. All the things you really want to have a horse and a shield and a sword and a spear … In Galahad I saw somebody who, who fused the something you know to do with the goodness and glory of things in this world, of which a knight in shining armor is one, but also a quest that went beyond this world, or went to the the point of contact between this world and the world beyond it.”
Guite says our society has gradually lost a lot of the ability to see the magic and the beauty we used to find in the Grail story.
Guite: “Our reductive, purely materialistic, atomising, skeptical view of the world -- whilst it's yielded some results in some fields -- has actually ended up with a state of you know what Max Weber famously called disenchantment. We have a world which no longer seems to be kindled with life and feeling and consciousness, and in which we no longer feel related, but rather we experience anomy, we experience alienation. … Now the question is: is that alienation just the grim reality we finally woke up to the fact that, as Philip Larkin said, none of this cares for us, or is it in fact something that we've constructed, that we've made nature this dull, deadly, dead, dead thing, precisely so that we can manipulate her, and that actually we've got a false view. Nature is much more alive, much more entangled, much more enchanted and enchanting than we've given her credit for.”
WSHU: “So the art and the stories of an age that’s seemingly disenchanted, and I'm thinking about the first things that would probably pop into most people's head if you talk about Arthur or the Grail would be Monty Python and Disney.”
Guite: “Yeah, yeah. Oh God, help us. Yeah.”
WSHU: “Or the ways in which fantasy or fiction of 21st century sometimes kind of cynically or ironically treat the stories of the past. … They're fodder for jokes.”
Guite: “There's nothing worse than an adult telling a child a fairy story with a sort of knowing wink to the other adults in the room. And I think I mean Disney can do some enchanting things, but I think Disney is in danger of that. Now you could say Shrek is the whole kind of like subverting. It's a little bit too clever. … “Recovery from that, which is kind of essentially an aspect of Jesus saying that the kingdom belongs to children, unless you become like a little child who will never know anything, has been to achieve what some people have called a second naivety. It's not that you forget all the sophistication. Some of it may be useful at certain points, but you clear it out and respond once more to the greenness of a blade of glass and the redness of a leaf and the astonishment of a sunrise, and you allow that to impress you. … I think one of the most chilling things about the acceleration of everything in the media is the loss of long form narrative. … You know, little videos they're now reels, now shorts, and then sort of infinite scrolling, where there's no narrative. If you just randomly scroll, everything is quite literally random, which is the lie that we're being told that we're just random. We're not random. We're part of a huge story. Story is precisely the opposite of random. Story is where events have beginnings, middles, and ends, and befores and afters, and anticipate one another and are moving towards some particular purpose. So, in order to recover a view of coherence and meaning, which when we have recovered, we may then begin to see that meaning shining through to us in all kinds of different phenomena. But in order to recover the meaning itself, we need to recover story.”
WSHU: “This book has cracked the top 50 on Amazon.”
Guite: “Yeah, it’s just about to have its fourth printing.”
WSHU: “I don't know the last time an Arthurian epic in ballad form hit the bestsellers.”
Guite:“Well, I can tell you the last time anybody actually wrote a poem of this length … about Arthur, was not in ballad form but in blank verse, and that was Tennyson's ‘Idylls of the King.’ … I had a feeling that either this would sink without trace, and but I would write it anyway. I would write it for 12 people. … But I also had a hunch that if I felt we desperately needed to lift the veil, to be reenchanted, to reconnect with something, to to grasp the. P possibilities of beauty and meaning and form and coherence in a world which seems to become much more ugly and incoherent. That if I felt we needed that, other people might feel we needed it too. So I thought maybe there isn't more than a few of us who have not yet bowed the knee to Baal. … I wondered if I might nudge the culture a little bit myself or be part of a change in the culture and … more than my wildest expectations, it has done. … I was just told the other day, literally a couple of days ago, by the the editor, that the the pre-sales on the the second volume have have passed 30,000 before the book has even been published, which for poetry, let alone narrative poetry, so as Dylan says, something is happening here, and I'm very glad to be part of that happening.”
Malcolm Guite is a poet, scholar and Anglican priest. The next book in his series, The Coming of Arthur, comes out next month.
