My first reaction to the book was utter surprise. I was reasonably aware of Steinbeck. I used to love hanging out in Cannery Row. But I had never heard of Steinbeck writing a King Arthur story. It wasn’t something that would be good for her to read, but possibly something I could read to my daughter (who was struggling to learn to read). I opened the book and began reading its introduction. These were Steinbeck’s very first words:
“Some people there are who,
being grown, forget the horrible
task of learning to read. It is
perhaps the greatest single effort
that the human undertakes, and
he must do it as a child.”
His opening words floored me. I continued. These were the very next words:
“An adult is rarely successful in the undertaking – the reduction of experience to a set of symbols. For a thousand thousand years these humans have existed and they have only learned this trick – this magic – in the final ten thousand of the thousand thousand.
I do not know how usual my experience is, but I have seen in my children the appalled agony of trying to learn to read. They, at least, have my experience.
I remember that words – written or printed – were devils, and books, because they gave me pain, were my enemies.“
I remember thinking to myself, how could a Nobel Prize winner for writing have ever thought of written words as “devils” and “enemies” or as the cause of “appalled agony”? I kept reading the introduction. Steinbeck went on:
“Some literature was in the air around me. The Bible I absorbed through my skin. My uncles exuded Shakespeare, and Pilgrim’s Progress was mixed with my mother’s milk. But these things came into my ears. They were sounds, rhythms, figures. Books were printed demons – the tongs and thumbscrews of outrageous persecution. And then one day, an aunt gave me a book and fatuously ignored my resentment. I stared at the black print with hatred, and then, gradually, the pages opened and let me in. The magic happened. The Bible and Shakespeare and Pilgrim’s Progress belonged to everyone. But this was mine. It was a cut version of the Caxton Morte d’ Arthur of Thomas Mallory.”
I had chills. He was describing the vast gulf between learning by listening to words and learning to read written words. He was describing a kind of Helen Keller moment when learning a code suddenly opens up a new universe. He was calling written words (not oral ones), the “tongs and thumbscrews of outrageous persecution“.
Steinbeck went on to share that the reason the book “clicked” was its orthography:
“I loved the old spelling of words.“
“The very strangeness of the language dyd me enchante, and vaulted me into an ancient scene.”
“Perhaps a passionate love for the English Language opened to me from this one book.”
As I continued reading the introduction, I learned that it was this book’s old English spelling (like Helen Keller’s “water” code moment) that clicked with his mind and launched Steinbeck’s life as a reader and writer. Finally writing made sense to him and it opened him to all he became as a master of English. In the later stages of his life, when reminded of the “horrible task of reading” by his own children, he wrote this story, partly to honor the story that changed his life, and partly to leave for other kids a modern adaptation of the great story of King Arthur.
This book was one of the triggers that led to the "children of the code" project.
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