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| reprint from Green Knight, 2000 |
Clemence
Housman (1861-1955), sister of A. E. (Classicist and poet) and Laurence
(playwright and illustrator), published The
Life of Sir Agloval de Galis in 1905.*
Best known for The Were-Wolf (1896),
a novella with a medieval setting, in which a man tries to save his brother
from woman-wolf), she also published The
Unknown Sea (1898), a third work of medievalism, in which a man falls in
love with a sea witch. While she hadn’t
an enormous output as a writer and hasn’t the lingering readership of her more
famous poet-brother A. E., she was also famous as a Suffragette and for her wood-engravings. She shows a literary debt to Malory, but also
to the neo-Gothic and to Victorian medievalism generally—and also perhaps to
the rise of psychoanalysis. This brief
essays aims not at detailed criticism of Sir
Agovale de Galis, but to direct attention to a neglected novel that
deserves the status of at least a minor classic of medievalism and Arthuriana. Just as science fiction is also usually
sociological fiction, so is fantasy fiction often psychological fiction: and Sir
Aglovale is a psychological blockbuster.
As a gothicized Romance, it draws the character of Sir Aglovale, very
limited in other Arthurian sources, into a captivating story of knighthood’s
struggle with itself, of a knight’s struggle with himself for his own soul.
Aglovale
appears in Le Morte Darthur, but not
with special significance. Housman’s
incarnation of the character shows a great deal of narrative and psychological
complexity. The eldest legitimate son of
King Pellinore, he has brothers who gain much more fame than he: Tor, Lamorak, Percivale of the Grail quest. A fourth brother, Durnor, suffers both mental
and spiritual challenges—he serves as a version of Aglovale without his brother’s
dark, brooding self-doubt, but with a parallel distance from “proper” medieval
social world. Moral and spiritual suffering
highlight this novel: desire for penance rather than absolution; self-criticism
amidst self-absorption, with a sense of unworthiness leading nearly to despair
and obsession with expiating guilt; desire for acceptance and love, but also
for truth and order; constant struggle with both natural and illicit desire and
human limitations—a strict sense of justice in relief against Christian mercy
and unbelievable forgiveness (both offered and practiced); a growing sense of
honor of honesty and truth fighting against Courtly notions of honor of the
accepted approach to knightly challenges; the contrast of contemplation and doing good—Housman pinpoints the problem
of how a self-aware and increasing self-critical knight could learn to live not
only, in a fallen world, but within the tainted body of a flawed and
self-loathing soul.
This novel has, among Arthurian
works prior to the last third of the twentieth century, an unusual if not
unique level of psycho-spiritual tension in the exploration of a fallen character
who knows himself fallen and hates himself for the fact, but who also must day
by day draw himself out of the muck of further mental and behavioral
descent: he is at once postmodern hero,
anti-hero, and loathsome abuser of privilege, and sympathetic human being
misunderstood by almost everyone he meets.
No one, not even his holy and supportive brother Percivale, understands
him very well—even the reader may have a hard time doing so, since few
protagonists float in such a mire of ill judgment and mixed intent. Aglovale lives for the entire novel on the
knife-edge of desire to please and sordid self-will, of desire for spiritual
attainment dragged down by knighthood’s social privilege and drive for violence.
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| Reprint from 1954 |
In
many ways Aglovale may strike a reader as a displacement, a version of a modern
reckless business manager or feckless CEO from the early twenty-first century
or a Fitzgeraldian tycoon lost in time. Struggles
with spiritual visions both drive him on and hold him back. He finds himself both admired and cursed—completely
misunderstood by most, hated by nearly everyone, nearly dismissed entirely by
his parents, and largely friendless—and hates himself for each breach of noble
conduct even as he falls into more of them.
Our time would, if not have forgiven, at least have understood those
breaches in a real human being, and contemporary readers may find even more
sympathy for him than did his creator:
he learns to strive to live nobly and dies so, despite receiving nothing
but contempt from Arthur and his retinue.
Through
no error of his own he falls into a familial semi-feud with the Gawain-kin who
bear a fierce anger against his father, Pellinore. Pellinore, a worthy knight and minor king,
kills King Lot in Malory’s Romance, and the Gawain-kin don’t care whether that
death was justified in battle or not.
But Aglovale’s greatest problem comes not from another family, but from
his own: his parents despise the fact
that he hasn’t the noble demeanor of his more knightly brothers (though his
mother does come around to a small expression of love for him), and his
brothers don’t understand him. They
can’t forgive anything that looks to them less than ideal chivalry, and
Aglovale has enough perception of human frailty to realize that the chivalric
ideal has its problems and that behavior typical of noblemen can be
exploitative and even brutal to those they claim to defend. Housman compares him serially to other
knights (much as Malory does with all the knights throughout the Morte), and Aglovale alternately wants
to feel part of their society and shuns it as full of lies and hypocrisy—he is,
himself, a recovering hypocrite. Other
knights deplore his “sin” (-ister), fighting with his left hand, and they hate
him for recognizing and admitting his own failures of courage, morality, or
skill.
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| First edition from 1905 |
Housman,
in a technique reminiscent of Shakespeare as well as Malory in the Morte, continually sets up doubles for
Aglovale, making him, whether he would or no, the antagonist and infernal version
of many other knights, at least from their perspective. Here are some examples. The doubling urges readers to compare not
only the knights, but their understanding of goodness and chivalry.
Aglovale
vs. Launcelot (or Galahad)
Galahad,
being pure and so free of spiritual angst, would have no understanding of
Aglovale, but Launcelot makes a more interesting comparison. Of all Arthur’s knights he shows the most
understanding and appreciation of and sympathy for Aglovale, perhaps because of
his own deep sin, though even he loses patience with Aglovale’s quirks and
inability to articulate the reasons for his suffering.
Aglovale
vs. Lamorak
Lamorak
is the favored son, even though he isn’t the first son, of their parents: he talks the talk of a proper knight and, for
the most part, walks the walk, though he gets into a deadly romantic
relationship (with Morgause) that a sensible knight would avoid.
Aglovale
vs. Durnor
The
younger son actually loves and admires his brother Aglovale, but he hasn’t the
wit or intelligence to make anything but a mess of his life: he is Aglovale without intelligence and
self-recrimination, and he is killed early in the novel—something that could
easily have happened to Aglovale, eliminating his long and well-earned
repentance.
Aglovale
vs. Tor
Tor,
Pellinore’s bastard son, receives more acclaim and appreciation than his
legitimate brother because he adheres more nearly to the chivalric code. He comes to appreciate Aglovale’s honesty and
the goodness of which he proves himself capable at his best.
Aglovale
vs. Percivale
Aglovale
adores his spiritually upright brother, but even Percivale fails finally in his
ability to love his less-than-perfect brother:
while Arthur’s court expects chivalric perfection, the Grail knight
expects his own version of spiritual perfection—a fault, as the author points
out, of the young and innocent. Housman
also briefly and sympathetically treats their sister, in this book named Saint, sometimes identified in other
texts as Blanchfleur.
Aglovale
vs. Bors
A
Grail knight himself, Bors—exhibiting his own error—shows no patience with
another knight he considers infinitely flawed, and he has no understanding of
why Launcelot shows sympathy for a knight he considers beneath contempt. Bors begins to understand Aglovale, but
rejects him when Aglovale—knowing Launcelot guilty—refuses to leave Arthur’s court
(where he has always been treated badly) and join Launcelot (where he would get
better treatment). More and more through
the novel Aglovale tries to determine what
he believes is right and to follow it.
Aglovale
has only problematic relationships with women (whether ladies or girls, whether
by his own faults or by their misunderstandings. The text draws particular attention to two
interesting and contrasting examples.
Aglovale
and Gilleis
In
one of the saddest episodes of the novel, Aglovale lies and leads a young
woman, Gilleis, away from her love of a good young knight. The knight is eventually killed, and Gilleis
dies of grief upon Aglovale’s confessing how he won her affection. He confesses his guilt to Nacien the Hermit,
but in the remainder of the novel never gets over what he has done to someone
he truly has loved.
Aglovale
and Laykin
This
episode parallels the story of Gilleis.
Aglovale rescues a beautiful young girl from freezing to death by
wrapping himself around her to keep her warm. She turns out to be his niece, daughter of his
half-brother Tor, and his respectful treatment of her saves his life, since
Tor’s family would otherwise have killed him.
At
one point late in the novel, Sir Griflet describes Aglovale as “the bravest man
that ever I saw fail; yet so cursed” (164).
Near the end Sir Ector observes to Launcelot that “for all you say Sir
Aglovale goes not by the ways of knighthood,” and Sir Launcelot replies, “Alas
for knighthood” (265). This book does
not fall into the easy error of praising knighthood as we find it in history,
in literature, or in our imaginations; it addresses, sometimes satirically and
sometimes with painful, realistic directness all its flaws and
hypocrisies. It shows the knights at
their best and at their worst, and better yet it shows that their best often
stands not far from their worst.
A
powerful novel of the kind of the variegated darkness that can haunt a soul,
Modern in its medievalism, medieval in its genesis, The Life of Sir Agovale de Galis recalls in its questioning of the
institution of knighthood a principle of the Anglo-Saxon world that preceded
it. It directs a reader’s attention much
as does the final line of Beowulf in
its use of the word lofgeornost, “the
greatest of praise-yearning”—one may desire both to get and to give praise, and
perhaps most of us do. The psychological
complexity that we think of as springing from the modern and contemporary world,
Housman suggests, must have been with us, misleading and tormenting us, all
along, even in characters we wish to believe represent us at our most noble. Not a beautiful novel, Sir Aglovale does something unusual in Arthuriana: it urges us to think about deep-down human
suffering.
Sincere thanks to Doug Anderson, who gave me a
copy with this novel along with a request that I take it seriously enough to
write something about it someday. He was
entirely right to praise it, and I have aimed ever since to pass along the
favor to other fans of Arthurian literature.
See The Life of Sir Aglovale de
Galis (Oakland, CA: Green Knight
Publishing, 2000), Introduction by Douglas A. Anderson.
E.L. Risden is a well-known medieval scholar who teaches at St. Norbert College and who is the author of many books of scholarship. His fantasy fiction appears under the pseudonym "Edward S. Louis": see his website by clicking here.
(c) 2016 by E.L. Risden
