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novels The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
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T. H. WHITE
Born: Bombay (now Mumbai), India; May 29, 1906
Died: Piraeus, Greece; January 17, 1964
Also known as: Terence Hanbury White; James Aston
Principal long fiction
Darkness at Pemberley, 1932
First Lesson, 1932 (as James Aston)
They Winter Abroad, 1932 (as Aston)
Farewell Victoria, 1933
Earth Stopped: Or, Mr. Marx’s Sporting Tour, 1934
Gone to Ground, 1935
The Sword in the Stone, 1938
The Witch in the Wood, 1939
The Ill-Made Knight, 1940
Mistress Masham’s Repose, 1946
The Elephant and the Kangaroo, 1947
The Master: An Adventure Story, 1957
The Candle in the Wind, 1958
The Once and Future King, 1958 (includes The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind)
The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to “The Once and Future
King,” 1977
Other literary forms
T. H. White’s first literary productions were two poetry collections. Several short sto-
ries enclosed within the satiric frame narrative of Gone to Ground were reprinted along with later items in the posthumously issued The Maharajah, and Other Stories (1981).
The majority of White’s nonfiction books celebrate his strong interest in field sports; The Goshawk (1951), which describes his experiments in falconry, is the most notable. The title The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959) refers to a legendary monument on the island of Inniskea. White also wrote two books on famous scandals, The Age of Scandal: An Excursion Through a Minor Period (1950) and The Scandalmonger (1952).
Achievements
T. H. White labored long and hard in relative obscurity before achieving literary suc-
cess. His most successful work, The Sword in the Stone, was considered by many a children’s book. White intended from the very beginning, however, that the story should be
the introduction to a comprehensive modern rendering of the Arthurian legend. The sec-
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ond and third volumes became increasingly adult in their concerns and much darker in
their implications. The fourth part languished unpublished for nearly twenty years, but after it was finally revised to form the conclusion of The Once and Future King, the collection was eventually recognized as a masterpiece of modern fantasy. Even that version
lacked the original fifth part, however, which remained unpublished for another nineteen years—thirteen years after the author’s death. Although the animated film of The Sword in the Stone (1963) and the film version of the Once and Future King-based stage musical Camelot (1967) have reached a far wider audience than the original novels, the Arthurian sequence can now be seen as a work comparable in ambition and quality to the similar endeavors of fantasy novelist J. R. R. Tolkien.
Biography
T. H. White, whose full name was Terence Hanbury White, was born in Bombay, In-
dia, the son of a district supervisor of police and the grandson of a judge. He spent his first five years on the Indian subcontinent before moving to England with his mother, Constance. His childhood was difficult because Constance—who eventually obtained a judi-
cial separation from her husband but not the divorce that would have allowed her to marry her live-in lover—was mentally disturbed, and White was frightened of her. Removal to
Cheltenham College in 1920 provided no relief; mistreatment from classmates main-
tained his misery, but he still won admission to Queen’s College in Cambridge. He might
have been happier there were it not for certain anxieties, in which homosexual feelings
and alcoholism were joined by the total loss of his early religious faith and irrepressible sadomasochistic fantasies. Also, he contracted tuberculosis while in his second year at
Cambridge, and his teachers had to donate money to send him to Italy to convalesce; it was there that he wrote his first novel.
White returned from Italy in much better condition. His determination to stay fit and
healthy cemented his interest in field sports, but his triumph over physical frailty was shadowed by an exaggerated awareness of his mortality, which added furious fuel to all
his activities. After obtaining a first-class degree with distinction in 1929, he became a schoolmaster—concluding with a four-year stint at one of England’s best public schools,
Stowe, in 1932-1936—before the autobiographical potboiler England Have My Bones
(1936) sold well enough to win him a commission to deliver a book every year to his pub-
lisher, Collins. He rented a gamekeeper’s cottage on the Stowe estate to pursue his new
career.
Fearful of conscription into a war he desperately did not want to be involved in, White
moved to Ireland (which remained neutral throughout World War II) in 1939, lodging in
Doolistown in county Meath and at Sheskin Lodge in county Mayo. In these two loca-
tions, living as an exile, he wrote the fourth and fifth parts of the Arthurian series, but Collins ended the book-per-year arrangement after issuing The Ill-Made Knight; the subsequent hiatus in his career lasted until 1946. In that year he relocated to the Channel Islands, 257
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living briefly in Jersey before settling in Aldernay in 1947; he died in his cabin, apparently of heart failure, while on a Mediterranean cruise in 1964.
Analysis
T. H. White’s first five novels, one of which was written in collaboration with R.
McNair Scott and two of which were concealed under the pseudonym James Aston, were
all naturalistic. White wrote his first novel— They Winter Abroad—under the pseudonym Aston. This work is of some interest for the insight it offers into his youthful state of mind.
Also as Aston he published his second novel, First Lesson. His first novel as White was Darkness at Pemberley. All three novels were published in 1932. The only one of White’s novels from this period that is now remembered is his nostalgic panorama of the Victorian era, Farewell Victoria; it is also the only one not solidly rooted in his own experiences.
Earth Stopped and Gone to Ground
Earth Stopped is a satiric comedy paying respectful homage to the works of English novelist Robert Smith Surtees, whose addiction to hunting, shooting, and fishing was
shared by White. White’s similarly addicted friend, Siegfried Sassoon, had introduced
him to a reprint of Surtees’ 1845 novel Hillingdon Hall in 1931. Sassoon’s autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) reflects sarcastically on the fact that he had been sent to a sanatorium to save him from a court-martial when he refused to return to the front after being wounded in action in 1917; his influence on White’s attitudes was
profound.
Earth Stopped introduces the inept revolutionary Mr. Marx into a Surtees-like party gathered for a weekend’s sport at an English country house. The party remains blithely
good humored until the final chapters, when a world war abruptly precipitated by the
forces of communism and fascism breaks out, at which point “the universe split open like a pea-pod, informed by lightning but far transcending thunder.”
The story continues in Gone to Ground, in which the survivors of the house party swap tall tales while they hide from the catastrophe, taking psychological refuge in fantasy
while taking physical refuge underground. Although its prophetic pretensions were sup-
posedly impersonal, this provided an ironic metaphorical account of the subsequent shape of White’s life and career.
The book ends with the conclusion of the final tale—reprinted in The Maharajah, and Other Stories as “The Black Rabbit”—in which Keeper Pan, who was the inventor of panic as well as the god of nature, asserts his ultimate dominion over the objects of human sport.
The Once and Future King
Anticipation of a new world war, which many imaginative people expected to put an
end to civilization, overwhelmed English fantastic fiction in the late 1930’s. Other English writers were writing apocalyptic fantasies far more terrifying than Earth Stopped, but 258
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White decided to go in the opposite direction, becoming a connoisseur of playful escap-
ism. The account of the boyhood and education of Arthur set out in The Sword in the Stone is as firmly rooted in personal experience as White’s earliest novels are, but it is a calculated magical transformation of the oppressions that afflicted the author and his ultimate redemption from them.
The Sword in the Stone begins with an exotic schoolroom syllabus devised for the future Sir Kay by his governess, who cannot punish her noble student but can and does take out her frustrations on his whipping boy, the Wart, who is not recognized as the future embodiment of England and the chivalric ideal until he acquires a far more inspiring tutor in Merlyn. The debt that White owed to his tutor at Cambridge and longtime correspondent
L. J. Potts is acknowledged in the fact that Merlyn, whose prophetic gifts result from living his life in reverse, actually served as a Cambridge tutor in the twentieth century, which lay in his distant past.
The account of the childhood of Gareth and his brothers contained in The Witch in the Wood is far darker—in spite of comic relief provided by the alcoholic lapsed saint Toirdealbhach and King Pellinore’s obsessive pursuit of the Questing Beast—because
their lustful, neglectful, and unbalanced mother is a transfiguration of White’s own. The characterization of Lancelot in The Ill-Made Knight probably owes something to Sassoon as well as to White’s perception of himself, and it is significant that the text explicitly compares the greatest of all the Arthurian knights to one of the great sportsmen of the late 1930’s, the Australian cricketer Donald Bradman. Lancelot’s obsessive anxiety that his
forbidden love for Guenevere will sap the strength that makes him England’s champion
and deny him the chance to find the Holy Grail is a transfiguration of White’s anxieties about his homosexuality and terror of military service (both of which were implicated in his decision to live as a recluse as soon as it became economically viable).
Given the deep personal significance of the first three volumes, it is hardly surprising that the dourly harrowing The Candle in the Wind, which White wrote in the latter months of 1940, is saturated with his anxiety for the blitzkrieg-devastated England that he had left and the civilization that it represented. He wrote to Potts on December 6, 1940, that he had discovered that “the central theme of the Morte d’Arthur is to find an antidote to war.” In the fifth volume, Arthur goes underground with his old tutor, and they analyze the dismal failure of the Grail quest and look for a new way forward. While they do so, in The Book of Merlyn, they are surrounded by the animals Arthur loved so much as a boy, and Keeper Pan is certainly present in spirit, if not in person. Two key sequences from The Book of Merlyn were transposed into the version of The Sword in the Stone contained in The Once and Future King, and other elements were grafted onto the new version of The Candle in the Wind to supply the sense of an ending, but these devices distorted the balance and meaning of the whole, which was not published in its intended form.
J. R. R. Tolkien set out to expand his children’s fantasy The Hobbit: Or, There and
Back Again (1937) into an epic at almost exactly the same time White began to elaborate 259
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The Once and Future King. Tolkien was a Catholic and an Old English scholar who carefully excluded everything that had arrived in Great Britain with the Norman Conquest
(1066) from the mythos of his fantastic secondary world, Middle-earth; however, it was
precisely that imported tradition of chivalric romance that White chose for the heart of his own exercise. There is, therefore, a curious sense that the two resultant masterpieces of fantasy are as complementary and opposed as the Universities of Oxford, which was
Tolkien’s home, and Cambridge, White’s spiritual home, to which he remained anchored
by his correspondence with Potts.
One might also compare and contrast The Once and Future King with the fantasies of an older Cambridge man, John Cowper Powys. Powys, also troubled by inescapable
sadomasochistic fantasies, eventually followed up the Grail epic A Glastonbury Romance (1932) with a more explicit transfiguration of Arthurian myth, Porius (1951), which was never issued in its entirety. Powys tackled the problem of designing a mythology for the much-conquered island of Britain by producing his own syncretism of Anglo-Saxon and
Anglo-Norman elements with earlier Celtic and Greek myths.
All three of these writers were trying to construct or reconstruct a neomythological
epic for an island that had somehow never contrived to produce a real one, which would
also embody and allegorize the crisis at which the contemporary British nation had arrived in the pause between World War I and World War II. Of the three, White’s is by far the
most lighthearted but also—by virtue of its precipitous plunge into tragedy in The Candle in the Wind—the most emotional. It is perhaps ironic that Tolkien, who was not nearly as committed to the politics of escapism as White, should have become the parent of a whole genre of escapist fantasy, while White became best known as the inspirer of a Walt Disney film and a musical comedy. Because of the University of Texas edition of The Book of Merlyn, however, modern readers and critics can reconstruct White’s masterpiece as he intended it to be read, and to judge its true worth as an epic for the isle of Britain.
Later novels
The three fantasies that White wrote after he recovered from the disappointment of
Collins’s initial refusal to publish The Candle in the Wind are best regarded as footnotes to the main sequence of his novels, displaying a gradual acceptance of the fact that he was seen as a children’s writer. The Elephant and the Kangaroo is an allegorical comedy in which an English atheist in Ireland witnesses a visitation by the archangel Michael and
sets out to build an ark in response to the threat of an impending second deluge. In Mistress Masham’s Repose, a young girl discovers descendants of the Lilliputians of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) living on an island and sets out to defend them from commercial exploitation by Hollywood filmmakers. The Master is a science-fiction story for children, whose juvenile heroes thwart the eponymous island-based villain’s plans for world domination.
Brian Stableford
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Other major works
nonfiction: England Have My Bones, 1936 (autobiography); The Age of Scandal: An Excursion Through a Minor Period, 1950 (anecdotes); The Goshawk, 1951; The Scandalmonger, 1952 (anecdotes); The Godstone and the Blackymor, 1959 (autobiography); America at Last, 1965 (autobiography).
translation: The Book of Beasts, 1954 (of medieval bestiary).
Bibliography
Brewer, Elisabeth. T. H. White’s “The Once and Future King.” Cambridge, England: D. S.
Brewer, 1993. Brewer examines White’s tetralogy, with separate chapters on each of the
four novels and another on the fifth, unfinished work, The Book of Merlyn. She discusses comedy in the tetralogy and places White’s work within the context of other Arthurian
romances, historical fiction, and fantasy literature. Includes a bibliography and an index.
Crane, John K. T. H. White. New York: Twayne, 1974. A c
ompetent introductory overview of White, with biographical information, discussion of his works, and a bibliog-
raphy. Very useful for the beginning student.
Gallix, François. “T. H. White and the Legend of King Arthur: From Animal Fantasy to
Political Morality.” In King Arthur: A Casebook, edited by Edward Donald Kennedy.
New York: Garland, 1996. This analysis of The Once and Future King is one of sixteen essays that examine how the legend of King Arthur has been recounted in medieval romances, nineteenth century art, and twentieth century literature.
Kellman, Martin. T. H. White and the Matter of Britain: A Literary Overview. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988. Kellman discusses all of White’s historical fiction,
the lesser-known works as well as The Once and Future King. Includes a bibliography and an index.
Manlove, C. N. The Impulse of Fantasy Literature. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983. Manlove’s study of fantasy fiction includes a chapter examining The
Once and Future King, placing the tetralogy within the context of British fantasy literature.
Matthews, Richard. “Shining Past and Future: The Persistence of Camelot (T. H. White’s
The Once and Future King).” In Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination. New York: Twayne, 1997. A study of fantasy fiction, containing a discussion of the genre’s origins and development from antiquity to the present as well as analyses of works by
White and other writers. Includes a bibliographic essay, a list of recommended fantasy
titles, and an index.
Sprague, Kurth. T. H. White’s Troubled Heart: Women in “The Once and Future King.”
Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 2007. An analysis of the female characters in
White’s tetralogy. Sprague describes White’s misogyny, which was a reaction to his
difficult mother, but notes that White also was able to create a charming portrait of
Queen Guenevere.
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JEANETTE WINTERSON
Born: Manchester, England; August 27, 1959
Principal long fiction
Boating for Beginners, 1985