The blurb for a recent reprint of Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of her old friend Tim White claims that:
Warner treats White's repressed sexual predilections with humane understanding in this wise portrait of a tormented literary giant, written by a novelist and a poet.Certainly he had his oddities - as did Sylvia Townsend Warner, for that matter - but it seems rather an odd way to characterise him: "When did you stop beating your wife?" - or, as in this case, repressing your sexual predilections?
I suppose that it highlights a problem with T. H. White's body of work as a whole, though. Just what exactly was he? As a writer, that is. We tend to see him as a children's author nowadays - if we think about him at all.
And, certainly, a couple of his books - The Sword in the Stone (1938) and Mistress Masham's Repose (1946) - have become children's classics. Confining him to that pigeon-hole seems more than a little reductive, however.
Actually I could easily have listed him under either of the other two categories of writer I've been compiling occasional posts about on this blog: Ghost Story Writers, or SF Luminaries.
The Master (1957) is - more or less - SF; and there are a number of ghost stories included in Earth Stopped (1934) and his other short story collections, some of them ("Soft Voices at Passenham") very good indeed.
Perhaps he was primarily a fantasy writer, then? Certainly his most famous book, The Once and Future King (1958) is more fantasy than anything else. It is, in fact, probably the most influential retelling of the Arthurian legend since Tennyson's Idylls of the King - and, like Tennyson, its principal source of both raw material and inspiration is Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485).
I remember the blurb on the back of my paperback copy referring to White's tetralogy as "a glorious dream of the Middle Ages as they never were but should have been." That strikes me as a pretty accurate description.
In form, The Once and Future King masquerades as a kind of modern commentary on Malory's translation/adaptation of his original French sources in the 13th-century Vulgate Cycle. But it's that pretence which allows White to soar into complex realms of psychology visible only by implication behind the conventions of late medieval romance.
I once examined an Honours essay on The Once and Future King. In pursuit of their thesis, this particular student had examined quite closely the extensive revisions White made in both The Sword in the Stone and The Witch in the Wood in order to fit them into the more ambitious, interlinked structure of the larger collection.
I see that I said in my comments:
I’m particularly impressed by the textual comparisons this student has made between the initial and revised versions of the first two volumes of the tetralogy (or set of five books: depending on whether or not one counts the Book of Merlyn). The points he makes about the changes in the 1958 text are worked seamlessly and tellingly into his overall argument.I recommended the highest possible grade for the essay, perhaps partially because I'd been longing to make that comparison myself ever since I learned that there was an earlier version of "The Queen of Air and Darkness", Part Two of The Once and Future King.
To complicate things still further, White's initial successes were in the field of outdoorsy, sporting adventure. England Have My Bones (1936) was his first bestseller. It was followed by Burke's Steerage (1938), and then by his masterpiece in the genre, The Goshawk - the terrifyingly intimate and (at times) shocking account of his largely unavailing attempts to tame a wild raptor.
As far as his personal life goes, if White ever had a great love, it was definitely for his Irish setter Brownie. He tried to explain the intensity of his feelings for her in a letter to his friend David "Bunny" Garnett:
It is a queer difference between this kind of thing and getting married ... married people love each other at first (I understand) and it fades by use and custom, but with dogs you love them most at last.Garnett wasn't having any. A real and lasting relationship with an animal was, to him, absurd. In response he lectured White on the immaturity and childishness of so extravagant an overreaction to the "natural" death of a pet.
Still, the poignancy of White's letter about his beloved dog's death has to be read to be believed:
[November 1944]Another letter followed hot on its heels:
Dearest Bunny,
Brownie died today. In all her 14 years of life I have only been away from her at night for 3 times ... but I did go in to Dublin about twice a year to buy books ... and I thought she understood about this. To-day I went at 10, but the bloody devils had managed to kill her somehow when I got back at 7. She was in perfect health. I left her in my bed this morning, as it was an early start. Now I am writing with her dead head in my lap. I will sit up with her tonight, but tomorrow we must bury her. I don’t know what to do after that. I am only sitting up because of that thing about perhaps consciousness persisting a bit. She has been to me more perfect than anything else in all my life, and I have failed her at the end, an 180-1 chance. If it had been any other day I might have known that I had done my best. These fools here did not poison her — I will not believe that. But I could have done more. They kept rubbing her, they say. She looks quite alive. She was wife, mother, mistress & child. Please forgive me for writing this distressing stuff, but it is helping me. Her little tired face cannot be helped. Please do not write to me at all about her, for very long time, but tell me if I ought to buy another bitch or not, as I do not know what to think about anything. I am certain I am not going to kill myself about it, as I thought I might once. However, you will find this all very hysterical, so I may as well stop. I still expect to wake up and find it wasn’t. She was all I had.
love from TIM
Dear Bunny,
Please forgive me writing again, but I am so lonely and can’t stop crying and it is the shock. I waked her for two nights and buried her this morning in a turf basket, all my eggs in one basket. Now I am to begin a new life and it is important to begin it right, but I find it difficult to think straight. It is about whether I ought to buy another dog or not ... I might not survive another bereavement like this in 12 years’ time, and dread to put myself in the way of it. If your father & mother & both sons had died at the same moment as Ray, unexpectedly, in your absence, you would know what I am talking about. Unfortunately Brownie was barren, like myself, and as I have rather an overbearing character I had made her live through me, as I lived through her. Brownie was my life and I am lonely for just such another reservoir for my love. But if I did get such reservoir it would die in about 12 years and at present I feel I couldn’t face that. Do people get used to being bereaved? This is my first time. I am feeling very lucky to have a friend like you that I can write to without being thought dotty to go on like that about mere dogs.
They did not poison her. It was one of her little heart attacks and they did not know how to treat it and killed her by the wrong kindnesses.
You must try to understand that I am and will remain entirely without wife or brother or sister or child and that Brownie supplied more than the place of these to me. We loved each other more and more every year.
... All I can do now is to remember her dead as I buried her, the cold grey jowl in the basket, and not as my heart’s blood, which she was for the last eight years of our twelve.
- Quoted from The Futility Closet (17/10/2014)
Knowing what we now do about the perversity of some of David Garnett's own relationships - his curious April-November marriage to his male lover Duncan Grant's young daughter Angelica Bell, for instance - it's hard not to see his indignation at White's confessions as the pot calling the kettle black.
But then, in this as in so many other matters, White seems to have been ahead of his times rather than - as the censorious Garnett implied - behind them. Such intense love for an animal companion: especially, as in this case, a dog who had been by White's side, through thick and thin, for fourteen years, surely no longer requires an apology?
There were, to be sure, other aspects to White's "repressed sexual predilections" - most of them innocuous enough to a modern reader - but for more detail on that I'll refer you to the White / Garnett Letters or, preferably, S. T. Warner's biography.
Mind you, White's generic and stylistic experiments certainly could lead him astray at times. His account of a new great flood, set in Ireland, where he lived during most of World War II, was greatly resented by his local hosts, who felt that it depicted them as ignorant peasants.
White was horrified by this - as he saw it - misreading of a light-hearted fantasy. but the fact remains that he was no longer welcome in this home away from home. The disposition to turn everything you encounter into copy is, I suppose, the writer's curse: but particularly so in White's case, since it took so long for each of his books to accrete.
Maybe he's not a great writer. Maybe he is. It's hard to take much interest in such matters of literary taxonomy. Above all, he was a great original, and each of his books takes a strikingly different approach to the question of how to live on this earth. His inability to fit into any particular category or mold is probably why they remain so lively and intriguing sixty years after his death.
I'm very fond of Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing, too. All things considered, given her own political and social leanings, I'm not sure she was best placed to interpret her friend Tim. She certainly did her best, however - throwing up her hands at times to admit her perplexity - and her biography remains an indispensable adjunct to the body of his work.
All of it, imho, deserves to be read, reread, and treasured.
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Poetry:
- Loved Helen (1929)
- Loved Helen and Other Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1929.
- The Green Bay Tree (1929)
- A Joy Proposed. Ed. Kurth Sprague (1980)
- A Joy Proposed: Poems. Ed. Kurth Sprague. 1980. London: Secker & Warburg, 1982.
- [with R. McNair Scott] Dead Mr Nixon (1931)
- [as James Aston] First Lesson (1932)
- [as James Aston] They Winter Abroad (1932)
- Darkness at Pemberley (1932)
- Farewell Victoria (1933)
- Farewell Victoria. 1933. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945.
- Earth Stopped (1934)
- Earth Stopped, or Mr. Marx’s Sporting Tour. London: Collins, 1934.
- Gone to Ground (1935)
- The Sword in the Stone (1938)
- The Sword in the Stone. 1938. London: Collins, 1945.
- The Witch in the Wood (1939)
- The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
- Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)
- Mistress Masham’s Repose. London: Jonathan Cape, 1947.
- The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947)
- The Elephant and the Kangaroo. London: Jonathan Cape, 1948.
- The Master: An Adventure Story (1957)
- The Master: An Adventure Story. 1957. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
- The Once and Future King (1958)
- The Sword in the Stone (1938)
- The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939)
- The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
- The Candle in the Wind (1958)
- The Once and Future King. London: Collins, 1958.
- The Once and Future King. 1958. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1967.
- The Book of Merlyn (1977)
- The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to the Once and Future King. Prologue by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Illustrations by Trevor Stubley. 1977. London: Fontana / Collins, 1978.
- The Maharajah and Other Stories: from Earth Stopped (1934) and Gone to Ground (1935). Ed. Kurth Sprague (1981)
- The Maharajah and Other Stories. Ed. Kurth Sprague. 1981. London: Futura, 1983.
- The Once and Future King (1996)
- The Sword in the Stone (1938)
- The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939)
- The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
- The Candle in the Wind (1958)
- The Book of Merlyn (1977)
- The Once and Future King. 1939, 1940, 1958, 1977. HarperVoyager. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
- England Have My Bones (1936)
- England Have My Bones. 1936. St. James’s Library. London: Collins, 1952.
- Burke's Steerage, or, The Amateur Gentleman’s Introduction to Noble Sports and Pastimes (1938)
- The Age of Scandal (1950)
- The Age of Scandal: an Excursion through a Minor Period. 1950. London: Jonathan Cape, 1951.
- The Goshawk (1951)
- The Goshawk. 1951. With diagrams from sketches by the author and specially illustrated for RU by Ralph Thompson. London: Readers Union Ltd. / Jonathan Cape, 1953.
- The Goshawk. 1951. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
- The Scandalmonger (1952)
- The Scandalmonger. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
- The Book of Beasts (1954)
- The Bestiary: a Book of Beasts. 1954. New York: Capricorn Books, 1960.
- The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959)
- The Godstone and the Blackymor. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. 1959. London: The Reprint Society, 1960.
- America at Last (1965)
- The White / Garnett Letters. Ed. David Garnett (1968)
- Letters to a Friend: The Correspondence Between T. H. White and L. J. Potts (1984)
- Letters to a Friend: The Correspondence between T. H. White and L. J. Potts. Ed. François Gallix. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984.
- Warner, Sylvia Townsend. T. H. White: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape / Chatto & Windus, 1967.
Fiction:
Non-fiction:
Letters:
Secondary:
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