Favourite Children's Authors: T. H. White

Sylvia Townsend Warner: T. H. White: A Biography (1967)

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 a strange way to characterise him: "When did you stop beating your wife?" - or, as in this case, repressing your sexual predilections?

T. H. White: The Master (1957)

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.

T. H. White: Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)

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.

T. H. White: The Maharajah and Other Stories (1981)

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).

T. H. White: The Once and Future King (1958 / 1967)

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.

T. H. White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)

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.

T. H. White: The Witch in the Wood (1939)

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.

T. H. White: The Goshawk (1951)

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.

T. H. White & Brownie

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 last days has to be read to be believed:

[November 1944]

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

Another letter followed hot on its heels:

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)

Angelica Garnett: Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood (1984)

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.

T. H. White: The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947)

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.

Sylvia Townsend Warner: T. H. White: A Biography (1967 / 2023)

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T. H. White

Terence Hanbury White
(1906-1964)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Poetry:


1. Loved Helen (1929)
   • Loved Helen and Other Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1929.
2. The Green Bay Tree (1929)
3. A Joy Proposed. Ed. Kurth Sprague (1980)
   • A Joy Proposed: Poems. Ed. Kurth Sprague. 1980. London: Secker & Warburg, 1982.

Fiction:


4. [with R. McNair Scott] Dead Mr Nixon (1931)
5. [as James Aston] First Lesson (1932)
6. [as James Aston] They Winter Abroad (1932)
7. Darkness at Pemberley (1932)
8. Farewell Victoria (1933)
   • Farewell Victoria. 1933. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945.
9. Earth Stopped (1934)
   • Earth Stopped, or Mr. Marx’s Sporting Tour. London: Collins, 1934.
10. Gone to Ground (1935)
11. The Sword in the Stone (1938)
    • The Sword in the Stone. 1938. London: Collins, 1945.
12. The Witch in the Wood (1939)
13. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
14. Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)
    • Mistress Masham’s Repose. London: Jonathan Cape, 1947.
15. The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947)
    • The Elephant and the Kangaroo. London: Jonathan Cape, 1948.
16. The Master: An Adventure Story (1957)
    • The Master: An Adventure Story. 1957. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
17. The Once and Future King (1958)
    1. The Sword in the Stone (1938)
    2. The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939)
    3. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
    4. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. The Once and Future King (1996)
    1. The Sword in the Stone (1938)
    2. The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939)
    3. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
    4. The Candle in the Wind (1958)
    5. The Book of Merlyn (1977)
    • The Once and Future King. 1939, 1940, 1958, 1977. HarperVoyager. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.

Non-fiction:


21. England Have My Bones (1936)
    • England Have My Bones. 1936. St. James’s Library. London: Collins, 1952.
22. Burke's Steerage, or, The Amateur Gentleman’s Introduction to Noble Sports and Pastimes (1938)
23. The Age of Scandal (1950)
    • The Age of Scandal: an Excursion through a Minor Period. 1950. London: Jonathan Cape, 1951.
24. 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.
25. The Scandalmonger (1952)
    • The Scandalmonger. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
26. The Book of Beasts (1954)
    • The Bestiary: a Book of Beasts. 1954. New York: Capricorn Books, 1960.
27. The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959)
    • The Godstone and the Blackymor. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. 1959. London: The Reprint Society, 1960.
28. America at Last (1965)

Letters:


29. The White / Garnett Letters. Ed. David Garnett (1968)
30. 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.

Secondary:


31. Warner, Sylvia Townsend. T. H. White: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape / Chatto & Windus, 1967.

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The Tribulations of T. E. Lawrence

Augustus John: Colonel T.E. Lawrence (1919)

i. m. Jeremy Michael Wilson (1944–2017)

As a kind of add-on to my series of posts about the Garnett family (and, for that matter, as an adjunct to my fascination with polymath poet Robert Graves), I thought I'd write a piece about their mutual friend T. E. Lawrence: a devotee of small-press publishing, and, consequently, something of an idol to book-collectors everywhere.

The portrait above supplies the heroic image of Lawrence we're most familiar with: at the height of his fame, the world at his feet, and his image as the quintessential "desert-mad Englishman" on display front-and-centre in the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I.

Lawrence himself appears to have preferred the rather more equivocal and self-doubting version of himself presented in this preliminary sketch by Augustus John:

Augustus John: T.E. Lawrence (1919)

In a strange sense, though, his role had already been prepared for him even before the Allied propaganda machine began to focus on him in 1917 - when there was precious little good news anywhere else in the world.

His exploits as a kind of Arabic version of Zorro or the Swamp Fox were vamped up mercilessly by pioneering American film-maker Lowell Thomas after their meeting in Jerusalem in 1918, culminating in his travelling show "With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia" (1919).

Lowell Thomas & T. E. Lawrence (1924)

But even before that, in 1916, Jingoistic author John Buchan had created a kind of Lawrence avatar in the form of "Sandy Arbuthnot," one of the protagonists of his novel Greenmantle, an exciting tale of a religious revolt against the Turks and their German allies, led by the eponymous prophet "Greenmantle," eventually impersonated by Sandy himself.

John Buchan: Greenmantle (1916)

Greatly though Buchan subsequently came to admire Lawrence - "I am not much of a hero-worshipper, but I could have followed Lawrence over the edge of the world" - it's not really possible that he could have known enough about him at this stage to base his hero on him.

Instead, it's thought that the model for Sandy Arbuthnot was his friend Aubrey Herbert, the half-brother of Lord Carnarvon (of Tutankhamun fame), and a colleague of Lawrence's in the intelligence war in the Middle East.

Effigy of Colonel The Honourable Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert DL (1880–1923)

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So much for the foundations of the myth. Wherever it came from, and whatever its ingredients, it grew far beyond any expectations of wartime propaganda. Nor was this hindered by the immensely complex way in which Lawrence backed his war reminiscences into print. The story is best told by Jeremy Wilson, his authorised biographer:

In 1922 T. E. Lawrence finished work on the third draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The first, written during 1919, had been incomplete when it was stolen from him at Reading station. The second had been a hurried re-write, dashed-off from memory. Using this as a basis, Lawrence worked for many months on a third version, which he corrected and polished. There were probably intermediate drafts of most chapters, because what finally emerged was a fair-copy manuscript. This, the earliest surviving complete text, is nearly 84,000 words longer than the version he later issued to subscribers.

This theft of the original, 1919 version has gone into folklore. Many have dreamed of locating that first, scrawled manuscript of what would become an immensely controversial book. What extra secrets did it contain? What indiscretions led to its being stolen - by the British secret service, perhaps? Or was it, as Lawrence himself intimated, simply mislaid?

The new, 1922 draft was printed and bound up in eight copies, which were distributed to a number of influential literary friends: E. M. Forster, Edward Garnett, Robert Graves and George Bernard Shaw among them. As Wilson rather coyly remarks: "It was this 1922 text which convinced readers that Lawrence had written a masterpiece." There was immense interest from publishers, and Edward Garnett offered to make an abridgement if its author still had misgivings about issuing the full text.

On 16 August 1922 Lawrence enlisted in the RAF under the pseudonym of "J. H. Ross." This attempted act of self-abnegation was, however, stymied by press attention, and he was forced to resign in January 1923. A couple of months later, a certain "T. E. Shaw" enlisted as a private in the Tank Corps, which was far less congenial to him. He was able to negotiate a transfer back to the RAF in 1925, however.

Through all these shenanigans, one of the few things keeping him afloat was his work on revising and tightening the text of this (so-called) 'Oxford' version of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which eventually resulted in the very expensive, full illustrated subscriber's edition of 100 copies in 1926.

T. E. Lawrence: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (subscribers edition) (1926)

Lawrence was careful to receive no profit from this publication. The production costs (especially the reproduction of the illustrations) were so high that he actually ended up in deficit. He did, however, allow Jonathan Cape to issue a shorter version, Revolt in the Desert, abridged by Edward Garnett, in 1927.

T. E. Lawrence: Revolt in the Desert (1927)

After Lawrence's death in 1935, his brother A. W. Lawrence, who had been named as his literary executor, decided to reprint the subscriber's edition for the general public. The rest is history. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom has probably never been out of print since. The longer 1922 version was not, however, reprinted until 1997.

T. E. Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (trade edition) (1935)

As far as the differences between the two texts go, Robert Graves, who published a popular biography of Lawrence in 1927, gave his views as follows:

There is such a thing as a book being too well written, too much a part of literature ... It should somehow, one feels, have been a little more casual, for the nervous strain of its ideal of faultlessness is almost oppressive ... On the whole I prefer the earliest surviving version, the so-called Oxford text, to the final printed text.

Lawrence laughed this off as proof that Graves wanted to assert his superior knowledge by revealing in this offhand way that he'd actually been allowed to see the earlier version. It must have rankled, though (as did Leonard Woolf's comment, in a review of Revolt in the Desert, that "every sentence begins again with a full breath and ends with a really full stop"). A few years later he asked E. M. Forster to read and compare the two texts. Forster's judgement was, when it came, just as equivocal:

I had to admit that the sentences in the revision were more concise and showed a superior sense for the functions, and incidentally for the etymology, of the words employed in them. But the relation between the sentences seemed to me a little impaired: the connection, though logical, wasn't always easy.

Later, after Lawrence's death, when the question of which version to reprint arose, Forster responded more straightforwardly:

the Oxford is in the judgment of several critics even superior to the version offered now, and it is good news that a reprint of it may eventually be made.

That didn't happen in A. W. Lawrence's lifetime (he died in 1991), but when, a few years later, the 1922 text was finally published, the comparison could finally be made by anyone - not simply a few privileged scholars and friends.

T. E. Lawrence: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (2014)

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Does it matter? Not as much as you'd think, I'm sorry to say. Lawrence's legend has always shone brighter in the writings of others than in his own work. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I think most of us who've actually read it can attest, is overwritten and difficult to follow. Not so his letters, which are clear, informal and fascinating. But it's as a character - the star of a series of warring biographies, as well as conflicting betrayals on stage and screen - that he's come down to us most vividly.

Michael Goldberg, dir.: The Ascent of F6 (Northern Illinois University)

This began early, in masked form, in W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's play The Ascent of F6 (1936). The latter's autobiography Christopher and His Kind (1976) lays out the dichotomy the two had evolved between the 'truly strong' and the 'truly weak' man:

The truly strong man, calm, balanced, aware of his strength, sits drinking quietly in the bar; it is not necessary for him to try and prove to himself that he is not afraid, by joining the Foreign Legion ... leaving his comfortable home in a snowstorm to climb the impossible glacier ... [192]

"From Christopher and Wystan's point of view, the Truly Weak Man was represented by Lawrence of Arabia, and hence by their character Michael Ransom in F.6."

This was, however, during the period when the Lord Chancellor still had to licence all new plays in Britain, and amongst his prerogatives was preventing the portrayal of public figures on stage in any but flattering guises. This power weakened over the years, and even before the abolition of state censorship of theatre in 1968, a number of attempts had been made to subvert this principle.

Terence Rattigan: Alec Guinness as Lawrence/Ross (1960)

Among these was Ross - a play by immensely popular dramatist Terence Rattigan (author of The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version and French without Tears).

The play concerns blackmail. It's based on a rumour Rattigan (himself a very closeted homosexual) had heard that a man called Dickinson had threatened to "out" Lawrence while he was hiding under a pseudonym in the RAF. Alec Guinness played Lawrence, and - it is alleged - made the homosexual undertones of the play more apparent in performance than in the published text. Wikipedia adds that:

Ross was originally written as a film script for the Rank Organization, with Dirk Bogarde cast as Lawrence. The project fell through due to a combination of financial difficulties and political turmoil in Iraq, where it was to be filmed. A later attempt to adapt the play, with Laurence Harvey as Lawrence, was scrapped when David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia went into production.

David Lean / Robert Bolt: Peter O'Toole as Lawrence (1962)

Which is where we re-enter history. Who has not seen, and marvelled at, Lawrence of Arabia? It must be one of the single most influential films of modern times. The sweep of it, the epic scope, the cinematography - on and on we rave.

A. W. Lawrence hated it. And it did have the effect of eclipsing the private, scholarly Lawrence he'd been quietly constructing off on his own all those years, and turning his brother into a preening egomaniac, a poseur, a victim - anything but the scholar and gentleman he was (or at least may much of the time have wanted to be).

Christopher Menaul / Tim Rose Price: Ralph Fiennes as T. E. Lawrence (1992)

There've been other attempts to resurrect Lawrence since. One of the most creditable is recorded above. But it's rather like trying to rewrite Hamlet. It can be done, of course, but the mould has really been set once and for all. Robert Bolt, David Lean, Peter O'Toole and T. E. Lawrence can never now be seen entirely separately again.

But that's not to say that the battle of the books didn't continue. One thing about writers is that they never allow somebody else the last word. The saga of Lawrence's biographers is perhaps even more interesting - and certainly more complex and involved - that that of his dramatic incarnations.

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Lowell Thomas: With Lawrence in Arabia (1924)

Robert Graves: Lawrence and the Arabs (1927)

Basil Liddell Hart: 'T. E. Lawrence': In Arabia and After (1934)

It began - after the Lowell Thomas farrago - with subtly modulated hagiography, under the close supervision of (first) Lawrence himself, and then his beloved brother. First Robert Graves, then Basil Liddell Hart, and finally A. W. Lawrence himself had a go at constructing a suitable memorial frieze:

A. W. Lawrence, ed.: T. E. Lawrence by His Friends (1937)

T. E. Lawrence to his Biographer: Robert Graves (1938)

T. E. Lawrence to his Biographer: Liddell Hart (1938)

As you can see from the above, Lawrence was not exactly bashful about supplying his biographers with answers to faqs. But you can't really keep a lid on things forever, however assiduous a literary executor you are.

In 1955 war poet and novelist (and ex-husband of American poet H. D.) Richard Aldington published possibly the most concerted attack on Lawrence and the Lawrence myth ever penned.

Richard Aldington: Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955)

I think the true nature of Aldington's work only struck me when I read a passage where he quotes someone's anecdote about how the Lawrence boys used to cycle to school in single file, one after the other, in order of age. "I don't know what this proves," quips Aldington, "except that a talent for posing manifested in him at an early age."

And so he continues. Oceans of bile are poured over poor Lawrence's head, and the gripes and dissatisfactions of a lifetime (Aldington's) are all attributed to him. This is not to say that the Lawrence legend didn't deserve some debunking, but one can't quite feel that Aldington had the temperament to do a really effective job.

A rather better attempt was made John Mack in his wonderfully titled (and Pulitzer prize-winning) psychological biography A Prince of Our Disorder:

John E. Mack: A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence (1976)

Just what was wrong with Lawrence? Why did he behave so strangely? Why did he pay a man to come and beat him in his later years in London? Was he a sado-masochist? Was he gay? Was he impotent? Few stones are left unturned in the course of the questioning.

After which, I suppose, a few people thought the poor fellow might be left to lie in his grave undisturbed for a while. It was not to be. The final tombstone of an 'authorised biography' still awaited him:

Jeremy Wilson: Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T. E. Lawrence (1989)

Opinions on Jeremy Wilson's magnum opus differ greatly. It was selected by The New York Times as one of the six best nonfiction books of 1990, while the Toronto Star described it as "an unremarkable book." It all depends on what you're looking for, I suppose.

For myself, I found that it answered almost all of the nagging questions I had about Lawrence: and that its depth and weight of research did have the effect of wiping other, competing attempts at biography (including, I'm afraid, Mack's) out of the field.

Was Lawrence a pathological liar, who shifted and invented things in his own account of his wartime exploits? The apparent inconsistencies in his text had led earlier commentators to assume so, but Wilson makes a surprisingly strong case for the proposition that Lawrence was actually remarkably accurate and truthful: not only about impressions, but also about the recorded facts of events.

Again and again "errors" in Lawrence's book turn out to be backed up by contemporary documents. Before Wilson, it seems that nobody really bothered to check. The website for Wilson's private press Castle Hill Books reveals just how much he's gone on to do for Lawrence's posthumous reputation. This includes a massive, multi-volumed edition of Lawrence's surviving correspondence, and - perhaps most importantly of all - the republication of the 1922 text of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

I can't help feeling that many of the sneers (or yawns) that have been directed at his great biography of his hero come either from people who haven't read it, or - even more likely - haven't read any of its forest of predecessors. If you really want to know the facts about T. E. Lawrence, admittedly from a very favourable viewpoint, there's really no alternative to reading Wilson: the full 1989 text, mind you, not the 1992 abridgement.

Here's a list of the Lawrence-iana in my own collection. As you'll see, it's quite extensive, but by no means complete. For a man who published so little in his own lifetime, Lawrence casts a surprisingly long shadow for subsequent bibliographers:

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T. E. Lawrence at Miranshah (1928)

Thomas Edward Lawrence
(1888-1935)

T. E. Lawrence: Works (1910-35)


Works:


1. Lawrence, T. E. Crusader Castles. 1910. Ed. A. W. Lawrence. 1936. Introduction by Mark Bostridge. London: The Folio Society, 2010.


2. Lawrence, T. E. The Complete 1922 Seven Pillars of Wisdom: The 'Oxford' Text. 1922. Ed. Jeremy Michael Wilson. 1997. 2nd ed. 2003-4. 3rd. ed. 2 vols. Salisbury, England: Castle Hill Press, 2014.


3. Lawrence, T. E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. 1926. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1946.


4. Lawrence, T. E. Revolt in the Desert. New York: Garden City Publishing Company Inc., 1927.


5. Lawrence, T. E. The Mint: The Complete Unexpurgated Text. Ed. A. W. Lawrence. 1936. Preface by J. M. Wilson. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


6. Lawrence, T. E. Oriental Assembly. With Photographs by the Author. Ed. A. W. Lawrence. 1939. London: Williams and Norgate Ltd., 1939.


7. Garnett, David, ed. The Essential T. E. Lawrence. 1951. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956.


8. Garnett, David, ed. The Essential T. E. Lawrence: A Selection of His Finest Writings. 1951. Introduction by Malcolm Brown. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Edited:


9. Lawrence, T. E., ed. Minorities. Ed. J. M. Wilson. Preface by C. Day Lewis. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971.




T. E. Shaw: The Odyssey (1932)


Translations:


10. Shaw, T. E. (Colonel T. E. Lawrence), trans. The Odyssey of Homer: Translated into English Prose. 1932. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.




T. E. Lawrence: Letters (c.1900-35)


Letters:


11. Garnett, David, ed. The Letters of T. E. Lawrence. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1938.


12. Lawrence, M. R., ed. The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence and His Brothers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954.


13. Lawrence, A. W., ed. Letters to T. E. Lawrence. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1962.




T. E. Lawrence: Biographies (1924-89)


Secondary:


14. Thomas, Lowell. With Lawrence in Arabia. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), Ltd., 1924.


15. Graves, Robert. Lawrence and the Arabs. Illustrations ed. Eric Kennington. Maps by Herry Perry. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1927.


16. Liddell Hart, B. H. ‘T. E. Lawrence’: In Arabia and After. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1934.


17. Lawrence, A. W., ed. T. E. Lawrence by His Friends. 1937. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1938.


18. Aldington, Richard. Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry. London: Collins, 1955.


19. Mack, John E. A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence. 1976. New Preface by the Author. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.


20. Wilson, Jeremy. Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T. E. Lawrence. 1989. Minerva. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1990.




Howard Brenton: Lawrence after Arabia (2016)


Dramatic versions:


21. Plays of the Sixties. Volume One: Ross, by Terence Rattigan; The Royal Hunt of the Sun, by Peter Shaffer; Billy Liar, by Keith Waterhouse & Willis Hall; Play with a Tiger, by Doris Lessing. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.


22. Lawrence Of Arabia, dir. David Lean, writ. Robert Bolt – with Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quayle – (USA, 1962)


23. Brownlow, Kevin. David Lean: A Biography. Research Associate: Cy Young. 1996. A Wyatt Book. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

T. E. Lawrence with Emir Abdullah (1921)

The Garnett Family (4): Richard the Third

Richard Garnett: The White Dragon (1963)

It's strange how important reading the right children's book at just the right time can be.

I'm not sure just what impression Richard Garnett's White Dragon would have on me now if I were encountering it for the first time, but, as it turned out, it had the effect of introducing me to a whole set of fascinating topics which have interested me ever since:

St. George and the Dragon (St Albans: 2015)


Mummer's Plays

For more on this, I strongly recommend the following:

E. K. Chambers. The English Folk-Play. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933.



E. K. Chambers: The English Folk-Play (1933)


In the book, the children find the remains of a pantomime dragon, "Old Snap," and are inspired to resurrect an almost forgotten seasonal play in which St. George battles this personification of winter in order to bring life back to the land again.



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Daniel Defoe: A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (Folio Society, 2006)


Daniel Defoe's Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26)

Garnett's protagonist, Mark Rutter, also centre stage in his earlier book The Silver Kingdom, reads a passage from Defoe's fascinating compendium of local gossip and anecdotes - combined with direct observation - about a mysterious 'white worm' which can only be seen at certain times of day on a nearby eminence called the 'Wormell' (or Worm-Hill).




Richard Garnett: The Silver Kingdom (1957)


Mark, who is (according to his archaeologist friend from the previous book) a 'born finder', discovers the solution to this mystery by sheer happenstance, and unearths another dragon to set alongside Old Snap.



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Uffingdon White Horse (c.1000 BC)


Hillside chalk figures

Sure enough, the second 'white dragon' in the book turns out to be a chalk figure cut into the hillside. Unlike the more familiar examples, where the turf has to be recut periodically to keep them visible, the 'white worme' of the Wormell has been made out of chalk packed into man-made ditches on this artificial eminence. As a result, it proves possible to re-establish its long-overgrown contours by the simple expedient of drilling small holes in the hillside.




Graham Oakley: Cover illustration (1963)


The above illustration shows the contours of the chalk figure as it is eventually revealed. Mark spots it because the snow melts more slowly on the chalk than the earth of the hill, so he is able to photograph its momentarily revealed shape one evening during the thaw: a 'born finder', indeed!



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Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne: Der Winter (1614)


Ice yachting

Mark's desire to construct an ice yacht for his cousin Tom, a keen skater injured in a road accident years before, and now forced to go everywhere on crutches, forms most of the actual narrative of the book.

This was the era of the can-do hero, when a set of enterprising boys and girls could easily solve a cipher, reconstruct an old building, start an archaeological dig, or - as in this case - master the mechanics of ice-yachting.

It's strangely inspiring to read about, however little it may resemble the pathetic constructions of cardboard and plastic which were all I and my contemporaries could achieve.




Richard Garnett: The White Dragon (1963)


The original cover of the hardback edition, above, shows the success that attends their efforts. 'The White Dragon' and 'The Red Knight' are the names of the two yachts they build out of a few old planks and some leftover ice-skates provided by the local junkshop owner.



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Year of the "Dragon" (2012)


Mahjong

This is more of a peripheral reference in the book, but a 'white dragon' in mahjong is a totally blank tile. It's named from the fact that such a sheet of white can represent a white dragon hiding on a field of snow - or nothing at all, depending on how you interpret it.




The beginner's guide to the greatest pastimes: Mahjong


The book concludes with the gift to Mark from his friends of a blank mahjong tile, the fourth (and last) dragon in the story. When asked what the difference is between a white dragon and a blank tile, he replies: "All the difference in the world." Those, rather appropriately, are the last words of the text.

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Julian Bell: Richard Garnett (1992)

As you'll have deduced from the title of my blogpost, the author of The White Dragon, Richard Garnett (1923-2013), was the third writer of that name, in direct line of descent from Richard Garnett the Philologist (1789-1850), and Richard Garnett the writer and editor (1835-1906). He was the grandson of Edward and Constance Garnett, and the son of David and Ray Garnett.

Despite - or perhaps because of - the weight of this family legacy, he was a pretty competent and multi-faceted character in his own right.

As well as an author of children's books (his only other published work in this vein, the historical novel Jack of Dover, is pictured below), he was also an editor and publisher.

Richard Garnett: Jack of Dover (1966)

This is his history of the firm that he mainly worked for, Rupert Hart-Davis, co-founded by his father, David Garnett:

Richard Garnett: Rupert Hart-Davis Limited: A Brief History with a Checklist of Publications (2005)

Nicolas Barker has this to say of his skills as a publisher in his 2013 Independent obituary:

Garnett was ... [Rupert Hart-Davis]'s production manager, and soon an expert editor as well. Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet, another bestseller, and the three-volume autobiography of Lady Diana Cooper (Hart-Davis's aunt), exercised both skills. Laurence Whistler's books spurred him to become a glass-engraver. His nautical experience came to the fore with the Mariner's Library of sea classics ... But the heart of the firm lay not in these but in scholarly but readable books such as Leon Edel's five-volume life of Henry James, Allan Wade's Letters of W. B. Yeats and Peter Fleming's imperial sagas. All of these achieved their reputation thanks to the joint expertise of Garnett and Hart-Davis. Not for nothing did one of their admiring beneficiaries call the firm "the university of Soho Square".

But commercial success did not follow. Three times the firm had to be bailed out. Control passed first to Heinemann, then Harcourt Brace and finally to Granada. Hart-Davis himself left in 1963; three years later the firm was merged with MacGibbon & Kee and finally Garnett was sacked. As he left, a water-pipe burst in the attic, leaving him to say "Après moi le déluge". ... Fortunately, Macmillan was in need of just his talents, to supervise copy-editing and proof-correction. He soon became indispensable ... Gerald Durrell's books owed much to his editing, which verged on authorial, as did the natural history books of Bernard Heuvelmans.

Barker sees his two greatest achievements as:

1. his 1991 biography of his grandmother, Constance Garnett:


Richard Garnett: Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (1991)



2. his design work for The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn et al., 16 parts in 34 volumes (Princeton University Press, 1969-2002):


Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (1983)

That seems as good a place as any to conclude my survey of this unusually talented family of writers and artists.

David "Bunny" Garnett had six children in all. Two sons - including Richard himself - with his first wife Rachel "Ray" Marshall (1891–1940); and four daughters with Angelica (1918–2012). The eldest of these, Amaryllis Virginia Garnett (1943–1973) was an actress who had a small part in Harold Pinter's film adaptation of The Go-Between (1970). She drowned in the Thames, aged 29 - whether by accident or suicide is unclear.

Richard Garnett himself died leaving two sons, but whether or not either of them - or their own children, for that matter - have literary ambitions remains beyond the grasp of that (would-be) fount of all knowledge, wikipedia.

Joseph Losey, dir.: The Go-Between (1971)

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."