Back in my teens and early twenties I went through a phase of reading all kinds of Arthurian inspired works; everything from Malory’s original “Morte d’Arthur” through to modern books which incorporated the legends, such as Susan Cooper’s wonderful “The Dark is Rising” sequence. Mary Stewart’s Arthurian books were possibly the ones which kicked it off for me, as my mum and dad were avid readers and this was probably where their tastes occasionally crossed; certainly “The Crystal Cave” was in the house when I was first moving on to more adult books (YA didn’t exist as a category when I was a teenager!) However, one of my pivotal Arthurian reads was “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White, which I loved; and so when Handheld Books approached me to see if I would be interested in reading their reissue of Sylvia Townsend Warner‘s 1967 biography of White, I jumped at the chance!! I mean, STW and White – what a combination! And it was the perfect book to turn to after finishing my re-read of the Coopers, which left me with a huge book hangover…
The biography itself has a fascinating history. Warner and White never met, but the latter admired the former’s work and the former described the latter as “a friend I never managed to have.” Warner was invited by White’s executors to write the great man’s biography, and besides visiting his home in Alderney, she also had access to all manner of his papers and correspondence, as well as being able to track down and speak to so many who had known him. So Warner was well placed to produce an in-depth book on White, and the result is a lyrical, sentitive and often moving portrait of a troubled and creative man.
White was born in colonial India, and his strongest attachment during his childhood appears to have been his nurse; his mother was an emotionally demanding, cold woman, who sent the nurse away; there was a background of domestic violence; and much of his life appears to have been an attempt to recover from the emotionally abusive early years. In fact, he recalled that his happiest times were when he had a period living with his grandparents. White attended public school at Cheltenham College, and after a year out earning a living, went on to study at Cambridge. His public school years seemed to be traumatic ones, with violence and humiliation from older boys turning into what he described as a “flagellist”; certainly, those years and his difficult early family experiences turned him into a complex person who struggled with personal relationships all through his life.
However, White moved on to teaching and writing, and he was a prolific author from the start; he produced a number of works under an assumed name (so as not to cause embarrassment for his employers); but it was the first of his Arthurian books, “The Sword in the Stone”, which brought him success, both in terms of recognition and also financially. White would go on to write the rest of the books in this sequence, as well as many others (I think “Mistress Masham’s Repose” is possibly one of his best known). A polymath, he wrote poetry and non-fiction, as well as painting on the side. And then there is “The Goshawk”…
White was a man who not only loved nature, he also enjoyed hunting and shooting and fishing it! Throughout his life, as he moved restlessly from one location to another, he tried to keep a variety of animals, including a number of hunting birds. “The Goshawk” is the result of one such experience, and it’s a book which has become incredibly influential. But his closest animal companion (indeed, *any* kind of companion) was his Setter, Brownie, beloved by him and deeply mourned when she died.
October 20th, 1939
There don’t seem to be many people being killed yet – no hideous slaughters of gas and bacteria.
But the truth is going.
We are suffocating in propaganda instead of gas, slowly feeling our minds go dead.
And on the wireless – it seems as if it must be hundreds of millions of times a day – the foulest and cheapest and vulgarest and most debasing.
So White wrote, and hunted, spending the war years in Ireland (he was horrified by WW2); he maintained many friendships, including a long and deep one with David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, scion of the Bloomsbury Group; and he found a final home on Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, where he lived out the last two decades of his life, a well-known author because of the Disney film “The Sword in the Stone” and the musical “Camelot”. He died on a trip to Greece in 1964, leaving an impressive and varied body of work behind him. A fascinating life, then; so how does Warner tell his story?
Well, from my point of view, she seems to have been an inspired choice to write White’s life! Her approach is intriguing, bringing a novelist’s sensibility to the art of biography, and the book is beautifully written and eminently readable. There are, it’s clear, elisions; Warner makes decision to focus more on certain parts of White’s life, especially his writing, his friendships and his relationship to the land; certain periods she explores in detail, other she tends to skim past. She is straightforward and non-judgemental about what could be regarded as problematic; White has been described a repressed homosexual (though I have seen that debated elsewhere), and in later years suffered an unfulfulled passion for a young boy, Zed. Notably, he refused to act on this passion, and indeed at times in his life seemed to come close to marriage and stability. He was a man with a complex nature, and it’s to Warner’s credit that she handles this element of White’s life so well; a modern biography might well go with screaming headlines and a shocked narrative, whereas Warner recognises White as being a flawed, troubled human. As he said himself, in one of his diaries, “It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them”.
White was obviously a mercurial, larger than life figure; driven by constantly changing enthusiasms and obsessions, his life was full of adventure and writing and friendships, as well as darker and lonelier episodes where his moods dropped. Warner makes liberal use of his diaries and letters, some of which are exchanges with his oldest and dearest associates, and builds up a fascinating portrait of a very individual character. The first-hand accounts of those who knew him are illuminating, in that it often seems that they all had their own version of White. He was a man who lived life to the extremes, whether driving his car too fast, drinking to excess, or learning to fly to master his fear of it. Despite the loneliness he experienced, his existence was often a rich one, full of events and books, and Warner brings it to life beautifully in this wonderfully written book. Needless to say, the Handheld edition is beautifully done, with an introduction by Gill Davies, an Appendix which lists White’s work, and excellent notes by Kate Macdonald – this really is the way to reprint works! A fascinating read, a worthy reissue and highly recommended!
(Review copy kindly provided by the publisher, for which many thanks! The book is published on 17th January.)