As a man, but not as a writer, T. H. White may be best compared to Ernest Hemingway. They were more than contemporaries and look-alikes; they were also remarkably close in psychological orientation. Both were big, handsome men, each extremely vital in his approach to life. Yet each was haunted by the very talent he possessed -- frightened of not only sudden death but the failure of his powers through the onslaught of age. Both were fatalists, not at all sure that the masses of humanity weren't tacitly trying to destroy each other and that God wasn't in on it all behind the scenes. Both were afraid of war, though both (White not as much as Hemingway) felt they had to participate to demonstrate their ability to deal with reality despite its horrifying definition. As substitutes for the conflict and challenges of war and life, both substituted the conflict and challenge of sport -- each felt that sport was a miniature battleground in which man had a chance to test himself for the bigger fight ahead. Each had consistent need to prove himself the better of the opposition and the fear that life seemed to mount against him, and each was furious when he failed to meet the test. Each failed to meet the test much more obviously with the coming of his forties and fifties, and both died premature deaths couched in unshakeable despair. (p. 17)

White could not exactly be called misanthropic, but his love and his respect for mankind were closely guarded. This self-protection was due mainly to the constant threat or actuality of war during the second half of his life. He one day discovered that only men and ants make war upon one another, and he was shocked at the way men of the 1930's, 1940's, and 1950's followed blindly into battle because leaders, haranguing on national patriotism, baited them to it. White's masterpiece, The Once and Future King, is, ultimately, an examination of mankind's addiction to warfare and of his moral and physical destruction by it. (p. 18)

He was a firm believer in the statement he has Merlyn make in The Sword in the Stone that the best thing for being sad was learning something. So White learned things which were huge and diverse. In the "Pleasures of Learning" lecture that he gave many times in America in 1963, he liked to catalogue the things he had attempted in order to relieve the sadness and fear which dominated his life. Shooting a bow and arrow, flying airplanes, plowing with horses, riding show jumpers, training falcons, deep-sea diving, sailing, swimming, shooting, fishing, racing cars, throwing darts, painting, carpentering, knitting, translating, and writing are just a few. Almost all of these, of course, appear in his writings at one point or another. (p. 19)

White cannot be classified as a modern British writer in terms of his total literary production. The few early novels that he attempted -- They Winter Abroad, First Lesson, Earth Stopped, and Gone to Ground were in the style and substance of modern British literature but were duds and flops. He was better when reverting to the style and the material of an earlier day; therefore, his best work grounds itself in the medieval era (The Once and Future King, The Book of Beasts), the eighteenth century (Mistress Masham's Repose, The Age of Scandal, The Scandalmonger), the nineteenth century (Farewell Victoria), or the timeless history of Irish Mythology (The Elephant and the Kangaroo, The Godstone and the Blackymor). In each of these ages, his imagination manages to "improve" and extend what he felt contemporary authors had left undone. White's poetry (Loved Helen and Other Poems, The Green Bay Tree) also smacks of an earlier day, but it is imitation rather than an extension or improvement.

Not White's greatest works but certainly his most distinctive and in some ways his most memorable are the diaries he published in book form from time to time. These provide the best picture of the author himself and the peculiar blend of enthusiasm for and fear of existence so especially characteristic of him. England Have My Bones, The Goshawk, The Godstone and the Blackymor, and America at Last are perhaps White's most flawless and realistic books. (pp. 20-1)

In every White book we find some distinct element which makes it unmistakably his, but that element is elusive when we must ultimately define it. The best estimation of his approach to life seems to me to have been presented in his own words in the sadness-learning statement by Merlyn and in the portrait of Lord Camelford [in The Scandalmonger]. White was a homosexual who was determined not to foist his problem upon others; thus, he became a semirecluse who tried to manufacture for himself entertaining diversions, but every diversion was permeated by the loneliness and fatalism which continually tried to gain control of his existence.

For this reason, a White book -- be it prose, fiction, poetry, or whatever -- usually possesses a dualism between surface and sub-surface. A work at first appears to be lilting and fabulistic, but this characteristic is invariably a masque for the sombre and reflective countenance which always lurks behind. And this masque, as Sylvia Warner has stated [in T. H. White: A Biography], always has painted on it a pair of raised-eyebrows, for White's tone is continually that of a man who is not surprised by what he sees in life but is rather insistently critical of it. The criticism is generally delivered lightly, with a pointed finger rather than with an upraised switch. If his eyebrows are raised, his voice accompanies them with a "tsk-tsk" of forced indignation. (p. 186)

White was a very versatile original writer at his best -- and very stodgy and imitative at his worst. Never a great creator of realistic characters, his finest work is that in which he sets characterization aside in favor of humor, satire, fantasy, and amateur philosophizing. Beyond fiction, his own life was interesting and dynamic to a degree that even one of his daybooks makes good reading. But when White tried to write poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins seemed to be a model he could neither duplicate nor avoid. Likewise, in his early fiction, the influence of Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh and others is much too obvious.

White, in fact, never was able to steer clear of another author's work in creating his own. In his early years, he imitated and failed; in his later ones, he extended and spoofed and, consequently, succeeded. Malory, Swift, Horace Walpole, and Stevenson all retire far into the background when White is delving into their respective milieus. As a scholar, White is interesting and entertaining but probably not lasting, for he could never dispel a sense of dabbling and dilettantism for himself or his readers. So T. H. White is important to English Literature mainly as a novelist and a diarist.

Farewell Victoria, The Once and Future King, Mistress Masham's Repose, The Elephant and the Kangaroo are certainly the finest examples of the White style: for they contain the most compelling combination of fantasy, satire, humor, and philosophical reflection. They are the books in which the eyebrows are raised the highest and in which the determination to make life worthwhile, despite the odds against doing so, is the strongest. None of these works could be called "modern" British fiction, but all of them are important and memorable contributions by a fine British writer.

As a diarist, White's own dominating personality, his fear of the unknown, his determination to overcome that fear, the endeavors through which he does so, and the musings upon the actual course of life as he knows it magnetize these themes together and universalize them. England Have My Bones, The Goshawk, The Godstone and the Blackymor, and America At Last are unique in the canon of English Literature. They are the type of book written about deceased authors by intimate acquaintances, but these works possess the intimacy of the man himself as he lived them and realized them. In this particular genre, whatever one chooses to call it, White probably has no equal. Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and [Norman] Mailer's Armies of the Night are the only books which seem to me to be even close to White's.

T. H. White was a man who despised life as it was made for him by his mother, his homosexuality, organized religion, and world politics. Yet, by receding within himself and speaking to the world from this hideaway, he was -- like Mundy, Merlyn, the Professor at Malplaquet, Mr. White of Burkestown, and Tim White of the journals -- able to fashion his life into a meaningful existence in which his own standards and personal morality replaced those which would otherwise have been imposed upon him by the modern world's manufactured machinery, manufactured war, manufactured god, and manufactured Hell. (pp. 186-88)