In fact, White had far more in common with other scholarly writers of his generation. His work, like theirs, was written largely in response to the events that led to World War II. His gift was to breathe new life into the accepted legends and myths of England, to show the relevance of that history to World War II and the period that followed.
White was the sole child of terribly mismatched parents, both British citizens living in India. The daughter of an Indian judge, White's mother didn't marry his father until she was thirty. She chose him capriciously, knowing that his position as a district superintendent of police would enrage her parents. She soon found herself deeply unhappy. In Sylvia Townsend Warner's T. H. White: A Biography, she quotes White when he recalled one of the more dramatic moments in his parents' unpleasant marriage: "My mother and father were to be found wrestling with a pistol, one on either side of my cot, each claiming that he or she was going to shoot the other and himself or herself, but in any case, beginning with me.... It was not a safe kind of childhood."
White's father lapsed into serious, abusive alcoholism. Though gifted with a wild imagination and a great sense of drama, White's mother did not provide much stability either. Warner quotes him as saying, "Either there were the dreadful parental quarrels and spankings of me when I was tiny, or there were excessive scenes of affection during which she wooed me to love her -- not her to love me."
By the time White was fourteen, his parents had divorced. In 1920 he was sent to Cheltenham College, a private school and military academy. White later blamed his masochistic tendencies partly on this brutalizing experience and on his confusing relationship with his mother, whom he adored for much of his childhood. White's sadistic tendencies took a personal toll; he did not successfully forge relationships with women and largely suppressed his homosexual feelings. On a less destructive note, Cheltenham was where he encountered C. F. Scott, a teacher who encouraged his writing and of whom White said, "I shall be grateful to him till I die."
To offset his tremendous lack of surety, self-confidence, and self-worth, White determined to excel academically and physically. He learned to hunt with a bow and arrow, to dive in an old-fashioned brass diving bell, to ride, to shoot, and to fish. He also learned falconry, a skill he used to great effect in his fictional writings, and to which he devoted an entire nonfiction book, The Goshawk. He was awarded first-class honors, with distinction, at Cambridge and went on to head the English department at Stowe School. He soon grew restless, says Warner, writing to a friend that he was anxious for the chance "to see a bit of the world while I am still young."
White balanced his booklearning with manual skills, with almost equal emphasis on intellectual and tactile abilities. Warner quotes him as saying at the time, "I am doing exactly three full-time jobs at the moment (a) being psychoanalyzed (b) being an author (c) being a schoolmaster. As relaxation I am learning to be a farmer." By 1935 he had already published two collections of poems, Loved Helen and Other Poems and The Green Bay Tree (or The Wicked Man Touches Wood), and four novels. An automobile accident in March of that year resulted in temporary blindness; he managed to earn enough with England Have My Bones, a collection of essays outlining the joys of English country life, that he resigned from Stowe to write full-time.
White's strength was to recreate medieval life in massive and believable detail while simultaneously poking fun at medieval concerns and beliefs. His wordplay takes the form of broad puns and complicated references to other literary, musical, and art works. He also scatters the story with symbols from children's literature, in particular the familiar fairy-tale use of animals as collaborators. Their assistance is necessary in helping Arthur to extract the sword from the stone.
Throughout, the novel draws from both realistic and fantastic elements. White lavished great detail on his hunting scenes. Arthur and his foster brother Kay speak and relate to one another like teenagers. Anachronisms, such as neon signs, and descriptions that rely on a knowledge of the twentieth century, play off quotations from Shakespeare and Latin poetry. In this sense, the book reflects its author's many scholarly accomplishments and his sense of humor.
For the most part, reviewers praised The Sword and the Stone highly. Typical was Vida D. Scudder's assessment in the Atlantic Monthly that it was "riotously funny.... If you are a boy, you can find here the best battles and enchantments going.... If you are just an ordinary person, it would be a pity for you to miss King Pellinore, blood-brother to the White Knight, and his household pet, the Blatant Beast; or Friar Tuck, turned into a pink china Cupid on Morgan le Fay's mantelpiece, or the living room of Madame Mim, B.A. Whoever you may be, don't miss this book." Writing in the New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman took issue with White's humor, terming his Twainian efforts "pretty dreadful," but he acknowledged that White knew whereof he spoke in matters of hunting and falconry, Fadiman concluded that the book was not meant to be taken seriously on any level but that White "wrote the book just for a lark, and a very nice lark it turned out to be, too." It became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and the film rights were acquired by Walt Disney Studios. By the time the film was produced, however, White had made heavy revisions to The Sword in the Stone in order to include it in The Once and Future King. He narrowed his focus to war's lunacy, removing many humorous references, and giving the book overall a graver, less exuberant tone.
Despite his professional success, White remained largely alone and lonely. He had friends, including the writer David Garnett, but was made terribly uncomfortable by his homosexual inclinations. He resorted to hormonal treatments in an attempt to deal with these feelings, and often turned to alcohol for relief.
Again, White's own concerns are reflected in his work, despite the fact that the narrative is not directly autobiographical. The shadow of World War II looms over his later books. Warner quotes White as writing, "I have made up my mind about this war at last. I am not going to fight in it." His decision sprang from his belief in his writing project. "My most important business is to finish my version of Malory, and so I shall tell any tribunal which sits on me. I cannot finish it if dead; I am the only person who can finish it. I have been at it unconsciously ever since I was at Cambridge, when I wrote a thesis on Malory; anybody can throw bombs."
Critics were more impressed with The Ill-Made Knight, including Commonweal's Olive B. White, who found that it matched its predecessors in "virtuosity and wit, and it outdoes them in wisdom, swift, scalpel-sharp, of a kind infrequently consorting with cleverness." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Beatrice Sherman praised it as "a more thoughtful, adult and subdued piece of writing" than the first two novels. Summing up in the New York Herald Tribune Books, Florence Haxton Bullock described The Ill-Made Knight as managing "both to debunk and to build up again on a more likely, human basis, the life of a period which has been fairly glamorized out of existence."
White wrote these books in Ireland, in the house of the McDonagh family. Publication of The Elephant and the Kangaroo, a direct satire of the family inspired by Chaucer's Miller's Tale, brought his friendship with the McDonaghs to a close. Nor did it make many points with critics. Charles Lee's write-up in the New York Times Book Review stated flatly that "[it] is not entirely clear what The Elephant and the Kangaroo is all about," but that "whatever it is, it does not come off."
White returned to England after the war and settled in Yorkshire. While there, White fell in love with a thirteen-year-old farm girl. This attachment prompted him to write Mistress Masham's Repose, a children's novel of great complexity and multiple plot lines. Maria, the protagonist, is a ten-year-old orphan who lives in a derelict mansion in Northamptonshire with only her governess and a cook for company. The grounds include monuments of every sort, dedicated to figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enough to give White ample opportunity to make reference to historical details, gossip, events, personalities, and literature of those periods.
In her exploration of her surroundings, Maria comes upon Mistress Marsham's Repose, a summer pavilion that houses five hundred Lilliputians. Eventually they, along with a Merlyn-like professor who is her only friend, help Maria to reclaim her rightful inheritance. Commonweal's Francis X. Connolly said that White "deserves to be mentioned in the company of Evelyn Waugh, C. S. Lewis, and George Orwell as one of the few fortunate possessors of a splendid prose style." He added that: "There are no sermons in the book, but one must be an irretrievable adult not to pick up some wisdom from this delightful story.... May it be read for the century to come."
Many of White's nonfiction writings dealt with human history, gossip, sports, and other pursuits of the moneyed classes, but in The Goshawk, he detailed his own attempt to become a falconer using seventeenth-century handbooks. Ostensibly a book for children, The Goshawk is a chronicle of the struggles between man and bird, a relationship composed equally of love and hate. In the New York Times, Henry Morton Robinson felt that White "is grappling with a mysterious, ruthless power, embodied in a bird that never voluntarily stoops (unless killing be its mood) to the level of the earth-treading man." But the New York Herald Tribune Book Review's Joseph Wood Krutch interpreted this struggle quite differently, positing that readers might "suspect in Mr. White's glorification of violence something uncomfortably close to the kind of romanticism which inspired recent unsuccessful political experiments in certain parts of Europe."
The last book for young people that White wrote was The Master: An Adventure Story, which he set on an island midway between Russia and America. Believed to be drowned, twelve-year-old twins Nicky and Judy are given up for dead by their wealthy parents. They are in fact imprisoned, along with their dog, by the Master, a 157 year old scientist, and his misfit staff. Eventually, it becomes clear that the Master is grooming Nicky to take over the world using techniques developed by the elder scientist. Filled with postwar warnings about militarism and the dangers of might-makes-right thinking, The Master was deemed a failure by many critics. Among the gentlest criticisms were those voiced by Maurice Richardson in the New Statesman & Nation who found that despite the work's ambitious scope, "it remains too much of a mish-mash of ideas and wheezes."
In 1958, White thoroughly revised his Arthurian novels and added to them The Candle in the Wind, which detailed the infighting that eventually undid Arthurian England. The entire saga appeared under the title The Once and Future King. In a journal entry, quoted by Warner, White noted on the day he completed the work that "I finished what I hope is my final revision of The Once and Future King, about twenty years after I started it, and believe and hope it is a great book. It sounds presumptuous to say so, but on a great subject, which is the epic of Britain, you have to write downright badly to make a mess of it."
Hailing White's achievement in The Once and Future King, a Times Literary Supplement reviewer said: "In three fields particularly the author excels. He can draw living people; he can describe a landscape; and he can enter into the inmost minds of birds and beasts.... This ambitious work, so long in the building, now stands complete. It will long remain a memorial to an author who is at once civilized, learned, witty and humane." In the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, Richard Winston rejoiced over "a whole stout volume of T. H. White's unique wit, vast and curious learning and brooding wisdom, a volume of levity and gravity for young and old." Erwin D. Canham echoed this in the Christian Science Monitor, where he declared "England's noblest tale, the composite memories of its golden age, have been put together by an expert medievalist who is also a brilliant storyteller, a wit, a master of romance and invention.... All this, and infinitely more, is woven together with literary genius, archaeological authority, and a freshness which is as bright as the dawn of history and the memories we associate with a golden age. It is hard to say at which level White's greatness is most special." In a critical discussion of the author's work titled T. H. White, John K. Crane stated that "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."
White altered his accustomed pattern of solitude to make a lecture tour through the United States from 1963 to 1964. He had a wonderful time and wrote to a friend, as quoted by Warner, that "the students of La Salle College gave me, for the last time I shall get it, the stunning applause and affection which makes my heart turn over, and I am miserable that the tour is finished." He greatly enjoyed America, the landscape, the animals, and people that he met: "novelty, discovery, beauty, grandeur, simplicity, seriousness, youth, vigour, [the] enormousness of the United States combine to look over our shoulders and say, Don't go. In spite of the killing struggle, perhaps because of it, I have never been happier in my life." Later, his account of this trip appeared under the title America at Last: The American Journal of T. H. White.
White departed the United States in January, 1964, aboard the S. S. Exeter, bound for Europe. He visited Spain, Italy, Egypt, and Lebanon. Greece was the last stop on the tour. Enroute White died of acute coronary disease at the age of fifty-seven. Writing to a friend two years earlier, according to Warner, he grimly predicted that "I think I will go to Venice and Naples and perhaps do a Byron and never come back any more. I expect to make a rather good death. The essence of death is loneliness, and I have plenty of practice at this." White was buried in Athens, Greece. His papers are contained in the T. H. White Collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
White's final addition to the Once and Future King, The Book of Merlyn, was published posthumously in 1977. In it, he turned Merlyn into a pacifist philosopher, a didactic instrument for White's own desire to rid the world of war. White never submitted The Book of Merlyn for publication and the volume was deemed of inferior quality to the rest of the novels by several critics. Typical of the response was Harold
C. Schonberg's article in the New York Times Book Review which stated that "all White loyalists will rush to read it, if only to savor the way their hero's mind works." A second posthumous publication, The Maharajah and Other Stories, garnered many of the same qualified responses. The stories dealt with many of the themes of White's longer works, in particular the tension between the world of feelings and the rational world. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that "an inevitable sameness" weakened many of the stories, but that White's "superb storytelling" compensated for the similarities. Writing in Best Sellers, Frank Kelly compared White's best stories to those of Saki, but despite "a few gems" found the collection disappointing. White was a prolific, dedicated writer. His work gave his life a much-needed center. As Crane writes, "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, he continues, White was 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." Similarly, Schonberg assessed White as "a wonderful writer and ... a man who so desperately wanted the world to live up to his dream: a dream in which the state never exceeds the individual, and in which the future lies with the personal soul." Fortunately for White's readers, he dealt constructively with his disappointments and failings, using literature to compensate for what he missed out on in life.