Like British scholars C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Terence Hanbury White turned his concern for the events leading to World War II into the unexpected -- a highly original children's book, The Sword in the Stone (1938). Unlike them White wrote his first Arthurian novel in the isolation of a gamekeeper's cottage at Stowe Ridings after resigning as the popular head of the English department of the Stowe School. At Stowe Ridings he deliberately lived a reclusive life, removing himself from the temptation of his strong pederastic feelings, devoting all of his energy to the voracious reading of books and the arduous accomplishment of ordinary skills such as milking and plowing, and exotic ones such as falconry. He reserved his affection solely for Brownie, his red setter. Vehemently opposed to war, he waffled between active participation and escape to Ireland.
White's children's novel about Arthur's youth and Merlyn's education of the boy who would become King Arthur was greatly revised in The Once and Future King (1958), which in turn became the basis for the musical Camelot (1960) and the subsequent film (1965), cultural icons of the 1960s. By that stage White's children's story of Wart had been lost in the famous adult romance of the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle.
His early interest in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485) and experience as a tutor and teacher led White to invent the comic and didactic details of Wart's education and to give Merlyn a more active role. As a tutor he had earned his way through Queen's College, Cambridge; he was briefly a teacher at Saint David's preparatory school in southern England (1930-1932) and finally the demanding but charismatic head of the English department (1932-1936) at Stowe School on that famous English estate. Royalties from The Once and Future King made White a wealthy man, able to indulge his whims and vagaries and to break his self-imposed isolation. He befriended celebrities such as Julie Andrews and her husband Tony Walton and played host to groups of deaf and blind persons during the summer at his home on the Channel Island of Alderney.
The Sword in the Stone will probably remain his best-known story, partially through retellings by others. He wrote three other children's books: Mistress Masham's Repose (1946), The Goshawk (1951), and The Master: An Adventure Story (1957). Some critics of children's literature would include all of the Arthurian novels that White wrote. But the other Arthurian works are unsuitable either by their tone or subject matter, especially the revised versions of the 1958 tetralogy. Humphrey Carpenter -- who in Twentieth-Century Writers for Children (1989) adds The Witch in the Wood (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), The Once and Future King (1958), and The Book of Merlyn (1977) to the list -- concedes that "Many of T. H. White's books have been read by children, but his claim to be a children's writer rests chiefly on The Sword in the Stone and Mistress Masham's Repose."
In a letter of 14 January 1938 to his former Cambridge tutor L. J. Potts, White called The Sword in the Stone a "warmhearted" story "mainly about bird and beasts" and "more or less a kind [of] wish fulfillment of the kind of things I should like to have happened to me when I was a boy." But The Witch in the Wood, written during his self-exile in Ireland (1939-1945), is a dark novel of what his early education and family life were really like, a tale of an abusive childhood and a sadistic military-college education at Cheltenham College (1920-1924). His hatred for a mother who first smothered and then rejected him is reflected in the novel's Queen Morgause. It poisoned the whole work, as he, his friends, and the critics recognized. Queen Morgause manipulates and psychologically distorts her four teenaged sons -- Gawaine, Gareth, Gaheris, and Agravaine -- leading them to kill sadistically the unicorn for her sake. Her incest with Arthur produces Mordred. The Ill-Made Knight concerns the dilemma of an ugly Lancelot who wants to remain a virgin to achieve the Quest of the Grail but who capitulates to his lust for Queen Guinevere. The Candle in the Wind (1958) gives the traditional story of betrayals within the family, the leadership, and the nation that lead to the fall of the Round Table and its ideals. Hailed in prepublication The Book of Merlyn proved a disappointing diatribe by Merlyn about war, nations, and honor to a disillusioned, mature, and defeated King Arthur. In retrospect the publishers, Collins, were right to reject it in 1941. When the four novels were revised to become The Once and Future King, White scrapped most of the fifth book, adding Arthur's experiences in the anthill and with the flocks of geese to the first book of the tetralogy.
The early life of T. H. White did little to foster a varied and skilled writer. At age thirty his mother, Constance, the daughter of an Indian judge, married Garrick White, a district superintendent of police, only to spite her parents. After his birth the marriage turned highly acrimonious and she refused further sexual relations. Her husband became a violent alcoholic. His parents brought White ill with parathroid to live with her family at Saint Leonard's in England, and his father returned to India. Constance rejoined him in 1914 but returned to England, again in 1915. In 1920 White was sent to a military school, Cheltenham College, where the masters enthusiastically caned the students. Loving grandparents raised him, while his parents tried another fruitless reconciliation in India. In 1923 his parents were divorced and his mother became a pig farmer on a small scale. White remained alienated from his father until Garrick White's death in 1946. According to Francois Gallix, White credited his mother with both a love of storytelling and an attraction to violence and cruelty. Certainly he worked to control his sadistic impulses, which took psychological, not physical, forms.
As a result White said his affections were so distorted that he could not find a normal relationship with a woman, and he refused to practice the homosexuality of his strong inclinations. Throughout the years he formed crushes on several unavailable or unsuitable women, such as the nurse who cared for him during his appendectomy, a barmaid, a thirteen-year-old girl, and an eighteen-year-old debutante. Late in his life, after abstaining from expressing his homosexual feelings for twenty years, he fell in love with Zed, the teenage son of friends, but resisted and was desolated when the boy's parents called an end to their friendship. Through most of his adult life he transferred his affection to a mixture of animals including badgers, owls, goshawks, grass snakes, and particularly red setters, especially one named Brownie. When Brownie died in 1944, White wrote that she "was mother, child and mistress to me for fourteen years."
His books of conventional poetry -- Loved Helen and Other Poems (1929) and The Green Bay Tree; or, Wicked Man Touches Wood (1929) -- the two detective novels -- Dead Mr. Nixon (1931) and Darkness at Pemberley (1932) -- and the two academic novels -- They Winter Abroad (1932) and First Lesson (1932) -- resemble those of many other bright Cambridge graduates. Yet in minor ways they contribute to his children's books. As a dashing teacher at two schools, he played the role of young man of the world, driving an old Bentley, pursuing field sports, and fishing while working on five books. At the same time he wrote ironically in 1931 to his tutor L. J. Potts that snobbery is "one of the best parlour games known to me -- for persons not among the gentry." Role-playing, and making fun of it, became a large part of his complex character.
He reached a crisis in 1935-1936: a car accident in March 1935 left him temporarily blind. But the modest financial success of England Have My Bones (1936), a series of detailed essays on the pleasures of ordinary country life, allowed him to resign from Stowe School in 1936 and to move into a primitive gamekeeper's cottage on the grounds and take up a different impoverished, independent life. Writing about subjects of real interest to him had proved to have a market. He also began hormonal treatments for his homosexuality as well as periodic drinking bouts that would continue throughout his life.
From this point on, his life was filled with various writing projects, the learning of skills as various as plowing, flying, operating a boat, oil painting, and training goshawks, and always with omnivorous reading. His books for children reflect his wide reading, his intimate knowledge and empathy with animals, and his championing of independence.
The Sword in the Stone begins with a famous parody of medieval education reduced to a public-school week: "On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology." Perspectives in the book shift constantly between medieval and contemporary life, a matter expedited by Merlyn, who is a twentieth-century person living backward into the fifteenth. Several themes hold the book together. The first is the search for a proper tutor after the sexual hysteria of the governess becomes evident. Another is Wart's discovery of his identity and fate, and a general one is the pleasures of country life. White's double perspective allows him to fill the book with accurate details of medieval farming, haymaking, and hunting and to counterpose these to the detailed and foolish aspects of King Pellinore for the Questing Beast. After Wart finds Merlyn in the forest, the book follows Jean-Jacques Rousseau's familiar model for children's literature in which a wise teacher waits for the student to ask questions and then provides the learning experiences.
The novel is full of autobiographical details. Merlyn's study, like White's, is messily full of books, animals, and insects. An owl named Archimedes sits on Merlyn's head just as it did on White's. Proclaiming that "Education is experience," he turns Wart into a fish, a hawk, a grass snake, an owl, and a badger to learn the limitations of Might as Right and military life; the insanity of those who live to fight; and some alternative myths and fables. On his own in the ordinary world, Wart learns responsibility by retrieving his goshawk; courage from rescuing Dog Boy, Wat, and Friar Tuck from Morgan the Fay; the need for the rules in the fall hunt; loyalty to one's home from the conversation with the badger; and finally humility and honesty in offering the sword from the stone to Kay.
In addition to explicit details about medieval life and its continuity with country life, the book also parodies medieval themes and situations. The Questing Beast nearly dies of a broken heart when King Pellinore ceases to chase it. White's Merlyn, often inept as a magician, says a spell incorrectly and gets a series of wrong hats and has to be corrected by the owl Archimedes. There are various inside jokes, some as obvious as the double entendre about the governess's muddle with her astrolabe and others more recondite, such as Little John's insistence that Robin Hood's real name is Robin Wood, probably White's allusion to Robin des Bois, the original title of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz and its famous hunting-horn overture.
There are allusions to classic children's literature. Kay and Wart are invited to dine and are trapped by Madame Mim in her cottage in the forest, an episode which recalls Hansel and Gretel. The later description of the temptations of sweets at the castle of Queen Morgan both recalls the edible cottage of this story and burlesques the excessive food imagery of some children's books. As in many children's tales, friendly animals aid the child-hero to achieve a quest. At the end of the novel Wart calls upon their spirits to give him strength to pull the sword out.
The book delights in the incongruous, such as the neon movie sign over Morgan's door -- "THE QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS, NOW SHOWING" -- and her description as "a very beautiful lady, wearing beach pajamas and smoked glasses." Quotations from classics such as William Shakespeare's lyric poems and the Latin refrain from William Dunbar's Lament for the Makaris (circa 1507), as well as silly rhymes and parodies of popular tunes, fill the pages.
The realistic hunting scenes and the fantastic battle against the mythological griffins and wyverns are lively. Wart and Kay talk and act like young teenaged boys. But the adults are mostly comic stereotypes. Throughout, the author's simple but skilled line drawings for head -- and tailpieces suit a children's book. The reviewers of The Sword and the Stone gave unanimous praise. It was made a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Walt Disney bought the rights to make the film, finally produced in 1963.
When White drastically revised this novel to become part of The Once and Future King, he decided that the Arthurian story was really about the futility of war, rather than a domestic tragedy of incest. As a result the revised version is more somber and lacks much of the playfulness and extravagance of the original as well as White's clever drawings. The later version, designed for a general reading audience, displaced this masterpiece for children.
During White's years in Ireland he completed The Once and Future King. In his farewell he turned his experiences of six years as the lodger of Mr. and Mrs. McDonagh in Doolistown into the satiric novel The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947), which owes much to Chaucer's Miller's Tale and ended his friendship with the McDonaghs. He returned to England in 1945 to stay for a year with his new dogs Quince and Killie in Duke Mary's, a Yorkshire cottage of his longtime friend David Garnett. While there he became enamored of a thirteen-year-old farm girl and was inspired to write Mistress Masham's Repose, a comic children's novel whose complex plot owes something to his earlier detective novels but much more to his experiences at Stowe and his enthusiasm for Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), especially the visit to the Lilliputians.
Dedicated to Amaryllis Virginia Garnett, his friend's daughter, this book proves that White could write well about women, if they were young enough. The book's orphaned heroine, ten-year-old Maria, is a studious bespectacled yet impulsive and adventurous sort with dark hair, pigtails, and brown eyes. She is good at games and afraid both of cows and her mean governess Miss Brown. She enjoys music and plays the piano but hates the fifth of November (Guy Fawkes' Day) because of the noise.
She lives in Malplaquet, a ruined eighteenth-century Northamptonshire mansion four times longer than Buckingham Palace and modeled on the Stowe Mansion and estate. It has fifty-two state bedrooms and twelve company rooms. Only the two bedrooms that she and her governess use do not leak. Mrs. Noakes, the cook and only servant, lives in the basement kitchen and has to pedal a bicycle through the corridor to wait on the two of them. Six of the 365 windows are unbroken. Stripped of most of its furnishings, the house is "surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples, Rotundas, and Palladian Bridges, which had been built in honor of General Wolfe, Admiral Byng, the Princess Amelia, and others of the Same Kidney." This setting allows White to crowd in all sorts of allusions to persons, literature, events, and gossip of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sorts of things that fill his eighteenth-century social histories, The Age of Scandal (1950) and The Scandalmonger (1952), and his novel of the Victorian age, Farewell Victoria (1933). His horse-obsessed Lord Lieutenant recalls hunting details of Earth Stopped (1934) and the satire of such sports in Burke's Steerage (1938).
Maria's friends are the Cook, whose illiterate speech and writing recall Mrs. Malaprop, and an old professor, who lives in a gamekeeper's cottage on the grounds and devotes his existence to scholarship and an eclectic menagerie. Maria's nemeses are Miss Brown, who uses flowerly speech and spreads "as a toad on one's hand" when she sits, and the local vicar and her guardian Mr. Hater, who as a schoolmaster is fond of caning boys. He drives a Rolls Royce bought with the money embezzled from Maria's estate. While playing pirate and invading an island in the midst of an ornamental lake, Maria discovers that Mistress Masham's Repose, a classical summer pavilion, is home to five hundred descendants of Swift's Lilliputians.
The plot has two parts. One concerns Maria's relationship to the Lilliputians. She kidnaps a woman and her baby until she learns that "people must not tyrannize, nor try to be great because they are little." Then she tries patronizing them by giving gifts and playing with them like pets until she almost gets one killed in a model airplane and loses the whalelike pike that the ship's crew is trying to land. When Miss Brown and Mr. Hater learn of the Lilliputians and try to capture them to sell them to the circus or the movies, Maria and the Professor join forces to prevent this.
The other plot concerns the discovery of a document that will restore Maria's inheritance to her. The two plots come together when Maria, the Professor, and some of the Lilliputians are locked in a dungeon. The novel allows White to fill in the history of the Lilliputians up to the twentieth century, to give minute details of their farming and hunting, and to imitate their eighteenth-century British speech through high-flown, capitalized nouns and verbs.
Like Merlyn in The Sword in the Stone, the Professor acts as the Rousseau-like instructor of Maria. He is also an absent-minded, scholarly pacifist, difficult to tear away from his scholarly researches and somewhat inept in practical matters. White satirizes himself as an improvident medieval scholar of "Isidore, Physiologus, Pliny, and similar people," the sort of research that resulted in The Book of Beasts (1954), a translation of a twelfth-century bestiary first proposed to him by medievalist Sir Sydney Cockerell in 1938. Puzzled and frustrated by not knowing the meaning of Tripharium, he hatches far-fetched schemes to get a copy of Du Cange's dictionary of medieval Latin, asking even the Cook for help though her only book is Mrs. Beeton's famous Victorian cookbook. The gloss to this word appears in the notes to his Book of Beasts.
The novel is filled with incongruous scenes, such as the Professor chopping wood with a sixpenny hatchet from Woolworth's beneath a marble monument to the theater dedicated "to Congreve, or to somebody of that sort." Other topographical jokes are erudite: the estate Malplaquet, named for one of Marlborough's minor battles; the monument to Admiral Byng, court-martialed for cowardice; Mrs. Masham's Repose, named for a bitter political enemy of Sarah Churchill; the pyramid, dedicated to John Burgoyne, who surrendered at Saratoga to the American army.
The novel has obvious debts to Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). But unlike Swift's Lilliputians, White's are kind, generous, and noble. There are echoes of other books. The Lilliputian scout and trapper Gradgnag is compared to Allan Quatermaine, the hero of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885). A few faults make the book just miss being the classic that David Garnett thought revision could have made it. Miss Brown's and Mr. Hater's plot to murder Maria does not ring true. The last chapter shifts in tone and perspective, first describing a Christmas party for Maria and then asking Amaryllis to imagine the appearance of the restored house as a stately home on tour and with 365.2564 servants (one for each day of a real year). Too often some of the language and allusions in the novel recall White's research notes on the eighteenth century.
This is children's literature only for the very bright. But its message of the difference between love and possession and how to become a true friend is clear. With excellent illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg, the novel proved a popular Book-of-the-Month Club selection. To avoid income taxes, White moved to the Channel Island of Alderney. Having sold too cheaply to Disney the film rights for The Sword in the Stone, he refused to sell the film rights to Mistress Masham's Repose.
Wren Howard, of his new publishers Jonathan Cape, visited him at Alderney in March 1949 and discovered under a cushion the typescript of The Goshawk (1951), written during 1936-1939. Howard read it and insisted that it be published. White added a postscript to the three sections. It has become a nature story for children, at least in England, according to Francois Gallix in T. H. White: An Annotated Bibliography (1986). Many of the details and even the names of White's goshawks Gos and Cully as well as their characterizations as insane and lunatic had been used in The Sword in the Stone. Its Attic style makes it easy reading. Its detailed explanation of the quixotic, arduous task that White set himself -- to become an astringer or trainer of hawks using seventeenth-century handbooks on falconry -- soon becomes a narrative of the contest of wills and the love/hate relationship between the man and the bird. The man discovers his flaws of character, especially those of impatience and pettiness. After six weeks of arduous training, the first goshawk, Gos, escapes through White's own folly, and he experiences great personal loss and yet joy because the bird has its freedom. The shorter second section details his fruitless attempt to recapture Gos. The brief third one deals with his training of Cully, a replacement, and the merlin Balan, who also appear in The Sword in the Stone. The postscript reveals that modern methods would have made all of this arduous labor unnecessary and that the sight of Gos free in the wild was a fictional invention. Probably the bird died, caught by its jesses in a tree. Like his other books for children, this one is filled with exacting falconry details about jesses, swivels, and creasance but also with a message about the harm in trying to own even an animal.
This book has some of the same concerns as his children's books: the contrast between past and present, the inferiority of the present to the past, the evils of possession, the destruction of war, and the folly of mankind. It has been broadcast over the BBC "Children's House," was made into a BBC film in 1969, and sold widely abroad where it has won film awards in the United States and Australia.
White's last children's story, The Master: An Adventure Story (1957), which continues some of the themes of his earlier books, is a curious failure. Dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson, because of White's respect for Treasure Island (1883), and bearing a quotation from Shakespeare's Tempest, this formula adventure novel set on the sterile island of Rockall, halfway between Russia and America, marks White's farewell to children's books. The story and its main character, originally called Alpha, show White's concerns about Adolf Hitler and World War II. White abandoned this story in 1944 and took it up again in 1955. But situations and character types that have depth and humor in other books are here flat, stereotyped, and dull. As the action begins, twelve-year-old twins Nicky and Judy, kidnapped on barren Rockall Island and believed drowned, are abandoned by their wealthy parents. With their dog Jokey they are held prisoner in the caverns of Rockall by the megalomaniac Master, a grotesque scientist 157 years old, and his small staff of associates: drunken Dr. Jones, also called Totty and Dr. McTurk; Squadron Leader Frinton, a demobbed and handsome but weak World War II airman; Pinkie, the tongueless black cook; Mr. Blenkinsop, a cultivated but villainous Chinaman; and a couple of anonymous mechanics. As the plot develops, Nicky is being educated by the Master so he can eventually rule the world. The Master plans to conquer the world in order to save it from the atomic bomb. The Master plans to use first mass hypnotism and extrasensory perception and later a super vibrator in the caverns to destroy all technology worldwide.
The novel is full of topical references to the Cold War, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, and Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The characters' discussions of Might-is-Right and Might-for-Right, vital in the Arthurian novels, sound only academic and petulant here. The Master, a perversion of White's voluble teacher figures such as Merlyn and the Professor, speaks only Latin and English proverbs, and those only after drinking whiskey. As he represents mainly intellectual abstraction and not action, he is offstage through much of the book and intervenes only to drive his cohorts to suicide when they attempt rebellion.
Just when the Master has total control and has switched on the ray machine, killing all of the birds on the island and causing a plane to crash thirty miles away, he goes for a walk and trips over the dog Jokey, breaking his hip. The Master then hurls himself from the cliff as Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony plays on the stereo. At the end of the book Judy, Nicky, and Mr. Frinton are back at Gaunt Godstone, the family country estate, preparing to give tours to tourists. Judy finds their adventure pointless; only Jokey seems pleased, eating his Wednesday kipper.
As Sylvia Townsend Warner writes in T. H. White (1967), The Master, though White considered this the kind of book he would have liked to have read as a boy and something like Treasure Island, could not be less like that classic: "The Master was written for a highly-strung introvert, ill-read, insecure, much more of a Shorter Catechist than the Scotch boy, and combating his fears by inventing terrors." After the revision of his four earlier Arthurian novels to make The Once and Future King, White's best writing was over. The Master may have been a deliberate farewell, as well as an attempt to capitalize on his name by writing a formula adventure book for children.
The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959), a miscellany, also draws upon much earlier materials from his experiences fishing and hunting in Ireland, and on his investigation of a fertility Godstone at Inniskea and his encounter with a black salesman of patent medicines. He enjoyed the success, publicity, and money attendant on the American musical Camelot (1960). Supposedly he saw the play seventy times. He became friends with the cast. Julie Andrews and Tony Walton were his guests at Alderney. From November 1962 to February 1963 he traveled in Italy. He had one hundred copies of his Verses (1962) privately printed at Alderney for friends. From September 1963 through December 1963, with Carol Walton (the young sister of Tony Walton) as his secretary, he made a successful lecture tour of various colleges and universities. As usual he kept a detailed diary of his experiences and observations about American life and culture. Edited by David Garnett this diary was published posthumously as America at Last (1965). On 17 January 1964, while White was aboard the S. S. Exeter accompanied by Vito Mariconi, an Italian college student acting as his secretary, and on his way to vacation in Egypt, Lebanon, and Greece, he died from a heart attack. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Athens.
His grave marker reads "T. H. WHITE / 1906-1964 / AUTHOR / WHO / FROM A TROUBLED HEART / DELIGHTED OTHERS / LOVING AND PRAISING / THIS LIFE." For the readers who know White's The Sword in the Stone and Mistress Masham's Repose, this delight in life and learning appears on every page. But often the reputation of his books is better known than the books. A recent two-volume collection of scholarly essays, King Arthur through the Ages (1990), mentions White's Arthurian novels only in passing, even though one essayist claims he is "the most enduringly popular of modern British Arthurian novelists." An essay on "Children's Reading and the Arthurian Tales" in this same volume does not mention White at all. His bibliographer Gallix, noting the few critical essays on White, blames his failure to fit into literary classifications. Though several theses and dissertations on his work have appeared and a large collection of research materials and unfinished manuscripts exists, as well as three published collections of witty and detailed letters to three close friends, John K. Crane calls White "a writer whom nearly everyone admires but whom scholars continue to neglect." Because his works for children are so few, so learned, and unique in their points of view, White's work will probably remain sui generis in the history of children's literature.