Poor White
PATRICK ANDERSON
T. H. White was a big, bearded, rather hand- some man whose prominent bright-blue eyes were often bloodshot with drink; in middle age he began to resemble a more refined and querulous Ernest Hemingway, although he also acquired a striking likeness to the Em- peror Hadrian, a figure he admired so greatly that he converted an Alderney cottage into a temple in his honour. (This temple was ritually inaugurated by a young boy wearing White's characteristically scarlet bathrobe.) White was an author with a schoolmaster's interest in Sir Thomas Malory and the Middle Ages; he pub- lished over twenty books, left much unpub- lished material, and at one time or another wrote robust and witty poems, bad plays, slightly scandalous novels, a murder story, and accounts of country life and falconry. His flawed masterpiece, the tetralogy comprising The Once and Future King, became the smash- hit musical, Camelot.
White was an eccentric extrovert and hearty, fond of country pubs and farm labourers he could call by their Christian names ('I behave like a tart'), who thus masked a solitary and tormented spirit. Despite the years of friend- ship and correspondence with L. J. Potts, his Cambridge tutor, Sir Sydney Cockerell, and David Garnett, his particular 'great man,' he could sigh: 'I have no friends, only acquaint- ances. You have no idea how curious it is to live one's life like a cat.' Terror and awe haunted him. He longed to 'revert to a feral state' and reflected, in self-justification when the Hitler war came and he was safe in Ire- land, that 'hawks neither band themselves together in war, nor yet retire from the world of air.' He was also a paederast with a self- confessed sadistic streak: an amateur of danger ('theory of deliberate fright'), a con- noisseur of pain ('kidney stone is a steady, quiet Colossus'), and an unrequited lover ('I love him for being happy and innocent, so it would be destroying what I loved'). This last of the boy who lustrated the temple.
In the phosphorescence of the 'thirties, when rural England already seemed denuded of values and as moribund as Mary Webb, he seems a candidate for the marshlights of Isherwood's fantasy of Mortmere or for the brutal scalpel with which Auden, that rebel from the Scout Troop and the Science Sixth, was wont to dissect the muddle-headedness of the bourgeoisie. One can imagine what those two, with their nose for the rat in the wains- cot, and the mother-fixation turning the shaving-mirror narcissistic, or souring it with self-hate, would have made of White's huntin', shootin' and fishin' and of his grass-snakes, tiercels, baby owls, badgers, and black Bent-
fey, not to mention the one reasonably satis- factory love-affair with—wait for it—a red-setter bitch. 'I stayed with the grave for a week, so that I could go out twice a day and say, "Good girl: sleepy girl; go to sleep, Brownie." It was a saying she understood. I said it steadily. I suppose the chance of consciousness persisting for a week is several million to one, but that was the kind of chance I had to provide for.' For White did have a possessively selfish mother to whom he remained 'Dumpling,' - although he had different words for her: in a poem she turns up as his 'maniac dam,' in a novel she is a witch, in a letter he describes how 'She became a lover of dogs. This meant that the dogs had to love her. I have inherited this vice.'
It is not, however, the masculine intelligences of Auden and Isherwood which now resurrect Tim White. He is positioned and focused, understood and tolerated—above all, allowed to reveal himself—by one of the most sensitive of our women novelists and poets, Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner, a septuagenarian who never made his acquaintance. The result must be one of the very best literary biographies of the period since the war. It is beautifully written. It is scrupulously researched; in addition to plentiful selections from the racy letters and self-probing diaries, Miss Warner has travelled to White's succession of bolt-holes and has interviewed his friends, right down to the eight year old who remarked succinctly, 'I think Mr White was quite a nice man, and also funny. I am not glad he died.' It is full of wisdom and insight. And, best of all, Miss Warner knows what writing is about. She sees how White freed himself in the first Arthurian book, The Sword in the Stone, by becoming both Arthur and Merlin: 'He gave himself a dauntless, motherless boyhood; he also gave himself an ideal old age.' She is acute on the reasons for the failure of the fourth (and the projected fifth) volume; the imbalance between the 'thinker,' who argued points in his diaries and who wanted to turn the novel into a tract against war based on a story of natural history, and the story-teller. 'White, who was modest about his creative powers, was conceited about his intellect—which was second-rate.'
And then, coming almost to the end of the strange series of melancholic solitudes and eager apprenticeships to new skills (the game- keeper's cottage at Stowe, where he had taught for a time, the Irish retreats, the haybarn 'on, the top of an Alp in Yorkshire,' the sudden riches and princely generosity displayed in the Channel Islands), she sees him amongst his adopted family of spivs in Italy. 'He looks so much out of place, heavy and lumbering, like a bear out of a northern forest, Wining his massive head, clutching his staff and wearing spectacles, alone among these sinuous Mediter- raneans with their beady eyes and their amiable vulpine grins.'
Was this lonely and unhappy but very alive man a good writer? I find England Have My Bones too full of attitudes and rather jejune provocations; White learns to plough and fly etc etc with his 'grand' and 'lovely' people but little is fully and solidly realised. The Goshawk is much better but often too man- nered. The early Arthur books are great fun, although some of the humour dates. Ignorant of the rest, I am persuaded by Miss Warner to fill in a number of gaps. White wasn't just a 'fascinating' personality. He disturbs because he knew so well, and at least in his letters ex- pressed so vividly, the emptiness that neither his talent nor his analyst could cure.
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