Laying it on
Benny Green
The Book of Merlyn T.H. White (Collins £5.25)
Accepted literary works are usually best left alone, even when the (missing) section unearthed years later turns out to be genius. The Once and Future King, one of the most remarkable novels of its generation, was a four-volume attempt to haul King Arthur off the tramcar of Time out on to some mystical continuum where TimeSpace was so perfectly circular that King Pelles could enjoy his elevenses, the Pons Asinorum might be measured against the Eternal Triangle, and Lancelot described as a `sortof Bradman'(A dreadful choice; it is Victor Trumper, or perhaps Denis Compton, who represents that soul of batting chivalry of which Bradman was the antithesis). Each epoch begets the Camelot it desires, and White was acutely aware of his place in the line of succession; Mallory and Tennyson become characters in his story, and his attempt to graft on to medieval sensibilities the paroxyms of post-Freudian compunction is an echo of an identical attempt fifty years ago by the American writer John Erskine, who made a career out of that sort of thing.
White, who saw the destruction of the Round Table as an allegory of all history, and who felt that for him, composing his book in the middle of a desperate war, to render that destruction irrevocable would be an unpatriotic act, strove for that anomaly, a Camelot purged of its tragedy. Fortunately some aesthetic instinct told him that an untragical Camelot was no Camelot at all, so he did the best he could by arresting the ineluctable forces of fate on the eve of Arthur's last battle, leaving the reader to write in his own bloody ending almost as though he could not bring himself to write it himself. It now appears that he did not stop there at all, that he added a fifth book in which that final eve moves into a night of fitful dreams in which Arthur debates the fate of humanity with the animals into whom Merlyn had metamorphosed him long ago, before he knew of his own royal destiny.
If the allegorical overtones of the first four books were clear enough, in the fifth they become obtrusive to the point where, artistically speaking, their effect is disastrous. We are led to understand that White 'insisted the five books should appear as a whole', in which case it was perhaps just as well that something as mundane as a paper shortage should have saved him from his own verbosity. Terrified by the cruelty of Man and by the infantilism of his political panaceas, White used the Arthurian text to proclaim the sanctity of the individual, to reduce his own species from Homo Sapiens to Homo Ferox, and to deride it as the instigator of the Society for the Invention of Cruelty to Animals, a cabal of which White, with his fine enthusiasm for blowing geese to pieces, was no doubt a respected member. Whimsical fable deliquesces into confused polemics, until in the end we can only echo the words of Arthur when he reacts to one of Merlyn's harangues with 'Goodness, you seem to lay it on'.
But if The Book of Merlyn fails as an adjunct to The Once and Future King, it at least provides a fascinating insight into the mind of a most unusual creative writer whose abstruse knowledge gives to his view of the modern world a curious obliquity. It is as though two bulging ragbags had been tipped up and their contents mingled, one packed with medieval arcana, the other with modern scepticism, so that peregrines become contiguous with R.C. Sherriff, peridexions with H.G. Wells, sparcells with Darwin. It is not that White's musings are particularly original. On the contrary what makes them so entertaining is the degree to which he succeeds in reconciling into some sort of a system the ideas of as disparate a body of men as can ever have appealed simultaneously to one contemporary writer.
His rejection of the idea 'the twentieth century is superior to other centuries' and his reaction to Darwin comprise the quintessence of the perfect Shavian; his 'happiness is only a by-product of function' would have made William Morris leap through the home-made arras with joy; Samuel Butler would have cheered `Scott's characters are made to talk like imitation warming pans' and both Aldous Huxley and Orwell would have seen themselves in the ant-motto `Everything not forbidden is compulsory'. Cervantes is invoked as the definer of foolishness, Mrs Gaskell as the priestess of bumbling English loveability; Twain is vilified as the corrupter of Arthurian nobility, but Lamb, Gilbert White and W.H. Hudson receive the accolade. The unacknowledged derivations range from Stephen Leacock to the Book of Proverbs, and Bradman's place is taken by a nag called Golden Miller, who won the Grand National in the same year that Bradman made 304 against Arthurian England in a test match.
The messianic fervour of all this suggests a man who would dearly like to play God in order to put the world to rights; what made the lonely, frightened, confused White so unusual was his evident ability to laugh at his own pretensions to godhead. At the end, when he was living on a remote island on the proceeds of the musical Camelot, a pair of proselytisers came knocking at his door saying 'We are Jehovah's Witnesses'. To which the author of The Once and Future King, whitebearded like the pard, replied, 'I AM Jehovah' and slammed the door in their faces. Explicit liber Regis Quondam.
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