This lecture is based on my reading of two books:

Sylvia Townsend Warner. T.H. White: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967; and Elisabeth Brewer. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993. I also recommend the biographical note by Sylvia Townsend Warner, the Afterword to the Harper-Collins edition of The Once and Future King.

Terence Hanbury White was born in Bombay on 29 May, 1906, the only child of a District Superintendent of Police of Irish extraction, and of the daughter of an Indian judge, from a Scottish family. The parents married on impulse, and the marriage appears to have been violently unhappy. After the birth of Timothy (White was named Timothy by his friends at University, after the chain-store firm of Tim White, the chemists, and never called Terence), his mother refused intercourse. In 1938, a few months after the publication of The Sword in the Stone had ensured his reputation as a writer, White wrote of his parents:

Of hapless father hapless son
My birth was brutally begun,
And all my childhood o’er the pram
The father and the maniac dam
Struggled and leaned to pierce the knife
Into each other’s bitter life.
Thus bred without security
Whom dared I love, whom did not flee?

White blamed his unhappiness as an adult, including his loneliness and inability to form lasting sexual relationships, on his mother. He wrote about her after her death:

“She was clever and intelligent and wildly imaginative. You never knew who she was being — Joan of Arc on Monday, Cleopatra on Tuesday, Florence Nightingale on Wednesday. I adored her passionately until I was about eighteen, except for the time when I forgot all about her because she was in India and I was with my grandparents. I didn’t get much security out of her. 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. It was my love that she extracted, not hers that she gave. I’ve always thought she was sexually frigid, which was maybe why she thrashed it out of me. Anyway, she managed to bitch up my loving women. She made me dote on her when I was at school.

She had a way of grinding her teeth.” (Warner 28)

Mother-blaming is, of course, a leading sporting activity of the Western, Eastern and other worlds, and we will never know the truth about these matters. Constance never spoke for herself on the issue. What is clear, is that White’s experiences of his mother, as he interpreted them, were to affect profoundly his presentation of maternal figures and female characters in the shorter novels which were finally gathered together and republished as The Once and Future King. It is also undeniable that White experienced severe and incurable psychological suffering throughout his life. On the positive side, by shaping his psyche and world view, these difficulties were what drove him to write his unique novels.

Late in 1911, White’s parents brought him to England. After more violent marital quarrels, Garrick White returned to India, to be followed eighteen months later by his wife. For the next six happy years, White was brought up in St. Leonard’s by his maternal grandparents, who were also looking after three of his cousins. This period of contentment ended in 1920, when at fourteen he was sent to Cheltenham College, a Victorian public school with traditional Anglo-Indian connections. Here the younger boys were routinely beaten by the masters and the prefects. According to White, Cheltenham turned him into a “flagellant.” Elsewhere in his writings he diagnoses himself as a “sadistic homosexual,” and it would appear that he was attracted to little boys. There is no indication that White ever gave way to these propensities, or that he abused his trust when he later became a teacher. However, in the period, gay sexual acts were illegal and punishable by imprisonment. The wider society regarded homosexuality with profound embarrassment and suspicion, to a degree now hardly credible. It is not surprising that White felt the force of society’s rejection, or that he lived a double life, concealing much of his inner being. He never succeeded in accepting his sexuality, and for ever felt his loneliness and his lack of a wife and children.

In 1923 his parents’ marital difficulties were made embarrassingly public, when Garrick White petitioned for the restitution of conjugal rights, and Constance White countered the suit by petitioning for a judicial separation. (In those days there were many legal impediments to divorce.) The case was discussed at length in the newspapers, and Constance’s petition was granted.

After Cheltenham, White spent a year as a private tutor as a of funding his university studies. He entered Queens’ College, Cambridge University, in 1925, and enrolled in the English Tripos (a three-year program of study in English literature). At Cambridge he formed a special friendship with his tutor. He later wrote:

“My tutor was L.J. Potts, whom I disliked to the point of rage for about a year. It took all that time to discover that he was going to be the great literary influence in my life, as well as being the most noble gentleman I have ever met. He was ugly, with a ginger beard, and he was the only man who I have known to try to live up to his own rigid rules of decency and to behave himself. He also taught me to behave and think. I believe he would have said that the decent person is he ‘who sweareth unto his neighbour and disappointeth him not, though it were to his own hindrance.’”
(Warner 35)

The reality, or possibility, of behaving with integrity, of honour, being a gentleman, and keeping your word, were one of the features that attracted White to Thomas Malory’s Mort Darthur, the fifteenth-century prose collection of Arthurian stories which brought the legend into the modern world. These same ideals of virtuous conduct became a preoccupation of The Once and Future King. In addition to Potts, White befriended other Cambridge dons, including T. R. Henn, and the famous critic of Milton and Shakespeare, E.M.W. Tillyard. His best friend among his fellow students was Elsie Phare. Throughout his life, White’s friends were his major source of consolation and support. He met and conversed with them, but above all kept his friendships alive in a fascinating body of correspondence, much of which survives. Townsend Warner publishes many revealing extracts. As part of his studies in his second year, White submitted an essay on Malory, which was received variously by its markers. Unfortunately it has not survived. The Mort Darthur was not highly regarded in intellectual circles at the time. Later, part of White’s achievement in The Once and Future King was to reveal to readers for the first time the complex and subtle humanity of Malory’s work.

In 1927 White was diagnosed as suffering from TB, a disease which in the period was often fatal. His Cambridge friends took up a collection which paid for a holiday in the warmer climate of Italy. White learned Italian, wrote a novel, They Winter Abroad, and a collection of poems, Loved Helen. When he returned to England he was fully recovered. He completed his studies at Cambridge in 1929, with first class honours and outstanding academic accolades.

Out of a need for money, White then took up two teaching posts in succession, while he used his free time to write and publish books. Brewer comments that he was a naturally gifted teacher, who enjoyed the company of young children. In The Once and Future King, especially The Sword in the Stone, education is a primary interest, and White has ideas about it which were far in advance of his time. While he found a degree of contentment, acceptance and respectability as a teacher, he also felt that he was wasting his talents. Ambition and a drive to learn, either academically or through physical practice, were both characteristics of White.

The first school White taught at, between 1930 and 1932 was Reigate, a preparatory (primary) school. Here White came up hard against the strict disciplinary standards of the headmaster, whom he nicknamed “Dr. Prisonface.” He was happier in his second teaching post as head of English at Stowe public school. Stowe was then in the forefront of enlightened educational method, under the headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh. White remained at Stowe until 1936. His literary life continued during his time as a teacher. He found a publisher for They Winter Abroad, and for several murder mysteries, which he published under the pseudonym of “James Aston.” He wrote Earth Stopped (1934) and Gone to Ground (1936). His most successful book from this period was a novel entitled, England Have My Bones (1936). All of these books deal with activities that White loved, and which he pursued along with everything else during his time as a teacher: hunting, fishing, shooting, and flying. One reviewer commented on England Have My Bones: “It is about subjects in which I am not even faintly interested. It is entrancing” (Warner 87). White pursued such activities, which he could not really afford, partly out of snobbery, and partly from an archaic belief in old England. He also had a red setter that he loved, called Brownie, and a succession of other animals for training, including (for two days) a tawny owl called Archimedes, a pair of merlins (raptors), and two goshawks named Cully, one of which escaped from him, and the other of which died due to a mistake in the way she was kept. All of these creatures filled White’s need for companionship, and his need to have something that depended on him.

In 1936, White made what was to prove to be a lifelong friendship with a fellow author, David Garnett. The White-Garnett Letters are fascinating to read. Also in this period, he met and made friends with Sir Sydney Cockerell, formerly curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Cockerell showed White his manuscript of a twelfth-century bestiary, which White was to translate and publish much later, in 1954, as The Book of Beasts. In the same year that he met Garnett, 1936, White resigned his position at Stowe, and committed himself to full time writing on the basis of royalties paid to him for England Have My Bones. He rented the gamekeeper’s cottage in the Stowe estates, Stowe Ridings. It was here, under the shadow of impending World War II, and of moral questions concerning the part that he himself should play in it, that White wrote The Sword in the Stone. The highly successful publication of this book in 1939 came in the nick of time, when White was running up debts with tradespeople and suppliers, and had an overdraft at the bank. Townsend Warner offers a brilliant analysis of the relationship between the novel and White’s experience of life to date:

“In fact, The Sword in the Stone had allowed him two wish-fulfilments. He gave himself a dauntless, motherless boyhood; he also gave himself an ideal old age, free from care and the contradiction of circumstances, practising an enlightened system of education on a chosen pupil, embellished with an enchanter’s hat, omniscient, unconstrainable and with a sink where the crockery washed itself up. As Merlyn, White had the time of his life: the brief dazzle of being head of the English Department at Stowe was a farthing candle to it. There was also the pleasure of discovering a Kingdom of Grammarie where there was room and redress for anything he liked to put into it: for the poor starved tawny who there feasted on dead mice cupboarded in his master’s cap, for the crockery in the Stowe Ridings sink, for the friend’s spaniel who had impeded their walks by winding her lead round their legs and became King Pellinore’s brachet, for the excessive earnestness and lacking final Gs of Advanced Equitation, for his own remarkable memory which enabled Merlyn to remember all the things that hadn’t yet happened. With this went the satisfaction of serving under Malory — a Master whose service imposed freedom.” (99).

In 1938, White joined David Garnett, his wife Ray and the children for a fishing holiday on the River Boyne in Ireland. He found lodgings on a farm, Doolistown House, about forty miles from Dublin, and unexpectedly remained there for the next six years, while the Second World War was raging. White was exempt from army service because of his age and ill health. For some years now he had been drinking too much. He nevertheless felt an obligation to participate in the war effort, and was distressed by his moral dilemma. He finally decided, however, to “make civilisation, rather than fight for it,” and continued working on his Arthurian sequence. In May 1939 The Witch in the Wood was published under the title of The Queen of Air and Darkness. The Ill-Made Knight followed in 1940. Ray Garnett, who had visited White in Ireland before her death from cancer, took the time to instruct him in women’s emotions, and White attributed the success of his characterisation of Guenever in The Ill-Made Knight to her. In Ireland White characteristically took lessons in Erse and flirted with the idea of becoming a Roman Catholic. He completed the fourth book in the Arthurian series, The Candle in the Wind, and the fifth, The Book of Merlyn. However his request to the publisher, William Collins, to print all five in a single volume was rejected. An acrimonious exchange resulted in the last two books remaining unpublished. The first four, revised by White from their original publication so as to accommodate The Book of Merlyn, and White’s belated discovery that the purpose of the whole sequence was to find an antidote to war, were first published together under the title, The Once and Future King, in 1958. The Book of Merlyn was first published separately in 1977 by Collins after White’s death. The whole five books were first published together by HarperCollins in 1996, retaining the title, The Once and Future King.

With the completion of his major Arthurian project, in 1941 White made several attempts to return to England and take part in the war effort. When these attempts came to nothing, he settled unhappily into an isolated life in Ireland. He wrote several more books, including The Elephant and the Kangaroo. To his intense grief, his dog, Brownie, died in November 1944. White tried to compensate himself for her loss by obtaining setter puppy, Killie. At the end of the War, he briefly occupied a cottage in Yorkshire found for him by David Garnett. His income remained insufficient, however, and in 1948 he moved to the tax haven of the Channel Islands.

Here White found a congenial life on the island of Alderney, where he was rich enough to buy his own home. He completed The Book of Beasts, and took up deep-sea diving. His drinking problem remained, although he made sporadic efforts to combat it. He learned the deaf-and-dumb alphabet and Braille, and worked with disabled children and adults in his own home. For four years he was in love with a boy called Zed, who visited Alderney on holiday from London. This relationship caused White intense emotional suffering.

When published at last, The Once and Future King was a huge success with readers. Lerner and Lowe made it into the musical Camelot. The star, Julie Andrews, and her husband visited White on Alderney, and they became good friends. Camelot was first performed in Boston in November 1960, and its success promised to make White rich for the first time in his life.

After what appears to have been a minor nervous breakdown and a bout of drinking, White was well enough to visit Italy on holiday in 1962. This was followed by a lecture tour of the States, which capitalised on the success of Camelot. Following the tour, White made his way to Naples by ship, from where he intended to tour Egypt, Lebanon and Greece. When his ship docked in Piraeus harbour, Athens, he was found dead on the floor of his cabin on 17 January, 1964. Sylvia Townsend Warner devised the inscription for his tombstone in Athens Protestant Cemetery.

T.H. White
1906–1964
Author
Who
From a Troubled Heart
Delighted Others
Loving and Praising Life.