The Ill-Made Knight

T. H. WHITE by Sylvia Townsend Warner. 352 pages. Viking. $6.50.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn." --The Sword in the Stone

This passage from the ringing first novel in T. H. White's Arthurian cycle, The Once and Future King, is a shade too piteous to be in character. The Sword in the Stone comes so near to being a perfect book that the momentary faltering in Merlyn's tone is worth examining. In her compassionate biography of White, Author Sylvia Townsend Warner suggests that it was White himself who missed his love, who lay at night listening to the roar of his veins, and who swallowed great draughts of learning as a painkiller.

As a writer, White was unique. He took the schoolboy classic which is also the common memory of the race--the legend of Arthur, Merlyn and the rest--and re-created it all in a new form, part magic and farce, part fairy tale and epic. As a person, White was a self-tormented man who drove himself to high and lonely accomplishment; he was also a fairly ordinary product of post-Victorian England. He was born in India in 1906. His mother, who married reluctantly and late, regarded sex and White's father with total revulsion and her only child with a flouncing petulance that lasted through her long life. Constance White did a thorough job of squelching her child's natural emotions; when the boy fastened his love on an Indian nanny, the mother fired her.

Gentlemanly Idling. At Cambridge in the '20s, a pose of homosexuality was acceptable and even fashionable, but for Tim White the matter was too serious for posing. Biographer Warner maintains an apparently deliberate reticence on the subject, but as clearly as the reader can determine from her patchy discussion, White was never able to accept homosexuality wholeheartedly. Nor could he really reject it. His solution was solitude, and his cure for solitude was Merlyn's: learning things and teaching.

After his graduation from Cambridge with first class honors in English, he taught for a few years at Stowe, in those days an up-and-coming public school. His learning project during the period was gentlemanly idling. With enormous industry and almost no money, he taught himself to hunt, shoot, fish, and handle falcons. He mocked this hunger for accomplishment in a book, written between hunt-club meets, called Burke's Steerage, or the Amateur Gentleman's Introduction to Noble Sports and Pastimes. White was not very good at falconry (goshawks and merlins kept getting away), but it became his passion; it had the advantage of belonging to the boyhood of history. Later, for perhaps the very same reason, he threw himself into the study of Gaelic, spent years translating a 12th century Latin bestiary, and became an armchair authority on the Emperor Hadrian.

He did not like his own times, or predicament. He lived alone except for a red setter bitch. He corresponded hugely with his Cambridge friends, but when they visited him friendship sometimes went sour. He had at least two heterosexual love affairs, but these were unhappy failures. After such disappointments, he would learn something new--cinematography, or how to fly an airplane. He drank too much.

Patriotic Piety. Case histories explain everything except cases, and genius. White had always written. At first he turned out light, brittle novels (signed "James Aston" to protect his teaching job), then a successful paste-up from his hunting and fishing diaries. His biographer, who never met him, overstates his seeming ease of production; in her portrait, he is an amiable but absent-mirded fowl who every now and then discovers that he has produced an egg. At any rate, in 1938, at the age of 32, White produced The Sword in the Stone, an evocation of "the 12th century or whenever it was," written as if remembered. It was without much question the best book for a twelve-year-old ever written, and a haunting delight for readers of any age. Besides unfolding the entire panoply of medieval life, it was a book of profound patriotic piety, distilling England's future greatness--and its humor as well.

White sat out World War II in an Irish farmhouse, and later settled on Alderney in the Channel Islands. He learned how to sail, and he learned the deaf-blind language so that, year after year, he could entertain members of a deaf-blind society whom he invited to Alderney. In 1957 he revised The Once and Future King, softening a nasty lampoon of his nasty mother (Queen Morgause, the witch).

In his last years he was wealthy, thanks to royalties derived from the Lerner-Loewe musical Camelot. He was also troubled, his biographer reports, by a hopeless and uncontrollable passion for a young boy. He visited Florence in 1963 and is recalled by some members of the British colony there as a boozy windbag who told his stories too many times. In 1964, only 57 but seeming old and trembling in his anatomies, he died on shipboard after a U.S. lecture tour. On his tombstone, he is described as an author "who from a troubled heart delighted others, loving and praising this life."

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