The Once and Future King
T.H. White, 1958
Penguin Group USA
640 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780441627400
Summary
The whole world knows and loves this book. It is the magical epic of King Arthur and his shining Camelot; of Merlin and Owl and Guinevere; of beasts who talk and men who fly, of wizardry and war. It is the book of all things lost and wonderful and sad. It is the fantasy masterpiece by which all others are judged. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 29, 1906
• Where—Bombay, India
• Death—January 17, 1964
• Where—Athens, Greece
• Education—Cambridge University
Terence Hanbury White was an English author best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958.
White was born in Bombay, British India to English parents, Garrick Hansbury White, an Indian police superintendent, and Constance White. Terence White had a discordant childhood, with an alcoholic father and an emotionally frigid mother, and his parents separated when Terence was fourteen.
White went to Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire, a public school, and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the scholar and occasional author L. J. Potts. Potts became a lifelong friend and correspondent, and White later referred to him as "the great literary influence in my life."
While at Queens' College, White wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (without reading it), and graduated in 1928 with a first-class degree in English.
White then taught at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, for four years. In 1936 he published England Have My Bones, a well-received memoir about a year spent in England. The same year, he left Stowe and lived in a workman's cottage, where he wrote and "revert[ed] to a feral state", engaging in falconry, hunting, and fishing.
White also became interested in aviation, partly to conquer his fear of heights. White wrote to a friend that in autumn 1937, "I got desperate among my books and picked [Malory] up in lack of anything else. Then I was thrilled and astonished to find that (a) The thing was a perfect tragedy, with a beginning, a middle and an end implicit in the beginning and (b) the characters were real people with recognizable reactions which could be forecast[...] Anyway, I somehow started writing a book."
The novel, which White described as "a preface to Malory", was titled The Sword in the Stone and told the story of the boyhood of King Arthur. White was also influenced by Freudian psychology and his lifelong involvement in natural history. The Sword in the Stone was well-reviewed and was a Book of the Month Club selection in 1939.
In February 1939, White moved to Doolistown, Ireland, where he lived out the international crisis and the Second World War itself as a de facto conscientious objector. It was in Ireland that he wrote most of what would later become The Once and Future King; two sequels to The Sword and the Stone were published during this time: The Witch in the Wood (later retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness) in 1939, and The Ill-Made Knight in 1940.
The version of The Sword in the Stone included in The Once and Future King differs in several respects from the earlier version. It is darker, and some critics prefer the earlier version. White's indirect experience of the war had a profound effect on these tales of King Arthur, which include commentaries on war and human nature in the form of a heroic narrative.
In 1946, White settled in Alderney, third largest of the Channel Islands, where he lived for the rest of his life. The same year, White published Mistress Masham's Repose, a children's book in which a young girl discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people in Swift's Gulliver's Travels) living near her house. Mistress Masham's Repose was influenced by John Masefield's book The Midnight Folk. He hosted Julie Andrews, her then-husband Tony, and became close friends with them at this time.
In 1947, he published The Elephant and the Kangaroo, in which a repetition of Noah's Flood occurs in Ireland. In the early 1950s White published two non-fiction books: The Age of Scandal (1950), a collection of essays about 18th-century England, and The Goshawk (1951), an account of White's attempt to train a hawk in the traditional art of falconry. In 1954 White translated and edited The Book of Beasts, an English translation of a medieval bestiary originally written in Latin.
In 1958 White completed the fourth book of The Once and Future King sequence, The Candle in the Wind, though it was first published with the other three parts and has never been published separately. White lived to see his work adapted as the Broadway musical Camelot (1960) and the animated film The Sword in the Stone (1963), both based on The Once and Future King. He died of a heart ailment on 17 January 1964 aboard ship in Piraeus (Athens, Greece), en route to Alderney from a lecture tour in the United States. He is buried in First Cemetery of Athens.
In 1977 The Book of Merlyn, a conclusion to The Once and Future King, was published posthumously.
Personal life
According to Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1967 biography, White was "a homosexual and a sado-masochist." He came close to marrying several times but had no enduring romantic relationships, and wrote in his diaries that "It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them."
Broadcaster Robert Robinson has published an account of a bizarre conversation with White, in which he claimed to be attracted to small girls. Robinson concluded that this was really a cover for homosexuality. Julie Andrews wrote in her auto-biography, "I believe Tim may have been an unfulfilled homosexual, and he suffered a lot because of it."
However, White's long time friend and literary agent, David Higham, wrote "Tim was no homosexual, though I think at one time he had feared he was [and in his ethos fear would have been the word]." Higham gave Warner the address of one of White's lovers "so that she could get in touch with someone so important in Tim's story. But she never, the girl told me, took that step. So she was able to present Tim in such a light that a reviewer could call him a raging homosexual. Perhaps a heterosexual affair would have made her blush."
White was also an agnostic, and towards the end of his life a heavy drinker. Warner wrote of him, "Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the human race."
Influence
Science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock enjoyed White's The Once and Future King, and was especially influenced by the underpinnings of realism in his work. Moorcock eventually engaged in a "wonderful correspondence" with White, and later recalled that "White [gave] me some very good advice on how to write."
J. K. Rowling has said that T. H. White's writing strongly influenced the Harry Potter books; several critics have compared Rowling's character Albus Dumbledore to White's absent-minded Merlyn, and Rowling herself has described White's Wart as "Harry's spiritual ancestor." When asked about the similarities between Harry Potter and his earlier character Timothy Hunter, Neil Gaiman stated he did not think Rowling had based her character on Hunter, stating "I said to [the reporter] that I thought we were both just stealing from T. H. White: very straightforward."
Gregory Maguire was influenced by "White's ability to be intellectually broadminded, to be comic, to be poetic, and to be fantastic" in the writing of his 1995 novel Wicked, and crime fiction writer Ed McBain also cited White as an influence.
Lev Grossman also paid homage to White in The Magicians (2009), in which magicians-in-training at Brakebill College are transformed into geese. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
[An] impressive work of literature, a far more remarkable flight of imagination, than readers of the earlier versions of The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood...and The Ill-made Knight could have guessed it would finally be....Mr. White has concluded his dealings with King Arthur by giving us much more than fun. Thought follows laughter..
Ben Ray Redman - New York Times (8/24/58)
Reading these enchanted pages, laughing at their wild comedy, smiling at their ironic humor, delighting in their revelation of the beauty and wonder of life in...once might conclude too soon that this is only an inspire and irreverent reworking of Thomas Malory. But the deeper one penetrates into Mr. White's Forest Sauvage the more one is aware of unseen presences, of dark broodings on the mysteries of human character, the tragic failures of high hopes and the relentless doom that drives men to kill each other in unending wars.
Orville Prescott - New York Times (8/25/1958)
[T]the single finest fantasy novel written in our time, or for that matter, ever written, is, must be, by any conceivable standard, T. H. White's The Once and Future King. I can hardly imagine that any mature, literate person who has read the book would disagree with this estimate. White is a great writer.
Len Carter (fantasy historian and writer)
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Once and Future King:
1. What lessons does Arthur learn from each of his transformations—into fish, hawk, ant, goose, and badger?
2. What does Merlyn mean that Might does not make Right? In what way does his concept challenge the existing ideals of medieval society? How is that concept apropos the history of the 20th century—or any era of history?
3. In what ways does White satirize war in his book? What is his concept of war? Do you agree?
4. The first sections of the book were written during the run-up to, and early years of, World War II, during which time White declared himself a conscientious objector. Does knowing that have any effect on how you read/understand/interpret The Once and Future King?
5. What is the point of Badger's "dissertation"?
6. How—and why—does White play tricks with time? Consider not only Merlyn's living by reverse time, but also the frequent use of anachronisms (modern references).
7. The various castles in The Once and Future King are different, each with its own setting and character. Talk about their variations...and how each embodies the hopes and fears of its inhabitants.
8. What is Arthur's attitude toward the love affair between Lancelot and Guenever. Why does he react the way he does? Do you think he should have reacted differently?
9. What is the meaning of The Round Table? What does Arthur hope to accomplish through its design?
10. What is the significance of the quest for the Holy Grail—and the knights failure to find it?
11. What is the literal—and symbolic—significance of the book's title? What does it mean in the larger scope of history?
12. White suggests in this retelling that good intentions and innocence are not enough in the struggle against evil. What, then, is enough? Is he saying that hope for justice and goodness is futile?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)