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T H White, author of the much-loved The Sword in The Stone, The Once and Future King, The Goshawk, and many other works of English literature, died in Greece from a heart attack in 1964, aged 57. When the eminent novelist and critic Sylvia Townsend Warner heard of his death she wrote in her diary: 'T H White is dead, alas! - a friend I never managed to have.' Warner was invited by White's executors to write his biography. She visited his home in Alderney in the Channel Islands to see what material was available and felt that he followed her around in his house; 'his angry, suspicious, furtive stare directed at my back, gone when I turned around'. When she finished his biography, nearly three years later, she wrote, 'O Tim, I don't like to lose you ? it has been a strange love story between an old woman and a dead man'. T H White. A Biography was published in 1967 and was Warner's greatest critical success since her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926). It reveals White's passions: for life, for learning, for all animals and birds, particularly hawks and dogs; his self-exile to Ireland during the Second World War, the creation of his tetralogy The Once and Future King, and the unexpected wealth and fame that came from The Sword in the Stone, the Disney cartoon and the Broadway musical Camelot. Warner treats White's repressed homosexuality and his sexual predilections with humane understanding in this wise portrait of a tormented literary giant, written by a novelist and a poet.White's writing on falconry was the inspiration for Helen Macdonald's acclaimed H is for Hawk. The Introduction to this new edition is written by Gill Davies.… (more)
User reviews
Sadly, White was a strange, lonely, eccentric, self-absorbed, conflicted mess. The only living being he ever truly loved was his red setter Brownie (and believe me, I do get that). But he was still capable of personally drowning in a bucket a litter of unwanted puppies born due his own negligence. He decided to be a falconer, and his goshawk first escaped and later died... again, due to his own carelessness and/or ignorance. He could be charming and overbearing; prone to riding roughshod over people in his own enthusiasms. He flitted from England to Ireland to the Channel Islands (mostly to evade taxes); occasionally proposed to women who he never ended up marrying (he was gay, attracted to young boys, and had sadistic inclinations); wrote some wonderful, imaginative stories and some pretty terrible maundering. He died alone in a stateroom aboard a ship en route to Greece, and was buried there.
Townsend is largely sympathetic, especially to his travails as a writer, but her portrait of White is not pretty. I took a shot at Once and Future King after finishing the biography, but while there is much to charm and admire in The Sword and the Stone, it rapidly declines thereafter into a lot of endless pantomime silliness, nasty women, and more creepy violence.
For fanatic Arthurians, and I suspect a lot of them won't like him or his take on Arthur either. Three stars because it is a competent, graceful biography of a man I ended up not liking at all.