T. H. White | |
|---|---|
 White lecturing on his Arthurian fiction | |
| Born | Terence Hanbury White (1906-05-29)29 May 1906 Bombay,British India |
| Died | 17 January 1964(1964-01-17) (aged 57) Piraeus, Athens, Greece |
| Nickname | Tim |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | English |
| Education | Cheltenham College |
| Alma mater | Queens' College, Cambridge |
| Genre | Fantasy |
| Relatives | Abraham Faure (great-great-grandfather) |
Terence Hanbury "Tim"White (29 May 1906 – 17 January 1964) was an English writer. He is best known for hisArthurian novels, which were published together in 1958 asThe Once and Future King. One of his best known is the first of the series,The Sword in the Stone, which was published as a stand-alone book in 1938.
White was born inBombay,British India, to Garrick Hanbury White, a superintendent in the Indian police, and Constance Edith Southcote Aston.[1] White had a troubled childhood, with an alcoholic father and an emotionally cold mother, and his parents separated when he was 14.[2][3]
White went toCheltenham College inGloucestershire, apublic school, andQueens' College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the scholar and occasional authorL. J. Potts, who became a lifelong friend and correspondent. White later referred to him as "the great literary influence in my life."[2] While at Queens' College, White wrote a thesis onThomas Malory'sLe Morte d'Arthur,[4] and graduated in 1928 with a first-class degree in English.[1]
White then taught atStowe School in Buckinghamshire for four years. In 1936 he publishedEngland Have My Bones, a well-received memoir about a year spent in England. The same year, he left Stowe School and lived in a workman's cottage nearby, where he wrote and "revert[ed] to a feral state", engaging infalconry, hunting, and fishing.[1][5] White also became interested in aviation, partly to conquer his fear of heights.[6]
White's novelEarth Stopped (1934) and its sequelGone to Ground (1935) are science fiction novels about a disaster that devastates the world.Gone to Ground contains several fantasy stories told by the survivors that were later reprinted inThe Maharajah and Other Stories.[7]
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."[4]
The novel, which White described as "a preface to Malory",[4] was titledThe Sword in the Stone and published in 1938, telling the story of the boyhood of King Arthur.[8] White was also influenced byFreudian psychology and his own lifelong involvement in natural history.The Sword in the Stone was critically well-received and was aBook of the Month Club selection in 1939.[1]
In February 1939, White moved to Doolistown inCounty Meath, Ireland, where he lived out theSecond World War as ade factoconscientious objector.[9] In Ireland, he wrote most of what becameThe Once and Future King:The Witch in the Wood (later cut and rewritten asThe Queen of Air and Darkness) in 1939, andThe Ill-Made Knight in 1940. The version ofThe Sword in the Stone included inThe Once and Future King differs from the earlier version; it is darker, and some critics prefer the earlier version.[10]
In 1946, White settled inAlderney, the third-largestChannel Island, where he lived for the rest of his life.[5] The same year, he publishedMistress Masham's Repose, a children's book in which a young girl discovers a group ofLilliputians (the tiny people inJonathan Swift'sGulliver's Travels) living near her house.Mistress Masham's Repose was influenced byJohn Masefield's bookThe Midnight Folk.[8] In 1947, he publishedThe Elephant and the Kangaroo, a novel in which a repetition ofNoah's Flood occurs in Ireland.[7]
In the early 1950s, he published two non-fiction books.The Age of Scandal (1950) is a collection of essays about 18th-century England.The Goshawk (1951) is an account of his attempt to train anorthern goshawk using traditional rather than modern falconry techniques.[11] He wrote it at his cottage in the mid-1930s, but he did not publish it until his agentDavid Garnett discovered it and insisted that it be published.[11] In 1954, White translated and editedThe Book of Beasts, an English translation of a medievalbestiary written in Latin.
In 1958, White completed the fourth book ofThe Once and Future King,The Candle in the Wind, which was first published with the other three parts and has never been published separately. White lived to see his Arthurian work adapted as the Broadway musicalCamelot (1960) and the animated filmThe Sword in the Stone (1963).
White died of heart failure on 17 January 1964 aboard ship inPiraeus,Athens, Greece, en route to Alderney from a lecture tour in the United States.[1] He is buried in theFirst Cemetery of Athens.The Book of Merlyn was published posthumously in 1977 as a conclusion toThe Once and Future King. His papers are held by theUniversity of Texas at Austin.[11]
According toSylvia Townsend Warner's 1967 biography, White was "a homosexual and asado-masochist."[5] He came close to marrying several times but had no enduring romantic relationships. In his diaries of Zed, a young boy, he wrote: "I have fallen in love with Zed ... the whole situation is an impossible one. All I can do is behave like a gentleman. It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them."[5]
Robert Robinson published an account of a conversation with White in which White claimed to be attracted to women. Robinson concluded that this was a cover for homosexuality.Julie Andrews wrote in her autobiography, "I believe Tim may have been an unfulfilled homosexual, and he suffered a lot because of it."[12]
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 Sylvia Townsend 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."[13]
Lin Carter portrays White inImaginary Worlds as a man who felt deeply but was unable to form close human relationships because of his unfortunate childhood. "He was a man with an enormous capacity for loving. It shows in his prodigious correspondence and in his affection for dogs, and in the bewildered and inarticulate loves his characters experience in his books; but he had few close friends, and no genuine relationship with a woman."[14]
White was agnostic[15] and a heavy drinker towards the end of his life.[2][16] Warner wrote of him, "Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the human race."[6]
Fantasy writerMichael Moorcock enjoyed White'sThe Once and Future King, and was especially influenced by the underpinnings of realism in his work.[17] Moorcock eventually engaged in a "wonderful correspondence" with White, and later recalled that White gave him "some very good advice on how to write".[17][18]
J. K. Rowling has said that White's writing stronglyinfluenced theHarry Potter books; several critics have compared Rowling's characterAlbus Dumbledore to White's absent-minded Merlyn,[19][20] and Rowling herself has described White's Wart as "Harry's spiritual ancestor."[21] AuthorNeil Gaiman was asked about the similarities between Harry Potter and Gaiman's characterTimothy Hunter, and he stated that he did not think Rowling had based her character on Hunter. "I said to [the reporter] that I thought we were both just stealing from T. H. White: very straightforward."[22]
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 novelWicked,[23] andcrime fiction writerEd McBain also cited White as an influence.[24]
White features extensively inHelen Macdonald'sH is for Hawk, winner of the 2014Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. One of the components of the book is a biographical account of White and alsoThe Goshawk, an account of his own attempt to train a hawk.[25]
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