Book Review: T. H. White
As a capstone of my Once and Future King project, I have always intended to read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s T. H. White: A Biography, which turns out to be a wonderful biography, sensitive and thoughtful to its subject, with an insight into his psyche which is all the more remarkable given that White and Townsend Warner apparently never met.
In Townsend Warner’s telling White was a divided and self-tormenting character, a man whose craving for connection and affection was only slightly less enormous than his terror of those self-same things. He was the only child of a wretchedly unhappy marriage: evidently his parents on multiple occasions stood above White’s crib wrestling over a gun, each determined to shoot the child and then commit suicide. (White was too little to remember these events consciously, but they must have left a mark.) White’s mother, a possessive and jealous woman, dismissed White’s ayah because she couldn’t stand that little White seemed to prefer the ayah to her.
After a divorce only slightly less acrimonious than the marriage that had preceded it, White never saw his father again. His mother turned to her son for emotional support, creating an emotional dynamic that White later channeled into his depiction of Morgause and her adoring but oft-neglected sons: she demanded to be the center of White’s emotional life, but paid attention to him only when it suited her. (And unlike the Orkney boys, White had no brothers to turn to for support.)
Then, as a cherry on top of this emotional dysfunction sundae, White realized that he had both homosexual and sadistic urges. Both troubled him, but the sadism perhaps moreso: Townsend Warner retails a conversation late in life with a friend when White explained that when he acted instinctually in love, that is by inflicting pain, he drove his beloveds away, whereas when he acted against his instincts his beloveds could sense his insincerity and that drove them away… A double bind that he never solved.
Given the givens White clearly would have had a lot of problems with human relationships anyway, but this final turn of the screw seems to have locked him in an emotional paralysis that lasted all his adult life. He yearned for close friendships and love, yearned contradictorily to be a hermit who didn’t need anyone, and ended up splitting the difference by becoming desperately attached to his dog Brownie.
Brownie was a red setter who chose White for her person, following him around until the breeder basically informed White that he had a dog now. White accepted Brownie with indifference at first, devoting most of his time to his goshawk, until Brownie began to pine away from a broken heart. She sickened with distemper and nearly died, at which point White, horror-stricken, realized that he loved her too, nursed her day and night, promised never to cheat on her again with hawks of any kind… and she recovered! And White remained devoted to her till she died, at which point he grieved like a father for his only child. He marked the date of her death in his diary for the rest of his life, often with musings about how he still loved his dear deceased Brownie better than anyone else in the whole world, including his current dog.
One is glad that he had this source of emotional succor, but also damn.
For the most part the biography focuses on White’s life, discussing White’s writing mainly as it affected everything else. (The one exception is Townsend Warner’s discussion of The Book of Merlyn, White’s proposed conclusion to The Once and Future King: she can’t get over how bad it is, which is fair enough.) This is fortunate, as it means that the book left my mental TBR list undisturbed... except maaaaaaybe for Mistress Masham’s Repose, just because I’m a sucker for books about tiny people.
And it did redouble my intention of reading more of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s books, just to experience more of her clear, graceful, evocative writing. But I already meant to do that anyway.
In Townsend Warner’s telling White was a divided and self-tormenting character, a man whose craving for connection and affection was only slightly less enormous than his terror of those self-same things. He was the only child of a wretchedly unhappy marriage: evidently his parents on multiple occasions stood above White’s crib wrestling over a gun, each determined to shoot the child and then commit suicide. (White was too little to remember these events consciously, but they must have left a mark.) White’s mother, a possessive and jealous woman, dismissed White’s ayah because she couldn’t stand that little White seemed to prefer the ayah to her.
After a divorce only slightly less acrimonious than the marriage that had preceded it, White never saw his father again. His mother turned to her son for emotional support, creating an emotional dynamic that White later channeled into his depiction of Morgause and her adoring but oft-neglected sons: she demanded to be the center of White’s emotional life, but paid attention to him only when it suited her. (And unlike the Orkney boys, White had no brothers to turn to for support.)
Then, as a cherry on top of this emotional dysfunction sundae, White realized that he had both homosexual and sadistic urges. Both troubled him, but the sadism perhaps moreso: Townsend Warner retails a conversation late in life with a friend when White explained that when he acted instinctually in love, that is by inflicting pain, he drove his beloveds away, whereas when he acted against his instincts his beloveds could sense his insincerity and that drove them away… A double bind that he never solved.
Given the givens White clearly would have had a lot of problems with human relationships anyway, but this final turn of the screw seems to have locked him in an emotional paralysis that lasted all his adult life. He yearned for close friendships and love, yearned contradictorily to be a hermit who didn’t need anyone, and ended up splitting the difference by becoming desperately attached to his dog Brownie.
Brownie was a red setter who chose White for her person, following him around until the breeder basically informed White that he had a dog now. White accepted Brownie with indifference at first, devoting most of his time to his goshawk, until Brownie began to pine away from a broken heart. She sickened with distemper and nearly died, at which point White, horror-stricken, realized that he loved her too, nursed her day and night, promised never to cheat on her again with hawks of any kind… and she recovered! And White remained devoted to her till she died, at which point he grieved like a father for his only child. He marked the date of her death in his diary for the rest of his life, often with musings about how he still loved his dear deceased Brownie better than anyone else in the whole world, including his current dog.
One is glad that he had this source of emotional succor, but also damn.
For the most part the biography focuses on White’s life, discussing White’s writing mainly as it affected everything else. (The one exception is Townsend Warner’s discussion of The Book of Merlyn, White’s proposed conclusion to The Once and Future King: she can’t get over how bad it is, which is fair enough.) This is fortunate, as it means that the book left my mental TBR list undisturbed... except maaaaaaybe for Mistress Masham’s Repose, just because I’m a sucker for books about tiny people.
And it did redouble my intention of reading more of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s books, just to experience more of her clear, graceful, evocative writing. But I already meant to do that anyway.