Since my Neil Gaiman talk in Tulsa got cancelled due to winter weather, I will be here to teach class on Thursday. And since most of you already got off on Tuesday for a trip, I don't want to lose an entire week of class if I can help it.
Today (Tuesday) we discussed the opening chapters (1-7) of The Sword in the Stone and discussed how fantasy functions as metaphor in this work and Coleridge's work. Be sure to answer Tuesday's question no later than Thursday, since very few people turned them in. For THURSDAY, read Chs.8-14, though there are no blog questions. I will give you an in-class writing response when you come to class. ALSO, I will assign Paper #2 on Thursday, so you want to show up!
Also, for those interested, here is an except from a long article I wrote on T.H. White that will give you some background on the creation of The Sword and the Stone. Click "read more" below to access it...
White’s increasing isolation made him draw
further inward, battling demons both real and imagined. His greatest foe remained homosexuality,
which he sought to cure through marriage.
Of course, he found little interest in the opposite sex, and had
difficulty making any new acquaintance.
Even close friends such as David Garnett (the son of famed translator,
Constance Garnett), had to be taken in small doses. His closest relationships were conducted by
letter and best appreciated from afar.
As his friend John Moore recalled, “I think he was 75 per cent of his
time unhappy and often very unhappy; probably about nothing in
particular...He was a self-tormented person and I imagine he saw himself very
much as Lancelot in The Ill-Made Knight” (Warner 93). If this is true, it is tempting to read that
book for clues on White’s character, particularly the following passage:
“[Lancelot’s] Word was valuable to him not only because he was good, but also
because he was bad. It is the bad people
who need to have principles to restrain them” (Ace, 339). Perhaps much of White’s writing and “crazes”
were an attempt to regulate what he felt were “bad” impulses and desires. Occasionally, he let the dark side win out
and did something wicked, as in his next book, Burke’s Steerage (1938),
which was a satire of gentleman’s sports.
White, who had for some time tried to affect upper class sensibilities,
now washed his hands of them. As Warner
remarks, “Burke’s Steerage was calculated to alienate his England
Have My Bones public, and duly did so...English sportsmen quite like being
laughed at: Burke’s Steerage, serenely sardonic, laughed at their
sports” (95).
Alone in the woods, White began to think about
his future: he made half-hearted attempts to teach in India, or take another
position in England. War loomed ever
closer, and White made preparations for the coming invasion. Perhaps to chase away black thoughts, he
reached for the work that pulled him through his exams—Morte d’ Arthur. As so often happens, a book that meant one
thing in youth changes completely in adulthood; so White, re-reading the book
in his early thirties, found an untapped source of inspiration. In a letter to Potts, he remarks, “I was
thrilled and astonished to find (a) that the thing was a perfect tragedy, with
a beginning, a middle and an end implicit in the beginning, and (b) that the characters
were real people with recognizable reactions which could be forecast” (Warner
98). He quickly found himself with a
manuscript of a book that, at first blush, struck him as somewhat A.A.
Miline—though, as he cattily admitted, “I’d gladly be Miline for the Miline
money” (Warner 99). The book combined
the two ‘Whites’ of his earlier books, drawing on the earnest, pastoral vein of
England Have My Bones and marrying it with the witty, satirical nature
of the Ashton books. White realized
this, and wondered aloud to Potts whether “it is for grown-ups or
children. It is more or less a kind of
wish-fulfillment of the things I should like to have happened to me when I was
a boy” (Warner 98). Like the Harry
Potter books that came after—and were largely inspired by White—The
Sword and the Stone captivates a younger audience but speaks confidentially
to the older. Perhaps, too, this struck
a chord with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, who yearned for simpler
times in the face of a new world war.
Whether or not the book was calculated to win a
broad audience, it quickly captivated readers in England and marched swiftly
overseas. The American Book Club adopted
the book and his bank accounts rose from virtually nothing to a comfortable 500
pounds. Unfortunately, this was 1938:
Hitler was poised to invade Czechoslovakia which would make war with England
inevitable. White now faced the dim
prospect of volunteering or waiting out the war in a gas mask (after WWI,
chemical warfare was expected). He
called on his various contacts throughout England to find him a safe job,
preferably behind a desk somewhere, but nothing came through. While he waited, he began work on a second
Arthur volume and even wrote a play (a his attempts to stage a play, often on Arthurian
themes, continued for years without success).
Finally, hearing that Garnett was traveling to Ireland to fish on the
River Dee, White decided to tag along.
Ireland, it seemed, would be the perfect out-of-the-way place to wait
out the war, and better still, finish his second book. Like many other English authors, Ireland
appealed to White for its history and mysticism; White also nurtured a tenuous
connection to Ireland through his father, who was born there (though only
half-Irish). He rented a farmhouse in
County Meath and settled down to the life of an eccentric author, amusing and
sometimes frightening the locals (some even believing he was an English
spy). Indeed, he even planned to covert
to Catholicism, but a sermon reeking of anti-English spleen and other
propaganda turned him away for good.
Ireland, as with all his human relations, would have to be admired from
afar.
As war engulfed Europe, White plunged doggedly into
his work, believing (or making himself believe) his books were essential to the
war effort. In a letter to Sydney
Cockerell, he writes, “I shall refuse to fight or run. My most important
business is to finish my version of Mallory, and so I shall tell any tribunal
which sits on me. I cannot finish it
dead; I am the only person who can finish it.
I have been at is unconsciously ever since I was at Cambridge, which I
wrote a thesis on Mallory; anybody can throw bombs” (Warner 123). This is a bold statement in wartime, all the
more so a war he believed in and felt extraordinarily guilty about
avoiding. Perhaps it was a necessary
rationalization, but part of him truly believed that art could save the
world. As Sylvia Warner remarks in her
biography, “by finishing the Tetralogy he would do more for civilization than
by fighting for it (168).
The work that has come down to us as The Sword
in the Stone, the first book of The Once and Future King, is a
curious amalgam of past and present: specifically, the White just before the
war and toward the end of it. The two
mindsets work quite well together, although some events seem inserted into the
fabric of the story with seams showing—which is exactly the case. Arthur’s adventures among the ants, for
example, was lifted bodily from the doomed The Book of Merlyn manuscript
and placed in the first volume. While
these passages subtly alter the overall feel of the book, it remains a unified
work, though perhaps not the lighthearted children’s fantasy advertised in
bookstores. The theme of the work is
education, and particularly, the education of a complete human being. As a teacher at Stowe, he would insist that
his students read and think with clarity, rather than simply getting by with
second-rate answers. In this we have the
very example of Merlin, who refuses to educate merely another king who will
fight the same wars and perpetuate the same miseries. The education of Arthur is a novel theme, as
the education of a king—and no less a king than King Arthur—is a way of
distinguishing the ideal from reality.
How would the greatest monarch of legend be instructed, and what
made him devise the notion of a Round Table when all around him was war and
decay? White eagerly seized on hints in Mallory to frame his epic of a wizard,
Merlin, who lives backwards in the hopes of educating man to escape his warlike
fate. Fittingly, the first book ends
with Arthur accepting completing the first stage of his education, eager to
begin the ‘good work’ of humanity. Yet
even in the first volume, Merlin’s prophecy remains guarded; he can only warn
Arthur that “Only fools want to be great” (Ace 180). Having seen a thousand years of great men
come to ruin, he has no exceptional hope for the human race.
In her introduction to The Book of Merlyn,
Sylvia Warner notes that “The Sword in the Stone has the impetus and
recklessness of a beginner’s work. It is
full of poetry, farce, invention, iconoclasm, and, above all, the reverence due
to youth in its portrayal of the young Arthur” (xii). It may seem strange to begin the story of
Arthur with the childhood of a boy named Wart, but White, a man who never had
children himself, cared deeply about the perspective of childhood. For Arthur, in some sense, never left off
being a child: that is, he continued to believe that innocence is less a
limitation than a perspective on truth.
Toward the end of the book, when Wart dreams of becoming a knight—much
to Merlin’s disgust—he explains, “I should insist on doing my vigil by
myself...and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world
in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and if I
were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it” (Ace 181). This sincere, Christ-like admission of
sacrifice is made in total ignorance of the world and its evil, as Merlin
knows. Yet when Merlin suggests he
reconsider this solution as an adult, Wart protests, “Why do people not think,
when they are grown up, as I do when I am young?” (Ace 181). It was perhaps a question the grown-up White
asked of the world, which seemed all too willing to accept the sacrifices of
the young—without any expense of its own.
Like the Romantic poets, White does not equate innocence with naive
childishness; rather, innocence is a perspective of purity and purpose,
unclouded by the adult pursuits of greatness and greed.
The first book, if we wish to call it a
“children’s book,” is youthful in spirit alone, not content. Perhaps the most ‘innocent’ feature of the
book is its use of anachronism and refusal to be scholarly and uniform in any
manner (we can imagine what his examining committee would have made of
it!). From almost the first page, we
read, “It was not really Eton that he mentioned, for the College of Blessed
Mary was not founded until 1440, but it was a place of the same sort. Also they were drinking Metheglyn, not port,
but by mentioning the modern wine it is easier to give you the feel” (Ace 10). The tone is like a well-meaning schoolmaster
explaining the more arcane details of a beloved text; never mind exactly what
is said, since the true meaning lies in the “feel” of the passage. Nowhere is this better seen than in Merlin
himself, a sorcerer who surrounds himself with the debris of future civilization. While arguing with a spell, he exclaims, “I
don’t want a hat I was wearing in 1890.
Have you no sense of time at all?” (Ace 91). Of course, children don’t have a proper
understanding of time (again, a very Romantic notion), as dates, centuries, and
events are all hazy adult constructions.
White, too, distrusts our notion of now and then, past and present, or
even savagery and civilization. For this
reason, Merlin returns to the “dark ages,” ostensibly to save civilization, but
also to offer a chilling truth from the future: man is ever as he was. So, if the greatest king of the past can be
made to learn, not just kingship but the aims of knowledge itself, perhaps
mankind can unmake itself into something better.
When his education begins, Wart assumes he is
learning how to be a proper squire or a knight-errant himself. Merlin quickly disabuses him of such notions,
asking him point blank, “You think that education is something which ought to
be done when all else fails?” (Ace 74).
In other words, education is something for its time of day (perhaps a
school day) which blissfully ends and one goes about doing something else. Merlin felt that education was less a pastime
than a philosophy, a way to face the suffering of human existence and emerge
with something new, something that might one day end the cycle of war and
misery. In perhaps White’s most
celebrated passage, Merlin comforts Wart’s disappointment at having to become
Kay’s squire:
The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That is the only thing that never
fails. 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
honour trampled
in the sewers of baser minds.
There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn
why the world wags and what wags it.
That is the only thing which the mind can
never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or
distrust, and never
dream of regretting. (Ace 183)
White
clearly shines through the mask or Merlin in these lines, as it was his
lifelong belief that the truth lay scattered at our feet; our human vanity,
however, prevented us from stooping down and finding a knowledge that could
console us for every tear shed and every life lost. It might even bring them back. This reminds us of White’s refusal to abandon
his writing during the dark days of World War Two. His writing was an act of “learning” both for
himself and the culture: it was his way of preserving culture as it was
swallowed up by the “baser minds” of racism and propaganda. To escape the sadness of being human, Wart
must learn what no man of his time—or any other, perhaps—had ever learned: what
‘humanity’ means to the animals of the earth, sky, and sea.
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