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T. H. White’s The Once and Future King
In the first chapter of the second book of The Once and Future King, Queen Morgause boils a cat, half-heartedly planning to cast a spell of sorts. The description of the cat’s agonizing death, and the stark contrast of this paragraph to the next one, outlining the insouciant complacency of its killer, is characteristic of the themes and structure of White’s complex tetralogy:
In the boiling water, the cat gave some horrible convulsions and a dreadful cry. Its wet fur bobbed in the steam, gleaming like the side of a speared whale, as it tried to leap or swim with its bound feet. Its mouth opened hideously, showing the whole of its pink gullet, and the sharp, white cat-teeth, like thorns. After the first shriek it was not able to articulate, but only to stretch its jaws. Later it was dead.
Queen Morgause of Lothian and Orkney sat beside the cauldron and waited. Occasionally she stirred the cat with a wooden spoon. The stench of boiling fur began to fill the room. A watcher would have seen, in the flattering peat light, what an exquisite creature she was tonight: her deep, big eyes, her hair glinting with dark lustre, her full body, and her faint air of watchfulness as she listened for the whispering in the room above. (White 1958: 221)
For those readers familiar with White’s story only through the saccharine Walt Disney film of The Sword in the Stone (1963), this passage might come as something of a shock. The episode marks the transition from the relative innocence of the Wart’s boyhood described in that opening book – even if there are many significant pointers toward the harsh nature of the world outside the Forest Sauvage in his wide range of experiences – to the savagery of the adult world outside. The reader is forced to confront the problem of cruelty, the concept that holds the book together and which gives White’s retelling of the Arthurian legends a distinctive identity. Is Morgause acting unnaturally in destroying another creature so wantonly (she later loses interest in her experiment and simply abandons the remains of the dead cat)? Or showing how dreadful and terrifying nature untamed by civilization can be?
There is a contrast between animal and human, which would imply the former, but then we also have to remember that the incident takes place in the most remote area of Arthur’s empire, the Scottish islands, those least tamed by Arthur’s centralizing efforts to unite his dominions. Morgause does all she can to exploit the festering resentment of her children and turn them against Arthur because of his father’s seduction of Igraine, their grandmother: “They considered the enormous English wickedness in silence, overwhelmed by its dénouement. It was their mother’s favourite story, on the rare occasions when she troubled to tell them one, and they had learned it by heart” (White 1958: 220). We have a pointed contrast between the rich, life-enhancing education that Merlyn gives to Arthur in The Sword in the Stone and the neglect practiced by Morgause, allied to her obvious hypocrisy in pointing out the supposed cruelty of others while she is so blind to her own.
White’s portrayal of Morgause began as a savage attack on the failings of his own mother, as early readers of the book recognized, persuading White to revise the manuscript a number of times, and to transform the book itself from its first incarnation as The Witch in the Wood (1939) to The Queen of Air and Darkness in The Once and Future King (Warner 1967: 130; Gallix 1982: 124). More importantly, the representation of the vicious queen of the Orkneys is a significant element in White’s exploration of the nature of violence and the problem of cruelty written against the background of World War II. White had been a pacifist in the 1930s, and had struggled with his decision to go into exile in Ireland, eventually offering his services to the forces and, when these were declined, seeing his novels as a part of the war effort (Brewer 1993: 11; Hadfield 1996: 209).
The series of novels explores the problem of how violence occurs and whether anything can be done to stop it. Arthur’s weak response to the attacks of the Orkney family, who seek to undo his efforts at establishing stability, is to excuse their failings, arguing like a good liberal. When Lancelot, new to the court, asks what is the problem with the Orkney faction, Arthur responds that “The real matter with them is Morgause, their mother. She brought them up with so little love or security that they find it difficult to understand warm-hearted people themselves. They are suspicious and frightened … It’s not their fault” (White 1958: 345). Clearly, such responses, whatever their truth-value, are unlikely to halt determined and wicked resistance to civilized values and show the limitations of Arthur’s abilities as a ruler.
Lancelot, the ugly and lonely ill-made knight, has a very different encounter with cruelty, one that complicates the plot still further, and helps to destroy the kingdom, but brings about his own personal redemption. Lancelot and Guenever go out hawking. Having miscalculated the falcon’s food the night before, Lancelot is in a terrible mood, which makes Guenever nervous and clumsy, and she winds up the twine that controls the bird badly. When Lancelot snatches it from her he realizes that “he had hurt a real person of his own age” (White 1958: 348), a revelation that causes him to fall in love with her. Lancelot’s nature and education have made him into a controlled and cruel creature who enjoys hurting others, which is why he now feels such an explosion of emotion. Lancelot’s self-knowledge and attempt to control his feelings, in effect to civilize himself, are simultaneously noble and disastrous, just like Arthur’s liberal decency. White’s narrator comments at length, drawing our attention to the importance of this seemingly insignificant episode:
It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them. For one thing, he [Lancelot] liked to hurt people. It was for the strange reason that he was cruel, that the poor fellow never killed a man who asked for mercy, or committed a cruel action which he could have prevented. One reason why he fell in love with Guenever was because the first thing he had done was to hurt her. He might never have noticed her as a person, if he had not seen the pain in her eyes. (White 1958: 353)
The civilized Lancelot stands in contrast to the uncontrolled nature of Morgause. However, they both contribute to the destruction of the Arthurian world.
One reason why it is so hard to attribute an overall design and purpose to The Once and Future King is because it is a complex work of art that resists easy categorization and does not settle for straightforward answers to difficult questions, as the above analysis indicates. Nevertheless, we should also bear in mind how long the work took White to write, his frequent frustrations with the plans he adopted at various points, and the inevitable changes of mind that took place during the period of composition. The Sword in the Stone was published in 1938, The Witch in the Wood in 1939, after extensive rewriting at the request of his publishers, Collins, and The Ill-Made Knight in 1940. White then worked on the conclusion to the sequence, initially planning to add two more novels, The Candle in the Wind and The Book of Merlyn, completed in 1941. His publishers refused, disconcerted by the length of the text (and possibly by the aggressively stated anti-war message of The Book of Merlyn), and the final text, The Once and Future King, appeared in 1958, with the second book now rewritten as The Queen of Air and Darkness. The Book of Merlyn was finally published posthumously in 1977 with a preface by the author’s biographer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, who points out that White’s “attempt to find an antidote to war, had become a war casualty” (White 1977: 22). Elements of this final novel were incorporated into the published tetralogy, including the Wart’s experiences as a bird flying over the territories below in The Sword in the Stone (other passages were omitted in this novel, such as Merlyn’s battle with Madam Mim, which was retained in the Disney film; Brewer 1993: chs 2–7).
White’s final message in the Book of Merlyn would appear to undermine the complex and sophisticated nature of the fictional sequence in its simplistic pacifist message, as well as repeating much of what is already in the published version of The Candle in the Wind. On the eve of Arthur’s final battle with Mordred, Merlyn returns to help him by reminding him of the lessons he learned as a child among the animals. Arthur is transformed once again into an ant and a goose before Merlyn assembles all the animals and delivers his last message. The enemy of mankind is nationalism, “the claims of small communities to parts of the indifferent earth as communal property.” The practical solution to the problem is remarkably straightforward:
The simplest and easiest solution … [is to] … abolish such things as tariff barriers, passports and immigration laws, converting mankind into a federation of individuals. In fact, you must abolish nations, and not only nations but states also; indeed, you must tolerate no unit larger than the family … the main thing is that we must make it possible for a man living at Stonehenge to pack up his traps overnight and to seek his fortune without hindrance in Timbuktu. (White 1977: 135)
Arthur has to choose between the way of the geese and the way of the ants: “There are no states in nature, except among monstrosities like the ants. It seems to me that people who go creating states, as Mordred is trying to do with his Thrashers, must tend to become involved in them, and so unable to escape” (163). Arthur does the right thing and compromises at any cost to end the war, calling a truce with Mordred, ceding half the kingdom “for the sake of peace. To tell the truth, he was prepared to yield it all if necessary” (167). The moral is far too easily directed, and would seem to be a rather self-regarding vindication of White’s own peripatetic and solitary lifestyle. It also avoids the challenging educational message of The Sword in the Stone, which placed great stress on the need for a child to learn actively, to become self-reliant and independent – White was undoubtedly aware of the educational experiment of Summerhill School, founded by A. S. Neill (1883–1973) in 1921, as he worked as a teacher for six years (1930–36) (Warner 1967: chs 2–3). Neill believed that children required freedom to develop their desire to learn and made lessons voluntary, arguing that children would choose to learn if not forced to do so and follow a traditional curriculum (Neill 1998). There are clear analogies between Neill’s radical ideas and the ways in which the Wart is educated by Merlyn, against the grain of the prevailing ideology. Indeed, The Sword in the Stone opens with a description of a traditional aristocratic education based on hunting and chivalry. However, in The Book of Merlyn, Merlyn simply tells Arthur the right answers.
Even without the final volume, the cyclical structure of the text was always a part of White’s plans, as the title indicates, and Arthur reverts to his childhood in his tent on the eve of the final battle. Arthur is given a chance to see the future and realizes that the ideal of Camelot must be kept alive. He achieves this by telling a young page called Thomas of Newbold Revell to avoid the last battle and so preserve their story. In doing so, White returns the story to its own origins in Malory’s Morte Darthur, a work he first read as a schoolboy at Cheltenham College (Brewer 1993: 2), another neat cyclical pattern.
The Sword in the Stone, conceived as a preface to Malory dealing with Arthur’s growth to maturity (Brewer 1993: 18), begins with Sir Ector, an amiable and rather limited rural aristocrat, attempting to find a tutor for his legitimate son, the talentless and arrogant Kay, and his timorous adopted charge, the Wart (Arthur). When out chasing a falcon in the Forest Sauvage, the Wart stumbles across Merlyn’s cottage. Merlyn, who lives his life backwards and so has been expecting him, agrees to become the Wart’s tutor. Merlyn teaches Arthur by transforming him into a range of animals and letting him learn what he can from the experience of each new form, and from engaging with new and unfamiliar creatures and surroundings. Arthur becomes a perch, an ant, a merlin, and a badger. He also meets Robin Wood (sic), Marian, and Little John, and is taken to a jousting tournament, when the news that King Uther Pendragon has died is announced and that the new king will be whoever can pull the sword from the anvil in London. Sir Ector, Kay, and the Wart travel to London, where they will attend another tournament. When Kay leaves his sword behind in the castle in which they are staying, the Wart, acting as his squire, is sent to retrieve it. Finding the door locked, the Wart looks for a sword elsewhere, finds the anvil and pulls out the sword, thinking nothing of his feat. Kay recognizes the sword, tries to pretend that he pulled it free, but eventually confesses, and all bow to the new king, who promptly bursts into tears.
The Queen of Air and Darkness, the shortest book in the sequence but perhaps the most artistically successful, contrasts the attempts of Arthur to unify his lands and develop a civilized kingdom with the anarchic and disturbing world at the boundaries of his kingdom, the Orkneys, ruled by Queen Morgause, Arthur’s half-sister. The powerful opening chapter, already referred to above, shows the four children, Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth, repeating versions of the story of Uther Pendragon’s rape of their grandmother, Igraine. We learn that this is the principal basis of their education, delivered by their negligent mother. She is more concerned with half-heartedly practicing her spells and plotting revenge on Arthur, against whom her husband, King Lot, is fighting. The children are also taught by the tedious and unimaginative tutor, St Toirdelbach, who tells them long, bellicose stories from Irish history which have no clear purpose other than to glorify violence, a pointed contrast to Merlyn’s ways of educating his young charge. In the second chapter we witness the developing relationship between Arthur and Merlyn, with the wizard still trying to lead Arthur toward the path of good government, and the young king now more resistant and eager to try things out for himself. Arthur, in his boyish enthusiasm, finds war fun, while Merlyn reminds him of its terrible cost, especially for those of lower rank. Arthur gradually starts to learn that might is not right.
Meanwhile, King Pellinore, a comic figure hunting the Questing Beast, lands in the Orkneys, astonishing the locals. Morgause flirts with his knights and persuades them to go out hunting with her for a unicorn. They fail because the hunt requires a virgin to attract the beast (although her sons think she can play this role). The boys decide to catch one for her, and, after consulting St Toirdelbach, they capture one, using their maid, Meg, in whose lap it lays its head. Agravaine brutally kills the animal, showing yet again that the boys’ lives are dominated by the malign influence of their mother: “This girl is my mother. He put his head in her lap. He had to die” (White 1958: 266). White is highlighting the cruelty of uneducated and directionless youth. Killing a unicorn, the most elusive and wonderful of all beasts, was an especially brutal and senseless crime, as White knew from his work on bestiaries (White 1954: 20–21). Summoned by the presence of a virgin, the unicorn was a symbol of Christ. The boys try to follow proper hunting procedure and perform a “gralloch,” removing the guts of the beast so that every part of the animal can be used (White probably has the hunting scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in mind, as these describe the proper procedures in close detail [Tolkien & Gordon 1979: lines 1,319–64]). However, their incompetence means that they perforate the intestines and the lovely creature is transformed into a disgusting object: “Everything had begun to be horrible, and the once beautiful animal was spoiled and repulsive” (White 1958: 268). The unicorn inspires a particularly perverse form of devotion in the boys, a product of their warped childhoods, and a warning of what they will be capable of as adults:
All three of them [Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gawaine] loved the unicorn in their various ways, Agravaine in the most twisted one, and, in proportion as they became responsible for spoiling its beauty, so they began to hate it for their guilt. Gawaine particularly began to hate the body. He hated it for being dead, for having been beautiful, for making him feel a beast. He had loved it and helped to trap it, so now there was nothing to be done except to vent his shame and hatred of himself upon the corpse. He hacked and cut and felt like crying too. (White 1958: 268)
Twisted love leads to violence, as love and cruelty are never far apart. Lancelot controls and uses his understanding of this, but the Orkney boys are traveling down a much darker path, one that White is exploring in the series of novels as his contribution to the understanding of Nazism. Morgause is unconcerned when her children return in a shambolic state, their clothes ruined. But she has them whipped when she learns that they have succeeded where she failed.
Arthur is making plans on the eve of the battle of Bedegraine and he announces his plans for a Round Table, the ideal of equality of all knights, established in conversation with Merlyn and Kay. Arthur also tells Merlyn that he has finally discovered a justification for fighting a good war, which is simply to have a good reason and to impose on people what is good for them against their wishes. Merlyn informs him that he is aware of such experiments and that when he was young “an Austrian … invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos.” When Kay reminds us that Arthur is fighting “to impose his ideas on King Lot” (274), we realize that we are being asked to think of Arthur in terms of Hitler. The gap between the fanatical nationalism of the Orkney faction and the civilizing efforts of Arthur, just like the gap between love and hate or cruelty, may actually be an overlap (Crane 1974: 91–2).
In Orkney the elderly knights run into yet more difficulties with the Questing Beast, with Sir Palomides and Sir Grunmore deciding to distract King Pellinore from a failing love suit by dressing up as the Questing Beast, only to encounter the real one, which chases them up a steep cliff. The Orkney boys quarrel over their mother’s behavior, Agravaine determined to send their father a letter informing him of their mother’s infidelity. In a heated quarrel with Gawaine, Agravaine produces a knife, and the stronger Gawaine gives him a savage, almost fatal, beating. The episode prefigures the last days of the Arthurian court and the split over Guenever’s infidelity, and we are warned that Gawaine is a fatally damaged creature: “when he was in one of these black passions he seemed to pass out of human life. In later days he even killed women, when he had been worked into such a state – though he regretted it bitterly afterwards” (White 1958: 283). In medieval romance, killing other knights was a sign of sin. Gawain, an enthusiast for the quest for the Holy Grail in the French prose cycle, is a notable killer, his actions doing far more harm than good and contributing significantly to the destruction of the fellowship of the Round Table (Matarasso 1969: 76–80).
Merlyn tells Arthur that he will have to leave soon and that he cannot escape his fate of being locked up for a thousand years, a reference to the medieval French Merlin tradition. He warns the king to beware of Guenever and Lancelot but his words fall on deaf ears. The comic plot is harmoniously resolved with King Pellinore rescuing Palomides and Grunmore, and being then reunited with his lady, Piggy. Palomides takes over from Pellinore as the hunter of the Questing Beast. Arthur wins the battle of Bedegraine, fighting “the twelfth-century equivalent of what later came to be called a Total War” (White 1958: 306), defeating Lot in a night ambush. Lot returns home and Morgause travels to England in order to be reconciled with the new regime. Pellinore marries Piggy, and then, through the use of a spancel (a piece of human skin taken from a dead body which traces the outline of the deceased, which if thrown over a sleeping man and tied with a bow, would make him fall in love with the plotter), Morgause seduces Arthur and conceives Mordred, who will bring about the destruction of the kingdom.
The Ill-Made Knight, the longest novel in the sequence, explores Lancelot’s affair with Guenever, but also other forms of love, including Arthur’s close bond with Gawaine, Agravaine’s devotion to his mother, and Elaine’s doomed love for Lancelot. The novel is based far more closely on Malory than either of the previous two works. Lancelot, the Chevalier Mal Fet (literally, the “ill-made knight”), an ugly and obsessive boy, travels to Arthur’s court because he is in love with the king, whom he met when his father helped quell the recent rebellion of King Lot. His devotion to rigorous training in the art of chivalry has made Lancelot the best knight in the world, and he is jealous of Arthur’s regard for Gawaine, and even more so of his love for his wife. Arthur defeats the Romans and Lancelot completes a number of quests as a knight errant, before he falls in love with Guenever. Having slept with Elaine earlier and produced Galahad, Lancelot reasons that he will already be compromised as the best knight in the world, and so may as well pursue his desire for the queen. Lancelot is also tormented, as he is in Malory and the French prose cycle, by feelings of guilt at his neglect of his Christian vows and the stain on his purity that limits him as a Christian knight. Arthur realizes what is going on – unconsciously, at least – but is too well brought up to take any action:
The effect of such an education was that he had grown up without any of the useful accomplishments for living – without malice, vanity, suspicion, cruelty, and the commoner forms of selfishness. Jealousy seemed to him the most ignoble of vices. He was sadly unfitted for hating his best friend or for torturing his wife. He had been given too much love and trust to be good at these things. (White 1958: 406)
In representing Arthur as too noble and too refined, White further complicates our understanding of childhood. Better education will solve a host of evils, but may be a limitation in a flawed and violent world more suited to the violent anger of Gawaine.
Guenever, when she learns of Lancelot’s relationship with Elaine, banishes them both from court. It is a matter of some conjecture whether White’s portrayal of Guenever is a strength or weakness of the book. White was candid about his ignorance of women, asking Mary Potts, the wife of his former tutor at Cambridge, J. H. Potts, and, like her husband, a close friend of the author’s, how women like Guenever might behave:
If either you or Mary have heard anything about what love feels like at 50, or about whether a man of 50 can go on loving a mistress of the same age, with whom he has been sleeping for 30 years, I should be glad to hear it? And what about love-making during the change of life? Has Mary some famous book on this, or will she write me a brief monograph on the subject (and will it get past the censor)? (Gallix: 1982: 116; Brewer 1993: 90)
The letter is familiar and humorous, of course, as the Potts were devoted to each other, but the tone betrays a nervous embarrassment, even though White had argued earlier in the same letter (April 9, 1940), with self-conscious exaggeration, that “Guenever is terrific … one of the realest women in literature” (Gallix 1982: 115, italics original). Many readers will probably not agree. While the cruel and obsessive passions of the male characters are explored with considerable depth and insight, Guenever appears as a rather empty vessel, either pretty and remote, or unable to contain her emotions, although some critics have found White’s representation persuasive (Brewer 1993: 87–93). White was, of course, working with the material he had, adapting the portrait of Guenever in Malory, with his famous defense of her character, and the first serious representation of her in Chrétien’s Le Chevalier de la Charrete (Malory 1969: II.425–6; Kibler & Carroll 1991). But it is hard to see how some of the dialogue really adds to a sophisticated understanding of Guenever’s character, given that “she is seen almost entirely from the outside … Her actual thoughts are very seldom revealed” (Brewer 1993: 90):
Elaine said calmly: “Sir Lancelot was in my room last night. My woman Brisen brought him in the dark.”
The Queen began pointing at the door. She made stabbing movements at it with her finger, and, in her trembling, her hair began to come down. She looked hideous.
“Get out! Get out! And you go too, you animal! How dare you speak so in my castle? How dare you admit it to me? Take your fancy man and go!” (White 1958: 413–4)
Guenever’s “central tragedy” is that she has no children (498), and so lavishes affection and sexual love on two men in return for their companionship.
The plot continues to follow Malory closely. Elaine is banished but Lancelot remains at court, growing old and gray with Guenever and Arthur. The peoples of England – Saxons and Normans alike – start to imagine themselves as English and knights come to the court because of Arthur’s reputation. These knights include Gareth and Mordred and the past returns to haunt the king. Gareth tells Arthur that Agravaine has murdered Morgause, cutting her head off, a killing that replicates that of the unicorn (451). Arthur searches for ways to distract the knights from their tendency for violence, and, realizing that tournaments are failing to contain their blood lust, suggests that they all hunt for the Holy Grail. We see the knights returning in succession, having witnessed Galahad’s success. As in the French prose cycle’s Quest for the Holy Grail, Galahad’s achievements are limited because he is not subject to the temptations and torment of ordinary humanity (Matarasso 1969: ch. 15). As Lionel comments, “it may be all very well to be holy and invincible, and I don’t hold it against Galahad for being a virgin, but don’t you think that people might be a little human?” (White 1958: 476). Lancelot, by contrast, is unable to enter the holiest of places because of his sins, a revelation that pushes him further toward a conviction that the spiritual life is superior to the secular path of knighthood. Guenever eventually realizes that Lancelot must leave, which, along with the deaths caused by the quest for the Grail (the best half of the knights have perished), paves the way for the increasing dominance of Agravaine and Mordred, who are waiting for Guenever to make a mistake. Aware of the hostility of the Orkney faction, she throws a dinner party for Gawaine with copious amounts of Gawaine’s beloved fruit. When Sir Pinel poisons an apple, the Irish knight, Patrick, eats it instead of Gawaine and the queen gets the blame. Lancelot saves the queen’s honor when he defeats Sir Mador. Arthur arranges a tournament to celebrate at Corbin, where Elaine lives, and, after Lancelot is wounded, she nurses him, committing suicide when he returns to court and so fatally wounding his relationship with Guenever. The disgruntled Meliagrance kidnaps Guenever; Lancelot pursues them and sleeps with the queen, cutting his hand on the bars on the window of her room and so staining the sheets. Once again, the queen is accused of treachery and Lancelot defeats Meliagrance to defend her honor, the book ending with the conclusion of the “Indian summer” of chivalry.
The final book, The Candle in the Wind, also follows Malory closely but expands and develops the characterization and implicit themes of the late-medieval version of the story. The focus returns to Arthur. The book opens with Mordred and Agravaine plotting the downfall of Arthur, insisting on right in a perverse and self-interested manner that undermines Arthur’s noble efforts to move from a world dominated by force to one in which justice reigns. White represents his hero as quintessentially English, and his son and enemy as “everything which Arthur was not – the irreconcilable opposite of the Englishman,” possessing “the savagery and feral wit of the Pict … expelled by the volcano of history into the far quarters of the globe, where, with a venomous sense of grievance and inferiority, they even nowadays proclaim their ancient megalomania” (548). It is perhaps not entirely surprising that White aroused the ire of many Irish readers when he depicted his hosts during the Second World War as uncivilized inhabitants of an “Irish stinkhole” in The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947) (Gallix 1982: 196–8). White not only compares the plot of Agravaine and Mordred to that of the Irish Republican Army, he has them adopt the swastika as their symbol, gathering together England’s principal foes as one mass. Later they become the Thrashers, a fascist gang aiming for “Gaelic autonomy and a massacre of the Jews as well” (628), and Mordred clearly symbolizes Hitler when the queen’s maid, Agnes, observes that his behavior is becoming increasing deranged: “all these speeches about Gaels and Saxons and Jews, and all the shouting and hysterics” (645). The headstrong Gawaine, in contrast, has started to turn English through his long sojourn at court. Although he “still kept his outland accent in defiance of the mere English … he had ceased to think in Gaelic” (554), a description that replicates the assumptions made centuries earlier when it was argued that Irish speech “made the man Irishe” (Hadfield & McVeagh 1994: 41).
However, White complicates this apparently stark contrast when Arthur admits that he tried to have all babies murdered by letting them drift out to sea in unmanned boats in an attempt to rid himself of Mordred, as the Orkney faction are all too well aware. Arthur may be quintessentially English, but the gap between English decency and foreign treachery is somewhat elastic (Crane 1974: 79, 108–10; Manlove 1977: 74–7). Arthur is now crippled with guilt and compensates for his earlier crime by leaving Mordred alone, compounding the problems he is creating for his regime. When Agravaine and Mordred confront Arthur with the evidence of Lancelot and Guenever’s treachery, they are able to undercut his attempts to avoid murderous conflict:
“Very well, Agravaine: you are a keen lawyer, and you are determined to have the law. I suppose it is no good reminding you that there is such a thing as mercy?”
“The kind of mercy,” asked Mordred, “which used to set those babies adrift, in boats?”
“Thank you, Mordred. I was forgetting.”
“We do not want mercy,” said Agravaine, “we want justice.”
“I understand the situation.” (White 1958: 590)
Arthur is, as Agravaine exultantly exclaims, “hoist with his own petard” (589). Lancelot kills Agravaine when he tries to surprise him in Guenever’s room, and then rescues the queen before she can be burnt at the stake and they retreat to Joyous Gard, where Arthur besieges them. Lancelot returns Guenever and affirms her innocence, but Mordred insists that Arthur continue his campaign in the name of justice, giving him the chance to abduct Guenever. On the eve of the final battle Arthur reflects on his achievements and the impossibility of establishing true justice in the face of such concerted attacks by determined and ruthless enemies, concluding, but in a slightly more subtle way than the Merlyn of The Book of Merlyn, that nations cause wars by overwhelming the efforts of individuals: “wars were not calamities into which amiable innocents were led by evil men. They were national movements, deeper, more subtle in origin” (668). The brief triumph of the Round Table was a candle that flickered in the wind (674). Realizing that geography is to blame and that humanity will be free of ideological chains, Arthur walks out to his fate.
White’s political musings are probably less impressive for a modern reader than his representation of childhood and the development of the individual’s personality. White was certainly a close reader of Freud, and it is also likely that he read Jung and, perhaps, Wilhelm Reich, as well as educational treatises such as A. S. Neill’s Summerhill School. It is undoubtedly no accident that White is best known for his representation of childhood in The Sword in the Stone, most importantly, the Wart’s relationship with Merlyn and his numerous metamorphoses. The Wart receives a brutal and blunt first lesson when transformed into a roach when he encounters the King of the Moat, the pike, Mr P. The future king encounters an “old despot,” whose “face had been ravaged by all the passions of an absolute monarch – by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness and thoughts too strong for individual brains,” a clear warning of what is to be Arthur’s lot in the near future. Mr P. is “remorseless, disillusioned, logical, predatory, fierce and pitiless,” (47), a piling up of significant adjectives that indicates to the reader that this is the first important encounter in the book. Mr P. gives the Wart the benefit of his experience, a reminder of what can happen to kings who grow old, refuse to learn anything new, and so let power corrupt them absolutely:
“There is nothing,” said the monarch, “except the power which you pretend to seek: power to grind and power to digest, power to seek and power to find, power to await and power to claim, all power and pitilessness springing from the nape of the neck.”
“Thank you.”
“Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end, and only Might is Right.” (White 1958: 47–8)
The Wart is shown a terrifying vision of what will happen to him if he does not think carefully enough about the use and abuse of the power he will inherit, and we know that some of the malign effects on the personality of Mr P. will inevitably visit the adult Arthur, however successful he is as a ruler. This episode is particularly well integrated into the thematic structure of the novel sequence. Mr P. is described as cruel, which links him to Lancelot in The Ill-Made Knight. Whereas Lancelot controls his cruelty and so uses a serious flaw to make himself more noble, Mr P. has surrendered to his baser instincts and become a despot. Moreover, Mr P.’s conclusion that “Might is Right” is echoed throughout the next three novels as Arthur debates this difficult issue and tries to establish the rule of law in the face of overwhelming opposition.
Mr P.’s clear, precise, and repetitive style establishes a desolate and terrifying universe devoid of sympathy and constructive purpose. There is a reductive truth in what he states and, if we simply see the overthrow of the Arthurian ideal as the final conclusion, then he is right. But what Arthur absorbs from Merlyn’s teaching is to resist such inevitabilities and not to allow others to obliterate the bigger picture, a lesson that the Orkney faction never learn as they use good and bad arguments to further their dark goals. White shows that Arthur is flawed and weak in many ways but he never loses sight of the good, even when he is wrong. The Once and Future King interprets Malory to mean that it would have been better for everyone if a blind eye had been turned to the unstable love triangle at the heart of the kingdom. It is a generous and very human message, one that recognizes the complexity of real life, opposes rigid codes of conduct, and argues that a good heart is more important than abstract reasoning. Put another way, we might see White’s work informed by a heady mixture of Dickens and the radical educational theories of the 1930s (Brewer 1993: 148, 175–6).
The deadening logic of Mr P. is manifested in an even more disturbing form when the Wart is transformed into an ant (a key episode for White, originally establishing a direct contrast to the freedom enjoyed by the pacific geese in The Book of Merlyn, but when that was not published White transferred it to The Sword in the Stone). The ants exist in a Nazi society, dominated by the worst excesses of social Darwinism (their national anthem is “Antland, Antland Over All” [127]). Their minds are deadened by monotonous music which prevents creative thought and their language is constructed as a series of stark opposites that inhibit expression: “the Wart discovered that there were only two qualifications in the language, Done and Not-Done – which applied to all questions of value” (124). The logic is reminiscent of Newspeak in George Orwell’s futuristic novel 1984, and the slogans that the ants employ – “EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY” (121) – recall those in Orwell’s Animal Farm.
The most significant detail is the ants’ use and abuse of logic, which looks forward to that of Mordred and Agravaine as they turn the tables on Arthur’s quest for justice. The Wart listens to the endless broadcasts that the ants receive in their antennae, which increase in intensity once it is discovered that a neighboring ant’s nest has an impressive hoard of seeds. White outlines for the reader the logical outline of the ants’ justification for aggression. The first takes the form of a syllogism:
A. We are so numerous that we are starving.
B. Therefore we must encourage still larger families so as to become yet more numerous and starving.
C. When we are so numerous and starving as all that, obviously we shall have a right to take other’s people’s stores of seed. Besides, we shall by then have a numerous and starving army. (White 1958: 127–8)
The circular logic justifies an aggressive and expansionist policy and the ants are so used to imagining that their reasoning is beyond thought that no one challenges the terrifying outcome. The second broadcast is more openly contradictory, with every statement reinforced by its opposite:
A. We are more numerous than they are, therefore we have a right to their mash.
B. They are more numerous than we are, therefore they are wickedly trying to steal our mash.
C. We are a mighty race and have a natural right to subjugate their puny one.
D. They are a mighty race and are unnaturally trying to subjugate our inoffensive one.
E. We must attack them in self-defence.
F. They are attacking us by defending themselves.
G. If we do not attack them today, they will attack us tomorrow.
H. In any case we are not attacking them at all. We are offering them incalculable benefits. (White 1958: 128)
White is imitating the inspirational rants of Hitler and showing that the appearance of logical thought can lead in terrible directions. The ants and the Orkney faction are all part of the same spectrum, damaged individuals and species whose education has warped rather than nurtured their hearts and imaginations. It is not that logical thought is mistaken in itself, but that an undue reliance on its value is an illogical belief, leading to further unreason, as the direction of these two broadcasts demonstrates. At the end of The Candle in the Wind, Arthur thinks he hears Merlyn returning to help him and he thinks about his education: “He remembered the aged necromancer who had educated him – who had educated him with animals. There were, he remembered, something like half a million different species of animal, of which mankind was only one” (675–6). Considering the relative insignificance of mankind places his own fate in perspective and points to different ways of negotiating the future. It also reveals White’s central message that only by retaining a childish desire to learn can we become properly human.
Primary Sources
Gallix, F. (ed.) (1982). T. H. White. Letters to a friend. New York: Putnam’s.
Kibler, W. W. & Carroll, C. W. (trans.) (1991). Chrétien de Troyes. Arthurian romances. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lawlor, J. (ed.) (1969). Thomas Malory. Le Morte Darthur. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Matarasso, P. M. (trans.) (1969). The quest of the Holy Grail. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Tolkien, J. R. R. & Gordon, E. V. (eds) (1979). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd edn (ed. N. Davis). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
White, T. H. (1954). The bestiary: A book of beasts. New York: Putnam’s.
White, T. H. (1958). The once and future king. London: Collins.
White, T. H. (1977). The book of Merlyn. London: Collins.
References and Further Reading
Brewer, E. (1993). T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.
Crane, J. K. (1974). T. H. White. Boston. MA: Twayne.
Hadfield, A. (1996). T. H. White, pacifism and violence: The once and future nation. Connotations, 6, 207–26.
Hadfield, A. & McVeagh, J. (eds) (1994). Strangers to that land: British perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the famine. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe.
Manlove, C. N. (1977). Flight to Aleppo: T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Mosaic, 10, 65–83.
Neill, A. S. (1998). Summerhill School. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Warner, S. T. (1967). T. H. White: A biography. London: Cape.