T. H. White on Guinevere

I want to share one last piece of T. H. White's writing from Sylvia Tonwsend Warner's biography of him before I turn to something else. White's thoughts on the other crucial character in the Lancelot story, Guinevere, are less astute, and, frankly, less interesting, than his thoughts on Lancelot. At great risk of oversimplifying, I would say it's not unreasonable to attribute his relative lack of perception to a mix of the simple fact that White wasn't a woman, wasn't drawn to women romantically or sexually, and had a complicated, painful relationship with the most important woman in his life, his mother. Nonetheless, his thoughts about Guinevere are far from without interest:

She must have been a nice person, or Lancelot and Arthur (both nice people) would not have loved her. Or does this not follow? Do nice people love nasty ones? Arthur was not a judge of nice people or he would not have had a child by Morgause. And Guenever hardly seems to have been a favourite of Malory's, whatever Tennyson may have thought about her.

She was insanely jealous of Lancelot: she drove him mad: she was suspected of being a poisoner: she made no bones about being unfaithful to Arthur: she had an ungovernable temper: she did not mind telling lies: she was hysterical, according to Sir Bors: she was beastly to Elaine: she was intensely selfish.

So much taken on faith there! And on the word of men, honor-obsessed men who have agendas of their own! While Lancelot's infidelity, even as he chooses it, is described by White as "wrong and against [his] will," Guinevere's is something she "makes no bones about." This court is beginning to seem a bit unfair (and, in the question of whether nice people love nasty ones, impressively naive).

It does get a bit better for Guinevere, who

had some good characteristics. She chose the best lover she could have done, and she was brave enough to let him be her lover: she always stuck to Arthur, though unfaithful to him, possibly because she really liked him: when finally caught, she faced the music: she had a clear judgment of moral issues, even when defying them, a sort of common sense which finally took her into a convent when she could quite well have stayed with Lancelot now that her husband was dead.

But White instantly backtracks:

Was this a piece of clearsightedness or was it cowardice? One way to put it would be to say that she grasped the best of two men while she profited by it, but afterwards betrayed them both. When there was no more to be got out of the Arthur-Lancelot situation she preferred the convent. The other way to put it would be to say that she finally recognized her ill influence and thought it best to shut herself up.

Not a lot of generosity there. No acknowledgment of the limited choices available to a woman, even a former queen, no sense that her heart might actually have been in conflict, a conflict that, rather than being settled by Arthur's death, was made more violent, even toxic by it.

White goes on in that vein for another couple of diary pages, giving with one hand ("She was brave, beautiful"; "She exercised control, demanded return, felt jealousy"), then taking away with the other ("Could she be a sort of tigress, with all the healthy charms and horrors of the carnivore? Is she to eat Lancelot as Morgause ate Arthur?"). Warner describes White's equivocations well:

Like a man on boggy ground, who leaps from tussock to sinking tussock, he zigzagged from conjecture to conjecture.

What I don't recall at this remove--a decade since I last read The Once and Future King is what Guinevere he ultimately ended up with? I don't remember her being a monster, but is she described convincingly? With any sympathy or understanding? Do we see why the two men would fall for her, and what it costs her to be the cause of their rupture? Don't suppose any of you folks have read the book recently and want to offer an opinion?

Sylvia Townsend Warner on T. H. White

Some recent library browsing--I went there to pick up one book and returned to my office with eight--led me to read Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1965 biography of her friend T. H. White this week. It's an odd book in that way that a certain strain of earlier British biography can be odd: it's deeply rooted in quotation, largely from White's letters and diaries, and it's more interested in giving an overall sense of White than of enabling us to understand a timeline or trajectory.

For a writer like White, who is primarily known for one book (The Once and Future King, which I rank with Watership Down as the most interesting and rewarding of the small subset of books that live on the knife edge between childhood and adult reading), such an approach works well: we see, clearly, how White as a person enchanted and exasperated; how his energy, intellect, and charm drew people in, but his reticence, drinking, and rebarbative tetchiness pushed them away. His was a lonely life, but it's not entirely clear that it was an unhappy one; Warner's great achievement in the biography is to let that ambiguity remain while allowing us to feel we've known the man.

People who follow me on Twitter will have noticed that the book is full of quotable lines, as both Warner and White can reliably turn a phrase. But one bit is far too long to quote there, yet far too good not to share: it's an early passage about a summer in White's undergraduate years when he visited Lapland with a friend, and Warner uses it to give a clinic on how to write in compact but memorable fashion:

Both of them now wanted to visit some uninhabited desert; neither of them could afford to spend a great deal of money getting to it. Studying maps of population densities, they decided on a walking tour in Lapland. They consulted a travel adviser and learned that in midsummer the snows are melted, the climate temperate, the rivers teeming with trout, the moors rich with game-birds feeding on cranberries. They could camp where they pleased and live off the country; some measure of protection against mosquitoes was advisable. It was the travellers' own good idea to add meat concentrates and some chocolate to their 80 lb. weight of equipment. They set out--a handsome high-spirited pair, all laughter, enterprise and romantic friendship. But the climate of Lapland cannot be vouched for, and in 1926 the flush of summer was belated. The snow had not melted, or only melted into freezing slush. The trout were torpid in the icy streams. The game was scanty and evasive, the cranberries not ripe. Only the mosquitoes lived up to their report. Veiled and muffled, hungrier and hungrier, tormented by inflamed insect bites, their faces swollen as though with mumps, their tempers strained, the two young men wandered over the waste in search of food and fuel--for a camp fire was essential, both to keep off the mosquitoes and to save them from dying of cold. The rationed chocolate was almost exhausted and they were barely on speaking terms when White with a long shot brought down a merganser--a species of duck with rudimentary teeth. He threw it across a stream, and while he was searching for a place where he could ford the torrent pictured his companion devouring it raw.

Either Warner polished this one unimportant paragraph multiple times or she was a savant: the rhythm, feel, and sound of it are so effective, even as none of those aspects gets in the way of the primary goal of relating a whole travel adventure in less than a page.

Some light visitations

For the first of tonight's October bookshelf wanderings I'll beg a modest indulgence. {Looks around furtively.} It's not about ghosts or haunts at all!

But it is from the pen of M. R. James, master of the ghost story, and it does feature the creature I'd most trust to manage a ghost, a cat. So surely it will do? It's from a letter to his friend Jane McBryde, then about nine years old, sent December 23, 1914. The season of ghosts, in England, and surely never more so--if not in the usual, light-hearted way--than at the end of that horrible first year of World War I. Spirits surely clustered thick about the land that Christmas. Despite the times, however, James conjures up some non-supernatural cheer:

My sister has been with me for about three weeks now, and has brought with her a large beautiful black cat who is so nervous that he won't speak to anyone: my own cat has not even seen him yet, but she suspects that something is being kept from her and takes it a little to heart. "Of course it is very likely that I"m not fit to be trusted," she said last night, "only I like to be told so; then I know where I am. If you like to have German spies in the house, it's no business of mine. It might become my duty to speak to the police about it, and it might be very unpleasant for some people if I did: but of course I don't want to make trouble only I do like people to be straightforward and say what they mean," and so on and so on. I said, "What makes you think there are German spies in the house?" "Oh nothing, nothing whatever, only when one sees meals being carried up to one of the bedrooms--and much better meals than ever I see downstairs--and when the maid take particular care that one shouldn't go into that room, and when one sees with one's own eyes a great vulgar black cat climbing the mulberry tree as if the whole place belonged to him: why, then, I think the time has come to put two and two together and speak plainly, but old as I may be, I'm not too old to see through a glass door." There was a great deal more, and at the end of it she burst into tears and laid her head on the fender and said nobody loved her and she had better go and bury herself in the garden or drown herself in the fountain.

Pleasantly silly, no?

Not wanting an October post to be entirely ghost-free, however, I'll share another passage I came across today, from the introduction to The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner, written by her friend William Maxwell, who also served as the volume's editor:

According to some notes that were taken down from Miss Townsend Warner's dictation in 1966, her mother fell into labour at the sound of a knell--a Harrow governor had just died--and she was born with a caul, which the midwife claimed and probably sold to a sailor as a protection against death by drowning. The ghost of her maternal grandmother visited her cradle.

Sadly, the notes didn't mention who actually saw that ghost. But, Maxwell continues:

She herself as a grown woman not only believed in ghosts but (in a letter that has managed to make itself invisible to me) described how she saw them, on two different occasions--the daughter of the house, who had died a year or two before her visit, and an old man who had taken his own life.

It would be just like a letter dealing with ghosts to spirit itself away, wouldn't it?