Up and away with The Once and Future King

Most readers won't come to Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk quite the way I did: fresh off reading books by and about T. H. White, whose account of mostly failing to tame a goshawk, The Goshawk serves as a sort of model, doppelganger, and nemesis throughout both Macdonald's book and the experience it chronicles: learning to train a goshawk while at the same time coping with the unexpected death of her father. If you've just been reading White--and are still abuzz with what a complicated, difficult, compelling, often difficult, and mostly unhappy man he was--the book is incredibly powerful: you see Macdonald struggling not just with the hawk, and with her own history and personality and emotions, but with White's, too, with his shortcomings and achievements, and, perhaps foremost, his loneliness. The result is captivating, a moving book that makes you understand the appeal of this relationship with something utterly alien and other, and, if it doesn't make you share White's and Macdonald's obsession, at least enables you to understand it.

I picked up H is for Hawk when I was in London: having already bought nine other books, I was sure I was finished overloading my suitcase--but then two different friends told me it was the best thing they'd read all year, an assessment that jibed with the shower of accolades the book received, so I broke down. As usual when I buy a book on the recommendation of a friend, I'm glad I did. Those of you who are Stateside should be able to get it early next month; consider this my recommendation.

Today, I'll share a passage that I still can't quite believe--it's simply too unexpected, too close to perfect in its strange dislocations of space, time, and experience. Here's Macdonald, early on, when she's just started telling the reader a bit about her youthful obsession with White's The Goshawk:

A few years ago I met a retired U2 pilot. He was tall, flinty and handsome and had just the right kind of deadly stillness you'd expect from a man who'd spent years flying at the edge of space in a dusty-black American spy plane. The geopolitical aspects of his role were truly disconcerting. But as a day job it was absurdly cool. At eighty thousand feet the world curves deep below you and the sky above is wet black ink. You're wearing a spacesuit, confined to a cockpit the size of a bathtub, piloting a machine that first flew the year James Dean died. You cannot touch the world, just record it. You have no weapons; your only defence is height. But as I talked with this man what impressed me the most weren't his dead-pan tales of high adventure, the "incidents" with Russian MiGs and so on, but his battle against boredom. The nine-hour solo missions. The twelve-hour solo missions. "Wasn't that horrendous?" I asked. "It could get a little lonely up there," he replied. But there was something about how he said it that made it sound a state still longed-for. And then he said something else. "I used to read," he said, unexpectedly, and with that his face changed, and his voice, too: his deadpan Yeager drawl slipped, was replaced by a shy, childlike enthusiasm. "The Once and Future King. By T. H. White," he said. "Have you heard of him? He's an English writer. It's a great book. I used to take that up, read it on the way out and the way back."

"Wow," I said. "Yes." Because this story struck me as extraordinary, and it still does. Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading The Once and Future King, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right, and the matter of what a nation is or might be.

A man on the edge of space, reading a book rooted in a largely imaginary past, conjured up to comfort and explain amid a world ever more new and strange, a book that explicitly grapples with questions of morality, force, war, and loyalty as if they were as new as the world, and as essential as anything. Amazing.

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?

T. H. White, notes on Lancelot

Last week, when I drew on Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of her friend T. H. White, I mentioned that one of its strengths was the extravagance of her quotations from White's letters and diaries. Today, I'll indulge in some extended quotation myself, because a passage from White's diaries that Warner cites offers an excellent window into how White thought about Lancelot, the most interesting character in his one lasting masterpiece, The Once and Future King. So, with apologies in advance for its length, here's White's diary entry for October 4, 1939:

What kind of person was Lancelot? I know about half the kind of person he was, because Malory contented himself with stating the obvious half.

Malory's Lancelot is:

1. Intensely sensitive to moral issues.
2. Ambitious of true--not current--distinction
3. Probably sadistic or he would not have taken such frightful care to be gentle.
4. Superstitious or totemistic or whatever the word is. He connects his martial luck with virginity, like the schoolboy who thinks he will only bowl well in the match tomorrow if he does not abuse himself today.
5. Fastidious, monogamous, serious.
6. Ferociously punitive to his own body. He denies it and slave-drives it.
7. Devoted to "honour," which he regards as keeping promises and "having a word." He tries to be consistent.
8. Curiously tolerant of other people who do not follow his own standards. He was not shocked by the lady who as s naked as a needle.
9. Not without a sense of humour. It was a good joke dressing up as Kay. And he often says amusing things.
10. Fond of being alone.
11. Humble about his athleticism: not false modesty.
12. Self-critical. Aware of some big lack in himself. What was it?
13. Subject to pity, cf. no. 3.
14. Emotional. He is the only person Malory mentions as crying from relief.
15. Highly strung: subject to nervous breakdowns.
16. Yet practical. He ends by dealing with the Guenever situation pretty well. He is a good man to have with you in a tight corner.
17. Homosexual? Can a person be ambi-sexual--bisexual or whatever? His treatment of young boys like Gareth and Cote Male Tale is very tender and his feeling for Arthur profound. Yet I do so want not to have to write a "modern" novel about him. I could only bring myself to mention this trait, if it is a trait, in the most oblique way.
18. Human. He firmly believes that for him it is a choice between God and Guenever, and he takes Guenever. He says: This is wrong and against my will, but I can't help it.

Of particular interest in the passage is White's uncertainty not so much about Lancelot's sexuality, but about the very options available for conceiving it. White, who to all appearances was gay, reveals his naivete (and, to be fair, some of the naivete of the period) in that passage--a naivete that surely wasn't helped by a life that, through a combination of choice and unavoidable aspects of his character, he spent mostly in the company of his beloved dog.

More interesting of course is the overall picture of Lancelot the list offers, and the precision with which White's numbered points allows us to picture the knight. This is the essence of the mythic character being drafted into our contemporary, psychological stories: his deepest-rooted characteristics are beginning to be pulled and pressed in ways the let us read back into the past and start to suss out the mind and personality that could generate them. When it comes time to turn that analysis into scene and action, White's depiction of Lancelot is wholly convincing, and our ability to understand and sympathize with his predicament drives the best, most affecting part of the novel.

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.

Back to Admiral Nelson

The main idea threaded through all of Nicolson's Seize the Fire is that Nelson was a pivotal figure in the transition from the 18th-century culture of sensibility, deference, and acceptance of one's position in society to the first flowerings of Romanticism and its celebration of the individual, the unbridled, and the immediate. It's the difference between Aeneas, a warrior within a system and society, and Achilles, a force of pure rage and individual motivation; at the level of personality, it's Bingley versus Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Nelson, Nicolson argues, though at the head of a disciplined, organized force working as a part of society to protect English commerce, was at the same time a decentralizing bringer of brilliant near-chaos in his tactics, his management of his men, and his own person. The argument is well-supported--one of the best aspects of Seize the Fire is Nicolson's frequent reference to the diaries and letters of individuals great and small--and fairly convincing, though Nelson seems so multi-faceted and complex that he could easily be tricked out in several other, competing theories.

But that's not really what I keep coming back to when I think about Seize the Fire. Rather, it's the press-gangs, and the difference between the officers and the men, between the above- and below-decks life. Nicolson points out several instances which suggest that a change was at the time slowly taking place in how the lower classes were regarded by the upper: not quite imbued by their masters with fully human feelings yet--and certainly not yet worthy of the full, human consideration that fellow officers deserved--but, as the tremendous risks taken by officers and men at Trafalgar to rescue their opposite numbers during an enormous post-battle storm show, their lives weren't entirely, as in past wars, to be thrown away wantonly.

It reminds me of the most interesting moment of ethical thought in The Once and Future King (a book that is full of questions about ethical leadership, friendship, and love), when a young King Arthur decides to bring home the true cost of war to both his men and the opposition. He orders his knights to change tactics: they are not simply to hack at the hapless peasants forced into the front lines, as the knights on the other side will be doing; rather, they are to take the battle directly to the opposing knights, which results, predictably, in much greater casualties among those whom the opposing king considers to be actual people. War, it turns out, is hell. Maybe, just maybe, it shouldn't be waged in such cavalier fashion.

I keep thinking about that, and, in a corollary, about the changes wrought over time in the forces that we, as a society, are willing to allow others to bring to bear on people they have in their power. At the time of Nelson, the press-gang, which would sweep lower-class men off the streets and deposit them on ships bound for the open seas, wherein they would be exposed to mortal danger and sickness, paid poorly and infrequently, and whipped brutally for such offenses as drunkenness and insubordination--was considered an acceptable way to staff His Majesty's fleet. At the time, it was also generally considered acceptable for people to hold certain types of other people as slaves. Women had few rights. And so on--the examples of inhumanity that long ago were considered acceptable are innumerable.

And from a slightly different angle, our attitudes have changed even very recently. More than 50,000 Americans--and at least 1.5 million Vietnamese--died in the Vietnam War before mainstream America began to vigorously argue that we needed to end it. With the Iraq War, we've nearly reached that point as a nation with far, far fewer dead--and all despite the absence of a draft, meaning that the vast majority of Americans are out of any personal danger. Are we, as a nation, getting less cavalier about the lives we're willing to throw away in war? Are we beginning to see the essential humanity--the irreplaceable individuals--behind each KIA?

It's the progressive impulse at work: forever attempt to enlarge the circle of those considered fully eligible to participate in human life, and therefore in the protections we as a society afford, in theory, to all humans--protections from coercion, from danger to life and limb, from oppression. The poor, women, gays, non-WASPs--all these and more are slowly brought into the community of those considered normal, ordinary, acceptable--human. And it's exactly that widening, that growth of inclusion, that conservatism has always fought, and is still fighting, against. Even as recently as the 1970s, Samuel Alito thought the admission of women to Princeton was worth fighting against. It's a principle of inclusion versus a principle of denial, progress against stasis, humanity against inhumanity.

Simultaneously, we aim to tighten the circle of what is acceptable to do to another human, to limit what force can be brought to bear on a person, with the aim of eliminating dehumanizing, brutal treatments that are fundamentally based on arguing that someone is outside that circle of humanity. Practices that would have been considered acceptable mere generations ago--from Jim Crow laws to Japanese-American internment camps to forced sterilization of the developmentally disabled--are considered beyond the pale now.

And it's those two components, the simultaneous widening of one circle and tightening of another, that work together to force actual improvements in human relations in the world. A press-gang is a mind-boggling concept now, slavery even more so. The idea of throwing away lives like Europe did on the Western Front in World War I is sickening. It's important to sometimes remember that, for everything that's clearly going wrong in the world, we have in the past several centuries radically altered our world's conception of who is human and what rights they should be accorded. Tremendous good has been done.

We've obviously still got a long way to go. George Bush can admit, off-hand, that more than 30,000 Iraqis have died because of our war, and most of America responds with a "Ho-hum." Our pundits think the efficacy and acceptability of torture are worthy topics for discussion. African genocide barely gets noticed here.

But that's the idea of progressivism in a nutshell: we don't ever get to give up or decide we're done. Humanity can always be better. It's our job to keep nudging it in the right direction.