Pure Magic

‘I have laughed at White’s great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life,’ wrote Ursula Le Guin of the tetralogy of novels by T. H. White now known as The Once and Future King. She encapsulates not only what’s so ravishing and so distinctive about it – its jagged blend of pathos and humour – but also the way in which White’s eccentric riff on Malory’s Morte d’Arthur can speak to children and grown-ups, in different voices, over the course of a whole life.

Certainly that was my experience. When I came to write my book about children’s literature, The Haunted Wood, I knew I would want to include White because I remembered reading and loving the first book, The Sword in the Stone (1938), when I was a child myself. Reading through the whole sequence as an adult I was more moved, and more flabbergasted by its brilliance, than by anything else I read during my research. There’s so much there for a child reader; and so much more besides. White himself didn’t quite know who it was for: ‘It seems impossible to determine whether it is for grown-ups or children,’ he wrote to a friend in 1938. ‘It is more or less a kind of wish-fulfilment of things I should like to have happened to me when I was a boy.’ The wish-fulfilment is most pronounced in that first book. Though its successors build on it wonderfully, The Sword in the Stone works happily as a stand-alone – and is, I think, the one that’s most clearly a children’s book. It is, on the face of it, a classic Harry Potter/Luke Skywalker/Moses fantasy: the tale of an orphan about whom there seems to be nothing very unusual at all, but who turns out to have a historic destiny. The story is set in an alternative medieval England called Gramarye, where Uther Pendragon led the Norman Conquest and the historical kings of England are creatures of legend. It combines Monty Python style absurdist gags, gleeful anachronisms and (occasionally) smutty jokes. When we first meet the tragicomic Sir Pellinore, he seems to belong to the chivalric sublime: ‘a knight in full armour, standing still and silent and unearthly, among the majestic trunks . . . All was moonlit, all silver, too beautiful to describe.’ But then he gets spooked, nearly falls off his horse, makes an undignified ‘baa’ like a sheep inside his helmet, lifts his visor to reveal fogged-up spectacles which he tries to wipe on his horse’s mane, ‘which only made them worse’, before fumbling with both spectacles and lance on the ground: ‘Oh dear!’ Later, he has a set-piece battle with a rival knight – ‘Traitor knight! Yield, recreant, what!’ – which is a sublimely funny and absurd piece of slapstick; as well, I suspect, as being slyly realistic about what it’s really like trying to fight in full plate armour. White has tremendous fun with the court wizard Merlyn, too. As well as sporting a proper wizard’s hat (‘a pointed hat like a dunce’s cap, or like the headgear worn by ladies of the time, except that the ladies were accustomed to have a bit of veil floating from the top of it’), Merlyn lives ‘backwards through time’. He mutters about psycho- analysis and plastic surgery and is forever scattering anachronistic knick-knacks such as ‘a complete set of cigarette cards depicting wild fowl by Peter Scott’ or ‘the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (marred as it was by the sensationalism of the popular plates)’. The book’s protagonist, though, is Wart, who is being brought up in Castle Sauvage under the loving care of his adopted father Sir Ector. His destiny, as he thinks, is to be the squire of his useless but likeable half-brother Kay. Much of the book’s action – amid all those camp cod-medieval hijinks – is the description of Wart’s education at the feet of Merlyn. Merlyn favours an immersive style of pedagogy: he uses his magic to turn Wart into a succession of animals for a few hours: he becomes a fish, an owl, a wild goose and an ant. (Is that, perhaps, a little tip of the cap to the idea that imagining what it is like to be someone else is the wellspring of empathy and the basic project of fiction?) The absolute otherness of those animals’ worldviews is brilliantly captured. As with the introduction of Sir Pellinore, White can turn on a pin between low comedy and writing of huge grace, beauty and seriousness. As an owl, for instance,

He felt the castle walls streaking past him, and the ground and the moat swimming up. He kicked with his wings, and the ground sank again, like water in a leaking well. In a second that kick of his wings had lost its effect, and the ground was welling up. He kicked again. It was strange, going forward with the earth ebbing and flowing beneath him, in the utter silence of his down-fringed feathers.

Here, in this fascination with the escape from human conscious ness that the animal world offers, is the T. H. White of The Goshawk, who was so available to Helen Macdonald when she wrote H Is for Hawk; and also the T. H. White whose letters written in grief after the death of his Irish setter Brownie are so moving: ‘Now I am writ ing with her dead head in my lap. I will sit up with her tonight, but tomorrow we must bury her. I don’t know what to do after that . . . I am certain I am not going to kill myself about it, as I thought I might once . . . She was all I had.’ What Wart doesn’t know as he proceeds through his adventures is that he is the secret son and heir of Uther Pendragon – and in the closing pages he will fulfil the prophecy, draw the sword from the stone and become King Arthur. There’s a moving bit in the moment after the sword is pulled when Sir Ector falls to his knees before his new king – and Wart is distraught. ‘Please do not do this, father,’ he says, kneeling himself. ‘Let me help you up, Sir Ector, because you are making me unhappy.’ What sweetness there is in that first book; and what longing. Wart, even before he embraces his destiny, is surrounded by love – as T. H. White was not. It’s that, rather than the idea of becoming king, that’s the real fantasy here. White, like so many children’s authors, was a deeply troubled and unhappy man. As described in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s wonderful 1963 biography, the trauma of his life was the break-up of his parents’ marriage when he was 14, and his whole emotional temperament was blighted by his alternately unfeeling and smothering mother. He later writes, of Lancelot (one of many avatars of White in the books): ‘It is fatally easy to make young children believe they are horrible.’ I think that psychological torque is what gives the sequence such an intense charge of feeling. The books that follow chart the course of Arthur’s reign, the life of the Round Table, the anguished love- triangle with Guenever and Lancelot (which dominates the third book, The Ill-Made Knight) and, in The Candle in the Wind, which brings the sequence to its close, the rising evil of Arthur’s bastard son Mordred. Here, Mordred’s gang are very obviously Nazis. The books have become statelier, graver and more adult. There are still jokes, though. Sir Pellinore is on a never-ending pursuit of the Beast Glatisant, and when it vanishes at one point in The Queen of Air and Darkness, he becomes positively depressed. To cheer him up, a pair of knights dress up pantomime-horse-style as the Beast – but their costume is too convincing. The real Beast Glatisant shows up and starts trying to, ahem, make love to them. But there’s much darker material in these later books too. White’s mother appears as Arthur’s half-sister and in due course seducer, the witch-queen Morgause. She is one of the most memorably cruel monsters in all children’s literature. When we first meet Morgause in the second book, The Queen of Air and Darkness, she’s boiling a cat alive to make a magic spell, and there’s an awful sequence in which her sons, desperate to please her, kill and muti late a unicorn. What a complexity of feeling is here: ‘[Gawaine] 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.’ And then, later:

She was, she discovered with a change of posture, interested in nothing but her darling boys. She was the best mother to them in the world! Her heart ached for them, her maternal bosom swelled. When Gareth nervously brought white heather to her bedroom as an apology for being whipped, she covered him with kisses, glancing in the mirror [my italics].

Through these stories White not only entertains, but – like Merlyn – he also instructs. They blend knockabout physical comedy with deep psychological insight and a grave seriousness about the duties of friendship, the moral governance of a state, and the lonely eminence of a king. One moment you’re hooting with laughter; the next, you’re pierced or moved or horrified. Is The Once and Future King for children? In its epic sweep, it never loses sight – as White was never able to – of the child buried in the sorrowing adult. When near the end of the story Lancelot sees the ageing Guenever using make-up to look younger ‘the heart-sack broke in his wame’:

Her stupid finery was not vulgar to him, but touching. The girl was still there, still appealing from behind the breaking barricade of rouge. She had made the bravest protest: I will not be vanquished. Under the clumsy coquetry, the undignified clothes, there was the human cry for help. The young eyes were puzzled, saying: It is I, inside here – what have they done to me? I will not submit.

The Once and Future King was the work of an affectionate, troubled, conscientious, scholarly man who loved jokes, felt cruelty deeply and poured himself in all his contradictions and strivings on to every page of it. It’s a masterpiece, and it’s like nothing else. If my own book, or this article, contribute in any way to keeping these books in print and on the bookshelves of the readers who will respond to them, I’ll consider my job well done.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Sam Leith 2025