TH White, author of the strange and indelible Arthurian sequence The Once and Future King, is also the author of a strange and indelible memoir called England Have My Bones. It is available for 1p here and for a cent here.
England Have My Bones is ostensibly a diary of a year of country living in the 1930s, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a book in which so much is unsaid. White fishes, hunts, shoots ducks, learns to fly a small aeroplane and keeps snakes as pets. He does these things one at a time and obsessively, being the sort of person who needs to be the best at everything he tries. He sets arbitrary and very difficult goals because he wants the punishment.
White writes beautifully, a master of prose so much in control that he can break the rules. He has a knack of composing perfectly-balanced sentences from those middling words which you think you know but would want to double-check in a dictionary if tested. This makes for a somewhat disorienting reading experience. For example:
The primaries of the plover buckled to the wind on the turn, like the tawse of a brogue. The pine clumps on the moors had dead trees in them, like the badger bristles on a tramp’s old chin. Then it began to rain. It was a Homeric east-winderly rain, as repeatedly described by the Southcotes.
He appears to be both vain and deeply self-loathing. This may be grounded in an unfulfilled homosexuality: one biographer described him as “a homosexual and a sadomasochist”, though his friend David Higham said: “Tim was no homosexual, though I think at one time he had feared he was…and in his ethos fear would have been the word.” White is terrified of people and relationships and humiliation, but not of death. This becomes apparent in the flying section of the book and in an extraordinary ending in which he suffers a serious car crash. Warner said, “Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the human race.” In other diaries (England Have My Bones contains nothing so direct) White himself made the Morrissey-ish statement: “it has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them.”
The odd thing is that all this comes through in what are, essentially, laboriously detailed descriptions of his hobbies. The effect is somewhat akin to finding a profound and melancholy meditation on the human condition in an airfix instruction booklet.
The strange ways of internet commerce have meant that countless secondhand books can be bought online for £0.01 plus postage. The Dabbler will be recommending some of the out-of-print, forgotten or neglected gems that can be yours, at the time of writing, for a penny. If you would like to nominate such a book, email your review to editorial@thedabbler.co.uk
Right, that’s ordered – although did you know I had to try three sellers before I found one that still had the book in question? You’ve clearly caused a run on it ….
Brilliant final sentence, by the way.
Thanks B, and yes we have to state that the book is available for 1p ‘at the time of writing’. There are often only a few available, so you need to get in there quick, Dabblers!
I’ve just re-read Bragg’s bio of Richard Burton who got very friendly with ‘Tim’ White through Burton’s role in Camelot (a musical) which was based on The Once and Future King.
Apparently White’s motto was ‘when in sorrow learn something new’.
They had a lot of fun together. This is from Burton’s notebooks:
‘One night in New York when we were both suitably and idiotically drunk and I had given him the sword “Excalibur” which I used in the play … he had insisted on knighting with full accolade many and various and bewildered New York cabbies…
…With his huge stature and white hair and beard it was some sight, as they say, to see Tim give the accolade to Harry Schwartz, and Sol Schmuck. Arise Sir Harry! Arise Sir Sol! A few of them actually knelt on the pavement! A barman, used to drunken eccentricity, knelt to be knighted with a glass of vodka in each hand. Quite a lot of actors were knighted also that long-ago wild night. Jason Robards is about the only one I can remember. He didn’t bother to knight me he said, because ever since he had first met me he had conferred a mental baronetcy on me. What a crying pity that White is dead… what a maniacal and lovely mind! I once sat there bewitched while he spoke for a couple of hours on the subject of worms, how each wriggling thing had locked inside him the beginning and the end of man, and that without worms we would all die. When you die, he said, give your body to the worms, they will be grateful. There is absolutely no reason to give it to fire…’
Do they make them like that any more? God, the modern world is crap.
Well I suppose every age laments the previous one, and ours will be lamented in turn, but it does sometimes seem that way, Gaw.
Mind you these hellreaisers are probably a lot more fun from a distance.
“he spoke for a couple of hours on the subject of worms”. Wonderful!
The Warner you mention in passing is presumably Sylvia Townsend W., White’s friend and biographer? I just happen to be reading her (truly excellent) diaries at the moment, picked up dirt cheap on a whim (though not for 1p), and there’s some curious stuff about THW and her difficulties in writing his life. In particular, there are the contents of a sinister tin box that she refers to as the “yellow sarcophagus”.
“I go deeper into the trunk as if I went deeper into dungeons. It is the attentive childishness … the care with which the photographs of endless buttocks bare or scarred are stuck onto the page, that frightens me. Perversions like his are like a goblin child that will not quit the grown man’s being.”
Despite her affection for White, she appears to have regarded him as potentially quite dangerous, at one point remarking of the Moors Murderers trial : “It was this, exactly this sort of thing … that waited around every corner for White. This I must both grasp and STATE.”
Then, bizarrely, John Arlott makes an appearance and attempts to “browbeat” STW into leaving his name out of the biography (he was a friend and neighbour of White’s on Alderney):
“an unmistakeable plain clothes policeman … tall, thick, prosy, self-esteeming … Oh, poor Tim: what awful friends you made. NB, however, the anguish, dull to searing, of persons who from their desire for higher things make friends with Tims.”
If only I could speak for a couple of hours on the subject of TH White 🙁
The book sounds great! just ordered me a 1p copy to add to the pile
His books are very fine. i read one of the Arthurian books at school and i think it left a deep impression on my psyche. i had no idea his personal life was such a mess. i guess his Lancelot embodies some of his problems. Curious chap. Interesting that he was interested in aviation but afraid of heights – my case also.