by T. H. White
The old patch shames the new garment. In that winter of two years before, White was at the height of himself, braced against an actual experience, his senses alert, his imagination flaring like a bonfire in the wind. ‘I am so physically healthy,’ he wrote to Sydney Cockerell, ‘that I am simply distended with sea—air and icebergs and dawn and dark and sunset, so hungry and sober and wealthy and wise, that my mind has gone quite to sleep.’
At Doolistown his mind was insomniac, vexed, and demanding. It allowed him to extend the vitality of the old patch over the few pages where Arthur watches the geese. But with Chapter XIII the intention to convince drives out the creative intention to state, and with but one intermission – when the hedgehog leads Arthur to a hill in the west—country, where he sits looking at his sleeping kingdom under the moon and is reconciled to the bad because of the good – the book clatters on like a factory with analysis, proof and counterproof, exhortation, demonstration, explanation, historical examples, parables from nature – even the hedgehog talks too much.
Yet the theme was good, and timely, and heartfelt, and White preserves an awareness of persons and aerates the dialectics with traits of character and colloquial asides. It is clear from the typescript that he recognized the need for this, for many of these mitigations were added by hand. Whenever he can escape from his purpose – no less aesthetically fell for being laudable – into his rightful kingdom of narrative, The Book of Merlyn shows him still master of his peculiar powers It is as though the book were written by two people: the story—teller and the clever man with the notebook who shouts him down.
Perhaps he went astray in that stony desert of words and opinions because he lacked his former guide. In the final chapter, Malory has returned. Under his tutelage White tells how, after Arthur’s death in battle, Guenever and Lancelot, stately abbess and humble hermit, came to their quiet ends. These few pages are among the finest that White ever wrote. Cleverness and contention and animus are dismissed: there is no place for them in the completed world of legend, where White and Malory stand farewelling at the end of the long journey that began by lamplight in the gamekeeper’s cottage at Stowe Ridings.
This is the true last chapter of The Once and Future King, and should have its place there. Fate saw otherwise. ‘I have suddenly discovered that…the central theme of Morte d’Arthur is to find an antidote to war.’ To give weight to his discovery by making it seem less sudden, White incorporated new material into the already published three volumes. In November 1941 he sent them, together with The Candle in the Wind and The Book of Merlyn, to his London publisher, to be published as a whole. Mr Collins was disconcerted. He replied that the proposal would need thinking over. So long a book would take a great deal of paper. The prosecution of war made heavy demands on the paper supply: forms in triplicate, regulations, reports, instructions to civilians, light reading for forces, etc. White insisted that the five books should appear as a whole. After prolonged negotiations, in the course of which White’s demand to see The Book of Merlyn in proof escaped notice – a grave pity, for he was accustomed to rely on print to show up what was faulty or superfluous – the fivefold Once and Future King was laid by.
The Once and Future King was not published till 1958. It was published as a tetralogy. The Book of Merlyn, that attempt to find an antidote to war, had become a war casualty.
SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER
About the Author
THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING
Terence Hanbury White was born in 1906 in India, where his father was a member of the Indian Civil Service, and educated at Cheltenham and Cambridge.
The author of poems, books about hunting and other sports and some detective stories, he found fame and success with The Sword in the Stone (1939), the brilliantly imaginative retelling of King Arthur’s early life. He continued the story in The Witch in the Wood (1940) and The Ill—Made Knight (1941). In 1940, he wrote what was believed to be the final volume of his Arthurian saga, The Candle in the Wind. The four books were revised and published in 1958 as a single volume titled The Once and Future King.
However, a further manuscript, concluding the story, was discovered among T. H. White’s papers at the University of Texas at Austin after the author’s death in 1964. This is The Book of Merlyn, written in 1941. Other papers at the University of Texas show that T. H. White intended all five books to make up the complete The Once and Future King. Here for the first time all five books appear as a whole. An afterword by White’s biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner reveals the story behind this greatest of English fantasy novels.
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This one—volume paperback edition 1996
FIFTEENTH EDITION
The Once and Future King (comprising four books) first published in Great Britain by Collins 1958
The Book of Merlyn first published in Great Britain by Collins 1977
The Once and Future King Copyright © T. H. White 1939, 1940, 1958
The Book of Merlyn Copyright © Shaftesbury Publishing Company 1977
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*Abbreviation for suspendatur, ‘let him be hanged.’
†‘Something comes of nothing.’ This is a parody or adaption of ex nihilo nihil fit, that is, ‘nothing comes of nothing,’ familiar (though not in that exact form) from both Lucretius and Persius.
*Literally, ‘now you send away’ or ‘now you let depart,’ from the Canticle of Simeon, Luke 2:29. This has come to be used in a general sense, signifying, ‘I’ve seen it all now; I can die happy.’
*‘The ant is an example of great industry.’
*‘Into Thy Hands.’ The entire phrase, from the death of Jesus (Luke 23:46), is ‘into Thy hands, I commend my spirit.’
†‘Here lies Arthur, the Once and Future K
ing.’
*‘And Arthur too, stirring up wars beneath the earth.’