The Once and Future King (79 page)

By then he was preparing for
The Ill—Made Knight
(
The Witch in the Wood
, delivered to his publisher six months earlier, had been returned with a request that it might be rewritten) and making an analysis of the character of Malory’s Sir Lancelot – with traits akin to his own: ‘Probably sadistic, or he would not have taken such frightful care to be gentle…Fond of being alone.’

In the analysis of Guenever, where he had nothing personal to go on, he speculates, and does his best to overcome his aversion to women. ‘Guenever had some good characteristics. She chose the best lover she could have done and was brave enough to let him be her lover.’ ‘Guenever hardly seems to have been a favourite of Malory’s, whatever Tennyson may have thought about her.’

It was a new departure for White to approach a book so deliberately or write it so compactly. There is no easy—going writing in
The Ill—Made Knight
, where the Doom tightens on Arthur, and Lancelot is compelled to be instrumental in it by his love for Guenever.

He wrote it in Erris, in the small—town hotel at Belmullet, between researches into the Godstone, lying out on freezing mornings waiting for the passage of the wild geese, local jovialities, and drinking fits after which he would lock himself in his hotel bedroom in terror of the IRA.

On October 1st, having completed
The Ill—Made Knight
, he put Erris behind him and went back to Doolistown to write
The Candle in the Wind.
This, the last
Morte d’Arthur
book, in
which the doomed king staggers from defeat to defeat, already existed as the skeleton of a play. White was incapable of writing slowly. By mid—autumn the play was brought to life as a narrative, and he was considering titles for the complete tetralogy: The Ancient Wrong…Arthur Pendragon…

November 14th, 1940

Pendragon can still be saved, and elevated into a superb success, by altering the last part of Book 4, and taking Arthur back to his animals. The legend of his going underground at the end, into the badger’s sett, where badger, hedgehog, snake, pike (stuffed in case) and all the rest of them can be waiting to talk it over with him. Now, with Merlyn, they must discuss war from the naturalist’s point of view, as I have been doing in this diary lately. They must decide to talk thoroughly over, during Arthur’s long retirement underground, the relation of Man to the other animals, in the hope of getting a new angle on his problem from this. Such, indeed, was Merlyn’s original objective in introducing him to the animals in the first place. Now what can we learn about abolition of war from animals?

Pendragon can still be saved.
Another salvation was involved.

White had gone to Belmullet assuming himself to be at home in Ireland. He came away an Englishman in exile. He had been received, and welcomed as something new to talk about; he had never been accepted. Another Ancient Wrong forbade it – the cleft between the hated and the hating race. He was believed to be a spy (the rumour of an English invasion had kept most of Belmullet sitting up all night); his movements were watched; he was reported to the police and not allowed to leave the mainland; he had joined the local security force, but was asked not to attend parades. His disillusionment may have been rubbed in by the parallel with
The Candle in the Wind
, where Arthur’s goodwill is of no avail against his hereditary enemies. Now another winter lay before him, a winter of intellectual loneliness, with only himself to consult, only himself to feed on. He had a roof over his head, a room to be alone
in, regular meals, the hedged landscape of County Meath to walk his dog in, nothing much to complain of, nothing to go on with. War had imprisoned him in a padded cell.

It was his own salvation he leaped at.

On December 6th, he wrote to L. J. Potts, formerly his tutor at Cambridge, continuously his Father Confessor in Letters: ‘The next volume is to be called The Candle in the Wind (one has to add DV nowadays)…It will end on the night before the last battle, with Arthur absolutely wretched. And after that I am going to add a new 5th volume, in which Arthur rejoins Merlyn underground (it turns out to be the badger’s sett of Vol. I) and the animals come back again, mainly ants and wild geese. Don’t squirm. The inspiration is godsent. You see, I have suddenly discovered that (1) the central theme of Morte d’Arthur is to find an antidote to war, (2) that the best way to examine the politics of man is to observe him, with Aristotle, as a political animal. I don’t want to go into all this now, it will spoil the freshness of the future book, but I have been thinking a great deal, in a Sam Butlerish way, about man as an animal among animals – his cerebrum, etc. I think I can really make a comment on all these futile isms (communism, fascism, conservatism, etc.) by stepping back – right back into the real world, in which man is only one of the innumerable other animals. So to put my “moral” across (but I shan’t state it), I shall have the marvellous opportunity of bringing the wheel full circle, and ending on an animal note like the one I began on. This will turn my completed epic into a perfect fruit, “rounded off and bright and done.”’

On the same day he wrote to Garnett, asking what book it was in which Garnett alleged having read that Malory raided a convent, and continuing, ‘So far as I can see, my fifth volume is going to be all about the anatomy of the brain. It sounds odd for Arthur, but it is true. Do you happen to know, off hand, of a pretty elementary but efficient book about brain anatomy in
animals, fish, insects, etc.
? I want to know what sort of cerebellum an ant has, also a wild goose. You are the sort of person who would know this.’

Though White uses the future tense in his letter to Potts, it is unlikely that he waited from November 14th to December 6th before beginning
The Book of Merlyn.
Book 5, taking up where the original Book 4 ended, has an immediacy of plain statement that could not have brooked much delay. Arthur is still sitting alone in his tent at Salisbury, awaiting his last battle in the final insolvency of his hopes, and weeping the slow tears of old age. When Merlyn enters to renew their former master—pupil relationship and sees the extent of Arthur’s misery, he is not sure whether he can do so at this late hour. His assurance that legend will perpetuate Arthur and the Round Table long after history has mislaid them falls on inattentive ears. He invokes their past relationship. The pupil has outgrown the master and puts him off with a
Le roy s’advisera.
Nowhere in the four previous volumes had White made Arthur so much a king as in this portrayal of him defeated. In
Farewell Victoria
, his novel of the early thirties, he hit on the phrase ‘the immortal generals of defeat.’ In the first chapter of
The Book of Merlyn
he substantiated it.

But the scheme of Book 5 is to take Arthur underground, where the animals of Book 1 are waiting to talk to him, and where Merlyn is to subject him to the contents of White’s notebook so that he may discover what can be learned from animals about the abolition of war.

Since animals avoid warring with their kind, this could be a good subject to examine.

But the discussion is slanted from the first by Merlyn’s insistence on the inferiority of man.
Liber scriptus proferetur
…Merlyn has opened White’s notebook, and finds small evidence that man deserves to be placed among the two thousand eight hundred and fifty species of mammalian animals in the world. They know how to behave befittingly, existing without war or usurpation. Man does not. Merlyn weakens the denunciation by adding the insult that man is a parvenu.

At this point no one present is impious enough to suggest that man may do better in time.

At a later stage of the discussion Arthur, the representative
of the parvenu species, suggests that man has had a few good ideas, such as buildings and arable fields. He is put in his place by the achievements of coral animals, beavers, seed—carrying birds, and finally felled with the earth—worm, so much esteemed by Darwin. The distinction between performing and planned performance is not allowed to occur to him, and the conversation sweeps on to nomenclature:
Homo ferox
(
sapiens
being out of the question),
Homo stultus, Homo impoliticus.
The last is the most damning; man must remain savage and dunderheaded till, like the other mammalian species, he learns to live peaceably.

It is easy to pick holes in White’s rhetoric.
The Book of Merlyn
was written with the improvidence of an impulse. It holds much that is acute, disturbing, arresting, much that is brilliant, much that is moving, besides a quantity of information. But Merlyn, the main speaker, is made a mouthpiece for spleen, and the spleen is White’s. His fear of the human race, which he seemed to have got the better of, had recurred, and was intensified into fury, fury against the human race, who make war and glorify it.

No jet of spleen falls on the figure of Arthur. Whenever he emerges from the torrent of instruction, he is a good character: slow to anger, willing to learn, and no fool. He is as recuperable as grass, and enjoys listening to so much good talk. When Merlyn tells him that to continue his education he must become an ant, he is ready and willing. Magicked into an ant, he enters the ants’ nest which Merlyn keeps for scientific purposes. What he sees there is White’s evocation of the totalitarian state. Compelled by his outward form to function as a working ant, he is so outraged by the slavish belligerence and futility of his fellow workers that he opposes an ant army in full march, and has to be snatched away by Merlyn.

For his last lesson White consigns him to what by then must have seemed an irrecoverable happiness: the winter of 1938 when he went goose shooting.

It is an insight into how many experiences White packed into his days and how vividly he experienced them that little
more than two years had elapsed between
Grief for the Grey Geese
and
The Book of Merlyn.
He had taken the goose book with him when he went to fish in Ireland, and Chapter XII of
The Book of Merlyn
opens with its description of the dimensionless dark flatness of the Lincolnshire Wash and the horizontal wind blowing over it. But now it is Arthur, become a goose, who faces the wind and feels the slob under his webbed feet, though he is not completely a goose as he has yet to fly. When the flock gathers and takes off for the dawn flight, he rises with it.

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