T.H. White's Fingerprints

CONSTANCE GRADY

TH. WHITE’S THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING is the definitive King Arthur story of the twentieth century, and it is born of tragedy and repression. White had a miserable childhood, and an adulthood of squandered hopes. His parents were by turns neglectful and abusive. He grew up gay, sadistic, and profoundly ashamed of both. Out of his pain he created a masterpiece: a work of legend and wonder, rooted in the human pain that he understood all too well. It’s in the odd position of being both deeply influential and half forgotten.

“I often wonder why White isn’t considered one of the founding fathers of modern fantasy, the way Tolkien and C. S. Lewis are,” The Magicians author, Lev Grossman, mused to NPR in 2010. “Perhaps one day, in the future, he will be.”

The Once and Future King is a loose adaptation of Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century book Le Morte d’Arthur. Malory’s version of the King Arthur legend is one of the most foundational texts in the English canon, so much so that John Milton considered adapting it before he settled on Genesis as the source for Paradise Lost.

White first encountered Le Morte d’Arthur as a student at Cambridge, where he wrote his thesis on it. Where Milton did not venture, White decided to plant his flag. He felt, he wrote in excited letters to friends, as though he really understood Malory’s characters. He knew what they would do under any circumstances. He could make a book out of them.

Much of what White read into Malory’s characters came from his own life. He wrote the best of his childhood, which he spent living under the benign neglect of his grandparents, into Arthur’s orphaned idylls. The worst of it he gave to the tragic children of the witch Morgause. An idealized portrait of his professional persona as a teacher became Merlin. White’s deep and longlasting shame he attributed to Lancelot, who is tortured by an inner weakness he cannot bear to name.

By the time White was through, he had brought the psychological depth only a novel can grant to Malory’s legendary figures. As a result, you might say that, before The Once and Future King, when people wrote about King Arthur they were responding to Malory. Afterward, they were responding to White.

The Once and Future King has had two beloved adaptations. White’s first volume, The Sword in the Stone (originally published as a separate novella), became the Disney animated film of the same name. It’s probably responsible for a generation of Americans being unable to tell the difference between the titular Sword in the Stone and Excalibur. Camelot became a sensation of its own, and inspired the sublime Monty Python parody Spamalot.

Beyond the White adaptations, all modern retellings of the Arthurian legend have had to reckon with White’s influence. That includes the queer YA Once & Future series, which reimagines Arthur as a teenage girl from the future. The other most famous Arthurian retelling of the twentieth century, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, positions itself as a feminist response to The Once and Future King. In some places, it matches White beat for beat.

Meanwhile, White’s ability to ground his magic and marvel in psychological realism leavened with playful anachronism would be deeply influential for a generation of modern fantasy writers. Not just Grossman but also Michael Moorcock, David Eddings, and Gregory Maguire have cited White as a major influence.

J. K. Rowling has said that White’s child King Arthur is Harry Potter’s “spiritual ancestor”; both amiable jocks who aren’t the brightest kids around, they’re neglected by their adult guardians and bullied by their peers, but redeemed by their selfless love for the people and the animals around them. (When Neil Gaiman was asked if Rowling had plagiarized Harry from his own similar character, Timothy Hunter, in The Books of Magic, he replied, “We were both just stealing from T. H. White: very straightforward.”) And there’s more than a touch of White’s absentminded, tragicomic Merlin in Rowling’s wise and quirky Dumbledore.

White’s influence made it to the movies, too. Star Wars is laced with King Arthur references, from Luke’s orphaned childhood to his relationship with the Merlin-like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. Some of those references come directly from Malory, but it’s White’s depiction of a late-stage Camelot turned decadent and failed by its heroes that gives us the decayed and destroyed Republic of the later Star Wars sequels. “We are the spark that will light the fire that will restore the Republic,” Poe Dameron says in The Last Jedi. He’s echoing White’s dying Arthur, who describes the legacy of the Camelot he’s built as a candle and passes it on to a young Thomas Malory. “I am giving you the candle now—you won’t let it out?” he asks.

White’s fingerprints are all over popular culture: the way we think about King Arthur, the way we write fantasy, what we think a fantasy story should look like. So, in a sense, we don’t have to wait for White to be considered one of the founding fathers of modern fantasy the way Tolkien and Lewis are. He already is one of fantasy’s great forefathers, whether we’re willing to grant him that honor or not.

CONSTANCE GRADY is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she writes about books, theater, and culture writ large.

Background image: T. H. White © Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.