Shannon’s Reviews > T.H. White: A Biography > Status Update

From a letter to John Verney, sent from Naples: I not only have a private orchestra . . . but also a private magician! I have never had one before. He is a timid, hopeful, oppressed little man, who believes his own horoscopes, so it would be unkind not to believe them too. He assures me that I am a widower who used to own an important factory. Then he looks at me hopefully, so I have to say, Yes I am.

After rehearsals in New York – in course of which Julie Andrews wrote [to White] propitiatingly: 'You'll love King Pellinore's dog – a marvelous red-eyed sloppy basset-hound – called "Horrid". And even she has an understudy!' – Camelot was taken to Toronto and then to Boston to be tried out before opening on Broadway.

White, for all his emotional turmoils, was always capable of being surprised by joy. He did not make it a matter of conscience to hoard old misfortunes.

From a letter to David Garnett critiquing his latest novel: The heritage of this is – you will think it quite dotty – but I can't help it – that I believe human beings ought to be monogamous . . . that if they consciously take a solemn vow in public they should stick to it – or not take it – and that women should not behave like headstrong babies. . . . Surely women are dependable people as well as men?

On another occasion he installed a newly widowed neighbour [in his spare cottage] 'because she adored her husband and cannot be left to despair in the wintry flat he died in'. He refused to be resigned to the woes of others. 'I go away and bite God,' he explained. Inevitably, he took up the cause of every under-privileged dog on the island, though sometimes to his own hindrance.

David Garnett on The Goshawk: 'I think this is really Tim's best book. . . . For Tim is not a lover of humanity or human beings and when he writes he usually writes partly for them, and the wish to please is a pretence. Here he only lapses occasionally into awareness of other people and is writing privately. He is therefore more exact, more honest, more interesting.'

From a letter to L. J. Potts: It would be a charity to me at any rate if we could only work up a correspondence about something that wasn't just gossip. What are you thinking about? Would it bore you to hear what I am thinking about? I sometimes feel like putting a message in a bottle and floating it down the Boyne: 'I am alive. T. White, 1944. Is anybody else?'

It's funny, and a bit sad, to see White poking fun at his own book titles in his journals. In an entry dated June 14th, 1940, he lists arguments in favor of enlisting in the army. Number one is "England has my bones, etc., and I don't like Hitlerism."

The impact of war tossed them into the realities of friendship, its clash of interests and temperaments. White turned in on himself. 'I only wanted to keep quiet and be alone and behave as if I were already dead.' Garnett was strained outward....Leaning out of their separate miseries and incomprehensions, they tried to be kind to each other.

He did not treat animals as pets, or as a pastime or a hobby. He turned to them for a renewal and enlargement of his being. Even with Brownie, who refused with the whole unscrupulous force of a strong and supple character to be non-possessed, and whose death in a few years' time was to maim his heart, he never stooped to being a Lord of Creation.