T.H. White: A Biography

Picked up by chance because I liked Sylvia Townsend Warners's The Corner That Held Them, and thought a serious novelist's take might be interesting. Helen MacDonald (H is for Hawk) also wrote about White's falconry experiences. I remembered enjoying at least the first book of The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone, years ago.

Sadly, White was a strange, lonely, eccentric, self-absorbed, conflicted mess. The only living being he ever truly loved was his red setter Brownie (and believe me, I do get that). But he was still capable of personally drowning in a bucket a litter of unwanted puppies born due his own negligence. He decided to be a falconer, and his goshawk first escaped and later died... again, due to his own show more carelessness and/or ignorance. He could be charming and overbearing; prone to riding roughshod over people in his own enthusiasms. He flitted from England to Ireland to the Channel Islands (mostly to evade taxes); occasionally proposed to women who he never ended up marrying (he was gay, attracted to young boys, and had sadistic inclinations); wrote some wonderful, imaginative stories and some pretty terrible maundering. He died alone in a stateroom aboard a ship en route to Greece, and was buried there.

Townsend is largely sympathetic, especially to his travails as a writer, but her portrait of White is not pretty. I took a shot at Once and Future King after finishing the biography, but while there is much to charm and admire in The Sword and the Stone, it rapidly declines thereafter into a lot of endless pantomime silliness, nasty women, and more creepy violence.

For fanatic Arthurians, and I suspect a lot of them won't like him or his take on Arthur either. Three stars because it is a competent, graceful biography of a man I ended up not liking at all. show less

T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King, lead a fascinating if tragic life captured poetically in this excellent biography.

Fascinating biography of a man I knew nothing about - http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/2019/02/t-h-white-a-biography/