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Books

T. H. White Biography Puts Sadness in a Profitable Light

By Alvin Beam, Book Editor

The late T. H. White is known in this country chiefly through his "The Once and Future King," from which the musical, "Camelot," was adapted, and through that imaginative, satirical, charming novel of latter-day Lilliputians, "Mistress Masham's Repose."

These were the books through which I knew him myself at any rate until the arrival now of Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of this "gifted, stimulating, wild-bearded man of letters," T. H. White (Viking; $6.50).

BUT WHITE WAS A deeply tormented as well as a greatly gifted man and his torment is central, as it needed to be, to Miss Warner's outstandingly fine presentation, at once detached and sympathetic. Startlingly but appropriately, the Introduction opens with bitter, apparently somewhat hurried lines he wrote in his diary on Dec. 1, 1938, when he was 32 and his "Sword in the Stone," later a part of "The Once and Future King," had just been chosen by the American Book of the Month Club:

Of hapless father hapless son

My birth was brutaliy begun, And all my childhood o'er the pram The father and the maniac dam Struggled and leaned to pierce the knife Into each other's bitter life. Thus bred without security

Whom dared I love, whom did not flee?

WHITE WAS A homosexual, though with relative little overtness, and whether his malady could properly be attributed to fallout from the complex emotional difficulties of father and mother only the experts in such matters may be prepared to say. But he believed it himself and in any case could never manage the human fulfillment for which he was equipped, with extraordinary richness, in so many ways.

There were others but his most mani*fest loves, pitifully, were for his red set-

ter, Brownie, and her successor at death, Killie. Brownie most importantly. His grief at her passing was with him for the remaining 20 years of his life.

White's long battle against his sexual nature led him into repeated periods of drunkenness and gluttony and at the end, at 58, he had become a garrulous trial to all who knew him.

But what a striking man, and what a writer, he had been, in the intervals. when his demons allowed.

MISS WARNER makes a little refrain of a quotation, Merlyn speaking, from "The Sword in the Stone:" "The best thing for being sad is to learn something." And White, hammer and tongs, went at all kinds of learning in his life, with an emphasis, as often as not, on physical and

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technical skills. He learned falconry and riding and shooting and flying and these and similar activities, to the point of downright recklessness in the speed driving of automobiles, gave him relief from spiritual turmoil.

In his reading, as one might suspect from his Arthurian cycle, he put Malory next to Shakespeare among English writers, and others, I think, have made worse choices.

Miss Warner, who never met White, was much admired by him as a novelist and this may have had something to do with the complete willingness of devoted friends to make letters available and with the freedom the estate trustees gave her in the exploration and use of his voluminous diaries.

She has written a sad and perceptive and splendid book. It should have a wide and sympathetic audience among those fond of the remarkably entertaining T. H. White of "The Once and the Future King" and "Mistress Masham's Repose.'

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