Great Britain: The Once & Future Merlyn

Deep in the Forest Sauvage some 1,400 years ago, Merlyn the Magician shared a cluttered cottage with two hedgehogs, six grass snakes, a stuffed phoenix, a buzzing beehive, six pismires, the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th edition) and countless wonders for the eyes of Wart, the boy who was to become King Arthur.

Historians deride the legend of Merlyn and doubt that Arthur ever ruled in England. One medievalist who knew better was Terence Hanbury White, who wrote the massive (677 pages), moving Arthurian tetralogy, The Once and Future King, from which came Broadway’s Camelot and Hollywood’s The Sword in the Stone. To many critics, it is one of the few classics of 20th century English literature.

Arthurian Cocktails. T. H. White, who died last week of a heart ailment at 57, was Merlyn. A blue-eyed, white-bearded six-footer who looked like an antic Elijah, he shared with the magician a hunger for knowledge and a delight in conveying it to others. A complex, lonely, compassionate man, he believed with Merlyn: “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

White himself learned to fly and skin-dive, was a proficient cameraman, hunter, horseman, sailor, archer, painter, naturalist, fisherman, falconer. From a mind as chockablock as Merlyn’s cottage—or his own—he could unlimber the rules of jousting, describe the nervous systems of fish, discourse on medieval cocktails (one favorite was called Father Whoresonne). He was the first scholar to translate a medieval Latin bestiary into English; he produced a minor classic on falconry (The Goshawk), wrote moving poetry.

From Dark to White. “My health is always better when I am drinking,” Tim White once explained. But it was only in the last four years of his life—thanks to some $3,000 a month from Camelot royalties—that he could always pay for his medicine. For The Sword in the Stone, which was sold outright when he was desperately poor, Walt Disney paid him a munificent $2,000. Since 1948 he had lived in Alderney, a pebble-sized Channel Island, where he won the natives’ hearts by announcing that he was a 17-time bigamist on the lam from London.

In his books, the Arthurian epic is a profound and pious chronicle of his nation’s founding, the glory of an age that never seemed Dark to White. From it came the Matter of Britain, the lesson of greatness, and White was its subtle sage. Bombay-born, the son of an Indian army officer, he was “a nostalgic Tory” who had little sympathy for Sir Grummore Grummurson, as he called Colonel Blimp’s Arthurian ancestor. White did not lament the decline of empire so much as the withering of English virtues commended by 15th century Printer William Caxton: “Chyvalrye, curtoyse, humanyte, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love.” In an age that celebrates the antihero, the neurotic, the schemer, Tim White argued that morality was something worth striving for. His conviction that justice rather than force must govern all human relationships seems even more relevant than in Arthur’s days.

To Avilion. Bachelor White confessed recently that he could “count only seven happy years” in all his life. Yet he always believed with Arthur that mankind is “on the whole more decent than beastly.” After a two-month, coast-to-coast U.S. lecture tour in late 1963, he spoke with keen pleasure of the kindliness he encountered in America. When he left Manhattan last month for a Mediterranean cruise, he planned to write a book about his U.S. odyssey, hoped soon to complete a novel about Tristan and Isolde. But for White, as for his once and future king,

It was too late. It was his destiny to die, or, as some say, to be carried off to Avilion, where he could wait for better days.