Th White

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Terence Hanbury "Tim" White (29 May 1906 – 17 January 1964) was an English author best known for his Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, which were first published in 1958 together.

The first of the series, The Sword in the Stone, was released in 1938 as a stand-alone book.

Early life

Constance Edith Southcote Aston was born in Bombay, British India, to Garrick Hanbury White, a superintendent in the Indian police, and Constance Edith Southcote Aston. White had a difficult childhood, with an alcoholic father and an emotionally fragile mother, and his parents divorced when he was 14 years old.

Education and teaching

White attended Cheltenham College, a public school, and Queens' College in Cambridge, where he was taught by scholar and occasional author L. J. (Leonard) Potts. Potts stayed a lifelong friend and reporter, and White later referred to him as "the greatest literary influence in my life." White wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur in 1929 and graduated with a first-class honour in English at Queens' College.

White spent four years at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire. He published England Have My Bones, a well-received memoir about a year spent in England, in 1936. He left Stowe School and spent a year in a workman's cottage nearby, where he wrote and "revert[ed] to a feral state," engaged in falconry, hunting, and fishing. White became interested in aviation partly to eliminate his fear of heights.

Later life

White settled in Alderney, the third-largest Channel Island, where he spent the remainder of his life. He released Mistress Masham's Repose, a children's book in which a young girl discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels) who live near her house for a year. The Repose of Mistress Masham was inspired by John Masefield's book The Midnight People. He published The Elephant and the Kangaroo in 1947, a book in which a recreation of Noah's Flooding occurs in Ireland.

He wrote two non-fiction books in the early 1950s. A collection of essays about nineteenth-century England published in The Age of Scandal (1950). The Goshawk (1951) is an account of White's attempts to prepare a northern goshawk with traditional rather than modern falconry methods. He wrote it at his cottage in the mid-1930s, but did not announce it until his agent David Garnett discovered it and demanded that it be published. In 1954, White translated and edited The Book of Beasts, an English translation of a medieval bestiary written in Latin.

In 1958, White published The Candle in the Wind, the fourth book in The Once and Future King's series, but it was never published separately. White lived to see his Arthurian works adapted as the Broadway musical Camelot (1960) and the animated film The Sword in the Stone (1963).

Personal life

White was "a homosexual and a sadomasochist," according to Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1967 biography. He came close to marrying several times but had no enduring romantic interests. "I have fallen in love with Zed, a young boy," he wrote in his diaries of the incident. All I can do is be courteous. It's been my hideous destiny that I was born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no intention of using them."

Robert Robinson, a British broadcaster, published an account of a White talk in which White claimed to be attracted to small children. Robinson argued that this was really a mask for homosexuality. "I suspect Tim may have been an unfulfilled homosexual, and he suffered a lot as a result of it," Julie Andrews wrote in her autobiography.

However, White's long-time associate and literary agent David Higham wrote, "There was no homosexuality at one time, but I suspect he was concerned at the time he was (and in his ethos, fear would have been the correct term). Higham gave Sylvia Townsend Warner the name of one of White's lovers "so that she could get in touch with someone so important in Tim's tale." But she never did take that risk, the teen told me. So she was able to portray Tim in such a light that a reviewer could not identify him as a raging homosexual. Perhaps a heterosexual affair would have made her blush."

Lin Carter portrays White as a man who felt deeply but was unable to establish close human relationships as a result of his unfortunate childhood. "He was a man with a hefty love for others." It shows in his scholarly correspondence and obsession with dogs, as well as the bewildering and inarticulate experience in his books; but it had few close friends, no personal acquaintance, and no genuine friendship with a woman."

At the end of his life, White was an agnostic and a heavy drinker. "Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the human race," Warner wrote about him.

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