T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This week is Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, organised by Helen at A Gallimaufry – I was mulling over which collection of short stories to take off the shelf when I decided to do a bit more of a curveball. I bought Warner’s biography of T.H. White (published 1967) nine years ago, and I can’t remember whether that was before or after I read her letters with David Garnett, in which they discuss it a lot. And, indeed, White’s letters – which Garnett edited.

Much like when I read Roger Fry by Virginia Woolf, this is one of those times when I’m more interested in biographer than subject – but a very intriguing portrait emerged nonetheless.

I’ve only read one book by White – Mistress Masham’s Repose, which is sort of a long-distance sequel to Gulliver’s Travels – but I probably saw the Disney Sword in the Stone at some point and he’s one of those names that is around a lot. For most people, he is best known for his Arthurian links – but I believe he has more recently taken on fame by association with Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, in which he features.

Hawking is one of the passions that comes out in Warner’s depiction of White. She is not a biographer who gives equal weight to all the different stages of a man’s life. She zooms straight through childhood in a handful of pages (which didn’t bother me at all; I always want to find out about an author being an author, not a child). What she draws out is White’s love of animals and particularly hawks, his writing, and his isolation.

Some years are dwelt on for so long that I began to feel trapped – 1939, for instance – whereas others flash by. We learn that White’s one real love in life was a dog called Brownie, and she is perhaps the most vivid secondary character of them all. His grief when she dies is long and painful. We also learn quite a lot about his writing processes, mostly from his own perspective. Rather wisely, Warner relies extensively on quotation. Why paraphrase what already exists? The biography becomes almost a patchwork of other people – White’s letters and diary, the letters of others, the memoirs of others. It’s hard to say, at times, whether Warner is a biographer or a collagist.

Chief among these is White’s friend and encourager David Garnett, author of Lady Into Fox and much else. It’s hard to know whether he would be considered quite so significant a figure in White’s life if he had not also been such a good friend of Warner’s, and thus able to provide her with a great deal of written material. But if the share of perspectives is a little skewed, it is none the less interesting for that.

We chart White’s shifting interests and anxieties. There is a curious attachment towards the end with a boy called Zed, about which Warner is coy and oblique. It certainly raises disconcerting questions about the suitability of their relationship, and any more recent biographer would investigate the issue more thoroughly. Warner introduces it mysteriously and leaves it mysterious.

What we see, collectively, is that White was sporadically successful and seldom content. The sentence that sums up the whole comes near the end: ‘He had been unlucky with his happinesses’.

Warner writes biography in some ways like her fiction and in some ways not. It shares the tone of her fiction in the belief that everything is marvellous, in the true sense of that word, but that nothing is especially so. But it has fewer of those sentences that crystallise everything in a suspended moment. Fewer of those sentences that jolt you slightly by their unexpected rightness. But I did write down one such, about Brownie:

There are photographs of her in his Shooting Diary for 1934 -slender, leggy, newly full-grown, with the grieving Vandyke portrait expression of her kind.

I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.

There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.

7 thoughts on “T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  • July 2, 2020 at 12:02 am
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    The whole book that The Sword in the Stone is based on, The Once and Future King is one of my favorite books of all time. Absolutely beautiful and “elegaic” is dropped as a description too often but it actually fits for that book.

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  • July 2, 2020 at 11:20 am
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    How interesting. I’ve read The Once and Future King (I had an Arthurian period way back in my early 20s) and it was indeed a wonderful and involving book. I don’t know what I would think of it now. I love your comment about biography vs collage – some biogs really *do* feel like that, don’t they?

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  • July 2, 2020 at 3:53 pm
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    Oh, that looks – slightly disappointing! I’d still like to read it though – perhaps when I’ve tackled The Once and Future King… In the letters STW seems to have quite Decided Views about biographies – naturally I can’t remember any of them, but she didn’t like David Cecil’s book about someone – that’s helpful – so I’d have expected something a bit more – more, if you know what I mean.

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  • July 5, 2020 at 12:02 pm
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    If I remember correctly from H is for Hawk (and I might not, but I don’t have it to hand at the moment to check), Macdonald’s opinion was that White was not comfortable with his sexual preferences, I think she suggests it’s one reason why he chose to isolate himself in a cottage with a hawk for a while. I wonder if Warner is coy and oblique here because that might have been how White was in his attachments? I’ve got a couple of old Penguin editions of some of White’s books which I really need to read. This sounds interesting too, but as I’m more interested in Warner than White I think I might share your disappointment that there’s not more of her here.

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  • July 6, 2020 at 8:08 am
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    Interesting, I love Sylvia Townsend Warner, and hadn’t got organised enough to join in the reading week. I remember reading about T H White in H is for Hawk, I was left with the impression from that book that he was a slightly sad man.

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    • July 7, 2020 at 5:27 pm
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      Anyone interested in what STW left out of this biography (and she left out a lot) should read The Cat in the Hamper:Warner and the Art of Narrating a Biography by Marine Krissdottir

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  • August 3, 2021 at 12:47 pm
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    Interesting: “Cat in the Hamper: Warner and the Art of Narrating a Biography by Marine Krissdottir” does not seem to exist in the world of Google.

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