White · 1939
T. H. White writes *The Once and Future King* at Doolistown
On 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, the Anglo-Irish writer Terence Hanbury White, thirty-three years old, declared himself a conscientious objector to the imminent war and left Stowe Ridings in Buckinghamshire (where he had been schoolmastering at Stowe School and writing) for a rented farmhouse outside Doolistown, County Meath, fifteen miles north of Dublin. He stayed at Doolistown for the next seven years through to 1946, taught himself falconry, fishing and hare-coursing on the County Meath country, and wrote across the wartime years the four-volume Arthurian retelling that the post-war publisher Collins would assemble in 1958 as *The Once and Future King*. The four volumes (*The Sword in the Stone* 1938, *The Witch in the Wood* / *The Queen of Air and Darkness* 1939, *The Ill-Made Knight* 1940, *The Candle in the Wind* completed 1941 and held over) became the senior twentieth-century English-language Arthurian retelling, the source-text for Disney's 1963 *Sword in the Stone*, for the Lerner-and-Loewe 1960 Broadway musical *Camelot*, and (through the Kennedys' adoption of the closing-line as their post-assassination political icon) the source of the post-1963 American 'Camelot' political-mythology associated with the Kennedy White House.
It is the late morning of 1 September 1939, in the rented Doolistown farmhouse kitchen outside Trim in County Meath, the morning of the Wehrmacht's invasion of Poland. He is thirty-three years old. He is Terence Hanbury White, born at Bombay on 29 May 1906, son of the Indian Civil Service District Superintendent of Police Garrick Hanbury White and Constance Aston, schooled at Cheltenham College (which he later described as the senior English unhappy-public-school experience of the period) and at Queens' College Cambridge (First in English, 1928).
On the kitchen table in front of him are the third draft of The Witch in the Wood (the second volume of the four-volume Arthurian sequence he has been working on since 1936) and the morning's Irish Independent with the headline on the German invasion of Poland. He has decided, on the overnight reflection, to register as a conscientious objector. He is not a pacifist by political conviction but by personal incompatibility-with-violence reaction; he writes in his journal that morning that the war will be the background-conditions of the writing rather than the small-foreground-activity of my life across the next seven years.
He thinks: the Arthurian sequence is the text on which the next seven years will be spent. The four volumes will retell the Malory Morte d'Arthur of 1469 from the small private psychological perspectives of the principal characters (Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guenevere, Mordred) on the working principle that the central material of the Arthurian-cycle is the impossible political question of how an idealistic king can rule without violence.
He thinks: Doolistown is the right place to write the four volumes from. The Meath farmhouse is a fifteen-mile bicycle-ride from the Dublin University libraries that hold the Malory and the Arthurian-tradition Welsh primary sources. The Meath country is the medieval-pastoral landscape that the Arthurian sequence is set against. The Irish neutrality is the political-philosophical foundation that the wartime-non-combatant residence requires.
He spends the seven years from September 1939 to September 1946 at the Doolistown farmhouse. He completes The Witch in the Wood (1939, retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness in the 1958 collected edition), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), and the fourth volume The Candle in the Wind (completed by July 1941 but held over from immediate publication on his publisher Collins's wartime-paper-shortage commercial-decision through to the post-war assembly). He hunts falcons, breeds pointer-dogs, fishes the Boyne, and writes the daily-journal that became the senior post-1959 published England Have My Bones and The Goshawk. He returns to England in September 1946 at forty.
The Once and Future King is published by Collins in November 1958 as the assembled four-volume edition. The Lerner-and-Loewe musical Camelot opens at the Majestic Theatre, Broadway, on 3 December 1960 with Richard Burton as Arthur and Julie Andrews as Guenevere. The Disney animated The Sword in the Stone opens on 25 December 1963 on the Buena Vista Christmas-release schedule. White himself dies of a small heart attack on a cruise-ship in the Aegean Sea outside Piraeus on 17 January 1964, fifty-seven years old, and is buried at the Athens First Cemetery. The senior post-Kennedy-assassination American political-mythology of November 1963 takes the closing-line of the Once and Future King (the wind cried Mordred) and the Lerner-and-Loewe musical title Camelot and binds them to the post-Kennedy-presidency memorial-tradition that ran through the Jacqueline Kennedy memoir of late November 1963; the Camelot designation of the John-Kennedy-White-House period has been continuous in American political-cultural reference since.