The Once and Future King Mass Market Paperback – June 1, 1987

Wished I had came to this Book at age fifteen,instead of eighty six.It has given me lessons that would have altered many decisions that I made had I been exposed to the thoughts contained in this book. I do hope I am blessed to read it at least two more times.

The popularity of the film and the play, Camelot, were due in some part its association with President John F. Kennedy’s brief 1,000 days in office which came to be called Camelot by many, a time in American history of lost hope and ideals. It was also a story the late president was very fond of. Of course it had much more to do with the enduring fascination with the legends of King Arthur which had found new form in the very popular retelling of the tale by T.H. White, The Once and Future King, which proved to be the immediate inspiration for the play and film, as well as a Walt Disney animated feature, The Sword in the Stone (1963). White was born in British India, died in Greece and spent his most creative period in self-imposed exile from his native Britain in Ireland to somehow get away from a world on the verge of war which he so despised. His condemnation of war took form in his interpretation of tales found in the work he most admired Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), and of course Mallory himself appears at the end of White’s work as well as the play and film as young Tom of Warwick who Arthur orders to avoid the coming battle and go back to England and live to tell the tales of Camelot and the Round Table. White’s work initially took the form of several books: The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, The Candle in the Wind, and later The Book of Merlyn, the first four of which were incorporated into The Once and Future King in 1939 and 1940. He clearly intended for the entire work to be reedited and include The Book of Merlyn as a final chapter but it never quite happened and the latter work remained unpublished until 1977. It is this last work that was most pointed in its denials and incriminations of war and the limits of humanity, man is joined in the practice of organized warfare against its own kind only by the lowly ant. Regardless of his intent, the work is one of the great pieces of modern English prose putting him in the rare company of T.E. Lawrence, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. The language is so rich much of it found its way into the play and the film as did a good deal of his wit and humor.There is a certain irony in the fact that perhaps the three most influential authors of modern fantasy lived about the same time an in the same area. Indeed, two of them were colleagues and friends, T.H. White died in 1964, and C.S. Lewis passed in 1963 to be followed by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1973. And all called England home. The impact of the tales of Arthur and Merlyn, Narnia, and Middle Earth are undeniable, all are well cherished by their followers and all resulted in significant film adaptations. Indeed, thanks to Peter Jackson in far off New Zealand no less than six epic films have been created to relate the tales of Middle Earth. Lewis and Tolkien lectured at Oxford University and regularly met in local pubs with pipes in hand. White was more of a solitary and quite troubled individual whose personal grappling with the immorality of war caused him to find some kind of refuge in neutral Ireland. All three were products of their time the turbulent first half of the twentieth century and the two World Wars. And all three proved masters of their craft. Aside from the common thread of fantasy in general, all three were singularly affected by the legends of Arthur and Camelot, principally from Mallory who is not only referred to constantly in White but actually takes the stage as a very important character to end The Once and Future King, young Tom of Warwick.

I got this because recent publicity for H is for Hawk kept referring to T H White's book on hawking. So I realized I had never read his classic The Once and Future King though I have read most of the classics and have run into the title many times. It turns out to be very strange book. I wonder how many people have actually read it lately. Strange should mean original, and it is, which is good, but it's strange in other not good ways. It begins as a kind of boys's book, with adventures, knights, animals, and a kind of bildungsroman about King Arthur's boyhood and education. No present day boy would be interested in it though. Too strange and unfocussed. King was written well into the 20th century though, the age of psychological realism, so it soon becomes a psychological novel about the Arthurian characters. (Tolkien showed that this could be easily avoided.) White is an uneven psychologist at best though, and while the idea of psychoanalysing mythological characters is interesting, this turns out to be beyond his talents. Not that anyone else could manage it either, except Homer. There are along the way tongue in cheek or comedic takes on Arthurian legends, some successful..Then it becomes a kind of philosophical treatise on ethics, the development of laws and constitutions, and politics, including even Nazism. Even those few readers who are interested in these topics would find nothing new, interesting or carefully thought out about White's ideas on these subjects, or even logical consistency. His strengths are that the book is very well written, contains a number of remarkably wonderful sentences, though perhaps not enough for 500 pp; and White has amassed an enormous trove about medieval life, legends, lore, falconry, armor, art, architecture and vocabulary. based but not limited to Malory's Morte d'Arthur, a true masterpiece. (Read it first.) The weakness besides the above is sadism. White according to what I read was a confessed sadist, and he shows himself sadistic to his characters and to his reader. for example, when a story has a tragic or bad ending, a reader will accept this if it seems inevitable, if the character has tragic flaws which lead to it. or even if the sad ending is seen somehow as an example of life's unpredictable cruelty. In this case, the downfall is encompassed by characters acting out of character. Arthur and Guinevere, who have been astute politicians throughout, canny psychologists, active and strong willed, and who hold all the political and armed power, allow themselves to be implausibly overcome by the villain, even though they and everyone else, including the tormented reader, see multiple possible ways to avoid this fate. To reader who is not masochistic will find this infuriating, in fact distasteful.. Oddly enough the villain IS defeated and the ending does not have to be seen as tragic at all. And yet White rubs out nose in a manufactured sad conclusion. It's a big book requiring a big review. A curdled classic.

This book arrived in a timely fashion and in great shape. I am most pleased to have it in my library. I read the story many years ago and know it is fabulous. I will certainly enjoy reading it again. thank you for a most welcome purchasing experience. I most highly recommend the book and the seller.