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Beginnings are always happening
Because it came up in conversation elsewhere on my friendlist, I am re-reading T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone (Putnam, 1939) for what may be the first time in thirty years. I have specified the edition because what I have is the royal blue hardcover that belonged to my mother, with her name carefully printed on the flyleaf and illustrations by the author throughout and endpapers by Robert Lawson; it turns out to be the first American edition, revised slightly from the original British publication the previous year but not as much as the version incorporated into The Once and Future King in 1958, meaning I never encountered the totalitarian ants or the pacifist geese. I can remember reading the novel repeatedly in the apartment of my childhood and not at all after we moved, which makes no sense, because it is exactly the sort of book I should have taken up into the large maple tree in our front yard or revisited once I began to practice archery, but it is exclusively associated with the bed my father built for me niched into the window seat overlooking the grape arbor with the net hammock of stuffed animals overhead and various clippings about space and nature stamps collaged onto the wall in the light of a swing-arm lamp. My room from the time my brother was born until the time we moved was a sterling tribute to the rental traditions of Greater Boston in that it was less of a room than a hallway—a sort of connector between the living room and the nursery—into which some enterprising landlord had fitted a closet, legally rendering it a bedroom even though it couldn't have supported an adult-sized bed rather than a child-sized one dovetailed into a window nook. It had room for a bookcase and shelves on which I put things like my interesting minerals and my butterfly in a glass sphere and my fossil fish. If anyone had presented me with a little silver knife whose pommel was the polished ivory skull of a stoat, I would have adored it just as much as Kay. Anyway, I realized that the mad goshawk Cully whose mutterings are always spinning off into mashed-up Shakespeare and Webster and Marlowe reads so much like a darker forerunner of the similarly jangling butterfly in Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968) that all at once the shifting mix of anachronism and metafiction and numinous and irony shared by the two novels snapped into focus as plausible, actual DNA. No one in The Sword in the Stone says, "Have a taco," but they do leave inscriptions like "Oh, if I had only paid for my dog license honestly, I should never have come to this pass." Like the arrangement of my bedroom, none of this struck me as weird as a child. I was in any case much less well equipped to catch the allusions and deflations and swerves of expectation, never mind the pop culture, in either book. (Pellinore on Christmas night is singing a filk of "The Lincolnshire Poacher." I wouldn't have been able to figure that out until I had discovered the folksong in college thanks to the arrangement by Benjamin Britten, who incidentally provided the music for the BBC's now five-sixths lost radio adaptation of The Sword in the Stone in 1939.) I went looking for criticism or at least discussion of this genealogy and ran into Beagle's remembrance of Christopher Lee: "Most of my memories of that time, and of Chris Lee, have to do with books and authors. He had known both J.R.R. Tolkien and a writer who mattered more to me, T.H. White. We had a long ongoing argument in Munich about a chapter of The Sword in the Stone that appears in the English edition of the book, but not in the American one. He turned out to be right. He usually was." Most of my formative fantasies are turning out to be early introductions to postmodernism, but I think it was good for me. Otherwise what I have done with my day is eat a couple of things and stay on schedule for my antibiotics and cough a lot.
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Yes.
*hugs*
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This post is really perfection. It is like, it almost is, the things it describes: reading it, one (this one, anyway) feels cozily ensconced in a nook bed with the best books and thoughts, while that elusive shimmering web of all the connections and implications of literature, art, history, and science seems to hover, about to let one in to its entire self rather than just a patch here and there.
P.
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I was fond of it. I still want a window seat at the head of my bed again.
It is like, it almost is, the things it describes: reading it, one (this one, anyway) feels cozily ensconced in a nook bed with the best books and thoughts, while that elusive shimmering web of all the connections and implications of literature, art, history, and science seems to hover, about to let one in to its entire self rather than just a patch here and there.
Thank you!
*hugs*
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I love that you taught a one-shot on magical creatures. I don't even care if the geese fit the theme. I want to audit your class retroactively.
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The mice (thank heavens) didn't gnaw my own beloved blue hardcover, now at my bedside. I had two, but I gave one to DWJ, who couldn't find the book she remembered.
*hugs*
Nine
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You're welcome!
The mice (thank heavens) didn't gnaw my own beloved blue hardcover, now at my bedside. I had two, but I gave one to DWJ, who couldn't find the book she remembered.
I am glad you had the right number for your needs.
*hugs*
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This was a lovely post. Thank you. Also I am beginning to think Christopher Lee generated more synchronicity than I do, plus also he got to be in that film, Lord Summerisle Lives His Very Best Life.
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I first saw Christopher Lee in Dracula on some midday horror movie special my parents would totally have forbidden me to watch! He scared the life out of me, it was great.
"Lee applied for a scholarship to Eton, where his interview was in the presence of the ghost story author M. R. James. His poor maths skills meant that he was placed eleventh, and thus missed out on being a King's Scholar by one place. His step-father was not prepared to pay the higher fees that being an Oppidan Scholar meant, and so he instead attended Wellington College, where he won scholarships in the classics, studying Ancient Greek and Latin."
That's kinda heartbreaking re maths. Imagine, we might have had Christopher Lee, the Classics scholar, too....
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Pass him over, quick!
I first saw Christopher Lee in Dracula on some midday horror movie special my parents would totally have forbidden me to watch! He scared the life out of me, it was great.
Aw! I have no idea what I first saw him in, except that I recognized him by the time of The Lord of the Rings. (There's a horrifying chance it was however much I actually watched of Return to Witch Mountain (1978), which was on once at a friend's house.) I first began to notice him with The Wicker Man (1973).
That's kinda heartbreaking re maths. Imagine, we might have had Christopher Lee, the Classics scholar, too....
I never saw any contradiction between opera and classics.
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If anyone could've done it all, he could. What a man.
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It's the BBC! Sometimes I'm impressed they saved anything! I hope someone just took the acetates home to play for their kids, to be discovered in the attic one of these days.
This was a lovely post. Thank you. Also I am beginning to think Christopher Lee generated more synchronicity than I do, plus also he got to be in that film, Lord Summerisle Lives His Very Best Life.
You're welcome. Lord Summerisle really, really did.
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*hugs*
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*hugs*
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I recommend it! It may feel older because, while I'm futzing around with literary influence, I would bet it on it taking some itself from Kipling in his Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)/Rewards and Fairies (1910) mode.
*hugs*
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But what it did was prepare me that I should be alert that this was not always a book that was going to be nice, as indeed it is not, and probably best to be prepared after it starts with animals and might have seemed like it would be.
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Agreed. Jeez. I hope her daughter came to it in her own time and formed her own opinions about it, regardless of what her mother thought. I am glad it was a useful book for you.
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...and a distantly polite relationship with her mother.
So there's that.
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(Rereading White is very much like rereading Pratchett for me in that I am constantly coming across passages that suddenly make me realize a thing I thought I had come up with more or less on my own is in fact something that White put there for me very young.)
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It's in my mother's!
"Chocolates, prince, oh chocolates!
You can eat them and fill up your pockets.
They squish in the mouth, oh chockets!
They also squish in the pocolates."
I'm looking at it right now. I don't know if later American editions were revised to conform with The Once and Future King—if so, it explains a remark my mother made when I borrowed her copy; she had wanted to get my niece a copy of her own, but all the versions she could find looked wrong to her—but if you can get hold of the 1939 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Morgan's castle is there. So is Madame Mim, so is Galapas, so is the Dream of the Stones. I don't believe there are many differences between this edition and the first British. I poked around on the internet out of curiosity and it looks like the differences were mostly in the battle after Morgan's castle. In all other cases noted by the blogger, my text conforms to the first British edition rather than The Once and Future King.
and while I did not find it, I did learn that my father apparently was involved in a school play version, at some point in the sixties, and believes he still has the script somewhere. I am very much hoping he turns it up because I am desperate to read it.
Okay, now, same.
(Rereading White is very much like rereading Pratchett for me in that I am constantly coming across passages that suddenly make me realize a thing I thought I had come up with more or less on my own is in fact something that White put there for me very young.)
Like what? I hadn't realized how much of the text of this book I apparently committed to memory before the age of eleven.
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I can understand your mother being taken aback by that. I last read the book at a point in time when I had no reference for minstrel shows, whereas this time was definitely "whaaaaaaa."
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I think when we're young, very few things are incongruous enough for us to register them as anachronistic. "Oh if I had only paid for my dog license honestly..." --I would have blithely assumed they had dog licenses back in the day. Indeed, since I didn't have a dog, I would have had only a hazy notion of what a dog license actually was.
When the Ivanhoe crew in Edward Eager's Knights Castle start driving cars--*that* I was able to recognize as anachronistic.
... the all-times-present-at-once thing that anachronistic references make possible is something you get in folktale-like stories, too. The one I just finished translating (yay!) places the Portuguese invasion of Timor (16th cent) and bottled water within three generations of each other and that's not historically accurate, but it can be *emotionally* accurate.
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How did I miss this comment? It's great! I love that kind of simultaneity of time.
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