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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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How did I miss this comment? It's great! I love that kind of simultaneity of time.
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