If I were ever to write a memoir (I won’t), whole chapters would take place in Oz or Middle Earth or Watership Down. Pages would pass in which I lay on my bed, sailing with Captain Bligh or Long John Silver, solving mysteries with Nancy Drew or Nero Wolfe, taking the arduous road to Mordor with Frodo and Sam. Very few books have not changed my life. In fact, I can’t think of a one. But some have had more obvious impact than others.
I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, we’d go as a family to the library every Friday afternoon. We’d scatter at the door and meet up later at the checkout desk with our loot. I had a library basket in case I took out more books than I could carry, which was always. My parents took pride in that.
But when I was about 12 or 13, they began to have concerns. I was so contented with the books I’d already read, books that were, in my parents’ opinion,(but clearly not my own) too young for me now. Did I spend too much time re-reading? When was I going to leave the children’s room and venture into the wider world of the stacks? Their nudging had no impact, so they co-opted my beloved librarians into their campaign to grow me up. Books were always being shoved into my hands.
I read those books; I even liked them. But when I’d finished, I’d go right back to my Oliver Butterworth, Clare Bice, Jim Kjelgaard, Carol Ryrie Brink.
The book that finally levered me into adulthood (or something sometimes resembling that) was TH White’s The Once and Future King. In some ways, it’s engineered to be just exactly that book. Part One, which deals with the young Arthur Pendragon (known initially as Wart) is heavy on adventure and magic and talking animals. Part one eased me in. Part two also starts with children – Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth, the four sons of Queen Morgause. But soon we are in troubling territory. A cat is horribly murdered and also a unicorn. There is a calamitous seduction. By the time we hit part three, we have put aside childish things completely.
Part Three is called The Ill-Made Knight. White’s Lancelot remains one of my favourite literary characters. Ugly to look at and filled with self-loathing – “It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible,” White says of him – Lancelot struggles to be a great knight and a good man, the one as hard to achieve as the other. How unhappy I was to find in the musical version that Lancelot had become a blowhard with a pretty face! The first in an ongoing saga of adaptational betrayals.
In part three, the story gets big, bigger than any story I’d ever read before. God appears as the dazzle on a shield. Football hooligans are taken sternly to task (but seem to have survived the tongue-lashing.) Guenever is drawn with a perspicacious sympathy I will, in future Arthurian readings, never encounter again. Galahad dies of his own perfection.
The Once and Future King had an enormous impact on me not just as a writer but also as a person, which is harder to locate and all tangled up in the kind of parents I had (liberal atheists with high standards for how a citizen behaves), and the things happening in the world around me when I first read it.
When I was 13, the civil rights movement was a daily feature in the US news. I learned from the television that Medgar Evers had been shot in the back, that four small girls had been murdered in a church bombing in Birmingham. I heard Martin Luther King Jr. make his dream speech. I saw people attacked with dogs and water hoses. I saw the National Guard protecting school children from shouting, spitting mobs. The nightly news had become a morality play – good against evil, courage against cowardice.
The Once and Future King in its simplest form (and it is not a simple book) is about people trying, despite their personal failings, to make a better world. The stakes are enormous, the costs terrible. In this, White’s book seemed to match the world outside. In this, the world outside seemed to match White’s book.
I was not the only one to make this connection. When JFK was assassinated his widow quickly chose the meme of Camelot as the way we were to remember his presidency. This deliberately adopted narrative made Lyndon B Johnson’s already difficult job of succession nearly impossible.
A few years passed and I joined the anti-war movement. Sixties activism was haunted by the issue of violence – could it be put to good ends, was it sometimes necessary, was it ever, demanded of good people? These are questions I met first in White’s book where he had no easier time resolving them than I did.
I don’t put my activism down to one thing and certainly not down to one book. But the civil rights movement made me think about the kind of person I wanted to be in the world, and White helped with that. (While also preparing me for the fact that I might not always manage to be that person.) For better or worse, for better and worse, The Once and Future King launched me on an Arthurian quest from which I have never come back.
