4 I now flinch from anything frightful – Siegfried Sassoon, unpublished letter to T. H. White, 15 October 1952, p. 1, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
5 tonic for the less forthright savagery – The Goshawk, p. 212.
6 At a particular point in the journey – T. H. White, ‘The Hastings Caves’, Time and Tide Magazine, 8 December 1956, p. 152.
7 It will be charming to have a rest – T. H. White, The Once and Future King, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1958, p. 228.
21: Fear
1 get for you a other passager Gos – The Goshawk, p. 187.
2 Plan for a Passage Gos . . . turns at this – T. H. White, annotations to inside cover of Edmund Bert’s Treatise of Hawkes and Hawking, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
3 It made me feel cleaner – T. H. White, letter to John Moore, in Sylvia Townsend Warner, T. H. White: A Biography, p. 92.
4 Think of Lust . . . like that – The Goshawk, p. 204.
22: Apple Day
1 humans and animals can turn into each other – Rane Willerslev, ‘Not Animal, Not Not-Animal: Hunting, Imitation and Empathetic Knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Sept. 2004), pp. 629–52, p. 659.
23: Memorial
1 Nature in her green, tranquil woods – John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, 1938, repr. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 1979, p. 208.
2 Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal – ibid, p. 99.
3 On mourning in children and adults, see Melanie Klein, ‘Mourning and its relation to manic depressive states’, in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1, Love, Guilt and Reparation, The Hogarth Press, 1940, pp. 344–69.
24: Drugs
1 ‘Parfay!’ quath he – Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal, ed. Lesley Johnson and Elizabeth Williams, The University of Leeds School of English, Leeds, 1984, p. 11.
2 He departed secretly – Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed. and trans. John J. Parry, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 10, 1925, pp. 243–380.
3 With the passion of an Edgar Wallace – T. H. White, ‘King Arthur in the Cottage’, Readers’ News, Volume 2, Number 3, August 1939, pp. 26–7, p. 26.
4 It seems impossible to determine – Letter to L. J. Potts, 14 January 1938, in T. H. White, Letters to a Friend, pp. 86–7.
5 Every comely man – John Cheever, The Journals, Jonathan Cape, 1990, p. 219.
6 The story of Puppy Mason is in T. H. White, unpublished manuscript fragment ‘A Valentine’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
26: The flight of time
1 Kingdom of Grammerie – Sylvia Townsend Warner, T. H. White: A Life, p. 99.
2 that of people desirous – Alfred Adler, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1924, p. 196.
3 seemed to be creating itself – The Goshawk, p. 186.
4 born at the wrong end of Time – T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone, Collins, 1938, p. 46.
5 When I was a third-rate schoolmaster – T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1977, p. 3.
6 A good man’s example – ibid, p.128.
27: The new world
1 One of my grandfathers . . . land management – Logan J. Bennett, ‘This is Ours to Fight For’, Outdoor Life, November 1942, Volume 90, No. 3, pp. 32–3, p. 52.
2 The initiation ceremonies . . . weaving and unwoven – T. H. White, entry dated 22 August 1939 in unpublished manuscript ‘Journal 1938–1939’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
28: Winter histories
1 The frequenter of downland – H. J. Massingham, English Downland, B.T. Batsford, 1936, p. 5.
2 On the chalk-cults of interwar England, see Patrick Wright’s excellent The Village that Died for England, Faber & Faber, 1995.
29: Enter spring
1 How you can talk of love for a bird – T. H. White, unpublished manuscript ‘The Merlins’, p. 20, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
2 one of the lunatic dukes – The Goshawk, p. 215.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go first to those people who made this book possible, and two in particular: to my wonderful agent Jessica Woollard, for her friendship, expertise and long-standing support, and to my inspiring and extraordinary editor Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape. I’d also like to thank everyone at the Marsh Agency, and Clare Bullock, Ruth Waldram, Joe Pickering and everyone else at Jonathan Cape who worked on this book behind the scenes.