It is easy to say – there. That is how The Sword in the Stone began. But I do not think that is the story at all. The book had been started months before, when a round thing that was something like a clothes-basket was set down before his door.
White thought it a warm-hearted book, quite unlike his previous efforts. ‘It seems impossible to determine whether it is for grown-ups or children,’4 he wrote to Potts. ‘It is a preface to Mallory.’ The boy in the book is called the Wart. He is a kindly soul, loyal and slightly stupid. He is an orphan and does not know he will become king. Sir Ector has raised him along with his natural son. The Wart will never become a knight because he is not a gentleman. But in the book he is given a magical teacher – Merlyn – and a magical education, too. Eschewing schooldesks and lessons learned by rote, Merlyn turns the Wart into animals and sends him off on quests. As a fish the boy learns about the dictator’s passion for power by meeting the pike in the castle moat. As a snake he learns of history. He hears the trees speak, and sees the birth of the world through the eyes and ears of an owl. He discusses mankind’s role in God’s plan with a donnish badger in a comfortably furnished sett. And at the end, his education complete, the Wart pulls the sword from the stone, learns he is the son of Uther Pendragon and is crowned King Arthur.
It is a glorious dream of wish-fulfilment for White. He writes himself into the character of the Wart, the boy of unacknowledged royal blood who runs wild around the castle just as he had raced about West Hill House in St Leonards-on-Sea, wild, and happy, and free. White had been torn from safety and sent away to school, but he saves the Wart from such a fate. There would be no beatings in his education. But even so, his lessons are full of cruelty. I did not understand quite how cruel a book it was when I was young. But I responded to that cruelty all the same. Because my favourite part of the book was the Wart’s ordeal as a hawk. It was truly terrifying. I’d read it and squirm, and curl my toes, then read it all over again.
Merlyn turns the Wart into his namesake, a merlin, and looses him in the castle mews at night. And as a new officer in the cadre of the castle’s trained hawks, the Wart must undergo the customary ordeal. He is ordered to stand next to Colonel Cully the goshawk until the rest of the hawks ring their bells three times. It is an exquisitely dangerous initiation, for the colonel is insane. As the ordeal begins the goshawk glowers and mutters. He quotes broken snatches of Shakespeare and Webster, run all together in a fugue of rising horror. After the bells ring once the goshawk begs for the test to end, cries, ‘I can’t hold off much longer.’ The bells ring twice. He moves towards the Wart, stamping the perch convulsively: ‘He was terrified of the Wart, not triumphing, and he must slay.’
In that awful ordeal, White is the Wart, the boy who must be brave. But he is not just the Wart, and the boy is not the only one imperilled. There’s a sad passage in Olivia Laing’s book The Trip to Echo Spring that reminds me of this desperate scene. She quotes the writer John Cheever, whose alcoholism was intimately bound up with his erotic desires for men. He hated his homosexuality and felt himself in constant danger. ‘Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy,’5 he wrote in his journals, ‘was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.’
Despite several affairs with women, White’s fantasies were sadistic and directed mostly at pubescent boys. He was certain that these fantasies had been shaped by his early abuse, and they shamed and horrified him, for in them he played the role of the abuser, just like his father and the masters who had beaten him. Therapy with Bennet had not taken these urges away. They never left him. Late in his life he wrote a pornographic novel about spanking schoolboys: it was a prolonged and awful confession. But he locked it away and never showed it to anyone. All his life he suppressed his desires. But sometimes, just sometimes, he could speak of them through other selves. Colonel Cully is one of them: a hawk wracked with desire to hurt a boy who is also a bird – a boy who is also himself. You can see the whole of his life’s tragedy there in one small scene.